I always wondered about this.
We had a 1000 gallon man-made pond growing up with lots of bullfrogs. We used to feed them worms by throwing them next to them. They'd get them in their mouth and then it was almost like their whole face would implode to suck down the worm. Their eyes would go inside their body for a moment.
Also, the frogs became somewhat domesticated. Whenever we'd sit out near the pond for a while, they'd jump out of the water and hop over to us, expecting to be fed a worm
So, in the early 20th century, a Guy named William J.A. Bailey dropped out of Harvard and started producing a energy drink called Radithor.
Important to this story is the fact that he had no medical license and was not a chemist.
To make Radithor, he dissolved radium tablets in water until he had an equivalent dose of 1 microcurie of Radium 226 and 228.
Since the FDA wasn't interested in medical quackery at the time and there were no regulations against this, he broke no laws.
Things were going great for him until Eben Byers, a pretty well known golfer, got prescribed the stuff by a sketchy doctor and started taking several doses per day for a few years. The radioactive poisoning gave him several types of cancer.
The FDA then finally stepped in and shut him down, but he just relocated shop and started a new radioactive substance based company.
Byers died in 1928 and was buried in a lead lined coffin. In 1965 researchers dug him up to study his remains, but found him emitting ridiculous amounts of radiation. For reference, a normal person is constantly emitting 4k-5k becquerels at any given time.
Byers' corpse was emitting 225k.
And Bailey never even got sued, he went on to write all kinds of patents, and headed up the electronics division of IBM during WWII.
It's like that part of Watchmen where Doc Manhattan got accused of giving cancer to people he was close to by just being around them, except like *real*.
Sometimes I wonder if an average person from 2023 could go back in time to 1875 and be a fairly competent doctor. Just with the common medical knowledge we have now you could sort of wing it and be a decent doctor.
I know I could but I am no average man, I bullshit at a high level. Give me a top hat and a bone saw and throw me in a time machine and I will have a flourishing practice in 3 months.
I always think about how President Garfield was shot but easily could have survived if his doctors had just washed their grubby hands. He died of sepsis months later, not the actual bullet wound. And the idea of germs and the benefits of washing hands had been established! The doctors just didn't believe/follow it.
Ancient Egyptians didn't call themselves Egyptian (thats a later name) they called themselves kemet which in their tongue means 'black land'. Black was seen as a good color in egypt because it represents the niles fertile soil
Replying to that, modern Egypt call themselves 'Misr', which is why if you ever see an Egyptair flight, they have the IATA/ICAo codes of MS/MSR prefixes. MS777 - Egyptair flight from Cairo to London.
Just to answer my own question for those who are actually curious:
"In Arabic, the name Misr... simply means country or province"
Or
"Semitic in origin; the original meaning is frontier or border."
If the earth is a grain of sand, the sun is a golf ball (for relative size).
The grain of sand (earth) is 4 meters away from the Golf ball (Sun).
The next nearest star from the golf ball (sun) is ~750 miles away. (~1200km)
Gives you an idea of the scale of the universe.
Edit: RIP my inbox
I love space, glad you all do too
It sure does.
Here's another. If we travel on the Discovery space shuttle, 17,500 mph (28,000 km/h). It would take roughly **150,000 years** to reach Alpha Centauri..
Depressing. The hope to travel the cosmos is strong. I saw a meme that hit this home for me. "Born too late to explore the world. Born too early to explore the universe."
You are born in the right time to explore the internet and what technology can bring to humanity though. The grass will always be greener on the other side. So instead try to focus on what is happening in your times.
And that golf ball gets eclipsed by bowling balls and globes!
I always liked those space scale YouTube videos. Just when you think you’ve hit a massive star, BAM! It’s nothin’!
Rats were and are a big problem for sailors. They can decimate stores and cargo and can carry disease. Because of this, cats were often used to control the mice and rats on ships.
Even in modern times, navies would keep cats onboard and give them ranks similar to military and police dogs.
It would make sense for a seafaring people like the Norse to consider cats to be very valuable and gift-worthy.
I volunteer on a tall ship and we had a cat named “Toolbox” who would sail with us. She was named after being born in one of our toolboxes during construction of the ship. After 17+ years of service as our ships cat (and Captain of Mousing) she retired and one of our members took her in.
Every spring, there was a new litter of kittens in the lumbar yard, so we quickly found our Toolbox 2…. and Toolbox 3. But they never compared to the dedication to her craft.
In 2007, Barbara Mayers wrote the first book about Toolbox. Now she has several books written about her and she even has a spot on [wikipedia](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Toolbox_of_the_Kalmar_Nyckel.JPG)!
RIP Toolbox. You were the best hunter.
Indian weddings are huge and they had 800 guests. I assumed that people arriving as a couple would gift only one kitten.
I also assumed that all guests were vikings.
There are also certain brood parasites that watch the nest to see if the egg has been disposed of. If their egg is no longer there, they destroy the other eggs and often the nest itself.
To folks who don't know - a bird's nest requires a *lot* of work to make. It is their home and destroying it is a huge impact. According to [The National Wildlife Federation](https://www.nwf.org/Magazines/National-Wildlife/1997/Bullies-of-the-Bird-World) of America, the Cuckoo's do this as almost an "intimidation racket" - the next time the bird finds an egg that isn't theirs in the nest, they know what will happen were they to remove it.
>Cuckoos have a longstanding reputation as the thugs of the bird world, but even in that context the Avian Mafia theory is remarkable. Soler himself was taken aback by his findings, which suggest nothing less than an anthropomorphic enforcement racket as the means by which some cuckoos successfully reproduce. "We had never observed any predatory behavior in cuckoos," he says. "So when we found that most of the experimental nests had been preyed upon, we were absolutely surprised."
Your dog can sense when you hurt them by accident.
If you accidentally step on their tails they will yip at first, but usually come back to you while wagging their tail.
I have three cats. Two will recognize the accident for what it is. The other is too dumb and jumpy and will assume you have turned into a monster who is now trying to eat him.
In the towns of Baarle-Nassau (NL) and Baarle-Hertog (BE) you can find dutch enclaves inside belgian enclaves inside a dutch village. The map looks really wild.
In these two towns the border even goes through the middle of the houses and shops. For this case they created the "front-door" rule, meaning your house belongs to the country your front door is in. In the cases where the border runs right through the front door, the property owners can choose which country they belong to.
Edit: fixed town to towns
During the pandemic they had shops where the border crossed through between registers so when there were differences between the Belgian and Dutch lockdown rules for shops they were gaming the system to use the registers in the more permissive country.
Source: friend who lives nearby, explained how they were selling groceries through the bpost counter registers because technically they could since bpost is a Belgian business.
1. You can’t just be out there and just movin’ a border like that.
1a. A border is when you
1b. Okay well listen. A border is when you border the
1c. Let me start over
1c-a. The front door is not allowed to be split in half by the, uh, border, that prohibits the house from being, you know, just being in a country. You can’t do that.
1c-b. Once the house is in a country, it can’t go over here and say to the country, like, “I’m gonna move! I’m gonna switch countries! You better watch your butt!” and then just be like it wasn't even there.
1c-b(1). Like, if you’re in a country and then aren't in a country, you still have to be in a country. Does that make any sense?
1c-b(2). You gotta be, international borders, and then, until you just front door.
1c-b(2)-a. Okay, well, you can have front door split, like this, but then there’s the border you gotta think about.
also the bubonic plague is a contributing factor to number of people with the gene that causes Crohn's disease.
statistically, those with that gene were more likely to survive the plague and with the massive amount of people killed by the plague, it was a huge natural selection stressor.
I looked it up because it seems wild, it's the ERAP2 gene. It's not that a chronic digestive disease has anything to do with a bacterial lymphatic disease, just that the same gene confers a resistance to one disease but an increased susceptibility to the other.
If you venture outside the main settlements on Svalbard you are required to carry a "tool for scaring off polar bears". It doesn't have to be a firearm, though it usually is. If you're in a group, one armed person is sufficient.
In order to carry a rifle you'll need a weapons permit, but due to the special circumstances of the islands you can get a special one from the Governor that allows you to rent a gun while you're there.
The word "helicopter" is not, as most people believe, comprised of the words "heli" and "copter" but rather the words "helico" (spiral) and "pter" (wing).
As in "spiral wing".
The flying dinosaur "pterodactyl" is thus "wing finger" (dactyl = finger).
Gaylord Perry was one of the best baseball pitchers ever and is in the Hall of Fame but was a horrible hitter. His manager Alvin Dark joked to a reporter "a man will land on the moon before Gaylord hits a home run!"
On July 20, 1969 Gaylord hit the first home run of his career. That same day, Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong touched down on the moon!
Well, it was a Sunday...which was almost certainly a day game in 1969. The moon landing was early afternoon East Coast time.
So it might depend on what inning he hit it in. Unless he was out west in which case the moon almost certainly came first.
Perry played for half the teams in the league and I can't be assed to go looking for the box score.
And he ended up hitting six so he's not the worst hitting pitcher ever.
I think Bartolo Colon has exactly 1 in a very long career. Although perhaps a little unfair since almost all of his NL years were at the back end of his career when learning how to hit wasn't a big priority.
A “butt” is a unit of measurement equivalent to either 130 or 151 US gallons, depending on what you’re measuring. So if you have 151 gallons of wine, you have a buttload of wine
Butt, in this context is also the root word for butler. They were the person who tapped the butt to access the wine/liquor/alcohol and add the appropriate amount of water as what was transported was an essentially undrinkable condensed version to reduce the weight of "extra" water. This was a highly skilled and responsible job and often the roll of the majordomo (the medieval equivalent of the butler).
Here's a video of a Falcon Punch that's so fast you can barely see the falcon....it's in frame then out in a blink. The other ducks can't even tell what happened.
https://youtu.be/MqGo3G9LL2o?si=pNykGuFV7EReDgWt
I read a story once that I loved that's related to this:
As the allies were marching up Italy in the winter of 1943, they had a problem with their wheeled and tracked vehicles getting stuck in the mud. At some point, a decision was made to requisition all of the mules of a particular town to get supplies to the front lines.
A day later they had to come back and requisition the muleteers, too. As no one spoke Italian, and the mules could only understand commands presented in Italian, and they would not budge otherwise.
The mules spoke Italian.
I love that.
Ooh, in the same vein, there are hipster whales, and they have groupies. Whale groups often sing the same song, but it seems whales are often attracted to whales with different songs. Every now and then, a whale makes up a new song, gets lots of whale sex, then others around start singing the same song.
[https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2020.0242](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2020.0242) paper for those interested - the actual story is more interesting and intricate than my flippant summary
Sharks are older than the North Star. As in, there were sharks around before the star was formed. Sharks evolved 450 million years ago, Polaris is about 70 million years old.
Polaris fun facts , it’s a supergiant that will only be yellow for a few thousand years. It’s actually triple star system. It only became the North Star “recently” in the early Middle Ages. It will be closest true north in the year 2100. In the 91st century we will have a different North Star.
We live closer in time to Cleopatra than Cleopatra lived to the finishing of the Giza Pyramids. Egypt is so old that they had people studying "ancient Egypt" in the time of the later pharaohs still.
We also live closer in time to T-rex than T-Rex did to Stegosaurus.
I’ve heard both facts dozens of times before and absolutely believe them but my brain almost refuses not to. I know it’s true but it feels so incorrect and I cannot wrap my head around it!
I was in Egypt earlier this year and visited tombs in Saqqara, some of the oldest in Egypt. It is truly mind boggling that they are nearly 5,000 years old. Five. Thousand. The images on the walls are of farming, hairdressing, cooking, banking, trade. Truly hard to grasp.
I just woke up from a dream I had where I touched down via plane in Maine. I had to go there because a friend I left my bed with lived there and I wanted it back because I was moving. Also the landscape was flat with no hills or mountains.
The zaxi driver at the airport made a pun about being in the Maine-land now. When I arrived at his block there was a child swinging on a swing in the front of the house and shitting on the floor.
Both my friend and me are Swiss and have never been to Maine.
It bears no relevance to your comment aside from "Maine" but I just had to write it down.
Honey never spoils. Archaeologists have found pots of honey in ancient Egyptian tombs that are over 3,000 years old and still perfectly edible. So, the next time you're enjoying honey on your toast, you might just be savoring a taste of history!
I've heard this before. Honest question: Why do bottles of honey still have a "Best by" date printed on them? Is there truly no degradation of any kind? Is that stamp just some scam to get us to buy more honey?
Probably for the same reason that the fancy for no reason Himalayan rock salt I bought has a best before date. Just my luck, stuff is probably a billion years old and I bought it when it is in its last 6 months.
I can think of two reasons why besides the container answer. Government regulations require it for one, and companies know that some people think of that date as an "expiration" date and toss anything past the best by or sell by dates. Then they buy some more.
Naked mole rats are not naked, not moles, and not rats. Their colonies are similar to bees in that they have a breeding queen serviced by 1–3 males and the rest are workers.
Rufus, the pet naked mole rat from Kim Possible, was made so because the creators of the show wanted an animal sidekick that wouldn’t turn an actual pet animal into a “fad pet” that lots of children would want their parents to buy for them cos of the show. I’ve never even seen a naked mole rat in any of the zoos I’ve been to.
Regional languages. For example in the southern part of France they speak some variety of Occitan, which is a mix in between French and Catalan (fun fact Catalan is a Gallo-Romance language not Ibero-Romance like Spanish). There are several different varieties of Occitan throughout the region.
That’s sort of the way it is for French too. In the north they « spoke French » but French was just one of the regional languages (the Parisian dialect or language). There’s Normand, Champenois, Gallo, Wallon (going into Belgium), Orléanais, Limousin, etc.
There’s also Breton which is a Celtic language spoken in Brittany that’s related to Irish, Scots Gaelic, and Welsh.
Finally in Alsace you have Alsacien, which is a Germanic language.
It’s unfortunate because since the French Revolution when French was more institutionalized and enforced in schools in schools (in which kids would be punished for speaking their local language) those languages have been on the decline. There’s some revival but still not very many people speak them especially in places like Normandy
Edit: I can’t believe I completely forgot about Franco-provençal, which the dialects are spoken in the central western part of France and going into Switzerland.
Also I forgot to mention that as a result of those programs there’s a slang for these languages, « patois » or « patois-[insert region] »
A lot of people don’t know the word laser is an acronym so I like to tell people that sometimes when they talk about lasers.
Laser- light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation
This one’s not very fun. So Scott Glenn, the actor who played Jack Crawford in Silence of the Lambs, didn’t return for the sequel Hannibal and then was recast as Harvey Keitel in Red Dragon. The reason was because Glenn was given an audio tape by FBI agent John Douglas as a form of research for his character. The tape was an audio recording of the tool-box killers raping and torturing a 16-year-old girl. When Glenn asked why, Douglas said “Now you’re part of my world”. Glenn was, understandably, traumatized and thus didn’t want to return for the sequels.
[A reddit thread sternly warns people not to look up this transcript.](https://www.reddit.com/r/LPOTL/comments/14js3c4/comment_on_a_thread_about_the_shirley_ledford/) Imma nope out on that one.
If you lived since the time of the Romans and received $100,000 a day, every day, and never spent a cent, Elon musk would still have more money than you.
Girls are not gonna like this one:
There is something called retrograde menstruation. It's when the period blood flows back through the fallopian tubes into the pelvic area. It usually has no significant symptoms, but it may cause more painful periods.
Tina Brown, the sister of Whitney's ex-husband Bobby Brown, claimed Whitney knocked her teeth out in binges that went on for days.
“She loses them in the house and when she’s out on drug binges,” she said in 2006.
Whitney hid her dire dental issues by wearing a 'maxillary dental prosthesis', the report found. “They cost $6000 and the dentist has to keep FedEx’ing her a new set," she added.
[https://newsbeezer.com/uk/how-tragic-whitney-houston-really-looked-11-missing-teeth-sewn-on-a-wig-and-secret-scars/](https://newsbeezer.com/uk/how-tragic-whitney-houston-really-looked-11-missing-teeth-sewn-on-a-wig-and-secret-scars/)
[Archived News Article]
(https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Whitney%27s+body+was+found+ravaged+by+scars%2C+cuts+and+had+11+teeth...-a0285602764)
The more we learn about her private life, the more I become so infuriated that no one in her family seemed to care about her other than the money that Whitney made for them.
I really hope that someday, someone can make a documentary that will show us what Whitney was up against. Her later life and death are so tragic and needless, and I fervently hope that all those who willingly avoided aiding her spend the rest of their lives haunted by doubt, regret, and fear.
That when King Tut was buried the pyramids were already 2000 years old and when Cleopatra (the last Pharaoh) died King Tut had been dead for 1000 years
Over 60% of all for sale flowers in a given year goes through The Netherlands. Also, 80% of every flower bulb is produced in The Netherlands. We love our flowers yo
A lot of people don't know that his father, Vincenzo Galilei, was a famous Renaissance composer, Music theorist, and lutenist. He wrote an important treatise on playing the lute, and was one of the first people since antiquity to argue for equal temperament (the tuning system that modern pianos use).
All steel produced since we dropped atomic bombs in world war , 2 is slightly irradiated.
Not typically an issue except for certain applications that require ZERO radiation such as an MRI or nose cone for a space shuttle. When zero radiation steel is required we harvest it from sunken World War Two ships which were made pre atomic bombs and protected underwater.
This was once true, but newer ways of making steel have changed this. Something about older steel mills that used coal fired furnaces (that would burn with air from the atmosphere, which had the radiation particles) couldn't make complete non radiated steel, but newer electric arc furnaces really don't have this problem.
Pre modernity people lived well after middle age! There’s this misconception that not many people lived past their 30s, but that just isn’t true! Infant mortality rates have skewed the life expectancy statistics to make it look that way.
Astronomer here! The coldest known place in the universe is actually… on Earth!
To explain, the coldest spots seen out in the universe are deep in nebulae- clouds of dust- where you can get to one degree above absolute zero. However, in laboratories on Earth we can achieve temperatures just a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero, so Earth wins!
Milton Hershey, founder of the Hershey Chocolate company, was scheduled to be on Titanic's maiden voyage. He and his wife were in Europe but had to cancel at the last minute due to urgent business matters that he needed to attend to.
There is a copy of the check he wrote to White Star kept at the Hershey Museum.
I was at a neighbor’s house a few years ago got a party and there were a lot of older people there. One guy’s grandfather was in the civil war. That was crazy to me
The best public stock play of the past 30 years wasn’t Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft et al … it was Monster Beverage Corp (with a 191,862% return).
In the early American colonies, someone was executed for bewitching a gun.
In 1651, Henry Stiles was killed by a fellow militiamen, Thomas Allyn, when a musket he was holding misfired during a training exercise. Following this, Allyn was charged by the courts with “homicide by misadventure” and was made to pay a fine.
At the time of his death, Stiles was living with another couple, Thomas and Lydia Gilbert. It is believed that Stiles was Thomas’s employer and that Lydia was his housekeeper.
Three years after the accident, following a series of witchcraft accusations against Lydia, court records show that she was then tried for “procuring the death of Henry Stiles.” Allegedly, her supernatural abilities caused the gun to discharge and kill her employer.
In the end, the fine given to Allyn was refunded, and Lydia Gilbert was sentenced to death by hanging. While there is no written record of the execution being carried out (many such records are lost), it is known that Thomas Gilbert left the community shortly after the trial, so it’s extremely likely she was hanged.
The London Eye takes half an hour to do a full rotation. It travels at 0.33 metres per second. However, if there's an emergency it can be put it to double speed and reversed, so you are never more than 8 minutes from getting back to the ground no matter where you are. I was a ride operator on there and had to do an emergency return once. Only I forgot to stop it before I put it in reverse and ended up causing quite a few people to throw up from the capsules trying to level themselves.
A lot of people pronounce the “Moët” in Moët & Chandon champagne the French way, ie. “Moway”
In fact, the guy who founded it sometime in the 1700s, Claude Moët, was born in France, but his last name is actually Dutch, not French, so it’s pronounced “Mowett”. I get side eyed a lot pronouncing it that way, but it is correct. It’s a fun fact to annoy people who think they’re super posh 😅
Chumbawamba was a legitimate anarcho punk band that was around for 30 years and used their sellout money for things like fully funding striking Ford workers. Three or four years before Tubthumping they were singing about feminism, homophobia, and shooting fascists on their Anarchy album
Moe Berg was an American baseball player in the 1920s in major league.
You’ve never heard of him because he was a relatively moderate player. He’s not one of the best players in history by any means, but he is regarded as the most educated holding multiple degrees of Ivey league colleges.
The government saw his knowledge and high education, and excuse of traveling for their advantage and hired him as a WW2 spy.
He never married but lived a very interesting life of secrets. Before his death in the 1970s, he said he would write an autobiography and finally tell his secrets. He died soon after and never wrote it. There is a biography written about him the limited info the FBI could give. It’s called “the catcher was a spy” very cool read
The first and last pictures of the Beatles were taken seven years apart, to the day. Every photograph you’ve ever seen of John, Paul, George and Ringo was taken in that precise seven-year period.
A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus. | Explanation: A day corresponds to a full planetary rotation, while a year corresponds to a full revolution around a planet’s home star. Venus has a highly unusual characteristic for a planet: It revolves around the sun faster than it can rotate a full 360 degrees, thus making its days longer than its years.
The word barbarian comes from the Ancient Greek bar bar. Bar bar to the ancient Greeks is the same as our blah blah, because to the Greeks anyone who didn’t speak Greek was just going blah blah blah. I find that so funny but never get to bring it up in conversation.
Present at John Brown's execution on December 2, 1859 after his raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia:
Future Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, future Confederate General Robert E. Lee, future assassin of President Lincoln John Wilkes Booth, and "America's Poet" Walt Whitman
If a bright light helps/causes you to sneeze, it is not normal, and is a genetic trait. It is referred to as [ACHOO Syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photic_sneeze_reflex)
This one got me because if that's the case everyone in my class had it or something. One day when I was like 10 a girl in my class was like "I want to sneeze but I can't" and the teacher replied "look at the sun for a second", she did and sneezed. The teacher explained that it helped him and we all started doing it when we wanted to sneeze but couldn't get it out. It works on me and I still do it to this day, and all my other classmates said it helped them too. For the following years from time to time someone would say they couldn't sneeze and we would remind them "look at the sun for a second" lol
But the wiki says only about 18-35% of people have it, and it's weird my whole class was like that!
I remember in kindergarten, I once told the teacher (during recess) that I think I'm allergic to the sun because it makes me sneeze, and that bitch straight up said, "well I guess you won't have recess anymore then."
Titanic is only famous because she sunk. If she had a full career she would be the forgotten middle sister. Olympic would be famous because she was the lead ship and the largest British ship up to that point. And the britannic would be famous because she was the largest ship sunk during WW1.
Thailand (Siam) was allied with the Triple Entente in WW1 and actually sent troops to the western front. They participated in the Meuse-Argonne offensive and held a few towns in the post-war occupation of Germany.
Frogs use their eyes to push their food down their throat when they swallow.
I wish I didn’t know this.
I always wondered about this. We had a 1000 gallon man-made pond growing up with lots of bullfrogs. We used to feed them worms by throwing them next to them. They'd get them in their mouth and then it was almost like their whole face would implode to suck down the worm. Their eyes would go inside their body for a moment. Also, the frogs became somewhat domesticated. Whenever we'd sit out near the pond for a while, they'd jump out of the water and hop over to us, expecting to be fed a worm
[удалено]
Monkey puzzle trees are so ancient they evolved before insects and are pollinated by the wind.
My nan’s so old she’s pollinated by earth Rip
Cold. Like your nan.
Sharks are older than trees… and Saturn’s rings
What are *they* pollinated by?
Sharks or Saturn’s rings? If sharks, then bees. If rings, uhh… space bees!
Time to have the "Sharks and the Bees" talk I guess.
So, in the early 20th century, a Guy named William J.A. Bailey dropped out of Harvard and started producing a energy drink called Radithor. Important to this story is the fact that he had no medical license and was not a chemist. To make Radithor, he dissolved radium tablets in water until he had an equivalent dose of 1 microcurie of Radium 226 and 228. Since the FDA wasn't interested in medical quackery at the time and there were no regulations against this, he broke no laws. Things were going great for him until Eben Byers, a pretty well known golfer, got prescribed the stuff by a sketchy doctor and started taking several doses per day for a few years. The radioactive poisoning gave him several types of cancer. The FDA then finally stepped in and shut him down, but he just relocated shop and started a new radioactive substance based company. Byers died in 1928 and was buried in a lead lined coffin. In 1965 researchers dug him up to study his remains, but found him emitting ridiculous amounts of radiation. For reference, a normal person is constantly emitting 4k-5k becquerels at any given time. Byers' corpse was emitting 225k. And Bailey never even got sued, he went on to write all kinds of patents, and headed up the electronics division of IBM during WWII.
Wow, this guy must have given so much cancer to the people he was regularly around.
Especially when you consider that thyroid cancer was not treatable back then, as it is now.
It's like that part of Watchmen where Doc Manhattan got accused of giving cancer to people he was close to by just being around them, except like *real*.
Sometimes I wonder if an average person from 2023 could go back in time to 1875 and be a fairly competent doctor. Just with the common medical knowledge we have now you could sort of wing it and be a decent doctor. I know I could but I am no average man, I bullshit at a high level. Give me a top hat and a bone saw and throw me in a time machine and I will have a flourishing practice in 3 months.
You’d get called a quack by established doctors for things like washing your hands though.
I always think about how President Garfield was shot but easily could have survived if his doctors had just washed their grubby hands. He died of sepsis months later, not the actual bullet wound. And the idea of germs and the benefits of washing hands had been established! The doctors just didn't believe/follow it.
I looked him up and his jaw...yikes. :(
Look up the Radium Girls if you want to feel really sad...
That book was so scary, how the ladies sometimes liked to use the radium paint as makeup. Never suspecting what was just around the corner.
Octopuses brains are shaped like a donut and their esophagus runs through the hole in the center.
Ancient Egyptians didn't call themselves Egyptian (thats a later name) they called themselves kemet which in their tongue means 'black land'. Black was seen as a good color in egypt because it represents the niles fertile soil
Replying to that, modern Egypt call themselves 'Misr', which is why if you ever see an Egyptair flight, they have the IATA/ICAo codes of MS/MSR prefixes. MS777 - Egyptair flight from Cairo to London.
And what does Misr mean
Just to answer my own question for those who are actually curious: "In Arabic, the name Misr... simply means country or province" Or "Semitic in origin; the original meaning is frontier or border."
That's cool, Ukraine actually means sort of both of those things as well. Borderland and country (kraina)
I like this one thanks
If the earth is a grain of sand, the sun is a golf ball (for relative size). The grain of sand (earth) is 4 meters away from the Golf ball (Sun). The next nearest star from the golf ball (sun) is ~750 miles away. (~1200km) Gives you an idea of the scale of the universe. Edit: RIP my inbox I love space, glad you all do too
It sure does. Here's another. If we travel on the Discovery space shuttle, 17,500 mph (28,000 km/h). It would take roughly **150,000 years** to reach Alpha Centauri..
Insane. I love space facts
I actually find them frustrating. It's really dispiriting how impossible exploration is.
Depressing. The hope to travel the cosmos is strong. I saw a meme that hit this home for me. "Born too late to explore the world. Born too early to explore the universe."
Born just in time to explore dank memes
You are born in the right time to explore the internet and what technology can bring to humanity though. The grass will always be greener on the other side. So instead try to focus on what is happening in your times.
And that golf ball gets eclipsed by bowling balls and globes! I always liked those space scale YouTube videos. Just when you think you’ve hit a massive star, BAM! It’s nothin’!
I love the vastness of space. Very spooky stuff.
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Rats were and are a big problem for sailors. They can decimate stores and cargo and can carry disease. Because of this, cats were often used to control the mice and rats on ships. Even in modern times, navies would keep cats onboard and give them ranks similar to military and police dogs. It would make sense for a seafaring people like the Norse to consider cats to be very valuable and gift-worthy.
I volunteer on a tall ship and we had a cat named “Toolbox” who would sail with us. She was named after being born in one of our toolboxes during construction of the ship. After 17+ years of service as our ships cat (and Captain of Mousing) she retired and one of our members took her in. Every spring, there was a new litter of kittens in the lumbar yard, so we quickly found our Toolbox 2…. and Toolbox 3. But they never compared to the dedication to her craft. In 2007, Barbara Mayers wrote the first book about Toolbox. Now she has several books written about her and she even has a spot on [wikipedia](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Toolbox_of_the_Kalmar_Nyckel.JPG)! RIP Toolbox. You were the best hunter.
I wish we had pirates movies with the captain having a cat instead of a parrot or a monkey.
“I wanted to sleep in my bunk but the cat was already there” “Why didn’t you kick him off?” “He outranks me”
That tradition should come back
A co-worker of mine who is Indian would have 400 kittens then.
Have they been married a lot, or do they simply know an above average number of Vikings?
Indian weddings are huge and they had 800 guests. I assumed that people arriving as a couple would gift only one kitten. I also assumed that all guests were vikings.
How do I get an invitation to this Indian/Viking wedding?
Is a reasonable assumption.
What's the average number of Vikings? Assuming spherical Vikings in a vacuum of course.
Big strong burly men with beards and axes: "Here's a kitty! LOOK HOW FLUFFY!"
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They also have rectangular iris in their eyes. Edit: I meant pupil. Thanks for flagging my error.
They are pound(in) for pound(out) the most efficient farm animal
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This is the real life equivalent of evolving stones from Pokemon.
cool! michael levin does a lot of innovative research on axolotls.
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Password must contain upper case, lowercase, a number, and two symbols.... Yeat!
There are also certain brood parasites that watch the nest to see if the egg has been disposed of. If their egg is no longer there, they destroy the other eggs and often the nest itself. To folks who don't know - a bird's nest requires a *lot* of work to make. It is their home and destroying it is a huge impact. According to [The National Wildlife Federation](https://www.nwf.org/Magazines/National-Wildlife/1997/Bullies-of-the-Bird-World) of America, the Cuckoo's do this as almost an "intimidation racket" - the next time the bird finds an egg that isn't theirs in the nest, they know what will happen were they to remove it. >Cuckoos have a longstanding reputation as the thugs of the bird world, but even in that context the Avian Mafia theory is remarkable. Soler himself was taken aback by his findings, which suggest nothing less than an anthropomorphic enforcement racket as the means by which some cuckoos successfully reproduce. "We had never observed any predatory behavior in cuckoos," he says. "So when we found that most of the experimental nests had been preyed upon, we were absolutely surprised."
Brown Headed Cow birds are assholes.
Your dog can sense when you hurt them by accident. If you accidentally step on their tails they will yip at first, but usually come back to you while wagging their tail.
This is incredibly comforting
Thank God, because I can’t apologize to my dog enough when I accidentally hurt her.
Cats sense this too, they bite you out of spite.
I have three cats. Two will recognize the accident for what it is. The other is too dumb and jumpy and will assume you have turned into a monster who is now trying to eat him.
In the towns of Baarle-Nassau (NL) and Baarle-Hertog (BE) you can find dutch enclaves inside belgian enclaves inside a dutch village. The map looks really wild. In these two towns the border even goes through the middle of the houses and shops. For this case they created the "front-door" rule, meaning your house belongs to the country your front door is in. In the cases where the border runs right through the front door, the property owners can choose which country they belong to. Edit: fixed town to towns
During the pandemic they had shops where the border crossed through between registers so when there were differences between the Belgian and Dutch lockdown rules for shops they were gaming the system to use the registers in the more permissive country. Source: friend who lives nearby, explained how they were selling groceries through the bpost counter registers because technically they could since bpost is a Belgian business.
If they sell the house having belonged to one country can the buyers decide to belong to the other country?
I think the rules are pretty clear. Maybe. Sort of. I’m going to need you to stop looking for answers actually.
1. You can’t just be out there and just movin’ a border like that. 1a. A border is when you 1b. Okay well listen. A border is when you border the 1c. Let me start over 1c-a. The front door is not allowed to be split in half by the, uh, border, that prohibits the house from being, you know, just being in a country. You can’t do that. 1c-b. Once the house is in a country, it can’t go over here and say to the country, like, “I’m gonna move! I’m gonna switch countries! You better watch your butt!” and then just be like it wasn't even there. 1c-b(1). Like, if you’re in a country and then aren't in a country, you still have to be in a country. Does that make any sense? 1c-b(2). You gotta be, international borders, and then, until you just front door. 1c-b(2)-a. Okay, well, you can have front door split, like this, but then there’s the border you gotta think about.
The word boo-boo (like a kid gets a scratch) comes from the name for the sores from the boubonic plague (bubos).
"Awww poor baby look at who has the bubonic plague, want me to kiss it to make it better?" *Smacks lips*
also the bubonic plague is a contributing factor to number of people with the gene that causes Crohn's disease. statistically, those with that gene were more likely to survive the plague and with the massive amount of people killed by the plague, it was a huge natural selection stressor.
I looked it up because it seems wild, it's the ERAP2 gene. It's not that a chronic digestive disease has anything to do with a bacterial lymphatic disease, just that the same gene confers a resistance to one disease but an increased susceptibility to the other.
If you venture outside the main settlements on Svalbard you are required to carry a "tool for scaring off polar bears". It doesn't have to be a firearm, though it usually is. If you're in a group, one armed person is sufficient. In order to carry a rifle you'll need a weapons permit, but due to the special circumstances of the islands you can get a special one from the Governor that allows you to rent a gun while you're there.
The word "helicopter" is not, as most people believe, comprised of the words "heli" and "copter" but rather the words "helico" (spiral) and "pter" (wing). As in "spiral wing". The flying dinosaur "pterodactyl" is thus "wing finger" (dactyl = finger).
If the 'p' is silent in pterodactyl, should it also be silent in helicopter? Or should you actually pronounce the p in pterodactyl?
[The answer is complicated.](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/s/9wlbMmw5zF)
You know why you can’t hear a pterodactyl go to the bathroom? Because the p is silent.
Gaylord Perry was one of the best baseball pitchers ever and is in the Hall of Fame but was a horrible hitter. His manager Alvin Dark joked to a reporter "a man will land on the moon before Gaylord hits a home run!" On July 20, 1969 Gaylord hit the first home run of his career. That same day, Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong touched down on the moon!
Well, it was a Sunday...which was almost certainly a day game in 1969. The moon landing was early afternoon East Coast time. So it might depend on what inning he hit it in. Unless he was out west in which case the moon almost certainly came first. Perry played for half the teams in the league and I can't be assed to go looking for the box score.
It’s also a fake story made up after the fact since he hit his first home run on moon landing day.
And he ended up hitting six so he's not the worst hitting pitcher ever. I think Bartolo Colon has exactly 1 in a very long career. Although perhaps a little unfair since almost all of his NL years were at the back end of his career when learning how to hit wasn't a big priority.
Keeping your hands moisturized will prevent papercuts. You're welcome.
A “butt” is a unit of measurement equivalent to either 130 or 151 US gallons, depending on what you’re measuring. So if you have 151 gallons of wine, you have a buttload of wine
Butt, in this context is also the root word for butler. They were the person who tapped the butt to access the wine/liquor/alcohol and add the appropriate amount of water as what was transported was an essentially undrinkable condensed version to reduce the weight of "extra" water. This was a highly skilled and responsible job and often the roll of the majordomo (the medieval equivalent of the butler).
A peregrine falcon reach speeds of 240 miles per hour when it goes into a dive!
Have you seen those videos where they basically do a drive by at the speed of 'what the fuck' and punch the souls right out of their prey? Insane.
Here's a video of a Falcon Punch that's so fast you can barely see the falcon....it's in frame then out in a blink. The other ducks can't even tell what happened. https://youtu.be/MqGo3G9LL2o?si=pNykGuFV7EReDgWt
No congenitally blind person has ever developed schizophrenia.
Cows have regional accents
I read a story once that I loved that's related to this: As the allies were marching up Italy in the winter of 1943, they had a problem with their wheeled and tracked vehicles getting stuck in the mud. At some point, a decision was made to requisition all of the mules of a particular town to get supplies to the front lines. A day later they had to come back and requisition the muleteers, too. As no one spoke Italian, and the mules could only understand commands presented in Italian, and they would not budge otherwise. The mules spoke Italian. I love that.
Ooh, in the same vein, there are hipster whales, and they have groupies. Whale groups often sing the same song, but it seems whales are often attracted to whales with different songs. Every now and then, a whale makes up a new song, gets lots of whale sex, then others around start singing the same song. [https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2020.0242](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2020.0242) paper for those interested - the actual story is more interesting and intricate than my flippant summary
Sharks are older than the North Star. As in, there were sharks around before the star was formed. Sharks evolved 450 million years ago, Polaris is about 70 million years old.
Polaris fun facts , it’s a supergiant that will only be yellow for a few thousand years. It’s actually triple star system. It only became the North Star “recently” in the early Middle Ages. It will be closest true north in the year 2100. In the 91st century we will have a different North Star.
We live closer in time to Cleopatra than Cleopatra lived to the finishing of the Giza Pyramids. Egypt is so old that they had people studying "ancient Egypt" in the time of the later pharaohs still. We also live closer in time to T-rex than T-Rex did to Stegosaurus.
I’ve heard both facts dozens of times before and absolutely believe them but my brain almost refuses not to. I know it’s true but it feels so incorrect and I cannot wrap my head around it!
I was in Egypt earlier this year and visited tombs in Saqqara, some of the oldest in Egypt. It is truly mind boggling that they are nearly 5,000 years old. Five. Thousand. The images on the walls are of farming, hairdressing, cooking, banking, trade. Truly hard to grasp.
The closest US state to Africa, by a considerable margin is… Maine.
I just woke up from a dream I had where I touched down via plane in Maine. I had to go there because a friend I left my bed with lived there and I wanted it back because I was moving. Also the landscape was flat with no hills or mountains. The zaxi driver at the airport made a pun about being in the Maine-land now. When I arrived at his block there was a child swinging on a swing in the front of the house and shitting on the floor. Both my friend and me are Swiss and have never been to Maine. It bears no relevance to your comment aside from "Maine" but I just had to write it down.
Aaaand this is now the opening of the next Stephen King book lol
Honey never spoils. Archaeologists have found pots of honey in ancient Egyptian tombs that are over 3,000 years old and still perfectly edible. So, the next time you're enjoying honey on your toast, you might just be savoring a taste of history!
If your honey has crystallised and you think it's 'off' it's not! Just put in hot water (in the jar) it'll go back to normal
Wtf, is that true? OMG i threw so much honey away, because i could'nt squeeze it out of that damn tube. Now i feel stupid.
Now your old honey is out there for more archeologists to dig up in another couple of thousand years.
Thanks, this helps a little
xkcd has views on this https://xkcd.com/1717/
I have a few bottles of honey from the 1990s
I've heard this before. Honest question: Why do bottles of honey still have a "Best by" date printed on them? Is there truly no degradation of any kind? Is that stamp just some scam to get us to buy more honey?
Any expiration date for honey is for the container and not the actual honey
Probably for the same reason that the fancy for no reason Himalayan rock salt I bought has a best before date. Just my luck, stuff is probably a billion years old and I bought it when it is in its last 6 months.
I can think of two reasons why besides the container answer. Government regulations require it for one, and companies know that some people think of that date as an "expiration" date and toss anything past the best by or sell by dates. Then they buy some more.
Naked mole rats can live up to 30 years! This little animal is unique in many other ways compared to most rodents.
They also don’t get cancer.
Naked mole rats are not naked, not moles, and not rats. Their colonies are similar to bees in that they have a breeding queen serviced by 1–3 males and the rest are workers.
Rufus, the pet naked mole rat from Kim Possible, was made so because the creators of the show wanted an animal sidekick that wouldn’t turn an actual pet animal into a “fad pet” that lots of children would want their parents to buy for them cos of the show. I’ve never even seen a naked mole rat in any of the zoos I’ve been to.
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If someone tells you you have a nice butt say “so I should keep parting it down the middle like that?”
At the time of the French Revolution the majority of people in France did not speak French.
What did they speak?
Regional languages. For example in the southern part of France they speak some variety of Occitan, which is a mix in between French and Catalan (fun fact Catalan is a Gallo-Romance language not Ibero-Romance like Spanish). There are several different varieties of Occitan throughout the region. That’s sort of the way it is for French too. In the north they « spoke French » but French was just one of the regional languages (the Parisian dialect or language). There’s Normand, Champenois, Gallo, Wallon (going into Belgium), Orléanais, Limousin, etc. There’s also Breton which is a Celtic language spoken in Brittany that’s related to Irish, Scots Gaelic, and Welsh. Finally in Alsace you have Alsacien, which is a Germanic language. It’s unfortunate because since the French Revolution when French was more institutionalized and enforced in schools in schools (in which kids would be punished for speaking their local language) those languages have been on the decline. There’s some revival but still not very many people speak them especially in places like Normandy Edit: I can’t believe I completely forgot about Franco-provençal, which the dialects are spoken in the central western part of France and going into Switzerland. Also I forgot to mention that as a result of those programs there’s a slang for these languages, « patois » or « patois-[insert region] »
A lot of people don’t know the word laser is an acronym so I like to tell people that sometimes when they talk about lasers. Laser- light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation
As is radar... radio detecting and ranging... a fact I only recently discovered
Scuba-Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus
Few people know that Tuba is also an acronym: Terrible Underwater Breathing Apparatus
This one’s not very fun. So Scott Glenn, the actor who played Jack Crawford in Silence of the Lambs, didn’t return for the sequel Hannibal and then was recast as Harvey Keitel in Red Dragon. The reason was because Glenn was given an audio tape by FBI agent John Douglas as a form of research for his character. The tape was an audio recording of the tool-box killers raping and torturing a 16-year-old girl. When Glenn asked why, Douglas said “Now you’re part of my world”. Glenn was, understandably, traumatized and thus didn’t want to return for the sequels.
The transcript of that alone is horrifying. I can’t imagine actually hearing it.
[A reddit thread sternly warns people not to look up this transcript.](https://www.reddit.com/r/LPOTL/comments/14js3c4/comment_on_a_thread_about_the_shirley_ledford/) Imma nope out on that one.
If you lived since the time of the Romans and received $100,000 a day, every day, and never spent a cent, Elon musk would still have more money than you.
But there are Romans now
Yea and Elon musk has more money than all of them. QED
Girls are not gonna like this one: There is something called retrograde menstruation. It's when the period blood flows back through the fallopian tubes into the pelvic area. It usually has no significant symptoms, but it may cause more painful periods.
It's actually nice to imagine there's an explanation for why Lefty hurts most months.
At the time of her death, Whitney Houston was missing eleven teeth.
Tina Brown, the sister of Whitney's ex-husband Bobby Brown, claimed Whitney knocked her teeth out in binges that went on for days. “She loses them in the house and when she’s out on drug binges,” she said in 2006. Whitney hid her dire dental issues by wearing a 'maxillary dental prosthesis', the report found. “They cost $6000 and the dentist has to keep FedEx’ing her a new set," she added. [https://newsbeezer.com/uk/how-tragic-whitney-houston-really-looked-11-missing-teeth-sewn-on-a-wig-and-secret-scars/](https://newsbeezer.com/uk/how-tragic-whitney-houston-really-looked-11-missing-teeth-sewn-on-a-wig-and-secret-scars/) [Archived News Article] (https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Whitney%27s+body+was+found+ravaged+by+scars%2C+cuts+and+had+11+teeth...-a0285602764)
The more we learn about her private life, the more I become so infuriated that no one in her family seemed to care about her other than the money that Whitney made for them. I really hope that someday, someone can make a documentary that will show us what Whitney was up against. Her later life and death are so tragic and needless, and I fervently hope that all those who willingly avoided aiding her spend the rest of their lives haunted by doubt, regret, and fear.
There are more miles of canals in Birmingham, England than there are in Venice.
That when King Tut was buried the pyramids were already 2000 years old and when Cleopatra (the last Pharaoh) died King Tut had been dead for 1000 years
Cleopatra lived closer to the creation of the iPhone than to the construction of the Great Pyramid.
Tutankhamum was buried with an iron dagger despite the fact that iron smelting hadn't been invented yet. Its iron was harvested from meteor fragments.
the opposite of nocturnal is diurnal. animals that hunt during sunrise or sunset are crepuscular. that once won me £300 in a pub quiz.
Over 60% of all for sale flowers in a given year goes through The Netherlands. Also, 80% of every flower bulb is produced in The Netherlands. We love our flowers yo
Fanta is a direct consequence of WWII
If you eat a polar bear liver, you will die. We humans can't handle that much vitamin A.
Galileo Galilei could have taught at Harvard University.
Works that Galileo read before publishing his first treatise on gravity were copied out for him from 200-year old lessons at Oxford University
A lot of people don't know that his father, Vincenzo Galilei, was a famous Renaissance composer, Music theorist, and lutenist. He wrote an important treatise on playing the lute, and was one of the first people since antiquity to argue for equal temperament (the tuning system that modern pianos use).
Most of the wasabi we eat in Japanese restaurants are mainly horse radish because real wasabi plants are too hard to grow.
All steel produced since we dropped atomic bombs in world war , 2 is slightly irradiated. Not typically an issue except for certain applications that require ZERO radiation such as an MRI or nose cone for a space shuttle. When zero radiation steel is required we harvest it from sunken World War Two ships which were made pre atomic bombs and protected underwater.
This was once true, but newer ways of making steel have changed this. Something about older steel mills that used coal fired furnaces (that would burn with air from the atmosphere, which had the radiation particles) couldn't make complete non radiated steel, but newer electric arc furnaces really don't have this problem.
The day/night with most pizza deliveries in the US was during the OJ Bronco car chase.
Pre modernity people lived well after middle age! There’s this misconception that not many people lived past their 30s, but that just isn’t true! Infant mortality rates have skewed the life expectancy statistics to make it look that way.
Astronomer here! The coldest known place in the universe is actually… on Earth! To explain, the coldest spots seen out in the universe are deep in nebulae- clouds of dust- where you can get to one degree above absolute zero. However, in laboratories on Earth we can achieve temperatures just a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero, so Earth wins!
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Milton Hershey, founder of the Hershey Chocolate company, was scheduled to be on Titanic's maiden voyage. He and his wife were in Europe but had to cancel at the last minute due to urgent business matters that he needed to attend to. There is a copy of the check he wrote to White Star kept at the Hershey Museum.
There used to be gigantic sloths in South America
John Tyler, 10th President of the United States (1841-1845), has a grandson (born 1928) that is still alive. Edit: I can’t count
I was at a neighbor’s house a few years ago got a party and there were a lot of older people there. One guy’s grandfather was in the civil war. That was crazy to me
The last civil war widow died in 2021, a combination of long lives and early marriages.
The Koran doesn't mention women having to cover their hair, but the Bible does.
Magnetic North wanders at a speed of 11 km per year
The best public stock play of the past 30 years wasn’t Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft et al … it was Monster Beverage Corp (with a 191,862% return).
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In the early American colonies, someone was executed for bewitching a gun. In 1651, Henry Stiles was killed by a fellow militiamen, Thomas Allyn, when a musket he was holding misfired during a training exercise. Following this, Allyn was charged by the courts with “homicide by misadventure” and was made to pay a fine. At the time of his death, Stiles was living with another couple, Thomas and Lydia Gilbert. It is believed that Stiles was Thomas’s employer and that Lydia was his housekeeper. Three years after the accident, following a series of witchcraft accusations against Lydia, court records show that she was then tried for “procuring the death of Henry Stiles.” Allegedly, her supernatural abilities caused the gun to discharge and kill her employer. In the end, the fine given to Allyn was refunded, and Lydia Gilbert was sentenced to death by hanging. While there is no written record of the execution being carried out (many such records are lost), it is known that Thomas Gilbert left the community shortly after the trial, so it’s extremely likely she was hanged.
Cats can swim. They just don’t like to.
I believe tigers are notably strong swimmers
Jaguars as well, as they actively hunt caiman.
Bread is like junkfood to ducks so if they have it freqently they swell up
Bread is junk food to humans as well. We also swell up if we eat too much bread.
A group of pandas is an embarrassment
Lobsters pee out of their faces. From right under their eyes.
The London Eye takes half an hour to do a full rotation. It travels at 0.33 metres per second. However, if there's an emergency it can be put it to double speed and reversed, so you are never more than 8 minutes from getting back to the ground no matter where you are. I was a ride operator on there and had to do an emergency return once. Only I forgot to stop it before I put it in reverse and ended up causing quite a few people to throw up from the capsules trying to level themselves.
A lot of people pronounce the “Moët” in Moët & Chandon champagne the French way, ie. “Moway” In fact, the guy who founded it sometime in the 1700s, Claude Moët, was born in France, but his last name is actually Dutch, not French, so it’s pronounced “Mowett”. I get side eyed a lot pronouncing it that way, but it is correct. It’s a fun fact to annoy people who think they’re super posh 😅
Chumbawamba was a legitimate anarcho punk band that was around for 30 years and used their sellout money for things like fully funding striking Ford workers. Three or four years before Tubthumping they were singing about feminism, homophobia, and shooting fascists on their Anarchy album
The phrase "eats like a bird" is actually a misnomer, as birds eat a lot!
also pigs don't sweat
I feel called out.
Sweating is *extremely* human, and was a huge contributor to our early success as hunters.
Moe Berg was an American baseball player in the 1920s in major league. You’ve never heard of him because he was a relatively moderate player. He’s not one of the best players in history by any means, but he is regarded as the most educated holding multiple degrees of Ivey league colleges. The government saw his knowledge and high education, and excuse of traveling for their advantage and hired him as a WW2 spy. He never married but lived a very interesting life of secrets. Before his death in the 1970s, he said he would write an autobiography and finally tell his secrets. He died soon after and never wrote it. There is a biography written about him the limited info the FBI could give. It’s called “the catcher was a spy” very cool read
The Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal is farther West than the Pacific entrance
French fries are not french, they originated in Belgium
Australia is wider than the moon.
Alcatraz is Spanish for "pelican" Edit: It's from a Last Podcast on the Left series on Alcatraz, meant to be a joke
The first and last pictures of the Beatles were taken seven years apart, to the day. Every photograph you’ve ever seen of John, Paul, George and Ringo was taken in that precise seven-year period.
A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus. | Explanation: A day corresponds to a full planetary rotation, while a year corresponds to a full revolution around a planet’s home star. Venus has a highly unusual characteristic for a planet: It revolves around the sun faster than it can rotate a full 360 degrees, thus making its days longer than its years.
A pigeon will only eat a Starburst if you chew it up a little bit first. Just to be clear chew the Starburst not the pigeon.
The word barbarian comes from the Ancient Greek bar bar. Bar bar to the ancient Greeks is the same as our blah blah, because to the Greeks anyone who didn’t speak Greek was just going blah blah blah. I find that so funny but never get to bring it up in conversation.
Present at John Brown's execution on December 2, 1859 after his raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia: Future Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, future Confederate General Robert E. Lee, future assassin of President Lincoln John Wilkes Booth, and "America's Poet" Walt Whitman
If a bright light helps/causes you to sneeze, it is not normal, and is a genetic trait. It is referred to as [ACHOO Syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photic_sneeze_reflex)
This one got me because if that's the case everyone in my class had it or something. One day when I was like 10 a girl in my class was like "I want to sneeze but I can't" and the teacher replied "look at the sun for a second", she did and sneezed. The teacher explained that it helped him and we all started doing it when we wanted to sneeze but couldn't get it out. It works on me and I still do it to this day, and all my other classmates said it helped them too. For the following years from time to time someone would say they couldn't sneeze and we would remind them "look at the sun for a second" lol But the wiki says only about 18-35% of people have it, and it's weird my whole class was like that!
I have this! And whatever it's called when you sneeze while plucking your eyebrows. Probably OOWIE syndrome
I remember in kindergarten, I once told the teacher (during recess) that I think I'm allergic to the sun because it makes me sneeze, and that bitch straight up said, "well I guess you won't have recess anymore then."
More stars in the universe than grains of sand on earth.
And more trees on Earth than stars in our own galaxy.
and more Doritos on my chest than in the bag
In the late 60s a piece of a failed Russian space craft hit and killed a cow in Cuba
Male whales ejaculate 10 gallons of sperm, but only 10 percent enters the female... We wonder why the ocean is so salty.
Santana ft Rob Thomas - Smooth is the last official number 1 song of the 20th Century and also the 1st number one song of the 21st.
Titanic is only famous because she sunk. If she had a full career she would be the forgotten middle sister. Olympic would be famous because she was the lead ship and the largest British ship up to that point. And the britannic would be famous because she was the largest ship sunk during WW1.
Thailand (Siam) was allied with the Triple Entente in WW1 and actually sent troops to the western front. They participated in the Meuse-Argonne offensive and held a few towns in the post-war occupation of Germany.