Fun facts topic

[Kytherno]

Couldn't find one, which kinda surprised me, but anyways...

Share awesome or strange fun facts here.

Here are a few I know:

The first owner of the Marlboro Company died of lung cancer.

Nintendo started out as a playing Card Company

Nintendo once operated an hourly love hotel

The world record for most coconuts broken with one finger is 4, in 30 seconds, by a Kung Fu fighter in Asia.

[Oppius]

Rats laugh if you tickle them.

Aristotle love to eat camel meat, especially roasted ones.

A teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh about 10 million tons.

[Chaho-Chi]

Well here's a disturbing one

Spoiler for After you read this you will start eating butter:

Margarine is one molecule away from being plastic.

[Slice of Life]

There is so much sand in Northern Africa that if it were spread out it would completely cover the Sahara Desert.

[Oppius]

1. When Anders Celsius (1701–1744) created the celsius scale, he invented it upside-down with 0 ℃ being the boiling point of water and 100 ℃ being the freezing point. It was reversed in the year of Celsius’ death by Carolus Linnaeus.

2. Sound travels much faster through a steel than it does air: Sound travels at 5100 m/s through steel, 1480 m/s through water and 330 m/s through air.

3. When dropped on a very hard, rigid surface, glass balls and steel balls will bounce higher than rubber ones. The reason is that rubber balls deform significantly on impact, flattening onto the surface, and then springing back. In the process of this squashing, some energy is lost.

4. At this moment, the earth is in the middle of an ice age which began around 2.58 million years ago. We are in an interglacial period which started between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago and may last for a further 50,000 years before global glaciation begins again.

5. Of the entire human body, around 3 pounds of the weight is microbial life; in other words, parasites and the like. Many of these are essential to the functioning of the body.

6. At certain points on Mercury’s surface, an observer would be able to see the Sun rise about halfway, then reverse and set before rising again, all within the same Mercurian day. Having said that, one day on Mercury is 176 earth days.

7. There are 62,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body – laid end to end they would circle the earth 2.5 times

8. We are moving through space at the rate of 530km a second. Our Galaxy – the Milky Way is spinning at a rate of 225 kilometers per second. In addition, the galaxy is travelling through space at the rate of 305 kilometers per second. This means that we are traveling at a total speed of 530 kilometers (330 miles) per second. That means that in one minute you are about 19 thousand kilometers away from where you were. Scientists do not all agree on the speed with which the Milky Way is travelling – estimates range from 130 – 1,000 km/s. It should be said that Einstein’s theory of relativity, the velocity of any object through space is not meaningful.

[momobunny]

~The world's termites outweigh the world's humans 10 to 1.
~The Earth weighs around 6,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons (5,940 billion billion metric tons).
~One in every 4 Americans has appeared on television.
~A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off - it dies from starvation.
~Your ribs move about 5 million times a year, every time you breathe
~Lightning strikes about 6,000 times per minute on this planet.
~A jellyfish is 95 percent water.
~One quarter of the bones in your body are in your feet.
~Fortune cookies were actually invented in America, in 1918, by Charles Jung.
~An earthquake on Dec. 16, 1811 caused parts of the Mississippi River to flow backwards.
~It is estimated that millions of trees in the world are accidentally planted by squirrels who bury nuts and then forget where they hid them.
~The only 2 animals that can see behind itself without turning it’s head are the rabbit and the parrot.
~Most hospitals make money by selling the umbilical cords cut from women who give birth. They are reused in vein transplant surgery.
~Rabbits cannot vomit .
~A rabbit will sleep up to 16 times a day.
~Rabbits can run up to 35 mph.
~Rabbits can move their ears independently of each other.
~Rabiits can save some fertilization after breeding and give birth a second time when they feel like they want to have another litter.

*has a bunny obsession*

[Evil Rick]

1) Womans get married because they think the man will change one day, mens get married because they think the woman will never change, both are wrong. XP

2) Womans are like swiming pools, you spend a lot in maintainense compared to the time you pass inside.

3) The bald people don't exist, they're just taller than the hair.

4) A bank is a palce that lend you money as long as you can prov you don't need it.

[Clarste]

Originally Posted by ayu-smepai

Well here's a disturbing one

Spoiler for After you read this you will start eating butter:

Margarine is one molecule away from being plastic.

That's a myth. It's not true, and even if it were true wouldn't mean much. Minor changes in chemical composition can have drastic effects. CO2 which you breathe all the time is one atom away from CO, which is in fact exactly why CO kills you. Anyway:

- Ants invented agriculture, animal husbandry, slavery, warfare, and even ritualized dance warfare millions of years before humans did.

- Dolphins and chimpanzees have been observed to kill their own kind for no particular reason. They have murderers.

- Dolphins, orcas, elephants, humans, all the great apes and magpies are the only animals known to recognize themselves in a mirror (as in they can tell it's a reflection). Human babies fail this test, as well as household pets like cats and dogs. Magpies are pretty damned smart.

- Magpies can learn from the mistakes of others. Magpies who observe the food of other magpies being stolen will very carefully hide their food in the future.

- Bees can count to 5, and communicate this number with other bees through some sort of gesture language, as measured by setting markers showing the way to food. After 5 they seem to be unable to communicate distances. It doesn't matter how far apart the markers are, so they're actually counting landmarks rather than somehow measuring distance.

- Bees can interpret symbols that they've been taught. They can learn to turn left or right in a maze based on signs, for example.

- Most of the world is covered in ocean. Most of the ocean is very deep. We haven't explored very much of it at all, and it contains life. We know more about the moon than we do about the largest habitat on Earth. We're more likely to find intelligent life down there than we are to in space (within a reasonable distance).

[C.A.]

Japanese macaques can learn something new and pass down the knowledge to later generations. Older macaques couldn't learn new tricks though, but younger macaques learn through spending time hanging around their mothers.

Japanese crows have learnt how the pedestrian crossing works. They throw nuts with hard shells onto pedestrian crossings to allow passing vehicles to crush the shells. They then wait at the side of the road for the green man to cross the road and pick up their food safely.

Originally Posted by Clarste

- Dolphins and chimpanzees have been observed to kill their own kind for no particular reason. They have murderers.

Actually its only the Bottle Nosed Dolphin that murders other dolphins and they selectively commit murder.

Recently scientists found out that the Bottle Nosed Dolphins kill the young of other Bottle Nosed Dolphins so that the females can become ready to mate again, just like lions who kill cubs to mate with lionesses.

Bottle Nosed Dolphins brings this to another level, by practicing their killing techniques on smaller species of dolphins that are of the same size as Bottle Nosed Dolphin pups. The scientists found conclusive evidence that only dolphins of the size of the Bottle Nosed Dolphin young are being targeted and killed.

For Chimpanzees, they kill for revenge among other reasons. They may be ganging on some adulterer, some thief, some other chimpanzee from another gang or something.

The murder intentions from these 2 animals may come from their higher intelligence compared to other animals.

Anyway this thread needs to be visited by the Mythbusters.

Like they've proved that ducks' quacks do have echoes.

Goldfish have a much longer memory than 3 seconds.

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by C.A.

Goldfish have a much longer memory than 3 seconds.

A normally behaving human has around 30 seconds of short-term memory. A seduced man has virtually no short-term memory. An angry spouse of that man has a memory that is longer than she can ever live.

The Ministry of Education (MOE) is known to have ugly front-counter staff.

Men can get breast cancer.

The first record setter for memorising 42,195 digits of pi is a game designer at Namco, the company that made Time-Crisis.

Bugs Bunny is not from Disney but Warner Bros, but many often associate the anthropomorphic rabbit with Disneyland.

The longest official word found in the dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioisis, but it is not registered in the spellcheck of Mozilla, Openoffice or Microsoft Word.

The RPG (rocket propelled grenade) got its name because it is just a handbomb (grenade) affixed with a rocket booster.

K-ON! is one of the few animated franchises that has its albums consistently hitting the top 10 sales on Oricon.

K-ON! practically consisted of every female stereotype in the manga/anime industry.

Paddle Pop is named as such because the Ice Cream look like oars (paddles).

The Iowa Class battlecruiser is the longest serving ship in the US Navy and has seen action since 1943 till 2006, and is still being maintained for future reactivation. It could be the longest serving ship ever in history if is were to be reactivated.

When elevators are first introduced, champagne was served after a ride to the top to prevent "elevation sickness".

[GreatTeacherKen]

The fear of long words is called hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia.

[leoblack9]

Here

The length of your ring finger in comparison to your pointing finger indicates your testosterone levels.

Spoiler for nsfw:

That the length of a man's thumb is the same length of his penis...
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Oh I see you measuring there... but it's wrong too bad

[npcomplete]

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_allegiance

How we used to salute our flag

[Haak]

I heard from my friend that putting goldfish into orange juice makes them explode.

[Mystique]

Originally Posted by Haak

I heard from my friend that putting goldfish into orange juice makes them explode.

Seriously tempted to try that xD
it's not water, so the poor things will suffer regardless, sometimes putting certain kinds of fish outside of freshwater or saltwater kills them too.


Octopuses have 3 hearts.

There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: "abstemious" and "facetious."

The word "queue" is the only word in the English language that is still pronounced the same way when the last four letters are removed.

After spending hours working at a computer display, look at a blank piece of white paper. It will probably appear pink.

[GHDpro]

Here is one I read about a few days ago:

The world's largest manufacterer of vehicle tires is not Goodyear, Bridgestone, Michelin or Dunlop. It's Lego.

Originally Posted by GreatTeacherKen

The fear of long words is called hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia.

Almost seems like they picked that name on purpose to aggravate people with this disorder even further.

[raito20]

In Singapore, it is illegal to sell or own chewing gum.

A 27 year old heir to a sausage empire was handed a ticket for 116,000 pounds for driving at 80 km/hr in a 40 km/hr zone. This is because the speeding tickets in Finland are based on how much money a person makes.

Read it on a site called amusing facts.

[Kakashi]

Originally Posted by Oppius

5. Of the entire human body, around 3 pounds of the weight is microbial life; in other words, parasites and the like. Many of these are essential to the functioning of the body.

Yup, we have more bacteria in our gut than human cells in the body. Philosophically we have to pose the question: are we human? or bacteria?

[SaintessHeart]

Switzerland is the longest word with all its letters used only once.

A human's intestine is 3-4 times longer than his/her height.

Singapore set the world record evolving from a third-world country to the first in roughly 20 years. Unfortunately, the resident population tend to have third world attitudes despite high education levels.

[mg1942]

This album remained on the Billboard Charts for 741 weeks, the longest duration of any album in history.