Did You Know – The Facts Are Here!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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The facts are indeed here.

Most Tuesdays in fact (no pun intended, that’s Thursdays!).

A very random selection of hopefully interesting things to peruse, perhaps with a nice cup of coffee.

Enjoy.

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Dogs don’t sweat through their tongue.

Most of their sweat glands are located in their foot pads.

While panting does keep them cool,

panting is not equivalent to sweating.

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The word “Berserk” comes from ancient Norse fighters

who were known as Berserkers

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800,000 brave men risked their lives

by exposing themselves to radiation

in order to contain the Chernobyl disaster.

25,000 of these have died (20 percent by suicide)

and 70,000 are disabled.

The environmental group Greenpeace places the

eventual death toll at 93,000 cancer deaths world wide,

but surprisingly, the overall rate of cancer deaths

and other health effects related to the Chernobyl accident

is lower than initially feared.

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The average woman is 5 inches shorter

than the average man.

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On her 112^th jump South African skydiver,

Christine McKenzie’s main and reserve

parachutes both failed to deploy.

As she raced towards earth from a height

of about 11,000 feet, she fell on power lines.

She was not electrocuted,

but instead the power lines helped

brake her fall and save her life.

 

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At any given time your brain

can generate up to 25 watts of power.

That’s enough to power a lightbulb.

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Martin Bormann, the highest ranking Nazi official

who wasn’t accounted for after World War II

was thought to have gone into hiding

somewhere in South America

and sightings had been reported for years.

In 1999, however, his body was found

in an unmarked grave near the bunker

where Hitler committed suicide.

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Bats aren’t blind.

While many species do use echolocation,

some have excellent night vision

and don’t rely on echolocation at all.

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British pro wrestler Mal “King Kong” Kirk

was squished to death under the belly

of Shirley “Big Daddy” Crabtree when

Crabtree performed his signature “belly slam”

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There’s a gas cloud in the constellation of Aquila

that contains enough alcohol to make

400 trillion trillion pints of beer.

(Now that’s my kinda gas cloud!)

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When you are looking at someone you love,

your pupils dilate…

they do the same when

you are looking at someone you hate!

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The statue of Cinderella at Disney

looks sad to adults,

but from a child’s view she is

happily smiling and wearing a crown.

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A Japanese man recently sued the

National Broadcasting Company

for the mental distress they caused him

by using too many English words in their programs

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The Earth isn’t actually orbiting around the Sun.

It’s orbiting around the Solar System’s center of mass

known as the Barycenter.

Although this point often falls within the mass of the Sun,

it can be shifted by the pull of larger planets.

Therefore, at least some of the time,

everything in the solar system

is orbiting around empty space

 

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The Silbo language of La Gomera

off the coast of Spain

consists entirely of whistles.

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Did You Know? – I Didn’t.

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Yes, I have to admit that many of the facts that I use on these posts are just as big a surprise to me as they possibly are to you.

But I hope interesting, as well.

Here is the latest batch from the archives.

Enjoy.

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There are 13 ways to spell

the “o” sound in French

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There is a planet called HD189733b

where it rains glass sideways.

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The language of the Native American Zuni tribe

has resemblances to Japanese.

Subsequent research confirmed

biological similarities between the groups.

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For a long time the world believed Troy to be a mythical city

and the Trojan War to be little more than legend,

until Heinrich Schliemann discovered the actual remains of the city.

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Despite the common myth that large brains equal more intelligence,

people like Einstein actually had a smaller brain

(only difference is, he used his!)

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Vikings didn’t have horns on their helmets.

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A man  named James Boole survived a fall of 6,000 feet

without a parachute with only a broken back and ribs.

It is estimated that when Boole hit the ground,

he was falling at about 100 kilometers per hour.

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There is no such thing as a banana tree,

bananas grow on a banana plant.

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Nuclear rain from the Chernobyl disaster

fell as far away as Ireland

where sheep farmers were banned from

selling their animals for human consumption for a time.

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For years Big Pharma made $millions off selling people

anti-stress drugs to cure their ulcers,

until an Australian scientist proved the ulcers

were quite often caused by bacteria and were easily curable.

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Fourteen of the original rides from

Disneyland’s 1955 opening are still in operation.

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Nice comes from a Latin word meaning “ignorant”.

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Side by side, 2000 cells from the human body

could cover about one square inch.

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When Robert Williams tried to retrieve

a faulty part at a Ford Motor’s casting plant,

the malfunctioning machine reactivated

and its arm slammed into his head, killing him instantly.

He is the first man in history to have been killed by a robot.

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In one of the stupidest decision

in the history of the music industry,

Decca Records turned down the Beatles

because they “weren’t sellable”.

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Did You Know? The Fact File Is Open Again.

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Yes, the fact file is open again.

Another random selection covering science, music, history, archaeology, nature and even brain surgery!

Enjoy.

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Women blink twice as much as men.

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Picking up baby birds and returning them to their nests

will not cause their mothers to reject them.

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It takes food approximately seven seconds

to get from your mouth to your stomach.

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The brain has no pain receptors so it doesn’t feel anything.

This is why doctors are able to perform open brain surgery

on patients that are still awake.

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But brain surgery is not something new.

In the past some cultures practiced “trepanation”,

or the act of drilling holes in the brain

to alleviate pain and cure sickness.

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More than 5 million people live in areas

that are considered to be “contaminated”

with radioactive material from the Chernobyl disaster.

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The body of the last English King to die in battle, Richard III,

was finally found buried under a Leicester car park

in what was one of the most astonishing

archaeological discoveries of the last few decades.

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The Chinese government

attempted to crack down on gift giving

by banning certain luxury commercials.

The economy immediately started falling.

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Disney Park employees are required to point

with either the whole hand or using two fingers.

This is because some cultures see pointing

with one finger as disrespectful

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Dropping a penny from the top of the

Empire State Building would not kill someone

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Lemur comes from a Latin word that means

“spirit of the dead”.

The person that named them cited their

nocturnal nature as a source of influence.

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For many years scientists couldn’t figure out

how the Earth’s solid inner core spins one way

and the liquid outer core spins the other.

Scientists at Leeds University recently found

that the answer lies in a simple “equal and opposite” reaction

based around Earth’s magnetic fields.

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The word “Addict” comes from ancient Rome

when soldiers were awarded slaves known as “addicts”,

which is the Latin word for slave.

It eventually came to refer to a person

who was a slave to anyone or anything.

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Air Force One is not the name of a specific plane,

but the name of any plane carrying the president.

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The Beatles still hold the record for the

most number-one singles in the Billboard Charts.

They had twenty in all

and their biggest seller was “Hey Jude”.

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Did You Know? – Prepare To Increase Your Knowledge Base.

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Welcome to another fact day and a list of very random things that certainly will increase your knowledge base, if you can remember them.

The only way to find out is to read on.

Enjoy.

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The first explorers who discovered the West Indies

thought it was Southeast Asia.

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At Disney there used to be paint brushes

hidden on Tom Sawyer island

and if you found one,

you could present it to the barge driver and

you and your party would get golden Fast Passes.

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If the average male never shaved,

his beard would be 13 feet long when he died.

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Sorry to bust a much believed myth,

but sugar does not actually make you hyper,

the whole idea of a “sugar rush” is not real,

in fact, according to recent science from Yale University

it’s all just a placebo effect.

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Cracking your knuckles won’t lead to arthritis

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The Chernobyl disaster region has become

one of the world’s most unique wildlife sanctuaries

with thriving populations of wolves, deer,

beavers, eagles, and other animals.

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Pamphlet comes from the title of a Latin love poem called Pamphilus

that was supposedly passed from person to person

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A cubic inch of bone is about

four times as strong as concrete.

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The 8 lane, 26 mile long Qingdao Bridge in China

cost 14.8 billion yuan to build

but gets almost no traffic.

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Napoleon was actually taller than the average Frenchman

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Not only is Reno, Nevada, west of Los Angeles,

but so are six other state capitals.

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William McKinley almost always wore

a red carnation on his lapel as a good luck charm.

While greeting a line of people in 1901, 

he gave the flower to a little girl.

Seconds later, he was shot by an assassin,

and died eight days later.

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Buck, the slang term for an American dollar

comes from the fact that on the American frontier

deerskins were used as units of commerce.

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The coldest inhabited place on earth is Oymyakon, Russia,

where sometimes the temperature drops

below freezing in mid September and stays there until May.

The average temperature in January is -46 °C.

The village has a population of less than 500 people.

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Hacky-sack was invented in Turkey.

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Did You Know? – Facts, Facts, And More Facts!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Another fact filled post for you.

The usual random mixture, so pick out the ones you like best.

Enjoy.

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Until 2001 Disney required that all cast members

playing costumed park characters

share communal underwear.

Talk about getting into your pants!

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Muscle comes from a Latin root meaning ‘little mouse’.

Apparently people used to think muscles

looked like little mice under their skin.

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Scotland is as far north as Alaska.

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NASA lost a Mars orbiter because part of the team

used metric units and the other half used English.

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The Chernobyl disaster remains the only level 7 incident

on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES)

making it the biggest man-made disaster of all time.

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The US government placed some beer

next to an atomic bomb blast

to determine if it was still drinkable.

The good news is that in the event of a

nuclear war beer is safe to drink.

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A full bladder is roughly the size of a soft ball

(a bit bigger than a cricket ball).

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Calvin Coolidge would occasionally press all the buttons in the Oval Office,

sending bells ringing throughout the White House

— and then hide to watch his staff run in.

Apparently he just wanted to see who was working.

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Men with hairless chests are more likely to

get cirrhosis of the liver than men with hair.

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A fact in honor of the World Cup currently underway in Brazil.

The word Soccer actually originated in the United Kingdom.

Association Football was shortened to “socca”

(derived from the middle of the word association).

This turned into the word “soccer”

that is still used in the US, Canada, and Australia.

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The day of his assassination,

Martin Luther King Jr.

got in a pillow fight in his hotel room.

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Cows have best friends and they tend

to spend most of their time together.

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The Dutch discovered Australia 100 years before the British

but decided to ignore it because they thought it was a useless desert.

Crikey!

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There is a ‘zip bomb’ called 42.zip

that is only 42 kilobytes when zipped,

but is 4.5 Petabytes uncompressed.

Be careful clicking on those email attachments!

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4’33? (pronounced “Four minutes, thirty-three seconds”

or just “Four thirty-three”) is a three-movement composition

by American experimental composer John Cage

for any instrument or combination of instruments,

and the score instructs the performer(s) not to play their instrument(s)

during the entire duration of the piece throughout the three movements.

Here it is…… No it’s not. What would be the point of that???

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Did You Know? – Candle Clocks And Feral Cats Are Just Two Of Today’s Fabulous Facts!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Another selection of random facts including candle clocks and feral cats, and what could be more random than that?

So here we go.

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Russia sold Alaska to the US for 2 cents an acre

because they thought it was a useless tundra.

(Big mistake comrades!)

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The Chernobyl disaster released

at least 100 times more radiation

than the atom bombs dropped

on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

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Up to 200 feral cats live in Disneyland

and are tolerated because they eradicate

mice and rats on the property.

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The largest cell in the human body is the female egg,

and the smallest is the male sperm.

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There are entire cities all over China

with no people living in them!

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In Germany there are fake bus stops outside many nursing homes

to prevent confused senior citizens from wandering off.

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Twelve book publishers rejected Harry Potter,

a very shrewd move on their part since

the sales of the series is now approaching half a billion!

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Before clocks as we now know them,

there were candle clocks that burned a set amount of hours.

If you wanted an alarm or reminder,

you pushed a nail into the candle at the desired height/time length

and when it melted the nail would fall out and the

noise of it hitting the metal holder would alert you.

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Loophole (or murder hole)

originally referred to the slits in castle walls

that archers would shoot their arrows through.

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NASA has lost over 700 boxes of magnetic data tapes

recorded throughout the Apollo program

including original footage of the moon landing.

They ‘think’ some of them may have

‘accidentally been taped over’.

A NASA tape – not one of the ones they lost – because they’re lost!!!

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Harvard University was founded

before calculus was derived.

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Apparently it is possible

to sail a boat from Pakistan to Russia

if you sail in a completely straight line.

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There are some trees alive today that

were alive before the pyramids were built.

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Chester A. Arthur was known for his impeccable attire,

earning him the nickname “Elegant Arthur.”

On his last day in office,

four women offered him their hands in marriage.

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Regarded as his finest song,

David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ purports to tell in only five minutes

a story that can easily serve as the plot to a two-hour sci-fi film.

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