“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”
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Hi and welcome to the first fasab fact feast for 2015.
If you like a random selection of interesting tidbits this is the place to be.
I hope you enjoy.
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There are
169,518,829,100,544,000,000,000,000,000
ways to play the first ten moves of any chess game.
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James Bond works for MI6,
which is a real agency,
except of course that he isn’t real,
so therefore he doesn’t.
I hope that’s cleared that up.
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Although the phrase ‘get out of hand’
has several different meanings nowadays,
still the most common is to describe when
someone loses control of things or a situation.
The phrase has its origins in the old days
when failure to keep a firm grip on the reins
would result in a team of horses
getting “out of hand.”
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The estimates of the number of workers
involved in the construction of the pyramids
differ significantly but it could have
been as many 100,000 people.
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A polar bear has particularly developed
sense of smell and can track an
icebound seal up to 20 miles (32 kilometers) away,
or sniff-out a seal’s breathing hole in the ice
more than half a mile away, even if the seal is absent.
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Harry S. Truman’s middle name
was just S.
According to Truman,
the S as his middle name was a
compromise of his two grandfathers,
Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young.
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Football star and American war hero Pat Tillman
rejected a multimillion-dollar contract to play
the game professionally and instead
chose to serve his country.
In 2002 he enlisted in the U.S. Army,
but sadly his career and life were cut short
when he was killed in action in 2004.
Even though the exact circumstances
of his death are still in question,
his legacy is not and Tillman is considered
one of the bravest American athletes
who turned his back on a comfortable,
luxurious life for the love of his country.
A great man.
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YouTube was founded
by three former PayPal employees,
Chad Hurley, Steven Chen, and Jawed Karim.
They registered the domain name in February 2005
and the site was officially launched that December.
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On the planet Mars there exists
what is known as the “face on Mars”.
It is believed to be an optical illusion
created from natural looking Martian hills.
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Greece’s national anthem
has 158 stanzas.
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In 1938 Adolf Hitler was named
Time Magazine’s Man of the Year
and in 1939 was nominated
for the Nobel Peace Prize.
World War II began in 1939!
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Male mice sing love songs for female mice.
The songs they sing are ultrasonic,
and humans are unable to hear them,
but presumably the female mice can.
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The scene in the movie ‘Titanic’
when the band members continue playing
to calm down the passengers as the ship is sinking
is based on fact.
The band did continue to play for hours
after the ship hit the iceberg.
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Alcohol more easily causes dehydration
and dilates blood vessels
which can result in headaches;
it also increases stomach acid and
decreases the rate the stomach empties itself
which can lead to vomiting.
We call this infliction a hangover.
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Contrary to what you see in the movies,
real Tequila does not have a worm in it.
The worm, or gusano, actually originated
with tequila’s ‘lower-quality’ cousin, mezcal,
largely as a marketing ploy.
The gusano is the larvae of a type of moth
that lives on the agave plant.
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