Did You Know? The Fact File Is Open Again.

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

Yes, the fact file is open again.

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

Enjoy.

.

.

Women blink twice as much as men.

.

.

Picking up baby birds and returning them to their nests

will not cause their mothers to reject them.

.

.

It takes food approximately seven seconds

to get from your mouth to your stomach.

.

.

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.

.

.

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.

.

.

More than 5 million people live in areas

that are considered to be “contaminated”

with radioactive material from the Chernobyl disaster.

.

.

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.

.

.

The Chinese government

attempted to crack down on gift giving

by banning certain luxury commercials.

The economy immediately started falling.

.

.

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

.

.

Dropping a penny from the top of the

Empire State Building would not kill someone

.

.

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.

.

.

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.

.

.

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.

.

.

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

but the name of any plane carrying the president.

.

.

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”.

.

.

==========================================

.

Did You Know? – Another Random Fact Feast!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

Random fact feast it is.

Another selection of hopefully interesting facts that you didn’t know you didn’t know.

Enjoy.

.

.

In Raiders of the Lost Ark there is a

wall carving of R2-D2 and C-3P0 behind the ark

.

. 

Chinese Checkers is not Chinese.

It was created in America to circumvent the

patent for a popular boardgame called Halma,

invented by a Boston surgeon named George Howard Monks.

.

. 

In the 17th century,

the value of pi was known to 35 decimal places.

Today, to 1.2411 trillion.

.

. 

Technically speaking, Alaska is the northernmost,

westernmost, and easternmost state of the United States.

Parts of the Aleutian Islands cross over the 180th meridian.

.

. 

The original story from “Tales of 1001 Arabian Nights” begins,

“Aladdin was a little Chinese boy.”

.

. 

There is a hotel in Sweden built entirely out of ice;

it is rebuilt every year.

.

. 

In 1959, the USSR launched a craft called the Mechta towards the Moon.

It missed, and instead became (inadvertently) the first

man-made satellite to go into orbit around the Sun.

.

. 

It has been calculated that in the last 3,500 years,

there have only been 230 years of peace throughout the civilized world.

.

. 

In the 1987 movie ‘Predator’, the character of the Predator

was originally set up for Jean-Claude Van Damme

to play a martial-arts fighting Predator.

However the producers realized much of the cast

were bodybuilders over 6 feet tall (and Van Damme was clearly smaller)

so they cast the enormous 7’ 21/2” Kevin Peter Hall

so that the Predator could realistically physically dominate

the film’s human characters.

Interestingly Hall also appears in the movie

as the helicopter pilot at the end.

.

. 

Gatorade’s inventor later created an alcoholic variation,

Hop ’n Gator

— essentially, lemon lime Gatorade mixed with beer.

.

. 

At the Great Gettysburg Reunion of 1913,

two men purchased a hatchet,

walked to the site where their regiments had fought,

and buried it.

.

. 

Though it’s rarely used,

the word referring to half a computer byte

is a “nibble.”

.

. 

Because of the angle at which its esophagus enters its stomach,

the horse is physically unable to vomit.

.

. 

The reason why hair turns gray as we age

is because the pigment cells in the hair follicle start to die,

which is responsible for producing “melanin”

which gives the hair colour

.

. 

Hydrogen gas is the least dense substance in the world,

at 0.08988g/cc

.

. 

The purpose of gasoline rationing during the Second World War

was not to conserve gas, but to conserve TIRES.

The primary source for natural rubber at the time was Southeast Asia,

much of which was under Japanese control.

.

. 

The concept of Boxing Day, which is on December 26th,

was to give boxes of food and clothing to the poor.

It is now viewed in some countries as a time

to get merchandise from stores at reduced prices

.

. 

Jewelers Tiffany & Co., based in New York, are responsible

for making the Super Bowl trophy

.

. 

The world’s most expensive cigarettes.

In 2009, Josh Muszynski used his Visa to buy cigarettes.

Due to a Visa “glitch,” he was charged over 23 quadrillion dollars.

To be exact: $23,148,855,308,184,500

. 

.

The popular hip-shaking dance, the merengue,

got its name from the whisking motion required to make meringue.

.

.

==================================

.