Curious Mind Blowing Facts - 10
will make you say "No Way" - From sources across the web
Birds sleep. They don’t fall from their perches because when a bird places weight on their feet, their muscles in the leg force the foot tendons to tighten, locking the foot closed. This gives the bird a vice like grip around the branch it is perched on. Therefore it will not fall.
English is the most spoken language in the world with 1.5 Billion speakers.
The electronic dance music genre started not in night clubs in Berlin or London, but in Motor City basement studios and concerts held in abandoned Detroit warehouses.
Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) are the top rated investments recommended and used by investments advisors in 2023.
The AI industry is now offering million-dollar annual compensation packages and accelerating stock-vesting schedules to draw people with expertise and experience to develop generative AI technologies. $1,000,000/year!
(https://archive.is/20240327182500/https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-fight-for-ai-talent-pay-million-dollar-packages-and-buy-whole-teams-c370de2b)
Too much licorice can significantly increase your blood pressure, and is only recommended in small quantities.
Our ancestors of 100 generations ago had brains that were larger than our own. Our brains now average about 100-150 cubic centimeters less than when our species first appeared.
Edwin Booth, the brother of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth, saved the life of Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s son.
Bernard Arnault overtook Elon Musk by almost 20 Billion Dollars as the richest person (that we know about) so far in 2024. The French billionaire chairman and CEO of the global luxury goods company LVMH runs dozens of luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, Sephora, and Tiffany & Co. He also has investments in businesses such as Netflix and ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.
Norway is home to the biggest sovereign wealth fund globally, valued at nearly $1.4 trillion. A sovereign wealth fund is a state-owned investment fund made up from money generated by the government. It is often derived from a country's surplus reserves. SWFs provide a benefit for a country's economy and its citizens.
China produced nearly half of the world’s top AI researchers and specialists. U.S. is around 20%.
According to Elon Musk, Neuralink's 'Blindsight' product is already working on monkeys to restore vision.
A Quattuorvigintillion is a unit of quantity equal to 1 followed by 75 zeros.
A software engineer named William Stafford Parsons charges $100,000 for an algorithm he built, that has just 10 lines of code:
Someone just shelled out a whopping $718,750 for the prop door from the ’Titanic’ movie.
What does TMZ stand for? TMZ is an American celebrity gossip website. It launched in 2005. The managing editor is Harvey Levin. The name TMZ stands for Thirty-Mile Zone after the historic "studio zone" at the intersection of West Beverly Boulevard and North La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles, California.
Don’t ask me how I know that the acid in your stomach is strong enough to dissolve razorblades.
A condom was discovered in the Tomb Of Tutankhamun. It’s the oldest condom known, and is from BC-1350.
In 2003, two men stole a parked Boeing 727 from Luanda International Airport in Angola and flew away into the sunset. They've never been found.
Azalea the chimpanzee lives in a North Korea zoo and smokes about a pack of cigarettes a day. She can light the cigarettes with a lighter or by touching another lit cigarette.
Osmium is the densest and rarest naturally occurring stable metal on earth. It takes more than 400,000 pounds of rock to be mined to extract 1 gram of it.
Chuck Jones claimed that he and the artists behind the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons adhered to some simple but strict rules:
"The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going ‘Beep-Beep!’"
"No outside force can harm the Coyote — only his own ineptitude or the failure of the Acme products."
"The Coyote could stop anytime — if he were not a fanatic. (Repeat: ‘A fanatic redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.’ — George Santayana)."
"No dialogue ever, except 'Beep-Beep!'"
"The Road Runner must stay on the road — otherwise, logically, he would not be called a Road Runner."
"All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters — the southwest American desert."
"All materials tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation."
"Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote's greatest enemy."
"The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures."
These rules were not always followed, and in an interview years after the series was made, principal writer of the original 16 episodes Michael Maltese stated he had never heard of these or any "rules" and dismissed them as "post production observation."
I have a personal unwritten goal of learning at least one new thing every day. Today, I learned they found a Trojan in King Tut's tomb.
Don't think I won't repeat it to everybody I see today.
The Road Runner Rules rule. Great list.