Curious Mind Blowing Facts - 20

That will surely make you say "No Way, José"

You may have heard about the “Blue Zones”. (https://www.bluezones.com/about/history/). There is a documentary on Netflix titled “Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones”. 
It was first used by the author Dan Buettner, who was studying areas of the world in which people live exceptionally long lives. They are called Blue Zones because when Buettner and his colleagues were searching for these areas, they drew blue circles around them on a map.
The concept and the Netflix show explored five places with 'Blue Zone' status: Okinawa, Japan ; Sardinia, Italy ; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Ikaria, Greece ; and Loma Linda, California in the United States. Blue zone status is living past 100 years old. Well there is controversy everywhere, and this Blue Zone “science” has been contested. The title of this article sums it up pretty well “How to live to 110: Drink, smoke and ... lie about your age?” Researcher Saul Newman wrote about potential fraud and mistakes of folks remembering or falsifying their birth dates for various reasons. https://www.smh.com.au/national/how-to-live-to-110-drink-smoke-and-lie-about-your-age-20190808-p52f7k.html and https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3.full.pdf

IN 2012 after a financial crisis in Greece 200,000 people were discovered to be getting pension payments for dead people. Using the system fraudulently. In Japan (2010) 230,000 Japnese centenarians were discovered to be missing, imaginary, clerical errors or dead. Which was an 82% error rate.
Poor record keeping, fraud, and misunderstanding are responsible for these mistakes.

A deep learning model trained on 85,000 eyes can tell male from female eyeballs with 87% accuracy but no one knows why.

Mars makes chocolate and pet food. 
The Mars Inc. candy company which makes M&M’s and Mars bars and such is the world’s biggest provider of pet care products and veterinary services. According to Bloomberg, pet care products comprise more than half of the company’s USD 50 billion annual revenue. That’s out of this world.

M&M stands for Mars and Murrie - named after Forrest E. Mars Sr. – the founder of Mars – and Bruce Murrie, the son of Hershey Chocolate's president William F. R. Murrie.

Most of our contemporary English color words can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) family of languages, which originated approximately 6,000 years ago. The first named colors were white and black, then red and yellow appeared, followed by green and then blue.

Space Junk

The European Space Agency (ESA) publishes figures on how many man-made objects are in space. 

Since 1957 there have been:

• 6,300 successful rocket launches

• 14,450 satellites delivered into Earth’s orbit

• 630 explosions

There are an estimated:

• 36,500 objects larger than 10cm

• 1 million objects between 1-10cm 

• 130 million objects between 1mm to 1cm.

Eddie Murphy’s character jokes in his new Beverly Hills Cop show that his great-grandfather used to play hockey in an all-black league, on a team called the Winnipeg Black Guys.
But this IS true:
Anne Murray (the Canadian ‘Snowbird’ singer) unsuccessfully tried to buy the Toronto Maple Leafs in the ‘80’s for 40 million dollars, but the owner, Harold Ballard wanted 100 million.

Keith Richards is one of my favourite guitarists. He collects guitars, and owns more than 3000 in his collection. He plays about 10 of them. I too collect guitars. I have 3 and play just one.

Some South African students sell school Wi-Fi passwords for lunch money. Residents walk up to 6km to connect to schools because 4G data is so expensive.

If I made this movie, would you watch it?

Prince wrote the Bangles song “Manic Monday” under the pseudonym "Christopher", a character he played in the 1986 film -  Under the Cherry Moon.

“America’s Mayor”, Rudy Giuliani has started his own coffee e-commerce business: https://rudy.coffee/
It starts shipping this month (June/2024). From his website: “A message from Rudy:
"I've moved at a fast pace, and have had many different roles in life, but the one constant thing has been a good cup of coffee, which is now proven to have health benefits. Please enjoy my delicious fresh roasted specialty coffee. It's quality you can trust." -Rudy Giuliani 

from his website

And unfortunately Giuliani’s Cameo side hustle is Temporarily unavailable. (https://www.cameo.com/rudygiuliani/feed/629d099f8ef1c91afc669e52?t=0)

You can (as of last month) buy the newsletter ‘Insanely Cool Tools’ for the asking price of $40,000. It’s a free weekly newsletter that shares cool tools, websites, and apps with over 19,000 subscribers and has $18k in TTM Revenue.(revenue that a company earns over the trailing 12 months (TTM) of business.)

There have been 317 tech companies with layoffs of 90,916 employees so far In 2024 (June). More data: https://layoffs.fyi/

Some artists who you may not have known were on Motown Records (https://pau1.substack.com/i/45690241/motown-hitsville-usa) :

Lindsay Lohan
Bruno Mars
Rick James
Edwin Starr
Bill Cosby
Michael McDonald
Junior Walker
Boyz II Men
Rare Earth
Meat Loaf 
Soupy Sales
Pat Boone
Bobby Darin
Lesley Gore
Kiki Dee
Sammy Davis Jr.

Canada is the 10th largest economy, and 4th in share of wealthiest people in the world. US, China, then Germany have the wealthiest people.

When Vincent Price agreed to lend his voice to Michael Jackson’s "Thriller," he had to choose between a share of the album's profits or a flat fee of $20,000. He chose the latter.

During the pandemic, the UK health agencies lost a load of COVID test data because they were sharing test records in Excel format. XLS (not XLSX) format. And the records were stored in columns, not rows.

Las Vegas was originally founded by Mormon missionaries, and in 1900 had a population of just 22 citizens.

When you’re buying a higher end refrigerator, you’re basically only paying for fancier doors. Most of the inner workings are the same, just a different door configuration. 

The oldest countries in the world?
Here are the countries World Population Review lists as the oldest in the world by date of earliest known organized government:

• Iran - 3200 BCE

• Egypt - 3100 BCE

• Vietnam - 2879 BCE

• Armenia - 2492 BCE

• North Korea - 2333 BCE

• China - 2070 BCE

• India - 2000 BCE

• Georgia - 1300 BCE

• Israel - 1300 BCE

• Sudan - 1070 BCE

• Afghanistan - 678 BCE

Surgeons typically don’t remove the transplant recipient’s native kidneys—unless they’re greatly enlarged or causing severe problems. “The nonfunctioning kidneys just get smaller over time,” notes Dr. Gelb (a New York transplant Surgeon).

Crocodiles can gallop like a horse.

There was a time when tulips were once more valuable than gold.

Leon Trotsky once said, 'Old age is the most unexpected of all things that can happen to a man.' Kinda experiencing this myself…

The country with the youngest population in the world is Niger, where almost 50% of the population is below the age of 15.

Most of the time, the blue flakes in your laundry detergent are just the white flakes dyed blue.

The color orange was named after the fruit.

During the late ’70’s Warren Buffett owned 25% of the Ambassador Bridge linking Windsor, Ontario with Detroit, Michigan. https://pau1.substack.com/i/43890236/warren-buffett-and-matty-moroun
The new “Gordie Howe“ Bridge is going to be open next year and will replace the Ambassador Bridge in a few years.

When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone he already had three missed calls from Chuck Norris.

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