Curious Mind Blowing Facts - 21
May make you say, "Stellllaaa"
During a drug binge Ozzy Osbourne shot his 17 cats and sat under his piano holding a knife and shotgun while waiting for Sharon to come home.
March 11, 1958: A U.S. B-47 bomber accidentally drops an atom bomb on Mars Bluff, South Carolina. The bomb lacks a fissile nuclear core, but its conventional explosives destroyed a house and injured six people.
(Thanks Jim Geschke for this contribution! )
According to NASA, lawns — including residential and commercial lawns and golf courses — are our single largest irrigated crop in terms of surface area. There are three times more acres of lawn than irrigated corn in the US. Watering grass accounts for nearly 8 billion gallons of water each day. And the average U.S. household uses more water outdoors than for showering and washing clothes combined.
The foot and mouth outbreak among livestock in 2001 was the UK's biggest crisis since 1945.
Spiderman’s motto "With great power comes great responsibility" was first used in a Superman episode 14 years before Spideys. https://www.looper.com/341108/spider-man-borrowed-his-most-famous-motto-from-another-superhero/
Readers spend 80% of time viewing the left half of a page on a typical webpage.
People have been living on the International Space Station for 24 years. No, not the same people. The current record is 371 days for a single person.
Elephants call each other by names and may be the first non-humans to do so. Don’t tell that to the Far Side Cows though. (https://www.earth.com/news/elephants-may-be-the-first-non-human-animals-to-call-each-other-by-names/).
Shhh! The quietest place on Earth, an anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota, is so quiet that background noise is measured in negative decibels. The quieter a room is, the more things you can hear that you haven’t before. Sometimes you can hear your lungs, or your heart beating. The chamber is called “anechoic” because it’s designed to stop sound waves from reflecting off the walls, silencing any echoes of noise. It has been used as a recording studio.
“For you and me, however, the room is a deeply disorienting place. Without the familiar hum of everyday life, people have trouble feeling oriented and even standing. “How you orient yourself is through sounds you hear when you walk. In the anechoic chamber, you don’t have any cues,” Orfield (the lab’s founder) told the Daily Mail. “You take away the perceptual cues that allow you to balance and maneuver. If you’re in there for half an hour, you have to be in a chair.”
The video is worth watching:)
https://www.newsweek.com/ricky-schroder-asks-elon-musk-explain-ufos-over-his-colorado-home-1756699
Paul Graham wrote this about Sam Altman in 2008. “Sam Altman has it. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king”. Some folks don’t agree:
(https://www.wheresyoured.at/false-prophet).
Back in 1998, when Derek Sivers started CD Baby, their order confirmation email was the usual: “Your order has shipped today. Thank you for your business.”
But for Derek, this generic email felt at odds with CD Baby’s mission of putting smiles on faces. So he spent 20 minutes writing up the following:
This idea has been copied hundreds of times and it resulted in tons of press, as well as “thousands of new customers” said Sivers:
The largest time difference on earth is 26hrs. From the Line Islands(+14hrs) to around the Howland Islands (-12hrs)
85% of the things you worry about - will not happen!
You have probably heard about the spork, which combines a spoon with a fork. There’s also the chork (chopsticks + fork),
the spife (spoon + knife),
and the knork (knife + fork).
Writing Suggestion: Beginning a story for a book or a chapter, start in the middle of an action scene to grab the reader’s interest and give them something to worry about and creates tension right off the bat.
The letter J was the last letter added to the English alphabet. The ”I” was used for "i" and "j" sounds until 1524.
A photographer has been disqualified from a picture competition after his real photograph won in the AI image category. This is the photo Miles Astray submitted to the Color Photography Awards:
Dick Rowe, a British Music executive auditioned and declined to sign the Beatles in 1962. Despite missing out on one of the biggest bands in history, Rowe later took a suggestion from George Harrison and gave a recording contract to The Rolling Stones. In the 1960s, he remained one of the most important producers and record executives in the United Kingdom, and signed Them (featuring Van Morrison), the Moody Blues, the Zombies, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Tom Jones, the Small Faces, the Marmalade, the Animals, Cat Stevens, Procol Harum, Kathy Kirby, and Gilbert O Sullivan amongst others.
There are more moose living in the Canadian territory of Yukon than there are people.
Out of the 26 million mortgage applications in the United States in 2021, roughly 15 million resulted in mortgage loans. That included applications for home purchase, home improvement, refinancing, cash out refinancing, and other purposes.
Out of the twelve astronauts who have walked on the moon only four are still living, and are between the ages of 88 and 94.
In the late 60’s when checking into hotels, Paul and Linda McCartney would use the aliases Mr. and Mrs. Ramone to avoid Beatlemania and the paparazzi. When Douglas Colvin (Dee Dee Ramone) read about this, he called his band “The Ramones”, and it became one of the most legendary punk bands of all time.
Fatal turbulence in air travel remains extremely rare.
“It is a very unusual and rare event. As far as I can tell it is over 25 years since a passenger was killed by commercial airliner turbulence,” said Paul Hayes, director of safety at UK-based aviation data group Cirium Ascend.
The Tufts Food Compass is touted as “the most comprehensive and science-based nutrient profiling system to date.” After 3 years of work and millions in NIH funding, the study found that Lucky Charms cereal are healthier than whole milk, twice as healthy as beef, and better for you than a baked potato or cooked green peas. (The Food Compass is sponsored by Big Food…so probably a ridiculous claim). The following newsletter is the real research:
Back in 1910, hunting was actually allowed in New York’s Central Park, but only for one man. Archer Hazzler - and he hunted in Central Park with a .36-caliber Remington rifle. The Parks Department hired him to “rid the parks of their undesirable animal citizens.” He was a war veteran and a decorated sharpshooter.
Neil Patel (https://neilpatel.com) just sent this interesting stat in his current newsletter:
There are over 1 billion blogs. That's roughly 1 blog for every 8 people.
On the flip side, there are over 4 million podcasts. That's roughly 1 podcast for every 2000 people.
Blogging is great and still works, but podcasting is wide open.
Among the 300 largest U.S. housing markets, home prices in these 5 metros have increased the most since their 2022 peaks:
Trenton, New Jersey: 13.3%
Hartford, Connecticut: 12.9%
Atlantic City, New Jersey: 12.8%
Rockford, Illinois: 11.8%
Savannah, Georgia: 11.6%
Among the 300 largest U.S. housing markets, home prices in these 5 metros have fallen the most since their peaks in 2022:
Austin, Texas: -18.7%
New Orleans: -13.7%
Lake Charles, Louisiana: -11.7%
Boise, Idaho: -10.4%
Idaho Falls, Idaho: -9.7%
The Prison Mirror, at the Minnesota Correctional Facility – Stillwater, is one of the oldest prison newspapers in the country, running since 1887. Publications like this aren’t common, but in an era where many journalism outlets in the free world are struggling to thrive amid scores of layoffs, journalism behind bars is actually growing.
Reader Angela Treat Lyon (https://lyonlyon.substack.com/about) sent this Chuck Norris joke: When Chuck Norris lifts dumbbells, they get smarter.
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Your favorite fact?
So, that’s just a v positive minded way of saying that 15% of things you worry about will happen, right?
I have a chronic case of Tinnitus, so that quiet chamber in Minnesota would drive me nuts within 30 minutes.
By the way, what is the moose population in Moose Jaw, ONT?