Curious Mind Blowing Facts - 42
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In Indonesia, there's a tribe that digs up their deceased relatives once a year, dresses them, and cleans them to celebrate their lives.
Sorry about that…Weekend at Bernie's was a great movie, wasn’t it?
In June of 1962, Neil Armstrong learned NASA was looking for its second group of astronauts. He submitted his application, but it arrived about a week after the applications were due. Fortunately for Armstrong, an old friend working at NASA’s Manned Spacecraft center saw his late-arriving application and slipped it into the group of applications being considered.
Do you suffer from Nomophobia? It’s the fear of not having your phone.
The concept of a laugh track started during the era of theatres, where people would be hired to laugh at the right moments. It moved to television in the 1950’s. All the sitcoms had the canned laughter tracks. But we grew to dislike them because they put them in when nothing funny was happening. So by 2020 they were discontinued.
A male donkey is called a jack or jackass, and a female donkey is called a jenny or jennet. An immature donkey of either sex is called a foal. Donkeys can interbreed with horses to produce mules and hinnies, which are both hybrid animals.
~ amazing segue ~
Speaking of Donkeys…
More than a quarter of all new computer code at Google is now generated by AI, CEO Sundar Pichai said during the company's third-quarter earnings call last month.
Medellin in Colombia has cut urban temperatures by 2°C in three years by planting trees, through its "Green Corridors" program.
The Great Lakes also called the Great Lakes of North America and are a series of large interconnected freshwater lakes spanning the Canada–United States border. The five great lakes are Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario.
They contain 21% of the earth's freshwater.
The top 15 most viewed Wikipedia pages of 2024, ranked by page views:
1. Deaths in 2024, 44,440,344 pageviews
2. Kamala Harris, 28,960,278
3. 2024 United States presidential election, 27,910,346
4. Lyle and Erik Menendez, 26,126,811
5. Donald Trump, 25,293,855
6. Indian Premier League, 24,560,689
7. JD Vance, 23,303,160
8. “Deadpool & Wolverine,” 22,362,102
9. Project 2025, 19,741,623
10. 2024 Indian general election, 18,149,666
11. Taylor Swift, 17,089,827
12. ChatGPT, 16,595,350
13. 2020 United States presidential election, 16,351,730
14. 2024 Summer Olympics, 16,061,381
15. UEFA Euro 2024, 15,680,913
Disney World Resort Orlando Florida, has an area of 110km2 (43 square miles). It is bigger than Paris, France at 105km2 (41 square miles) and almost double the size of Manhattan 59km2 (23 square miles).
Tariffs and Tariff Engineering
Tariffs are in the news lately. Have you heard the term Tariff Engineering?
Tariff Engineering is when a product is designed or modified to fit into a lower customs duty category when imported. It’s a legal way businesses save costs while following trade laws.
Here are some simple examples of how tariff engineering works:
1. Clothing Buttons
Plain plastic buttons have a 10% import duty.
Decorative buttons (with slight engravings) have a 5% duty.
A company might add small decorative engravings to classify buttons as "decorative." This lowers the duty rate from 10% to 5%.
2. Frozen Shrimp
Raw frozen shrimp faces a 12% tariff.
Cooked and frozen shrimp has a 5% tariff.
An exporter could partially cook the shrimp before freezing. This shifts the shrimp into the "cooked" category, reducing the tariff.
3. Electronics Assembly
Fully assembled devices face a 20% import tax.
Parts for assembly face only a 5% tax.
Instead of shipping fully assembled devices, a business can ship parts and assemble them locally. This significantly lowers the import tax.
I’ve seen this in action. When I imported specialty equipment from the U.S., the manufacturer bought parts from China, assembled the product in the U.S., and saved on import fees. These savings were passed on to everyone.
Well-Known Examples
1. Converse Shoes
Canvas shoes often have higher tariffs than leather or textile shoes.
Shoes also have higher tariffs than slippers.
To save costs, Converse added a small amount of synthetic material (felt) to the bottom of some shoes. This reclassified them as "slippers," reducing the tariff from 25% to just 3%.
2. Columbia Shirts
Shirts with "pockets below the waist" or "tightening at the bottom" are taxed at 16%, instead of 26.9%.
Columbia added a "nurse's pocket" below the waist on some garments to qualify for the lower tariff.
Alternatively, Columbia might adjust fabrics or coatings to classify shirts as "performance clothing" (e.g., moisture-wicking). These are taxed at lower rates in many countries.
How many AI tools are there?
Thousands of AI tools are being added to lists daily. That makes it hard to distinguish exactly how many AI tools exist at any given moment, but the total number is likely in the hundreds of thousands.
Last fall, we visited an Okanagan Lake resort hotel. While outside, we heard strange bird sounds—more like cries than songs. Curious, we asked the manager about it.
He explained they’d had a bird problem, with birds flying around and making a mess near the pool and hot tub. To fix it, they hired a company to create sounds to scare the birds away. They now play a loop of bird cries and predator calls through Bluetooth speakers for about a minute every half hour. It worked—after a few days, the birds were gone!
Like this:
Could have saved them thousands of dollars if they knew this was free on YouTube!¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We don't remember being a baby because of a phenomenon called infantile amnesia, which refers to the inability to recall memories from the first few years of life. This happens because the parts of the brain responsible for forming and storing long-term memories, like the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, are still developing during infancy. Additionally, babies lack the language skills and cognitive frameworks needed to organize and store memories in a way that can be easily retrieved later. As a result, even though we experience and learn a lot as infants, these early experiences are not stored as retrievable memories.
Advertising: Omnicom is reportedly in advanced talks to buy Interpublic, which would create the largest advertising company in the world, according to sources.
Right now, Omnicom is the third-biggest ad company, and Interpublic is the fourth. If they join forces, they’d overtake WPP, which currently holds the top spot with about $15.1 billion in net revenue last year.
This merger would combine agencies behind big brands like Geico (The Martin Agency), Taco Bell (Deutsch), and Microsoft Xbox (McCann) with those handling Apple, McDonald’s (TBWA), P&G, Pepsi, and Pedigree (BBDO). Combined sales would then be more than $25 billion.
The New York Times reports that Taylor Swift’s 21-month Eras tour made an incredible $2.08 billion in ticket sales. That’s double the earnings of any other concert tour ever. And that’s just from tickets—merchandise brought in more than hundreds of millions as well. All amounts are in U.S. dollars.
UPDATE: “Over the past two years, Swift gave out $197 million in bonuses to everyone working on her tour — including truck drivers, caterers, instrument techs, merch team, lighting, sound, production staff and assistants, carpenters, dancers, band, security, choreographers, pyrotechnics, riggers, hair, make-up, wardrobe, physical therapists and video team”. (https://people.com/taylor-swift-gave-eras-tour-crew-usd197-million-in-bonuses-exclusive-8758216)
Following are a selection from Tom Whitwell’s yearly “52 Things I Learned in 2024” (https://medium.com/@tomwhitwell/52-things-i-learned-in-2024-75efffe44f15): More Curious Mind Blowing Facts!
There are just 16 trademarked scents in the US, including Crayola crayons, Playdoh, an ocean-scented soft play in Indiana and a type of gun cleaner that smells of ammonium and kerosene. [Via Gabrielle E. Brill]
Ozempic is a modified, synthetic version of a protein discovered in the venomous saliva of the Gila monster, a large, sluggish lizard native to the United States. [Scott Alexander]
Medellin in Colombia has cut urban temperatures by 2°C in three years by planting trees. [Peter Yeung]
Avatar Robot Cafe Dawn in Tokyo is staffed by robot waiters that are remotely controlled by workers with disabilities working from home. [Yuji Semba]
If you drop a normal hair dryer into a fish tank full of tap water, it will carry on working, gently warming up the water. (NB Please do not try this.) [JD Stillwater]
Between 1926 and 1934, the average life-span of a light bulb fell from 1,800 hours to 1,200 hours, because a global cartel of lightbulb manufacturers fined anyone who made a longer-lasting bulb. [Markus Krajewski]
Some languages have only three named colours: red, black and white. So green is black, blue is also black, yellow is red. [Marco Giancotti]
To avoid radio jamming, some Russian drones in Ukraine now trail a 10km long spool of super fine fibre optic cable behind them for steering and communication. [David Hambling]
Sponges are animals. And they can live a long time. The most impressive is found in Antarctica, where scientists estimate one specimen, the Monorhaphis chuni, can live to a ripe old age of 11,000 years. https://www.iflscience.com/these-bizarre-antarctic-animals-can-live-for-11000-years-77133
The chemical name for the protein titin is methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylarginyltyrosylglutamylserylleucylphenylalanylalanylglutaminylleuc...isoleucine, which is 189,819 letters long. It is considered the longest word in the English language.
The name is based on the chemical structure of the protein and is so long because titin is made up of 244 proteins, and the name of each one was joined together. It would take over three hours to say the word out loud.
Titin is the largest known protein in the human body and is involved in the formation of striated muscles.
When Chuck Norris's parents had nightmares, they would come to his bedroom.
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A copywriter for Montgomery Ward dreamed of writing a great American novel. During a tough time in his life, he created a legendary Christmas character.
Thanks to books, a popular song, TV specials, and lots of merchandise, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer became the most famous reindeer of all.
And if our newsletter paths don’t meet again until after the 25th, then I wish you a heartfelt best of the holiday season, and I’m sure we all look forward to an even better 2025!
What a perfect segue from your item about donkeys! A picture is worth 1,000 words.
Stayed in Celebration, FL once - a whole town designed by Disney. Not mind blowing but definitely odd.