54 replies to this topic

[outsidedream86]

Over many years on the interwebs, I've come across some fascinating things that are surprising or aren't commonly known that I thought you guys might find interesting:

Most people usually breathe out of one nostril at a time, and it switches every four hours. Your brain also has a cycle where each hemisphere will take turns being slightly more dominant. You can change which side is dominant by plugging up that side of your nostril. Wanna be right-brained for a while? Plug up your right nostril.

Incompetent people think they're smart because of the Dunning-Kruger effect. On the other side, intelligent people tend to underestimate their own intelligence (Downing effect).

You can make your own potato chips in the microwave. They are delicious.

Most streets in Japan don't have names.

A chicken lived for 18 months without a head, and toured the US in a sideshow.

Shirley Henderson, who played Moaning Myrtle in the Harry Potter movies, is 44 years old

You can open a wine bottle with your shoe.

I'll post more later. Anyone else know anything cool/interesting that isn't common knowledge? (Not those lame "interesting facts" lists that everybody knows)

[pabs123]

Wales (country that is part of the United Kingdom), there is a village called Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (58 letters), which in English means "Saint Mary's Church in the hollow of white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the Church of Saint Tysilio near the red cave." The locals call it Llanfairpwll.


i remember someone showed me this a couple of years ago i couldnt stop laughing

Edited by pabs123, 13 July 2010 - 11:21 AM.

[Georgina]

Wales (country that is part of the United Kingdom), there is a village called Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (58 letters), which in English means "Saint Mary's Church in the hollow of white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the Church of Saint Tysilio near the red cave." The locals call it Llanfairpwll.


i remember someone showed me this a couple of years ago i couldnt stop laughing

Yeh, i posted this on the boards like 2 weeks ago. I live in wales

[pabs123]

Yeh, i posted this on the boards like 2 weeks ago. I live in wales

is it like a tourist attraction over there?

[Redemptionist]

Each line contains a fact. Credits to my school assignment book =)

• 1,525,000,000 miles of telephone wire a strung across the U.S.
• 101 Dalmatians and Peter Pan (Wendy) are the only two Disney cartoon features with both parents that are present and don't die throughout the movie.
• 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
• 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily.
• 123,000,000 cars are being driven down the U.S's highways.
• 160 cars can drive side by side on the Monumental Axis in Brazil, the world's widest road.
• 166,875,000,000 pieces of mail are delivered each year in the U.S.
• 27% of U.S. male college students believe life is "A meaningless existential hell."
• 315 entries in Webster's Dictionary will be misspelled.
• 5% of Canadians don't know the first 7 words of the Canadian anthem, but know the first 9 of the American anthem.
• 56,000,000 people go to Major League baseball each year.
• 7% of Americans don't know the first 9 words of the American anthem, but know the first 7 of the Canadian anthem.
• 85,000,000 tons of paper are used each year in the U.S.
• 99% of the solar systems mass is concentrated in the sun.
• A 10-gallon hat barely holds 6 pints.
• A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
• A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off.
• A company in Taiwan makes dinnerware out of wheat, so you can eat your plate.
• A cow produces 200 times more gas a day than a person.
• A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.
• A dragonfly has a lifespan of 24 hours.
• A fully loaded supertanker travelling at normal speed takes a least twenty minutes to stop.
• A giraffe can clean its ears with its 21-inch tongue.
• A giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can.
• A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.
• A hard working adult sweats up to 4 gallons per day. Most of the sweat evaporates before a person realizes it's there.
• A hedgehog's heart beats 300 times a minute on average.
• A hippo can open its mouth wide enough to fit a 4 foot tall child inside.
• A hummingbird weighs less than a penny.
• A jellyfish is 95 percent water.
• A "jiffy" is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
• A jumbo jet uses 4,000 gallons of fuel to take off.
• A male emperor moth can smell a female emperor moth up to 7 miles away.
• A man named Charles Osborne had the hiccups for 6 years. Wow.
• A mole can dig a tunnel 300 feet long in just one night.
• A monkey was once tried and convicted for smoking a cigarette in South Bend, Indiana.
• A pig's orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.
• A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.
• A Saudi Arabian woman can get a divorce if her husband doesn't give her coffee.
• A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
• A quarter has 119 grooves on its edge, a dime has one less groove.
• A shark can detect one part of blood in 100 million parts of water.
• A skunk can spray its stinky scent more than 10 feet.
• A sneeze travels out your mouth at over 100 m.p.h.
• A toothpick is the object most often choked on by Americans!
• A walla-walla scene is one where extras pretend to be talking in the background -- when they say "walla-walla" it looks like they are actually talking.
• A whale's penis is called a dork.
• About 3000 years ago, most Egyptians died by the time they were 30.
• About 70% of Americans who go to college do it just to make more money. [The rest of us are avoiding reality for four more years.]
• According to a British law passed in 1845, attempting to commit suicide was a capital offense. Offenders could be hanged for trying.
• Actor Tommy Lee Jones and former vice-president Al Gore were freshman roommates at Harvard.
• Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer.
• All 50 states are listed across the top of the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the $5 bill.
• All of the clocks in the movie "Pulp Fiction" are stuck on 4:20.
• All porcupines float in water.
• Almonds are a member of the peach family.
• Almost a quarter of the land area of Los Angeles is taken up by automobiles.
• America once issued a 5-cent bill.
• America's first nudist organization was founded in 1929, by 3 men.
• Ancient Egyptians slept on pillows made of stone.
• An animal epidemic is called an epizootic.
• An average person laughs about 15 times a day.
• An iguana can stay under water for 28 minutes.
• An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
• Armadillos are the only animal besides humans that can get leprosy.
• Armadillos have four babies at a time and they are always all the same sex.
• Armored knights raised their visors to identify themselves when they rode past their king. This custom has become the modern military salute.
• Aztec emperor Montezuma had a nephew, Cuitlahac, whose name meant "plenty of excrement."
• Babe Ruth wore a cabbage leaf under is cap to keep him cool. He changed it every 2 innings.
• Babies are born without knee caps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2-6 years of age.
• Baby robins eat 14 feet of earthworms every day.
• Back in the mid to late 1980's, an IBM-compatible computer wasn't considered a hundred percent compatible unless it could run Microsoft's Flight Simulator.
• Bank robber John Dillinger played professional baseball.
• Barbie's measurements if she were life size: 39-23-33.
• Bats always turn left when exiting a cave.
• Ben and Jerry's send the waste from making ice cream to local pig farmers to use as feed. Pigs love the stuff, except for one flavor: Mint Oreo.
• Bird droppings are the chief export of Nauru, an island nation in the Western Pacific.
• Blueberry Jelly Bellies were created especially for Ronald Reagan.
• Bubble gum contains rubber.
• Camel's milk does not curdle.
• Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from blowing sand.
• Canada is an Indian word meaning "Big Village".
• Cat's urine glows under a blacklight.
• Cats can produce over one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs can only produce about ten.
• Charles Lindbergh took only four sandwiches with him on his famous transatlantic flight.
• Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.
• Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them use to burn their houses down - hence the expression "to get fired."
• Cleo and Caesar were the early stage names of Cher and Sonny Bono.
• Columbia University is the second largest landowner in New York City, after the Catholic Church.
• David Prowse was the guy in the Darth Vader suit in Star Wars. He spoke all of Vader's lines, and didn't know that he was going to be dubbed over by James Earl Jones until he saw the screening of the movie.
• Did you know that there are coffee flavored PEZ?
• Dogs and cats consume almost $7 billion worth of pet food a year.
• Dolphins sleep with one eye open.
• Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn't wear pants.
• Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was the physician who set the leg of Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth... and whose shame created the expression for ignominy, "His name is Mudd."
• Dr. Seuss pronounced "Seuss" such that it rhymed with "rejoice."
• "Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt."
• Dueling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.
• During your lifetime, you'll eat about 60,000 pounds of food, that's the weight of about 6 elephants.
• Einstein couldn't speak fluently when he was nine. His parents thought he might be retarded.
• Emus and kangaroos cannot walk backwards, and are on the Australian coat of arms for that reason.
• Eskimo ice cream is neither icy, or creamy.
• Even if you cut off a cockroach's head, it can live for several weeks.
• Every person has a unique tongue print.
• Every time Beethoven sat down to write music, he poured ice water over his head.
• Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.
• Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order, as does arsenious, meaning "containing arsenic."
• February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.
• Fingernails grow nearly 4 times faster than toenails.
• Fortune cookies were actually invented in America, in 1918, by Charles Jung.
• Gilligan of Gilligan's Island had a first name that was only used once, on the never-aired pilot show. His first name was Willy. The skipper's real name on Gilligan's Island is Jonas Grumby. It was mentioned once in the first episode on their radio's newscast about the wreck.
• Giraffes have no vocal cords.

[pabs123]

was that completely necessary we all have google you know...

Edited by pabs123, 13 July 2010 - 12:02 PM.

[Redemptionist]

was that completely necessary we all have google you know...

:)lolz thats all the interesting things I've learned from school

[pabs123]

ps 25 is false

[Georgina]

You learnt them all in school huh?

http://www.tckid.com...t-need-to-know/

Funily enough there all on there in the same order lol.


And Yep pabs it is a bit of an attraction, but alot of the welsh language is crazy so I dont think people go out of their way to visit there much.

[pabs123]

You learnt them all in school huh?

http://www.tckid.com...t-need-to-know/

Funily enough there all on there in the same order lol.

lol owned i knew it i just didn't wanna accuse him without being sure...there's no way anyone would sit down and copy 101 facts from a textbook/ of the top of their head

[outsidedream86]

(Not those lame "interesting facts" lists that everybody knows)

Quite a few things in alexispro's monstrous list aren't true, and the rest could really use some citation or link to further information. I like learning about new things, not just spitting out useless numbers and percentages.

[Taraberra]

Aw, I really feel bad for that poor chicken. I can't even imagine the pain it had to go through when the stupid ass of a farmer did that.

[pabs123]

Aw, I really feel bad for that poor chicken. I can't even imagine the pain it had to go through when the stupid ass of a farmer did that.

ya but then it became famous lol

[diopriest]

Already seen the list of facts on the internet somewhere long ago, but it was interesting to read them again. Thanks

[Alexa]

ps 25 is false

They tested it on mythbusters

[pabs123]

They tested it on mythbusters

exactly!

[Alexa]

I love that show:thumbsup:

[pabs123]

whoever doesn't sucks

[Redemptionist]

I love that show:thumbsup:

me to! and btw, the thumbs up icon doesn't work =(

[pabs123]

me to! and btw, the thumbs up icon doesn't work =(

thumbs up? just space it no?

Edited by pabs123, 13 July 2010 - 03:00 PM.

[vin]

You learnt them all in school huh?

http://www.tckid.com...t-need-to-know/

Funily enough there all on there in the same order lol.


And Yep pabs it is a bit of an attraction, but alot of the welsh language is crazy so I dont think people go out of their way to visit there much.

hahaha obvious copying&pasting is obvious.

[Warriors]

Aw, I really feel bad for that poor chicken. I can't even imagine the pain it had to go through when the stupid ass of a farmer did that.

They shoulda invented the Double Down back then...The chicken coulda lead a fulfilling life =D


as for Alex...congrats you are a one of kind scanner....

[munie]

rofl.. busted =_=

[outsidedream86]

The Pizza Planet truck has appeared in every single Pixar movie (except the Incredibles).

Greek and Roman buildings (and statues) were not as boring as we think. Also, many of the things the average person "knows" about classical architecture aren't correct.

Mozart wrote some seriously dirty poems.

Americans call football "soccer" because it's short for "association football." And the Brits were the first to use it.

Salting frog legs will make them dance.

[pabs123]

omg that frog leg thing is sooo freaky does anyone know why this happens? salt makes the muscles contract or something?