If there’s one thing I love in this world, it’s a random fact or two. Knowing a lot about a certain field is great, but knowing a little about everything and anything is just so much fun.
And there are so many facts that sound really made up, but are 100% true! In response to this tweet, people shared their favorite outrageous factoids.
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Humans painting humans… with humans.
Mummy Brown is a color I learned about during my undergrad, and I almost wish I didn’t know about it. Why anyone thought grinding up mummy remains was a good idea is beyond me.
Dorothy as in the fictional Dorothy.
The “friend of Dorothy” thing I knew about, but not the part about the military thinking she was a real person. Either way, it must’ve been a scary time for gay people.
“Don’t worry, people won’t remember that embarrassing thing you did.”
Great, now I’m thinking about all the embarrassing things I’ve done and hoped no one would remember.
Jimmy Carter saved Canada.
I had to Google this to be sure, but this is actually true. He and a team of navy sailors stopped the world’s very first nuclear reactor meltdown from being much, much worse. Not to mention his actions saved the capital of Canada.
The man, the meme, the legend.
Though it has a pretty different meaning nowadays, Dawkins first coined the term “meme” in his book, The Selfish Gene . It had more to do with social behavior, and a lot less (as in nothing) to do with funny internet pics (which makes sense, since the book predates the internet).
An important mother son duo.
The fact that Jack Black’s mom is Judith Love Cohen, a NASA engineer, is impressive enough. But the fact that she gave birth to him immediately after she solved a problem that helped save Apollo 13 is legendary.
The U.S./Canada border is pretty wild.
This sounds fake given how Canada is generally associated with cold weather, and California is associated with heat. But the southernmost part of Canada, Middle Island , is actually further south than the northernmost part of California!
Pineapples are… acidic.
I’d say it’s amazing how our stomachs can handle highly acidic foods that can eat away at our flesh if we aren’t careful, but that’s literally what stomachs are designed to do. We all have incredibly dangerous, corrosive acid in our bodies that’s contained by stomach lining. Fun to think about.
By the time Cleopatra was born, the pyramids were old news.
Ancient Egyptian civilization spanned a ridiculously large amount of time. By that logic, Cleopatra lived closer to us today than she ever did to the pyramids’ construction.
Astrology Twitter is shaking right now.
Astrology is actually way more complicated than it might seem. Most practices do without Ophiuchus, but some include it. Which to be honest, is probably confusing to everyone.
It’s weird to think they were neighbors.
Apparently, Beckett didn’t exclusively drive Andre the Giant to school, but he did do it from time to time . The fact that they lived in the same French town at one point in time is kind of mind blowing.
“Let them eat cake!”
You might think of the guillotine as some kind of medieval torture device that people stopped using pretty quickly, but the last time it was used was… less than 50 years ago. There are plenty of people who are still alive that were around then.
I ain’t afraid of no tuna!
An apex predator is really any animal that’s at the top of its ecosystem’s food chain, and since tuna tend to not have predators that go after them (besides, you know, us ), they count .
That’s… a lot of gold.
When you think about how much gold is actually used in a piece of jewelry, that kind of makes sense. Still, it’s pretty hard to imagine.
They seem to be a long way from home…
I’m not gonna lie, the idea that somebody brought those wallabies over there and the wallabies were kind of like, “okay, I guess this is our home now,” is a little funny to me.
This is why bike riding is so important!
When you think about how fast and far you can go on a bike compared to how much energy it takes to power one, it makes total sense!
One fish, two fish…
I mean, that makes sense considering how many weird fish there are. Even sharks! Some of them don’t even have bones (they have cartilage instead).
Two very different people who have something in common.
It’s weird to think about how two men who ended up having totally different career trajectories actually lived together during their college days. But it’s true !
When other people look more like you than you do:
It happened so long ago that it might not be strictly true, but I honestly wouldn’t doubt it.
But it also happened to a different celebrity more recently.
To be fair, drag queens work very hard when it comes to celebrity impersonations. And it doesn’t seem like Dolly Parton took offence to it.
