22 Useless Facts That You Might Need One Day
by N/A, 10 years ago |
4 min read
|
13524
Probably useless. Definitely entertaining.
1. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packer flipped a coin to see whose name would be first in the company title.
2. People who come from lower incomes tend to prefer the toilet paper to go under the roll.
3. A jiffy is real unit of time.
In physics and chemistry, a jiffy is equal to about 33.3564 picoseconds, the amount of time light takes to travel one centimeter. In computer engineering, it is equal to the length of one cycle of the computer's system clock, or around 10 milliseconds.
4. Flamingos are pink because of the carotenoid pigments in the food they eat.
That includes algae and shrimp. Once their feathers shed, they quickly lose their color.
5. The official name of the lint that collects at the bottom of your pockets is gnurr.
6. On average, women blink more than men.
A study showed women blink 19 times per minute, while men blink 11 times per minute.
7. NASA renamed the sizes of the equipment used by male astronauts to pee because no one would chose the right size.
The sizes went from "small, medium and large" to "large, gigantic and humongous."
8. Some animals are able to delay pregnancy for months.
The embryos cease developing for a certain period of time before attaching to the uterine wall. Otters, kangaroos and the western spotted skunk are all able to do this.
9. Sigmund Freud once believed cocaine could be an effective way to treat addiction to morphine.
10. Camels have three eyelids.
It's meant to help protect themselves from sand blowing in their eyes.
11. Once each player has moved three times in a chess match, there are more than 120 million possibilities for the match to follow.
12. The line between two numbers in a fraction has a name.
It's called the vinculum.
13. If you're without a thermometer, you can use a cricket to get a rough estimate of the temperature.
All you have to do is take the number a of times a cricket chirps in 15 seconds and add 37.
14. Up to 100 acres of pizza are served by the U.S. pizza industry every day.
That's 484,000 square feet of pizza.
15. The worlds oldest animal was accidentally killed by scientists when trying to research on it.
The quahog was over 500 years old when it was accidentally killed. (A different quahog is pictured here.)
16. An original Rubik's Cube has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different ways to solve it.
It is also always possible to solve the puzzle in 20 moves or less.
17. A big was publicly executed in France in the 14th century.
The pig was charged with eating an infant.
18. If you want to drop your bread and have it land butter side up, it's best to drop it from eight feet high,
19. Chewing gum dates back at least 5,000 years,
20. There are almost 650 different meanings for the verb "run."
21. An ostrich's brain is about the same size of its eyeball.
22. One cubic inch of bone is four times stronger than concrete.
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