Toph Tucker | Fun | Fun Facts

You know those strange little facts you come across now and then, like the claim that a swan can break your leg with its wing? Well, those little tidbits are so interesting that I decided to make a little compilation of some of the better ones!

If you have any fun facts you'd like to share, be sure to email me!

NOTE: Unless labeled otherwise, all of these are, to the best of my knowledge, perfectly true facts. But some of this stuff is pretty out-there, and I'm not an expert in any of it, so please contact me with corrections.

Black Hole Bogglers

> It would be possible to go beyond a black hole's event horizon and not even know it! Of course, you would pretty soon as the difference between the gravitational pull in front of and in back of you rips you apart!

> If you took all the heavy water from all the world's oceans and made it into one big nuclear bomb, the immense pressure resulting from the explosion would create a black hole. Too bad there would be no one left to admire it.

Funny Factoids

> A lei, when you unravel it, is approximately 29 feet 4 inches (that's 8.9408 meters for all you metric people) long!

> There are more Barbie dolls in Italy than there are Canadians in Canada...

> ...and according to the latest census data, there are more Jedi than Jews in the United Kingdom.

> The name of the IRS commissioner -- Mark W. Everson -- can be rearranged to spell "Rev. Snakeworm."

Melliferous Miscellany

> Ice Age got it all wrong. You know how Scrat caused an "Ice Age" by, what, cracking a glacier? And then triggered the meltdown in Ice Age 2 by, er, triggering a volcanic eruption? (At least, that was implied.) Well it's actually possible that a supervolcano triggered an ice age some time far in the past - all the ash and soot and such could have blocked out the sun, thereby cooling everything down a bit.

Mysterious Math

> If you fold a regular ol' piece of paper just 50 or so times, it'll be tall enough to reach the sun. No, really. Regular paper. Try it.

> How many numbers are between 1 and 5? Infinite - 1.01, 1.001, 1.0001, et cetera. You could just keep on adding 0's between the decimal point and the second 1. How many numbers are between 1 and 10? Infinite for the same reason. However, there must be more numbers between 1 and 10 than between 1 and 5... right?

> Take your phone number (without the area code and country code). Multiply it by two. Add five. Multiply by fifty. Add your age. Add the number of days in a non-leap year. Subtract 615. Now take a look at the answer. Cool, huh?

Quantum Quagmires

> Let's say there's a box with a device in it that has a 50/50 chance of releasing an instantly lethal gas within one hour. Put a cat in that box and leave it for one hour. At the end of that hour, is the cat dead or alive? According to quantum theory, it is dead AND alive until observed.

> Black holes and other singularities are both incredibly massive - more the realm of Einstein's physics - and incredibly small - the realm of quantum physics. Since those two theories don't quite match up, how can we describe those singularities? (Sorry about the unusual usefulness of that one...)

Shocking Science

> Hundreds of tiny neutrinos fly through you every second.

> Many people think that astronauts orbiting the Earth are in zero-gravity. In reality, there's pretty much just as much gravity up there as there is down on the Earth's surface. The astronauts are simply in one big, never-ending free-fall around the Earth.

Verbose Vraisemblant Verisimilitudes

> 22 percent of Americans say they feel less safe when they see a police officer on the street.

> Cockroaches have only recently evolved their aversion to light. Less than two hundred years ago they had no such distaste.

> 1.83 percent of Germans can "recall" seeing a unicorn in a zoo at some point in their life.

> In comic books, there are approximately 20 super-villains for every super-hero.

> Cranial escritobattery is the technical term for hitting ones head against a solid surface such as a wall.

For these and more verisimilitudes, click here.

Wacky Wikipedia

> In 1906, Mississippi's new legal code forgot to mention any sort of official flag, so Mississippi had none. Nobody noticed until 1993. This wonderful bit of trivia brought to you by, yes, Wikipedia.

> Thanks to its anyone-can-edit philosophy, "edit wars" occasionally erupt on Wikipedia. Some can be utterly ridiculous. For example: what picture, if any, should be featured on the page for the Invisible Pink Unicorn? Should the page on Exploding whale include the phrase "the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds"? Is it "colour" or "color"? Where should the picture go? What color background should a list have? Should there be spaces before and after the dash in between birth and death dates? Which edit wars should be listed as "lamest"?

> Editors of Wikipedia are forbidden by official Wikipedia policy from climbing the Reichstag building dressed as Spider-Man in order to promote their cause.

> Wacky Wookieepedia: There's Order 66, the well-known directive to execute all Jedi. And then there's Order D6-66, an apparently unrelated (and rather obscure) law requiring all spaceship docks to have time-lock devices. Is that trivial enough for you?

Zany Zugzwangs

> The estimated number of possible chess games, called the Shannon Number, is roughly 10¹¹⁸ - far greater than the number of atoms in the universe.

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I'll keep adding new facts as I find them, so send them in! Thanks! :-)

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