Fifty Amazing, (but Completely Useless), Facts

suze · 919605. Mon Jun 25, 2012 5:20 pm

Let's have a look at a few of these, then ...

1. More or less true. Most people will have seen the fairground game where you put your money in and then have to use a mechanical arm to try and grab a teddy bear. It's a bit like that, except that the "prize" is a live lobster rather than a cuddly toy.

2. I thought it was Roman belief rather than Egyptian belief, but in essence this is true. In the Slavic countries, the wedding ring is worn on the corresponding finger of the right hand.

3. The apparently brightest star to an observer on Earth is the Sun, but Sirius (α Canis Majoris) is next. Apparent magnitude is a function of both a star's actual brightness and its distance from us; there are stars many thousands of times brighter than Sirius but which are much further away and cannot be seen with the naked eye.

4. Not true. End of.

5. True. Although because of the reluctance of the USA to allow apostrophes in place names, it is spelled Monkeys Eyebrow.

6. I imagine this fact refers to the USA, and I don't know where to find American inflation data. But based on British inflation data, £1 in 1950 was worth 3.5p at the end of 2011. 2009 is the only year in that period in which the annual change in RPI was negative.

7. True.

8. For those who don't know, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was a long running children's TV show which originated in Canada but soon moved to the USA. There are probably examples on YouTube; it was pretty dated even when it was new, so must look very dated by now.

The claim that Mr Rogers' sweaters were all hand made by his mother is often made, but seems unlikely. Fred Rogers presented the show until he was 73; how likely is it that his mother was still alive and well and knitting sweaters? It's also claimed that the reason he wore long sleeved sweaters even during summer was to cover an armful of tattoos. His widow says that this is not true; he had no tattoos.

9. Peanut oil has been used in the manufacture of glycerol, which is one of the "ingredients" of dynamite. But there are other and easier ways to make glycerol, and in practice peanut oil does not normally feature.

10. True. Montpelier VT, 14 July 1985. The cow was called Mist, which probably makes it just as well that it was bought by a Boston lawyer and not a German.

That's enough for now.

Posital · 919653. Tue Jun 26, 2012 1:29 am

The answer is:
21 - true
22 - false
6 - indeterminate
1 - what are you thinking, moron?

exnihilo · 919706. Tue Jun 26, 2012 5:53 am

11. True

12. Not really. Two Lamborghinis were donated to the police by the maker for high speed chases. They crashed and totalled one almost immediately.

13. Taste is pretty subjective, but beetles and wasps I've eaten and I'd say this was false. People who have had worms say they taste of nothing much.

14. No they don't.

15. No they don't. There was a very poor study done in the 80s (Halpern & Coren) which suggested this 'fact' which keeps getting quoted now. Later, more reliable, studies (Aggleton et al) have comprehensively debunked it.

16. Incorrect. His body is on display most of the time for all to see but on the 100th and 150th anniversaries of UCL it was taken to the College Council meeting where it was listed as 'present but not voting'.

17. Iceland seems curiously susceptible to epidemics of canine distemper, there have been several outbreaks (most recently in 1966-67) which have done damage to the canine population and, indeed, there is one recorded in the 1800s but accurate figures of it's toll are not available.

18. There's spoiling and there's spoiling. Honey can keep for a very long time but it is susceptible to things like botulism if not properly stored.

19. True. Like many other animals they rest one hemisphere of the brain at a time to enable them to continue to watch for danger and, in the specific case of dolphins, to breathe.

20. False. While bathing was something of a luxury, Elizabeth was Queen a person to whom luxury was very much available. She is known to have bathed regularly (if not as regularly as we do) and to have been very particular about smells anywhere near her.

That, as suze says, will do for now.

Jenny · 919834. Tue Jun 26, 2012 10:52 am

krollo · 919842. Tue Jun 26, 2012 11:34 am

23.In the film E.T., the sound of the alien walking was produced by a sound engineer squishing her hand in jelly.

Pretty much true, though the sound engineer was a man (John Roesch) and it was a t-shirt full of jelly that was squeezed.

24.Lucy and Linus from the Peanuts comic strip had a little brother named Rerun who sometimes played baseball with Charlie Brown.

Yup.

25.In China, the three most well known Western names are Jesus Christ, Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley.

Very doubtful. I cannot find any watertight references for this, or anything else, but China isn't as insular as many people think.

26.Due to time zone shifts, if you had flown from London to New York on the Concord, you would arrive two hours before you left.

Sounds about right. Perfectly possible - 5 hour time difference, 3 hour journey.

27.You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching TV.

Sleeping burns about 90 calories per hour, TV watching about 68. True.

28.The largest number of children born of a single woman was 69. The woman, a Russian peasant, gave birth to 16 sets of twins, 7 sets of triplets and 4 sets of quadruplets from 1725 to 1765.
Listed in the GWR 2004, so I assume it to be true - most sources simply say that it is in the 'church records'.

exnihilo · 919845. Tue Jun 26, 2012 11:47 am

23. According to the Foley Artist, John Roesch, a wet T-shirt crammed with jello was used to simulate the noise of E.T.'s walk.

24. True. Rerun van Pelt

25. Repeated, along with the rest of this list, all over the place but I've no idea how you'd go about demonstrating it to be true. However, if it ever was (in the '60s say) then I very much doubt it is now.

26. Was true due to passing through five time zones in three hours, now is not as the Concorde no longer flies.

27. Apparently, yes. The average calorie burn rate asleep is 77/hour, where watching TV is 56/hour if you just sit there like a lump. Apparently reading a book burns 100/hour so there's a lesson for us all in that.

28. According to Guinness World Records 2001, yes. The first wife of Feodor Vassilyev (1707-1782) of Shuya, Russia. Between 1725 and 1765, in a total of 27 confinements, she gave birth to 16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets, and four sets of quadruplets. 67 of them survived infancy.

29. True, in 1950. Although the first record of its use in the current sense dates to a Newsweek article from 1951, the proximity of dates and the fact that slang terms are generally in use before they're in print suggests it predates Seuss.

30. Not as far as I can tell. Uruguay, however, legalised duelling in 1920 and only repealed the law in 1992.

Yes, I'm bored.

exnihilo · 919846. Tue Jun 26, 2012 11:48 am

Looks like we were working on those at the same time!

exnihilo · 919848. Tue Jun 26, 2012 11:56 am

31. Hmm. Well, first you'd need to define "war" and then "lost" but it is true that the US Army used mules as late as WWII and in both the War of Independence and the Civil War. So it seems likely they used them in 1812 and, according to some, they lost that.

32. Only if you mean nobody knows the names of all the workers. We do know who commissioned it...

33. The same size at birth, but the Neanderthals' were indeed larger by the time they reached maturity.

34. Well, no. They may well have evolved from such, but no dolphin ever was one.

35. According to research at UCSC the average for people aged over 10 is 4-6, so anywhere from 1,460 to 2,196 per year (allowing for leap years).

exnihilo · 919852. Tue Jun 26, 2012 12:09 pm

36. Perhaps when this list first started polluting inboxes (although some of the 'facts' have been updated). Now the cost of the average Superbowl advert is $3.5 million. NBC made $80 million on the last one with the most expensive being Chrysler advert featuring Clint Eastwood at $5.84 million.

37. She may have sold books worth that amount, but her net worth in 2012 was estimated at $910 million in April of this year.

38. The earliest fortune cookie-like confections appear to have been Japanese but the form we know today was probably first made in the US. There are, however, competing claims including one from Hong Kong citing 1918. In either instance the Japanese claim is older.

39. So it would seem.

40. Yes. One main, systemic, heart and two single-chambered branchial hearts which supply blood to the gills.

This list appears, word for word, on several "fabulous facts" websites. The absence of the OP might make an uncharitable person think they only posted here to drive traffic to their own site. Still, at least more of them are true than on the usual lists we see.

And now I think I shall make dinner and leave the last few for someone else.

krollo · 919855. Tue Jun 26, 2012 12:25 pm

41.Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, but could never call his mother or his wife – they were both deaf.

First bit: Bullcrap, as we well know.
Second bit: True.

42.Every human was but a single cell for approximately one half hour.
Plausible.

43.The number one employer in Brazil is Walmart.
Noop - it appears to be the snappily named Companhia Brasileira de Distribuicao Grupo Pao de Acucar.

exnihilo · 919860. Tue Jun 26, 2012 1:26 pm

44. Should have been 46, for neatness, but see above.

45. Seems to be true, but one ought not to give babies salt until they're much older in any case.

46. The official start is "Black Friday", the day after Thanksgiving. But given that Christmas things appear in shops earlier and earlier every year I see no reason why this would not be true - or why it would be remarkable.

Edit: Consumer Reports produced a study that suggests it's 40% now, so 37% whenever this was drawn up seems fine.

47. Apparently so, and it seems he holds the record to this day. If he hiccupped once every ten seconds, though, it would only be 220 million or so. Amusingly, WikiPedia records that his hiccups stopped when he was 96 ... and died.

48. Oops. Ironing. Mea culpa. Still, see above.

49. So he said. Although a patent to cook food using similar methods was filed in 1934 by Bell Laboratories the first working one was made by Raytheon in 1947 based on the findings of Spencer.

50. Nope. China is first (58%), India second (25%), then Egypt, Iran and Turkey. new Jersey's not even the biggest producer in the United States, that would be Georgia.

There, all done.

suze · 919861. Tue Jun 26, 2012 1:30 pm

44. Shakespeare's date of birth is unknown. But if we use the convention that he was born on 23 April 1564 (three days before he is known to have been baptised), then work on the KJV was ongoing during the year in which he was 46; it had started somewhat earlier and he'd turned 47 by the time Bibles went on sale.

As already noted, shake is indeed the 46th word of Psalm 46 in the KJV. But spear is 47th from the end.

45. Asserted as true by Beauchamp, 1986. How does he know?

46. Asserted as true by the National Retail Federation (of the USA) in 2006.

47. True, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

48. If this was ever true, those days are gone.

49. So Percy Spencer claimed, certainly.

50. Utter rubbish. More than half of the world's aubergines are grown in China. The USA is not among the top ten producers, and New Jersey ranks only fifth among American states where they are grown.

Oh look !!!

exnihilo · 919862. Tue Jun 26, 2012 1:31 pm

Sorry, I got bored! Still, always nice to have someone else arrive independently at the same results.

So, of the 50 'facts', 22 are false, 7 are debatable and 2 are unconfirmed. Not a stellar result.

dr.bob · 919968. Wed Jun 27, 2012 5:11 am

dr.bob · 919969. Wed Jun 27, 2012 5:17 am

I misremembered, it wasn't eggshaped, it was Aaron.

Here's the research note: