Myths

• LSD is not retained in your spinal cord
• Sugar does not cause hyperactivity in children
• You don’t lose excess body heat from your head. (You can leave your hat at home if you don’t want to muss your hair!)
• We use much more than 10% of our brains
• Eating at night does not make you fat. (Though the obvious rules still apply—you can’t eat more calories than you burn)
• Unfortunately, there is no scientific evidence that you can cure a hangover
• Shaving does not cause hair to grow back faster, darker, or coarser
• Reading in dim light will not destroy your eyesight
• You don’t need to drink eight glasses of water a day, so save yourself the bloat
• You are not more likely to catch a cold when it’s cold outside
• The red part of a strawberry is not a fruit
• The definition of a species is debated. Two organisms belong to the same species if they can mate. Not true in practice. Perhaps in the future look at similarities in DNA, or the number of identical proteins in both organisms
• “Irregardless” is a real word and means exactly what you think it does
• Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse wasn’t resonance with the wind. It was aeroelastic flutter
• The Great Wall of China is not visible from space
• Cracking your knuckles does not cause arthritis
• You don’t only use 10% of your brain
• Eskimos don’t really have 100 words for snow (they have words for Icy Snow, Yellow Snow, etc.)
• You don’t need 8 glasses of water a day
• Gum does not take 7 years to decompose
• People don’t swallow 8 spiders a year sleeping
• Alcohol does not kill brain cells

People

• In 1847, a doctor performed an amputation in 25 seconds, operating so quickly that he accidentally amputated his assistant’s fingers as well. Both later died of sepsis, and a spectator reportedly died of shock, resulting in the only known procedure with a 300% mortality rate.
• Isaiah Mustafa (the Old Spice guy) won the money to pursue his acting career on The Weakest Link thanks to his knowledge of comic books
• Joseph Späh, an acrobat, survived the Hindenburg crash by doing an acrobatic roll out one of the windows
• None of The Beatles could read music
• The last two speakers of a dying language are refusing to talk to each other (the language is Ayapaneco)
• The sphincter muscles in Bowie’s left eye were torn by a fingernail when his friend fought over girl and was punched in the face. His pupil remains permanently open
• Eistein’s dying words were lost because his nurse didn’t understand German
• Kevin Spacey refused top billing for Seven to avoid giving away the killer’s identity in the opening credits
• Bill Paxton is the only actor to have been killed by a Predator, an Alien, and a Terminator
• Francis Perkins is the father of all modern work-related systems (health insurance, social security, minimum wage)
• Washington invented the word bakery
• Thomas Midgley invented leaded fuel and freon: he had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth’s history
• In 1824, Lozier and DeVoe came up with a hoax — made people believe they will separate Manhattan and turn it upside down!
• Henry Ford retired — took up sailing to avoid the traffic jams he had created
• Franklin wanted to drop c, j, q, w, x, y, put in 6 new ones so that every sound could be written with one letter
• 1793, A girl in Tourcoing, France was born with one eye in the middle — lived to the age of 15
• Al Capone’s business card — Second-hand furniture dealer
• In 1608, Thomas Coryat introduced the Italian custom of eating with a fork to England, first thought it was an insult to dignity
• Between 1665 and 1666 Newton returned home from Cambridge. He couldn’t talk to anyone, and so singlehandedly invented calculus, gravity
• In 321 A.D. the Roman emperor Constantine officially reduced the week from eight days to seven
• The founder of Adidas and founder of Puma were brothers – Adolf and Rudolf
• Norman Borlaug is said to have saved over a billion people from starvation
• Chevy Chase’s name is Cornelius Crane Chase
• The second person to survive going over Niagara falls later died from slipping on an orange peel.
• In 1947, German logician/mathematician Kurt Gödel told Albert Einstein that he discovered a loophole in the Constitution allowing the US to become a dictatorship. However, Einstein prevented Gödel from revealing the proof because he knew it would hurt Gödel’s chances of gaining citizenship.
• Christopher Walken worked briefly as a lion tamer in a circus at the age of 15
• The Most Interesting Man In The World is 73 years old, and fakes the accent used in the commercial.
• When Stephen Hawking guest starred on the Star Trek: TNG, he paused in front of the warp core set piece and remarked, “I’m working on that”.
• David Bowie was using so much cocaine in 1975 that he can’t remember recording Station to Station, one of his most acclaimed works.
• The current head of the Korean imperial dynasty (and de facto Emperor of Korea) works as a general manager in a department store.
• Charles Darwin Ate Every Animal He Discovered
• Einstein actually had excellent grades (http://gizmodo.com/5884050/einstein-actually-had-excellent-grades)
• “Psycho”, “Silence of the Lambs”, and “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” are all based on the same guy and he wasn’t even a serial killer
• During a blizzard in 1996, the Orlando Magic, Marilyn Manson, and the cast of Sesame Street Live were all stranded in a hotel together
• Mark Twain was born under Haley’s Commet, and said “It will be greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet.” He did.

Words

• Vin Diesel is an anagram for “I end lives”
• In English, turkey is called turkey because the Brits thought it came from Turkey, but in Turkey, turkey is called hindi — because they thought turkeys came from India
• The San Diego Wild Animal Park features a “Wgasa line”. It is short for who gives a shit anyway
• The Greek word for fish is ichthys — Iesus Christos Theou Yios Soter — Jesus Christ son of God, the savior
• Dulles airport renamed to Washington Dulles (reagan was confused with Dallas airport)
• It’s actually “Houston, we’ve had a problem”
• Second string — the terms comes from when the archer used to carry a second string for his bow
• Get fired — clans would set houses on fire to get rid of somebody
• Aglets — plastic things on the end of shoelaces
• Devil’s advocate — opposite view when appointing a saint
• Philtrum — lines connecting lip to nose
• Lunula — white part of the fingernail
• 2 words containing a, e, i, o, u in order: abstemious, facetious
• Left bank of a river — left of a person looking downstream. St. Louis on the right bank of Mississippi, Manhattan forms on left bank of the Hudson
• Greenland was named by Eric the Red in an attempt to induce followers to settle
• A is the first letter everywhere except Old German (fourth), Ethiopian (it’s the 13th)
• Longest sentence in Les Miserables 823 words, 93 commas, 51 semicolons, 4 dashes (3 pages)
• Laser, Radar, Scuba, Snafu, Sonar — all abbreviations
• Cities: Accident (MD), Difficult (TN), Intercourse (PA), Social circle (GA), Truth or Consequences (NM)
• Longest name of lake, Lake Chargogagogmanchaugagogchaubunagungamaug near Webster MA (officially Webster Lake) means “You fish on your side, we fish on our side, nobody fishes in the middle”
• Yucatan — means “what do you mean?”, after asking the Indians “Where are we?”
• The Carthaginians gave the land the name Spania (“land of rabbits”)
• Longest name of a city — Welsh town of Llanfairpwllgwynggyllgogerychwyrndrobwell-Llantysiliogogogoch
• Centillion — 10^600
• There are double contractions in English, e.g. wouldn’t've.
• It’s called a “second” because it’s the second division of an hour by sixty
• The word mortgage is a Law French term meaning “death contract”.

History

• A genocide in Ukraine in the 30s killed up to 4 million more people than the holocaust, in less than one year.
• The US printed special money for Hawaii during WWII, to be deemed invalid in case of a Japanese invasion
• In 1957 scientists may have inadvertently shot a steel plate cap in to space at up to 6x the escape velocity of Earth whilst conducting nuclear tests – potentially making it the first man-made object to depart the Solar System: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#The_first_nuclear-propelled_manmade_object_in_space.3F
• The US warned the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to evacuate before the 1945 atomic bombings.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evacuations_of_civilians_in_Japan_during_World_War_II
• There was a song written in the 1630s that was performed only in the Sistine Chapel. The Vatican kept the composition of the piece secret for 150 years until the 14-year-old Mozart listened to the piece two times, transcribed it from memory, and produced the first unauthorized copy of the song
• Nixon’s secret Apollo 11 failure speech: “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace”
• City of St Pierre on Martinique island was completely destroyed when Mt Pelee erupted on May 8 1902. Of 30,000 inhabitants, only 1 was found alive — a prisoner deep underground the prison
• Shortest war — 38 minutes England and Zanzibar, 1896
• When modern Italy was formed, the Florentine dialect was chosen as the universal language largely due to the works of Dante.
• After the fall of the Roman Empire the technology to make concrete was lost for 1000 years.

Animals

• In ancient times, hares were thought to be hermaphrodites, and could give birth while virgins. That’s why bunnies are associated with Easter.
• Cattle use 30 percent of the land on Earth.
• All Polar bears present today may have descended from a single female brown bear from Ireland
• Gazelles never drink — chemical process transform part of their solid food into water
• Koala will touch nothing but eucalyptus to eat
• Almost all bears can climb trees, so can’t climb the tree to escape the bear!
• Lemmings do commit mass suicide, when their population grows too big
• Gophers like to eat the lead around telephone cables, disrupting transcontinental service
• Fish can get seasick if kept on board a ship
• There is a type of frog that breaks its own legs, and uses the protruding bones as claws to maim enemies if attacked
• Military Working Dogs are always one rank higher than their handlers, in order to ensure that if a handler ever mistreats his dog, it is considered an assault on a superior, which in the military is a major offense.
• Men and monkeys — only ones to distinguish color
• Leaping flea accelerates from 0 to 3 feet per second in 0.002s — 150G (driving car into brick wall at 200mph)
• Only gesture man doesn’t share with any other animal — smile
• Tuna would suffocate if it ever stopped swimming (needs continuous flow of water through gills)
• There is an organism that can survive: temperatures of -272C to 151C, pressure of 6,000 atmospheres, and can survive in the vacuum of space for at least 10 days
• In some countries, octopuses must receive anesthesia before surgery because of their intelligence
• Cows have best friends and get stressed when they are separated
• Playing a deep B flat on a Tuba gets gators horny

Things

• In June 2008, a tornado hit Kansas State University’s campus destroying only one building: their Wind Erosion Lab
• You consume 59 times the calories licking a British stamp than an American stamp.
• The budget for Reservoir Dogs (1992) was so low that many of the actors used their own clothing as wardrobe.
• Silica Gel (the deoxidizing stuff in beef jerky packets) is actually non-toxic, and only says “DO NOT EAT” because it’s not food and could be a choking hazard.
• TIL every person with blue eyes descends from one ancestor, born 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, whose genes mutated away from brown.
• In about 800 million years, carbon dioxide levels fall (due to weathering of Earth’s surfaces increasing with Sun’s luminosity) to the point at which C4 photosynthesis is no longer possible. All plant species die. Free oxygen eventually disappears from the atmosphere. Multicellular life dies out.
• In 1984, due to the complaints of the gore in “Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom” and “Gremlins”, Steven Spielberg requested that the MPAA create a new category, called PG13, for movies that have too much adult content to be rated PG, but not enough to be rated R.
• Back in 1978, a Russian scientist accidentally stuck his head into a particle accelerator and survived
• So many new isotopes of elements were created with the explosion of atomic bombs that you can test whether or not a painting is a forgery by examining the isotopes of elements used in it, as some of these didn’t exist prior to 1945.
• Spearfish, South Dakota holds the world record for the fastest temperature change. 27C (49F) in two minutes
• That the only road leading Gibraltar to Spain intersects with the airport’s runway. meaning it has to be closed down every time a plane lands or takes off
• In 1938 a person had his office built inside of an elevator so that he could move from floor to floor to manage his businesses. This elevator office also has a working sink, a working telephone, and had built in air conditioning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zl%C3%ADn#Architectural_Highlights
• 87% of the U.S. Population are uniquely identified by {date of birth, gender, ZIP}
• Dr Pepper is bottled by both Coca-Cola and Pepsi, depending on location
• It is estimated 1 in 10 Europeans was conceived on an Ikea bed
• You can take your own personal parachute on commercial flights as long as it meets certain requirements
• In Malta, by law, if a shop owner doesn’t wish for a seeing-eye dog to enter the shop, a coin is flipped to determine the outcome
• There is such a thing as water too clean to drink. Drinking it could kill you: http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/26OJRL/www.fastcompany.com/1750612/the-dangerously-clean-water-used-to-make-your-iphone
• The Wikipedia page on copyright is under investigation for copyright infringment
• Most sunglasses are made by the same company. Ray-Ban, Oakley, Bulgari, Dolce & Gabbana, Salvatore Ferragamo, Prada: They’re all made by one company, Italian manufacturer Luxottica
• The only plane allowed to fly on 9/11 after the attacks was a plane from San Diego to Miami delivering anti-venom to a man bitten by a highly poisonous snake; it was accompanied by two jet fighters
• Underground river ‘Rio Hamza’ discovered 4km beneath the Amazon – up to 6000km long, it flows at just 1 mm/hr
• There is an opera house (Haskell Opera) that straddles the US/Canada border, and inside, the seats are separated by a line. If you do not exit the same side that you entered, you have committed an international incident, and are subject to arrest.
• On 6/28/2011 in a ceremony in Rome, the United Nations has officially declared that for only the second time in history, a disease has been wiped off the face of the earth. The disease is rinderpest. Everyone has heard of smallpox. Very few have heard of the runner-up.
• Most gas stations only have two tanks – one for the lowest octane and one for the highest. When you pump the mid-grade, it pulls from both and mixes the two together
• The movie industry is based in Hollywood because movie makers were trying to get away from Thomas Edison (based in New Jersey). He had patents covering virtually all of the movie making process but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California was known to rule againt patent claims.
• HTTP status 418 is “I’m a Teapot”
• Cuteness in Japanese Culture is a result of teenage girls switching to mechanical pencils
• In 1963 MIT made a artificial ring around the earth with 4.8*10^8 copper needles
• There are no clocks in a casino, or windows.
• Two-thirds of all people who ever reached the age of 65 are alive today
• Japan doesn’t overbook flights
• Foreign governments can spy on one another in the US just not on US citizens
• Secret first screening of Star Wars — to Spielberg, Coppola, Scorcese, de Palma. They hated it
• Soap floats — it’s its most useful property
• Airline pilots are not allowed to have the same dish during the flight
• Norma Talmage stumbled onto cement on board walk in LA
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has the word nigger in it, so it was removed from two school districts
• Secret daily flight to cuba — for journalists
• The original James Bond theme comes from a stage musical called A House For Mr Biswas set in the Asian community of Trinidad
• Spanish flu was the most lethal disease in the U.S. (1 in 152 people died) in 1918-9
• The wind power we can potentially capture is 23 times the current need of Mankind (1% of Sun’s power converted to wind)
• It is estimated that a 100-millisecond delay reduces Amazon’s sales by 1 percent
• The building on One Times Square is empty because the owner can afford it from just advertising on it alone
• Icelandic language remained unchanged since 12th century
• A 10-gallon hat holds 3/4 of a gallon
• 1962 — most costly punctuation error — omission of a hyphen destroyed Venus space probe rocket
• English police in Sussex asked girl pedestrians to wear miniskirts (long legs stand out more at night)
• Guards at Alamos must serve out sentence of any escapee
• Flag of Denmark — oldest unchanged, since 13th C
• 1870 a law firm in Utah built a machine that gave divorce papers for $2.50, legal when signed by both man and woman
• In the last 3500 years there have been 230 years of peace in the civilized world
• Falcon Island disappeared in 1913, appeared in 1926, disappeared again in 1949
• Total cost of constructing Eiffel tower was recovered from fees for the first year of operation!
• The spoon dates from the 18th century!
• The Tour d’Argent — oldest restaurant in Paris — writes the name of the guest who orders canard rouennais. 112151 (Roosevelt), 253652 (Charlie Chaplin)
• It’s impossible to catch a cold or another germ-based disease in Verkhoyansk (-90 F recorded once), the air is too cold for the germs to live; food won’t spoil for years
• Quito, capital of Ecuador, sits almost directly on top of equator. but it’s 9300 feet above ground, enjoys springlike climate all year
• First book written with a typewriter — Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. He didn’t admit, fearing he’d be questioned about the operation of the machine
• In Uruguay, duelling is legal as long as both parties are registered blood donors
• Raindrops fall on Sahara, but rain never reaches the desert (Evaporates)
• Not all liquids are wet — Mercury at room temperature
• First traffic light was for safe passage of pedestrians in 1868 (two semaphore arms). The semaphore blew up killing a policeman
• Until 1600, diners brought their own knives, which between meals served as daggers
• If air conditioning was turned off in Houston Astrodome, entrance of warm humid air could cause it to rain in the stadium
• Most poisonous substance is the toxin of Clostridium botulinum bacteria — 1/3000 of an ounce could poison entire human population
• On a clear day, you can see seven states from a point near Chattanooga, TN (TN, AL, GA, SC, NC, VA, KY)
• A 23-foot iron pillar in Delhi has not rusted in 1500 years, no one figured out why
• A train doesn’t tip over when going around a curve because the outside rail is higher than the inside rail
• A heart does not produce enough pressure to pump blood — the veins themselves have their own muscle tissues
• Big mystery: the appearance of [okrytozalazkowe] plants around 65 million years ago
• Each item on the food chain uses up 90% of the energy for its own purposes (hence people don’t eat lions — they would be 10 times more expensive than beef, which is below lions on the food chain)
• How were first cells created? We don’t know. Catch 22: if proteins were created from aminoacids in the air or on the surface of the ocean, UV radiation will destroy them. If they were created in the ocean, they will be destroyed by water. Solution: high concentration of aminoacids so water can’t get to them (tidal basins where aminoacids are accumulated) or in protective bubbles made of fats
• 99.9% of all species has already gone extinct
• Neandertalus was not primitive — had religion, burial, made decorations. Common misconception: the first found skeleton belonged to an individual who suffered from arthritis
• Every human on earth today has had a single ancestor — called Eve — living in Africa about 200,000 years ago
• Good question: why aren’t leaves black? They would absorb most of the light
• A single magnetic pole (a monopole) could not so far be found. Weird — otherwise there is a complete symmetry between electricity and magnetism
• 46BC: 2 months and 29 days were added to February (Caesar). 1582: 5 october became 15 october (Gregor XIII)
• Only three experiments were enough for scientists to accept the general theory of relativity
• In the middle of the Indian Ocean there is a “valley” in the ocean’s surface about 300m deep (but its diameter is thousands of kilometers)
• In “rinse, lather, repeat”, repeat was added to double sales
• “After opening refrigerate” is a sales move — if you put in the fridge, you’ll be reminded of the product
• “Eat within 8 weeks” is a sales move to make you buy more of the product
• Abraham Lincoln delivered a speech so mesmerizing that the reporters in attendance were said to have put down their pencils in amazement, failing to transcribe what was said. No record of the speech exists; it’s known as “Lincoln’s Lost Speech.”
• Most Powerful Companies You’ve Never Heard Of – Cerberus, Serco
• Greenland can’t join FIFA because they can’t grow grass for a regulation (soccer/football) field
• Area codes were assigned based on how long it would take to dial them on a rotary phone
• Black boxes are not black. They are orange to make it easy to find it.
• You cannot buy a house in China, you lease it for 70 Years from the Government
• The consumption of energy in the US has dropped since the 70′s and has plateaued.
• The Sun works because of quantum tunneling
• Sassafras, the tree that gives us root beer, also contains the oils which produces ecstasy
• The reason you can’t buy cashew nuts in their shell is because they are toxic to the touch, similar to poison ivy
• Germany captures 43% of the world’s solar power
• In each scene with Detective Donald Kimball (Willem Dafoe), Mary Harron asked Defoe to portray his character three different ways: 1) Kimble knew Patrick Bateman killed Paul Allen, 2) Kimball didn’t know Bateman killed Allen, and 3) Kimball wasn’t sure if Bateman killed Allen. Harron would then edit the takes together, giving the audience an unsure vibe of what Detective Kimball thought of Bateman
• Candy Canes were initially created to get kids to shut-up in Church.
• It is no longer legal to manufacture 100 watt standard incandescent bulbs in the US.
• When Winston Royce described the Waterfall Design model, he presented it as what NOT to do
• The movie “Thank You For Smoking” didn’t have any one smoking a cigarette throughout the whole movie.
• During the filming of “The African Queen”(1950) in the Congo, most of the crew and actors (including Katharine Hepburn) became ill with dysentery except Humphrey Bogart, who refused water and only drank whiskey during his time there
• There is a mutation that causes your bones to become super dense causing things like sinking like a rock and walking away from automobile accidents without a single fracture.
• There is an Island Off the Coast of Virginia in Which Inhabitants Speak a Dialect Similar to Elizabethan English.
• PETA kills 95% of all animals it rescues.
• Wikileaks expressed “outrage” at not being granted a speaking slot at UNESCO event: “The Media World after WikiLeaks and News of the World.”
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese_people refuse any contact with outside civilization; they drove off a helicopter with arrows
• A Congressman, while defending a murder suspect, accidentally killed himself while recreating a scenario where the victim could have accidentally killed himself. The defendant was acquitted.
• The price of pizza has matched, with uncanny precision, the cost of a NYC subway ride for 50 years. Economists have named it “The Pizza Principle.”
• You can open a bottle of wine with your shoe. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuGfjtBffiE&feature=youtube_gdata_player)
• You can’t legally watch MLK’s “I Have a Dream Speech” for free — you have to buy it for $10 — thanks to the King family and US copyright laws
• in 1979 a woman jumped from the 86th floor of the Empire State Building, only to be blown back onto the 85th floor. Her only injury was a broken hip.
• Henrietta Lacks’ cells are “immortal” and still used today for research.
• The Founder of FedEx Once Saved the Company by Taking its Last $5,000 and turning it into $32,000 by Gambling in Vegas.
• There is a town in the Alps that does not get any direct sunlight for 84 days. However the town fixed that by installing a giant mirror on the side of the mountain.
• in 2008, test subjects could not tell the difference between audio played through Monster Cables and audio played through coat hangers.
• At the premiere of Beethoven’s 9th, police had to break up the applause, as the amount he was receiving was considered inappropriate for a private citizen
• The CIA spent $20 million on a cat equipped to spy on Soviets, but it got hit by a taxi.

Haven’t Had Enough Yet?

• Useless Facts

Physics Trivia (from “Motion Mountain”)

• Space and time are not continuous — nothing infinite in our universe. This is because there is a smallest entropy for any system
• No way to distinguish space from time, vacuum from matter from radiation
• Proofs of three-dimensionality of space: knot and vestibular labyrinth in inner ear of a mammal
• Measure the speed of a gun bullet with a stop watch without electronics
• Fractal dimension of real-life objects (plot density as a function of scale)
• Higher derivatives of (displacement, speed, acceleration): jerk, snap, crackle, pop
• Antimatter has positive mass
• Center of mass moves straight during fall even if the body is rotating
• Find center of mass for an arbitrary body? – Hang from two ropes, prolonged ropes cross at center of mass
• Simplest experiment to show rotation of the earth: metal rod slightly longer on one side of the axis, supported with a wire to a frame. When wire is burned with a candle, moment of inertia decreases by a factor of 10^4 — rotates with 10^4 rate of rotation of earth — can shine light beam on mirror and observe reflection moving on the wall
• Good scale does not show constant weight when you step on it — heart pumping changes your weight
• Only impact of a meteorite could cause earthquakes 12 in Richter scale
• Staircase only comfortable if depth + twice height is a constant 0.63m (+- 2cm)
• As a result of tidal forces, the Moon always has the same face to Earth
• Do not hold your breath when you’re decompressed in vacuum
• If you walk on an escalator, it consumes more energy
• Show that light is a wave with your fingers only — two fingers in front of your eye, almost touch, see black lines
• We would not be able to talk in an even number of dimensions! (Waves don’t stop in even dimensions)
• A 7x7x7 Rubk’s cube is not possible
• Measure weight of a car with a rules (measure area of contact of tires and multiple by tire pressure)
• Nature doesn’t allow precision of more than 20 digits
• Lowercase letters added to save paper surface by shortening written words
• You can’t measure the one-way velocity of light
• Sky is dark because of maximum force in nature. Also the reason for universe being of finite size
• Joseph Kittinger stepped out of balloon at 31.3km (900 km/s!), didn’t feel anything. Free fall = rest (principle of equivalence)
• Universe is spatially flat, expansion accelerating, no big crunch
• A black hole is independent of how it was formed or the materials
• You can get a lot of energy from a rotating black hole (Penrose effect)
• Black holes are not black (because they have entropy, and hence temperature!) but are blackest objects in the universe
• Full theory of general relativity: All observers agree on a perfect speed in nature (maximum energy speed relative to matter — massless radiation); All observers agree on a perfect force in nature (on event horizons). Deduce from this: spacetime and space are curved near mass and energy
• Kelvin generator: create a spark with two streams of water flowing from one set of buckets to the other
• Older people can sense approaching thunderstorms in their joints: coincidence between the electromagnetic field frequency emitted by thunderclouds – around 100 kHz – and the resonant frequency of nerve cell membranes.
• triboluminescence — pulling Scotch tape quickly produces sparks
• Rubbing a plastic spoon with a piece of wool charges it. Such a charged spoon can be used to extract pepper from a salt–pepper mixture by holding the spoon over the mixture.
• Ionosphere around the Earth has a resonant frequency of 7Hz. Light makes seven turns of the Earth in one second
• Measure speed of radio waves: Put the chocolate bar (or a piece of cheese) in the microwave and switch the power off as soon as melting begins. The bar melts at regularly spaced spots, half a wavelength apart.
• Everyday nature is left-right symmetric
  colours in human language have a natural order, same in all languages. in the following order: 1. black and white, 2. red, 3. green and yellow, 4. blue, 5. brown, 6. mauve, pink, orange, grey
• Human bone is piezoelectric
• Logical thinking requires energy — AND gate erases information and entropy is created when information is erased (not locally, but totally)