45 Useless Facts You'll Never Use Again In Your Life
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Politics and Activism

45 Useless Facts You'll Never Use Again In Your Life

A collection of my favorite, utterly useless information from That's A Fact Jack!

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45 Useless Facts You'll Never Use Again In Your Life
New Statesman

I find it difficult to watch an entire movie without looking up the ending — my friends hate me for it. I want to know everything and my brain is filled with useless information and facts that I will never again use in my life. While Black Friday shopping, I came across a useless fact book in my favorite store (Barnes & Noble, duh); 'THAT'S A FACT JACK! a collection of utterly useless information.' For your entertainment, I have compiled a list of my favorite useless [but informational] facts that you will never again use in your life.

1. All blue-eyed people have single common ancestor who lived near the Black Sea six to ten thousand years ago.

2. NASA landed Apollo 11 on the Moon with computers that had less processing power than a cell phone.

3. If you put a mirror one light-year away from Earth and looked at it through a telescope, you would see two years into Earth's past.

4. Birds can be gay. Crows, ducks, finches, flamingos, geese, gulls, penguins, sandpipers, swans, swallows, and woodpeckers, to name only a few species, often form female bird pairs, which court each other, copulate, and even raise chicks — from male sperm donors, of course.

5. Potatoes have more chromosomes than humans do — 48 versus 46.

6. Too much coffee can kill you. A lethal dose of caffeine for the average adult is somewhere around 10 grams, or the equivalent of drinking between 50 and 200 cups of coffee in rapid succession.

7. Humans actually have nine senses. Besides hearing, sight, smell, taste, and touch, theres also equilibrioception (balance), nociception (pain), proprioception and kinaesthesia (joint motion and acceleration).

8. Studies show that men find the smell of women's tears unattractive.

9. There are roughly 144,000 mosquitos for every person on earth.

10. Tampons were originally designed to plug bullet wounds. The word "tampon" comes from the French tampion, a piece of cloth used as a stopper.

11. Every 20 minutes, the world's population increases by 3,500. In the same time, one or more species of animal or plant life is wiped out — roughly 27,000 species per year.

12. If you feel the obsessive need to correct other people's grammar, you may suffer from a type of obesessive-compulsive disorder called grammatical pedantry syndrome, or GPS.

13. Winston Churchill had a heart attack in the White House while straining to open a bedroom window.

14. The Bible is the most shoplifted book in the world.

15. Throughout its lifetime, an elephant goes through six sets of teeth. The elephant starves to death once the sixth set of teeth falls out.

16. Tigers have striped skin under their hair, but zebras don't.

17. Butterflies are cannibals.

18. You can in fact get cooties. Cooties are lice.

19. Poison ivy is a member of the tropical cashew family, from which we get cashew and pistachio nuts.

20. Charlie Chaplin once lost a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest. He failed even to make the finals.

21. In his role as James Bond, Sea Connery wore a toupee to hide his receding hairline.

22. The infinity sign is called a "lemniscate".

23. On average, women utter 7,000 words a day; men manage just over 2,000.

24. ETAOINSHRDLUCMFGYPWBVKXJQZ — The alphabet in order of its frequency of use in written English.

25. At 1 in 176 million, the odds of winning a Mega Millions jackpot are extraordinarily slim. You are more likely to be crushed by a vending machine, give birth to identical quadruplets, become president of the United States, or die in an asteroid apocalypse than win the lottery.

26. At -90 degrees Fahrenheit, your breath will freeze midair and fall to the ground.

27. Chewing an apple is just as effective at waking you up in the morning as drinking a cup of coffee.

28. Like snowflakes or fingerprints, the bacterial profile in your belly button is unique.

29. You can put out a fire with sound waves.

30. Fifty Barbie dolls are sold on E-bay every hour.

31. Men who kiss their wives goodbye in the morning earn higher salaries than men who don't.

32. If the minimum wage had risen as fast as the top 1 percent of incomes over the past half century, the lowest paid workers in the U.S. would earn close to $33.00 an hour.

33. There are more Subway sandwich shops in Manhattan (176) than there are actual subway stations (147).

34. Bamboo is stronger than concrete.

35. A two-inch square of Velcro is strong enough to hang a 175-pound man from the ceiling.

36. Twenty-five percent of all the vegetables consumed in the United States are French fries.

37. Saddam Hussein's favorite American snacks were Raisin Bran and Doritos. He disliked Froot Loops.

38. Trees make a gurgling sound when they're thirsty.

39. Of the four fundamental forces — gravity, electromagnetism, weak nuclear force, and strong nuclear force — gravity is by far the weakest.

40. Saturn has such a low density that, if placed in water, it would float.

41. Sumo wrestlers skip breakfast, then nap after lunch to gain and sustain their weight.

42. Morphine was named after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams.

43. The tongue of a blue whale weighs about as much as a full-grown elephant or a sport utility vehicle.

44. A fetus acquires fingerprints by the end of the first trimester.

45. The largest human cell is the female ovum. The smallest is the male sperm.

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