#factsandchicks

New York City is the most linguistically diverse city in the world, with 800 languages spoken

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The Vietnam Memorial was designed by a 21 year old architecture student for a class project. She got a B+ despite winning the national competition.

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We’ve had the ability to turn Lead and Mercury into Gold since the 50’s. It’s just cheaper to mine so we don’t do it on a commercial scale.

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You would need 76 work days to read all the privacy policies you agree to each year.

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Crows are one of the smartest non-primate animals on earth, with the intelligence of a 7-year-old human. They use and manipulate tools, they have long-term memory including facial recognition, and they understand analogy.

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Blood passes through the kidneys at a rate of 1.1 Liters per minute. The human body has about 5 Liters of blood. This means your entire blood gets filtered by your kidneys every 5 minutes.

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A man “walking oddly” in Baltimore in 1989 was stopped by police. He was found to have 21 live homing pigeons stuffed in his trousers.

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Adrien Brody, in order to star as Wladyslaw Szpilman in The Pianist, “withdrew for months, gave up his apartment and his car, broke up with his then-girlfriend, learned how to play Chopin on the piano, and lost 29” pounds, which earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor at 29 years old.

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In 552AD two monks successfully smuggled silkworm eggs in their walking sticks from China to the Byzantine Empire, essentially ending the silk monopolies of China and Persia, and bringing silk manufacture to Europe.

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A very tired chemist once spilled UK’s entire supply of plutonium(10mg) on a table, and in order to recover it he used a saw to cut out that section of the table, then burned it. He recovered 9.5mg of the plutonium from the ashes because science.

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In computing, half of a byte is called a nibble

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The U.S. Air Force successfully deployed a reconnaissance drone capable of Mach 3.3… almost fifty years ago

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Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day of the same year.

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Monkeys with smaller testicles scream louder to compensate.

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In 1846, Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his taxes because he objected the Mexican-American War and slavery. He spent the night in jail for his actions. This popularized the concept of Civil Disobedience, peacefully protesting a law, which later influenced Gandhi, MLK, and Leo Tolstoy.

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Back in May 2016, in order to show the absurdities of software EULAs, the Norwegian Consumer Council did a live, word-by-word, non-stop reading of all of Apples and 3rd party EULAs on an “average” iPhone. It took them over 32 hours.

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When Ready Player One was released, there was an easter egg in the book that lead readers to three challenges, including playing a new Richard Garriott game and setting a world record on a game for the Atari 2600. The winner of the challenges was awarded a vintage DeLorean.

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On the set of The Princess Bride, André the Giant once “let out a 16 second fart and brought production to a standstill.” Nobody said anything except director Rob Reiner, who said “Are you OK, André?” to which André replied, “I am now boss.”

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President Harry S. Truman was so poor after his presidency that Congress had to enact a law to give him a pension. President Herbert Hoover the only other living ex-president took the pension as well, despite his wealth, to avoid embarrassing Truman.

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Mark Twain was born on the day when Halley’s Comet flew by earth. He said “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it.” Halley’s Comet next appeared on April 21, 1910 which is the day Mark Twain died

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