If all the salt in the sea were spread evenly over the land, it would be 500 feet thick.
Sweden makes biofuel from dead rabbits.
Nine species have been named after Barack Obama – more than any other US President.
Volkswagen has changed its official language from German to English.
Almost two-thirds of the 33,000 annual gun deaths in America are suicides.
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I can’t teach you about safe sex because it might encourage you to become promiscuous.
I can’t tell you what airbags do. That information will make you think it’s okay to start crashing into things.
I’m sorry class. We can no longer study Mexico. As you’d all run away to Tijuana if I told you what was there.
If I teach you girls how to rescue a burnt casserole, how can I trust you to follow the teachings of Héloise?
I’m afraid I can’t tell you how Hannibal crossed the Alps. If I did, you crazy kids are likely to conquer the prom with elephants. Oops.
Trigonometry will no longer be taught. You could use that knowledge to calculate the trajectory of eggs thrown at my Geo Metro.
We won’t be using safety glasses this year in shop class. I believe anyone who gets a word chip in their eye have it coming.
Science has been cancelled because your parents prefer to believe in magic.
– Big Fat Whale, Brian McFadden 2006
A four-wheeled horse-drawn carriage, designed in 1839. It had an open seat for the driver in front of the closed cabin for two or four passengers. Named after its designer Henry Peter, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux (1778–1868).
‘Topsham, brougham, renown, but known,
Knowledge, done, lone, gone, none, tone,’
– Gerard Nolst Trenité, The Chaos
Gymnophoria is the sense that someone is mentally undressing you.
Elephants tickle each other.
The Sami people of northern Finland use a measure called Poronkusema: the distance a reindeer can walk before needing to urinate.
The novelist Kurt Vonnegut ran America’s first Saab dealership.
When Rameses II’s mummified body was shipped to France in 1974, it was issued with a passport. Its occupation was “King (deceased)”.
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If the empty space in atoms could be removed, the entire human race could fit into an average sugar cube.
The most common surname in China is Wang.
Originally, the traditional Argentine game of pato, which is a combination of rugby, polo and basketball, was played – as the Spanish name suggests – with a live duck in a basket. Nowadays, a leather ball is used.
There are 117 road accidents in Rome every day.
No country in history has imprisoned more citizens than the United States.
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John Cleese’s father’s surname was Cheese. Cleese grew up 10 miles from Cheddar and his best friend at school was called Barney Butter.
In 2013, Monaco and North Korea had an unemployment rate of 0,0%.
The record for the most babies born to one woman is 69. She gave birth to 16 sets of twins, 7 sets of triplets, and 4 sets of quadruplets. While the woman’s name is not known, she was the first wife of Feodor Vassilyev, a peasant from Shuya, Russia who lived from 1707-1782.
There is a town in Finland called Leppäkummuntie.
Coco Chanel, Hugh Hefner, Elizabeth Taylor, John Lennon, George Harrison, Aristotle Onassis, Jack Nicholson, Ronnie Wood, Elvis Presley, Rowan Atkinson, Jeremy Clarkson, Park Chung-hee, Josip Broz Tito, Nicolae Ceauşescu, Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha, Ferdinand Marcos, Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-Il and Sadaam Hussein have owned a Mercedes-Benz 600.
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Consider this horrible scenario:
“Two cars crashing head on at 50 mph is the same as one car crashing into a wall at 100 mph.”
Of course, a head on collision is no picknick, but fortunately, the scenario is not true. Consider Newton’s 3rd Law: ‘Every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction.’
This explains that although the two-car crash doubles the speed, the energy of the crash is transferred to twice the mass resulting in a crash that looks like just one car hitting a wall at 50 mph.
Therefore, 10 + 10 is not the same as 40.
So, why are two cars crashing into each other not the same as one car going into a wall at twice the speed?
In terms of energy, the energy of motion is called kinetic energy. Kinetic energy depends on the square of the velocity. This means a car moving at twice the speed will have 4 times the kinetic energy.
Consider the following points:
In the scenario, the force of the wall exerted on the car and the force of the car exerted on the wall have the same magnitude. Now, what if the wall is replaced with another identical car travelling at the same speed?
Since the initial momentums are the same and the forces are same, the effects are the same on the two cars. So, two cars are the same as one car into a wall. However, when the impact speed hitting the wall is doubled, the car will have a different initial momentum, therefore, the crash will not be the identical. Initially, it seems unlikely, but it’s true.
“Our only kiss was like an accident – a beautiful gasoline rainbow.”
– Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones
On January 7, 1558, the French nobleman Francis, Duke of Guise, captures Calais, the last English possession in mainland France.
Duke of Guise
Because of a mistake in one of the five-year plans, during a brief period in the 1950s, Soviet Russia virtually ran out of lavatory paper; however, no official wanted to admit to this at the time, nor let it come out. So, to prevent the shortage from becoming public knowledge, the Soviet government made a secret trade agreement with Britain in which they bought vast amounts of compensatory lavatory paper. For months, British planes flew to Soviet Russia delivering the grey cargo. This was done at night to minimise the risk of discovery.
On January 11, 1569, The first official lottery is held in England, with 10 shilling lots sold at old St Paul’s Cathedral.
Moses is mentioned more in the Quran than any other individual. Jesus is mentioned more often in the Quran than Muhammad while Mary is mentioned in the Quran more than in the New Testament.
On 29 January, 1886, German engineer Karl Benz patents the first practical car powered by a petrol internal combustion engine.
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