Useless Facts, Badly Drawn

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100% interesting but 110% useless knowledge you're guaranteed never to use. Badly drawn by Marcus Santiago 😁 Buy the book! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G92RJD32/

The Tree of Ténéré was the loneliest, most isolated tree in the world. It was an acacia tree growing in an empty expanse of the Sahara desert, located 400 km away from the next nearest tree, and served as a navigational landmark for old caravan routes. It was clearly marked even on large maps in the 1930s. It lived for 300 years until it was knocked down by a drunk truck driver in 1973.
A London bus is 1.23 London buses long. The old buses were thirty feet in length, and often used as an informal measurement of size (like comparing things to an Olympic swimming pool or a football field). However, the new buses are 1.23 times longer than the old ones.
MIT awards a certificate in piracy to students who complete all the courses in archery, fencing, pistol (air pistol or rifle) and sailing. Tragically, it comes with a clear disclaimer that this certification "does not give the recipient license to engage in piracy or any pirate activities."
"Concord" was the biggest commercial failure in video game history (so far). It took 8 years and an estimated $400 million to create. However, Sony recalled the game and refunded every sale just 12 days after release, meaning they made literally no money off the game whatsoever. According to critics, the game wasn't actually bad or buggy, it was just really boring. It also cost $40 while its long established rivals were free-to-play, which probably didn't help.
The Centurion or «Black" Card was a rumored credit card for the richest of the rich, with a supposedly unlimited credit limit. American Express got tired of their wealthiest clients asking if it really existed. So they made it real in 1999. Details are scarce, but it's invite-only, with a minimum spending requirement of $1 million annually. The most expensive single purchase known to be made with one was a painting for $170 million.
Project A119 was a secret plan to nuke the Moon, proposed during the height of the Cold War and the space race. The idea was to create a nuclear explosion on the Moon visible from Earth as a "morale boost" for Americans. It was cancelled for obvious reasons, like the risk of the rocket falling back to Earth.
Uranus doesn't have typical sunsets or sunrises. Rather, the sun traces a spiral path in the sky for half a Uranian year (42 Earth years), followed by darkness for the other half. This is because Uranus rolls along on its side, while the other (normal) planets spin like tops on a table as they go around the Sun.
Vapes and e-cigs were originally designed to help you quit smoking by Hon Lik, a Chinese pharmacist, in 2003. However, over time, flavors got added and they evolved into today's addictive vapes. He is currently marketing the e-hookah to the Middle East and North Africa.
Manatees control buoyancy by farting. Also, herrings use farting to communicate. The scientists who figured this out (about the fish) won an Ig Nobel Prize for their valiant efforts.
The DeHavilland Comet is why airplane windows are round and not square. The Comet was the first commercial passenger jet, futuristic and far ahead of its time. Unfortunately, the corners of its square windows were stress points where cracks formed from metal fatigue, a problem nobody knew about at the time, leading to explosive decompression on three deadly Comet crashes in the 1950s.
Titivillus is the patron demon of typos (and scribes and printers). Not to be confused with a patron saint, he collects typos, mispronunciations and idle talk in in church. Titivillus saves them in a sack to to be counted against the offenders in Hell. Supposedly, the Oxford English Dictionary has had an error in the footnotes to its entry on on Titivillus for over half a century.
A hyperparasite or metaparasite is a parasite that uses another parasite as its host. I'his is most common among insects and some fish. However, fungi take it further, with up to three known levels of parasitism observed: For example, a fungus was observed growing within another fungus within yet another fungus on a beech tree.
Cats purr at a frequency that might strengthen their bones. It's theorized that they sit on you and purr to try and heal your bones too by sharing the vibrations through contact. Purring also has a range of effects on humans, lowering stress and blood pressure and more.
The world's fastest ambulance ride was (arguably) a US Air Force FB-111 jet plane that flew at the speed of sound to transport a human heart for transplant. It flew on Valentine's Day, 1986, from Oklahoma to Connecticut in just two hours. The mission was a success.
The Umbrella Slug has the most teeth of any animal. It has over ten thousand teeth, all on its "foot" surrounding its mouth. It constantly grows new teeth, so throughout its ten-year lifespan, it will go through about 750,000 teeth.
Al accidentally made me believe in the concept of a human soul by showing me what art looks like without it.
Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den is a Classical Chinese poem written by Yuen Ren Chao in the 1930s that consists of only the syllable "shi" repeated 92 times. It makes perfect sense if you read it; but if you recite out loud, even native speakers will only hear gibberish, thanks to unique quirks of the language that make this poem possible.
You want me to work for exposure? The thing that killed Marie Curie?
The cigarette snail is so-called because if it stings you, you have just enough time to smoke a single cigarette before you die. However, the venom actually takes one to five hours to kill, and prompt medical care can prevent death by keeping the victim alive long enough for the toxins to wear off.
Horses cannot vomit but giraffes can, despite their longer necks.
Two of Saturn's moons switch places every four years. Originally thought to be one moon, Janus and Epimetheus were later discovered to be two separate moons that swap their orbits every four years, thanks to complicated gravity and math stuff.
Swearnet: The Movie holds the world record for the highest number of F-words in a single movie, at 935. It's 112 minutes long, which means an F-bomb is dropped every 7.2 seconds on average. And that's not even counting other swear words. Gosh darn it...
"I Am Rich" was an iOS app that did nothing but display a red gem and a mantra on the screen. It was released in 2008, priced at US$ 999.99, and sold only 8 copies before being removed by Apple. The app existed to show off the wealth of the owner, and served no other practical function or purpose.
A flying pig caused a major blackout in China. On January 26, 2024 in Tongjiang county, Sichuan province, a farmer used his drone to transport his pig to a slaughterhouse. However, it got tangled in overhead power lines, causing a ten-hour-long electrical blackout to the entire village. Apparently, transporting livestock by drone is a common practice in rural areas.
Bob Coveiro was a dog who refused to leave his owner's grave for ten years. During that time, he was known to comfort grieving mourners at funerals with his playful and friendly personality at the Taboão da Serra cemetery in Brazil. When he died in 2021, a statue of him was raised in his memory, and he was buried beside his owner. Brazil then passed The Bob Coveiro Law in his honor, which allows pet dogs and cats to be laid to rest alongside their human families.
When Alexander the Great met Diogenes (a brilliant philosopher who chose to live on the streets homeless, foregoing all material possessions), Alexander offered him anything his heart desired. Notably, at the time, Alexander was arguably the single most powerful man alive on Earth. Diogenes supposedly replied with: "Yes. Move, you're blocking my sunlight."
The Spire of Lloyd is called "Ireland's only inland lighthouse," and it's located 25 miles (40 km) from the nearest coast. It's a folly, or a building with no function or purpose other than aesthetics.
TrES-2b (aka Kepler-1b) is the darkest planet discovered so far. Located 750 light years away, it appears literally blacker than coal, but glows slightly in infrared because its surface temperature is about 2,900 F or 1,600 C.
The Lone Gunmen was a spin-off of The X-Files. In the pilot, the heroes (who run a conspiracy theory magazine) uncover a secret plan by rogue agents of the U.S. government to remotely hijack a large passenger airliner, crash it into the World Trade Center, and blame it on terrorists in order to justify a new, profitable war. Notably, the episode was aired six months before the 9/11 attacks.
Satoru Nomura was the first Yakuza boss sentenced to death in Japan, and (partly) because of a penis enlargement surgery. While recovering from the procedure, he felt disrespected by one of the nurses. So he ordered an attack on her. However, the investigation into this attack led to charges added to several other serious crimes, including murder. He got the death penalty in 2021, later commuted to life in prison.
Johnny Cash was once nearly killed by an ostrich. Despite defending himself with a 6-foot long stick, Cash broke two ribs and was nearly disemboweled by the huge bird’s claw. Ostriches can reach 9 feet tall and weigh 320 pounds. They can be aggressive, and can easily kill a human (and have). The incident led to his addiction to painkillers and nearly ruined his life.
Helen Duncan was the last person to be imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act of 1735. A "psychic," she held a seance in 1941 and revealed the sinking of the HMS Barham, which was classified and only known to the Navy and the sailors' families. She actually heard it from an intelligence leak, and her "vision" was inaccurate on many key details (like the design of the sailors' uniforms). The Navy investigated the leak, which led to her trial for witchcraft and fraud. She was sentenced to nine months in prison.
"aaaaaaa ccccc deeeee ghiiiiiii Illl mm nnnnnnnnn oooopp grrs ttttt uuuuu" was the first written human description of Saturn having rings, by Christian Huygens in 1655. He encoded it as a Latin anagram in his book Systema Saturnium, before claiming credit for the disovery three years later. This was proof he discovered it first, while giving himself time to refine his initial findings.
The Cox-Zucker machine is an algorithm in arithmetic geometry by mathematicians David A. Cox and Steven Zucker. Their paper: "determines whether a given set of sections provides a basis (up to torsion) for the Mordell-Weil group of an elliptic surface E->S, where S is isomorphic to the projective line, " whatever that means. Also, Cox and Zucker said that as soon as they met as students at Princeton, they collaborated specifically because the paper's title would be so funny.
Fact check: Is it really illegal to talk to dolphins? The Marine Mammal Protection Act doesn't specify communication, but prohibits "interfering with marine mammals" in a way that alters their natural behavior. This includes attempting communication. So it's probably okay to talk to one; but if you're trying to get them to talk back, you may need a lawyer.
Finnair Flight 666 flew to HEL on Friday the 13th, October 2017 (Copenhagen to Helsinki). It landed safely without incident.
"Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe" is a 1980 documentary where the legendary filmmaker fulfills a bet to eat his own shoe if his friend ever completed their film. At its premiere, Herzog boiled his shoe in garlic and ate it on camera. It wasn't even Herzog's first strange bet. While filming "Even Dwarfs Started Small, " he bet his crew he'd dive into a cactus patch while they film it, if there were no more accidents on set. There weren't, and he made good on his promise.
The Breathalyzer's co-designer, Dr. Richard Lacey, was caught drunk driving in the UK in 2024.
The Torpedo fish wasn't named after the torpedo, but the other way round. The underwater missile was named after the fish, which are now called electric rays (genus Torpedo, family Torpedinidae). The name, in turn, comes from the Latin torpēdo, meaning lethargy or sluggish-ness. The name was fitting because the original design was more like a sea mine than today's self-propelled device.
The Matrix Defense is a legal defense based on the 1999 movie The Matrix (where the entire world is revealed to be a huge computer simulation) and argues that the defendant committed their crimes because "none of this is real."
•Kkrieger is the world's smallest-sized computer game at just 96 kilobytes, and this was in 2004. Despite its tiny filesize, it was a first-person shooter with 3D graphics, textures, original music, and detailed maps; and looked like Doom or Quake from the era. It was made by German demogroup theprodukkt for a game demo competition, which it won. For perspecțive on how small 96 KB is, this comic's image file is around 1 MB, or about ten times larger.
Ancient Egypt covers such a vast expanse of time (3150 BC to 30 BC), that each era of ancient Egypt had their own ancient Egyptian anthropologists studying previous eras of even more ancient Egypt before them.
The most expensive speeding ticket was for €650,000 (or US $1 million). It was handed out in 2010 to a Swedish millionaire for doing 180 mph in his Mercedes AMG SLS in Switzerland (the speed limit was 72 mph). Some European countries base traffic fines on the offender's income and car's value as well as speed. In 2015, for example, a Finnish millionaire was slapped with a $58,000 fine for going just 15 mph over the speed limit.
The one-electron universe is a hypothesis that says the entire known universe consists of just one single electron, moving backwards and forwards through time.
Takanakuy is held in some parts of Peru where entire villages ring in the new year by getting drunk and beating the crap out of each other. The idea is to settle old scores and grudges, and start the new year with a clean slate. The results are legally binding. It's unclear how healthy this is, but it certainly can't make political debates any worse.
The Sator Square is a word square or grid of five five-letter words (sator, arepo, tenet, opera, and rotas). It has existed since 62 AD and has been found all over Europe, the Middle East, Asia minor and North Africa. However, nobody knows its real meaning or origin. It could also be an early meme. It was also featured in the worst movie ever made by mankind, Christopher Nolan's Tenet.
Roland the Farter was King Henry II's royal court jester who was famous for performing an act called the "saltum, siffletum, Pettum" (a jump, a whistle, and a tart, simultaneously) for the king's court every Christmas. He was apparently so good at it that the king gave him 110 acres of land in Suffolk.
Krampus is the anti-Santa Claus. We all know about jolly St. Nick rewarding good kids with presents on Christmas. But in pre-Christian folklore, he was also accompanied by Krampus, a "half goat, half-demon" who would punish bad kids. He's depicted as dark and hairy, with goat horns, cloven hooves and a long, pointed tongue. Variations show him with birch branches for whipping naughty kids and a sack in which to carry them to hell. So, uh... Merry Christmas!
Lake Natron is a blood red salt lake in Tanzania that is so salty, hot and alkaline (with a pH above 12), that any animal that dies in or near it is calcified, or turned into a salt statue.
The dodo was actually intelligent and inedible, contrary to popular belief. They went extinct mainly due to habitat loss and the introduction of invasive species by explorers, rather than being hunted. It didn't help that they had no fear of humans, like penguins today. They were initially named "Walghvoghel" meaning "tasteless bird" by early Dutch explorers. And as members of the family Columbidae, which includes pigeons, they were probably of above-average avian intelligence.