Nerd Alert

When drawn on a sphere, the interior angles of a triangle sum to greater than pi! This is because the shortest distance between the vertices of the triangle are the geodesics of the sphere, or in other words, the great circles that have the center of the sphere as their origin and pass through two of the triangles vertices. They are called geodesics because they are the lines of least curvature, or the curves that most closely represent a straight line on a curved surface. This is a result from elliptic geometry, a non-euclidean geometry.

Fun Fact for Vegetarians!

Some people in this world have speculated that the eating of animals is a cruel and immoral practice. To all the vegetarians in the world, here is an interesting fact to consider. All of the lush vegetables and produce that you have been purchasing at your local grocery store has in fact led to the death of thousands of cute, furry, innocent rabbits. That's right, you can no longer sleep easy at night knowing that your vegetarian principles have spared you moral regress. Every time the industrial combine sweeps the fields to harvest your precious produce, small woodland creatures and flightless birds are decapitated, mutilated, and painfully slaughtered, all to collect your crop.

 

20 Fun and Incredibly Random Facts:

1. Elephants are the only animals that can't jump
2. Honey is the only food that doesn't spoil
3. Women blink nearly twice as much as Men
4. Mohammed is the most common name in the world
5. The letters on your zipper; YKK, is Yoshida Kogyo Kubushibibaisha. Worlds largest zipper manufacturer
6. 315 entires in Websters 1996 dictionary are misspelled
7. It took Leonardo Da Vinci 10 years to paint Mona Lisas lips, she also has no eyebrows
8. There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos
9. Mosquito repellents don't repel. They hide you so the mosquito's sensors don't detect you
10. Micheal Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than the entire Nike factory workers in Malaysia
11. The average person falls asleep in 7 minutes
12. We shed 40 pounds of skin in our lifetime
13. Mexico City sinks about 10 inches a year
14. Brains are more active sleeping than watching TV and more calories are burned
15. Blue is the favorite color of 80 percent of Americans
16. It is against the law to own a dog in Iceland
17. Eyes remain the same size from birth, but noses and ears never stop growing
18. Tongue prints, like finger prints, are completely unique
19. China has more English speakers than the U.S.
20. More than 40,000 parasites and 250 types of bacteria are exchanged when making out

Cal Ripken Jr. of the Baltimore Orioles played in 2,632 baseball games in a row.

The original Stanley Cup was 7 inches tall.

A World Cup referee will run on average 12 miles in a single match

Golf is the only sport to be played on the moon.

Hot Head

Wear hats in cold weather to stay warm.  Don't go outside with wet hair (you could catch a cold).  If you're hot, take your hat/hood/ear muffs/scarf off so the heat can escape.  All of these valuable pieces of advice support the common myth that you lose most of your body heat through your head.  In fact, you only lose 10% of your body heat through your head.  The rest is lost in various other parts of the body.  So unless "most" can qualify as significantly less than half, most of your body heat is NOT lost through your head.

How long does it take to digest gum? Not 7 years....

Remember when your grandmother used to warn you not to swallow your gum because it would stay in your system for seven years?  Well, Grandma, you were wrong.  The theory that it takes gum seven years to be digested is just an old wives tale.  In fact, it only takes a couple of days at most.  While it is not necessarily healthy to swallow chewing gum, it also won't kill you--or stay inside you for seven years.

Cracking Knuckles: Just a Bad Habit

Cracking your knuckles may bother other people, but their warnings that it may cause arthritis is just a myth!  Cracking your knuckles may weaken your joints, but it will not lead to arthritis in the future.  So, knuckle crackers--crack away!

Disney's hidden messages

In Aladdin, the 1992 Disney movie, just before Aladdin takes Jasmine on the magic carpet ride, he is attacked by Jasmine's tiger Rajah. He yells "Get back, Kitty" and then if you listen really closely, you can clearly hear him tell Jasmine to take off her clothes. This is not the only hidden dirty moment in the classic children's movies.

In The Little Mermaid, when Ariel and her prince are getting married, the priest clearly has an erection. If you look really closely at one point in the sky in The Lion King you can see that the stars spell out "SEX". Although these have often been believed to be myths, images from the movies show them to be true. Luckily when these images are seen, most of the viewers are too young to realize them, or know what they mean. They add a little shock factor for people who have watched Disney for years, they are not as innocent as they may seem.

source: http://cinemaroll.com/

The mosquito is the deadliest animal

Mosquitos are not only one of nature's most annoying animals, they are also the deadliest. There are over 3,000 species of mosquito, but only three carry deadly diseases such as malaria, West Nile virus, encephalitis, and yellow fever. Unfortunately, the areas where these mosquitos are found are mainly in Africa and Asia. Most of the countries affected are third-world countries that do not have proper medical resources to fight off these diseases. It is hard to determine the exact number of how many people mosquitos kill each year, but it is in the millions.

sources: nationalgeographic.com

Harry was almost animated

Before Chris Columbus was chosen to direct the smash hit series of Harry Potter films, the production company Warner Bros. asked Steven Spielberg to do the job! Spielberg was interested, but had a very different vision for the movies than what has been produced today. Spielberg wanted to condense the plot of the books to make them more easy to create. Also he didn't want real people to play the characters. Instead he wanted to create a Pixar-style animated set of movies because he claimed the wizardy involved in the books would be very difficult and expensive to produce because many special effects would be necessary to make it all look realistic. Luckily for Potter fans worldwide, Spielberg's idea was cast out, and Columbus was chosen to bring the story of the Boy Who Lived to life. CLOSE CALL!


source: http://theweek.com/article/index/209435/the-harry-potter-phenomenon-7-surprising-facts

How Nerdy

The term "Nerd" originated in the 1950 book "If I Ran the Zoo" by Dr. Suess! 

The line from the book goes:

"And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo. And Bring Back an IT-KUTCH, a PREEP and a PROO, a NERKLE, a NERD, and a SEERSUCKER, too!"

The term became widely used and is defined as "a foolish person who lacks social skills or is boringly studious." 

Just another thing that Dr. Suess gave to the world!

source: http://omg-facts.com/view/Facts/3140

On April 8, 1970 Pittsburg Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter in a Major League Baseball game, under the influence of LSD.

Just a Button

The show Seinfeld began and ended in the exact same way. In July of 1989, the show about nothing started with the two characters George and Jerry discussing the correct placement of a button on George's shirt. The show successfully made it through nine seasons on NBC and held true to its claim to being a show about nothing. On May 5th, 1998 George and Jerry ended the show with a discussion that was almost word for word the same as the beginning about where George should place the button on his shirt.

source: http://www.askmen.com/entertainment/special_feature_150/164b_special_feature.html

Eating turkey makes you sleepy because it contains tryptophan: FALSE

Most people feel sleepy after Thanksgiving and most people blame it on the tryptophan that is in turkey.  However, the levels of tryptophan in turkey are not nearly enough to affect one's energy level.  In fact, a person would have to eat more than an ENTIRE turkey in order to feel the affects of tryptophan--and even then, it would have to be eaten on an empty stomach because that is how tryptophan reacts.  Furthermore, cheese and pork contain higher levels of tryptophan per serving than turkey does.  The reason we feel sleepy after Thanksgiving dinner is because we eat so much, not because the trytophan is drugging us.

Apple seeds and cherry pits are poisonous—in theory

Apple seeds and cherry pits, commonly thought to contain high levels of vitamin-C actually contain no health benefits at all.  They contain cyanide, which when consumed in large quantities can result in mild poisoning symptoms.  Symptoms of mild poisoning include headache, dizziness, confusion, anxiety, and vomiting.  One or two seeds won't hurt you, but larger doses can lead to difficulty breathing, increased blood pressure and heart rate, and kidney failure.  Reactions can include coma, convulsions, and death from respiratory arrest.  Chewing the seeds makes their toxicity even higher and more than a handful's worth can cause the symptoms of poisoning to occur.  So, next time you feel like swallowing a cherry pit because the garbage can is too far away...maybe you should think again. 

Sources:
http://chemistry.about.com/b/2007/09/12/yes-apple-seeds-and-cherry-pits-are-poisonous.htm

Mario wasn't always Mario..

Mario, of Super Mario Bros. fame, appeared in the 1981 arcade game, Donkey Kong. His original name was Jumpman, but was changed to Mario to honor the Nintendo of America's landlord, Mario Segali. Mario became famous in 1985 with the release of the Super Mario Bros. Nintendo game that was a sequel to the 1983 Mario Bros. version!

source: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bingbin/

The Smallest Primate in the World: The Mouse Lemur

The mouse lemur is the smallest primate in the world. Like all lemurs, the mouse lemur can be found on Madagascar. This cute little guy is a nocturnal creature that eats insects, fruit, and other vegetation. They live in female-dominated groups of up to fifteen lemurs. They are very rare and were only recently discovered. They rarely leave their lofts in the forest trees.

Mouse lemurs are less than two and a half inches long (including their heads) and their tails are almost twice the length of their bodies. They can store up to 35% of their body weight in their hind legs and tails. Female mouse lemurs hibernate during Madagascar's dry season.

Sources: Nationalgeographic.com

The world's largest landfill isn't on land

It's actually in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. However, it is not just one large patch of trash. According to the Mother Nature Network, it is a "galaxy" of garbage. The garbage is collected in one of Earth's largest ocean currents, the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. This gyre is formed by the warm waters near Hawaii coming up and clashing with the cool waters near California, and then coming back down by the cold waters near Japan and clashing with the warm waters near Hawaii. It is unknown how large the patch would be if all the garbage was together, but estimates range from the size of Texas to the size of a continent.
The patch is divided into two sections: the Western patch and the Eastern patch. The Eastern garbage patch lies between California and Hawaii, while the Western patch is in between Japan and Hawaii. Both sections of the patch are connected by the Subtropical Convergence Zone, which is a 6,000 mile-long ocean current. Trash also collects in the Subtropical Convergence Zone, almost connecting the West and East patches.
Most of the garbage is plastic, which is not biodegradable. Because plastic is not biodegradable, the patch can only grow and kill more aquatic life. Plastic only photodegrades, which is a process that fragments the item of plastic but does not break it down into simpler compounds. Because of this, plastic will never disappear, or if it does, it will take hundreds of years. In the meantime, ocean life gets tangled in plastic or eats it, which destroys the bodies of the creatures that eat it.
Many people do not know about this patch or realize the effects it has on the environment. It is evident that this is a problem, but it should be better known how dangerous plastic is to the environment.

sources: howstuffworks.com, mmn.com

The elysia chlorotica is the only animal known to use photosynthesis

The elysia chlorotica is a sea slug that lives in the cold waters of the Eastern and Western coastal United States. It is the only known animal to steal the genes of plants and algae and use photosynthesis to feed itself. Scientists have proven that the snail is not only harboring plants on it, but has actually stolen genetic code and embedded it in itself. Scientists' most comprehensive test to prove that the slug produced the chlorophyll enzymes on its own involved them injecting the slug with an amino acid. They found that the slug only produced chlorophyll a when it was in the light and not in the dark.
This theft of genes has made the sea slug the first solar-powered animal and a true hybrid between plant and animal

sources: wired.com/weirdscience

The right whale got its name because it was the "right" whale to hunt

Throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, when whale oil and baleen were used for many items  such as corsets and horse whips, right whales were hunted almost to extinction. They have the most oil, blubber, and baleen out of any whale, which makes them float after they are dead, making it easy for hunters to gather them. There are only about 350 right whales left in the oceans today and they mainly reside in the northeast Atlantic Ocean. They feed on krill, which is a small shrip-like organism no larger than the head of a pin. Right Whales can eat up to 2,500 pounds of krill in one day.
It is hard for the right whale to re-populize because females become sexually mature after they are ten years old and can only have one calf. The pregnancy lasts for about one year. These whales are easy to spot because they are the only whales that have callosities (barnacle looking growths) on their enormous heads. Their heads can be up to one-third of the 50-foot long body.

sources: nationalgeographic.com, oceanconservancy.org