Topic: The Little-Known Factoids Thread
Facts in this thread should be roughly one sentence long, bold, and yellow. (Further elaboration on the facts can be longer, unbolded, and white — I just want the 'headline' facts to be easily-scrollable later, y'know?)
I keep archives of all kinds of things (because I like having a version of my brain with a search function) and several of those categories are information-related, so I'll kick this off with a handful of fun ones right now, but hereafter I'd expect most folks will just share cool facts onesie-twosie-style, as they learn or remember them.
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The piano we hear in "Hey Jude" is the same piano we hear in "Bohemian Rhapsody."
The 'inter' in 'internet' derives from 'intergalactic.'
The Hindenburg is the largest thing to have ever flown.
Carl Sagan has a number-range named after him; a 'Sagan' is a group of more than four billion.
(4,000,000,001 is the lowest number to which Sagan's famous construction "billions and billions" applies.)
Humans are more related to chimpanzees than African elephants are to Indian elephants.
The Atlantic is named for Atlas, who was the son of Poseidon.
The first recorded instance of the word 'jazz' appears on the same day Titanic left for New York.
Marx would tell you that the opposite of 'communist' is 'alienated.'
In the U.S., 30° is the maximum bank angle for an airliner and mandated slope for an escalator.
The frequency range of speech, to which the human ear is best-attuned, is the 'tessitura' range.
What's dark matter? We dunno, but look at the name: if photons can interact with it, it's not dark.
What you see when you look at fire is soot, hotly glowing according to the black body spectrum.
A six-inch sphere of solid gold weighs 36 kilos, or 80 pounds — or, about the weight of four tires.
The speed of light is Mach 900k.
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I'll stop there and leave some for later.
Your turn.
I have a tendency to fix your typos.