Cool Facts

This post is full of facts that I think are cool or interesting. You may disagree. Some of them have featured as the Fact of the Day on my site.

J.R.R. Tolkien died in 1973. Think about that number for a bit. Spooky, huh?

The energy you expend when you press a letter key on your computer is enough to lift a squirrel onto a stack of four sheets of paper. Which means that with the energy I used to type that last sentence, I could have lifted a squirrel onto more than a ream of paper. I should make better choices.

NASA wants to build a warp drive in the next few decades. And researchers say they have actually made a tiny warp bubble. Of course, none of this means for sure that the drive would work or be survivable, but there is a real chance that we could beat Star Trek to FTL travel.

The most powerful laser ever built has an output of 10 petawatts. That's 10 million billion watts.

Smaug the dragon in the Hobbit films can release 2/3 of the energy of Little Boy (the bomb) with one blast.

The approximate tensile strength for Spider-Man's webbing is over 1000 MPa, just more than that of real spider silk.

There are two species of ants that use "nerve gas" to kill termites.

Bananas are berries, but strawberries aren't.

Before Clinton won reelection, no Democrat incumbent without combat experience had beaten a challenger whose first name was worth more in Scrabble.

The second most popular color (after green, of course) for Christmas trees in Oregon is pink.

Dune is the seventh-highest-grossing film this year.

If you take a penny and leave it on the dashboard of your car, in 140,000 miles it will have used enough extra gas to make it not worth it.

Christopher Lee was the only LOTR cast member to have met Tolkien, and he still holds the record for most film swordfights (17).

A Medieval greatsword (up to six feet long) only weighed up to eight pounds. A typical longsword weighed under three.

Glass is not actually a liquid, but an amorphous solid.

Archeologists may have found the actual Trojan Horse.

Captain Bucky O' Neill was one of the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War. During the Battle of San Juan Hill, he kept walked down the American trenches while smoking and laughing at his men's fears that he was going to be shot. "The Spanish bullet is not molded that will kill me", he said. A moment later, he was shot. In the mouth. And died.

The last thing anyone ever said to JFK was, "Well, you can't say the people in Dallas don't love you, Mr. President."He replied with his last words: "No, you certainly can't."

A termite mound can weigh twelve tons.

Allegedly, physicist Gerson Goldhaber at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab was talking on the phone with another physicist near Stanford University near the end of the day on Tuesday, October 17, 1989. The other physicist suddenly interrupted with, “Gerson, I have to go! There’s a very big earthquake happening!” and then hung up. Gerson stepped out into a group of people in the hall, yawned, checked his watch, then said, “Aren’t we about due for an earthquake?” Before anyone could respond, the Loma Prieta earthquake reached Berkeley.