The internet is chock full of amusing and interesting information. But some of it is so ‘out there’ that your initial instinct might be skepticism. While having that instinct is really important in this day and age (yuck, misinformation), the reality is that some claims are simply weird. Fact really is weirder than fiction in some cases.
One r/AskReddit fan, u/Fairy_Electra, sparked a really fun discussion on the online group by asking everyone to share the most ridiculous facts they know. Not only are they beyond bizarre, but they might reignite your curiosity about the world, too. We’ve picked out some of the best posts, so check them out below!
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#1
Counting non-stop, it would take you about 12 days to count to a million.
It would take you 31 years to count to a billion.
#2
A word you can type on the top letter row of a standard keyboard is TYPEWRITER
And the only word in the English language with 3 consecutive double letters is BOOKKEEPER. I'm a bookkeeper.
#3
When it comes to life in the digital age, having a healthy amount of skepticism for everything you read, watch, and hear online is an absolute must. One study conducted by researchers from MIT found that false news spreads more rapidly than real news on the Twitter (now X) social network. And it’s not because of bots, either. It mainly comes down to real people retweeting false news.
“We found that falsehood diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information, and in many cases by an order of magnitude,” Sian Aral, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, said.
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The MIT study found that false news stories were a jaw-dropping 70% more likely to be retweeted than real news items. Not only that, but real stories took roughly 6 times longer to reach the benchmark of 1,5k people than misinformation.
Essentially, this suggests that falsehoods are more likely to go viral—and they do so faster and with more impact—on social media platforms than real news.
This means that internet users should take the time to double-check any claims that sound dubious, overly dramatic, ‘spicy,’ or have a clear bias. If it sounds too good or bad to be true, it probably is. (Real life is often much more mundane and nuanced.) In short, don’t repost/reshare/retweet anything mindlessly because you’d only be adding to the problem.
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#8
Crows have the intelligence of a 7 year old human child. They recognize faces, make tools, use currency amongst themselves, understand physics and are self aware. They've been seen doing things like dropping walnuts in intersections for cars to run over and waiting for the light to pick up the seeds from the street.
If you p**s them off, they'll tell other local murders about you and pass that hatred of you on to their offspring, making you a lifetime enemy and do s**t like drop rocks on your car windshield and punch holes in your screen door.
I know this last fact from personal experience because my grandma made enemies with the crows where she lived when they started eating her crops. She would swing her broom at them and accidentally killed one by throwing a shoe at it. Every time I visited her, they'd s**t all over my car and tuck bramble into my car's vents and exhaust. Even after she died, they peck at her gravestone and leave shells and bramble around her grave.
#9
That said, skepticism is hard work. Double-checking every single claim that you come across in the news or on social media can be exhausting. Not everyone has the time to spend countless hours cross-referencing facts and delving into history books to refute iffy and spammy misinformation.
There are jobs to work, kids to raise, college essays to write, chores to avoid, and cute pets to photograph. That’s why evaluating the (un)reliability of a source rather than each individual fact is a better way to spend your time.
The News Literacy Project urges people to start things off by doing a quick search to learn more about a particular news outlet or reporter. You can look at the ethical guidelines and standards they follow and get an eye for the general quality of their work.
Are they transparent about where they get their information from? Do they link to multiple sources? Do they credit other people or organizations? Do they make corrections if they realize that they’ve made mistakes?
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Credible sources aren’t afraid of owning up to errors. They are not secretive about where they get their data from. Nor are they scared of showing a more nuanced, rather than biased, view of the world.
Of course, no single source is going to be ‘perfect.’ They’ll make mistakes from time to time. But they’ll own up to them. And they’re still a better alternative than heavily politicized outlets with a clear agenda and a narrow view of things.
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Which of the facts in this list surprised you the most, Pandas? What is the most ridiculous or bizarre fact that you personally know? What do you do when you stumble on a claim on the news or social media that you’re not quite sure you can trust?
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this, so if you have a spare moment, why not scroll down and share yours in the comment section?
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Not really ridiculous, but more sad.
We don’t know Albert Einstein’s last words, as he spoke them in German to a nurse who only knew English.
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#25
Kangaroos can't hop backwards. If you're ever in a fight with a Kangaroo (looking at you Aussies)...just get behind him.
**thanks Daniel Tosh.
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There's a town in Japan with the grave of Jesus Christ. This is based on the story that Jesus travelled to Japan for the 12 years before his ascension to divinity. His brother, Isukiri, took his place on the cross and Jesus fled back to Japan, becoming a garlic farmer until his death of old age, married with 3 daughters.
I greatly prefer this version of events.
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#31
TASER is an acronym. It stands for Thomas A. Swifts Electric Rifle. It's from a book published in 1911 called Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle.
#32
Roses have prickles not thorns. One of the few things I remember from botany class.
#33
Playing the lottery numbers 1-2-3-4-5-6 has just as much of a chance of winning as any other number combination. You're more likely to have to split it with others that also guessed that way though.
#34
Umami can be translated as " tasty taste".
#35
Everyone once held the record for the youngest person in the world.
#36
In all of recorded human history, only one person has survived an untreated rabies infection. Otherwise, for all intents and purposes, untreated rabies is 100% fatal.
#37
Vikings would use animals bones when creating their weapons are armor which would make it stronger due to the carbon being added to the metal, not due to their belief of the animal's spirit embodying the weapon or armor.
#38
Project Acoustic Kitty
In the 1960s, some people at the CIA thought it would be a brilliant idea to use a Cat, wired up with a microphone and antenna, to spy on Soviet Agents talking in Washington DC parks (where you couldn't setup reliable bugs).
There's a couple versions of how the project came to an end. Either:
A) The prototype cat was hit by a cab immediately at the start of it's first field trial.
B) The Cat(s) were proving too difficult to train/control (duh), so those that were surgically 'enhanced' with microphones and antenna were returned to normal.
#39
After mating, the male anglerfish will bite into the female and be fused and eventually absorbed into the female’s body.
#40
One of the main reasons syphilis has become such a serious STD over history is largely due to Christopher Columbus and his crew. They got it from llamas they encountered in the Americas. While it's probably that some of the crew, unfortunately, had an infected llama spit at them, the most likely reason why so many got it is because they were sleeping with llamas.
#41
If the earth was covered in glass and something cracked it, it would take approximately 3 hours for the crack to travel the earths entire circumference.
#42
That following the invention of basketball in 1891 it took another 15 years before someone replaced the peach baskets with metal hoops & nets, which had previously required someone with a ladder to go get the ball out of the basked after each & every point scored.
#43
Ants out number humans one million to one.
#44
Most of the sand on tropical beaches is parrotfish poop.
Parrotfish feed on algae and microorganisms found on coral, they crush it in their beaks, and pass it through their digestive system.
Some species produce 2000 pounds of sand per year.
#45
The incident where Michael Jackson caught his hair on fire in the '80s was, within a day, the exact halfway point of his life.
a) 8/29/1958 - date of his birth
b) 1/27/1984 - date of burn incident
c) 6/25/2009 - date of his death
Days between a and b - 9,282 days
Days between b and c - 9,281 days.
#46
Teddy Rosevelt wanted a wrestling ring in his NY Governor’s office. When he didn’t get one, he told people to meet him at the governor’s mansion until he tweaked his back.
When he was president, he learned Jujitsu in the Oval.
#47
Cleopatra lived closer to the creation of Pizza Hut than she did the creation of the great pyramids
Trex lived closer to modern day man than he did stegosaurus.
#48
In Japan in the 1980’s, an unknown person or group of people kidnapped the president of a candy company, taunted the police, claimed to poison said company’s candy (no poisoned candy was found), targeted another candy company, poisoned a few packs of this company’s candy, and then taunted the police some more. They stopped because a chief of police committed suicide by lighting himself on fire. Over a million officers worked on the case, yet no leads ever lead to capturing whoever was dubbed “The Monster with 21 Faces”. One of my favorite unsolved mysteries, especially considering how many hints the perp/s gave to police.
#49
An adult male of average height has enough iron in their blood to make a 2 inch iron finishing nail.
#50
Birds’ bones are not hollow to be lighter. They are also more dense, which means they end up weighing about the same even though they are hollow. The structure does add some stiffness, but does not really make them appreciably lighter.
The *actual* reason that birds’ bones are hollow is to add volume to the air sacks that are part of their (extremely different) respiratory system.
*The insides of birds’ bones are part of their respiratory system?!*
Also, air only flows one way through birds’ lungs, with these air sacks basically pumping air through them.
Birds are weird af.
#51
The Lewis and Clark expedition can be tracked because they left excess deposits of mercury in the soil.
They were all constipated from their meat based diet, so they were taking these mercury based laxatives called Thunder Clappers.
#52
You know the Challenger explosion? It was caused by launching during conditions that were too cold for one of the critical o-rings. That type of o-ring smells like cinnamon.
These are the kind of weird tidbits that you pick up while learning materials science.
#53
There are *more* bacteria in you, than there is *you*. Due to the human gut flora.
Scientifically accurate estimates of the bacteria vs human cells ratio: 38 trillion microbial cells (3.8x1013) versus 30 trillion human cells (3x1013), which leads to a 1.3:1 ratio.
#54
In 1927, a guy named Ebenenzer Byers injured his arm on a train and got prescribed a medicine called Radithor to deal with the pain. He apparently really liked how it made him feel, taking more and more and more until the effect stopped.
He started getting headaches, lost weight and his teeth began falling out. And then in 1931 his f*****g lower jaw fell off.
Radithor, it turns out, was just Radium mixed into water. That's it. He irradiated himself for about 4 years until eventually he died in 1932.
Edit: I really hate and love the fact that nearly every comment is a dad joke. This is amazing and I blame all of you for it.
#55
Mars is the only known planet inhabited entirely by robots.
#56
Charlie Chaplin lost his own lookalike contest.
#57
The Outerbridge Crossing is a bridge that connects Staten Island to New Jersey. It’s the southernmost bridge in New York State and arguably the outermost bridge in New York City.
Anyway, it was named after Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge.
#58
The probability of a shared birthday exceeds 50% in a group of only 23 people.
Or that there are more ways to arrange a 52 deck of cards, than there are atoms on Earth. If you shuffle 52 cards well, that particular deck arrangement is almost certainly unique, and has never occurred in history! You are the first person holding it.
Or that time dilation is an actual thing. GPS systems, to be able to work with this accuracy, have to take both gravitational time dilation and relativistic time dilation (velocity) into account.
Another one is that matter can display characteristics of both waves and particles, it is the wave particle duality of quantum mechanics. It may sound a bit boring, but look into the double-slit experiment, it is mind-blowing. This experiment is the generator of many “crazy” theories and interpretations.
I kind of broke the rules and shared 4… but this crazy stuff sometimes keeps me up at night!
The Caesar Salad was invented in Tijuana Mexico.