20 Weird but True Facts

Sometimes you find something out and you just can’t believe it’s true. But there it is, and you simply have to reconcile the new truth you’ve discovered. I love facts like those, and so I’ve put together twenty of my favourite completely weird yet completely true facts. Enjoy!

1. There are more politicians in America than there are pandas in the world

Pandas are among the most endangered species on Earth, because for some reason they insist on eating bamboo when they’re evolved to eat meat and as a result haven’t got the energy to have sex. There are estimated to be fewer than 2000 pandas left in the wild, and only a few hundred in captivity. By contrast, there are over 87,000 elected officials in the United States of America in every level from local town management to the President.

2. The dinosaurs still exist

Working in a museum, this is one that I get to blow people’s minds with frequently, but it is a bit hard to explain. The simple version is that birds – ALL birds, from turkeys to eagles to finches to hummingbirds – are dinosaurs. The more complicated version is that one species of dinosaur began to diverge from other dinosaurs about 150 million years ago and has evolved along a separate line ever since then, eventually becoming modern birds.

3. Cleopatra lived closer to the opening of the first McDonald’s than to the building of the Great Pyramid

Cleopatra VII Philopator of the Ptolemaic dynasty (the famous one who seduced both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony before losing to Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian and committing suicide) was born 69 BC and died in 30 BC. The Great Pyramid of Khufu, the tallest Pyramid in Egypt (and indeed the entire world) was completed in 2560 BC, nearly 2500 years before Cleopatra’s birth. By contrast, the first McDonald’s outlet opened in 1940, 2009 years after the birth of the final Egyptian Pharaoh.

4. In 1908 London hosted the Olympic Games because of an Italian volcano

As of the time of writing, London is the only city in the world to have hosted the Olympic Games three times since their resurrection in 1894, having played host in 1908, 1948 and 2012. But London only hosted the 1908 games because of a volcanic eruption in Italy two years before. Mount Vesuvius, the same volcano that had destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 AD, experienced a large eruption on 7^th April 1906. The eruption killed over one-hundred people and caused serious damage to the nearby city of Naples. The Italian government, who had been preparing to host the 1908 Olympics in Rome, decided to end all commitments to the Games and instead focus on dealing with the aftermath of the eruption. London was selected to replace Rome as the host city

5. Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire, and as old as the Crusades

The Aztec civilisation, which fell to the Spanish in 1521, first appeared in central Mexico in 1325. By the time that the Aztec Empire truly began to flourish in 1428, there had been teaching in Oxford for over 300 years. The first recorded scholarship in Oxford took place in 1096, at the same time as Christian lords from across Europe were leading armies of religious fanatics to conquer Jerusalem in the First Crusade.

6. Germany is a younger country than the United States

It is quite fashionable among Europeans, as well as fun, to mock the United States of America for its lack of history. It is, after all, only 239 years old at the time of writing, whereas countries such as England, France and Denmark have all existed in essentially their modern forms for a thousand years or more. But Germany, a country which is just as ready as the rest of Europe to mock America for its lack of history, is only 144 years old, having been founded as recently as 1871. In 1919, as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany lost a great deal of territory, and more territory was lost in 1945. Also in 1945, Germany was split into two nations, democratic West Germany and Communist East Germany. In 1989 the two Germanys were reunited, creating the current, modern country of Germany. So, looked at in that way, Germany is only 26 years old.

7. One of the richest men in history was a firefighter

Marcus Licinius Crassus (115 – 53 BC) was the richest man in the world during his lifetime, with a wealth of 200 million Roman sesterces ($8.5 billion or £5.6 billion) – the annual budget of the entire Roman state at the time. He made his money by being a fireman, or at least their boss. In Crassus’ day Rome had no dedicated fire service, even though the tightly-packed, wooden buildings were incredibly susceptible to fire. When Crassus heard that a valuable house was on fire, he would buy the house and those around it (those in the most danger from the fire) at a fraction of a fraction of their actual worth and then send his own private fire service to extinguish the blaze. He could then set rents to whatever he liked, and they were usually extortionate. Crassus also traded slaves, owned silver mines, and made good business and property investments. He was basically the Roman Donald Trump.

8. We have spent nearly 20,000 years watching Gangnam Style

As of writing, PSY’s song Gangnam Style has been viewed 2,422,430,966 times on YouTube (that’s JUST the official video, so doesn’t take into account other uploads on the internet). The video is 4 minutes and 12 seconds long, or 252 seconds long. If we assume that every individual viewing of the video carried on until it ended, then Humanity has spent a total of 610,452,603,432 seconds watching Gangam Style. That’s 10,174,210,057.2 minutes, 169,570,167.6 hours, 7,065,423.7 days, 1,009,346.2 weeks or 19,410.5 years. We have spent less time developing the entirety of our civilisation.

9. Two Japanese soldier kept fighting World War Two for 45 years after it ended

For the vast majority of the Human population, the Second World War ended in 1945, with the Germans surrendering on 8^th May and the Japanese surrender following on 2^nd September. These two events marked the formal end of hostilities, but not everybody got the message. One Japanese soldier, Hirō Onoda, remained isolated on an island in the Philippines and continued to believe that the war was ongoing until 1974, when his former commander arrived on the island to give him formal orders to stand down. But two other former Japanese soldiers, Shigeyuki Hashimoto and Kiyoaki Tanaka, only stood down in 1990. Following the Japanese surrender, Hashimoto and Tanaka had joined the Communist Party of Malaya’s guerrilla forces explicitly so that they could continue to fight against Japan’s wartime enemy, Britain. They only laid down their arms and returned to Japan following the signing of a peace treaty in 1990 – more than thirty years after the British had left Malaysia.

10. In America’s 239 years of existence it has been at peace for 17 of them

America was a country born of war, so perhaps is it not surprising that it has a taste for conflict. In the 239 years since 1776 and the signing of the Declaration of Independence, America has been at war for 222 of those years. This means that if you take a random year from 1776 to 2015 then there is a 93% chance that America will have been at war at some point during that year. It also means that every single US President, from Washington to Obama, has presided over a war, and it is also interesting to note that America has never gone more than five years without a war, with the only extended period of peace being from 1935 to 1940, when it had the Great Depression to worry about. Then World War Two happened.

11. The British Queen’s Guard only wears bearskin hats because the French did

The bearskin hat, tall and dark atop the Guardsman’s head, is one of the icons of Britain, especially to foreigners. But those regiments of the British Army that wear bearskins only wear them because of their connection with France. It goes back to the battle of Waterloo, 1815, when the 1^st Regiment Foot Guards fought against the bearskin-wearing Old Guard. The Old Guard were the very best soldiers in La Grande Armée, the most senior, most respected and most feared element of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard. To a man they were excellent soldiers, fierce in battle and fanatically loyal to the Emperor. But at the battle of Waterloo, they were defeated by the Foot Guards, who adopted their bearskins as trophies. To this day, certain elements of the British Army wear the bearskin for ceremonial purposes to gloat at the French.

12. The French, despite their reputation, have the best military record of any nation in Europe

Having just talked about how the French were beaten, I think it only fair to point out that they have the best military record of any European nation. In the past 800 years the French have fought in 185 significant battles and won 132 of them, giving the French Army a success rate of 71%. They won the Hundred Years’ War (despite winning fewer battles), had a good (but ultimately unsuccessful) run under Napoleon and had one of the hardest fights of any nation in the First World War, in which they lost almost 1,400,000 soldiers – for comparison, Britain lost 700,000, around half as many. The reputation that the French now have as military walkovers almost certainly comes from the Second World War, in which France resisted the Germans for just six weeks before surrendering. Even then, however, many former French soldiers and ordinary French people resisted the Germans bravely, and today France has one of the better militaries – and along with the UK is the only nuclear power in the European Union.

13. The Daleks almost didn’t happen

Today, with Doctor Who one of the most significant programmes on television, it is hard to imagine that it could have ever existed without those most iconic of genocidal aliens, the Daleks. But the truth is that the Daleks almost never happened. The first Dalek story, which became the second episode of Doctor Who ever aired, was written by Terry Nation in 1963 and almost everybody thought it would be terrible and would fail spectacularly. But in the end, no other scripts were available when shooting of the second episode began, and so The Daleks was beamed into millions of British homes. Instantly, the Daleks became a sensation, and they have become a fixture of British culture all over the world.

14. Ants outnumber Humans 1.6 million to 1

There are an estimated 7 billion Humans alive on Earth right now, spread over seven continents and more than 200 nations. As huge a number as that is, it is nothing compared to the number of ants that there are on Earth. Ants are estimated to outnumber Humanity by a ratio of 1.6 million to 1, which means that there around 11,200,000,000,000 ants crawling around.

15. The last widow of the American Civil War died in 2003

In 1909, Gertrude Grubb was born in the American state of Tennessee. From 1925, at the age of sixteen, Gertrude was courted by the 79 year-old John Janeway, a veteran of the American Civil War who had fought for the Union’s 14^th Illinois Cavalry. In 1927, when Gertrude was 18 years old, the couple married and spent the next ten years living together in a log cabin until John’s death in 1937, aged 91. Gertrude lived on in the cabin until 17^th January 2003 when, aged 93, she herself finally died. Every week, from her husband’s death until her own, she received a cheque for $70 from the Veterans’ Administration, all because John Janeway had fought in a war that ended in 1865.

16. The last veteran of the Crimean War died in 2004

The Crimean War was a conflict fought in the Crimean Peninsula (now part of Ukraine but claimed by Russia) between 1853 and 1856. The last veteran of that war died in 2004. The twist? She was a tortoise. Timothy, as the tortoise was called (yes, a female tortoise was named Timothy), was born in 1839 and served as the ship’s tortoise of HMS Queen during the war and was approximately 165 years old at the time of her death. This is not surprising, as tortoises are known to be able to live for centuries.

17. Jellyfish are immortal

They say that death is inevitable – unless, apparently, you are a jellyfish. While all species of jellyfish can die of illness or being killed by something else, there are species which do not die of old age. Instead, on reaching a certain stage in their sexual maturity, the stage analogous to menopause in Humans, they begin to regress until they effectively become children again. Then, once they have reached the beginning of their reproductive cycle again, they start the process again. In theory, the species that do this could live forever if simply left to live in peace.

18. Humans spend so long as children because we are so clever

It is not uncommon for animal species to reach sexual maturity and adulthood within their first five years of life. Humans, however, become sexually mature much later than most animals (usually between ten and thirteen years) and become fully grown adults even later; where a lion might be fully-grown by age 10 a Human is not fully-grown until 22. The reason that we spend twice as long as other mammals growing is because we are so much cleverer. A much, much higher proportion of the energy that we get from our food goes to the developments of our super-evolved, unique, brains, whereas in less intelligent animals the brain needs less energy and so more can go toward growing.

19. Humans have evolved terribly

It seems strange, especially considering that we are definitely the dominant species on this planet, but we have evolved really, really badly. We have no natural defences, no claws, spines, shells or sharp teeth. We are not particularly fast; a tiger can easily outrun a Human, and easily overpower one as well as we are not very strong either. Where in other animals childbirth can go virtually unnoticed, in Humans it can be incredibly dangerous to both mother and baby. If it weren’t for our intelligence, and our ability to think creatively and overcome these problems, then we would have been wiped out millions of years ago.

20. Diamonds are not rare

It’s natural to believe that diamonds are rare. They are, after all, incredibly valuable. But they’re actually relatively common. It’s just that they’re all owned by greedy hoarders who are releasing them onto the market in tiny numbers at a time, thereby artificially inflating their value and the price these hoarders can charge for them. Similar things are done with silver, gold and platinum, none of which are as rare as many people believe.