Facts that Fascinate Me

I truly love writing this blog, but sometimes I struggle to decide what I’m going to write about.  And so I troll the internet, looking for topics that would lend themselves to my industry in general and, I hope, my job specifically.  But as anyone who has gotten lost in the nooks and crannies of the internet knows (sticky, tangled web indeed), it’s easy as all get-out to be distracted by the minutiae.  I've been keeping a list, and here are just a few tidbits that sparked my interest:

• Scientists believe the Greenland shark can live over 500 years.  Full disclosure – the dating method is inexact.  The particular shark in question might be anywhere from 272 to 512 years old, but most likely is about 400.  And one study in the journal Aging Research Reviews notes a deep-sea sponge from the species Monorhaphis chuni lived to be 11,000 years old. Sponges, by the way, are animals, not plants, which is another fascinating fact I learned. 
• You can take an adult axe throwing class.  Yes, there are also children’s axe throwing classes (my heart pounds at the thought).  Which begs the question:  when would this skill come in handy these days?  On that note, at Carnegie Mellon you can major in Bagpiping and at Florida Southern University, you can get a degree in Citrus.
• Women weren’t allowed to run the Boston Marathon until 1972, although Kathrine Switzer ran it in 1967, cleverly registering as KV Switzer.  When her gender was discovered, officials tried to physically force her off the course, but she managed to finish, in a very respectable 4 hours and 20 minutes (NY Times).  This year’s fastest woman made it in 2 hours and 21 minutes.
• National Velociraptor Awareness Day is observed every year on April 18.  Lest we forget the plight of the velociraptors.
• The inventor of the polygraph married the first person he interrogated.
• Active noise-cancellation (ANC), works by using microphones to pick up low-frequency noise and neutralize it before it reaches the ear. The headset generates a sound that’s phase-inverted by 180 degrees to the unwanted noise, resulting in the two sounds cancelling each other out. 
• The man who voiced Tony the Tiger in the original Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes commercials, Thurl Ravencroft, also sang “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” in How the Grinch Stole Christmas. 
• Tug of war used to be an Olympic event.
• The website dedicated to Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign is still active:  http://www.dolekemp96.org/
• A sneeze travels at 100 mph.
• Whales that sing in the wrong key get lost and are alone in the ocean (I wonder if I was a whale in a previous life).
• Honey is the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, including enzymes, minerals, water and vitamins.
• The space station is the third brightest object in the night sky.
• Before 2011, Russia considered beer to be a soft drink.
• It’s illegal to sing off-key in North Carolina.  Which means if I ever go to North Carolina, I would quickly become a criminal (just because I can’t carry a tune doesn’t mean I won’t toss one around).

When I was a child, if I made the grave mistake of telling my mother I was bored, she made me read the dictionary.  My kids have the internet to wander through, and can therefore never claim boredom.  Although I do keep a big, hardcopy of the dictionary handy, just in case.