Fun Facts!

A list of fun facts I find fascinating! I plan to periodically update this list and add categories as appropriate. An (inspiration) link denotes the source that first made me aware of the fun fact, whether or not the source provided all the information given here. “Fun” means “interesting” more than “cheerful.”

Plant Breeding

1. In the 1990s, a new cultivar of Brussels sprouts was developed that is less bitter, so Brussels sprouts are now markedly better than they used to be (inspiration).
2. A single species, Brassica oleracea, gives rise to cabbage, Brussels sprouts, kale, broccoli, and more (source, relevant memes, relevant xkcd).
3. Modern citrus fruits are all hybrids of a handful of ancestral wild types with a very tangled family tree. For instance, there is no single common ancestor that separates limes from non-limes. There is one school of thought that contends that all citrus fruits are the same species, whereas someone from the opposite school of thought has come up with 147 species (source 1 with a beautiful illustration of the taxonomy, source 2).
4. Between 1886 and 1942, the US Department of Agriculture commissioned artists to create watercolors of fruit cultivars as a botanical reference, resulting in the Pomological Watercolor Collection. High-resolution scans of the paintings can be downloaded for free at the above link and make great desktop backgrounds (inspiration)!

Standards and Measurement

1. Accelerometers that mechanically integrate their signal to obtain velocity are still more accurate than those that do this electronically (source).
2. There are two official US government times: one kept by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and one kept by the US Naval Observatory (source).
3. The Coordinated Universal Time standard is abbreviated UTC as a compromise between the English and the French (“Temps Universel Coordonné”) (source).
4. As we have developed better technology for making computer chips, we have crammed more and more transistors into the same space, achieving greater performance and power efficiency. Successive generations of these chips are referred to in decreasing series of nanometers — 5 nm chips came out in 2020, 2022 saw the release of 3 nm chips, US policy has sought to limit exports to China of equipment used to make chips under 16 nm, etc. One would expect this figure to correspond to some physical measurement, and although it originally referred to transistor gate length, nowadays the number is basically made up — the relevant physical dimensions of 5 nm chips are in the dozens of nanometers range.

Etymology and Language

1. The word “companion” comes from “to have bread with.”
2. The word “rubric” is related to the medieval monastery position of “rubricator,” whose job was to write certain parts of the copied manuscript in red (cf. “rouge”) for emphasis (inspiration).
3. A “contronym” is a word with two opposite meanings; these include sanction, citation, and (almost) prescribe/proscribe.
4. The French for “to sue” is “attaquer en justice” (inspiration: my high school French textbook).
5. (trypophobia warning) There exists a 15th century manuscript that renders the Cyrillic letter O (О) with many circles: the so-called “multiocular O,” said to represent the many eyes of the seraphim of which the text speaks. This glyph has been included in Unicode (ꙮ) and has recently been updated to include more eyes (source 1, source 2, inspiration, fascinating linguistic tangent).
6. You may know that when one river or stream flows into a larger river or stream, it is called a “tributary”: the Missouri River is a tributary of the Mississippi. What do you call a stream that flows out of a larger one? A distributary!

Energy and Environment

Note: many of these facts are from the blog of the Energy Institute at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, recommended to me by an NREL colleague, which I would highly recommend to people who find these sorts of facts interesting. It’s an accessible but not oversimplified treatment of interesting topics in energy economics, with fun quotes like “Advocating prices for pollution is the main activity of environmental economists. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But, sometimes you really are in a room full of nails.”

1. The largest power plant in the US (by average annual generation) is also the only major nuclear power plant in the world to not be next to a body of water for cooling. Located in the Arizona desert, its cooling needs are instead met by sewage(!) purchased(!) from Phoenix and other nearby cities. It’s so important to the Western electrical grid that grid operators consider losing 2/3 of its power to be their worst-case contingency scenario, the Soviets had plans to attack it in the Cold War, and the National Guard guarded it during the Iraq War. Like many infrastructure projects in the Southwest, a good chunk of it is owned by Los Angeles (inspiration).
2. In 2020, Congress gave the EPA authority to further regulate HFCs, a class of refrigerants, etc. we switched to after we realized the older CFCs were destroying the ozone layer. HFCs are much safer for the ozone layer but can cause thousands of times more global warming per kilogram than CO₂. In 2023, the EPA came out with a rule to phase down HFCs that it estimates has a net benefit of 270 BILLION DOLLARS in the next three decades alone due to the reduction in climate change (source, inspiration).
3. The guy who invented CFCs also invented leaded gasoline. Oops. Then there was a classic misinformation campaign to hide the harmful impacts of lead in gasoline, à la tobacco and climate change. We removed lead from most gasoline a while ago, but from racecar gasoline only recently, and the latter change turned out to be worth $1800 per child exposed in reduced neurotoxicity (inspiration). See also lead-crime hypothesis, a tragic theory and an excellent band name.
4. In 2012, the EPA began requiring ships to use low-sulfur fuel within 200 nautical miles of the coast to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions. This has been calculated to result in a roughly 3% decrease in infant mortality in counties within 200km of heavy ship traffic (source, inspiration).
5. In 2020, the top two installers of solar panels were China and the US. The third? Vietnam! (source).

Built Environment

1. Rust is extraordinarily expensive. A 1998 Federal Highway Administration-funded study found that corrosion cost 3.1% of US GDP; a 2013 study found it to cost 3.4% of global GDP (inspiration).
2. Only quite low frequency radio waves can penetrate water to a significant extent, so countries sometimes build miles-long antennas to communicate with their nuclear submarines. These transmitters have very low bandwidths, sometimes just a few bytes per minute.

Miscellaneous

1. “The north magnetic pole is a magnetic south pole.” The north pole of a magnet points north, and opposites attract, so the earth’s magnetic pole near the north geographic pole is actually a magnetic south pole. (Sadly, I have forgotten where I got this phrasing from.)
2. The Catholic Church classified beavers as fish so that fur traders could eat them on Fridays during Lent (source).
3. There is a type of legal case called in rem where one of the parties is an object the other party wants to exercise power over, leading to hilarious names like “United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins” (the shark fins won), “South Dakota v. Fifteen Impounded Cats” (South Dakota won) and “Quantity of Books v. Kansas” (the books won) (source).
4. The motion sickness and nausea drug Dramamine (dimenhydrinate) is a combination of Benadryl (diphenhydramine) and a stimulant similar to caffeine to offset the drowsiness.
5. Studies suggest that birds’ internal magnetic compasses are based on quantum entanglement in their eyes. The leading theory is that blue light entering the bird’s eye creates entangled pairs of free radicals that oscillate between two different states before collapsing, the earth’s magnetic field influences the proportion of time spent in each state, and eventually this signal makes it to the optic nerve. To be sensitive to such a weak magnetic field, the entangled state needs to last a long time, so birds evolved a setup that can preserve the entanglement for longer than we can achieve in similar conditions in the lab (inspiration, sources 1, 2, 3).
6. The Royal Air Force in 1919 produced a “Pigeon Service Manual” describing their military “capabilities, management, and use.” There is also this excellent illustration of how to wrap up a pigeon to drop it from an “air-craft” (inspiration, possibly).
7. Obsidian blades can be made to be much sharper than steel blades. It is rare but not unheard of to use an obsidian scalpel for modern surgery (source).
8. In addition to tilting up and down (pitch) and side to side (yaw), our eyes can rotate about the line of sight (roll) (source: I discovered it for myself in the mirror, but here’s Steve Mould demonstrating and explaining).
9. You’ve probably encountered HTTP error 404 Not Found, which occurs when you ask a server for a page that doesn’t exist. You may have also seen error 500 Internal Server Error, which is a catch-all for a miscellaneous problem on the server’s end that is not your fault. In 2015, the Internet Engineering Task Force approved a draft for Error 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons, meant to signify that a page cannot be served due to government censorship or other legal issues. The number references Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The standard is that error numbers starting with 4 denote a problem on the user’s end and those starting with a 5 a problem on the server’s end; the reader is invited to consider any political implications of this error being in the former class….