Weird but interesting facts of life
Some are funny facts and some will make you say WTF. But being inconvenient and not useless, all those facts will enrich your knowledge base and help you pass through.
Almon Brown Strowger noticed he was losing business because a competitor would have his wife, a telephone operator redirect calls asking for Strowger to his business. Strowger later invented the automatic telephone exchange which eliminated the need for operators.
In some European markets, Netflix monitors illegal downloads to decide which shows to purchase.
Most older CD based video games can be put in a CD player and you can listen to the soundtrack of the game
Iran has one of the largest rates of brain drain in the world. It's estimated that 150,000-180,000 specialists leave the country every year, costing the country at least $50 billion in human capital annually.
Homer Simpson's iconic exclamation "D'oh!" is never explicitly used in any Simpson's Script. All the script ever says is "annoyed grunt"
The Writer of "Caddyshack" fell off a cliff and died a month after the movie's release, after becoming depressed due to negative reviews. His co-writer joked that he "probably fell while looking for a place to jump." The film is now a cult classic.
Vitamin A enriched rice, developed nearly 15 years ago, could have prevented hundreds of thousands of cases of childhood blindness. It has never been used due to concerns over GMO foods.
Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin wrote in his autobiography that his views on communism were shattered after seeing an American supermarket for the first time in 1990.
A 2007 study found that men are more likely than women to believe "women should have the right to breastfeed in public places," "it is appropriate to show a woman breastfeeding her baby on TV programs," and "breastfeeding education should be available as part of a high school health education."
The founders of Bebo sold the site for $850M. They later bought it back for just $1M.
Nordic folklore has a Christmas character called "Perchta the Disemboweller", who would either give you coins for being good or would slit your belly open and fill it with oats and straw if you had been bad.
John F Kennedy ordered 1,200 Cuban cigars just hours before signing the trade embargo in 1962.
In WW2, The Allies estimated German average monthly tank production using statistical analysis of their serial numbers. They were off by one.
Nikon was accused of racist face-detection software - when Asian faces were photographed, a message would pop up on the camera screen asking, "Did someone blink?"
Habeas Corpus is a law because when the UK Parliament voted on it in 1679, they jokingly counted a fat guy as ten votes