45 Facts That Your Intuition Might Say Are Fake But They’re Actually True

For the price you need to pay to have your hip replaced in the US, you could fly to Spain first class, have it replaced. Go running with the bulls, break your hip again. Replace it a second time. Fly back to the US first class. And STILL have some left over.

1 million seconds = 11 days.
1 billion seconds = 30 years.

We don’t need billionaires.

jpporcaro:

The difference between a million and a billion is about a billion.

Egyptian civilisation is so old that Ancient Egypt itself had Egyptology. They had no more clue about the origins of the Sphinx than we do today.

ferret_80:

Egypt is so ridiculously old it can be hard to truly picture. Cleopatea ruled in 50 BCE, there was already 5000 years of Egyptian civilisation at that point.
We are currently only 2074 years from Cleopatra's rule. Think how old Roman ruins are, how ancient they seem to us. And Ancient Egypt 2000 years ago had double that time as a civilisation.
Anyways prehistory fascinates me and I'll take most any excuse to enthuse about it.

Right_Two_5737:

They dug a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea and used it for a few centuries. Then economic conditions changed and the maintenance cost of the canal wasn't worth it anymore, so it was abandoned and filled in with sand. A few centuries later, economic conditions changed again so they dug the canal again. All of this happened several times.

Bananas are berries and strawberries aren’t.

miniatureconlangs:

This kind of... well, it stems from a misunderstanding of how language works, really.
It's quite common for words to have multiple slightly different meanings. Just consider words like 'just', 'consider', 'words' or 'like'. Context usually tells us which meaning is intended.
The normal, "inherited" and old meaning of 'berry' is basically 'tiny somewhat juicy fruitlet'. Raspberries, strawberries, bilberries, lingonberries, gooseberries et.c. all qualify for that. If you're the kind of person who shames someone for calling any of those berries berries, stop it and be ashamed of yourself.
An artifical, and very contextually specific meaning of 'berry' is that used in botany - 'A soft fruit which develops from a single ovary and contains seeds not encased in pits.' This was never intended for universal use, but for specialists to be able to discuss a specialized topic without having to be very wordy. For them, the size is of secondary consideration when discussing these matters, and so, they made up their own terminology to discuss them. However, they used words that were already in circulation, because there were many of them, and they didn't feel like making new ones up.
Their technical, very specific definition was never meant for widespread use.
What makes this very clear is that if you encounter a species you've never seen before, if you honestly believe in the idea that berries only are to be used of "a soft fruit which develops from a single ovary and contains seeds not encased in pits", then you won't know what to call it until you've dissected the berry. That's not a practical approach to human communication, that's downright inane.
But of course, if you're the kind of person who corrects people for calling berries berries, you're probably also the kind who will correct me when I tell you that whales are bony fish.

The U.S. Appalachian Mountains and the Scottish Highlands are the same mountain range, torn asunder by plate tectonics. The ancient mountains are older than sharks, themselves older than the Rings of Saturn, and knew a world before trees.

Tdhods:

Sharks are also older than the North Star, which blew my mind.

You can fit all the other planets in the Solar System between the Earth and the Moon.

Locke_Erasmus:

With plenty of room to spare, if I recall correctly. Pretty sure you can jam Pluto in there too. Justice for Pluto!

Spiders learn your daily routine. Who the F**K figured that out?

Anytime you see a spider in your house, it's because you've deviated from your daily routine and, according to the spider, you're not where you're supposed to be.

I found this out just the other day. When I first moved into my place it had been empty for a month or so and there were spiders, not everywhere, but noticeably around. Now I don't see them at all anymore.

Michelin stars are given out by the Michelin tyre company.

It was a marketing ploy, designed to get people to drive further, and to wear down their tyres. Now it is seen as one of the highest endorsements in the cooking world.

Engineary:

Also, the Michelin man ("Bibendum") is white because natural tire rubber was white / gray in color, and original tires were white.
Once they started adding carbon to the tire mixture to add strength (and turning the road tires black), Bibendum was already so well-known and recognizable that they just left him white.

athy-dragoness:

Similarly, Guinness World Records was created by the Guinness beer company and originally given out in pubs.

Wild but true, Octopuses have three hearts, honey can survive 3,000 years, sharks predate trees, wombats poop cubes, and there’s a jellyfish that can live forever.
Nature really doesn’t play by the rules.

SwingingtotheBeat:

That explains why my last jar of honey said, “Best by: March 03, 5025”

There would be a lot more ancient Egyptian mummies around if the Victorians didn’t turn most of them into paint or eat them.

Southern_Hamster_338:

They even unraveled mummies at parties for entertainment! SO WEIRD!!! No wonder there are so many laws now about desecrating the dead!
And the Victorian Era continued til 1901 I think? So that’s crazy too!

Taman_Should:

I’ve read a few things about this. The Victorians didn’t “eat” mummies per se, but they did enjoy using the aptly named Mummy Brown pigment like you said, and “mummy powder” was a common item sold in drug stores and apothecaries. It’s more accurate to say that they snorted ground-up mummies as “medicine.” 
The local governments in Egypt also deserve their fair share of the blame for keeping this bizarre fad going. They were well aware of the European appetite for mummies and ancient curiosities, and they capitalized on it every chance they got. At one point, the mummy trade made up a significant percentage of the whole Egyptian economy. Just imagine grave-robbing being something like 1/3 of your nation’s GDP! 
You have to understand though, there were once thousands upon thousands of mummies all over Egypt and Sudan. Mostly in plain above-ground mausoleums. For centuries, it was the most common burial practice for anyone who could afford it. Everybody wanted to be mummified, from all walks of life, in every social class. Movies and other works of fiction have given a lot of people the impression that being mummified was a privilege only reserved for the elites or powerful leaders, but this isn’t true at all.
There were so many mummies that when Egypt was first building railroads through the Sahara, the trains sometimes burned mummies as fuel when there was no wood or coal available. Their oily wrappings were conveniently flammable. That’s right, they had MUMMY-POWERED TRAINS. 

As a species, humans can out-run every other animal on earth. EVERY ANIMAL.

Its not that we're faster, its that we have the longest endurance. They might get away from us, but we always catch up when the animal gets tired.

Woolly mammoths were still alive when the Egyptian pyramids were being built.

There is a fish with the scientific name Boops boops.

"In the early third century CE, Athenaeus, in his Deipnosophistae, suggested that the name came from the sound that the fish makes. The name boops is mentioned due to the fish's large eyes."

Just learned this factoid - most "shooting stars" you see are about the size of a raisin. That, to me, is unbelievable.

The largest desert in the world is Antarctica.

99.6% (or so) of Canadians live further south than Glasgow.

BondStreetIrregular:

By way of context, a Canadian town on the same latitude as Leeds gets about 40 times more snow annually.

Flying from Anchorage, Alaska to London is about the same distance and time as from Miami, Florida to London.


Girth matters.

Radio Shack sued a regional auto parts chain Auto Shack for infringing on their name. Auto Shack changed their name to AutoZone. Years later, Radio Shack created a section called POWERZONE so AutoZone sued them for infringing on their name.

atombomb1945:

I worked for Radio Shack long ago. They were happy to sue any business or company using the words "Shack" or "Radio" in their name. One that happened while I worked there was some Mom and Pop place opened a restaurant called "Pizza Shack" and they were taken to court. We were all told to be very careful about how we used the company name as well. This was before social media but we were warned that even using the name of the store outside of work could be grounds for a lawsuit.
They just ended up k**ling themselves actually.

There are two comic strips called Dennis the Menace - one from the UK, one from the US. They have nothing to do with each other and were developed entirely separately from each other - but they both premiered on the same day (March 12 1951).

CMDR_omnicognate:

Also that Dennis the Menace US is like, a regular boy who sometimes gets into trouble, UK Dennis the Menace is an actual menace. The meme showing the difference between the two is funny to me, showing the US one fishing in a goldfish bowl, and the UK one just sawing his mum’s table in half for no reason at all.

Pokemon has made more money than Harry Potter, Marvel, the Beatles, and Taylor Swift combined. Pokemon is the highest grossing IP of all time and it isn’t even remotely close. Pokemon is many $10B’s ahead of second place.

Sunnyfishyfish:

It also was the reason Nintendo dominated the handheld game industry for so long. Most franchises spike and then drop off after awhile. Pokemon never did. It just kept going up and up and up and up and up.