You can tell me whathever you find interesting a rabbit hole, a funny joke, a political system, a science discovery, a history fun fact etc.
Depending of how interesting is the answer I will give more or less reward for it.
If I already know what you tell me you will probably get nothing.
Thanks! 😄
Related questions
Have you heard about the Serb who contributed to the end of Yugoslavia by inserting a bottle in his anus?
I have a lot of other historical fun facts/rabbit holes. It's commonly known that Vikings did not have any helmets with horns, but did you know that the main source of riches that the Vikings obtained from their raids was slaves? Vikings got everywhere, from Sicily to deep inland Russia to the Varangian Guard in Byzantium. Vikings were basically early medieval pirates, and their raids functioned in very similar ways.
Speaking of pirates, the entire popular culture notion of pirates borrows very heavily from Treasure Island, which invented most pirate tropes. Popular media depictions of Pirates paint them as mostly being in the Carribean, and mostly becoming rich by looting gold from ships. In reality, pirates made most of their wealth from either ransomming ships, or raiding the shores for slaves (nobody ever told me pirates were slavers). Early modern pirates were mostly active in the Barbary (Western North Africa), not in the Carribean. They were mostly muslim, not white Europeans. Like the Vikings, the Barbary pirates went to all kinds of random places, and even raided Iceland once. After centuries of being the scourge of Europe, they were defeated by a coalition led by the Americans, in an American war that you probably never heard about but was quite big.
Another interesting historical misconception and rabbit hole is around Sparta. Ever seen 300? Well, sorry to break it to you but they were not 300. They were probably something like 10 times as much. It's just that Greek writers basically never wrote about non-citizens and slaves, even though we know they fought in their armies. Spartan bravery is also a made up myth by Plato, who really admired how heirarchical and undemocratic Sparta was. Another interesting Sparta fun fact is that they had their version of "the purge", a yearly festival where you could anything you want to slaves (there weren't many rules on normal days either). During this festival, Spartiate boys would kill a random defenseless slave, and by that complete their rite of passage into men. More here: https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/
Many words like as "she" and "female" actually don't originate from "he" and "male"
"She" evolved from Old English from seo/heo which were words reffering to female people from Proto-Germanic words meaning that/there. He evolved from the same ideas, but with the Proto Germanic this/here.
The word male comes from Old French "masle" which meant masculine, and female came from Old French "femella" which meant young woman. The words don't actually have a connection in their origins other than both being Old French.
The Finnish principal criminal act, despite being rewritten several times over the years, still contains the original 1889 enacting formula involving the Russian czar.
This isn't the oldest still-valid law in the books; there are at least three that date to 1734, the time of Swedish rule. Unfortunately they do not have pompous preambles.
The current fastest Super Mario Bros (1985) speed-run by a human is 4:54.631. The fastest theoretical run, found through frame-by-frame data using a computer (which goes by the name of tool-assisted speedrun or TAS) is 4:54.032. Humans are less than a second away from literally perfecting the game's speed-run.
Deciduous trees are genetically more closely related to cruciferous vegetables (think broccoli, asparagus) than they are to evergreen trees. In fact “tree” is just kind of a mode of plant; there is no grand tree ancestor.
Even dandelions can become trees, and some on the canary islands are over 7 feet tall with woody trunks.
We move our eyes in short, fast bursts called "saccades", very quick, synchronized movements-- but the problem with that is that while these happen, our eyes go all useless and blurry. Having our vision turn into a blurry mess every time you move your eyes is clearly not a good idea, so our brains hide that from us. From an engineering standpoint, there would be two very obvious solutions: make the vision go black, or show us the last thing we saw prior to movement.
both are good options with different downsides, but NOPE, our brain does neither. What basically actually happens is that your brain puts your visual system on pause, you're not seeing blackness or even nothing, you're just not seeing period. When you finish the saccade it shows you what you see at your new position.... and then pretends it can time travel.
It shows you the image at its new point, but time-shifts it backwards so that it seems like you were seeing it the whole time your eyes were moving-- Because your brain is not a computer with a consistent clock, THIS WORKS.
You can see this effect if you watch an analog clock with a second hand. Look away (with just your eyes, not your head), then look back to the second hand. It'll seem like it takes longer than a second to move, and then resumes moving as normal. This is because your visual system just effectively lied to you about how long time is in order to cover up the physical limitations of your eyes.
This effect is called Saccadic Masking and more specifically Chronostasis. Your vision doesn't look all weird when this happens because your brain has a whole load of hacks to avoid that.
The English use of the Latin alphabet isn't the only case with obsolete letters like eth or thorn or yogh or ash - there's also the obsolete letters of Hangul, the obsolete kana of Hiragana, and specific Arabic letters used only for loan words! (They don't have a "p" in the native Arabic script because there's no "p" in Arabic!)
And did you know that Japan has a problem where due to use of archaic characters, sometimes elderly people forget how to write their names?
back when penn station was being planned, they debated building a massive record breaking multi-level train bridge over the hudson river, before deciding on tunnels instead. it would have used more stone than the pyramids, and had 10+ lanes of train tracks. the new longest suspension bridge (built last year in turkey) is about the same size as that would've been (last image)
An amateur historian located the long-lost resting place of English king Richard III in a parking lot in Leicester in 2012. PBS produced a documentary to determine if the king, whose skeleton showed had a serious case of scoliosis, would have been able to fight as fiercely on the battlefield as some sources claim. They needed a living subject who had the same condition of the king; unfortunately, almost everyone with a similar case of scoliosis today has had surgery to correct the condition. Bizarrely, a 25 year old man with an exact match for Richard’s condition reached out to researchers; that man was also an historical reenactor, who often spent his weekends at Bosworth Field, the site of Richard’s demise. The documentary’s producers had him trained in medieval warfare to see if Richard could have actually led a cavalry charge.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/resurrecting-richard-iii-preview/1896/
Science is done by humans and humans are uh. questionably rigorous. see humor below
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