User:RaptorHunter/FunFacts

Cesium-137
Everything has minute particles of radioactive fallout in it. You can test to see if something was produced before 1943, by checking for distinctive gamma rays from the decay of cesium-137.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesium-137

Thorium reactor
There's a nuclear reactor that can't meltdown and produces safer waste, but we don't use it because we wanted weapons-grade plutonium to build nuclear weapons during the cold war.

Atomic Bombs
Uranium is more common than tin and found all over the earth. Uranium-238 makes up 99.3% of that and is completely harmless. It's the 0.7% of Uranium-235 that needs to be separated to make bombs. The seperation process requires heating the uranium to gas and running it through centerfuges repeatedly so you can skim off the lighter uranium-235. This is a time consuming and expensive process involving thousands of centerfuges and years of effort. However the technology isn't much different than the original 1950s design and isn't a secret anymore. If you have the time and money anyone can enrich unranium to make an atomic bomb. Or you could just buy it on the black market. Shit leaks out of the former soviet union all the time.

Futhermore, the design of the atomic bomb can be very simple. While most designs are multi-stage and require precisely timed high explosives, you can make a less efficient nuclear bomb by simply shooting one chunk of highly enriched uranium into another. If you do this with about 100Kg of uranium (the size of 4 grapefruits) you could easily level a 2 mile radius within a city. Really the hard part is getting the highly enriched uranium. Once you have it, it's easy to smuggle anywhere (it's not very radioactive) and the nuclear bomb is easy to construct.

Genetics
The human brain has been shrinking for the last 28,000 years. As complex societies emerged, the brain became smaller because people did not have to be as smart to stay alive. As Geary explains, individuals who would not have been able to survive by their wits alone could scrape by with the help of others—supported, as it were, by the first social safety nets.

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-why-brain-shrinking/article_print

Among white Americans, the average IQ, as of a decade or so ago, was 103. Among Asian-Americans, it was 106. Among Jewish Americans, it was 113. Among Latino Americans, it was 89. Among African-Americans, it was 85. Around the world, studies find the same general pattern: whites 100, East Asians 106, sub-Sarahan Africans 70. One IQ table shows 113 in Hong Kong, 110 in Japan, and 100 in Britain. White populations in Australia, Canada, Europe, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States score closer to one another than to the worldwide black average

http://www.slate.com/id/2178122/entry/2178123

Meta study: http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

Demographic studies have indicated that in humans, fertility and intelligence tend to be negatively correlated, that is to say, the more intelligent, as measured by IQ, exhibit a lower total fertility rate than the less intelligent. It is theorized that this trend may lead to a downward spiral in the entire population, known as dysgenics. Other correlates of fertility include income and educational attainment. This is predicted to cause a decline in IQ of 0.8 to 0.9 per generation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

MAOA Gene

Religion
If someone prays for you (and you know this is happening) your chance of dieing actually goes up.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/health/31pray.html

Gun Control
In a given year, there is one drowning of a child for every 11,000 residential pools in the United States. (In a country with 6 million pools, this means that roughly 550 children under the age of ten drown each year.) Meanwhile, there is 1 child killed by a gun for every 1 million-plus guns. (In a country with an estimated 200 million guns, this means that roughly 175 children under ten die each year from guns.) The likelihood of death by pool (1 in 11,000) versus death by gun (1 in 1 million-plus) isn’t even close: Molly is roughly 100 times more likely to die in a swimming accident at Imani’s house than in gunplay at Amy’s.

http://freakonomicsbook.com/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/chapter-5/

National Debt
Every post World War II Democratic president whose completed their term(s) in office has reduced the federal debt.

Iraq War
Over 1.2 million deaths (1,220,580), estimated by the ORB, an independent agency located in London, outnumbering even the death toll of genocide in Rwanada.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORB_survey_of_casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

Aids
In penile-vaginal intercourse with an HIV-infected partner, a woman has an estimated 0.1% chance of being infected, and a man 0.05%. (1 in 2000) Condoms further reduce the risk by 85% Since only 0.34% of population in USA is infected, the chance of infection is only 1 in 4 Billion (0.05e-2*0.15*0.34e-2*100=0.0000255%) Given that the fatality rate per 20 miles driven is 1 in 4.4 million It follows that you are a 1000 times more likely to die driving to your sexual encounter with a stranger than to contract aids from it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiv#Transmission

http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx

Drug decriminalization
Drugs have been decriminalized in Portugal for over 5 years and as a result, usage and HIV rates are down. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=portugal-drug-decriminalization

US Goverenment spies on internet
AT&T installed a fiberoptic splitter at its facility at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco that makes copies of all emails, web browsing, and other Internet traffic to and from AT&T customers.

http://www.eff.org/issues/nsa-spying

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_controversy

Tsar Bomb
The USSR built bigger nukes than America because they weren't confident in their guidance systems and wanted to ensure that they could wipe out a city even if they missed horribly. The tsar had a yield of 50 megatons. This is equivalent to 1,400 times the combined power of the two nuclear explosives used in World War II or 10 times the combined power of all the explosives used in WWII. Bombs this large were designed to destroy an entire large city even if dropped five to ten kilometres from its centre. However, the advent of ICBMs accurate to 500 metres or better made such a design philosophy obsolete. Subsequent nuclear weapon design in the 1960s and 1970s focused primarily on increased accuracy, miniaturization, and safety. The standard practice for many years has been to employ multiple smaller warheads (MIRVs) to "carpet" an area, resulting in greater ground damage.

Satan
Nowhere in the Bible is Satan described as ruling over or being in Hell.

http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/fj9ee/til_that_nowhere_in_the_bible_is_satan_described/

Counterfeit goods
Foreign contractors produce more goods than they've been asked to, and sell the rest as exact 'counterfeits' of the real products. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/05/01/8375455/index.htm

Al-Queda's actual published strategy
Alqueada's actual strategy:
 * 1) Provoke the United States into invading a Muslim country.
 * 2) Incite local resistance to occupying forces.
 * 3) Expand the conflict to neighboring countries, and engage the U.S. in a long war of attrition.
 * 4) Convert Al-Qaeda into an ideology and set of operating principles that can be loosely franchised in other countries without requiring direct command and control, and via these franchises incite attacks against countries allied with the U.S. until they withdraw from the conflict, as happened with the 2004 Madrid train bombings, but which did not have the same effect with the 7 July 2005 London bombings.
 * 5) The U.S. economy will finally collapse under the strain of too many engagements in too many places, similarly to the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Arab regimes supported by the U.S. will collapse, and a Wahhabi Caliphate will be installed across the region.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda#Strategy

firefox fixes
Firefox backs up your tabs every 10 seconds; this can cause videos to stutter. Setting the interval to a higher number will fix the problem. In about:config, changing browser.sessionstore.interval to a much higher value (like 100000, = 100 seconds) will alleviate the problem.

Astronomy
The rotation of the earth is actually dragging spacetime along with it. This means that orbiting satellites are moved by 2 meters from where you would expect them to be every year. http://www.space.com/456-einstein-warped-view-space-confirmed.html

The lifespan of the earth is 80% over. In 1 billion years the heating of our sun will cause all water to boil away leaving a lifeless wasteland.

Ordinary matter makes up only 17% of the universe. The rest is something called dark matter that no one really understands. New physics will be required to explain it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

Some parts of the universe are actually moving away from us at greater than the speed of light. This is due to the expansion of the universe stretching spacetime in all directions. The further away from earth you get, the faster the universe is expanding. This means that there are some galaxies we will never be able to see. In fact, if an alien civilization were to develop in this galaxy billions of years from now, they would look up into the night sky and see only our galaxy. With no other evidence, they would wrongly conclude that this galaxy is the only one that exists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space

The moon is slowly drifting away from the earth. The tidal effects are slowing the rotation of the earth by 12 microseconds per year and transferring that energy to the orbit of the moon increasing it's orbit by 3.8 cm per year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_the_Moon#Tidal_evolution

Number One
The first digit of any number from a data set has a 30% chance of being a 1.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

http://www.rexswain.com/benford.html

Health
Sugar does not make kids hyper.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/kx10890h33351475/

Bikini
Our beloved bikini was named after the Bikini Atoll in the pacific, to raise public consciousness on Americas nuclear test blasts in the area:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll

Bomb dogs
In WW2, the soviets trained dogs to carry explosives and blow up tanks by running under them. However, Gunfire from the tanks scared away many of the dogs. They would run back to the trenches and often detonated the charge upon jumping in, injuring Soviet soldiers. To prevent that, the returning dogs had to be shot, often by their controllers and this made the trainers unwilling to work with new dogs. Another serious training mistake was later revealed; the Soviets used their own diesel-engine tanks to train the dogs rather than German tanks which had gasoline engines.[5] As the dogs relied on their acute sense of smell, the dogs sought out familiar Soviet tanks instead of strange-smelling German tanks. From 1941 on, every German soldier received orders to shoot any dog in combat areas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog

Gorillas
Orangutans sometimes rape human women, and one tried to have sex with Julia Roberts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orang_utan#Sexual_interest_in_human_females

Gorillas demanded to see human breasts:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4280961.stm

That there is an annual marathon in Wales which pits human runners against horses. And Humans have won twice in the last 10 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon

Prohibition
During Prohibition, the US government actively poisoned industrial alcohol with the clear intent of killing those who consumed illicit liquor made with it. It resulted in the deaths of over 10,000 Americans, mostly poor.

http://www.slate.com/id/2245188/

Project MKULTRA
The CIA used to abduct and torture random Americans (and Canadians) for research. The published evidence indicates that Project MKULTRA involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs and other chemicals, hypnosis,[5] sensory deprivation, isolation, and verbal and sexual abuse.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MK_Ultra

Dubious
Gorilla has a higher IQ (70-95) than most of africa:

http://www.koko.org/world/

http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t551642/

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/9sv0x/koko_the_gorilla_has_about_an_85_iq_she_is/

The Peter Principle states that "in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence", meaning that employees tend to be promoted until they reach a position at which they cannot work competently. The best way to improve efficiency in an enterprise is to promote people randomly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

Debunked Facts
A pound of plutonium would kill everyone on earth. Reality: Only 2 million people could die from a pound of plutonium.

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter13.html

More facts
http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/top/?t=all

http://www.slate.com/id/1787/landing/1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unusual_articles

Smaller pages
http://www.cracked.com/article_18627_6-things-from-history-everyone-pictures-incorrectly.html