Cause I wanna know.
Roald Dahl, author of James and the Giant Peach and Willy Wonka, was a twice-shot-down fighter pilot that spent WWII attached to the diplomatic corps in Washington where he vacationed with Eleanor Roosevelt, encouraged LBJ into politics, set up a feature film on Gremlins with Disney and served as the inspiration for James Bond to his coworker and drinking buddy, Ian Fleming. He later wrote a Bond script, as well as the screenplay to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. From memory. Not positive about chitty chitty bang bang.
Chitty Chitty was an Ian Fleming book for which Dahl did co-write the screenplay. I love that movie. Ian Fleming attended Camp X, a spy training ground in Canada and stayed at an apartment in Toronto which was across the street from St. James - Bond United Church.
A lot of WWII spies ended up either in entertainment or just being famously weird. I'm sure there were more that were typical bureaucrats, but just looking at people with "worked in intelligence during WWII" in their biography somewhere, it starts to look like the job they gave you if you were smart but too much of an oddball to be useful anywhere else.
Aren't those grains composed of atoms, though?
The Colossal Squid and domestic turkey both have beaks so may have a common genetic ancestor. If so, perhaps Colossal Squids could also be domesticated.
If there was a nightmare I could tell you about the night sky, Eta Carinae would be a good candidate. Easily the brightest "far away" star in the sky (sorry Northern Hemisphere) this star defines scary. First, it is not one star but two. The small star is roughly 80 times as massive as the sun... the bigger star is over 100. Each of these giants, if placed in the center of our solar system, would be larger than the orbit of the earth, maybe Mars. These two giants orbit each other in less than a five and a half years, but that does not explain what is scary about them. They orbit a common center called a barycenter, much like Pluto and Charon do. But they are about as far apart as the Sun and Uranus; Uranus takes 84 years to orbit so imagine to massive stars whipping around each other in that big of a circle only 15x faster. In 1843, something went bad. Eta Carinae became the second brightest star in the sky and then went unstable, at times one of the 5 brightest stars in the night sky and then fading to be barely visible to the naked eye. BUT! and here is the blow your mind fact. We are now starting to record the evidence of that explosion... TODAY. You see, there is a massive nebula behind Eta Carinae, roughly 140 light years behind it. We are now starting to see this reflection nebula grow brighter... This is the light from 1843 that went off in all directions, some went to us, some hit that nebula and then bounced back our way, only 280ish years later. Astronomers are literally looking at light from a major event that bounced off a wall of gas and headed back towards earth.
Did you know that there once was a plan to build an airport in the middle of London on top of King's Cross Station for commuters, with three runways and in the shape of a wheel? Did you know that vader is the Dutch word for father, resulting in the following line on the Dutch Wikipedia page for Darth Vader:
Vader is Luke's vader.
Your fingertips get wrinkled after being soaked in water for a while. You knew that. But if the nerves serving the fingers are damaged, the fingertips won't get wrinkled in water. It's not clear why.
In 2008 there was a blackout in Florida. That blackout was measurable in Winnipeg and Maine.
Terminator is an old word in Polish, used ages before the current pop-culture meaning, and in here it still means basically "a person in progress of training to become an artisan". I know that there are a lot of other uses, but this actually confused quite a lot of us since the murderous robots seemed rather far from what title seemed to suggest ;).
Wayne and Brent Gretzky hold the NHL record for most combined points by two brothers (2857 for Wayne and 4 for Brent). and if Wayne had never scored a goal, he'd still have the individual record for most points. Morbid personal facts: I grew up with 2 guys that murdered people. I have seen 3 plane crashes in which 9 people died and saw a snowboarder die. Also found a dead guy once.
The fax machine was invented while people were still traveling the Oregon Trail in covered wagons. And here are some other fun ones to peruse to bend your brain a bit.
The Ottoman Empire shall rise again! It's gonna happen!
Legend has it that there was a female pope during the Middle Ages. Whether this is true, there exist a related legend: Here's Gyles Bradreth telling the story.As a consequence, certain traditions stated that popes throughout the medieval period were required to undergo a procedure wherein they sat on a special chair with a hole in the seat. A cardinal would have the task of putting his hand up the hole to check whether the pope had testicles, or doing a visual examination.
Oh, I have an another one! Sum of all natural numbers as in: 1 + 2 + 3 + … = - 1/12 Yes! Minus one twelfth! Here are two videos crucial for getting it: Explanation of why 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + … = 1/2 (important partial result): Explanation of the equation for all naturals:
While definitely cool, I refuse to believe that somehow adding natural numbers makes a negative fraction. I think the weirdness comes where it's just assumed that 1 0 1 ... = 1/2 which I don't buy.
I guess that I have succeeded with delivering mind-blowing fact. And that one bit was 'assumed' as in "we don't want to make this video a boring 30 minute slog so just trust us that we know what we are doing" not "we have just arbitrarily decided on that one result and will continue onward without regard if that's true or not". But it is true. It's not all that counter-intuitive as it might seem, but it forces you to stop assuming that what you know about finite operations hold true. Article. Consider this: Sum of all numbers from k = 0 up to k -> Infinity (k is assumed a natural number) in form of: 1/k! (inverse of a factorial of k). You are adding 1 + 1 + 1/2 + 1/6 + 1/24 + 1/120 + … and you are getting Euler's number. Think about it. You are adding rational numbers but get an irrational number as the result! It defies normal finite-element reasoning. I mean, it's not like I can add two rational numbers and get something like square root of 3, right? Mathematics is full of such situations where you can't allow yourself to just go on intuition, but need to have a strong formal backing. I can do a formal reasoning for you if you are actually interested.