“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Hi, and welcome to the fasab blog.

Today is fact day with another random selection of hopefully interesting things to learn.

Enjoy

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In gangster slang, a boxing match

that is fixed is called a ‘barney’.

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In 2009, one of the twelve surviving copies of

Edgar Allen Poe’s first book ‘Tamerlane and Other Poems’

was sold at Christie’s Auction House for $662,500,

a record price paid for a work of American literature.

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Isaac Smith was a commissioned officer in

the Royal Navy and the cousin of Captain Cook,

with whom he explored the then-New World.

Smith also became the first European to arrive in eastern Australia

and the first man to create survey maps of various Pacific islands and coastlines,

including Tierra del Fuego in South America.

Despite all his pioneering in the world of exploration

he is best remembered as the last survivor

of James Cook’s first voyage in the South Pacific Ocean

aboard the HMS Endeavour, from 1768 to 1771.

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Research suggests that dark chocolate boosts memory,

attention span, reaction time, and problem-solving skills

by increasing blood flow to the brain.

Dark chocolate can also improve the ability

to see in low-contrast situations (such as poor weather)

and promote lower blood pressure.

Yum!

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On average, 35 meters of hair fiber

is produced on the adult scalp.

Really???

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Ant colonies range greatly in size from

a few dozen individuals to many millions of ants.

The largest ant colonies are called ‘supercolonies’ that create

giant ant hills sometimes thousands of miles long.

The largest supercolony covers over 3,700 miles,

and has over 1 billion ants.

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Most toilets flush in E flat.

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The largest building in the world by volume

is The Boeing Everett Factory, in Everett, Washington,

which was originally built for the construction of the Boeing 747.

It has a volume of 472,370,319 cubic feet (1.7495e+7yd³)

and an area of almost 100 acres (40 ha 4685.6m2).

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Oak trees can live 200 years or more.

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Astronaut John Glenn is a decorated World War II veteran,

one of the first American astronauts in history,

and one of the epic Mercury Seven.

Glenn was also the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth

and the fifth astronaut in history to go into space.

At the age of 93 he’s the last remaining astronaut of the Mercury Seven

and one of the very few surviving astronauts (American or Soviet)

of the Space Age that began in the late 1950s.

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A less successful astronaut was a Chinese man called Wan Hu,

a sixteenth-century local government official during the Ming Dynasty,

who had ambitions to travel to the Moon by means of a

special chair he designed with 47 attached rockets.

After lighting the rockets,

instead of shooting the ambitious government official into the air,

the rockets exploded, killing him.

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When Pluto was first located by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930

it was just given the generic name Planet X.

It was named ‘Pluto’ by an 11-year-old girl,

Venetia Burney of Oxford, England.

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Want somewhere quiet to eat?

Then try Nicholas Nauman’s restaurant called ‘Eat’

in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York,

which features nothing special except for the fact

that you cannot speak while dining there.

Apparently it was inspired by his life-changing stay

at a Buddhist monastery in India,

which made him want to create a place

where people could enjoy silence.

The silent dinners became so popular that nowadays,

people have to book their tables in advance.

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The first toilet stall in a public washroom is the least likely to be used

and therefore also likely to be the cleanest.

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The character of Michael Myers

was named after the European distributor of

John Carpenter’s previous film,

Assault on Precinct 13,

and apparently this was the director’s way of

saying a kind of weird “thank you” for the

film’s incredible success throughout most of Europe.

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