Wacky Facts

It has one of the largest railway networks in the world, with over 7,000 stations.

Rivers carry dissolved salts to the ocean, and evaporation leaves them behind. On average seawater is about 3.5% salt.

In 2009 he won Best Original Score and Best Original Song (“Jai Ho”) for Slumdog Millionaire.

They are the only two sovereign states with square national flags.

Nalanda in Bihar flourished from the 5th century CE and attracted scholars from China, Korea and Central Asia. Its ruins are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The word comes from “bangla”, meaning “in the Bengal style”, a type of single-storey house.

Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes created bubble wrap in 1957 while trying to make textured wallpaper. It later found its real purpose as packaging.

It spans Rajasthan and parts of Pakistan and has a far higher population density than most deserts.

Its brain was tiny for a body about 9 m long.

Kabaddi, which originated in ancient India, is now played internationally, with a World Cup and the popular Pro Kabaddi League.

The masseter, which closes the jaw, can generate very high force relative to its size, which is why human bite force is surprisingly strong. “Strongest muscle” depends on how you measure — the heart and the glutes have other claims.

Excel inherited the error from Lotus 1-2-3 so spreadsheets would stay compatible; it accepts 29 February 1900, a date that never existed.

Built by billions of tiny coral polyps, it stretches over 2,300 km off Australia and is visible from space.

Alan Turing asked whether a machine could imitate a human in conversation well enough to fool a judge.

Eyes grow from about 16–17 mm at birth to about 24 mm in adults, much less than the rest of the body.

ImageNet contains over 14 million images hand-annotated with what they show, labelled largely through Amazon Mechanical Turk. The yearly ImageNet challenge became the benchmark that showed deep learning’s power.

This popular claim is a myth: pigs can raise their heads and look upwards, though their neck anatomy limits it somewhat.

Gastric acid has a pH of about 1.5–3.5. The stomach lining protects itself with mucus and constant cell renewal.

The post office at Hikkim in Spiti, Himachal Pradesh, sits at about 4,400 m and is reached in summer by tourists who come just to post a letter.

Removing milk solids lets ghee reach higher temperatures than butter before burning.

The Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia reached about 12.2 km in 1989, deeper than the Mariana Trench is deep, before rising temperatures stopped drilling.

The first version of Excel shipped in 1985 for the Apple Macintosh. The first Windows version (Excel 2.0) arrived in 1987.

VBA 6 arrived with Office 2000 and VBA 7 in 2010 mainly added 64-bit support; the language itself is little changed.

Her career spanned about seven decades, and she received the Bharat Ratna in 2001.

The “IKEA effect” shows people value products more when they assembled them.

Its axis is tilted about 98 degrees, possibly due to an ancient collision, so each pole gets about 42 years of continuous sunlight.

IBM researchers designed SEQUEL in the early 1970s; it was renamed because of a trademark.

Indian Railways is one of the world’s largest rail networks and one of the largest employers in the world.

Nicéphore Niépce’s “View from the Window at Le Gras” (c. 1826–27) is the oldest surviving camera photograph. Its exposure is estimated at many hours, possibly several days, which is why sunlight appears on both sides of the buildings.

Scott Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon proposed 🙂 and 🙁 on 19 September 1982 so readers could tell jokes from serious posts.