Wacky Facts

Indian mathematicians treated zero as a number with its own rules; Brahmagupta described arithmetic with zero in 628 CE. The idea spread through the Arab world to Europe.

The 1996 promotional site became a famous time capsule of early web design.

F-O-R-T-Y: each letter comes later in the alphabet than the one before.

The Challenger Deep is about 10,900 m deep. Mount Everest, at 8,849 m, would disappear with over 2 km of water above its peak.

China began using paper money during the Tang and Song dynasties, over a thousand years ago.

Sound waves propagate through mechanical molecular vibrations. In freshwater at 20°C, sound travels at roughly 1,482 meters per second—more than four times faster than in air (approx. 343 m/s). Because liquid water has vastly higher bulk elastic modulus and intermolecular density than compressible gases, acoustic energy transfers significantly faster between tightly packed molecules.

Early square windows concentrated stress at the corners; after Comet crashes in the 1950s, airlines switched to rounded windows.

The Shinkansen opened in 1964 and has an average delay measured in seconds per train.

In 1930 Gandhi walked from Sabarmati to Dandi over 24 days to protest the British salt tax.

British officers in India played a game called “Poona”, and early rules were drawn up there in the 1870s before the sport was named after Badminton House in England.

Between August 1860 and July 1861 it received about 26,461 mm of rain, a record for a single year.

Why it happens

Cherrapunji (Sohra) sits on the southern edge of the Khasi Hills in Meghalaya, facing the plains of Bangladesh. In the monsoon, warm, wet winds blow north from the Bay of Bengal across hundreds of kilometres of flat floodplain with nothing to stop them. When they hit the steep hills, the air is forced upward, cools, and drops its moisture as rain. This is called orographic rainfall, and the funnel-shaped valleys around Sohra concentrate it even more.

Most of the rain falls at night. Cool air sliding down the slopes meets the warm monsoon air in the valleys, so the heaviest downpours often happen before dawn.

How we know

The record comes from rain gauges read by British administrators between August 1860 and July 1861: about 26,461 mm in twelve months. It is still the world record for a single year. Nearby Mawsynram, about 15 km west, now has the highest long-term average rainfall of any place with reliable records, close to 11,900 mm a year.

Did you know?

Despite all that rain, Cherrapunji can face water shortages in winter. The thin soil and steep slopes let water run off quickly, and decades of deforestation mean little is stored in the ground.

Chess developed from chaturanga, a strategy game played in India around the 6th century CE. Its pieces represented the four divisions of an army: infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots.

Kabaddi is believed to have originated in ancient Tamil Nadu and became a medal sport at the Asian Games in 1990.

It travels at roughly 28,000 km/h, completing an orbit about every 90 minutes, so its crew sees around 16 sunrises and sunsets each day.

It receives an average of roughly 11,000–12,000 mm of rain a year, much of it during the monsoon.

It is very long but only a few metres wide and made of materials that blend into the landscape. Astronauts, including China’s first astronaut Yang Liwei, have said they could not see it unaided from orbit. Cities and airports at night are far easier to spot.

Pongal means “boiling over”; rice and milk are cooked until they spill over the pot, a sign of abundance.

Brian Kernighan used it in a 1972 tutorial and in the famous book “The C Programming Language”.

Guido van Rossum was reading scripts from “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” when he started the language and wanted a short, slightly mysterious name. That is why Python tutorials love “spam” and “eggs” as example variables.

At about 70 beats a minute, that is over 2.5 billion beats in a lifetime.

“Brain”, written by two brothers in Lahore, Pakistan, infected the boot sector of floppy disks. It even contained their names and address.

The thermohaline circulation moves water between oceans driven by differences in temperature and salt.

Their diet of eucalyptus leaves is low in nutrients and hard to digest, so koalas save energy by sleeping or resting for most of the day.

The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution lists 22 languages; hundreds more are spoken across the country.

In the 1830s an American physician promoted tomato ketchup as a cure for indigestion and other ailments, and it was sold in pill form for a while.

Sauropods such as Argentinosaurus may have reached around 30–35 m in length.

The company’s name originally stood for “Systemanalyse Programmentwicklung” and later “Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung” — Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing.

Early hard drives for personal computers held a few megabytes and cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. Today a gigabyte costs a tiny fraction of a cent.

The Indian tectonic plate is still pushing into Asia, lifting the Himalayas. Measurements suggest Everest rises by a few millimetres per year, though earthquakes and erosion also change its height.

After a US Navy press event about Frank Rosenblatt’s perceptron — a simple early neural network — The New York Times reported the Navy expected it to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence. It could learn to tell simple shapes apart.