Wacky Facts

The Rule of 72: divide 72 by the annual interest rate to estimate the years needed to double money. At 12% a year, it doubles in about 6 years.

Mostly silica sand melted at around 1,700 °C with soda ash and limestone.

He received the award in 1992, shortly before his death, for his lifetime of filmmaking.

Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876 and spoke these words to his assistant Thomas Watson in the first successful call.

Australia is about 4,000 km from east to west; the Moon’s diameter is about 3,475 km.

All the planets, moons, asteroids and comets together are a tiny fraction; Jupiter holds most of what is left. The Sun is so massive that it could hold about 1.3 million Earths by volume.

It spins once in just under 10 hours despite being the largest planet.

Recorded by underwater microphones in 1997, the very loud low-frequency sound sparked sea-monster theories; scientists later matched it to icequakes from breaking Antarctic ice.

A typical cumulus cloud holds hundreds of tonnes of water droplets spread over a large volume of air.

IBM’s RAMAC (1956) stored about 5 MB and weighed about a tonne.

S/4HANA, launched in 2015, is “Business Suite 4 SAP HANA”, with the S standing for Simple — a reference to its simplified data model on the HANA database.

Opened in 1881, its narrow 2-foot gauge line climbs to over 2,200 m with loops and zig-zags.

The female king cobra gathers leaves into a mound nest for her eggs and guards it — unusual among snakes.

Energy from the core bounces around the dense interior for an estimated tens of thousands of years before reaching the surface. Then it reaches Earth in about 8 minutes.

The Kumbh Mela is one of the largest human gatherings on Earth, with tens of millions of pilgrims, and satellite images have captured its scale.

Held every December near Kohima, it brings together the dances, crafts and food of Nagaland’s tribes and is named after the hornbill bird.

Edvard Munch made painted, pastel and print versions of The Scream between 1893 and 1910.

Non-bird dinosaurs died out about 66 million years ago; modern humans appeared about 300,000 years ago.

The Sun’s diameter is about 109 times Earth’s, so its volume could hold roughly 1.3 million Earths.

Work by Australia’s CSIRO on radio astronomy led to a patented technique for reducing signal echoes indoors, which became part of Wi-Fi standards in the late 1990s.

The cashew nut hangs below the fleshy “cashew apple”. In Goa, the apple is used to make the drink feni.

E makes up about 12–13% of letters in English text; Q and Z are the rarest.

Ganga Bishan Agarwal, nicknamed Haldiram, opened a shop selling bhujia in Bikaner in 1937. The brand now sells across the world.

Neutron stars are the collapsed cores of massive stars: more mass than our Sun squeezed into a ball about 20 km across. Their matter is so dense that a teaspoon would weigh roughly as much as a mountain.

VSNL launched public internet access on 15 August 1995. Dial-up plans started at thousands of rupees a year.

It was nationalised in 1949 and issues all banknotes except the ₹1 note, which the government issues.

It sits a little towards the hoist so it appears centred when the flag flies.

They contain potassium-40; the “banana equivalent dose” is an informal unit to explain tiny radiation amounts.

Medieval bakers added an extra loaf to avoid being fined for short weight.

This giant storm has been observed for well over 150 years and is wider than Earth, although it has been shrinking in recent decades.