Fun Facts – 16 September 2015

– Colouring books for grown-ups are a huge trend and publishers struggle to keep up with demand. The books have successfully been used to reduce stress, relieve anxiety and as rehabilitation aids for patients recovering from strokes.

– There is a star in our galaxy that is 5 billion times volume of our sun.

– If a billiard ball was the size of Earth it would have bigger canyons then the Grand Canyon and taller mountains then Mt. Everest. Conversely, if Earth was the size of a billiard ball its surface would be smoother then a billiard ball.

– In May 1997, an IBM supercomputer known as Deep Blue beat then chess world champion Garry Kasparov, who had once bragged he would never lose to a machine. After 15 years, it was discovered that the critical move made by Deep Blue was due to a bug in its software.

– The average high school student today has the same stress level as the average psychiatric patient did in the 1950s.

– When invented in 1840s, some people criticised anaesthesia as a “needless luxury”.

– During a 1964 hoax, a Swedish journalist exhibited paintings done by a chimpanzee under the name Pierre Brassau. The journalist was testing whether critics could tell the difference between true avant-garde modern artwork and a chimp’s work. They could not, and in fact, praised the works.

– Irene Bergman is the oldest woman on Wall Street at 100 years old she’s still managing money for clients.

– The most ancient evidence of human tattooing is found on a mummified 5,300-year-old Neolithic Iceman who has a total of 61 tattoos of lines and patterns, interestingly most of which overlap with classical acupuncture points used to treat rheumatism, a medical condition that plagued him.

– On a trip to England in 1698, Peter the Great loved the taste of stout beers, but was unable to take any back with him to Russia before it spoiled. To mitigate this, London brewers added more hops and alcohol to their stouts thus creating a new beer style, the Russian Imperial Stout.

Courtesy of crazyfacts.com