10 More Facts That Sound Like BS, But Are
True (Part 4) 10. Chicago Was Once Raised 6 Feet (and no-one
noticed) There are some facts that you instinctively
know are BS, even if you’re not sure why. The idea that someone once managed to make
the city of Chicago levitate 6 feet in the air without anyone noticing is definitely
one such fact. For one thing, it’s impossible. For another, well, just listen to what you’re
saying. You might as well claim the Moon is made of
cheese. Well, sorry, but we’re about to completely
mess with your perception of how reality works. On New Year’s Eve 1855, the Chicago Board
of Sewage Commissioners tasked engineer E.S. Chesbrough with finding a solution to the
city’s regular cholera outbreaks. Chesbrough decided the easiest option would
be to hike the entire city out its swamp, 6 feet into the air. It was known as the Raising of Chicago, and
it was completely literal. To get the city out the cholera-infested swamp
it sat on, hundreds of men jacked up the streets using massive screws, filled in the space
beneath them, and called the result ‘ground level’. The work carried on for 20 years, and was
often completely mad. There are stories of whole hotels being hoisted
up into the air, and not a single person inside them realizing it was happening. Nor was it a temporary fix. The Chicago you see today is the ‘raised’
version. That’s right: Chicago is still levitating
today, and no-one living there has ever noticed. 9. Irish Traffic Police Accidentally Invented
their own Supervillain Not so long ago, the name Prawo Jazdy struck
fear into the hearts of Ireland’s traffic cops. A Polish immigrant, Mr. Jazdy was also the
most prolific petty-criminal the Garda had ever encountered. Over the course of two short years, he racked
up over 50 speeding tickets in every part of the island. Stranger still, he’d never been caught. It gets weirder. Mr. Jazdy was a master of disguise. Sometimes he’d be dressed as a middle-aged
man when he was stopped. Other times he’d be dressed as a young woman. Irish traffic cops found he’d given them
a different driver’s license every time they’d stopped him. He’d given 50 different home addresses,
and 50 different dates of birth. Eventually, a special task force was assigned
to catch this international man of mystery. At which point a native Polish speaker joined
the Garda’s traffic division. He took one look at Mr. Jazdy’s file and
probably fell down laughing. Y’see, Prawo Jazdy wasn’t a supervillain. He wasn’t even a person at all. Prawo Jazdy is Polish for ‘driver’s license’. According to the BBC, Ireland’s confused
traffic cops had spent 2 years writing up tickets for different Polish drivers under
the assumption that they were all the same person. The mistake was finally discovered in 2009,
to the embarrassment of all. 8. The State of Maine Has More Black Bears than
Black People The northeasternmost state of the US, Maine
is one of the most-rural places in America. With a population of 1.33 million, it’s
not the emptiest state, but it’s definitely kinda lonesome. It’s also one of the whitest places in the
whole of the States. How do we know this? Because according to data from both the state
of Maine and the US Census, Maine has more black bears than it has black people. Seriously, it ain’t even close. The last US Census recorded roughly 19,000
African-Americans living in Maine. A couple of years before, the state of Maine
estimated its black bear population at roughly 36,000. In other words, there are roughly two black
bears for every single black person in Maine. That’s a crazy figure, especially if you
grew up in a big city, or in the South, or on the West Coast, or, well, anywhere but
Maine. Nationally, black people make up 13.2% of
the US population. In Maine, they make up just 1.4%. By contrast, if black bears were people, they’d
make up 2.7%. 7. Congress Name-Checks Hitler Seven Times a
Month hitler Godwin’s Law states that the longer an argument
goes on, the greater the chance of someone bringing up Hitler. It further states that, the minute Hitler
comparisons are invoked, the conversation becomes worthless. Which, when you think about it, is the perfect
way of describing Congress. Both parties have been engaged in a never-ending
argument for decades now, and both have essentially become worthless. We know this because they just can’t stop
bringing up Hitler. The nonprofit Sunlight Foundation tracks all
words in the official Congressional record for their Capitol Words project. The database stretches back to 1996, and contains
millions of words. In 2015, they crunched the numbers for Hitler,
and found Congress name-checked the Nazi dictator an average of seven times a month. Hitler has been compared in Congress to Saddam
Hussein, to global warming, to modern China, to Gaddafi’s Libya, to Sudan, to Iran, to
ISIS, to the cloning of human beings, to the American military, and (bizarrely) to the
Founding Fathers. No other dictator even comes close. The high point came in 2003, when Hitler was
mentioned 93 times in a single month. Republicans mention Hitler slightly-more often,
with 57% of mentions to the Dem’s 43%. But, as the Daily Dot pointed out, no party
has yet been known to mention Godwin’s Law. 6. We Still Have No Idea How Many People Chernobyl
Killed On April 26, 1986, the nuclear reactor at
Chernobyl, Ukraine, exploded. The resulting meltdown killed 31 people more-or-less
instantly, and poisoned millions of square miles of land. At the time, the World Health Organization
estimated the disaster would ultimately cause 4,000 deaths from radiation-induced cancer. Over 30 years later, we’re still guessing. Depending on your source, Chernobyl caused
anywhere from a mere 53 deaths, to over half a million. The trouble is Chernobyl blew radiation over
such a vast area, no one really knows how many excess fatal cancers in Europe, Asia
and Africa are due to the accident. The UN estimates around 16,000. The Russian Academy of Sciences estimates
up to 200,000. The Ukraine National Commission for Radiation
Protection calculates 500,000. And those numbers keep climbing. One recent high-end estimate pegged the total
number dead at nearly one million. If true, that would make Chernobyl the deadliest
disaster in human history bar the catastrophic China Floods of 1931 (which may have killed
up to 4 million). For comparison, the combined atomic bombing
of Nagasaki and Hiroshima killed a maximum of 236,000. That’s right, the screw up of a bunch of
Soviet engineers may yet turn out to be deadlier than the bloody endgame of the most-brutal
war in human history. 5. Nintendo Existed at the Same Time as the Ottoman
Empire One is a modern Japanese entertainment company,
best known for a certain, red-suited, Italian plumber. The other was a vast Islamic empire founded
in the 14th century, that was ruled by sultans and once laid siege to Vienna in Austria. Both of these things existed at the same time
for thirty three whole years. The issue here is that Nintendo is way older
than you probably imagine, while the Ottoman Empire didn’t fall apart till much later
than you probably think. The Ottoman Empire only collapsed in 1922
as a result of losing WWI, after the Allies had carved up its territory for themselves. Nintendo, meanwhile, was founded way, way
back in 1889. At the time, Nintendo was a simple playing
card company, with nary an Italian plumber in sight. That’s probably not surprising, as Italy
had only been a unified state for less than 2 decades by that point, less than the time
separating us now from the release of Titanic. Europe was still (mostly) ruled by the Prussians,
Austro-Hungarians, Russians and Ottomans, and Britain had an empire that stretched all
the way around the world. Meanwhile, Japan had only just left two and
a half centuries of self-imposed isolation 35 years beforehand. 4. The Ocean Contains 20 Million Tons of (unclaimed)
Gold Imagine if you discovered a near-limitless
supply of gold sitting right under your nose. All your worries would be over, right? Well, we’ve got some good news and some
bad news for you. The good is that such a stash of gold really
does exist, likely within easy driving distance. The bad is that its scattered over the entire
ocean. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA), our planet’s oceans contain a staggering 20 million tons of unclaimed
gold. That’s enough to give every single person
alive today 9 pounds of the stuff… or to just hoard it for yourself and become the
richest person on the entire planet. The trouble, sadly, is getting at it. Much of the oceans’ gold is distributed
on a very, very fine level. As in, a single liter of seawater contains
13 billionths of a gram of gold. There’s just no way of extracting that,
and the stuff that’s concentrated is equally hard to get at. The biggest gold deposits are buried a mile
or two under the sea’s surface, and would require a massive mining operation to extract. Still, if you go looking, you might get lucky. In 2015, the nation of Colombia discovered
$1 billion worth of sunken Spanish gold sitting right off the coast of Cartagena. 3. The Biggest Quake in History Hit 23 on the
Richter Scale If you live in earthquake country, you’ll
know anything above about a 4 on the Richter Scale is terrifying. The 2010 earthquake that leveled Haiti was
a magnitude 7.0. The 1964 earthquake that nearly upended the
whole of Alaska was 9.2. The largest in modern history was a 9.6 off
the coast of Chile, and that caused 35 foot waves 6,200 miles from the epicenter. But there’s actually an even-bigger earthquake
on record. It went beyond standard measurements and hit
a devastating 23 on the Richter Scale. That estimate comes courtesy of NASA, who
observed the quake in action. That’s right, thankfully for all life on
Earth, the quake happened millions of lightyears away, at a star known as SGR J1550-5418. The ‘starquake’ was big enough to destroy
everything in a 10 light year radius. Starquakes are caused when the crust of a
magnetar – a super, super dense neutron star that packs the mass of more than million
Earths into an area the size of Manhattan – cracks. The resulting release of energy is one of
the deadliest events in the universe. Any nearby planets would be wiped out instantly. One single, 20 minute quake releases more
energy than our sun does in 20 whole years. Thank God we haven’t got any in our galactic
neighborhood. 2. Antechinus Mice are so Sex-obsessed They Literally
Screw Themselves to Death You might like to think you’ve got going
power in the sack. You ain’t got nothing on the Antechinus. A mouse-like marsupial found in Australia,
the male is capable of mating for 14 hours straight. In mating season, guy Antechinus’s get so
much action in that they literally screw themselves to death. We don’t mean there’s some crazy biological
mechanism that makes them die after reproducing. We mean they simply keep going for so long,
and go so hard, that their bodies are destroyed by multiple stress injuries and they die of
a failed immune system. Think about how you get more susceptible to
disease if you’re tired and already injured, from playing football, say. Mr. Antechinus gets that times a million. Eventually, his stress levels rise so high
that his immune system cuts out and he dies. According to National Geographic, this malady
infects every single male Antechinus. 11 months after birth, they become so desperate
to mate that they wind up screwing for 3 weeks solid. They then die, and a new generation of boys
are raised, who will also grow up to have a libido even Ron Jeremy would envy. 1. You Make History Every Time You Shuffle a
Deck of Cards Stop reading this for a second, and go find
yourself a deck of cards. Got it? Right, now give that mother a shuffle and
lay the cards in the order they come out. Congratulations, you’ve just done something
completely unique in the whole of human history. 52 cards may not sound like much, but it creates
an insane number of possible combinations. Highbrow British quiz show QI calculated the
number at 52 factorial, which means 52 times 51, times 50, times 49… etc. Written out, it looks like this: 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000. That’s a big number, but we’re not even
close to describing just how insanely big. The QI ‘Elves’ phrased it like this: “If
every star in our galaxy had a trillion planets, each with a trillion people living on them,
and each of these people has a trillion packs of cards and somehow they manage to make unique
shuffles 1,000 times per second, and they’d been doing that since the Big Bang, they’d
only just now be starting to repeat shuffles.” So there you have it. If you wanna make history, don’t cure cancer
or invent a new device or conquer half the world. Just grab a pack of cards and get shuffling. We guarantee the results will be historically
unique.
OH god, all that "tssh" sound is making me Crazy.