14 Fascinating Facts You Probably Didn't Know

1. Romans were known to create tombs for their dogs and gave them epitaphs to remember them by. One such inscription read, “I am in tears, while carrying you to your last resting place as much as I rejoiced when bringing you home with my own hands 15 years ago.

2. In 1959, police were called to a segregated library in S. Carolina when a 9yr-old Black boy refused to leave. He later got a PhD in Physics from MIT, and died in 1986, one of the astronauts aboard the space shuttle Challenger. The library that refused to lend him books is now named after him.

3. BBC journalists requested an interview with Facebook because they weren’t removing child abuse photos. Facebook asked to be sent the photos as proof. When journalists sent the photos, Facebook reported the them to the police because distributing child abuse imagery is illegal.

4. Only three people in the nation were qualified to hand-pack the parachutes for Apollo 15. Their expertise was so vital, they were not allowed to ride in the same car together for fear that a single auto accident could cripple the space program.

5. You are less likely to die during an economic depression. This is mostly attributed to cleaner air, reduced traffic, and fewer dollars spent on vices like tobacco and alcohol.

6. Glenn K. Tripp, a D.B Cooper copycat, hijacked a plane for a $600k ransom. He had his drink spiked with Valium by a flight attendant, and after a 10 hour standoff, lowered his ransom to 3 cheeseburgers and a head start on a getaway.

7. Bill gates purchased the Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex for $30,802,500. Three years later he had its pages scanned into digital image files, some of which were later distributed as screen saver and wallpaper files on a CD-ROM as part of a Microsoft Plus! for Windows so everyone could enjoy them.

8. Super Mario is named after real-life businessman Mario Segale, who was renting out a warehouse to Nintendo. After Nintendo fell far behind on rent, Segale did not evict them but gave them a second chance to come up with the money. Nintendo succeeded and named their main character after him.

9. The Mexican government sent around 500 of it’s elite soldiers to be trained as commandos at Ft. Bragg(USA), in order to better combat the rising drug violence in the country. After training, many of the soldiers returned to Mexico, only to start the brutally violent drug cartel: Los Zetas.

10. Joss Whedon wrote the Buffy episode “Hush” after hearing people say that the show was only successful because of the dialogue. Hush, with only 17 minutes of dialogue, became the only episode nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Writing and is considered to be one of the show’s greatest.

11. During the time of the Great Depression, a banker convinced struggling families in Quincy, Florida to buy Coca-Cola shares which traded at $19. Later, the town became the single richest town per capita in the US with at least 67 millionaires.

12. Human procrastination is considered a complex psychological behavior because of the wide variety of reasons people do it. Although often attributed to “laziness”, research shows it is more likely to be caused by anxiety, depression, a fear of failure, or a reliance on abstract goals.

13. Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, a Great Depression-era gangster and notorious bank robber, endeared himself to the public by destroying mortgage papers at the banks he robbed, freeing many from their debts.

14. When deaf people with schizophrenia ‘hear voices’, they hallucinate hands communicating using sign language.