Random Facts that Will Impress or Confuse Your Friends

The following are random facts and esoteric trivia that may be interesting conversation starters or ways to annoy know-it-all types if needed. If you know more please comment and share!

Pennies before 1982 have a composition of 95% copper, pennies in 1982 itself were of 7 different types(copper and mainly zinc, from Philadelphia and Denver), and pennies after 1982 are lighter(about 2.5 grams) and made mostly of zinc. If you flip a penny hard and fast into the air you can hear a different sound for a copper one versus a zinc one.

You can catch a live lobster from some vending machines In Japan, the country that has the most bizarre vending machines by far.

Our brains are about 75% water. Maybe being wishy-washy and having a brain-freeze aren't so unusual after all.

You should feel really, really lucky if you come across a US quarter from before 1965 or even a dime from before 1965. The reason is they're 90% silver - and most of them were hoarded back in the late 60s.

The longest shot in NBA history was made by Baron Davis - a 92 foot baseball throw.

New Orleans and Cairo, Egypt are on almost the same exact line of latitude.

If you look closely at a white pixel on a computer monitor, you will see that the square is actually made up of red, green, and blue stripes, in that order.

People get the most traffic tickets near their home(like within 2 miles of home).

If someone tried to sell you a 1 zettabyte hard drive, they would undoubtedly be lying. A zettabyte is 2⁷⁰ bytes, which is a 21 digit number.

The brightest star in the night sky is Sirius. Stars twinkle, but planets don't twinkle. Jupiter is a Jovian planet that rotates extremely fast.

Yao Ming is the tallest NBA player at 7'6". The tallest in all history was Manute Bol at 7'7". Tyrone "Mugsy" Bogues was the shortest player ever to be in the NBA, and he was only 5'3". The shortest currently playing is Nate Robinson at 5'9", who along with Spud Webb at 5'7", didn't let his shortness prevent him from winning an NBA Dunk Contest.

Upon exiting a cave, bats will always turn to the left. Batman goes after the bad guy.

A pomelo is a citrus fruit that can grow to the size of a basketball.

It's easy to figure out 99 * any two-digit number. For numbers that are not multiples of 10, all you do is this: multiply 9 by the ones' digit of the second number, and multiply 9 by one plus the tens' digit of the second number, and then put those two results together like this: the first result goes into the ones and hundredths spot, and the second result goes into the thousandths and tens spots. For example: what is 99 * 77? So 9 * 7 = 63, and you put 63 like this _6_3. Now 9 * (7+1) = 9 * 8 = 72. So put 72 into the remaining slots like this: 7623. However if the number is a multiple of 10, then it's still easy - there will always be 9 in the hundredths place for the answer and a 0 in the ones' place. The other two slots are 9 * the ten's digit of the number you're multiplying by ==> so 99 * 80 = 7920, is that right? Yeah calculator says so.

Interesting words: to nictitate is to wink, to osculate is to kiss, to masticate is to chew, and to defenestrate is to toss something out of a window.

Hypermiling can help you save up to 30% at least in your gasoline expenditures. One way to save gas is to pump up your tires over their recommended PSI by about 10 PSIs, as long as you are not going to go on the highway for more than a few miles.

Alnico and neodymium magnets are unusually strong. On YouTube you can see some cool videos of them.

The NBA briefly used a different basketball last year - but the new synthetic ball hurt the players' hands and they complained about it a lot - the NBA returned then to the old style ball thankfully.

New Orleans is also known by the nicknames of "The Crescent City", "Naw'lins", and the "Big Easy." A poem was written by Niyi Osundari, a UNO professor, about New Orleans post-Katrina, and he coined the term "Big Uneasy" to describe the city's state.

Cat Stevens, who was a famous music star in England back in the 60s & 70s, became a Muslim and his name now is Yusuf Islam. He still makes songs, except they are Islamic songs now.

More than 50 millions lines of code are contained in the Windows XP operating system. Among those lines of code however are some comments meant only for humans to decipher the semantics.

You can type weird-looking characters using the charmap, a Windows utility. In the Windows Operating System, Just go to your start menu and click "Run", then type "charmap."

If you rode a camel in Egypt, it would most likely be a dromedary, or one-humped camel.

In northern Texas there exists a town named "Happy". And six towns in the U.S have the name "Climax." In Kentucky there's a small town called "Monkeys Eyebrow" and in Kansas there lies a town called "Gas" with lots of natural gas(really).

It is impossible to create a computer program that decides whether another program has an infinite loop.

Timor-Leste is a small country which came into being in 2002. It is located in Southereastern Asia, at the eastern half of the island of Timor(which it shares with Indonesia). It also includes two islands: Pulau Atauro and Pulau Jaco. Of the eight airports in this country, five have unpaved runways.

You have about 93,000 miles of peripheral nerves, and the fastest ones send impulses at up to 395 feet/second and this happens up to 300 times per second.

Babies blink the least frequently, while adult women blink the most frequently, with the exception of John McCain.

When basketball was first invented every time you made a shot there would be a time-out break as the ball was taken out of the basket. Back then people were much more patient in general.

Popeyes chicken's distinctive spicy flavor is such a big secret that the spicy flavor comes pre-packaged in strange looking bags that are opened in the store.

Chuck E Cheese has its headquarters in Irving, Texas. This magnet for kids merged with ShowBiz Pizza in 1984, and in 1998 it all became CEC Entertainment, Inc. It all started in 1977 and today there are over 400 stores.

You can rearrange the letters in the word "stripes" to get six other words: esprits, persist, priests, spriest, sprites, and stirpes.

Pitcairn is the least populated territory in the world, and easily hardest to find. Of the volcanic Pitcairn Islands(which includes three other islands) It is the only populated one. The population was last reported at 48. It's very far out in the Pacific Ocean.

There are four areas on our bodies where we can easily measure our pulse - our left chests(by our heart), our carotid arteries that are at the top of our necks(under cheek bone), on our wrists(at the bottom of our forearms and straight down from thumb), and up on our temples(in front of ears and up by forehead) which is called the temporal pulse.

The northernmost large-sized city in the world is Murmansk, Russia.

By using steganography a person can send a secret message to a recipient in a normal, everyday, and peaceful portrait of a farm or a flower. Or encrypt the message in the famous Mona Lisa.

You can find the tallest people on average in the Netherlands(men average right about 6'0" and women about 5'6"), and the shortest in Indonesia(men - about 5'2" and women 4'10").

A 13-year-old boy in England has recently become a father, and his partner was a 15-year-old girl. Their families were supportive and loving, given the unusual circumstance. If his progeny continue the trend and have kids at 13, he can be a 101-year old living great-great-great-great grandfather, or great^4 grandaddy. This would doubtless be a new feat in human lineage. Now do you want to hear something that is truly amazing? The youngest mother was a 5-year old Peruvian girl. This extremely rare case was documented in 1939.

Most adults have 206 bones(which were fused from the 300 bones they had as a child), but some people have an extra bone in the arch of their feet, and one in 20 has an extra rib.

If you called someone a "luftmensch" you would be dissing them in Yiddish with a word roughly meaning smart, idealistic bum. If you called someone "puissant" you'd be calling them powerful.

Long ago, before the advanced pregnancy kits, a pregnancy test was injecting a mouse with a woman's urine, and if the mouse died that meant the lady was preggers.

Plastic surgery doesn't involve plastic like in GI-Joes but rather either silicone or saline solutions, and there are numerous health risks associated with plastic surgery, sometimes even death.

A jongleur was a traveling entertainer of the Middle Ages who juggled, sang, and performed acrobatics.

Your tender heart is actually quite strong and beats 100,000 times a day and about 2.5 billions times in your life. Furthermore, all this power comes from an organ that weighs between a half to 3/4th of a pound.

There are reportedly men in this world who, near the time of their wives' childbirth, have weight gains and pretend to also be pregnant. They sympathize with their wives' changing bodies. They may even feel phantom pains, and this strange social phenomena is called couvade.

Laissez les bon temps rouler is a Cajun French phrase in Louisiana that means "let the good times roll." A native French person would find the phrase grammatically incorrect.

91 multiplied by any two-or-more digit number with identical numbers yields a palindrome. For example, 91 * 33 = 3003; 91 * 777 = 70707; and 91 * 444444 = 40444404; and 91 * 5555555555 = 505555555505, etc.

The French(or their ancestors?) apparently talk too much and their word for the number "ninety" translates to "four twenties and ten." Forgive me, any French person who was offended.

In computer science, a nibble is four bits. Two nibbles make a byte. And a million-plus bytes make a megabyte. Cookies are used to store session information on servers while browsing websites. I think the programmers who came up with these names must have been hungry a lot back in the day.

An oologist studies or collects bird's eggs. Fun job - must be delicate work.

Nigeria is the most populated country in Africa, then Egypt.

The microwave oven was invented after a man noticed a chocolate bar had melted in his pocket after coming near a microwave tube. I still prefer the stove-top though.

Kazakhstan's main export is oil, not potassium.

The following sentence is grammatically correct: "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." But don't expect more than 0.000001% of humans you meet to comprehend its meaning.

Potassium nitrate is used a lot in making gunpowder and in medicines.

It is redundant to say "ATM machine" as ATM stands for automated teller machine.

Seahorse babies are actually given "birth" to by the males - the females deposit their eggs on the males, who keep the eggs safe on them until they're ready to go. In other animal species, such as the rhea(a flightless bird), the father takes care of the babies most of the time, sitting on them and being very protective. Being a stay-at-home dad is the norm for them.

A meerkat is a clever mongoose that lives in Southern Africa.

The average head has 120,000 hairs. Natural blondes have as many as 140,000 and natural redheads have as few as 90,000.

The current QWERTY keyboard layout has its roots in 1874, when it was used for a typewriter.

The canned drink "Hawaiian Punch" actually contains around 4% fruit juice(not 5% like it says over the nutritional chart) which is comprised of the following seven fruits: pineapple, orange, passionfruit, apple, apricot, papaya, and guava. If you wanted to learn or ask questions about Hawaiian Punch you can call 1-866-ASK-PUNCHY. I'll still take this punch any day over another carbonated soft drink.

The Ford Focus SVT, a souped-up version of the Focus that was discontinued in 2005, was built in Hermosillo, Mexico.

Inside your amazing body there is about 10 pints, or 4.73 liters, of blood. This is almost the same amount as the oil in a V-8 engine.

You have over 640 skeletal muscles, and the largest one is the one you're sitting on. I hope it's comfy right now.

The words lymphadenopathy and lymphangiography both have the letters "L", "M", "N", "O", and "P" in them consecutively.

In Italy they have Lamborghini police cars. Wow lucky cops. Can't catch a speeding Ferrari with a Fiat Punto.

The first email system(which was only for Department of Defense-funded organizations) was introduced in 1972 by ARPANET. Back then the common man only had a vague idea of what a computer could do, and e-mailing was definitely not on the list.

You always only see one side of the moon, and this is because the moon is locked in synchronous rotation. Only a select few have seen the dark side of the moon, and these were the astronauts who stayed behind as the module pilot and floated around all alone in the middle of nowhere(like Michael Collins for first moon landing) for the Apollo missions.

Congratulations on reading all of this! I know it was a lot.

Central Intelligence Agency. CIA - The World Factbook -- Pitcairn Islands. CIA - The World Factbook.

Central Intelligence Agency. CIA - The World Factbook -- Timor-Leste. CIA - The World Factbook.