Did you know?

Amazing facts, historical oddities and fantastical niceties that will boggle your mind

Feb 21, 2025

Today, a departure.

Rather than the standard fare of political rants or a treatise on the peculiarities of the English language, we feature some of today’s (and history’s) most astonishing facts, oddities and fantastical niceties.

Credit where due. Usually, this is the bailiwick of Paul Macko, the marketing guru from British Columbia who writes the terrific column “Deplatformable Newsletter.” Among other things, Paul features more than 50 pieces called “Curious Mind-Blowing Facts.” If you have a little time to kill, have a look through Paul’s archive. It is guaranteed to “blow your mind.”

Anyway, in the process of researching my many projects and rabbit hole dives, I occasionally get sidetracked. In so doing, I’ve uncovered various odd but fascinating facts that will amaze and astonish.

Particles and more particles

Remember this?

This was the standard model atom, the particle that made up everything in the universe. It was the model taught in high school science classes well into the 1990s. Three parts: protons and neutrons in the middle, and electrons that buzzed around the nucleus, aka: The NASA logo. Simple.

But that was before the mysterious world of quantum mechanics introduced subatomic bits into the Theory of Everything. Suddenly, we were made aware of the invisible presence of gluons, quarks and the elusive Higgs-Boson.1

The number of subatomic particles is not fixed and depends on how they are defined and classified. However, the Standard Model of particle physics, the most widely accepted framework, has two main categories of matter: fermions and bosons.

Fermions are the building blocks of matter and include:

Quarks: There are 6 types of quarks (up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom).
Leptons: There are 6 types of leptons (electron, muon, tau, and their corresponding neutrinos: the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino and the tau neutrino).

Each quark and lepton has an antiparticle (e.g., antielectron or positron), doubling the count. So, that's 12 particles (6 quarks plus 6 leptons) and their 12 antiparticles, making 24 fermions in total.

Bosons are force-carrying particles and include:

Photon (electromagnetic force)
W and Z bosons (weak nuclear force)
Gluons (two types)
Higgs-Boson (which gives other particles mass)

That’s eight types of bosons (including the hypothetical graviton for gravity, though it’s not yet confirmed). Adding these together, the Standard Model counts 32 particles that make the universe work and which confounds Classical Physics.

I think it was easier with the atom.

The deadliest animal

The deadliest animal in Australia?

Sharks? Snakes? Spiders?

Wrong. The answer: Horses. An average of 125 deaths each year are caused by falls on horseback or by an accident involving a horse. By contrast, shark attacks cause an average of six deaths annually.

Speaking of Australia, the continent has the highest population of camels in the world – approximately 1.3 million. In fact, Australia exports camels to many countries in the Arabian Peninsula.

Share Quoth the Maven

Biggest Bang

The 1883 Krakatoa volcanic eruption, near Java in the South Pacific, is known as the loudest natural sound ever recorded.

This explosion was reportedly 13 times louder than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and could be heard up to 3,000 miles away. The eruption blew 5 cubic miles of earth into the sky, produced a shockwave that circled the Earth seven times and caused a tsunami that killed 36,000 people.

Robot dance

This is unbelievable. And a little bit creepy. (click the link)

Bye Bye Clyde

The first person to leave the solar system was scientist Clyde W. Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered the dwarf planet Pluto in 1930. Tombaugh died in 1997 at the age of 91, but to honor his memory, NASA placed his ashes inside the New Horizons space probe, which was launched in 2006.

Fittingly, New Horizons flew past Pluto in 2016 and is currently deep in the Kuiper Belt, roughly 5.4 billion miles from the Sun.

As long as we’re on the topic of space travel, Voyager I is currently the furthest man-made object from Earth, at 13.3 billion miles. Launched in 1977, Voyager I officially left the solar system in August 2012 and is currently flying in interstellar space.

To put it into time perspective, Voyager I is speeding along at approximately 38,000 miles per hour. If the probe was aimed at the nearest star, Alpha Centauri (4.2 light years from Earth), it would take roughly 72,000 years to get there.

Even more context … it has taken 48 years for Voyager I to travel 22.3 light hours.

A bovine dilemma

In 2018, in the Austrian province of Valaborg, farmers had the vexing problem of how to rid themselves of dead cows.

Nestled on the Austrian-Swiss border at the base of the Alps, the Valaborg terrain presented a logistical problem for anyone with a cow that had reached the great beyond. It seems it cost upwards of $1,000 to remove the remains of deceased bovines by helicopter, so the farmers decided upon a quicker, more efficient way: blowing them up with dynamite.

The cost: $32. However the practice of creating a quick stew was quickly outlawed by authorities because a) the remains were creating a health problem (disease, etc.) and b) it was off-putting to tourists.

Fun fact: About 60 percent of the world’s Christmas decorations are made in China.

Please Mr. Postman … take Junior

You can send a lot of things in the mail, but you can’t send a person — at least not anymore. But in the early days of the U.S. Postal Office’s parcel post service, there was nothing to prevent people from mailing their own children.

Beyond the novelty of it — when the parcel post service began on January 1, 1913, some were eager to see which packages they could get away with sending — it was a surprisingly practical way of getting one’s kiddo from point A to point B. So they did.

In some instances, children traveled on trains as Railway Mail but with postage stamps instead of more expensive train tickets. The longest known trip by a child through the mail occurred in 1915 when a 6-year-old boy was sent 720 miles from Florida to Virginia—a trip that cost just 15 cents.

First photo

This is the first photo ever taken with a live human being in the frame. In the lower left corner, you can see a man and a shoe shine boy.

The photo, “Boulevard du Temple,” was taken by the famous French inventor Louis Daguerre in Paris in 1838 and developed through the “daguerreotype” process. It depicts a busy Parisian street scene, but due to the long exposure time—estimated at around 10 to 15 minutes—most moving objects, like carriages and pedestrians, didn’t register on the plate.

However, the two stationary figures appear because they remained motionless long enough to be captured, making this an unintentional but historic record of the first photographed humans.

I Spy … (ugh!)

During the Cold War, the West’s intelligence services instituted Operation Tamarisk, a collective effort by the U.S., U.K., and France behind the Iron Curtain. It should have been called Operation Dumpster Dive.

Operation Tamarisk tasked secret spies with sifting through Soviet trash, including used toilet paper made from official documents, to gather sensitive information and intelligence. It seems there was a shortage of toilet paper in Eastern Europe, so foreign agents often had to use documents and files to … um … clean up.

The operation was often messy, requiring agents to gather hospital waste, including discarded body parts. National security, you see.

In the end, Operation Tamarisk was considered a rousing (but grubby) success.

###