Factman's Facts

Hello, dear followers.

I have come to a decision that it's time to put this tumblr on hiatus. I don't have as much time to dedicate to research and writing facts and fearing a dramatic drop of quality, I concluded that it's best to end while the content is still any good. And 75 seemed a nice round number to end on.

I doubt that I will be able to quit completely and you can expect a fact once in a while, every time I learn something new and cool I'd like to share, but it definitely won't be a daily thing.

Fact: The Indian enclave of Dahala Khagrabari is located within a Bangladeshi enclave, located within an Indian enclave, located in Bangladesh.

Fact: Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived the atomic attack on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki and is the only person to be officially recognised by the government of Japan to have done so.

Explanation: Tsutomu Yamaguchi was an engineer working for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries - he helped design oil tankers. Yamaguchi worked and lived in Nagasaki, but he went to Hiroshima in 1945 on a business trip, which was to end on August 6 and on that day he was actually preparing to leave. However, he realised he forgot his documents, so he returned to his workplace - and that was when the bomb exploded, three kilometres from him. He suffered burns, his eardrums were ruptured and the flash blinded him, but he survived. Having rested, he set out to find his colleagues, with whom he was to travel back to Nagasaki. Finding they survived, all three of them rested in a shelter and the next day travelled to Nagasaki, where they received treatment.

A few days later, on August 9, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki (interestingly Nagasaki wasn't the primary target, but the bad weather conditions over Kokura prompted a change of targets), again about three kilometres from Yamaguchi. This time the blast didn't injure him directly, but he was unable to receive further treatment (as the city was in ruins). Suffering from high fever for many days, he eventually recovered and led a relatively normal life until 2009, when he was recognised as the first and only double atomic bomb survivor (although about 160 such people are known, they are not recognised by the government).

Fact: The battle of the Somme in 1916 captured 64 km of terrain in 140 days of fighting. The Nazi invasion of Denmark took 6 hours.

Explanation: On 1 July 1916 began one of the largest battles of WWI and the bloodiest operation in human history - the Battle of the Somme. The British and French forces mounted an attack on the heavily entrenched German armies. The battle ended on 18 November with the victory of the Allies - Germans withdrew 64 kilometres to a second line of defence; this victory came at a huge cost however, with the Allies losing 620,000 soldiers (that is an average cost of almost 10 dead men per metre of gained terrain). The Germans lost between 400,000 - 500,000 of their own. On the first day of fighting, the British lost 60,000 men.

Twenty-three years later, the Germans had adopted a completely different doctrine. World War II saw the use of mechanised infantry, tanks and aeroplanes to move quickly and surprise the enemy, many of whom were still in the old, trench mindset. As we know this was a success, with the Nazi regime occupying or de facto controlling most of Europe. One of the most impressive testaments is the Nazi invasion of Denmark that began on 9 April 1940. In fact, it ended on that day too. The Germans managed to completely occupy Denmark within 6 hours, at a cost of only 203 casualties (that includes wounded soldiers).

Fact: The Bagger 288 is the world's largest vehicle in the world, weighing 13,500 tonnes.

Explanation: No, that is not photoshop. What you're seeing on the picture is the Bagger 288, the world's largest land vehicle being moved in 2001 from one mine to another. It's an excavator, and can dig up to 240,000 tonnes every day - the equivalent to making a hole the size of a football pitch 30 metres deep. Also, that's enough to fill up 2400 coal wagons.

To complete this task, it uses the massive excavating head that is 21 metres in diameter (that's that thing on the left that looks like a massive buzzsaw). Each of those teeth is actually a massive bucket the size of a jacuzzi.

The whole machine is 220 metres long and about a hundred tall, and can move at a staggering pace of up to 0.6 km/h. It weighs a staggering 13,500 tonnes (since I seem to be using this comparison often, it's equivalent to 220 Challenger II tanks). What is incredible is that due to its massive amount of caterpillar tracks, the weight is very well distributed, and the machine can move on dirt, gravel and grass without leaving much of an imprint (the pressure under it's treads is 170% atmospheric pressure).

Fact: The impostor tsar Dmitriy I was killed, quartered, cremated and his ashes shot from a cannon.

Explanation: In 1593 the son of Ivan the Terrible died childless, ending the  Rurik dynasty which ruled Russia for over 400 years. That started what is called the Time of Troubles, a 15 year period before a new dynasty was established (the Romanov dynasty, which ruled Russia until the death of the last tsar at the hands of the communist revolutionaries). In that period there was a claimant to the throne, Dmitriy I (also called False Dmitriy I), who claimed to be the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible, which would give him right to the throne.

Before he could take the throne, however, he needed help, money and armies. He got them from the Polish, which didn't gain him a whole lot of trust from the Russians. After seizing the throne, he ruled for 10 months, during which he was disliked by his subjects. He was a womaniser, didn't follow local traditions, didn't have a beard and surrounded himself with Poles.

Fact: If a human was to jump as high and as far as the froghopper, they would be able to jump 200 metres into the air. If a human was to be as strong as a Hercules beetle, they would be able to lift 60 tonnes. If they were to be as quick as an American cockroach, they would be able to run at 315km/h.

Explanation: Insects are wonderful animals and often the most underrated, simply because of their size. If things were to be scaled up to human sizes, the insects would have incredible strength, speed and power.

Take a froghopper, for example. It is a small insect that lives in our back gardens, usually about half a centimetre in size. It is however able to jump up to 120 times it's own length, experiencing the acceleration of a baseball getting struck by a bat (60 times the deadly acceleration for a human).

And the Hercules beetle is a true strongman of the insect world. It is a massive beetle growing up to the size of a human hand and is able to lift up to 850 times its own weight, equivalent to a human lifting a Challenger tank overhead.

The American cockroach is the quickest bug ever recorded, reaching 50 body lengths per second, If this was a human, we'd be able to outrun most cars.

Fact: The horned lizard's defense mechanism is to shoot blood out of its eyeballs.

Fact: One of the houses that now makes up 10 Downing Street was owned by Mr Chicken.

Fact: The Aerium, a building originally built as a hangar for airships, is the world's largest uninterrupted volume buidling and now houses a tropical resort.

Explanation: The Aerium was originally built in 1996 as a hangar for developing a massive airship (a ridig-body blimp) for heavy cargo operations.  It has the world's largest uninterrupted volume (meaning it's basically one single room without any separators in between) of 550,000 cubic metres. How big is that? Well, have a look:

See those tiny dots on the bottom left? Those are people.

Eventually, the company that built this beast filed for insolvency and had to sell this off. Now it serves as a self-contained tropical paradise resort. And it looks pretty sweet.

Fact: The Wärtsilä RT-flex96C is the world's largest engine. Each of it's cylinders has a bore of about 1 metre and with each stroke, the cylinders move down by 2.5 metres.

Fact: A fire burning under a town for over 50 years has rendered Centralia, Pennsylvania, completely uninhabitable with fumes of toxic smoke coming out from beneath the ground.

Explanation: Keeping on the theme of things burning way longer than you'd expect, I present Centralia! It was a small mining town, being completely uninteresting until in 1962 a rubbish fire in one of the abandoned mineshafts has spread to a coal seam. You might think that a coal seam, with its insanely large amount of flammable material, burning right beneath a town might be bad, but in fact it was even worse than that - due to low amounts of oxygen beneath the ground, the coal doesn't burn, it smoulders. This means it undergoes incomplete combustion, producing carbon monoxide, a highly toxic gas, rather than carbon dioxide.

As clouds of toxic fumes came from beneath the ground, cracking the earth, causing collapses and landslides, the town was evacuated with only ten bravest (or craziest) souls remaining.They live in a town where any day the earth could swallow you up, cook you, suffocate you or otherwise leave you dead.

Fact: There is a massive flaming hole in Turkmenistan called the 'Door to Hell'. It has been alight for over 40 years.

Explanation: In early 1970s Soviet scientists identified a location in (then) soviet republic of Turkmenistan which had plentiful oil and gas. Shortly after setting up camp and a drill site and drilling some gas, the site collapsed into a massive crater without any loss of life. There existed a problem, however - the collapse released massive amounts of methane gas, which is not only flammable but also toxic to humans. After short deliberation, the scientists decided to burn it off, as it would prevent any harm to humans and actually would not damage the atmosphere so (methane is a much more damaging greenhouse gas than the resultants of its burning). Also, it's much cheaper than extracting it out of the ground.

So they expected it to burn out within days.

It's been burning for forty-two years.

Fact: Humans move more earth every year than rivers, glaciers oceans or wind, making us the largest force of erosion.

Explanation: Natural erosion is a powerful phenomenon that can reduce mountains to molehills, flood away fields leaving nothing and generally move huge amounts of material. For example, it has been estimated that rivers, the largest natural mover of sediment, transports between 24 and 39 billion tonnes of material every year. That sounds like a massive number and it is.

But humans move earth too! Less frequently we move it as constantly as rivers do, but we move earth for tunnels, bridges, roads, buildings, farms, hell, getting the monolithic rocks to Stonehenge are a form of human material movement! If you add them up, it turns out that we move about 45 billion tonnes of material every year.

Fact: Every year there is enough concrete produced, to give each person on earth 4.5 tonnes.

Explanation: Concrete is a really good material and has been in use since the Roman times. It's cheap, relatively easy to make, very strong in compression and corrosion resistant. Nowadays we make most of our buildings with concrete; more than 89 thousand kilometres of highways in America are paved with concrete.

Every year it is estimated that 31 billion tonnes of concrete are produced, making it the most used man made material in the world. We use more concrete than wood, steel, plastics and aluminium combined. In fact, water is the only thing we use more of.

Fact: The mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska is called Stubbs and is a cat.

Fact: Most children are born in spring and on Thursdays.

Explanation: Having written the fact about probability of birthdays, I decided to have a look at the actual data regarding distribution of births. I have checked out two studies which analysed the weekly distribution of births in Australia and one which analysed the annual distribution of births in a number of European and North American countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmar, England & Wales, Ireland, Finland, Hungary, Italy, Yugoslavia, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United States and Canada). I'm just writing this as a disclaimer - human birth distribution is very strongly correlated with the culture, so what I'm about to say relates really only to 'western' culture. Additionally, most of the data is quite old, therefore might not be accurate now.

A paper by C. D. Mathers analysed the births occuring in Australia between 1976 and 1979 and found that the births follow a seven day periodic pattern with most births Tuesday to Friday and a drop during the weekends. 12% more babies are being born on Thursday and 26% less are born (the percentages relate to the weekly average) on Sunday with public holidays having a similar level of decrease.

W. H. James looked at the monthly variations of births between 1966 and 1986 (ranges varied for different countries) and concluded the following: there are considerable peaks in the spring and autumn with a dip in the summer (the conclusion here was that it is likely that the human body has an optimum conception temperature, which occurs somewhere in the spring and autumn. This is further corroborated by the fact that the discrepancy is lower since the introduction of air conditioning). Additionally, in countries celebrating Christmas and New Year's Eve, there is a considerable increase in September and October.