Commonplace Fun Facts

Colorblindness: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and Why Your Charts Are the Problem

Explore colorblindness: what it is, common myths, causes, everyday challenges, and surprising advantages in this humorous, informative guide.

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April 4, 2026April 4, 2026

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Gobs of Information In Every Gob

One gram of DNA can hold about 1×1014 MB of data. That’s the equivalent of 145 trillion CDs. The number of CDs required to hold this amount of information, lined up edge to edge, would circle the Earth 375 times, and would take 163,000 centuries to listen to.
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No Escaping It

“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” — Abraham Lincoln Read more fun facts about Abraham Lincoln. Read more inspiring quotations.
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Like to Ski But Hate the Cold?

Monte Kaolino is a sand dune in Hirschau, Bavaria, Germany. It consists of 35,000,000 tonnes (34,000,000 long tons; 39,000,000 short tons) of sand, a by-product of kaolinite production over the years. The sand dune is now used as a ski resort in addition to other activities.
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What’s More Scary Than a Psychopathic Killer? How About One Who Looks Like William Shatner?

The horror film Halloween used a cheap William Shatner mask, costing $2, due to its low budget. The modified mask became an iconic image of horror cinema, contributing to the film’s huge success, grossing $70m worldwide from a budget of $325,000. This made it the most profitable film featuring Shatner’s face.
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How Nikola Tesla’s Experiment Relieved Mark Twain’s Constipation

Discover how Nikola Tesla’s high-frequency oscillator experiment provided an unexpected remedy for Mark Twain’s digestive issues.
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The Elephants Are Convinced

Thomas Edison electrocuted an elephant in 1903 to prove Tesla’s AC current was dangerous. source
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Don’t Look Now… That Duck Is Watching You!

Anatidaephobia is the fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you. source
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Black Ivory Coffee: The Price Isn’t the Only Thing that Stinks!

Black Ivory Coffee: Processed By Elephants The most expensive coffee in the world is made from elephant dung, and it’s called Black Ivory coffee. It costs $50 per cup, with coffee beans going for $1,000 for 1.1 pounds (0.5 kg). Purchase Black Ivory Coffee here and try it out for yourself. In comparison, Kopi Luwak…
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Like Coffee? Thank a Hyper Goat

The legend reveals the coffee origin is with Ethiopian shepherds who coffee’s energizing effects when they observed their goats behaving energetically after consuming coffee berries. This anecdote highlights the historical origins of coffee and its stimulating properties that have captivated people across cultures.
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Bow Ties Are Cool

When Doctor Who’s Matt Smith uttered the line, “Bow ties are cool,” bow tie sales shot up 94% within one month. source
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Think You Are Dead? You’ll Want to Read This

The Cotard Delusion is a rare psychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that he or she is dead, does not exist, is putrefying or has lost their blood or internal organs. Rarely, it can include delusions of immortality. In 1788, Charles Bonnet reported one of the earliest recorded cases of Cotard’s…
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Which Would You Rather Eat From — Your Desk or Your Toilet?

The typical office desk harbors 20,000 germs per square inch, 400 times more than the regularly cleaned toilet.
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Is There Intelligent Life Out There?

The Drake equation is a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial life civilizations in the Milky Way. Designed by Frank Drake, he estimated between 1,000 and 100,000 civilizations could be in our galaxy.
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Legos: Imagine the Possibilities

The rise in popularity of LEGO bricks can be attributed to the amount of imagination a child can use to build something with the bricks. The bricks are so versatile that the LEGO Group has calculated that just six eight-stud bricks can be arranged in 915,103,765 different ways.
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I Can’t Wait to Use tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq In a Conversation

The word Yupik describes a family of five languages, spoken by residents of Siberia and Western Alaska. Each one of those languages is similar, but different—if two people from a different region met, one might not be able to understand the words spoken by the other, but because of the sentence structure and similar phonetic…
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