WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 20: An installation of 857 empty school desks, representing the number of students nationwide who are dropping out every hour of every school day, is on display at the National Mall June 20, 2012 in Washington, DC. The installation was presented by not-for-profit organization College Board to call upon presidential candidates who are running for the White House to make education a more prominent issue in the 2012 campaigns and put the nation’s schools back on track. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 20: An installation of 857 empty school desks, representing the number of students nationwide who are dropping out every hour of every school day, is on display at the National Mall June 20, 2012 in Washington, DC. The installation was presented by not-for-profit organization College Board to call upon presidential candidates who are running for the White House to make education a more prominent issue in the 2012 campaigns and put the nation’s schools back on track. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
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Learning. Is it necessary any longer? It seems that all I would need to know is how to spell basic words and I can find anything I could possibly want to know on Google or YouTube.

So why spend hours in the classroom when I can find the atomic weight of Cobalt with a few keystrokes? If you really need to know it’s 58.933195 ± 0.000005 u. Feel smarter?

Does Knowing Stuff Make You Smart or Just Knowledgeable?

There are some things I don’t have to look up, like who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb or when  the War of 1812 was declared. Today I thought I’d give you some info so you don’t have to waste valuable workplace time to look up.

  • What are the chances of getting hit twice by a foul ball at a baseball game? Richie Ashburn hit a fan with a foul ball and as they were taking her to get medical attention he hit her again with another foul ball.
  • Who was Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1938? You guessed it — Adolph Hitler. And Time Magazine has been going downhill ever since.
  • I bet you didn’t know that the mole in your front yard could dig more than 300 feet in a single night. Or about the length of a football field.
  • We just had an earthquake in California. The Mississippi River once ran backwards due to an earthquake.
  • Modern presidents all carry nuclear launch codes at all times. Other than the time President Jimmy Carter left his in some clothes that went to the dry cleaners.
  • We all remember the Model A and Model T cars made by Henry Ford. What you may not know is that Dodge made the engines in those cars.
  • Try this at home. Put a can of regular Coke and Diet Coke in water. The diet will float and the regular will sink. It must be the reduced calories that makes the diet lighter.
  • Who makes the most tires in the world? Easy. That would be LEGO.
  • Snails can sleep for up to three years at a time. It’s not like they have to be somewhere.
  • It won’t do you much good to stop smoking in Mumbai. The air is so polluted that breathing it is the same as smoking more than two packs of cigarettes a day.
  • Put all the ants in the world in one pile and all the humans in another pile and they will both weigh about the same.
  • There are 3.1 million homeless in the US. There should be room for them in the 18.6 million vacant homes in America.

Some Final Thoughts

We live in an amazing world. And, it’s always fun to find out interesting things we didn’t know. Thankfully our brains have plenty of room for reams of totally useless information that we will probably never use, other than to pull out at cocktail parties to impress others.

We don’t know what we don’t know and we don’t know that we don’t know it. I better quit while I’m ahead. What cool interesting facts do you know that the rest of us don’t? Post them below.

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