16-20 Kickass Random Facts
16. One of London’s hidden rivers runs over a tube station, Sloane Square, held inside an iron conduit built in the 19th century. – Source
17. During the Falklands War, the British Royal Navy killed 3 whales with torpedoes and depth charges after mistaking them for Argentinian submarines. – Source
18. Harvard sentences are 720 sample sentences, in sets of 10, which are phonetically balanced and used for testing phone and voice-to-text systems. – Source
19. Before 1986 professional athletes were not allowed to compete at the Olympic Games. – Source
20. Overuse of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) can cause spinal cord injury by inactivating vitamin B12. Numbness, weakness, and even sexual dysfunction are common symptoms. Taking B12 preventatively before nitrous use is ineffective as no matter how much B12 is present, it is all ‘turned off’. – Source
21-25 Kickass Random Facts
21. When natural gas producers have a surplus, they can pump it into massive underground salt caverns for storage, some 6,000 feet underground. – Source
22. The Shunganunga boulder, a 23-ton red quartzite rock, was moved by glaciers from the Dakotas to Kansas hundreds of thousands of years ago; the boulder is sacred to the Kanza tribe (expelled from the state named after them) and Shunganunga translates to “Big Red Rock” in their language. – Source
23. The state of Florida has a Python Elimination Program where they pay by length for individuals to hunt pythons. – Source
24. Tennessee has a state artifact – the Mississippian stone statue, a statue of a kneeling man carved by an unknown Native American artist between 1250-1350. It was discovered in Wilson County in 1939. – Source
25. The Baltimore Ravens name is from the poem ‘The Raven’ by Edgar Allen Poe who lived and died in Baltimore. In 1996, residents of Baltimore were polled on a name for their new NFL team and the Ravens won by an overwhelming 21,108 votes. The Americans and Marauders were a distant second and third. – Source
