WTF • Fun • Fact    ( /dʌb(ə)lˌju/  /ti/   /ef/ • /fʌn/ • /fækt/ )

     1. noun  A random, interesting, and overall fun fact that makes you scratch your head and think what the...

WTF Fun Fact 12652 – Stalin’s Penchant for Editing Photos

It’s a good thing Stalin didn’t have Instagram, or he would have spent a lot of time updating it.

Josef Stalin’s Great Purge was his way of systematically eradicating members of the Marxism–Leninist party who were in his inner circle when he thought they had betrayed them. And he did eradicate them quite literally (by firing squad).

But he also used a propaganda technique that erased many historical records of them – he had them edited out of photos. In that way, Stalin was a photoshop pro before Photoshop was born.

According to the writers at History.com:

“After consolidating his power in 1929, Stalin declared war on Soviets he considered tainted by their connections to the political movements that had come before him. Beginning in 1934 he wiped out an ever-changing group of political “enemies.” An estimated 750,000 people died during the Great Purge, as it is now known, and more than a million others were banished to remote areas to do hard labor in gulags.”

And of the photos, they noted:

“Stalin used a large group of photo retouchers to cut his enemies out of supposedly documentary photographs. One such erasure was Nikola Yezhov, a secret police official who oversaw Stalin’s purges. For a while Yezhov worked at Stalin’s right hand, interrogating, falsely accusing and ordering the execution of thousands of Communist Party officials. But in 1938, Yezhov fell from Stalin’s favor after being usurped by one of his own deputies. He was denounced, secretly arrested, tried in a secret court, and executed.”

The more enemies Stalin made, the more photos needed to be retouched. In fact, in some group photos, only Stalin himself remains.

Stalin even went so far as to doctor photos to have himself inserted into historical moments. Oh, and he had people make him look taller and more handsome as well. – WTF fun facts

Source: “How Photos Became a Weapon in Stalin’s Great Purge” — History.com

WTF Fun Fact 12651 – The Military Researchers Who Turned a Cat Into a Phone

Have you ever wanted to turn a cat into a telephone? We haven’t either. But in 1929, two Princeton University researchers gave it a go anyway. Apparently, they weren’t cat lovers.

Professor Ernest Glen Wever and his research assistant Charles William Bray performed the experiment that involved a live but unconscious (thankfully!) cat in order to see how the auditory nerve perceives sound.

That’s a fancy way of saying they sedated a cat, opened its skull, accessed its auditory nerve, and attached a telephone wire to it. The other end of the wire was connected to a telephone receiver.

While many of us may turn up our noses at the thought of animal research, it has saved and improved many human lives. Bray and Wever weren’t even interested in making a cat into a telephone for any practical purpose (not that we could even think of one anyway). Instead, they were interested in the research methods used to run the tests, which paved the way for more sophisticated research on human hearing and made contributions to devices called cochlear implants that convert sound vibrations into electrical signals in the brain for deaf people.

Despite not caring much about creating a cat phone, the experiment did work, and Bray was able to speak into the cat’s ears while Wever listened through the receiver 50 feet away in a soundproof room.

Princeton’s Mudd Manuscript Library wrote a blog describing it in more detail. They say:

“The common notion during this time was that the frequency of the response of a sensory nerve is correlated to the intensity of the stimulus. In the case of the auditory nerve, as a sound becomes louder, the frequency or pitch of the sound received by the ear should be higher. When Bray made a sound with a certain frequency, Wever heard the sound from the receiver at the same frequency. As Bray increased the pitch of the sound, the frequency of the sound Wever heard also increased. This experiment proved that the frequency of the response in the auditory nerve is correlated to the frequency of the sound.”

Wever and Bray received the first Howard Crosby Warren Medal of Society by the Society of Experimental Psychologists in 1936 for the experiment.

Later, both men entered military research. Bray became the Associate Research Director of the U.S. Air Force Human Resources Research and then served on the civilian psychological research team for the National Defense Research Council and the Navy. Wever became a consultant to the National Research Council on anti-submarine warfare.

And cats worldwide likely rejoiced that they found other things to do. – WTF fun facts

Source: “The Cat Telephone” — Mudd Manuscript Library Blog

WTF Fun Fact 12650 – The Largest Stadium Ever Built

Today, the world’s largest stadium/arena is Narendra Modi Stadium, which holds 132,000 spectators. But that’s a far cry from the largest one ever built. For that, you have to go back to ancient Rome’s Circus Maximus.

The Circus Maximus was a chariot racing stadium and the largest stadium in the entire Roman Empire. To this day, no one has ever built a bigger enclosed stadium.

Built in the 7th or 6th century BCE, it was also used for festivals and other competitions. It was big enough to hold wild animal hunts that people could watch from their seats.

The Circus Maximus was 621 meters long and 118 meters wide. Historians estimate that it could hold an amazing 250,000 people at once (some say it may have been closer to 300,000). Even more could watch from the surrounding hillsides. There is seating for around 150,000.

While you may be more familiar with the Roman Colosseum, by comparison, that stadium only ever held 50,000 spectators.

In any case, it’s hard to imagine a city accommodating that many visitors all at once!

As Christianity took over Rome, the stadium was used less. By the 6th century AD, it was no longer in use. The space it sat on is now a public park and little of the ruins remain because of a combination of theft of the building materials and degradation from flooding and the passage of time. However, concerts have been held on the site, including shows by Genesis and The Rolling Stones. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Circus Maximus – History and facts of the largest circus in Rome” — Rome.net

WTF Fun Fact 12649 – A Considerate Thief

A thief in Texas stole a lawnmower, but the strangest act caught on camera wasn’t the theft itself but rather the footage of him mowing the victim’s lawn before he took off with the equipment.

He mowed both the front and the back!

The Port Arthur Police Department said Marcus Hubbard stole the lawnmower on April 1, but the theft was no joke. Hubbard eventually did make off with the mower. But police arrived on the scene as he was making off with the stolen property and he abandoned it during his attempted escape.

They’re still looking for Hubbard at this point, so secure your mowers if you live in the area!

Check out the unexpected video below:

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Man steals lawnmower, cuts victim’s grass, police say” — WRIC News

WTF Fun Fact 12648 – When Einstein Turned Down a Presidency

Albert Einstein was asked to be president of Israel in 1952. He was considered to be the greatest Jew alive and offered both Israeli citizenship and a chance to continue his research. But he turned it down. Turns out, he just wasn’t that into people around people.

The request read:

Embassy of Israel
November 17, 1952

“Dear Professor [Albert] Einstein:

The bearer of this letter is Mr. David Goitein of Jerusalem who is now serving as Minister at our Embassy in Washington. He is bringing you the question which Prime Minister Ben Gurion asked me to convey to you, namely, whether you would accept the Presidency of Israel if it were offered you by a vote of the Knesset. Acceptance would entail moving to Israel and taking its citizenship. The Prime Minister assures me that in such circumstances complete facility and freedom to pursue your great scientific work would be afforded by a government and people who are fully conscious of the supreme significance of your labors.

Mr. Goitein will be able to give you any information that you may desire on the implications of the Prime Minister’s question.

Whatever your inclination or decision may be, I should be deeply grateful for an opportunity to speak with you again within the next day or two at any place convenient for you. I understand the anxieties and doubts which you expressed to me this evening. On the other hand, whatever your answer, I am anxious for you to feel that the Prime Minister’s question embodies the deepest respect which the Jewish people can repose in any of its sons. To this element of personal regard, we add the sentiment that Israel is a small State in its physical dimensions, but can rise to the level of greatness in the measure that it exemplifies the most elevated spiritual and intellectual traditions which the Jewish people has established through its best minds and hearts both in antiquity and in modern times. Our first President, as you know, taught us to see our destiny in these great perspectives, as you yourself have often exhorted us to do.

Therefore, whatever your response to this question, I hope that you will think generously of those who have asked it, and will commend the high purposes and motives which prompted them to think of you at this solemn hour in our people’s history.

With cordial wishes,
Abba Eban“

In his reply he wrote:

“I am deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel [to serve as President], and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it. All my life I have dealt with objective matters, hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions. For these reasons alone I should be unsuited to fulfill the duties of that high office, even if advancing age was not making increasing inroads on my strength. I am the more distressed over these circumstances because my relationship to the Jewish people has become my strongest human bond, ever since I became fully aware of our precarious situation among the nations of the world.”

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Offering the Presidency of Israel to Albert Einstein” — Virtual Jewish Library

WTF Fun Fact 12647 – The Voynich Manuscript

The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious book written in the early 15th century written in a language no one knows or can trace. Yet it’s 250-pages long.

The document resides in Yale University library’s special collections. It contains a mix of Latin and Arabic letters, and no one has ever been able to decipher it, though many have tried.

Recently, a German Egyptologist claims to have deciphered it, though it’s not the first time someone has made the claim.

According to The Art Newspaper:

“The actual translation of the Voynich-book will need a couple of years of work, even if specialists in the Hebrew language, who are well versed in medieval Hebrew and the terminology of botanical and medical texts, take over the analysis,” Hannig writes. “The character of the script, the pronunciation which one needs to get used to, the peculiarity and the vocabulary of the period will cause a lot of trouble even to a native speaker of [Hebrew]. But it will take a few years to translate, and there are few ways to know if the method he’s using is correct”, the German scholar said.

What we do know about the book is that it contains 240 pages of “bear illustrations of plants, floating heads, signs of the zodiac, fantastic creatures (including dragons), castles, women bathing, and astronomical symbols. Scholars have used these illustrations to organize the manuscript’s content into six major sections: botanical, astronomical and astrological, biological, cosmological, pharmaceutical, and recipes. However, without the ability to read the text, its true content has remained elusive. Even the name of the manuscript’s author remains a mystery.”

The Voynich Manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, who discovered the mysterious book in 1912. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Has Yale’s mysterious Voynich Manuscript finally been deciphered?” — The Art Newspaper

WTF Fun Fact 12646 – The Power of the Musical Birthday Card

Ok, to be fair, there wasn’t much computing power available to the Allied forces during WWII. But it’s really more about something called Moore’s Law.

According to Michio Kaku’s book Physics of the Future:

“Moore’s law simply says that computer power doubles every eighteen months. First stated in 1965 by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of the Intel Corporation, this simple law has helped to revolutionize the world economy, generated fabulous new wealth, and irreversibly altered our way of life. When you plot the plunging price of computer chips and their rapid advancements in speed, processing power, and memory, you find a remarkably straight line going back fifty years. (This is plotted on a logarithmic curve. In fact, if you extend the graph, so that it includes vacuum tube technology and even mechanical hand-crank adding machines, the line can be extended over 100 years into the past.)

Exponential growth is often hard to grasp, since our minds think linearly. It often starts deceptively slowly. It is so gradual that you sometimes cannot experience the change at all. But over decades, it can completely alter everything around us.

According to Moore’s Law, every Christmas your computer games are almost twice as powerful (in terms of memory and processing speed) as they were the previous year. Furthermore, as the years pass, this incremental gain becomes truly monumental. For example, when you receive a birthday card in the mail, it often has a chip which sings “Happy Birthday” to you. Remarkably, that chip has more computer power than all the Allied Forces of 1945. Hitler, Churchill, or Roosevelt might have killed to get that chip. But what do we do with it?  After the birthday, we throw the card and chip away.  Today, your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969 when it sent two astronauts to the moon. Video games, which consume enormous amounts of computer power to simulate 3D situations, use more computer power than main frame computers of the previous decade. The Sony Playstation of today, which costs $300, has the power of a military supercomputer of 1997, which cost millions of dollars.“

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Your cell phone has more computing power than NASA circa 1969” — Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

WTF Fun Facts 12645 – The Legacy of Hanns Scharff

We don’t think of any interrogators as being friendly, much less those used by the Nazis during WWII. But Prussian-born Hanns Scharff became a master interrogator by using an overwhelmingly successful technique that involved using kindness to win the trust of the soldiers he was asked to get information from.

Scharff was due to be sent to the front lines, but shortly before it happened, the Nazis decided that he would be an asset in interrogation because he knew English. He interrogated over 500 prisoners during his service and only failed a couple of dozen times.

Scharff became known internationally, and because he wasn’t considered a war criminal, he wasn’t tried at Nuremberg. In fact, he was able to come to the US in 1948 instead if he agreed to interrogate and testify at the trial of the Air Force pilot Martin J. Monti, who defected to Germany in 1944 and became a Nazi propagandist.

Once in the US, Scharff even met up with some of the men he interrogated in German prisons!

Eventually, Scharff was able to return to his original career as an artist, and more specifically, a mosaic artist and furniture maker. His mosaics can be found in countless government buildings, hotels, colleges, and even Disney World. He created the mosaic at Cinderella’s castle as well as ramps into Epcot Center.

He died in 1992, but his “Scharff Technique” is still taught in the US military. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Hanns Scharff; Creator of L.A., State Capitol Mosaics” — LA Times

WTF Fun Fact 12644 – The Parrot Who Saved a Dead Language

German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt embarked on a 5-year exploration of North and South America in 1799. His trip was successful, and when he returned home in 1804, he had an extensive collection of plant and animal specimens

Humboldt also took voluminous notes, including some interesting jottings from a trip through Venezuela in 1800 where he spent some time chatting with a local parrot.

According to Mental Floss:

“According to legend, during his exploration of the Orinoco River, Humboldt met and stayed with a local indigenous Carib tribe near the isolated village of Maypures. The tribe, so the story goes, had a number of tame parrots kept in cages around the village, many of which had been taught to speak—although one, Humboldt noted, sounded noticeably different from the rest. When he asked the locals why this parrot sounded so unusual, he was told that it had belonged to a neighboring tribe, who had been the Caribs’ enemies.”

In other words, the parrot was speaking a different language than the rest. And sadly, the parrot was the only speaker left. The rest of the tribe had been wiped out, and not a single native speaker remained. Just the parrot. It was the last vestige of their linguistic culture.

Being the keen observer and recorder, Humboldt wrote down what the parrot sounded like, transcribing the sounds phonetically and coming out with about 40 words from the parrot’s (and the lost tribe’s) vocabulary.

We’ll never know how accurate the language is, but the notebook holds the last of what we have.

Interestingly, in 1997, an artist taught two more parrots to speak the language based on Humboldt’s notebook.

Some think the parrot’s story is mere legend, but Humboldt recounted his trip down the Orinoco river in his Equinoctial Regions of America in great detail and accurately described the Atures tribe that the parrot spoke the language of. – WTF fun facts

Source: “The Parrot That Kept A Language Alive” — Mental Floss