WTF Fun Fact 12587 – Discount Turns to Debt

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In what may be one of the most expensive typos in history, in April of 2006, Alitalia had the price of their business class flight from Toronto to Cyprus (an island nation in the Mediterranean) deeply discounted. The regular cost was $3,900, but a glitch resulted in the price losing two zeros. Tickets were sold for just $39 – for a 12-15 hour flight! (And that’s just in Canadian dollars – it was $33 in US dollars. Then again, once you add taxes and fees, it was closer to $200.)

Word spread quickly on the website FlyerTalk before Alitalia could make any changes and while they didn’t release the specifics, guesses as to the number of tickets sold range from hundreds to over 2000.

The price was active for around 12 hours, and you better believe that Alitalia tried not to honor the price at first. And purchasers had the angry reaction you’d imagine. In fact, things got so heated that Alitalia ended up honoring the tickets that were officially confirmed. (People who bought through Orbitz and other brokers were largely out of luck.)

The lucky buyers who were given ticket confirmation numbers upon purchase took their trips, costing Alitalia around $7 million.

CBC News interviewed one of the lucky travelers shortly afterward, Donnie Bowers of New Haven. “I didn’t even know where Cyprus was,” he said.”I looked at the regular price, and I thought, wow, this is something to really get involved in.”

They reported that 509 people made purchases, though other sources report higher numbers.

“Why not roll the dice and see what happens?” Bowers said as he prepared for his October 2006 trip. – WTF fun facts

Source: Flyertalk Forums, 2006

WTF Fun Fact 12586 – Using Urine to Treat Stains

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Healthy urine is 95% water, 2.5% urea, and 2.5% salts, minerals, enzymes, etc. That doesn’t necessarily make it the ideal laundry detergent, but there’s plenty of historical evidence that it was used as such going all the way back to ancient Rome.

The key here is urea, which decays into ammonia. You’ll find ammonia in many household cleaners because it can cut through dirt and grease.

Even after the invention of laundry soap, some people preferred to use urine for tough stains. (Our question remains: what do you use to get out the urine stains and smell?!)

Hey, it’s free and never in short supply, so we can see why you might want to soak a particularly terrible grease stain every now and then when you had no other choice. And one would need to use stale urine to get the correct chemical reaction, so perhaps that’s easier to rinse out? We’re not sure; we’ve never tried.

Urine also had other uses back in the day – disinfecting wounds and softening leather, for example. But there’s really no reason to try this at home to see how it works.

Now, for those who continue to claim that Romans used it for whitening their teeth, we’d like to see some more evidence. The only citation for this “fact” is a poem by Catullus, famous for writing scandalous and filthy poems (and who hardly makes a factual claim).

– WTF fun facts

Source: “From Gunpowder to Teeth Whitener: The Science Behind Historic Uses of Urine” — Smithsonian Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 12585 – Ronald Wayne Sells Apple

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We’ve all heard of Apple co-founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. But do you remember the third co-founder, Ronald Wayne?

The trio founded Apple Computer Company (now Apple, Inc) in 1976. But while Wozniak and Jobs each owned 45% of the company, Wayne had 10%, which would make him the tie-breaker in any disagreements between the two Steves.

He was the administrative brains among the computer geeks. And like any good businessman, he wanted to mitigate his risks.

Funny enough, Wayne’s first business sold slot machines (and ran out of luck, going into debt that he had to pay off personally).

The three met when they all worked at Atari, and Wayne invited Wozniak and Jobs to his house to discuss the future of computers. Jobs suggested they start a business, with Wayne (who was the 41-year-old “elder”) at the time acting as “the adult in the room.”

Wayne drafted the partnership agreement and designed Apple’s first logo (which was replaced the following year). But he got cold feet as he considered the future of the business in light of his past failure and the resulting debt.

Legally, all partners in a company are responsible for its debt, so when Jobs made a purchase order with a $15,000 loan, Wayne started to get cold feet. The vendor Jobs purchased from wasn’t known for being speedy with their deliveries, and Wayne saw warning signs.

His job at Apple also wasn’t his passion – he enjoyed engineering and his slot machine designs. So he did what any intelligent businessman might do – he moved on to greener pastures. Well, at least they seemed greener at the time.

Renouncing his 10% of the ownership after just 12 days (though Wozniak’s account is that it took a few months), Wayne sold his shares back for $800.

Just for comparison, in 2011, the contract signed by all 3 men in 1976 was sold at auction for $1.6 million. (Oh, and Wayne sold that as well – in the 1990s he gave it up for $500 before he knew what it might be worth someday.)

Wayne says that he made the best decision he could with the information he had at the time, which is respectable. And while he retired to a trailer park to collect stamps and play penny slots, he insists he doesn’t regret the decision.

Had he stayed with the company, his life would have certainly been different. Those shares would be worth a mind-boggling $300 BILLION today. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Apple just hit a $1 trillion market cap—here’s why its little-known third co-founder sold his 10% stake for $800” — CNBC

WTF Fun Facts 12584 – Largo di Torre Argentina

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Largo di Torre Argentina is a popular Roman tourist destination. It holds a great deal of ancient history, but that’s not why everyone goes. Many people come to see the cats. There are dozens of them climbing and napping on the ancient ruins, and while no one is supposed to feed them, you can always find cans of cat food nearby.

The location is crumbling at an alarming rate, so Rome has recently made some renovations. After all, it does hold the site of Julius Caesar’s murder by members of the Roman Senate.

Luxury fashion house Bvlgari will pay around $1.1 million to clean the ruins and build walkways through the site. Before this, people could only look down into the ruins from the street. We’re not sure how the cats feel about all this, but we will guess “cranky.” Many are not fond of people.

You might wonder how such an important historical location ended up in such disrepair in the first place, but that’s the price of expanding a city. The site was largely lost until Italian dictator Benito Mussolini set out to unearth ancient Rome and tie his dictatorship into the lore of the Roman Empire as part of a propaganda effort. They found four temples and part of the Theater of Pompey, the site of the Roman senate.

During World War II, the Largo di Torre Argentina became neglected once again, and Rome lacked the funding to restore it until recently.

And don’t worry about the cats – the feline colony is protected by the laws of the State and the Municipality. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Site Where Julius Caesar Was Stabbed Will Finally Open to the Public” — Smithsonian Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 12583 – How California Got Its Name

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California is named after a 16th-century Black Queen of an island of women. The only catch is that she’s fictional.

Real or not, she’s still the inspiration behind the state’s name.

Queen Calafia was a character in Castillian author Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Las Sergas de Esplandián, an early 16th-century adventure-romance novel. A Black warrior queen, Calafia ruled a mythical island called California inhabited only by Black women.

Calafia was also a fierce queen with quite an arsenal – armor made of fish bones, weapons made of gold, and an army of griffins (because, hey, why not?).

Needless to say, many people are surprised by this origin story. At the very least, it was rare for a man during the Renaissance to write in such a triumphant way about a woman, much less a Black woman. There is no sense of racial inferiority (which was a common trope) in her story.

So how did an American state come to be named after a mythical character?

Well, the novel was so famous in Spain that when conquistadors arrived on the tip of what is now the Baja Peninsula, they thought they had found the mythical island of California. So that’s what they called the whole area.

And while the name stuck, Calafia has been largely forgotten until recently.

An excerpt from the book reads:

“Now I wish you to know about the strangest thing ever found anywhere in written texts or in human memory. […] I tell you that on the right-hand side of the Indies there was an island called California, which was very close to the region of the Earthly Paradise. This island was inhabited by black women, and there were no males among them at all, for their life style was similar to that of the Amazons. The island was made up of the wildest cliffs and the sharpest precipices found anywhere in the world. These women had energetic bodies and courageous, ardent hearts, and they were very strong. Their armor was made entirely out of gold—which was the only metal found on the island—as were the trappings on the fierce beasts that they rode once they were tamed. They lived in very well-designed caves. They had many ships they used to sail forth on their raiding expeditions and in which they carried away the men they seized and whom they killed in a way about which you will soon hear. On occasion, they kept the peace with their male opponents, and the females and the males mixed with each other with complete safety, and they had carnal relations, from which unions it follows that many of the women became pregnant. If they bore a female, they kept her, but if they bore a male, he was immediately killed. The reason for this, inasmuch as it is known, is that, according to their thinking, they were set on reducing the number of males to so small a group that the Amazons could easily rule over them and all their lands; therefore, they kept only those few men whom they realized they needed for their race not to die out.“

–WTF fun facts

Source: “Our Origin Story’: Queen Calafia Returns to California in New Theatre Production” — KQED

WTF Fun Fact 12582 – Blessing a Sneeze

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When someone sneezes, it seems rude not to acknowledge it in some way. In fact, saying “bless you” or “God bless you” has become a part of modern etiquette.

But where did this come from?

Most people have been told that the habit comes from the belief that the soul momentarily separates from the body during a sneeze. Therefore, “bless you” is a way of sending your best wishes their way in case the soul doesn’t come back. Some also believe that blessing the soul prevents it from being snatched up by evil spirits while it was disconnected from the body during a sneeze.

But it’s likely that the origin of “God bless you” goes back to 590 AD when a plague was ravaging Europe. Sneezing was often the first sign that someone was ill (and while they didn’t realize it at the time, it was also the way the plague spread). In order to bless the would of those who may get deathly ill, Pope Gregory the Great commanded that sneezing people be given a quick blessing.

While “God bless you” and “bless you” go back to the 6th century, the acknowledgment of a sneeze goes back even further – by hundreds of years. Roman author Pliny the Elder wrote in his 77 AD Natural History:

“Why is it that we salute a person when he sneezes, an observation which Tiberius Caesar, they say, the most unsociable of men, as we all know, used to exact, when riding in his chariot even?”

The superstition predates the pope, but Pliny offers no explanation as to why the sneeze was acknowledged.

Of course, there are secular ways of acknowledging a sneeze as well. Those who don’t believe in disembodied souls can keep it polite with a quick “gesundheit.”

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Why We Feel Compelled to Say ‘Bless You’ When Someone Sneezes” — The New York Times

WTF Fun Fact 12581 – The Shrinking Human Brain

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All jokes about human intelligence these days aside, it’s true that humans have smaller brains than ever before.

The human brain has been shrinking in size for tens of thousands of years (so we can’t blame video games or reality TV or politics). According to anthropologists, the brain volume of Homo sapiens has decreased by about 10% over the last 40,000 years.

We’re used to hearing about the increasing size of brains as humans evolved, but that is a trend that goes back millions of years in human evolution.

And to be fair, our brains may be smaller today, but they are still about 3x bigger than other primates based on body weight.

Anthropologists estimate the brain sizes of our ancestors by measuring the amount of room in the skull. The oldest ancestors of humans had brains the size of a modern chimp’s. The skull cavity could hold about 1.5 cups (to put it in quantities that are easier to picture).

Then, between 2 and 4 million years ago, craniums (and therefore brains) got bigger, distinguishing humans from other primate ancestors. They could hold about 2 cups.

If you go back “just” 1 million years (to our ancestors Homo erectus), their brains could hold 4 cups. And Neanderthals and Homo sapiens (going back about 130,000 years) had craniums that could hold 6 cups.

So if you go back far enough, you see that brain size did increase, up to a point. After that, they began shrinking in size.

Today, the average human brain holds around 5.7 cups. But why? We can only make assumptions.

For starters, human bodies got smaller once the Ice Age was over, and so did skulls and brains.

But Discover Magazine claims that the most convincing hypothesis comes from anthropologist Brian Hare, which he calls “survival of the friendliest.”

This hypothesizes that Stone Age societies valued different, more domestic traits – specifically, ones that made humans more social. Social behavior is regulated by hormones that also affect brain and body size. So when we selected for these behaviors (by breeding with more social humans), we also chose genes that made bodies and brains smaller.

A reduction in skull and brain size isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It may be that we needed less brain volume as we began to live in collectives, cooperate, and rely on our communities. In other words, now we share the burden of survival with others, so our brains don’t have to hold every element of survival. – WTF fun facts

Source: “The Human Brain Has been Getting Smaller Since the Stone Age” — Discover

WTF Fun Fact 12580 – African Elephant Poop

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Elephants are the largest land mammals in the world. So it’s logical to believe that they would do everything in a big way. We just didn’t realize HOW big.

Looking at the facts, it makes sense that an adult African elephant could produce over 300 pounds of poop per day. Males can grow up to 13 feet high and weigh 7 tons (that’s 14,000 pounds!). Females weigh about half of that.

It’s no surprise that they produce so much poop, considering how much they eat and how their digestive systems work. African elephants eat about 4-7% of their body weight in grasses, herbs, fruit, plants, and trees each day. And that vegetarian diet must be doing something right because they can live to be around 70 years old.

Of course, that same diet is also hard to process, so most of it comes out in their waste products. The rest is absorbed for nutrients while they sleep.

And sometimes, those elephants need those calories when they’re on the move – they can walk up to 120 miles a day (but their average is closer to 15 miles). If necessary, they can also use that energy to run. In fact, an elephant can run much faster than a human, reaching speeds of 40mph!

But back to the fact at hand. Elephants produce about 300 pounds of dung per day. So much that 1) we’re glad we don’t have to clean it up, and 2) some animals (such as dung beetles and specific monkey species) have evolved to eat this feces. The latter makes sense since much of the food is not digested and would still contain some nutrients.

 – WTF fun facts

Source: “African Elephant Facts” — Elephants for Africa

WTF Fun Fact 12579 – Viruses Aren’t Living Things

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There’s really not that much disagreement in the scientific community – in fact, what constitutes being “alive” is more of a philosophical question. But at some point, it’s both helpful and fascinating to think about what really counts as “being alive.”

In many ways, viruses simply don’t make the cut, even though we talk about them as if they were alive. But that’s because we tend to use metaphors of living things to describe them.

Why not? Well, here are a few reasons:
– They cannot carry out any metabolic processes on their own (generally the definition of being alive)
– They cannot reproduce on their own, only replicate within a host cell.
– They don’t have ribosomes (in fact, they don’t even have cells)
– They cannot produce energy or control the environment in which they exist (only replicate in it).
– They cannot independently form proteins from messenger RNA
– They’re just so darn small (which, to be fair, is not a big part of the argument but something to consider).

In the end, they are just a jumble of protein and RNA that needs a spark of life from somewhere else to do anything at all.

Of course, there are some arguments to the contrary. Those who believe viruses should be considered living things point out the following:
– They have genomes
– They can evolve
– Under the right conditions, they do have the ability to reproduce (even if it’s not on their own)

So perhaps viruses are in between somewhere, only being alive when they can reproduce. That’s something to consider, but only for fun really, since the answer won’t help us solve our viral issues. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Are Viruses Alive?” — The University of Texas at Austin Biodiversity Center