random facts

WTF Fun Fact 13113 – The Island in a Lake in an Island in a Lake

Vulcan Point has an interesting factoid that few pieces of land that share this distinction. It’s an island in a lake in an island in a lake in an island. These are called “recursive islands.”

How do you get an island in a Lake in an Island in a Lake?

How does this make sense?

Well, Vulcan Point is a tiny piece of land inside a crater lake on Volcano island in Lake Taal, which sits in the island of Luzon in The Philippines. Luzon is in the Batangas province. You can see it all here on Google.

Vulcan Point isn’t a tourist destination so much as it’s just a curiosity. Lake Taal is believed to have been formed by rainwater, and it was covered in vegetation until recently when the Taal Volcano erupted in 2020, and it evaporated. However, typhoon water brought back the lake, and its island is now a bit bigger (and Vulcan Point is on its peninsula).

Trust us, looking at a map will help.

Recursive islands

A recursive island is merely an island in a lake. But there are 12 other islands in lakes in islands in lakes in islands in the world. Canada has the most. Indonesia has a pair as well. The rest are in the UK and Cuba.

There’s only one island in a lake on island in a lake on an island in a lake in the world (which takes it all one step further). It’s called Manar. But its island, lake, next biggest island, etc. remain unnamed. But the main island is in Lake Yathkyed, way up in Nunavut.

We’re not sure they make the best vacation spots – though there’s little stopping you from visiting many of them – but they do make for good trivia! — WTF fun facts

Source: “Taal Volcano Main Crater Lake” — Wikipedia

WTF Fun Fact 13112 – Psycho’s Toilet Scene

The Hitchcock thriller Psycho has some memorable scenes, a few of which take place in bathrooms. But Pshcyo’s toilet scene, while not the most iconic bathroom scene, was still a pathbreaker. It was the first American movie to feature an audible toilet flush.

Why is Psycho’s toilet scene unique?

Other films had featured toilets in passing. Silent movies had featured toilets flushing (although it was extremely rare). But the film pushed the envelope on the Hays Code (a self-imposed agreement to stay away from anything morally questionable) by featuring the up-close toilet flush.

It seems silly now, of course. We all flush the toilet. But American audiences were scandalized at the time to see and hear such a seemingly private thing on screen.

Interestingly, it wasn’t Hitchcock who wanted the toilet in the movie, it was reportedly screenwriter Joseph Stefano. According to Screenrant, “Stefano was adamant in showing this to add realism to the movie but Hitchcock stated it must be needed in the script. Stefano then wrote the scene in which Marion Crane flushes evidence down the toilet.”

What gets flushed?

The self-assured Marion Crane, played by Janet Leigh, steals money from the real estate office where she works and goes on the run. Of course, there’s an ill-fated stop at the Bates Motel, but before the iconic shower scene, we get the toilet flush heard ’round the world.

After her conversation with Norman Bates, the motel owner, Marian returns to her room and makes notes about her finances. Knowing better than to leave such evidence in writing, she tears up the paper and throws it in the toilet. Getting rid of the evidence for good requires a strong flush.

Apparently, it was necessary to hear that to make it clear that the evidence she created tying her to the theft is gone.

Of course, none of that matters to her anyone once she steps into that shower. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Psycho’s Toilet Flush & 9 Other Movies With Obscure Cinematic Milestones” — Screenrant

WTF Fun Fact 13111 – The Most Common Wild Bird

You may see sparrows, cardinals, and pigeons non-stop. But the most common wild bird in the world actually lives in Africa. Now, it won’t be common for all of us to see, but it’s the most abundant wild bird, meaning there are more of these birds than any other birds.

What is the most common wild bird?

The most common wild bird in the world, in terms of its sheer abundance, is the Red-billed Quelea.

These birds live in sub-Saharan Africa (south of the Sarahan Desert). And they don’t just fly in flocks, they fly in massive hordes. In fact, if you see a group of these birds, you’re probably looking at 2 million or more in one flock.

According to the Audobon Society (cited below): “They fly in such tightly synchronized masses they can be mistaken at a distance for clouds of smoke.”

How many Red-billed Quelea are there?

It’s estimated that there are around 1.5 billion Red-billed Quelea out there. That makes them the most abundant wild bird in the world. Of course, they’re not common in North America, but if you took all the birds in the world and put them together, the number of Red-billed Quelea would dwarf the populations of most other wild birds.

The Red-billed Quelea is the size of a sparrow and is brown for the most part. Like most birds, the males are more colorful. They often have red and black feathers on their heads.

These birds eat seeds, which they crack open with their beaks. But unfortunately for farmers, they are drawn to crops like millet. And as you can imagine, having 2 million birds descend on your field for a meal can easily strip you of your income.

At times, “Single colonies can cover hundreds of acres, totaling tens of millions of birds,” according to Audobon.

Unfortunately, their tastes include cultivated crops, like millet. But the enormous growth of cereal crops in sub-Saharan Africa has likely led to the birds’ proliferation. — WTF fun facts

Source: “What Is the Most Abundant Wild Bird in the World?” — Audobon Society

WTF Fun Fact 13110 – Jonathan the Tortoise’s Birthday

Jonathan the Tortoise has seen some things. More than any of us. And that’s because the big guy just celebrated his 190th birthday!

Jonathan the Tortoise’s birthday

A while back we told you about Jonathan, and at that time, no one really seemed to know precisely how old he was since he was brought to – a sanctuary in Saint Helena, a British territory in the Atlantic Ocean off the coasts of Angola and Namibia – at an unverifiable age.

Take a look:

WTF Fun Fact 12819 – Jonathan the Tortoise

Since then, it looks like it’s been decided that Jonathan is 190 as of this year. We can’t begrudge the guy a party, so we’ll go with it.

Jonathan’s party

CBS News reports that Jonathan the tortoise’s birthday party was quite a bash when it was held in early December 2022.

“The island held an official birthday bash over the weekend, celebrating the longest-living chelonian at the island’s governor’s residence. Along with hosting broadcasts about Jonathan’s significance, the island also held a ‘main event’ in his honor on Sunday [the 4th], where people could get Jonathan stamps and other Jonathan-themed souvenirs.”

Throughout the weekend, the world’s oldest land creature was hailed as a “national treasure” and indulged in a cake made of his favorite vegetables.

According to CBS News (cited below) “Jonathan’s long life has earned him two Guinness World Records – one in 2019 for becoming the world’s oldest land animal and another this January for becoming the oldest living chelonian, a term encompassing turtles, terrapins and tortoises.”

While the sanctuary where he lives lists his birth year as 1832, Guinness believes he could be older. That’s because he wasn’t discovered until 1882, when he was already fully mature. Clearly, some significant years had already passed. We just don’t know how many.

Regardless, Jonathan has survived two World Wars and was even alive when the first telephone call was made in 1876. We feel wiser just looking at him. — WTF fun facts

Source: “World’s oldest land animal, Jonathan the tortoise, celebrates 190th birthday” — CBS News

WTF Fun Fact 13109 – The First PB&J

In the last WTF Fun Fact, we told you about the invention of sliced bread. Now, we’re here to tell you about something so delicious it actually pre-dated automatic slicers – the first PB&J, or peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Inventing sandwiches

Whether it was the Earl of Sandwich or someone else who decided to first put things between bread, some would have you believe that the PB&J is an integral part of history.

History.com (cited below) says “After English speakers adopted the word “sandwich,” they began coming up with new words and phrases to describe different types, from meaty Sloppy Joes to the layered club sandwich.”

We understand that desire to put meat and vegetables into a sandwich, but we’re still stumped on what made someone decide to create a sandwich out of what are largely considered to be two condiments.

“The first known recipe for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich appeared in 1901 in ​​The Boston Cooking School Magazine of Culinary Science & Domestic Economics. During the 1920s, companies began to mass-manufacture peanut butter in the United States, and targeted children as potential new consumers. This helped make the PB&J a common school lunch.”

Standardized in Home Ec and rose to fame via school lunches? Ok, we could have guessed that.

How the PB&J came to be

So we can date the formal sandwich itself back to 1901, but did it exist in some form before that? Well, the answer is we’re not sure, but it’s unlikely.

Smithsonian Magazine has the answer to how the PB&J came to be, and if you guess “because of vegetarians,” you are correct!

Around the late-19th century, ladies’ luncheons were popular, and tiny tea sandwiches were often served. Alongside the cucumber and cheese option was one that contained no animal products at all. In addition, “health food advocates like John Harvey Kellogg started promoting peanut products as a replacement for animal-based foods (butter included). So for a vegetarian option at these luncheons, peanut butter simply replaced regular butter.”

Peanut butter wasn’t created for mass manufacture until the 1920s. And at that point, it was marketed specifically to target children.

Smithsonian also reports that it was cookbook author Julia Davis Chandler who wrote, “some day try making little sandwiches, or bread fingers, of three very thin layers of bread and two of filling, one of peanut paste, whatever brand you prefer, and currant or crabapple jelly for the other. The combination is delicious, and so far as I know original.”

Ladies took the sandwich idea from the garden party to their children’s lunch boxes in the 1920s when they could finally get mass produced peanut butter (with hydrogenated vegetable oil and sugar to make it tasty).

And no one was happier than Skippy, the first brand to target children “as a potential new audience, and thus the association with school lunches was forged.” — WTF fun facts

Source: “Who Invented the Sandwich?” — History.com

WTF Fun Fact 13107 – Google Backrub

You may know part of the the story of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google. They met on a tour of Stanford, when Brin was showing prospective grad student Page around. While they didn’t agree on anything at first, they eventually became friends and business partners and invented Google. Except there was a step before Google – Backrub.

From Backrub to Google

According to Google’s own page on their history, the men wanted to build “a search engine that used links to determine the importance of individual pages on the World Wide Web. They called this search engine Backrub.”

So…eww. Can you imagine saying, “I don’t know, I’ll need to backrub that information?”

We don’t know the precise details about why they changed the name. But we know how the word Google came to be.

“The name was a play on the mathematical expression for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros and aptly reflected Larry and Sergey’s mission ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.'”

Google was a big deal in the academic community at first. Then it caught the eye of Silicon Valley investors in the late 90s.

“In August 1998, Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote Larry and Sergey a check for $100,000, and Google Inc. was officially born. With this investment, the newly incorporated team made the upgrade from the dorms to their first office: a garage in suburban Menlo Park, California, owned by Susan Wojcicki (employee #16 and now CEO of YouTube). Clunky desktop computers, a ping pong table, and bright blue carpet set the scene for those early days and late nights.”

Google grows

Keeping things useful but unconventional was the duos brand style. Do you remember the first Google Doodle in 1998? It was a stick figure inside the logo telling everyone the staff was off-site attending Burning Man.

How about their motto? “Don’t be evil.”

In any case, things are now a far cry from the days of Backrub. — WTF fun facts

Source: “From the garage to the Googleplex” — Google

WTF Fun Fact 13106 – Children of Identical Twins

Is your biological parent an identical twin? If so, you and your cousins might have a lot more in common than you realize. The children of identical twins are as genetically similar as a half-sibling would be.

Research on the children of identical twins

Like identical twins themselves, the children of identical twins provide researchers with great insight into how children develop. In fact, the University of Minnesota helps fun a “Children of Twins Study” to look at ” – like the twins themLike for their twin parents, there are many fascinating family relationships for the children of twins–when identical twins have children, their children are cousins but genetically as similar as half-siblings. The Children of Twins (CoT) study examines “psychopathology, psychosocial functioning, neurocognitive functioning, and brain structure and functioning in a sample of 176 substance-naïve children of twin parents…without a history of problematic substance use.”

According to their website, they are also “in the process of completing a neuroimaging assessment with the twin parents of children in the CoT study, which will yield the first (to our knowledge) comparable imaging assessment in twin parents and their children and will allow us to examine whether brain deviations associated with problematic substance use in adults are also observable in their young children prior to substance initiation.”

Twinning

Cousins whose parents are identical twins share will have 25% of their DNA in common (as opposed to 12.5%). (Full siblings share 50% of their DNA.)

In rare cases when sets of identical twins marry other sets of twins, their children are genetically full siblings. They’re called “quaternary twins” and are incredibly rare. Of course, a person’s environment and other causes of genetic mutation can change their phenotype (the expression of the genes). — WTF fun facts

Source: “Children of Twins (CoT) Study” — University of Minnesota, Family Cognitive Affective Neurodevelopment Lab

WTF Fun Fact 13105 – The Banana Curve

Have you ever looked at the way a specific food grows and been totally surprised? We’ve certainly felt that way – especially about asparagus and pineapples. Now the banana curve is blowing our minds (with how little we know about our food).

How the banana gets its curve

The reason bananas don’t grow straight and instead have a curve is so that they can retrieve sunlight. It makes sense, we just couldn’t quite picture it at first.

According to Chiquita, “Bananas go through a process called ‘negative geotropism’…What it means is that bananas grow away from the ground, instead of growing towards it, hence the ‘negative’ geotropism.”

Despite bananas being ubiquitous on grocery store shelves, they come from the rainforest (or at least places that can simulate that environment). In a place with so much foliage, bananas had to find a way to claim some sunlight for themselves since they hang downward.

Bananas evolved not to grow straight up but rather to curve in order to get around the foliage and soak up some rays.

More about banana growth

You might think that if it’s looking for the sun, a banana would evolve to grow upwards. But they’re simply too heavy to do that. Because gravity pulls them down, they develop a slight curve rather than a new growth pattern.

Not only is banana growth a fun new fact for us, but we also didn’t know they were considered a berry. Bananas may have actually been one of the first fruits. They date back about 10,000 years, although they taste much different now.

And it turns out the world loves them – we consume about 100 billion bananas globally every year. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Bananas. Not only one of the healthiest fruits but most recognizable!” — Chiquita

WTF Fun Fact 13103 – Dr. Joel Poinsett

Do you know where the poinsettia – the traditional flower of the Christmas season – got its name? We assumed it was a botanical concoction. But it was named after Dr. Joel Poinsett.

Who was Joel Poinsett?

If you’re beginning to decorate for the holidays this year, you may have picked up a few poinsettias. (And, hopefully, if you have pets, they are far out of reach!) The flowers are pretty long-lasting, so if you care for them, you can pick one up the day before Thanksgiving, and it may last all the way through New Year’s Eve!

The flowers – particularly the red ones – are a very common winter season decoration. And that’s been the case for many years thanks to Joel Poinsett.

Dr. Joel Poinsett was the United States Secretary of War in 1838. According to Smithsonian Magazine (cited below),“…he presided over the United States Exploring Expedition, the first circumnavigation of the globe sponsored by the United States.” In choosing the team of explorers, he insist many scientists be included.

He got the job, in part, because he himself was a botanist. And when he served as the first U.S. minister to Mexico, he found the flower growing there. Locals told him it was once used by the Aztecs as both a red dye and a medicine to help reduce fevers.

Eventually, Poinsett became a founding member of the National Institution for the Promotion of Science when it was formed in 1840. The goal of the organization was to promote the study of natural history and other sciences.

The name “poinsettia”

Poinsett was a physician, diplomat, botanist, and more in a time when a man could be all of those things (partly because they didn’t require nearly as much formal training as they do now). But that’s to say that he has a lot more in his background than just a flower.

Upon finding the flower called the Flor de Nochebuena (or Christmas Eve flower) in Mexico, he sent a specimen back to the U.S. That’s when it became known as a poinsettia in his honor. But it had long been a Christmas flower. — WTF fun facts

Source: “How Joel Poinsett, the Namesake for the Poinsettia, Played a Role in Creating the Smithsonian” — Smithsonian Magazine