Oddities
Random
60 rabbit holes · 25 people exploring
Common starting questions
- What does blood smell like?
- Was the Max Headroom hijacker ever caught?
- Is the CD length really based on Beethoven's 9th?
- Was there ever a Sinbad genie movie?
- Was Polybius a real arcade game?
Rabbit holes
- What gives blood its smell
The searches followed blood's smell through different environments, oxygen, iron content, and possible causes of a bad smell.
Vincent · 6 sources
- the first webcam was pointed at a coffee pot
Cambridge researchers put a camera on the coffee machine in 1991 so nobody made the trip to an empty pot. It started as a 128×128 greyscale feed on the lab network, went on the web in 1993, and then people all over the world were watching a coffee pot in England. It was switched off in 2001.
Ayodele Bankole · 7 sources
- the Mechanical Turk was a person in a box
A chess-playing 'machine' that toured Europe for decades and beat Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin. A chess master hid inside. Amazon named its crowdwork service after it, which is either honest or bleak.
Wren Abernathy · 4 sources
- the NASA space pen myth is backwards
Clara Novak · 4 sources
- the theory that 297 years of the middle ages never happened
It's nonsense (astronomical records, Chinese chronology, and dendrochronology all disagree), but tracing exactly WHY it's nonsense was a great tour of how calendars work.
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources
- 28,000 rubber ducks fell into the Pacific and taught us about ocean currents
A container of bath toys went overboard in 1992. Oceanographers tracked them for years as they washed up in Alaska, Hawaii, South America, and supposedly some made it into the Atlantic.
Inês Carvalho · 5 sources
- tunguska flattened 80 million trees and left no crater
An object exploded in the air over Siberia in 1908 and flattened about 2,000 km² of forest. No crater because it never hit the ground. Chelyabinsk in 2013 was the same thing but smaller, and on dashcams.
Theo Martin · 4 sources
- pineapples were rented out as status symbols
In 18th century Britain a pineapple could cost a fortune, so people rented them to display at parties. There's a building in Scotland with a giant stone pineapple on top.
moth · 4 sources
- Disney traded a sportscaster to get back a lost rabbit
Walt Disney lost Oswald, his first big character, in a contract dispute in 1928 and made Mickey in response. In 2006 Disney got him back from NBCUniversal as part of the deal that let Al Michaels leave ABC/ESPN for NBC's Sunday Night Football. Lost Oswald shorts keep turning up too: one in the BFI archive in 2015, one with a collector in Japan.
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources
- the Voynich manuscript and other books nobody can read
Every few years someone announces they've cracked it and it never holds up. The vellum is from the early 1400s. The plants in it don't match any real plants.
Yuki Tanabe · 5 sources
- the Hum: a low noise some people hear everywhere
Small percentage of people in places like Taos and Bristol report a constant low droning sound that others can't hear. Explanations range from industrial noise to spontaneous otoacoustic emissions. Nobody's fully pinned it down.
moth · 5 sources
- birds are dinosaurs, a thread
Not 'descended from'. Birds ARE dinosaurs, in the same way we're mammals. Velociraptor had feathers and was the size of a turkey.
Clara Novak · 6 sources
- the deepest hole humans ever dug is 23 cm wide
12,262 m deep. They stopped because rock at 180°C was behaving more like plastic. The 'screams from hell' story was a 1989 hoax that spread through Christian broadcasting.
Anya Petrova · 4 sources
- Nobody ever caught the Max Headroom hijackers
Yuki Tanabe · 7 sources
- in 1876 it rained meat in Kentucky
Leading theory: a flock of vultures vomited mid-flight (they do that to lighten up when startled). Two local men tasted it and said it was venison or mutton.
Yuki Tanabe · 3 sources
- The Dancing Plague of 1518
Hundreds of people in Strasbourg danced for days. The authorities' fix was to build a stage and hire musicians so they could dance it out, which made it worse.
Yuki Tanabe · 5 sources
- the 2.5 km iron ore train across the Sahara
One of the longest and heaviest trains in the world, and people ride on top of the ore for free. Saw a travel video and couldn't stop thinking about it.
Yuki Tanabe · 4 sources
- a hobbyist found the 'einstein' tile
David Smith, a retired print technician who liked playing with shapes, found the 'hat' in late 2022 and got in touch with mathematicians. A few months later came the 'spectre', which doesn't even need mirror images of itself. 'Einstein' here is German for 'one stone'.
Kate Lindqvist · 5 sources
- is a CD 74 minutes long because of Beethoven's 9th?
Rosa Delacroix · 5 sources
- Shazaam: the 90s genie movie that never existed
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources
- the Hampster Dance got about 800 visits in its first year and a half
A Canadian art student made it on GeoCities in 1997 as part of a contest with her friend and sister over who could get the most traffic. Barely anyone visited until early 1999, when it suddenly spread by email and got tens of thousands of views in days.
Lou Tremblay · 6 sources
- Polybius, the arcade game that never existed
Legend: a mysterious arcade machine in Portland in 1981 that gave kids nightmares and amnesia, and men in black collected data from it. Reality: no evidence any of it existed. It probably borrows from real 1981 Portland stuff, like two people getting sick at an arcade and the FBI raiding arcades over gambling machines.
Ludovica Ferri · 6 sources
- In a WWII prison camp, cigarettes became money and the economy got inflation
Radford's paper reads like a tiny economics textbook. Red Cross parcels arrive, people trade, prices emerge, middlemen show up, and when the parcels stop coming everything deflates.
moth · 5 sources
- hidden mothers in Victorian baby photos
Babies had to stay still for the exposure, so the mother would sit behind them draped in fabric, pretending to be a chair. The photos look like a ghost is holding the kid.
Jade Fontaine · 5 sources
- the Wilhelm scream
Ben Burtt found it in a studio sound library and slipped it into Star Wars, then kept using it. Now sound designers hide it everywhere as an in-joke. Once you know it you will hear it in roughly every third action movie.
Rosa Delacroix · 6 sources
- were carrots made orange for the Dutch royal family?
Yuki Tanabe · 3 sources
- a UK game shop's terms of service once claimed customers' immortal souls
April Fools 2010: Gamestation added a clause to its online checkout terms granting it 'your immortal soul.' The point was that nobody reads these, and it worked.
Noor Rahman · 6 sources
- Pompeii's graffiti is just people being people
Election ads, insults, love notes, 'I came here and had bread', and a whole lot of people writing their names on walls. Two thousand years and absolutely nothing has changed.
moth · 5 sources
- some old camera lenses are radioactive
Some mid-century lenses used thorium oxide in the glass for a high refractive index without much dispersion. Over decades the radiation turns the glass yellow-brown. Apparently leaving the lens under a UV lamp for a while clears most of it up.
Fern Achterberg · 5 sources
- the second-biggest Wikipedia is in Cebuano, and a bot wrote most of it
moth · 6 sources
- a printer threw his entire typeface into the Thames so nobody else could use it
After falling out with Emery Walker, Cobden-Sanderson spent months in 1916 and 1917 walking to Hammersmith Bridge at night and dropping the type, the punches and the matrices into the river, a bit at a time.
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources
- everything keeps evolving into crabs
It's real! At least five separate times, crustaceans that weren't crabs ended up with a flattened crab body plan. The meme is barely an exaggeration.
Inês Carvalho · 5 sources
- Indiana almost legislated the value of pi in 1897
An amateur mathematician convinced he'd squared the circle offered his 'discovery' to the state for free. The bill passed the Indiana House unanimously. A Purdue math professor who happened to be at the statehouse that week talked the senators out of it.
Wren Abernathy · 5 sources
- Slender Man started as a Something Awful photoshop thread
June 2009, someone on the Something Awful forums posted two edited photos of kids with a tall, faceless figure in a suit in the background. That's the whole origin. Everything after that was other people adding to it, until it started behaving like an old legend with a known author.
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources
- the Toynbee tiles
Hundreds of linoleum tiles embedded in asphalt across US and South American cities, all saying roughly 'TOYNBEE IDEA IN MOVIE 2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER'. Pressed into the road by traffic.
Yuki Tanabe · 5 sources
- the six-wheeled F1 car won a race
Four tiny 10-inch front wheels, meant to sit behind the front wing and cut drag. Tyrrell finished 1-2 with it in Sweden in 1976. It faded partly because Goodyear wasn't really developing tyres that small for one team, and later the rules just said four wheels.
moth · 5 sources
- MissingNo. is the game reading your name as a Pokémon
Priya Natarajan · 5 sources
- the zombie ant fungus is real and somehow worse than the game
It makes infected ants climb to a specific height, bite onto the underside of a leaf at a specific time of day, and die there, and then a stalk grows out of the head to rain spores on the ants below.
Noor Rahman · 4 sources
- gallium melts in your hand and wrecks aluminum
Melts at about 30°C, so it turns liquid on your palm. Put a drop on aluminum and it seeps along the grain boundaries until the aluminum crumbles. Also: gallium was one of Mendeleev's predicted elements, 'eka-aluminium'. When its discoverer published a density, Mendeleev wrote to say it was off. It was remeasured and Mendeleev was right.
Yuki Tanabe · 5 sources
- B.F. Skinner tried to make pigeons steer missiles
WWII project: pigeons in the nose cone, trained to peck at an image of the target to steer. It apparently worked in tests and was cancelled anyway. Later he showed pigeons fed at random intervals develop odd ritual behaviors, which he called superstition.
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources
- the 'goldfish attention span' stat doesn't come from anywhere
Everyone cites the '8 seconds, less than a goldfish' line from a 2015 Microsoft Canada marketing report. The report credited a statistics website, and when BBC's More or Less went looking they couldn't find any study behind it. There's no single attention span number anyway, it depends on the task.
Inês Carvalho · 5 sources
- why I keep seeing faces in electrical outlets
Started on r/Pareidolia, ended on why the brain has a region that's so into faces. The usual explanation is that a false alarm costs nothing and missing a real face costs a lot, so the detector is tuned to fire easily.
Tess Quinlan · 5 sources
- Nintendo started in 1889 making playing cards
Kyoto, 1889, hanafuda cards. In the 60s it tried running a taxi company and selling instant rice, got close to going under, and was rescued by an extending grabber toy that one of its maintenance engineers had built for fun.
Noor Rahman · 6 sources
- Big Ben is adjusted with old pennies
Stacking a penny on the pendulum changes its effective length and speeds the clock up by about 0.4 seconds a day.
Alistair Grant · 4 sources
- surströmming cans bulge because the fish is still fermenting
Baltic herring fermented with just enough salt to stop it rotting, then canned while it's still fermenting, so the cans swell over the months. You open it well away from the table, ideally punctured underwater in a bucket. In 2006 several big airlines banned it, calling the bulging cans potentially explosive.
Rob Fitzgerald · 5 sources
- in 1752 Britain skipped 11 days
September 2 was followed by September 14. The 'give us our eleven days' riots are probably a myth, partly traced to a Hogarth painting.
Alistair Grant · 4 sources
- why bananas are bad luck on boats
A bunch of theories: fast banana ships meant no fishing en route, spiders hiding in bunches, fermenting fruit giving off fumes in the hold. Fishermen in Hawaii and Florida still take it seriously.
Clara Novak · 3 sources
- The Gimli Glider: a 767 that ran out of fuel because of a units mistake
The captain happened to be an experienced glider pilot, and the first officer happened to have served at Gimli. Neither of those things should have been necessary.
Carlos Mendoza · 5 sources
- daylight saving was proposed by a bug collector
Franklin's 'proposal' was a joke essay about Parisians wasting candles. The actual first proposal was a New Zealand entomologist in 1895.
Yuki Tanabe · 4 sources
- Does hot water freeze faster than cold?
Haruto Sato · 4 sources
- ball lightning was basically folklore until someone accidentally filmed one
Centuries of eyewitness reports, glowing spheres floating through rooms, and almost no instrument data. The one good measurement is a spectrum recorded by chance in 2012 by researchers studying ordinary lightning in western China. It showed silicon, iron and calcium, which fits the idea that it's vaporized soil burning. Still no consensus.
Dev Malhotra · 5 sources
- the Mulsanne Straight got chicanes because cars were hitting 400 km/h
In 1988 a WM Peugeot was clocked at 405 km/h on the Mulsanne. Two chicanes went in for 1990, and nobody has come near 400 there since.
Gabriel Souza · 6 sources
- the goats that ate Kahoʻolawe, and other islands overrun by feral animals
Started with Kahoʻolawe's goats and ended up reading about every island where a ship left goats or rabbits and they ate everything.
Inês Carvalho · 4 sources
- Australia lost a war to emus
1932. Soldiers with machine guns vs. ~20,000 emus eating wheat crops. The emus won. The commanding officer reportedly compared them to tanks.
Inês Carvalho · 4 sources
- Ian Fleming named a Bond villain after a brutalist architect
Fleming supposedly disliked Goldfinger's modernist houses in Hampstead. Goldfinger was not amused. Trellick Tower went from 'tower of terror' to listed building with expensive flats.
Jess Wong · 5 sources
- why junk email is called spam
The name is from the Monty Python sketch where Vikings drown out everything by singing 'spam' over and over. The first one was a DEC ad in 1978, and the first giant Usenet one was two lawyers advertising green card lottery services in 1994.
Ayodele Bankole · 5 sources
- On Yap, money is a giant stone that never moves
Some of the stones are too big to move, so ownership just changes when everyone agrees who owns it now. There's even a story of one that sank on the trip back and still counted, because everyone knew it was down there.
Tess Quinlan · 6 sources
- nobody has ever seen eels mate (and Freud tried)
Every European eel is born somewhere in the Sargasso Sea and swims thousands of km to rivers in Europe, then back to spawn and die. We have never directly observed them spawning in the wild.
Inês Carvalho · 6 sources
- the great molasses flood
1919: a tank of 8.7 million liters of molasses burst in Boston and a wave of it moved through the streets. 21 people died. Locals claimed the neighborhood smelled sweet on hot days for decades.
Yuki Tanabe · 4 sources
- hagfish slimed an entire highway in Oregon
In 2017 a truck carrying hagfish flipped on Highway 101 and the fish slimed the road and a car. A hagfish can turn a bucket of water into slime in seconds.
Yuki Tanabe · 3 sources