Book of Random

Fact Check

Did you know that...

1. High Heels were originally men's shoes - Around the 10th century, some enterprising soul in a horse-riding culture figured out that your foot would stay more firmly in the stirrups if your shoe had a bit of a raised heel. The innovation spread quickly, and soon whole armies—of men—rode into battle wearing pumps. Soon both men and women of means wore heels until they ultimately fell out of fashion for men.

2. Wearable eyeglasses have been around since 1284 - Back then people had to lift a piece of glass the size of a mirror to your face in order to see properly. Then some enterprising folks in Italy shrank the glass and heavy frames enough that they could finally be worn on the nose. later Spanish eyeglass makers came up with the idea of attaching ribbons to the frame so that the glasses could remain on the wearer's face. Eventually in the 1700s, these ribbons were replaced with the "arms" that today's glasses have, allowing them to rest comfortably on the nose and ears.

3. Houseplants are good for people - It turns out growing greenery inside your house is not only pleasant to look at; it's also good for your physical and mental health. Studies have shown that indoor rooms with plants have up to 60 percent fewer airborne molds and bacteria. More than that, found that houseplants tend to make people more contemplative and self-reflective since they often remind people of loved ones (when given as gifts) and the beauty of nature. But make sure you get the right type of greenery like English Ivy, peace lilies, Boston ferns, and Reed and dwarf date palms which are especially good at cleaning the air and regulating humidity.

4. A smartphone could send astronauts to the moon - You probably know that the phone you carry around in your pocket is light-years ahead of the technology of five decades ago. However, it's hard to grasp just how advanced it is. In terms of processing ability, your phone is millions of times more powerful than the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) that NASA used to send astronauts to the moon in 1969. AGCs cost $3.5 million each and were the size of a car, but even just the clock function of an iPhone 6 is comparable to sending 120,000,000 simultaneous Apollo-era spacecraft to the moon and back.

5. Rice is the oldest food we still eat today - Humans have been cultivating rice plants—which are actually species of grass—for somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 years. All of our modern, domesticated rice can be traced back to a single crop in the Pearl River Valley of ancient China.

6. Dogs aren't actually colorblind - Though you may have heard the myth that dogs don't see colors, the truth is that they do, but in a more limited spectrum than humans. They can see yellow, blues, and violets very well, but have a harder time distinguishing reds, oranges, and greens. However, a decreased vision of color allows dogs to have more of the receptors that let them see well in low light and track movement.

7. The first webcam was created to check a coffee plot - Nowadays, people use FaceTime and Skype to see and chat with friends all over the world. However, webcam technology originated with a slightly less ambitious goal. In 1993, researchers at the computer science department at the University of Cambridge just hated getting up from their chairs to check the coffee pot only to find that it was empty. They wired up a system that would stream images—three per minute—from the Trojan Room where the pot was kept to the internal computer network. By the end of the year, the stream made it onto the new World Wide Web and the Trojan Room coffee pot briefly attained international fame.

8. Chocolate was used as a medicine - Native to Mesoamerica, chocolate—or the cacao bean from which it comes—wasn't discovered by Europeans until the late 1500s. Explorer Francisco Hernandez observed the Aztecs using cacao as, among other things, a medicine. When chocolate came to Western Europe soon after, the Church was suspicious of its stimulating properties, but since it could be used for medical applications, it was deemed acceptable. European doctors prescribed it for everything from fevers to indigestion to melancholy. Though these cacao mixtures were quite different from the chocolate of today, chocolate might have been banned from Europe altogether had it not been used as a medicine.

9. Your keyboard was designed to slow you down - Have you ever taken a close look at your computer's keyboard and wondered why the letters seemed to be randomly strewn across the keys? In reality, it's not random at all. This QWERTY design (named for the top left row of letters) was invented in 1872 for the typewriters of the time. Typists were getting faster than the machines they used, which would cause the typewriters to jam, so slowing them down actually saved time in the long run. There's no need for the same result now, but everybody's so used to QWERTY keyboards that they've even made the leap to smartphones.

10. Pencils are yellow because of Chinese Royalty - Pencils come in all sorts of colors, of course, but if you had to pick a "standard" pencil color, you'd probably think of a yellow-gold color. That's no accident. When pencils started to go into mass production in the 1890s, the finest available graphite (not lead) to fill them came from China. Pencil manufacturers wanted everyone to know that they used only the best Chinese graphite, so they painted their pencils yellow, the traditional Chinese color of royalty.

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