12 Trivia Tidbits for Thursday, April 11, 2024

Costco started selling one-ounce gold bars in August 2023, because gold is proving to be an extremely solid investment at the moment. They’re reportedly raking in $200 million per month.

San Quentin State Prison has hosted a 105-lap marathon for prisoners every autumn since 2005. There are currently about 50 members of the prison’s 1,000 Mile Club training for this year’s ‘thon.

A European court ruled that Switzerland has violated the rights of a group of elderly women who said heat waves put them at a high medical risk, and that the Swiss government is at fault for failing to act against global warming. One continent down, six to go!

Infotech company Cloudflare released a report that says internet traffic dipped between 40 percent and 60 percent in states that were in the path of totality. States outside of totality, but that still saw some eclipse action, dipped by a more modest 30 percent.

The Javan tiger was declared extinct in 2008, but in 2019, a local conservationist in Indonesia claimed to have spotted one on the outskirts of a village. He and a researcher went to do some recon, and they found a single hair stuck to a fence, that was found to be a 97 percent match when genetically tested.

A.I.-assisted academic essays have been all the rage since ChatGPT and its competitors launched. A.I. detection company Turnitin has scraped over 200 million papers from high school and college students, and found hallmarks of A.I. prose in about 22 million of those. Eleven percent of papers had about 20 percent help from A.I., while 3 percent were upwards of 80 percent assisted.

Alaska’s Fairbanks International Airport employs dogs to scare birds and other animals off the tarmac before takeoff, but they’ve now partnered with Boston Dynamics to unleash a pack of robotic dogs to accomplish the task. 

People have begun noticing that digital cashiers in city restaurants are “staffed” by overseas labor farms. A little bit of digging revealed that some of these laborers are making as little as $3.25 per hour.

NASA has collected an artifact that plummeted from the sky and crashed through someone’s roof in Florida to confirm their suspicions that it’s a battery pack from the International Space Station. They believe it’s from a chunk of space garbage that was meant to be returned to Earth in 2021, but due to a scheduling error, was shoved haphazardly into orbit, with the hopes that it would just burn up if it ever re-entered the atmosphere.

Two distinct broods of cicada are scheduled to make an appearance this spring, an overlap that last happened in 1803 and won’t happen again until 2245. Experts expect over one trillion cicadas to blot out the sun, etc. Expect to hear more about this from the freaks who said the eclipse was going to wake up Biblical giants and stuff.

A truck containing over 100,000 salmon, aka a “fish taxi,” overturned before it reached its destination, where it was meant to restock the Imnaha River. By a wild stroke of luck, about 75 percent of the fish were able to flop into a nearby creek, which will give them a clear path to migrate to the Pacific Ocean.

Smuckers founder Jerome Monroe Smucker had a rule that any potential heirs had to work outside of the family business before taking the helm. His great-great-grandson and current CEO Mark Smucker followed those orders, casting off into the business world for five years before returning and working his way up the corporate family ladder. According to Mark, “J.M. Smucker is a meritocracy, and my journey here took a lot of twists and turns.”