12 Trivia Tidbits for Monday, March 4, 2024

Poon Lim holds the record for longest time floating on a raft. He was the only survivor of the British merchant ship Ben Lomond after it was torpedoed by Germans in 1942. He found a raft stocked with everything he’d need on his journey to rescue: food, flares, water, pots and flashlights. He supplemented his diet with the meat (and blood) of sharks and sea birds, and tied a rope to his arm the whole time because he wasn’t a great swimmer.

Ethan Manuell had been wearing a hearing aid since he was four. In 2015, he converted a few old toys to run on his hearing-aid batteries, and ran a series of tests to see how certain things impacted battery life. He found that leaving zinc batteries exposed to air for five minutes increased their battery life by 85 percent (and won his school's science fair in the process).

The Chinese Communist Party is afraid that any supernatural or religious iconography might undermine their authority, so any movies with overtly ghostly storylines are banned. The 2016 Ghostbusters movie renamed itself Super Power Dare Die Team, but it was still denied.

John Brandenburg published a paper in 2014 called Evidence of a Massive Thermonuclear Explosion on Mars in the Past, the Cydonian Hypothesis and Fermi’s Paradox. He believes that the two most prevalent Martian species, the Cydonians and the Utopians, were bombed from space by an even more advanced race.

Designer Simin Qiu created the “Swirl Faucet,” a special double turbine nozzle that forces water out in visually pleasing patterns, and also happens to cut down on water usage by 15 percent.

That’s kind of obvious, but it’s a little jarring to see all their tactics lined up in a row. Planet Fitness, for example, loves to give out free candy, throw members-only parties to stuff you full of carbs, sound a “Lunk Alarm” that goes off to discourage people from working out too hard and design their free-weight areas to encourage chilling out, not working out.

If you needed to handle an outraged drunk in the streets, or capture a noble to be held for ransom, the Man Catcher was your tool of choice. It was sort of a spiked, handheld handcuff, designed for several to be used in tandem to pin a person down by their extremities.

Steven Steinberg’s attorney successfully argued that his wife drove him into “intermittent dissociative states,” and that he was in one of those when he stabbed her 26 times. Kenneth Parks drove to his in-law’s house, murdered his mother-in-law, failed to murder his father-in-law, then drove himself to the police station, all while legally “asleep.”

In 1990, two guys dressed as cops walked out of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum with 13 pieces of art worth $500,000. Authorities still don’t know who did it.

In 1869, surgeon Paul Segond described a “pearly, resistant fibrous band” in the knee. Everyone forgot about it until 2013, when the Journal of Anatomy published an article about the anterolateral ligament that some scientists had noticed in a bunch of cadavers.

Manshiyat Naser is a section of Cairo known as “Garbage City,” where residents live in abject poverty and make their living sorting through Cairo’s trash. Different families have dibs on different types of waste, such as metal and plastic for recycling, or general rubbish for burning.

HIV viruses were used as viral vectors to deliver treatments of two diseases, leukodystrophy and Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome, to a group of 16 patients in 2010. Three years later, six of them were found to be recovering.