12 Trivia Tidbits for Wednesday, March 27, 2024

From the 1920s to the 1990s, IBM was constitutionally opposed to laying off anyone in its workforce. The company was the poster child for the “cradle to grave” ethos, meaning a company strove to retain and take care of its workers (and their families) until they died.

In 2018, a man learned of a 1969 law that essentially says certain hotels in New York are legally required to let you rent them long term, for next to nothing, if you ask in just the right way. He said the magic words, a judge ruled in his favor and the decision was worded in a way that seemed to grant actual ownership of the entire New Yorker Hotel to him. Against all odds, the guy successfully filed some crucial paperwork, and spent the next five years living in the space for free while the real owners tried to untangle this legal mess.

It’s not necessarily a causal relationship, but a study found that for every 1.2 hours of “extended computer usage for leisure,” a man is 3.57 times more likely to develop ED. 

The Northern Hemisphere’s last full moon of the winter is called a Worm Moon, as it often rises on earthworms who have burrowed up from the recently-thawed ground, or at least portends the worms to come with the impending warmer weather. 

A recent study has confirmed what other studies have shown in the past: Cursing can help you withstand pain longer, and experience it as less severe. The study had people stick their hand in ice-cold water, say when they were feeling pain, and then rate that pain. People saying “fuck” and/or flexing their middle finger were more likely to experience less severe pain, and experience it later, than people saying “flat” and/or flexing their index finger.

The physical matter in the universe that we’re able to see and touch appears to only account for five percent of all the stuff out there. “Ghost particle” is kind of an umbrella term for everything else that science hasn’t been able to interact with. CERN is developing a new atom-smashing experiment that should be 1,000 times more sensitive than previous attempts, and they’re very hopeful it may help crack the mystery of what really makes up the universe.

For 20 years after his death, a small army of volunteers guarded Lincoln’s body, randomly moving it from place to place, because it was such a prime target for graverobbers. Robert Todd Lincoln eventually insisted that they pick one spot and build a monument. His coffin was inspected one final time to make sure he was still in there, and was then buried under two tons of concrete.

Scientists witnessed a group of sperm whales fend off an attack from 30 bloodthirsty orcas via “defense defection”: a coordinated explosion of diarrhea that cloaked their whereabouts and allowed them to escape.

In the mid-1800s, a guy figured out that kerosine and gasoline are pretty good cleaning agents, and began a service to clean clothes that shouldn’t touch water. Kerosine has been replaced in modern dry cleaners with perchloroethylene, but a few synthetic materials still react poorly with it, which is why some buttons need to be removed during the cleaning process and reattached after.

Trader Joe’s raised the price of its bananas for the first time in 20 years — from 19 cents to 23 cents.

They were invented in the 1860s, but they rose in popularity in the 1930s, when the Great Depression made them fun, colorful substitutes for chicken eggs, which were becoming too expensive to hide around a person’s yard for fun.

Anguilla’s top-level domain is .ai. It made about $32 million selling website URLs in 2023, about 10 percent of its entire GDP.