12 Trivia Tidbits for Tuesday, April 9, 2024

Sure, statistically, a mid-day earthquake is going to disrupt a lot of surgeries. But one dude is going viral for his story about interacting with his startled doctor: “I can’t say definitively if he was in between testicle(s), but he was down there when we felt the whole room shake.”

Twenty-six-year-old Russ Cook, self-styled “Hardest Geezer” in the world, just finished his 352-day, 9,941 jog, becoming the first known human to do so.

Eclipse-related activity is projected to result in $6 billion spending nationwide, while Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour was worth over $5 billion, and the Super Bowl was worth over $1 billion. Should trickle down any day now!

Target employees have leaked that the store is often able to compile security video of customers stealing from the self-checkout kiosks. If they notice a repeat offender, they‘ll keep a tab, and only get police involved once the total rises to the level of grand larceny. Depending on the state, that’s usually around $900 to $1,000.

A.I. training systems are feeding their models data as fast as digitally possible. The Wall Street Journal has calculated they’ll have blown through all high quality sources, like Wikipedia and scientific journals, in about two years. Some companies are already producing “synthetic data,” i.e., having A.I. make up fake data. Basically: Furbies training Furbies.

Nineteen stray cats who roam the presidential palace have just been declared “fixed assets,” a status usually reserved for non-living things, granting a slice of the national treasury’s budget for their food and care.

A total solar eclipse is only possible because of an astronomical coincidence: The moon just happens to be close enough to the Earth that the two bodies appear in our sky as almost identically-sized discs. But the moon is scooching about 1.5 inches away from the Earth every year, so in about 600 million years, it’ll no longer overlap the sun with such breathtaking perfection.

Someone just pulled off one of the largest thefts in American history, stealing over $30 million in cash. Instead of going after some small-time cash dealer like a bank or a restaurant, these pros went for a straight-up money storage facility operated by a security firm. The FBI isn’t leaking many details, but experts estimate the cash could have weighed over three tons, just to give you an idea of the scale of the operation.

The median sale price of a property on Nantucket island is $3.6 million, but that’s more reflective of the value of the property itself. Since demolition can be pricey, new owners have begun offering sweetheart deals: If you can get the house off of the property, it’s yours. Folks trying to build rental properties, or housing for local workers, get to skip the whole “building a house” part of their journey.

Astronomers pointing telescopes and spectroscopes at the sun during the 1869 total eclipse got a rare opportunity to study the sun’s corona. They noticed that some parts of the visible light spectrum were unaccounted for, and deduced that they must have been absorbed by some previously unknown chemical in the Earth’s atmosphere. Later, in 1882, a physicist noticed the exact same phenomenon in lava from an eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Before they’d even captured the element in a dog-shaped balloon, they named it after the Greek god of the sun, Helios. 

Artist Ron Gittins lived in the same apartment for over three decades, and quietly covered every surface in paintings and sculptures. His family only discovered it after he died in 2019. It’s so sick, the British government just granted it protected status, treating it as a “micro-museum.”

A Japanese professor has posited that, due to an old law requiring spouses to have the same name, it’s statistically very likely that every person in Japan will have the surname “Sato” in about 500 years.