12 Farm-Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Sunday, October 13, 2024

While hiking in Utah’s Y Mountain, just above Brigham Young University, a woman met and became fast friends with a total stranger. When he revealed he was on the waiting list for a kidney, she offered up her own spare part. They turned out to be a match, and went through with the operations.

The nearly octogenarian hiker broke her leg in the middle of a three-mile solo hike. She was found by a group of young men, who called 9-1-1, and were told a rescue team would arrive in five hours. The guys instead made her a makeshift splint and piggybacked her the whole way to the trailhead.

After pulling off an emergency landing, a United pilot bought a round of pizza for all of his passengers during their unexpected seven-hour delay.

Two Harvard students were able to hack the newly-released Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses to quickly identify and pull up personal information on just about anyone who comes into the wearer’s line of sight.

They crawl out of the woodwork to do some interviews every four years, then do zero meaningful activism or campaigning in between. And somehow, support for third-party candidates has dropped from 63 percent in 2023 to 58 percent currently. 

The company works with 450,000 coffee farms around the world, but just bought two with very specific evil plans in mind. They bought a struggling Guatemalan farm so they can try to solve some coffee-specific problems as climate disaster consumes the Earth. And they bought a Costa Rican farm specifically to test out automation, so they can cut as many humans out of the process as possible.

Methods include counting maggots, taking rectal temperatures, seeing how the face reacts to electrocution, poking a needle in an eyeball and hitting muscles with a hammer.

After a 12-state pilot program went well in 2024, the IRS is expanding its TurboTax-killing free online filing software to just under half of American states.

A team of researchers has categorized four effects of weed that contribute to heightened enjoyment of music: 1) Altered Cognitive Processes and Reinterpretations; 2) Auditory Perceptual Effects; 3) Emotional Openness and Sensitivity; and 4) Embodiment and Immersion.

A website is crowdsourcing the most beautiful words in the English language by having users select the more beautiful between two random words. So far, “consultations,” “thematic” and “passage” are topping the leaderboard, while “somethin,” “assumpsit” and “Nazi” lead the Hall of Shame.

Project Skydrop was meant to be a years- or even decades-long scavenger hunt wherein a small gold statue was hidden in the middle of the woods somewhere in Massachusetts. One of the hints was a webcam broadcasting from the location. A guy figured out how to cross-reference the weather shown on the webcam with real-time cloud-coverage maps, and found the treasure in less than a month. 

Oddly, he still hasn’t contacted the dudes who set it all up to claim his $87k crypto prize.

NASA astronauts can request and fill out an electronic absentee ballot, which is then encrypted and sent through some satellites to a ground terminal in White Sands, New Mexico. It’s transmitted through landlines to Houston’s Johnson Space Center, which then transmits it electronically to that astronaut’s county clerk’s office.