France's longest border is shared with...Brazil.

(730km in French Guiana)

Colors are an illusion created by our brains to help us make sense of the world around us. Colors are not properties of objects themselves but are created by our brains. When light hits an object, it reflects certain wavelengths. Our eyes detect these wavelengths and send signals to our brain, which interprets them as colors. So, what we perceive as "red" or "blue" is actually our brain's way of interpreting different wavelengths of light. If we take an example from nature, you may wonder why deer seem so stupid that they can't see a tiger hiding in the grass. But in reality, their eyes perceive just normal shades of green, and the tiger's stripes blend in perfectly, making it much harder for them to spot.

Fun fact:

@remindme in 4 years

Newton's Apples (and Your) weight is more in Illinois than in IndianaNewton's Apples (and Your) weight is more in Illinois than in Indiana

For gravity does vary across the earth, meaning Newton’s apple has a slightly different weight in various other parts of the world and falls at slightly different speeds. That’s due to a combination of four factors.

• First, there’s a latitudinal effect. The earth is not perfectly round: It’s flatter nearer to (and flattest at) the poles and bulges more towards (and most along) the equator.

• Secondly, there’s a rotational effect. That difference in gravity between the poles and the equator is only partly due to gravity itself; it’s also caused by the fact that the earth spins faster at the equator.

• Then there’s an altitudinal effect. Earth’s gravitational pull depends on your distance from its center. Gravity diminishes with altitude—but again, with fairly limited effect. If you’re 16,400 feet (5 km) up a mountain, you weigh 99.84% of what the scales would say at sea level.

• Fourth differentiator: the tidal pull of the moon and sun. Although this has visible, repetitive and significant effects—the ebb and flow of sea levels—the variations this causes in the earth’s gravity are very small indeed.

While the first four factors can be compensated for mathematically, it’s the local geology which produces random gravity anomalies of the kind mapped here.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/strange-maps-uneven-gravity

The name "aardvark" comes from a South African word that means "earth pig".

The Shortest War in History:

The Anglo-Zanzibar War, fought between the United Kingdom and the Sultanate of Zanzibar on August 27, 1896, holds the record for the shortest war in history. It lasted only 38 minutes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Zanzibar_War

Electricity travels around 90 per cent of the speed of light – about 270,000 km/s

https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/how-fast-does-electricity-flow

You can't lick your elbow.

There is evidence that frogs have roamed the Earth for more than 200 million years, at least as long as the dinosaurs.

https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/frogs-a-chorus-of-colors/frog-fun-facts

14 years ago you could get 1 Bitcoin for a dirty fiat quarter!

Maine is closer to Africa than Florida. https://www.sciencealert.com/which-us-state-is-closest-to-africa

NETFLIX DOWN?

BITCOIN NEVER GOES DOWN!

LESSON FOR Y’ALL

Diamonds are metastable, meaning they can technically revert to graphite over an immense timescale under normal conditions.

George Orwell was a democratic socialist.

Zátopek developed his own training methods to give himself an edge.^[1] He’d run as fast as he could holding his breath, take a few huffs and puffs and then do it all again. It was an extreme version of Buteyko’s methods, but Zátopek didn’t call it Voluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing. Nobody did. It would become known as hypoventilation training. Hypo, which comes from the Greek for “under” (as in hypodermic needle), is the opposite of hyper, meaning “over.” The concept of hypoventilation training was to breathe less. Over the years, Zátopek’s approach was widely derided and mocked, but he ignored the critics.^[2] At the 1952 Olympics, he won gold in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters. On the heels of his success, he decided to compete in the marathon, an event he had neither trained for nor run in his life. He won gold. Zátopek would claim 18 world records, four Olympic golds and a silver over his career. He would later be named the “Greatest Runner of All Time” by Runner’s World magazine.^[3] “He does everything wrong but win,” said Larry Snyder, a track coach at Ohio State at the time.

Source: "Breath: Improve your health and wellbeing by discovering the lost art of breathing" by James Nestor

1. Zátopek developed: More about hypoventilation training is available on Dr. Xavier Woorons’s website: http://www.hypoventilation-training.com/index.html; “Emil Zatopek Biography,” Biography Online, May 1, 2010, https://www.biographyonline.net/sport/athletics/emile-zatopek.html; Adam B. Ellick, “Emil Zatopek,” Runner’s World, Mar. 1, 2001, https://www.runnersworld.com/advanced/a20841849/emil-zatopek. For what it’s worth, Zátopek’s height is something of a mystery; some references state he was six feet tall but others, such as ESPN, have him as five-six. The consensus, according to Runner’s World, is that he was about five-eight. ↩

2. widely derided: Timothy Noakes, Lore of Running, 4th ed. (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2002), 382. ↩

3. would later be named: “Emil Zátopek,” Running Past, http://www.runningpast.com/emil_zatopek.htm; Frank Litsky, “Emil Zatopek, 78, Ungainly Running Star, Dies,” The New York Times, Nov. 23, 2000, https://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/23/sports/emil-zatopek-78-ungainly-running-star-dies.html. ↩

Out of all mammals, walruses have the second largest penis

Fun fact: You can read something you disagree with on the internet and keep scrolling.