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30 Useless Facts That Will Just Take Up Space In Your Head, Unless You’re A Random Trivia Fanatic
Interview
We learn many different things throughout our lives. But while some of this knowledge might serve a very real purpose in our lives, there are those pieces of information that we know just because we do, and we have no idea what to do with it.
But despite being useless in the practical sense, some of these facts can actually be quite thought-provoking, interesting to ponder, and fun to share with others. That’s why, when one Redditor asked people online about the most useless pieces of information that they know, then answers came pouring in. Scroll down to read what they said!
More info: Reddit
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
The difference between a nook and a cranny is that a nook is a corner and a cranny is like an narrow opening.
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#2
If the Sun was the size of a white blood cell swimming through your veins, the Milky Way would be the size of the continental United States. (Really puts into perspective just how small we are.).
Ryan Mercer 9 months ago
And our galaxy is one of about a trillion galaxies in the observable universe. There's literally no knowing what lies beyond that, and everything we know about science says we will never know. But the observable universe could itself be a speck in a vast sea. To call it big kind of misses the point. It is well, well, well beyond imagining,
#3
Otters hold paws while sleeping so they don't drift away, and can form some pretty impressive structures called "rafts" when they're in a large group.
We loved reading through all the answers that the question of this thread brought out, and so we wanted to learn what the original inspiration that ignited this discussion was. To do that, Bored Panda reached out to LoneVentriloquistSFW, who loved our interest and was glad to answer our questions.
The OP shared that he decided to ask this question minutes after learning that E is the most used letter in the alphabet, which he also shared in the comments of his thread. “It just sparked my interest in knowing a ton of useless information from people,” said the author, adding that he didn’t find any other use for it yet.
The success of his post caught the OP by surprise. “To be honest, I didn’t expect my post to blow up like that,” said the poster, talking about how this was probably the highest interaction he has ever gotten from Reddit. “It felt awesome. It felt like I was a celebrity for a moment *lol*.”
#4
A jiffy is an actual unit of time. It's 1/100th of a second.
#5
Ants can’t take fall damage because their terminal velocity isn’t fast enough to break their exoskeleton.
There is a certain type of knowledge that we define as useless. But when you stop and think about it, no kind of information is ever truly and completely without any use, is it?
While you may not be able to practically apply some of the knowledge you come in contact with, and if you’re forced to learn it anyway, it might feel like a waste of precious time, as Brian Tomasik wrote in his blog, there are many other ways in which it can be valuable.
And we don’t look as deep to find that value. Learning in itself is a fun thing that can bring a lot of enjoyment. For example, you can learn by reading books or watching films, and while the stuff you come across there will rarely find practical application in your life, few would argue that it’s not entertaining. Plus, any kind of learning can come with some unexpected discoveries, as it can often be difficult to predict just what kind of information you’re lacking or what thing you don’t know you might like.
#7
Vomiting can ease the migraine but dehydration and muscle flex caused by vomiting can cause the migraine….
#8
You have to stick your finger inside an alligator to find out its gender.
#9
The back of tigers ears have a white spot to resemble eyes so they scare off things that look at them from behind, sort of like a peacock.
At the same time, learning new things plays a big role in shaping your worldview. Our brains change with every experience. While we might forget a lot of the stuff that we learn, we retain the wisdom we gain from it. Moreover, it also improves our intuition and pattern-recognition abilities, as well as our general understanding of how the world functions.
Acquiring new information and skills also works as an intellectual exercise that can be compared to a professional athlete going to the gym. Even if the stuff you’re learning doesn’t seem to matter at the moment, it can help you get into a habit of learning and prepare you for when you need to learn something actually important.
#10
Sometimes pandas are too lazy to have [intercourse]. And in order to reproduce them, there is a special person who infuses the female with ejaculate.
Cosmikid 9 months ago
Pandas, you will be amazed to learn, are not humans. Nor are they "bears". In the fairly short period of time humans have studied pandas there have been multiple points where - they did not behave like humans, nor bears- therefore the panda students declared "pandas are deficient in..." Only to learn later, that pandas are NOT deficient in anything (Oh, look- pandas living in the woods without us...) - they are just, um; not humans, and not bears. Too lazy for sex? Um. I'll bet they just don't wanna, whey YOU wanna. But they manage to have babies all by themselves. Somehow.
#11
Some people have voluntary control of their Tensor Tympani muscle in their inner ear. They can make a rumbling noise in their ears at will by tensing it.
Hand when there is loud noise around to kinda reduce it as you walk past.
MaximumKarmaSaint 9 months ago (edited)
I have this too! It doesn't always work, but when it does, it's pretty easy! (For clarification: I guess what I mean by this is that I think I know how to make the rumbling noise, but sometimes doing what seems to be the same action won't cause it to happen, it's usually much easier after the rumble was caused naturally, like by yawning.)
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leendadll 9 months ago
I can't. Never even heard of it till about a week ago (I'm 61 yrs old).
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Ru Bee 9 months ago
I LOVE this post and the amount of replies to it. I absolutely can NOT do this 😊 but it sounds kinda useful. I found out recently that a lot of people don't have an inner monologue I asked friends about there inner voice and a fair few of them where like "What?! Nah if no one's talking to me it's quiet and blank inside my mind ” ..... Must be soooo peaceful.
Caroline Nagel 9 months ago
I can do that but I have no idea how I control that muscle - it's the rumbling you hear in your ears when you yawn. I also hear loud noises/bangs in my head just before I fall asleep. It's called exploding head syndrome (EHS). It's nothing to worry about, it doesn't do any harm.
Red PANda (she/they) 9 months ago
Such a violent name for a condition that’s harmless lmao
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Teutonic Disaster 9 months ago
Oh cool, finally a there's a funky thing I can do with a bodypart that's kinda rare AND I CAN'T EVEN SHOW IT TO ANYONE!!!
Upstaged75 9 months ago (edited)
I can do this. But it still doesn't drown out the sound of the tinnitus in my left ear. :(
Tyranamar 9 months ago
Most people have a muscle in the ear that helps to reduce loud sound. People without it are very sensitive to noise. I've never heard of the hearing the rumbling thing with it though. Or it being voluntary. It's usually an involuntary process. I forget the name of the muscle.
Alicia M 9 months ago
I have it and I am still super sensitive to noise. I can tense something up in my ear, but I can't describe how I do it. It just works. Sort of feels like I'm tensing the muscles up that make me clench my jaw, but I'm not actually clenching my jaw. To me it sounds like a mixture of white noise and the ocean.
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KnightOwl 9 months ago
I can do this, I always thought everyone could! I just tense a muscle(?) In my inner ear and it makes a loud rumbling/rushing noise that drowns out most other sounds.
Red PANda (she/they) 9 months ago
Wait so you can tune stuff out by doing that? Like a mute button?
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Jennifer Hartigan 9 months ago
That's me! I do it only when I'm really tired though. It's eerily satisfying!
Ur_Fav_Lazy_Panda🫶 9 months ago
I thought this was normal? 👂it also kinda sounds like a roaring lion- not at powerful and loud tho
YetAnotherSarah 9 months ago
Are we just talking about flexing the muscle to pop your ears? Balancing the air pressure?
edward 9 months ago
Nope. Its called ear-rumbling. I twitch a little muscle inside my ear which produces a small pressure on the eardrum producing a steady hum. Like the sound of the "sea" when one put a seashell to one's ear, only much louder. I can drown out a conversation taking place next to me by doing this. When I was a child I thought it was a super power, cause no one else knew what i was talking about on the rare occasion I mentioned it
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Aerial (Any pronouns/Canadian/Jewish) 9 months ago
Wait that's not normal? I can do it but only in my right ear.
ravn 9 months ago
I can beat that! I have a constant high-pitched ringing all the time, and don't even have to work at it!
CORGI QUEEN 9 months ago
I can do it! its kinda fun to do some times and it does in fact reduce sound around me
TheGoodBoi 9 months ago
I got a weird look from a coworker while trying to do this. Thanks lol
#12
Fish don't fart.
They continuously secrete waste gasses through their skin.
Johnny Briones of Medium further expands on this subject, writing about how memory techniques that can help to recall and retain information are best learned using so-called useless information.
Memory techniques sound and are quite wonderful. However, the problem is that people sometimes don’t realize that these, too, have to be learned first and you can’t just jump right in, learning everything that you want with ease.
#13
The spikes at the end of a stegosaurus tail is named after a character from the Far Side cartoon.
Bouche and Audi and Shyla, Oh My! 9 months ago
The Thagomizer, named after the late Thag Simmons.
#14
As a child of the 80's (born 1983), I still remember my mother and my grandmother's landline phone number.
My mom moved at least twice since then and don't even use a landline anymore.
My grandmother died like 10 years ago.
Bouche and Audi and Shyla, Oh My! 9 months ago
My parents' and grandma's last four digits are my numerical passwords. Totally random numbers to anyone else, but very easy to remember for me.
#15
Morphologies of onomatopeias are written differently according to the language and I appreciate how to say "meow" in different languages.
Bouche and Audi and Shyla, Oh My! 9 months ago
We meow in American English, but then, we're American shorthairs, so there you go.
Running into problems at first is expected, and when you do, you’ll likely spend more time looking for solutions than actually learning what you set out to learn. This can be frustrating and make it seem like the techniques you’re using are not working.
However, if you first practice these methods using useless information, you won’t feel the pressure if you can’t remember something that doesn’t really matter to you. Thus, you will be able to easily identify problems you run into and find ways to solve them.
#16
In 16th century Italy duels often took place where the chosen weapon was very hard maths questions.
#17
Ohio is the only state in the US that doesn't share a letter with the word mackerel.
#18
That most car horns play an F4 on the first space of the treble clef.
In conclusion, we can confidently say that while not all information is equally important, no information is ever truly useless, even if it may seem that way at first glance. So read up because you never know when some random fact you encounter in Reddit threads like these might prove to be a lot more valuable than you thought.
What did you think of these facts? Do you have anything you’d like to add? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
#19
Male swallowtail butterflies have eyes on their [male genital] so they can position themselves correctly when mating.
#20
When a body was placed in a coffin after being guillotined, they didn't always put the head above the shoulders. Sometimes it would be between the legs, face first into the crotch.
#21
Where do I start?
Nepal is the only country in the world whose flag isn't a rectangle
Raptors will sometimes take tortoises to the top of a cliff and drop them from midair, breaking their shell
Earth was uninhabitable for the first few hundred million years of its existence, but life emerged more or less immediately once Earth became inhabitable
You may have heard that the speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s (no matter how fast you're going), but that's actually precisely how much it is, we define a meter to be such that the speed of light is that number, no decimal point
Cleopatra lived between 69-30 BCE and the pyramids were built around 2780 BCE, meaning she lived closer to today than to the building of the pyramids.
Mimi La Souris 9 months ago
a planet becomes inhabited when it becomes habitable, strange, isn't it ?
#22
The a**s is the first part of the body to open up. We develop a**s-first.
#23
The wax/metal tips at the end of shoelaces are called aglets.
#24
I'm an expert with binary. Also- Honey is the only natural food that is made without destroying any kind of life. What about milk you say? A cow has to eat grass to produce milk and grass is living.
#25
You can calculate the circumference of the universe with a margin of error less than the diameter of an atom if you have 60 digits of pi. Thus, any further digits are completely useless. You're welcome to all of you that memorized 100+ digits back in school.
Editor's note: 38 digits of pi is sufficient.
Apatheist Account2 9 months ago
*visible universe. We don't actually know how big it is, only the bits that we can see.
#27
By volume, the sun generates heat at the same rate as a compost heap.
#28
I memorized this as a song and I’ve never forgotten it since
Exa Peta Tera Giga Mega Kilo Hecto Deka Deci Centi Milli Micro Nano Pico Femto Atto
I don’t really use it in daily life or anywhere else but you never know.
#29
You can hipnotize chickens by drawing a line on the dirt and made the chicken look at the line.
Apatheist Account2 9 months ago
I applied to study this, but failed the hen trance exam....I'll get my coat.
#30
I just learned today that E is the most used letter in the alphabet.
What do you think ?
Mimi M 9 months ago
It is an objective fact that things that do not exist cannot get worse.
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Mimi M 9 months ago
It is an objective fact that things that do not exist cannot get worse.
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