facts

Tumblr gets in real deep sometimes. Sure, a lot of it is just memes and thought exercises, but some threads get into stuff like the historical concept of the color purple in rhyming fashion, or how modern cats became domesticated. So anyway, here's why magenta is a made up color based on your brain just doing its best.

The general idea here is whether or not older cars are "better" than newer ones when it comes to accidents. Sure, an older sturdy car won't fall apart as easily in an accident. What it will do is transfer all the kinetic energy of a crash directly into your body. Sometimes people on the internet are wrong about stuff, like this discussion about the facts of plague and veganism

We know that languages are all weird, and the one we use can be particularly confusing, but that can make it a more fun and nuanced thing to explore. We're all for seeing some creative uses and misuses of the English language. If you just wanna see people totally suck at English, then here are people who failed at using the English language.

Everyone knows the most fun facts are about morbid history and animal genitals. Some of these are just plain interesting, some are amazingly gross while others are sad and damning. If it gets to be too much there's also some happy facts to hopefully counteract all the messed up ones.

We've seen a whole lot of not fun facts that are scary and disappointing. Sure, they're inherently compelling, but it kind of starts to bring down your world view. So here are some nicer facts that are on the uplifting side. For some surprisingly interesting facts, here's a twitter thread on fonts that is actually fascinating. And if you just want to feel smart about the things you already know, here are some of the dumbest things people had to explain to adults.

Multi-level marketing "companies" are shady businesses that use a pyramid scheme model to rope in desperate people and encourage them to "be their own boss" by hawking stuff like health and beauty supplements to their friends and family over Facebook. The odds that anyone will ever be successful at these is incredibly small, and the companies often pass on the costs to their own "employees," which results in stuff like this guy who reconnected with a high school friend after his dad died so he could sell health supplements.

You remember learning that the reason veins can appear blue is cause deoxygenated blood turns blue? Well that's total horseshit. Your blood doesn't turn blue, and the reason your veins might look that way is because blue and red light travel though skin with different levels of success, so what's reflected back is a more bluish color. If you just learned this, you may be intrigued by these people who learned basic stuff way too late. Anyway, this dad asked if he was wrong for being really persistent with a teacher teaching the wrong thing.

We're as surprised as you are. You wouldn't think a topic as dry as typesetting and fonts would actually be interesting, but since using some sort of a keyboard is something almost all of us do every single day, the history and language behind it is actually really interesting. The internet is host to many intriguing discussions on language, like this tumblr post about figures of speech, or this thread on translation. Or for some straight up language wins and fails, here are some uses and misuses of the english language.

If there was ever a reason to pay attention in school, this would be it. You'd be surprised how many grown-ups  don't know basic stuff like what pasta is made of or that submarines exist. There is no shortage pf people saying dumb things. Seriously, people hear some really goddamn dumb things. These people found themselves explaining really basic stuff to folks who either didn't do their homework or never paid attention in the first place.

Sometimes what we think of as common knowledge isn't actually as common as we thought. Well, also people can be pretty dumb. In fact, there might be one or two of these that make you go "holy crap I'm a moron." If you still think Alaska is an island there's probably no hope for you but, what the hell, live and learn.

Just a a few short dumbass examples, and the unfortunate repercussions of scientists turning their work into hilarious puns. That all being said, Nim Chimpsky is an absolutely hilarious monkey pun in our opinion, and we hope scientists use more incredibly stupid puns in the future. If this made you interested in science stuff, here's a microbiologists unbelievable thread about lobsters. And for puns, here are some terrible/excellent puns.

While it often seems like the internet is just a tool for making people angry, sometimes someone gets a good one in that stops the show. Thanks to all those strangers knocking their opinions into each other like an overturned jug of bouncy balls down a flight of stairs, we sometimes get some prodigous slams and clapbacks that achieve max damage.

Here's some pizza knowledge to drop at your next pizza soirée. If you want to rekindle that whole feud about pineapple on pizza, let this be a reminder that it was invented by a Greek guy in Canada. Pizza is good, and absolutely crazy people like it too, which inspired this list of one pizza delivery driver's strangest customers.

There are a surprising amount of businesses out there that exist not because their service requires that much time or skill, but because of some dubious sociological precedent in place, or because they actively try to keep people from knowing the truth. Unlike these things people wrongfully think are scams, some industries are just run by bastards. 

This reviewer had the nerve to call a suitable response to their insulting offer "unprofessional" and inadvertently went in for round two. The world is full of frustrating cheapskates, but when someone leaves a ridiculous review like this they leave themselves open for an utter takedown of their entire character.