Archives: Useless Facts

Is the tomato a fruit or vegetable?

The largest island in the world is Greenland.

Can you name the world’s biggest island?

Meryl Streep holds the record for the most Oscar nominations of any actor. With her first nomination for her role in the 1978 film The Deer Hunter she has been nominated 21 times. Eight more than both Katharine Hepburn and Jack Nicholson, tied for second place. Katherine Hepburn received four Academy Awards for Best Actress.  In 2012, with a win for her performance in Iron Lady,  she became the fifth actor to win three competitive Academy Awards for acting (Walter Brennan, Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, and Jack Nicholson). Since then, Daniel Day-Lewis became the sixth actor to achieve that distinction, winning for his role in Lincoln.

Who holds the record for the most nominations of any actor for an Academy Award (Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences), most often referred to as an “Oscar”?

John Forbes Nash Jr. is the only person to have won both the Nobel Prize (Economics) and the Abel Prize (the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in the world of mathematics). Nash made fundamental contributions to mathematics, providing major insights into the role of chance and decision-making within complex systems – many found in our everyday lives. In 1959, symptoms of schizophrenia began to emerge and he spent several years being treated in psychiatric institutions. While he was able to return to academic life, the struggle with his illness and is battle to overcome it was the subject of a biography written by Sylvia Nasar’s, which subsequently became a major motion picture bearing the same title “A Beautiful Mind.” Sadly, Nash and his wife Alicia were killed in a car crash (a taxi in which they were riding) in 2015.

Who is the only person to have won both the Nobel Prize and the Abel Prize?

By initially observing the movement of sunspots, scientist concluded that the Sun does rotate, but because the Sun is made up of gaseous elements and is not solid, the rotation is uneven. The rotations at the equator is about once in a little over 25 days, but at the poles about 36 days and varying in between. The Sun is also tilted on its axis of rotation (relative to the Earth and our point of view). But never look directly at the Sun without special protection for your eyes.

The planets in our Solar System rotate, but does the Sun rotate?

The term 10-4, like many other codes, refers to a distinctive communication lingo adopted by users of Citizens’Band (CB) radio – primarily among truckers hauling freight in the United States throughout the 1970s and 80s.

The code 10-6 means I’m busy at the moment, but stand by and 10-13 is a request to get information about the weather and road conditions. When a CB radio message asks ‘what’s your 10-20?’ they are asking for your location – where are you?