Fact Dump October 7th, 2012
Fact Dump for October 7th, 2012. Check out 5 random fun facts below:
The Brain Accounts for 20% of Your Daily Calorie Usage
The brain is a calorie burning machine. It only takes up 2% of total body mass, but accounts for a whopping 20% of all your daily energy usage. Scientists have determined that most of this energy is used to continuously fire signals around the body and the remainder is used for general brain-cell housekeeping. Don’t think that you can go do some math and start shedding serious pounds though. It turns out there’s not a huge difference (calorie wise) between the brain being at rest and the brain under heavy load.
Leo Fender Couldn’t Play Guitar
Leo Fender is the man behind the most popular electric guitar in the world and he didn’t even know how to play it. For his lack of musicianship he made up in engineering skills though. While first creating the guitar, he would often bring in people to test it for him and properly tune it.
White House Food Isn’t Free
That’s right, as President of the United States living in the White House, you still have to pay for all your food. You get your own personal executive chef, 24/7 room service, and all the other fancy perks – but at the end of the month you also get a nice shiny bill to pay for it all. Even things like toiletries and dry cleaning are billed to the president. Nancy Reagan was quite surprised by this fact stating: “Nobody ever told us the president and his wife are charged for every meal, as well as incidentals like dry cleaning, toothpaste, and other toiletries.”
Alarms Before There Were Clocks
Before clocks were responsible with the horrible, horrible task of waking us up every morning, people used candles instead. These “Candle Clocks” could be used to both tell time and act as an alarm clock. The candle would have evenly spaced lines from top to bottom and as the candle burned you could see a physical representation of how much time had passed. To act as an alarm clock, people would insert a nail within the candle somewhere and once the burning wax reached that point, the nail would fall to the ground and hit a metal plate.
The Incredible Hulk Was Originally Gray
When Stan Lee created The Incredible Hulk, he originally had Bruce Banner turn into a giant GRAY monster rather than a giant green one. However, gray caused inconsistencies with the coloring. Throughout the first comic, Hulk was different shades of gray and even green on some pages. Stan Lee liked the green and decided to just change the color to that instead.
