Feed Your Brain With These Fascinating Facts
interesting stuff from around the world
Published 8 years ago in Wow
1
The Osage Indians were once the richest per capita people in the world due to oil reserves on their land. Congress then passed a law requiring court appointed “guardians” to manage their wealth. Over 60 Osage were murdered from 1921-1925, their land rights passed to the guardian. Three men were convicted and sentenced in this case, but most murders went unsolved. A late twentieth-century investigation by the journalist Dennis McAuliffe revealed deep corruption among white officials in the county at the time. Problems included failure of law enforcement to conduct post-mortem exams, falsified death certificates issued by the coroner’s office, and other activities among white officials to cover up the murders.
2
Dutch sex ed classes emphasize love, fun, and excitement, while US sex ed classes emphasize the mechanics and dangers. Scholars have critiqued American sex education for its overemphasis of danger and risk, noting the cost to teenage girls…. [and] the missing discourse of teenage love in American sex education, and its effects on boys, who confront a broader culture that provides scant recognition of, or support for, their emotional needs. In comparison, sex education in the Netherlands tends to frame boys’ and girls’ sexual development in the context of their feelings for and relationships with others. Curricula include discussions of fun and exciting feelings. They also validate young people’s experience of love.
3
Because of an old superstition, several ravens are kept at the Tower of London at all times. These ravens are enlisted soldiers of the Kingdom, and have occasionally been dismissed for bad conduct. While wild ravens live for 10-15 years, Tower ravens can live past 40 years. “Their presence is traditionally believed to protect the Crown and the tower; a superstition holds that “if the Tower of London ravens are lost or fly away, the Crown will fall and Britain with it””
9
A Canadian child molester who posted about 200 swirled images of his face online molesting kids in Cambodia and Vietnam. German investigators figured out a technique for unswirling the images, leading to his arrest. While Neil was teaching in Thailand, he allegedly employed the services of a Thai to bring young boys from internet cafes to his apartment to perform sexual services. His original sentence of 6 years was reduced by about half because he admitted to the crime. Status: Released from prison on March 26, 2017
10
In 1971, the U.S. left a memorial on the Moon for every astronaut who died in the pursuit of space exploration, including Russian Cosmonauts. The sculpture was to be lightweight but sturdy, capable of withstanding the temperature extremes of the Moon; it could not be identifiably male or female, nor of any identifiable ethnic group. According to Scott, it was agreed Van Hoeydonck’s name would not be made public, to avoid the commercial exploitation of the US government’s space program. Scott kept the agreement secret from NASA management prior to the mission, smuggling the statue aboard his spacecraft.
11
Wealthy Chinese hire body doubles to get prosecuted for their crimes; this process is called Ding zui. Incredibly, substitutes could be hired even for executions. Nineteenth-century traveller Julius Berncastle, the Qing Dynasty author De Fu, and the legal scholar John Bruce Norton each described substitute executions as regular events. An 1883 report from the Board of Punishments demanded an inquiry into how a youth named Wang Wen-shu “was wrongly convicted” and “was on the point of being executed as a substitute for one Hu T’ian, whose alias he was falsely declared to be.” T.T. Meadows, the British diplomat who persuaded Western nations to copy China’s system of civil-service exams, argued that the phenomenon of substitute executions was not as surprising as it might seem. If a family is starving, wouldn’t many parents accept execution in exchange for enough money to save their children?
12
At the time of WW1, the King of Britain, Russia, and Germany were all first cousins. When asked about WW1, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany sarcastically remarked, “If my grandmother (Queen Victoria) had been alive, she would never have allowed it.” Tsar Nicholas and Kaiser Wilhelm were actually quite close. In a series of famous wartime telegrams they referred to each other with childhood nicknames: Nicky and Willy.
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