The advent of computer-controlled traffic signals make the walk buttons at pedestrian crossings on heavily trafficked streets obsolete. By the late 1980s, most (but not all) walk buttons in New York City have been deactivated yet people push them anyhow, either in ignorance, out of habit, or in the off chance the buttons did work.

Many large office buildings also have dummy thermostats to give office workers the illusion of control. Some even go as far as installing white-noise generators to mimic the hum of fans after the HVAC system is shut off.

The same goes for the close button in elevators. Most elevators built or installed since the early 1990s don’t have close buttons that work, unless you have a fireman’s key. People do push them anyhow, because the fact that the door eventually closes reinforces their belief that the button works.

The moa were hunted to extinction by 1500 by the Maori in New Zealand. They were the only species of birds with no wings. But wait, you say, what about kiwis, emus, and ostriches? Well, these flightless birds, a group of birds called ratites, actually do have wings (some of them vestigials).

Oh, and one more thing. I mentioned New Zealand – have you ever asked yourself where is Old Zealand? New Zealand is actually named after Zeeland, a major seafaring province of the Netherlands, by Dutch navigator Abel Tasman in 1642 (yup, the island of Tasmania is named after him). Captain James Cook misspelled it New Zealand and the name stuck ever since.

Before the invention of the stethoscope, a physician would listen to a patient’s heart by placing his ear over the chest.

In 1816, René Laennec, a physician and devout Catholic, was called to examine a young woman suspected to have a diseased heart. According to the medical procedure of the time, Laennec tapped his hand on the patient’s back and tried to listen to the resulting sound (the "thumpyness" of the sound was used in diagnosis). Unfortunately, because the patient was too fat, he couldn’t hear anything.

Too embarrassed to put his head on the young woman’s ample bosom to listen closer, Laennec came up with a simple yet brilliant solution: he rolled a piece of paper into a cylinder and used that to listen to the patient’s heartbeat.

Laennec later created a new instrument made from hollow wooden cylinder he called stethoscope, from the Greek words stethos (chest) and skopos (examination).

Now, you would think that such an invention would be universally embraced by the physicians of his time, but you’d be wrong. Even the founder of the American Heart Association, Lewis A. Conner, resisted the stethoscope, preferring to listen to the heart directly over the chest of the patient.

Marie Byrd Land is a portion of Antarctica so remote that no country in the world bothered to claim it. It’s the single largest unclaimed territory on Earth.

Bir Tawil Triangle likely has no owner because of some administrative snafu. First of all, despite of its name, it’s not a triangle at all. In fact, it has a trapezoidal shape. In 1899, when the British drew the map between Egypt and Sudan, Bir Tawil was put in Sudan’s territory (which Egypt accepted). However, in 1902, when Sudan drew its own map, it put Bir Tawil on the Egyptian side! So far, neither country bothered to lay claim to this patch of land.

It was no big loss, however, as Bir Tawil is full of sand and a whole lot of nothing.

In the tenth century, the papacy of the Roman Catholic Church fell under the influence of harlots in an era termed Pornocracy.

Pornocracy or the Rule of the Prostitutes/Rules of the Harlots or the more polite Saeculum obscurum (latin for the Dark Age) began in 904 AD with the installation of Pope Sergius III. The Pope was completely under the control of Theodora, the beautiful wife of Roman consul Theophylactus, who used sex to wield power.

Theodora’s 15-year-old daughter Morazia became the concubine of Pope Sergius III. Their son later became Pope John XI – the only illegitimate son of a Pope that later became Pope himself.

The era of Pornocracy ended with Pope John XII (the grandson of Marozia) in 963. He was so immoral that the Basilica of Rome was said to be converted into a brothel under his rule.

Here’s an example:

An Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman walk into a bar. The bartender turns to them, takes one look, and says "What is this – some kind of joke?"

Or for all you scientists:

An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician find themselves in an
anecdote, indeed an anecdote quite similar to many that you have
no doubt already heard. After some observations and rough calculations

the engineer realizes the situation and starts laughing. A few
minutes later the physicist understands too and chuckles to himself
happily as he now has enough experimental evidence to publish a
paper. This leaves the mathematician somewhat perplexed, as he
had observed right away that he was the subject of an anecdote,
and deduced quite rapidly the presence of humour from similar
anecdotes, but considers this anecdote to be too trivial a corollary
to be significant, let alone funny. (Source)

Panamax is the largest class of ships that can fit through the Panama Canal.

This size is determined by the dimensions of the lock chambers and the depth of the water in the Panama Canal. Panamax is a significant consideration in ship design.

In 1982, Larry Walters tied 42 helium-filled weather balloons to his lawnchair and flew over Los Angeles.

Lawnchair Larry planned to rise 100 feet above the ground, but he actually flew to an altitude of 16,000 feet (3 miles) and floated into the controlled airspace near Long Bech airport. After he shot a few balloons with a pellet gun he was carrying for this purpose, Larry’s lawnchair descended … onto a powerline!

The dangling cables got caught in a powerline, which caused a blackout. When he was arrested, Larry was asked by a reporter why he had done what he did. His answer: "a man can’t just sit around." (Source)

[YouTube Link]

Fast forward to April 2008, when Reverend Adelir Antonio de Carli, a priest in Brazil, strapped himself to helium-filled party balloons to raise money for a spiritual rest-stop for truckers. The wind pushed him off course to the ocean, and he went missing, and presumed dead. (Source)

Scientists have actually investigated the Five-Second Rule.

The Five-Second Rule states that it’s okay to eat a dropped piece of food, as long as you pick it up before you can count to five.

In 2003, a high school intern at the University of Illinois named Jillian Clarke conducted a survey and found that half the men and 70% of the women knew about the five-second rule. Jillian then conducted this experiment: first, she contaminated a ceramic tile with E. coli bacteria, then she
placed gummy bears and cookies for 5 seconds and analyzed the food: they sure were contaminated.

In 2007, professor Paul L. Dawson of Clemson University and colleagues repeated the experiment. This time, the test surfaces were tile, wood flooring, and nylon carpet; the food were bread and bologna; and the bugs were salmonella. They discovered that a) salmonella can survive for 28 days on a surface and b) in just 5 seconds, anywhere from 150 to 8,000 bacteria transferred to the food.

So what does this mean for the Five-Second Rule? Do what you like, but remember: the infectious dose (the smallest number of bacteria that can actually cause illness) is as low as 10 for salmonella and 100 for E. coli. (Source)

Comedian Yakov Smirnoff

Smirnoff was an art teacher in Odessa before he came to the United States and became known as a comedian. After 9/11, Smirnoff painted "America’s Heart," a pointillist-style artwork with one brush-stroke for each victims of the attack. A giant mural of his painting was displayed on a damaged skyscraper overlooking the World Trade Center ground zero. (Source)

The Sark National Football Team, nicknamed "The Bad Lions" is the "losingest" national soccer team in history.

The Sark national football team represented the island of Sark in the International Island Games Association (Island Games 2003). The team lost every match by 15 goals or more, scored no goal, and had a total of 70 goals scored against it in just 4 matches.

The team’s coach Shane Moon summed up as such:

"It was a special occasion for our lads to enter the tournament. They will probably never do this again in their lifetimes." (Source)

Under Scots law, there are three potential outcomes of

The "not proven" [wiki] verdict, also called the Scottish Verdict or the "bastard verdict," is where although the juries don’t think that the case has been proven against the defendant, they also not convinced of his innocence.

Ann Hodges was the only human ever struck by a meteorite and lived to tell about it.

Ann was napping on her couch one fateful day in November 1954 when a grapefruit-sized meterorite crashed through the roof of her house, bounced off a large wooden console radio and struck her in the arm and hip.

The story didn’t end there: the Air Force confiscated the it (actually, they were under orders to confiscate any items from space for fears of a Soviet attack). Then a lawsuit by the landlord followed (everyone wanted to make money by selling it afterwards, including the Hodges). By the time possession of the meteorite was legally settled, people had lost interest and Ann was so fed up with the whole thing that she donated the meteorite – against the wishes of her husband – to the University of Alabama. (Source)

Le Train de Nulle Part (The Train From Nowhere) is a 233-page French novel

Sample (from Wikipedia):

Quelle aubaine ! Une place de libre, ou presque, dans ce compartiment. Une escale provisoire, pourquoi pas ! Donc, ma nouvelle adresse dans ce train de nulle part : voiture 12, 3ème compartiment dans le sens de la marche. Encore une fois, pourquoi pas ?

Fool’s luck! A vacant seat, almost, in that train. A provisional stop, why not? So, my new address in this nowhere train: car 12, 3rd compartment, forward. Once again, why not?

Thaler said this about verbs: "The verb is like a weed in a field of flowers. You have to get rid of it to allow the flowers to grow and flourish. Take away the verbs and the language speaks for itself." (Source)

Undecimber is the

It’s not a joke: the logic is that lunar calendars sometime have 13th month (for example, in the Hebrew calendar, 7 years out of every 19 have 13 months.

In the 18th century, watching and taunting "lunatics" in an asylum was a popular form of entertainment.

The cost of admission at the Hospital of St. Mary in London, the oldest psychiatric hospital in the world (later renamed Bethlem Hospital), was one penny. The asylum was so chaotic that it became the basis of the word "bedlam."

Philematology is the art or science of kissing.

The origin of the word kiss comes from Old English cyssan ("to kiss"), which transformed into the Middle English kissen before becoming the word as we know it today.

Anthropologists think that kissing evolved from grooming behavior or as a result of mothers premasticating (chewing) food for their children. Others think that kissing allowed prospective mates to sniff and taste each other’s pheromones for biological compatibility.

To avoid clashing their noses, couples turn their faces slightly to one side when kissing. In 2003, Onur Güntürkün observed that most couples turn their head to the right – by a ratio of 2:1 – when kissing in public (like while bidding goodbyes at airports). He noted that it’s similar to a baby’s preference for turning the head to the right during the final weeks of gestation and for the first few months after birth.

The human mouth is full of bacteria. When you kiss someone, you exchange anywhere between 10 million and 1 billion bacteria.

[YouTube Link]

Thirsty? Consider this: when it rains in the arid floodplains of Australia, the water holding frog absorbs water through its skin and then burrows into the soil. It then sheds a layer of its skin which harden into a cocoon to keep it from drying out. The frog then enters a deep resting stage and stays there until the next rainy season, which can be a full year away or longer.

The Aborigines sometime dig up the water holding frog from its burrow and squeeze it for a sip of water.

Odynophobia is the most common fear in the world. It’s the fear of pain.

Most people don’t like feeling pain – but being able to feel pain is actually a good thing. Consider the opposite: about 17 people in the United States are born with "congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis" – basically, they feel absolutely no pain. Far from being a wonderful thing, living without pain is actually hell.

Here’s a story of (then) 4-year-old Roberto Salazar, who was born without the ability to feel any pain:

When you first meet 4-year-old Roberto Salazar, you can’t help but notice his unwavering smile and constant laughter. By all accounts, he’s a very happy boy.

It is only when he rams his head violently into walls or plays a little too roughly with a schoolmate, all the while smiling, that you are reminded that he suffers from an incredibly rare genetic disorder. [...]

His family was shocked when Roberto started teething. He gnawed on his own tongue, lips and fingers to the point of mutilation. "If you could imagine when you bite your tongue how bad it hurts. At one point, you couldn’t even distinguish that his tongue was his tongue," Stingley-Salazar said.

Doctor Felicia Axelrod of the New York University, who specializes in this rare disease, said:

"For some children it’s a mild degree such as breaking a leg, they’ll get up and walk on the leg. They feel that something is uncomfortable but they keep on moving," she said. "For other children, the pain loss is so severe that they can injure themselves repetitively and actually mutilate themselves because they don’t know when to stop." (Source)

They also perform the job of a "puller-off," pulling off passengers who try to get on the train too late or when the train is too full.

Why, there’s a YouTube video clip of the oshiyas in action – Thanks Christophe!

The tradition of the class ring

Members of the United States Military Academy at West Point class of 1835 designed their own rings, which were purchased privately and made to order for the individuals. (Source)

Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest, and lost! He didn’t even make it to the finals.

In 1915, "Chaplinitis" swept across America and Charlie Chaplin look-alike contests became popular. One such contest was won by a rising young actor/comedian that became quite famous on his own right. His name was Bob Hope.

Blackboard chalk is made of gypsum, not chalk.

Chalk is a type of limestone composed of the mineral calcite. Blackboard chalk used to be made from natural chalk, but it has since been replaced by compressed gypsum (calcium sulfate).

Legendary gunfighter and lawman James Butler

His brother’s name was Lorenzo Butler Hickok. The origin of the nickname "Wild Bill" was unclear. One popular story told of how Hickok saw a man about to be beaten by a group of thugs and intervened. He drew his revolvers and threatened to shoot the first man to move. As nobody wanted to be shot, the crowd disperesed. (Source)

In 1876, Hickok was killed while playing poker in Deadwood, Dakota Territory. He was holding a pair of aces and a pair of eights, a hand that got to be called the "Dead Man’s Hand."

Coach John Heisman (yes, of the American football trophy fame) divided the game into quarters, invented the center snap and the "hike" yell, and made popular the forward pass.

Ever year, the Heisman Trophy is awarded to the most outstanding college football player in the United States. No Heisman Trophy winner has ever visited John Heisman’s grave in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. (Photo: Robert J. La Verghetta [Wikipedia])

Prisoners in the New Hampshire state prison in Concord, New Hampshire, stamp license plates with the state’s motto: "Live Free or Die."

The Bizarre History of 10 Common Sayings

Article contains some NSFW language.

The American football huddle was invented by Paul Hubbard, a deaf player at Gallaudet University, to avoid the other team see his signs.

Gallaudet University is the world’s premiere liberal arts university for the deaf and the hearing-impaired. Its all-deaf players football team was disbanded in 1994 for "lack of interest." The Gallaudet Bisons hadn’t won more than three games a season since 1930. (Source)

Dog

The only dog mentioned by breed in the Bible is the greyhound:

There be three things which go well, yea,
Which are comely in going;
A lion, which is strongest among beasts and
Turneth not away from any;
A greyhound;
A he-goat also. (Proverbs 30:29-31, King James Version)

In the Bible, dogs are considered ill-tempered scavengers that are tolerated, but not loved. (Source) (Photo: Neurodoc [wikipedia])

Every day, 27 million people eat at McDonald’s in the USA. Every year, this number grows by 1 million.

McDonald’s (USA) have experienced 45 consecutive months of sales increases since 2002. The secret? More and more McDonald’s are open 24 hours. (Source)

Rutherford B. Hayes was the first US President to have a telephone and a typewriter in the White House.

You may not remember Hayes, but he started the very first Easter Egg hunt on the lawn of the White House, a tradition that still continues today on the Monday after Easter.

Every second, the sun produces more energy than human civilizations have ever produced in history.

Indeed, every second, the sun produces about 400 trillion trillion watts of energy. That’s the equivalent of a trillion 1 megaton atom bombs! (Source)

There are more hazardous waste sites in New Jersey than anywhere else in the United States.

In 1998, The Garden State had 109 hazardous waste sites on the national priorities list for the federal Superfund program or 8.7% of the national total. The state’s land area is just 0.2% of the United States. New Jersey’s hazardous waste density (the number of sites per 1,000 square miles) was 14.7 or 40 times the national average. (Source: A Geography of New Jersey: The City in the Garden by Charles A. Stansfield)

If you like to go on vacations, move to Italy. The average number of vacation days every year there is 42 days.

In the United States, on the other hand, employees only get an average of 13 days of vacation each year.

In 2007, Oklahoma made watermelon its official state vegetable.

Yes, you read that right: on April 17, 2007, the Oklahoma State Senate passed a bill declaring that not only is watermelon a vegetable (related to cucumbers, they said), it’s also the state’s official vegetable. (Source)

Other states have official vegetables are:

Arkansas – South Arkansas vine ripe tomato
Georgia – Vidalia sweet onion

Idaho – potato (what else?)
Louisiana – sweet potato
New Mexico – chile and pinto bean
North Carolina – sweet potato
Texas – sweet onion
Utah – Spanish sweet onion
Washington – Walla Walla sweet onion

H. Ross Perot Jr. (yes, the son of Ross Perot) piloted the first ever helicopter round the world flight.

On September 1, 1982, H. Ross Perot Jr. and Jay Coburn left Fort Worth, Texas, on a Bell 206 L-1 Long Ranger II and returned 28 days later. They flew on average of eight and a half hours a day, refueled 56 times and flew over 26 countries. (Source)

Before anti-smoking groups had their way, Mr. Potato Head’s favorite accessory was a smoking pipe.

The pipe was discontinued by Hasbro in 1987. (Image: wm.edu)

The original Mr. Potato Head was an actual potato. In the early 1950s, as a young boy in a poor farming family, George Lerner took potatoes from his mother’s garden and used grapes as eyes and a carrot as a nose to make a doll for his younger sister.

Superman has a pet monkey named Beppo.

Beppo was originally a test animal used by Superman’s father Jor-El to develop a spaceship. The monkey stowed away on board of the craft when it launched baby Kal-El to earth.

Because it’s from Krypton, Beppo the monkey had super powers … that it used for mischief! Superboy had to lead the super monkey into deep space and left him there.

The Bic ballpoint pen was

He dropped the "h" from Bich because he feared that people would call it the Bitch pen. Technically, it’s name is the BIC CRISTAL.

Each Bic pen has enough ink for up to 2 miles (3.2 km) of writing. If you accidentally get its ink on clothing, just use alcohol-based hairspray to dissolve it.

Bic pen is incredibly useful. Besides writing, it can be used to unlock a Krytonite bike lock, make a chandelier and a weapon for intra-office warfare, as well as to perform an emergency tracheotomy (as Hawkeye did in M*A*S*H).

In 2005, BIC announced that it has sold its 100 billionth pen.

Until 1973, the American Psychiatric Association defined homosexuality as a mental illness.

The APA listed homosexuality as a mental illness in their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II), a guide book that list different categories of mental disorders and criteria for diagnosing them. In 1973, they removed homosexuality and replaced it with "sexual orientation disturbance."

The present DSM-IV also does not list homosexuality as a mental disorder, but still has "Sexual Disorder Not Otherwise Specified" as a diagnosis for someone with "…persistent and marked distress about sexual orientation." (Source: Healthieryou.com, Photo: Bonkersinstitute.org)

Suicide is present but very rare among black American females, Irish Catholics, Mexicans, and Muslims in Egypt; Suicides are common in Hungary, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Japan, and Finland. (Source: Comprehensive Textbook of Suicidology)

One theory is that the word "testify"

And why did the Romans have to hold their balls before they could testify in court? It was so that eunuchs and women were excluded.

We should say that etymologists aren’t unified on this: some say that the origin of testify came from the latin "testis" which means "third person standing by" or "witness." But that’s boring. (Source: American Heirtage Dictionary of the English Language)

The Muppets Bert and Ernie were designed by Don Sahlin based on two fruits: Bert was a banana and Ernie was an orange.

Rumor was, Bert and Ernie were named after two characters in Frank Capra’s "It’s a Wonderful Life" (Bert the cop and Ernie the cabbie).

One-pack-a-day smoking habit will cost you at least 2 teeth every 10 years.

According to 30-year studies at Tufts University, chain smokers lost an average of 2.9 teeth after 10 years of smoking one pack a day. Non-smokers lost an average of 1.3 teeth after 10 years. A smoker that quit will reduce his or her toothloss to 1.7 teeth. (Source)

In the Siege of Acre in 1191, Richard the Lionheart constructed two trebuchets that he named "God’s Own Catapult" and "Bad Neighbor."

Things flung during a medieval siege included: rocks, fire bomb, carcasses of animals and people (to spread disease and demoralize the enemy), and burning sand. Now, hobbyists build trebuchet mainly to chuck pumpkins.

Americans are getting bustier:

Some statistics say that up to 85% of American women are wearing the wrong bra size. Indeed, Oprah Winfrey once did a "bra intervention" and got so excited she said: "I’m so excited. Whoo, whoo. Whoo, whoo. Whoo!" (Source)

Thanks to Bette Midler, we all know that the brassiere was invented by Otto Titsling. (YouTube)

Oprah’s favorite bra is the Le Mystere Tisha Bra #955 (Source). But that’s just a creepy trivia, so let’s stop there before it gets any weirder.

More than a third of American adults hit the snooze button every morning an average of 3X.

The "snooziest" group is the 25 to 34-year-olds: 57% of them hit the snooze button. Compare this to seniors: only 10% of Americans over 65-years-old regularly hit the snooze button (Source).

The ZIP code 12345 belongs to

Every year, GE gets thousands of mails from children who believed that it’s only logical that Santa Claus has the ZIP code 12345.

Urban Legend has it that when Neil Armstrong stepped on the Moon, he said "Good Luck, Mr. Gorsky!"

This is an oldie but goodie urban legend; supposedly when Armstrong was a child, he overheard his next door neighbor Mrs. Gorsky shouting to her husband: "You want oral sex? You’ll get oral sex when the kid next door walks on the moon!" Snopes has the story.