SurprisinglyTrue

Facts you probably didn't know, and wouldn't have guessed. You can also follow us on Twitter.

[surprisinglytrue]

In the 1960s, a Chinese dentist was executed for comparing a mango to a sweet potato.

In 1966, Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong initiated the Cultural Revolution, a large-scale social upheaval meant to solidify his grip on power.  The results were chaotic, but his overall goal was ultimately accomplished.  In the process, a cult of personality began to develop around Mao.

In 1968, Mao received about 40 mangoes as a gift from the Pakistani foreign minister.  He gave these mangoes to a group of workers who had recently ended a student revolt.  At the time, mangoes were a novelty in China, especially more rural areas.

The mangoes took on a sort of religious significance, and were revered like religious relics.  They were taken on tour all over the country and paraded through the streets.  Mangoes began to take a prominent place in government propaganda, and consumer goods decorated with mangoes became widely available.

But not everyone bought into the frenzy.  A dentist in a rural village saw one of the “touring” mangoes, and was unimpressed.  He made the mistake of comparing the mango to a sweet potato (which, it must be said, does look somewhat similar).  For his candor, he was publicly humiliated and executed.

The mango fad died out over time, and by the end of the decade Chinese interest in the tropical fruit had died out.

More:

Mao's Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution

China's curious cult of the mango (BBC)

[surprisinglytrue]

During WWI, soldiers held an informal "Christmas truce", singing carols, exchanging gifts, and playing soccer.

December 24, 1914, was the first Christmas Eve of World War I.  At Flanders, Belgium, after days of brutal fighting, British and German troops reached an informal Christmas truce that ultimately lasted for several days.

At first it was tentative; Germans placing Christmas trees where they would be visible from the opposing trench and lighting candles, and singing Christmas carols.  The Brits began to join in the singing, and slowly the two sides became convinced of each other's friendly intent.

By morning, the "No Man's Land" between the trenches was filled with soldiers singing, exchanging gifts from the Christmas supplies given to them by their respective governments, and even playing soccer.

But it was not to last.  By New Year's Day, commanders on both sides were ordering their troops to resume hostilities.  The war would drag on for nearly four more years.

More: Snopes

[surprisinglytrue]

Sir Christopher Lee is known to many people as the actor that played Saruman in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film trilogy.  Lee is a lifetime fan of the Lord of the Rings books, and in a chance meeting in a pub in Oxford several decades ago he briefly met author J.R.R. Tolkien.  He is widely reported to be the only person working on the trilogy to have ever actually met Tolkien.

But long before that role, he lived quite an interesting life.

During World War II he initially volunteered (along with several other Brits) to aid Finland in fending off Soviet attack.  The Brits were kept away from the front lines and ultimately left after a few weeks without seeing any combat (the Finns ultimately trounced the Soviets).  Lee next joined the Royal Air Force hoping to be a pilot, but late in his training suffered medical issues that kept him from flying.  He joined RAF Intelligence and was posted in several areas.

At the end of the war, the Allied governments began rounding up suspected Nazi war criminals so that they could face trial.  Lee (who speaks German as well as French, Italian, and Spanish) helped interview people accused war criminals and others.  Afterward, he retired from the RAF.

After the war, Lee got into acting.  He has had a long and distinguished career, mainly playing villains.

So what does Lee do these days?  He still acts.  But he also sings.  He occasionally sang parts for musical scores throughout his movie career, but in 2005 he became actively involved in heavy metal music, providing vocals for songs by several bands.  In 2010 he released his own metal album, and he continues to record.

Not bad for a guy about to turn 93.

More:

Lord of Misrule: The Autobiography of Christopher Lee by Christopher Lee

Interview with Christopher Lee, Ian McKellen, and John Rhys-Davies

All Music

[surprisinglytrue]

On Sunday, June 7, 2015, Sir Christopher Lee has passed away after being hospitalized for heart and other issues.  Lee was 93 years old.  In honor of his remarkable life, we are reblogging this post.

[surprisinglytrue]

There is a storm on Jupiter that is larger than the Earth.

Jupiter is a gas giant, the largest planet in the Solar System, and it is really really big.  Jupiter’s “Great Red Spot” is a colossal storm that has been raging at least since the late 1800s, when astronomers first recorded seeing it.  At one point it was so large that some estimates suggested that its long axis was three times the diameter of the Earth.  Since then, it has been shrinking; recent observations from the Hubble Space Telescope indicate its size is approaching the diameter of the Earth, and it could disappear within decades.

More and image source: NASA

[surprisinglytrue]

Ernest Hemingway’s former house in Key West is full of mutant cats.

Author Ernest Hemingway loved cats.  He was once given a cat, which he named Snow White.  That cat had polydactyly, a mutation in cats that causes them to have more toes.  This sometimes giving the front paws the appearance of a “mitten”, with the extra toes sticking out to the side like a thumb.

In the 1930s, Hemingway lived in a house on Key West, Florida.  There, he and his family had a number of cats that were allowed to roam relatively freely.  His polydactyl cat bred with other cats.  Polydactyly is a dominant trait, so many descendants of that cat also bore the mutation.  Over time, this led to a substantial population of polydactyl cats living on the island.  Many of them lived in or around his house.

Polydactyl cats became so associated with the writer that they are sometimes known as “Hemingway cats”.

Hemingway moved from Key West to Cuba around 1940.  After his death in 1961, the house was sold.  The owner decided to make it a museum in 1964.  The museum keeps about 50 cats at the house.  The cats have free reign of the house.  Many of the cats are polydactyl.

More:

Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum

[surprisinglytrue]

On an aircraft carrier, just the chains for the anchors can weigh over 300 tons... each.

The United States has 10 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers.  These ships are some of the largest ever produced, and everything about the scale of them is staggering.

Case in point: each Nimitz-class carrier has 2 anchors.  Each of those anchors weighs 30 tons (60,000 pounds).  That might sound like a lot, until you realize that that each of the anchor chains weighs 307.5 tons, more than 10 times as much.  And again, there are two on each ship.  The chains are each 1,082 feet long (about one fifth of a mile), and each link of chain weighs 365 pounds.

The newest American carriers being built are the Gerald R. Ford class, which are lighter than the Nimitz class.  The anchor system is lighter too, by about half.

More:

US Navy site for the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69)

Huntington Ingalls Industries

[surprisinglytrue]

There is a “correct” order for adjectives in English.

It’s common to attach more than one adjective to a noun, for example “the quick brown fox”.  Native English speakers often note that particular combinations seem “natural”, but have a hard time explaining why or describing any underlying pattern.

As it turns out, there is a pattern that holds most of the time.  Sometimes abbreviated OSASCOMP, it is:

Opinion

Size

Age

Shape

Color

Origin

Material

Purpose

This is not a hard-and-fast rule, and is really just describing the way English speakers usually use adjectives.  As with everything in the English language, there are exceptions and special cases, and this “rule” is sometimes bent by writers or speakers trying to create a particular effect.

More:

University of Victoria

[surprisinglytrue]

Toad the Wet Sprocket took their name from a Monty Python bit.

In the 1970s, for a segment called Rock Notes that would later appear on Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album, Monty Python’s Eric Idle reels off a bunch of fake music news.  The events are meant to be silly and surreal, and the band names chosen to be so ludicrous that no real band would ever use them.

In 1986, as their first real gig approached, a band from California was trying and failing to choose a name.  As a joke, they used Toad the Wet Sprocket, one of the band names from the Monty Python bit.

The name stuck, and the band went on to have several successful singles.

More:

Toad the Wet Sprocket official site

All Music

[surprisinglytrue]

The United States once sent 813 soldiers, helicopters, bombers, and an aircraft carrier to cut down a tree.

Since the armistice in 1953, North and South Korea have been divided by a "no man's land" known as the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ).  There are strict rules for anyone moving through the DMZ, and both sides have watch towers along the border.

The lack of human habitation has turned the DMZ into a sort of nature preserve.  It is full of trees, and to maintain visibility both sides periodically trim trees that may obstruct their view.  There are rules for these operations specifying how many people can be sent, how many of them can be armed, and so on.

In 1976, a crew of South Korean and American soldiers entered the DMZ to trim the branches of a tree that was blocking the view between two United Nations Command operating locations.  They had notified the North Koreans in advance, as was required.

After they began trimming the tree, a group of North Korean soldiers arrived and demanded that they stop.  The American officer in charge, Captain Arthur Bonifas, ignored this and commanded the soldiers to continue working.  The North Koreans sent for reinforcements and, once they arrived, repeated the demand.  Again, Bonifas ignored them.

It was at this point that the North Koreans attacked the South Korean and American soldiers.  They picked up the axes dropped by the tree-trimmers and used these as weapons.  Two Americans were killed (Capt. Bonifas and 1st Lieutenant Mark Barrett), and most of the rest of the crew were injured.

The incident came to be known as the "axe murder incident".

The American and South Korean governments quickly deliberated on their response.  Three days later, they launched Operation Paul Bunyan.

Operation Paul Bunyan had two basic components.  The first was to send a crew unannounced into the DMZ to completely chop down the tree with chainsaws.  And the second was a large show of force to convince the North Koreans to back down.

That show of force included several hundred soldiers deployed in and around the DMZ, helicopters, bombers, and fighter jet escorts.  The aircraft carrier USS Midway and her associated task force of ships were relocated to a station near the coast.

The tree was felled in 42 minutes.  The North Korean side deployed several hundred troops but did not open fire.  The stump of the tree, which was quite large, was left behind for symbolic value.  It remained in place until 1987, when it was replaced with a stone monument.

The show of force worked; Kim Il-sung did not escalate the situation further, accepted some degree of responsibility for the North Korean side, and apologized, more or less.

More:

Global Security

Stars and Stripes

[surprisinglytrue]

NASA creates movie-style promotional posters for each International Space Station crew.

Whether for promotional purposes or just for fun, NASA creates "posters" for each crew that goes to the International Space Station (ISS).  Often based on posters for popular movies, the results range from amusing to ridiculous.

More: View them all on Wikimedia Commons (warning, many images)

Image: Expedition 16 The Matrix crew poster, NASA, public domain

[surprisinglytrue]

The Vatican owns some of London's most expensive real estate, thanks to money it got from Mussolini.

In 1929, the Catholic Church made a deal with Benito Mussolini, Italy's fascist dictator.  The Church would recognize the legitimacy of Mussolini's government, and in exchange Vatican City would be officially recognized as an independent state (the Lateran Treaty) and the Church would receive a substantial amount of money.  It would be easy to view this as a sort of Faustian bargain, but the political realities at the time meant that the Church had little choice but to reach some kind of agreement with the dictator.

The money was kept secret at the time, probably due to the political sensitivity of having taken money from Mussolini, and the Church spent the next several decades secretly investing it through a system of shell companies.  Many of those investments were in real estate, including properties in Switzerland, Paris, and London.  They managed the money well; recent estimates suggest they have grown it to the equivalent of more than half a billion British pounds.

More:

The Guardian

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican by Gerald Posner

Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy: Financing the Vatican, 1850-1950 by John F. Pollard

[surprisinglytrue]

If you fully shuffle a deck of cards, that specific configuration of cards has probably never occurred before.

When you shuffle a deck of cards, if you do it properly, it is a totally random process.  There are over 8 * 10^67 possible configurations for a standard deck of 52 cards (that's 52! configurations if you want to be precise).  So let's do some math.

The age of the universe is currently estimated to be about 13.798 billion years.  That's around 4 * 10^17 seconds.

Suppose that you and all your friends, along with the other 7 billion people on Earth, decided to shuffle some cards.  Suppose you all started at the beginning of the universe (which would carry its own challenges), and each person shuffled a deck once per second.

That would be about 7.4 * 10^27 shuffles.

If none of those shuffles ever repeated, that would mean that only 0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,009% of all possible configurations have ever happened (that's 9 * 10^-41).  Which would be, helpfully, the likelihood of you repeating a configuration that had happened before.

So remember, as you watch your annoyingly-slow friend shuffle on poker night, that you are witnessing something that has almost certainly never happened in the history of the universe.

[surprisinglytrue]

In 1947, the first real "computer bug" was found: a moth.

The term "bug" to indicate unexpected or undesired behavior is sometimes claimed to originate from insects getting into electronics and causing them to misbehave.  But this is erroneous.

This image shows a moth that was removed from a relay in the Harvard University Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator, with the annotation "First actual case of bug being found."  The term was already in widespread use at the time (which is why the annotation would have been amusing at the time), with an etymology going back decades.  The story of this "first actual bug" was spread widely by Admiral Grace Hopper, a noted early computer pioneer.

The moth, and the piece of paper that it is taped to, currently sits in the Smithsonian Museum.

More: The Jargon File

Image: NH 96566-KN, US Naval Surface Warfare Center, public domain

[surprisinglytrue]

Marvin Gaye had to record an album with the profits going to his ex-wife, so he made it about their divorce.

In 1977, celebrated musician Marvin Gaye was served with divorce papers by his then-wife, Anna Gordy Gaye (born Anna Gordy), after having been separated for about 4 years.  After some wrangling, they reached an agreement on the divorce settlement.  She was to receive a large portion of the royalties from his next album.

Gaye initially considered deliberately tanking the album, writing something so bad that it wouldn't sell and therefore reducing the royalty payout.  But instead, he decided to make the album entirely about their relationship, marriage, and divorce.

The resulting album, Here, My Dear, is widely considered to be one of Gaye's best.  It describes their tumultuous relationship with brutal, total honesty.  It might be said that it paints a fairly negative picture of Anna Gordy Gaye, but then Gaye himself doesn't exactly come off as a saint.  In his version of events, both parties bear responsibility.

More: All Music

[surprisinglytrue]

The fax machine is older than the telephone.

You might associate the fax machine with, say, the 1980s.  But the technology, in one form or another, is actually much older.  The first thing that we might call a fax machine was patented by Scottish inventor Alexander Bain in 1843.  Several improvements were devised in the following years, and the first commercial fax service entered operation in 1865.  These early designs worked over telegraph lines.

The telephone would not be invented for several more years, with Alexander Graham Bell receiving his patent in 1876.

In 1881, English inventor Shelford Bidwell devised the scanning phototelegraph, which more closely resembles the operation of what we would today call a fax machine (it could scan and transmit an arbitrary image).

[surprisinglytrue]

Concrete is over 2,000 years old, and was used extensively in ancient Rome.

Many people think of concrete as a symbol of modern times, but it actually dates back more than two millennia to ancient Rome.  The Romans invented a form of concrete similar to modern concrete, and used it heavily for many different kinds of construction, including underwater.  Many of the structures are still standing, including some of the most famous surviving Roman ruins.

More:

History.com

National Institute of Standards and Technology Internal Report 5900

[surprisinglytrue]

Christopher Lee met JRR Tolkien, interrogated Nazi war criminals, and now records heavy-metal music.

Sir Christopher Lee is known to many people as the actor that played Saruman in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film trilogy.  Lee is a lifetime fan of the Lord of the Rings books, and in a chance meeting in a pub in Oxford several decades ago he briefly met author J.R.R. Tolkien.  He is widely reported to be the only person working on the trilogy to have ever actually met Tolkien.

But long before that role, he lived quite an interesting life.

During World War II he initially volunteered (along with several other Brits) to aid Finland in fending off Soviet attack.  The Brits were kept away from the front lines and ultimately left after a few weeks without seeing any combat (the Finns ultimately trounced the Soviets).  Lee next joined the Royal Air Force hoping to be a pilot, but late in his training suffered medical issues that kept him from flying.  He joined RAF Intelligence and was posted in several areas.

At the end of the war, the Allied governments began rounding up suspected Nazi war criminals so that they could face trial.  Lee (who speaks German as well as French, Italian, and Spanish) helped interview people accused war criminals and others.  Afterward, he retired from the RAF.

After the war, Lee got into acting.  He has had a long and distinguished career, mainly playing villains.

So what does Lee do these days?  He still acts.  But he also sings.  He occasionally sang parts for musical scores throughout his movie career, but in 2005 he became actively involved in heavy metal music, providing vocals for songs by several bands.  In 2010 he released his own metal album, and he continues to record.

Not bad for a guy about to turn 93.

More:

Lord of Misrule: The Autobiography of Christopher Lee by Christopher Lee

Interview with Christopher Lee, Ian McKellen, and John Rhys-Davies

All Music