Top 10 Facts That Sound Like BS But Are Actually True- The Top Ten Today

We all know that there are many curious, amazing and intriguing facts in the world. Any one person can only dare to collect few of them. Its more than just easy to say "I Know That", than actually knowing a thing.

Many simple facts and stories are in this world which sound like utter BS until you really see the proof that its true. Sometimes its better to know what you're saying rather than terming something as BS.



 

So here we are noting down our list of Top 10 Facts That Sound Like BS But Are Actually True, that are surely gonna amaze and educate you.

Now you may buckle up as we're diving straight to the list. 

Also read The Top 10 Amazing Coincidences.

#10. Building Melts Cars?

 On the 2nd of September, 2013, BBC News London reported that a new London skyscraper dubbed the "Walkie-Talkie",so-called for its curved shape, melted parts of a car parked on a nearby street by reflecting so much sunlight.

Like every ordinary day, Martin Lindsay parked his Jaguar on Eastcheap, in the City of London, on Thursday afternoon. When he returned about two hours later, he found parts of his car - including the wing mirror and badge - had melted.

Nearby shops were also damaged by the intense sun rays. 
One shopkeeper said the glare caused his doormat to start smoking and scorched a lemon, another said it blistered paint - and one journalist even managed to fry an egg with the startlingly bright rays.
 

The 37-storey building, which has been nicknamed as the 'Walkie Scorchie', was fitted with a 'sunshade' to deflect the rays finally to prevent any further damage!!

#9. Benford's Law Proves You Wrong!

In real-life numerical data, the probability of the first number being 1 is almost 30% and not 11.11% that many may think intuitively.

Sounds like complete BS isn't it? This is known as Benford's law.

Let's take an example. Take the height of 60 tallest buildings in the world.
Take a count of the leading digit frequencies. Let's say, in meters.

Amazed?
As the sample data size would increase, the probabilities of the first digit would keep getting more accurate as by Benford's law.

But surely, I'm joking, let's do it in feet instead of meters!

Even more accurate!

These buildings are a fluke, show me some more, you say?

Let's take asteroids, and planets, and the Sun! Buildings might have been influenced by Benford himself, surely he couldn't make the radius of the objects in the Solar system fixed, right?

We compare the mean radius, in km, as given on Wiki. It makes our job even easier as we don't have to count anything. It categorizes the objects in class intervals.

There are 39 objects in the category of radii larger than 400 km. Out of these, 6 have a radius in the 1000-2000 range, and none in the 10000-20000 range.

Then, there are 56 objects in the category of 200-400 km radius. None of them obviously have leading digit 1.

Then there are 72 objects in the category of 100-200 km radius. All of them obviously have leading digit 1.

And then there are a large number of objects ~ approx 150 in the next category of 100-50 km radius. None, again, with a leading digit 1.

Let's have the analysis now.
Leading digit 1 cases = 6 + 72 = 78
Total cases taken = About 320 (since I didn't bother counting the 100-50 km radius category exactly)
Probability of the leading digit being 1 = 24.4%

Much, much more than the 11.11% one will intuitively suggest.
Now since we didn't consider the next category 10-50 km, our results are not exactly as predicted by Benford 30.1%

But still, amazing enough, I believe.

Even the Fibonacci sequence follows Benford's law. Let's take the first 15 numbers.
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144,  233, 377

Leading digit 1 comes in 4 out of the 15 cases, with a probability of 26.67%

Let's take the first 30 numbers.
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144,  233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181, 6765, 10946, 17711, 28657, 46368,  75025, 121393, 196418, 317811, 514229

Leading digit 1 comes in 9 out of the 30 cases. Hence the probability is now 30%.

Before you start trying to find data where this law does not fit, please be aware that Benford's law makes the most accurate predictions only in real-life data. 

That means, only in the cases where there's orders of magnitude differences in the values. So, it won't work on ages of people, which are limited to just about 100 numeric values. 

It will however, work on annual incomes of people, which can vary from 0 to 1,00,000 and even more.

#8. You Never Took Rest!

While sitting still on a chair ,we are moving with a velocity of 3 million km/hr!!!

 

When, after a long day of running around, you finally find the time to relax in your favorite armchair, nothing seems easier than just sitting still. But have you ever considered how fast you are really moving when it seems you are not moving at all?

To make one complete rotation in 24 hours, a point near the equator of the Earth must move at close to 1000 miles per hour (1600 km/hr). 

The speed gets less as you move north, but it's still a good clip throughout the United States. 

Because gravity holds us tight to the surface of our planet, we move with the Earth and don't notice its rotation.

#7. Will You Switch?

George is on a game show, and he has to pick one of three doors. There's a car behind one of them and goats behind the other two. 

He picks door number one. The host, who knows what's behind all the doors, opens door number two, revealing a goat. He then says to George, "I'll let you switch doors if you want."

Should George stick with door number one or switch to door number three?

It seems obvious that it makes no difference. The car is equally likely to be behind door one or three, so whichever door George picks, he has a 50-50 chance of getting the car.

That's wrong, though. Switching will give him an advantage.

If I pick a door and hold, I have a 1/3 chance of winning.

My first guess is 1 in 3 — there are 3 random options, right?

If I rigidly stick with my first choice no matter what, I can’t improve my chances. Monty could add 50 doors, blow the other ones up, do a voodoo rain dance — it doesn’t matter. The best I can do with my original choice is 1 in 3. The other door must have the rest of the chances, or 2/3.

The explanation may make sense, but doesn’t explain why the odds “get better” on the other side.

#6. Hitler Got Nobel Peace Prize?

One of humanity’s greatest villains was Adolf Hitler. It’s impossible to figure out how many deaths he and the Nazis were responsible for, but it is in the tens of millions.

Three months after starting World War II with the invasion of Poland in 1939, (and 16 months after being named Time’s Man of the Year), Hitler was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Swedish politician Erik Gottfrid Christian Brandt. Another nominee that year was Mahatma Gandhi.

What the Nobel committee didn’t get was that Brandt’s letter nominating Hitler was ironic. Brandt was anti-fascism and he wanted to provoke Hitler and the Nazis. 

When Brandt realized that the committee didn’t know it was a joke, he immediately withdrew his nomination. We hope in part because he realized that if you have to explain a joke, it’s just not funny anymore.

In the end, no one won the 1939 Nobel Peace Prize because of the outbreak of World War II. But we’re hoping it would have been Gandhi over Hitler.

#5. Sharks Are Older Than Trees?

According to fossilized scales found in Siberia, it’s believed that sharks first appeared on Earth sometime around 450 million years ago during the Silurian period. Over the years, sharks evolved and at one point there were over 3,000 species of shark. 

There are about 500 species today.

Trees, on the other hand, didn’t appear until millions of years after the appearance of sharks. It’s believed that trees first started growing during the Devonian period, which happened about 416 million to 358 million years ago. 

The oldest known tree fossil is 385 million-years-old; that is 65,000,000 years after the first appearance of sharks! Besides trees, sharks are also older than the dinosaurs by 220 million years, and they are 390 years older than Mount Everest.

Just for some perspective on that, Homo sapiens only evolved about 200,000 years ago. No wonder they get a whole week to themselves.

#4. Chicago Is Raising And Nobody Notices!

There are some facts that you instinctively know are BS, even if you’re not sure why. The idea that someone once managed to make the city of Chicago levitate 6 feet in the air without anyone noticing is definitely one such fact. For one thing, it’s impossible. 

For another, well, just listen to what you’re saying. You might as well claim the Moon is made of cheese.

Well, sorry, but we’re about to completely mess with your perception of how reality works. On New Year’s Eve 1855, the Chicago Board of Sewage Commissioners tasked engineer E.S. Chesbrough with finding a solution to the city’s regular cholera outbreaks. 

Chesbrough decided the easiest option would be to hike the entire city out its swamp, 6 feet into the air.

It was known as the Raising of Chicago, and it was completely literal. To get the city out the cholera-infested swamp it sat on, hundreds of men jacked up the streets using massive screws, filled in the space beneath them, and called the result ‘ground level’.

The work carried on for 20 years, and was often completely mad. There are stories of whole hotels being hoisted up into the air, and not a single person inside them realizing it was happening.

Nor was it a temporary fix. The Chicago you see today is the ‘raised’ version. That’s right: Chicago is still levitating today, and no-one living there has ever noticed.

 

#3. Giant Mushrooms Covered The Earth

Between the late Silurian and Devonian periods (around 360–430 million years ago) the earth was far more whimsical looking than it is today. 

Plants were relatively uncommon during this era and instead the earth was covered with giant fungi called Prototaxites.

Large amounts of fossil evidence is being discovered to support this, with the first being found in Canada in 1859.

The photo above is a recently discovered Prototaxite fossil found in Saudi Arabia.

These fungi could grow up to 26 foot tall with trunks of around 3 foot diameter, making them by far the largest organisms at the time. Pretty tall for mushrooms if you ask me.

I’m sure this would sound like BS to most people.

#2. Information To Energy

That’s right. Scientists have found a way to convert information—mere measurements—into energy. They’ve even quantified how much energy one bit of information is “worth”— a value equal to kTln2, where k is equal to Boltzmann's constant and T represents the temperature of the storage medium. 

This concept has its roots in the famous “Maxwell’s Demon” thought experiment.

See, this wacky physicist named James Maxwell sat down one day and thought, “Hmm, everyone says the Second Law of Thermodynamics is correct, but I’m pretty sure my imaginary demon friend breaks everything we know about physics.” 

Or something like that.

He pictured two things: a super powerful, all-knowing “demon,” and a box of gas with two chambers connected by a door. In Maxwell’s mental experiment, whenever a faster, more energetic particle came barreling towards the door, the demon could quickly open it, letting the particle into the other chamber, and then slam the door shut behind it.

If the demon knew which particles were faster and which were slower, he could strategically open and shut the door to build up a collection of faster particles in one chamber. 

Essentially, he could take a gas and separate it into a warm component and a cooler component (since faster particles means a warmer gas). 

This appeared to decrease the entropy of the system and therefore violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

#1.Self Balancing Bike

An electric motorcycle that drives itself on its two wheels and can even stop and stay in balance.

It's no longer sci-fi. Honda has released in November 2017 its first self-balancing motorcycle prototype that was presented at the 45th Tokyo Motorshow. The demonstration is amazing.

 

The motorbike stays in balance only on its two wheels and can even gently follow its owner.



Although we know very little today on the principle that allows this technological feat, Honda only concede during its press conferences that the bike does not use the gyroscope principle but it balances itself by tiny corrections of the front wheel in the manner of a cyclist. 

Although the seat has been lowered to provide a center of gravity closer to the road, the automatic steering system of this motorbike remains impressive to watch.

There you have it, Top 10 Facts That Sound Like BS But Are Actually True and seem too amazing to be true.

I hope you liked this list of amazing and unknown facts, and if you did then make sure to share it with your friends and family so they also can know how amazing the world unknown to us can really be.

Related Reads:
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Top 10 mind-blowing facts about Google!

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