The Empire State Building was the first building tall enough to allow a person who jumped off the top of it to achieve terminal velocity.

It's been speculated that one of the things that may have contributed to the Hatfield-McCoy feud was a disease called von Hippel-Lindau disease, which the McCoy family was susceptible to.  In 20% of cases, sufferers develop a tumor in the adrenal glands, which produces an excess of adrenaline and "a tendency towards explosive tempers".

For the first half of his career, Groucho Marx's famous mustache was painted on with grease paint.  He didn't grow a real one until middle age.

English longbowmen drew their bows backwards.  Normally when someone draws a bow to fire, they hold out their bow arm and then draw the string back to firing distance.  Medieval longbowmen put the string at firing distance and then pushed out with their bow arm until it was straight.  Then they fired.  This was a much more effective way of firing ( Read more... )

The oldest hotel chain in the world is Nisiyama Onsen Keiunkan in Japan. It was founded in 705.

The industry standard of "Five Nines" with regard to service uptime is that an online service should be up for 99.999% of the year.  This means the service is allowed 5.26 minutes of downtime per year.

Change that to Six Nines (99.9999%), and the amount of allowable downtime drops to 31.5 seconds per year.

This one came from researching which horse was which in the image faecat  posted in a comment to the last entry.

Pestilence was not one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  The Horsemen were, in order of appearance:

Conquest - Rides the white horse, holds a bow
War - Rides the red horse, holds a sword
Famine - Rides a black horse, holds scales
Death - ( Read more... )

When the Book of Revelations talks about Death and his pale horse*, it is saying that the horse was green.  "Pale" was a translation of "pale green" from the original Greek ( Read more... )

A blue whale's aorta is so large that a human baby can crawl through it.

It costs about USD25,000 just to get a permit to climb Mt. Everest.  That's per person, not per expedition.