551
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The Seán O'Casey bridge in Dublin was designed to swing open to allow ships to pass through.
It stayed closed for four years after the operator lost the remote control.
(Image: Peter Misik; CC BY-SA.)
552
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Darth Vader's heavy breathing is trademarked.
553
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Isaac Newton was such a bad teacher that no one enrolled in his classes.
Since his contract required he teach, he sometimes lectured at an empty room.
554
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In 1960, the RAF parachuted cats into Borneo to deal with a rat army.
555
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0.5% of US births are to self-reported virgins.
556
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We'll be honest, this is probably our favourite ever QI credit.
557
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"Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it's unbelievable." ROALD DAHL
558
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"If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be 'meetings'." DAVE BARRY
559
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There is a museum in Australia entirely dedicated to animal droppings that is called Pooseum.
560
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In December 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes and more than 20,000 readers cancelled their subscriptions to The Strand Magazine, which almost bankrupted it. Staff referred to Holmes’ death as ‘the dreadful event’.
561
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This is from NASA’s Apollo 10 mission’s transcript… (Image: Apollo 10 Mission, NASA/JSC)
562
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In 1969, a drunk Richard Nixon ordered a nuclear strike on North Korea.
Henry Kissinger countermanded the order and told the Joint Chiefs to wait until the president had sobered up to make any decisions.
563
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Psychic mediums are worse at identifying how people died from memorial photos than ordinary members of the public are.
564
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A CAPITONYM is a word that means something different if it's capitalised - for instance "polish" and "Polish".
565
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French employees are forbidden by law from eating lunch at their desks.
566
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In the town of Whittier, Alaska, almost everyone lives in one building.
90% of the town's residents live in one 14-storey building - that also houses a post office, shop, police station, health clinic, and a bed & breakfast.
(Image: WordRidden; CC BY.)
567
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The first official vegetarian society in Russia was co-founded in 1901 by a man called Burger.
568
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The new mayor of Cockington in Devon has been banned from his local pub where he was a regular known for drinking Guinness.
He is also a four year old Shetland pony called Patrick.
569
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This colour - Pantone 448 C - is considered to be the ugliest in the world.
When the Australian Department of Health referred to it as "olive green", the Australian Olive Association complained that this denigrated olives.
(Image: علاء; CC BY-SA.)
570
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"Rubber duck debugging" is the practice of debugging software by explaining what you meant the program to do to the duck.
Often, explaining the process will cause the programmer to figure out what they did wrong.
(Image: Tom Morris; CC BY-SA.)
571
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Consuming memes helps people deal with pandemic-related stress.
572
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According to some physicists, there is no such thing as "now".
Since we must wait for light to travel to us to react to something, and the brain must process the information, we are effectively all living (about twenty milliseconds) in the past.
573
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Glow in the dark mushrooms can produce enough light to read by.
574
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The shred of skin that peels off after sunburn is called a blype.
575
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The UK has approx. one pub for every 1400 people.
Rhayader, Wales holds the crown for most pubs per capita; in 2008, it had one pub for every 173 residents.
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves