1. The Musée d’Orsay in Paris was originally a train station before it became unsuitable for longer trains and was eventually converted to a museum.
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2. In the airline industry, tango routes are longer routes flown by some airlines to by-pass the expense of flying through several air traffic zones.
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3. Though it geographically spans across 5 time zones, officially all of China has only one time zone - 8 hours ahead of Co-ordinated Universal Time.
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4. Leonardo da Vinci actually left the painting we now know as ‘Mona Lisa’ unnamed. The title for the painting was derived from a description in the biography of the painter by Giorgio Vasari - published 31 years after Leonardo’s death. Therefore, the claim by author Dan Brown (in The Da Vinci Code) that Mona Lisa is an anagram code (involving the Egptian gods of fertility) by Leonardo is a fictional construct.
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5. Around 1792, there was a serious movement afoot to rename the United States of America as Columbia - after Christopher Columbus. It was partly to satisfy those asking for the name change and partly to honor the discoverer of the continent, the nation’s capital was given the name District of Columbia, King’s College in New York City was renamed Columbia University, and several cities across the United States were named Columbus or Columbia.
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6. There are 17,897 comic strips of Peanuts - and Charles Schulz drew every single one of them himself and by hand.
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7. In Japan, sleeping on the job is called inemuri - literally “to be asleep while present.” It’s accpetable as long as certain unwritten rules are adhered to - like, one should remain upright to show one is socially engaged in some way.
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8. Napoleon measured 5ft 6.5in (or 1.6 m) which made him slightly taller than the average Frenchman in the 19th century. The rumour that he is short resulted from a confusion between Frech feet and Imperial feet, two different standards of measurement. Napoleon’s height turns out be 5ft 2in in French feet.
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9. Contrary to popular Internet lore, duck’s quacks do echo. However, the echo is very soft.
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10. Both incumbent President Gerald Ford and his running mate in the 1976 US Presidential elections, Robert Dole, were Freemasons.
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About:
Iqbal Mohammed is Head of Innovation & Strategy at a digital innovation agency serving the DACH and wider European markets. He is the winner of the WPP Atticus Award for Best Original Published Writing in Marketing & Communication.
He blogs about #innovation, #technology and #marketing at misentropy.com. You can reach him via email or Twitter.