Sunday, June 02, 2013

Things I learned lately 2 June

  • Some McDonald's have a secret menu item called the McGangBang. It's a McChicken wedged into a double cheeseburger and it's not available at all restaurants.
  • Burger King has a few secret menu items, including the Suicide Burger (4 beef patties; 4 cheese slices; a pile of bacon); BK Club; BK BLT; and frings (fries and rings).
  • McDonalds has a Neapolitan shake on their secret menu.
  • Even before the 2010 earthquake, 80% of the population in Haiti lived under the poverty line, with 54% living in abject poverty.
  • Helium-3 is created by the sun and blasts through space. Some of it lands on the moon. Mining 9 feet deep in an area 0.75mi squared would produce 220lbs of Helium-3, enough to power Detroit for a year using fusion.
  • A single 500m wide platinum-rich asteroid could yield 1.5 times the known world reserves of platinum.
  • The most practical plan to solve the worker-to-retiree ratio is to allow lots of young immigrants into the country. Either that, or convince people to have a lot more kids. Now.
  • The US government spent $1.7 billion maintaining 77,700 unused buildings.
  • The IRS stores unused furniture at a warehouse at a cost of $862,000 annually.
  • The US has more than 45,000 wind turbines. That's one turbine for every 7000 people. Germany has 22,297. That's one for every 3700 people.
  • In Belgium, all of the highways are lit.
  • The old form of the word 'pea' was 'pease'. Yes, that's singular.
  • The word 'apron' used to be spelled 'napron'. But people too often misheard it as 'an apron' and the n was dropped. 'Newt' suffered the opposite. It started out as 'ewt' and because people most often said 'an ewt' in a sentence, it transformed into 'newt'.
  • The F-35 costs about $35,000 per hour to fly.

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