30 random trivia facts that might one day come in handy

Learning random trivia facts is lots of fun, but at the end of the day, these little bits of information  take up space in your brain, right? Not necessarily! Check out these fun facts that might just provide some useful information, impress those around you, or at the very least, boost your morale a little!

You may not think of sarcasm as the most endearing habit or quality. If you tend to have a sarcastic sense of humour, you’ve probably been told to tone it down at least once. But according to this bit of random trivia, sarcastic people get the last laugh – studies have shown that sarcasm boosts your creativity. And as if that weren’t enough of a reason to embrace the snark, sarcasm can also boost the creativity of recipients, too! Using it involves making connections between opposing ideas, and interpreting it also requires your brain to reason beyond the literal.

Check out these search results that prove Google has a sense of humour.

When you flip a coin, physics, not probability, determines how it will land. Mathematician Persi Diaconis found that a coin is slightly more likely to land on the face that was up when you flipped it. The way a coin lands is not ‘random’; it’s easy, with a little practice, to manipulate your coin flip so that it lands the way you want it. What’s more, if you’re spinning a coin, it’s more likely to land tails up, since the heads side weighs slightly more.

‘The horizon’, a distant concept that might seem almost abstract, might be closer than you think. There’s an equation that, if you know how far above sea level you’re looking from, can tell you the distance of the horizon. The neatest application of this rule is that if you’re six feet tall, standing at sea level, your eyes are about five and a half feet above sea level – and the horizon is approximately five kilometres away. The equation does require a calculator – the actual equation is ‘√(height above surface / 0.5736) = distance to horizon’ – but it’s still handy to know there’s a way to figure it out!

Easier said than done, of course, but wildlife experts agree that this is the best way to save yourself in the event of a crocodile attack. The eyes are the most sensitive part of its body, and jabbing at them should, ideally, cause them to loosen their jaws. (Your fingers will do if you don’t have the presence of mind to specifically use the thumb.)

Don’t miss these photos of the rarest animals on earth.

Yes, ‘Go.’, all of two letters is a grammatically correct English sentence. It’s only a sentence, though, if it’s used as a command, then ‘you’ is the understood subject. It’s commanding the listener to go. If you’d rather a sentence with a separate word as the subject, ‘I am’ is the shortest sentence, with three letters.

Don’t miss these words that are their own opposites.

Ever told someone you’d be back in a ‘jiffy’? You were definitely lying. Though the English language has adopted it to mean ‘a short amount of time,’ it actually is a scientific term. In the physics world, a ‘jiffy’ is the time it takes light to travel a centimetre in a vacuum or around 33.4 picoseconds. (A ‘picosecond,’ meanwhile, is a trillionth of a second.)

Turns out ‘paper money’ is a bit of a misnomer! Australian banknotes are made of a polymer, giving them a waxy feel and a US banknote is actually 75 per cent cotton and 25 per cent linen.

The colour orange will make the worst first impression at a job interview, according to a Career Builder survey. Twenty-five per cent of respondents claimed that the bright colour comes across as unprofessional. The best colour to wear, in case you’re wondering, is blue.

The moment you were born, you were the youngest person in the world, however briefly. Pretty cool, right?

Here are some funny baby photos that will make you laugh out loud.