The average high school GPA of a representative sample of 700 millionaires in the United States is 2.9

Entertaining but you have to keep in mind that the half-life of the veracity of some of these items might be quite short. From 52 things I learned in 2018 by Kent Hendricks. Most all these are pulled from books which ought to indicate a higher probability of validity. However, there are many items in this list which the replication crisis calls into sharp challenge as to their probable truth. There are others which are old chestnuts oft repeated by also highly contestable.

Here are some of the items which were new to me, seemed at least possible if not plausible, and were intriguing.

Around 90% of infants lie with their heads facing right. (Gardner, et. al. 1976)

In the NBA, teams down by one at halftime are more likely to win. (Berger & Pope, 2011)

On average, a piece of gossip gets passed on to 2.3 people—often people who are higher status than you. In this way, gossip functions as a check on the amount of power the people with the highest social status have in a group. (Dacher Keltner, The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence)

Contrary to the beliefs of roughly 33% of Americans, Kansas is not the flattest state. In fact, it’s the 9th flattest state, and it’s one of only two Great Plains states to make the top ten (the other is North Dakota). The flattest state is actually Florida, the second flattest state is Illinois, and the least flattest is West Virginia. (Disruptive Geo)

The average high school GPA of a representative sample of 700 millionaires in the United States is 2.9. (Eric Barker, Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong)

For nine hundred years, there was a persecuted and despised underclass in France called the Cagots, living in villages from the English channel to northwestern Spain. They were not allowed to enter buildings or churches via main entrances, they were served communion on a stick, they were not allowed to pay taxes or possess firearms. They were allowed to practice carpentry and ropemaking, but no other trades. As late as 1968, people were still mocked for being descended from Cagots. Nobody really knows where they came from or why they were so discriminated against. (Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography)

Roughly one-fifth of Europeans alive a millennium ago have no living descendants today. (Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived)

Inventing fire and learning how to cook food has given humans many physiological advantages over our primate cousins. Chimps can chew around 300 calories of food per hour, while humans can intake an average of 2,000-2,500 calories per hour or more. Chimps spend more than six hours per day chewing; if humans ate the same raw foods as chimps, we would be chewing 42% of the day, just over five hours. In fact, humans chew between 5 to 12% of each day, and that figure includes a 2 hour evening meal. (Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human)

The surface area of human lungs is as big as a tennis court. (James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science)

86% of people in France have never traveled by airplane. (Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography)

People spend roughly one hour each day traveling or commuting, regardless of city size or form of transportation. This is called Marchetti’s constant. Whenever faster forms of transportation have been invented—the domestication of horses, the invention of trains, cars, and then planes—people do not reduce the amount of time spent commuting, they simply commute farther. Walking speed is around 5 km per hour, so the maximum size of a walking city is roughly 20 square kilometers; there are no large ancient cities built prior to 1800 larger than this. As transportation has become faster, and transportation networks have expanded, the physical size of cities has expanded in direct proportion. When people spend less time commuting or work at home, they make up for in it other days, including by going on walks that last as long as the remaining time that would be allotted for commutes. Even people stuck within the confines of prison spend around an hour a day walking around. (Wikipedia)

How many Americans have never flown? 18% according to this research.