The Verifiably Absurd: Part II

Even More Lessons the Education System Forgot to Mention

Syllabus Update (Again)

School gave us the basics: multiplication tables, the water cycle, and the ability to write a five‑paragraph essay under duress.

What it didn’t give us — once again — were the facts that actually matter.

The ones that sound like lies.

The ones that make you wonder whether history, science, and reality itself were supervised by anyone at all.

So, with the new school year upon us and in the spirit of continuing education, here is a second revised syllabus.

Same subjects.

New material.

Still absolutely, verifiably true.

And if the first curriculum unsettled you, don’t worry.

This one is worse.

Chemistry

Pure water doesn’t conduct electricity

Now, before you decide to catch a plugged‑in toaster thrown to you while you’re doing a half‑gainer off a diving board, I should highlight the crucial word in that sentence: pure.

Pure water, as it turns out, is a terrible conductor of electricity — so terrible that it’s considered an insulator. It’s the impurities in water that do the real work when it comes to electrocution.

Most water contains dissolved minerals and stray ions that are more than happy to play hot potato with a lethal current — and if that current runs through your chest on its way to completing the circuit, your heart is the part that pays for your stupidity, usually by stopping.

In the pool you’re imagining for your Jackass‑level stunt, those ions come from all the sanitizing, oxidizing, and water‑balancing chemicals — not to mention the shimmering slick of sunscreen, sweat, and filth left behind by the mass of humanity who absolutely did not shower before cannon-balling in.

So yes — pure water won’t electrocute you.

But it’ll still drown you if the toaster hits you in the noggin and knocks you unconscious.

The first synthetic plastic made billiard balls explode

By the mid‑1800s, billiards was among the most popular ways to misspend your youth.

At the time, balls were carved from ivory, but a single tusk yielded only four or five usable balls.

This meant at least two elephants had to give their lives (not voluntarily, in case you were wondering) for a single set of billiard balls — three if you wanted to play snooker.

Worried about both the rising cost of ivory (definitely) and the ethics of turning African game animals into sporting equipment (almost certainly not), the New York billiard‑table manufacturer Phelan & Collender offered a $10,000 reward for anyone who could invent a synthetic substitute for ivory.

The catch — there’s always a catch — was that claiming the prize meant signing over the manufacturing rights to whatever you invented.

American inventor John Wesley Hyatt took up the challenge and, in 1869, patented a new material he called celluloid — the world’s first synthetic plastic. It was strong, moldable, and, as people would later discover, alarmingly flammable.

Hyatt didn’t initially realize just how volatile his invention was — that discovery came later, when reports started coming in from billiard halls about balls occasionally exploding on impact, startling patrons, spilling beer, and sending the odd shard of cue‑ball shrapnel skittering across the floor.

Hyatt never ended up applying for the prize. He realized that giving away the rights to his invention for a one‑time payout was a terrible deal, so he kept the patent, founded the Albany Billiard Ball Company, and dominated the market with his spherical grenades until less explosive, more durable plastics arrived.

The chains in a ship’s chain locker can kill you — but probably not the way you think

When iron rusts, it consumes oxygen. Rusting just one kilogram of iron requires about 0.3 kilograms of oxygen — roughly the amount in a cubic metre of air.

Inside a ship’s chain locker, you don’t have one kilogram of iron. You have tons of steel chain with a ridiculous amount of surface area quietly reacting with the air.

You might think, “Sure, but it would take ages for that to matter.”

Which is true — if you think “ages” means “about a day.”

Because oxygen levels can become dangerously low much sooner than you’d expect.

Normal air contains 20.9% oxygen, and everyone is perfectly happy.

But at 19.5%, air is officially unsafe to breathe — a drop in oxygen content of just 1.4 percentage points.

Experiments replicating chain‑locker conditions have shown that this tiny drop can happen in well under an hour.

After a few hours, oxygen levels can fall to 10–12%. Breathing this in will make you disoriented, weak, and likely to collapse.

In some tests, oxygen levels dropped toward zero within a day.

But don’t worry. You’d be dead long before that.

All from just rust.

Keep this in mind the next time you find a mysterious box of rusty nails under your pillow.

Physics

Your head is older than your feet

If you know even the Coles Notes version of Albert Einstein, you’ve probably heard about time dilation — the idea that motion affects how fast time passes. The faster you move relative to someone else, the slower your clock ticks.

Which means that the person out jogging is aging ever so slightly more slowly than the person sitting on the couch.

So yes — running really does slow down the aging process.

Just not in the way the fitness industry wants you to think.

Then, in 1915, Einstein added a second twist: gravity also affects the passage of time. The closer you are to a massive object — or, more accurately, that object’s center of mass — the more slowly time moves for you.

For humans, this creates a tiny but measurable effect: the parts of your body closer to the ground age a little more slowly than the parts farther away.

And since your feet spend most of their lives closer to the Earth’s center of mass than does your noggin, the result is this: over an average lifetime, your head ends up about 90 billionths of a second older than your feet.

Which finally explains the wrinkles on your face.

The coldest temperature in the universe was recorded in Kyoto, Japan

If you think “absolute zero” refers to your spouse or significant other, well… who am I to judge.

In physics, however, absolute zero is the coldest theoretical temperature — where all heat has been removed from a system causing molecular activity to grind to a halt.

It’s defined as 0 on the Kelvin temperature scale, which works out to –273.15°C.

Nippy, to say the least.

Now, while you can’t actually reach absolute zero, you can get impressively close. For a long time, the coldest known place in the universe was the Boomerang Nebula, a cloud of gas and dust about 5,000 light‑years away, chilling at roughly 1 Kelvin above absolute zero.

Then, in 2022, a research team at Kyoto University decided to one‑up Mother Nature and — using an array of finely tuned lasers — cooled a cloud of gas to just one billionth of a Kelvin above absolute zero.

That’s:

0.000000001 K

or

–273.149999999°C

Which means the coldest temperature ever recorded in the universe wasn’t in deep space.

Or even Portage and Main in January.

It was in a lab in Japan.

If you could remove all empty space from atoms, all of humanity would be reduced to the volume of a sugar cube

An atom — much like your father‑in‑law’s skull — is almost entirely empty space. Roughly 99.999999999% of an atom is nothing at all. The actual matter is packed into an absurdly tiny nucleus surrounded by a cloud of electrons that barely count as “there.”

So if you could somehow remove all that empty space from every atom making up every person on Earth — all 8.3 billion of us — what you’d have left is a single lump of matter about the size of a sugar cube.

And because that’s where all the matter is, it’s also where all the mass is.

This tiny cube would contain the total mass of humanity which would weigh in at hundreds of millions of tonnes — a number that really shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s recently visited a beach or a Las Vegas buffet.

Social Studies / Social Sciences

6% of Americans think they could beat a grizzly bear in a fight

As the polite, conflict‑averse neighbours to the north, we Canadians have always admired American confidence.

Truly.

It’s a renewable resource down there — though the mechanism behind its renewability remains unclear.

Maybe it’s the widespread availability of cheap beer.

Maybe it’s an infinite reservoir of naturally occurring awesomeness.

Hard to say.

At any rate, nowhere does that confidence shine brighter than in the 2021 YouGov survey where a statistically meaningful number of Americans believed they could defeat — unarmed, mind you — a grizzly bear.

Put another way: at a NASCAR race with 50,000 people in the stands, roughly 15,000* of them believe they could take down a grizzly in hand-to-paw combat equipped with nothing but a wildly optimistic belief in their ability to apply a rear naked chokehold to an animal whose neck is essentially a tree trunk.

* - Yes, I know this doesn’t equal 6%. I’ve adjusted the figure to account for the unusually high confidence‑density of a NASCAR crowd.

This is less a commentary on wildlife and more a commentary on the human brain’s ability to say, “Yeah, I could take him,” when presented with a 700‑pound apex predator whose hobbies include mauling things and mauling slightly larger things.

Babies are born able to distinguish every human language

Those of you with children already know that they lose the ability to listen to their parents remarkably early in life. What’s surprising is just how early this process begins.

When a baby is born, they are what linguists call a universal listener. Newborns can hear and distinguish every phoneme, trill, inflection, glottal stop, and vowel contrast used in every human language. If a sound exists somewhere on Earth — Mandarin tones, Italian vowels, Zulu clicks, even just the guttural hostility of German — a newborn can pick it up instantly.

And they show no preference for the language spoken around them. A baby born into an English‑speaking home is just as good at distinguishing Hindi retroflex consonants or Japanese vowel length as they are at telling apart the English “r” and “l” sounds.

Sadly, this superpower doesn’t last long.

Between six and twelve months, babies begin tuning themselves to the language they hear most often.

So yes — your child really was born able to distinguish every language on Earth.

They just became a selective listener long before they started ignoring you about mowing the lawn or cleaning their room.

Literature

When Fiction Gets a Little Too Real

In 1898, American author Morgan Robertson wrote a novella about an “unsinkable” ocean liner called Titan that sailed through the North Atlantic in April, hit an iceberg, and sank about 400 nautical miles off the coast of Newfoundland — killing thousands because it didn’t have enough lifeboats.

Sound familiar?

Fourteen years later, the RMS Titanic sailed through the North Atlantic in April, hit an iceberg, and sank about 400 nautical miles off the coast of Newfoundland — killing thousands because it didn’t have enough lifeboats.

Robertson wasn’t a prophet. As a former sailor, he said his knowledge of maritime trends helped him imagine the inevitable consequences of building ever‑larger ships while skimping on lifeboats.

The fictional Titan carried only 24 lifeboats.

The real Titanic, when actual lives were at stake, carried even fewer — just 20.

It’s almost as if Fate read the book and said, “Challenge accepted.”

Pop Culture

Bugs Bunny is responsible for a myth about rabbits — and for changing the meaning of a word

In an early cartoon, animators needed something for Bugs to chew on while delivering rapid‑fire dialogue. They borrowed the bit from the 1934 movie It Happened One Night, where Clark Gable’s character leans against a fence and casually crunches back a raw carrot mid‑monologue. It worked perfectly for Bugs — visually funny, easy to animate, and just annoying enough.

There was only one problem: rabbits don’t actually eat carrots.

Not in the wild, anyway. They’re basically rabbit junk food — too sugary, not natural forage. But Bugs Bunny became so iconic that the image of a rabbit gnawing a carrot turned into a full‑blown cultural myth that persists to this day.

And while we’re on the subject of Bugs accidentally rewriting reality, he’s also responsible for changing the meaning of the word “nimrod.” Originally, Nimrod was a mighty hunter in the Bible. So when Bugs sarcastically called Elmer Fudd “Nimrod,” the joke was that Elmer was the opposite of a great hunter.

The biblical reference went straight over the heads of kids and parents alike. They assumed “nimrod” meant a foolish or inept person — and that’s the definition that stuck.

Dennis The Menace has a twin, of sorts

Most of us are familiar with American cartoonist Hank Ketcham’s Dennis the Menace — the blond, slingshot‑wielding kid in bib overalls who torments his long‑suffering neighbour, Mr. Wilson. But at the very same time, across the Atlantic, British cartoonist David Law was creating another comic strip titled Dennis the Menace, featuring a completely different troublemaking boy named Dennis.

Two entirely separate comic strips.

Same title.

Same premise: mischievous boy wreaks havoc.

Same first name.

And neither cartoonist had any idea the other existed.

That alone would qualify as an odd coincidence.

But there’s one final twist that pushes this story straight over the edge into Twilight Zone territory: both comic strips debuted on the exact same day — March 12, 1951.

Final Exam

The world remains committed to being bewildering.

Facts continue to behave like lies.

Lies continue to behave like facts.

And reality continues to operate with the chaotic energy of a substitute teacher who has lost control of the classroom.

Maybe school didn’t fail us.

Maybe it simply ran out of time.

So here is the second curriculum — the elective course no one asked for, but everyone deserves.

And one more thing before you go: If you see someone you love heading out of the house in board shorts and wearing a snorkel and flippers with a toaster under his arm, maybe flag him down for a chat.

Class dismissed. See you next semester.

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