Dan Lewis - Now I Know: The Revealing Stories Behind the Worlds Most Interesting Facts

Avon, Massachusetts

To Stephanie, Ethan, Alex, Annie, and my parents.

Truth is stranger than fiction. Someone once said that. I have no idea who, but he or she is rightthe most astonishing things around us arent made up; theyre real. Mark Twain once allegedly observed why: Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isnt.

For more than three years, Ive been writing about these interesting facts and the fascinating stories behind them. For example, everyone knows that airlines occasionally lose luggage, but what happens when they find it months later? If it never goes back to its owner, where does it go? We know that people landed on the moon. But what would have happened if they couldnt get home? And what happens to the stuff they left behind, like the American flags?

In this book, youll find the answers to those questions, and the stories behind 100 of the worlds most mind-blowing pieces of trivia. Each entry includes a fact, the story behind that fact, and a related bonus fact. Ive tried to connect them all in some way, piggybacking off one another, but they dont form a logical line. Youll zigzag from McDonalds (why cant you get a hot dog there?) to Daylight Saving Time (and pumpkins youll see!) pretty quickly. Well look at the strangest reality TV show in history (its Dutch) and somehow wander to the worlds strangest traffic signals (theyre North Korean), all in the span of about ten pages. Together, well jump around from one thing to another, always finding something interesting along the way. Chances are, wherever you wind up, itll be someplace interesting. (For more of this sort of thing, go to my website, www.NowIKnow.com. There youll find a lot more random facts and the stories behind themdid you know Abraham Lincoln created the Secret Service on the day he was fatally shot?)

As each story proves that truth is stranger than fiction, youll be able to declare now I knowand thats half the battle. So welcome to the world of the utterly strange, which couldnt be made up because it couldnt be true, except that, as we all know, it is. Somehow.

The English alphabet contains twenty-six letters, with two of the lettersA and Ithemselves also constituting words. However, another characterthe ampersand (&)was also, at times, included in the alphabet. And amazingly, the word ampersand is probably a by-product of the symbols inclusion.

The ampersand was developed along with the rest of the alphabet back in the early years of Rome in the seventh century B.C.E. Romans would occasionally combine the letters E and T into a similar symbol, representing the word et meaning and. It was included in the Old English alphabet, which was still in use into medieval times. When Old English was discarded in favor of the modern English we are familiar with, the ampersand maintained its status of member of the alphabet (to coin a phrase) to a degree, with some regions and dialects opting to include it until the mid-1800s.

Except that it was not yet called an ampersand. The & sign was, rather, referred to simply as andwhich made reciting the alphabet awkward. As Dictionary.com states, it was (and is) odd to say X Y Z and. So, people didnt. Instead, our lexicon developed another saying: X, Y, and Z, and by itself, and but instead of saying by itself, the Latin phrase per se came into favor. The result? And per se, and, or, muttered quickly by a disinterested student, ampersand.

Why the inclusion of the ampersand in the alphabet fell out of use is anyones guess, but there is a good chance that credit goes to the ABC song we are almost all familiar withthat is, the one that shares its tune with Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star (and borrows from Mozarts Ah Vous Dirai-je, Maman). That song was copyrighted in 1835, around the time that the ampersand started falling out of favor with the rest of the ABCs.

If youre a Jeopardy! fan, and particularly one who watched the show in 2004, theres a nearly 50 percent chance youve seen Ken Jennings on the screen. That year, Jennings, a software engineer from Utah, won seventy-four consecutive episodes spanning 182 calendar days (due to weekends, the shows week off in the summer, and interruptions from various tournament and special episodes). His total prize money from his seventy-four wins and one second-place finish exceeded $2.5 million.

Jennings earned another $800,000 from subsequent Jeopardy! appearances to date. In 2005, he returned for the Jeopardy! Ultimate Tournament of Champions, involving 145 of the games biggest winners over the previous two decades. Jennings came in second, earning $500,000. And in February 2011, he and the champion of the Ultimate Tournament, Brad Rutter, faced off against Watson, a computer built by engineers at IBM.

Watson beat the two human champions, earning $1 million for a pair of charities. Jennings earned $300,000 and Rutter $200,000 for third place. (Each of the humans donated half their winnings to charity as well.) Watsons programming team fed the computer more than 200 million pages of data from sources such as Wikipedia, news articles, dictionaries, and thesauruses. Although Watson succeeded in beating Jennings and Rutter, its creators realized that it had a flawWatson had a difficult time, to say the least, understanding slang and the nuances of the English language. Around the same time the Jeopardy! episode aired, Team Watson introduced a new data source to the machines databanksentries from the slang and shorthand website Urban Dictionary.

Founded in 1999, Urban Dictionary invites users to suggest and vote on words and phrases that have entered our collective lexicon but arent generally accepted, at least not by sources such as Merriam-Websters or the OED. Over the years, the website has gained acceptance in more formal environments; for example, according to www.thesmokinggun.com, it was used as a source by federal prosecutors when a suspect posted to Facebook about how he intended to murk someone. (Murk, per Urban Dictionary, means, to physically beat someone so severely, he ends up dying from his injuries.) But it also includes a bunch of terms that contain vulgarity and, when used without an appreciation for the connotation of the terms, shouldnt be used in certain environments.

Watson lacked that appreciation. As reported by Fortune, the computerized Jeopardy! champ couldnt distinguish between polite language and profanity, even using some choice, bovine-related language when telling its programmer-researchers that they were incorrect about something. The researchers added profanity filtering to Watsons programming, but this proved inadequate given the extensiveness of Urban Dictionary.

Finding no alternativeunless one wants to build a genius robot that swears like a sailorthe researchers removed Urban Dictionary from Watsons database.