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Kindle Notes & Highlights
COVID-19 self-isolation in India is not easy – pushing people to self-isolate on trees, due to lack of space. The population density in India is 464 per km2 (1,202 people per sq. mi).
During the coronavirus shutdown in 2020, US professional gamblers in Las Vegas requested to be acknowledged as “independent contractors” and thus be able to claim unemployment payments while the casinos remained closed.
In the USA, consumption of Corona beer dropped by more than 30% since the start of the 2020 pandemic of COVID-19, aka coronavirus.
A surgeon is three to four times as probable to be sued for medical malpractice as a psychiatrist is.
US children get a quarter of their vegetables in the form of French fries.
Worldwide, tobacco use causes more than 7 million deaths per year.
According to a 2002 study, “Medical Errors and Wrong-Side Surgery - Orthopaedics”, one out of every four orthopaedic surgeons with 25 years of experience has operated on the wrong limb.
According to several studies, people with blue eyes have a higher tendency to abuse alcohol than people with darker eyes.
While only 2% of Europeans lack the gene for smelly armpits, most East Asians and almost all Koreans lack it. That is why it could be hard to buy deodorant in South Korea.
According to a 2012 study of the North-Western University, USA, every time you remember an event from the past, your brain networks change. Thus, the next time you remember it, you might recall not the original event but what you remembered the previous time.
If you scare someone, they are more probable to comply in the short-term. COVID-19 hysteria was a good example.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a Russian nurse was reprimanded for wearing only lingerie beneath a see-through gown.
Three women from North Carolina, USA, were arrested in 2019 for organising fights between Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. The nursing home employees encouraged patients to fight each other, recorded the fights and posted the videos on social media.
Every six months, more US citizens commit suicide or are murdered than have died in the last 25 years in terrorist attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
On average, US police forces killed three people per day in 2019, for a total of nearly 1,100 killings.
In May 2020, a five-year-old US boy was pulled over by Utah police while driving his parents’ car “to California to buy a Lamborghini”. The boy had $3 in his pocket.
In Victorian England, having all your teeth removed was considered the perfect gift for a 21st birthday or a newly married bride.
The actress Gwyneth Paltrow marketed a scented candle named “Smells Like My Vagina”.
In 2011, the US Congress passed a bill allowing, when composing a school lunch, a pizza with two tablespoons (30 mL) of tomato paste to qualify as a vegetable.
In 2018, China banned Hip-Hop culture and tattoos from television.
In many US states it is still legal to leave children unattended in a car.
Shindo Renmei was a secret organization of Brazilian-Japanese nationalists who claimed Japan had won World War II and would assassinate those who would not agree. It was disbanded around 1955.
Still today, both German phrases “Mit deutschem Gruß” (with German greetings), a written equivalent to “Heil Hitler”, and “Unsere Ehre heißt Treue” (our honour is called loyalty), the slogan of the SS, are illegal to say or write in Germany and Austria.
In November 2019, Croatian police mistakenly deported two Nigerian sportsmen, thinking they were illegal migrants.
In the US state of Minnesota, pharmacists can turn away patients seeking emergency contraceptives because of religious or personal objection.
In 2019, Dutch police found a family living in a basement of a farmhouse in the Drenthe province “waiting for the end of time”. A father and his six children had spent over nine years there without any contact with the outside world.
Until 2018, the US states Idaho and Utah did not allow breastfeeding in public.
Obese tourists are crippling the donkeys that carry them around the Greek island of Santorini. This has forced locals to use mules instead because the latter are sturdier.
On 16 February 1568, the Spanish Inquisition issued a death sentence to all residents of the Netherlands.
The words “cannibal” and “Caribbean” have a similar etymology: from Spanish “Canibales (plural)”, variant (recorded by Christopher Columbus) of Caribes, the name of a West Indian people reputed to eat humans.
The US state of Delaware abolished flogging as a legal punishment in 1972. It had been last used in 1952, when a wife-beater got 20 lashes.
In 2017, Saudi Arabia accidentally printed a textbook showing the Star Wars character Yoda sitting next to King Faisal as he signed the UN charter.
In 2018, in a weird sort of protest of US sanctions causing the Turkish currency to plummet, hundreds of Turks smashed their iPhones and posted videos on social media.
Most college-age Americans cannot find the UK on the map.
Robert Lane from New York, USA, named his two sons “Winner” and “Loser”. Winner grew up to be a criminal and Loser became a detective with the police.
In Japan, late-night dancing was illegal in the period 1948-2015.
In Australia, 11 November 2019 was the driest day since weather records began 137 years earlier. Every region of the country had virtually zero rainfall.
A cemetery in Culiacán, Mexico, has many two-story tombs fitted with living rooms, air conditioning, and bulletproof glass. Dedicated to deceased drug lords, some graves cost up to half a million dollars.
During WWII, in 1943 pre-sliced bread was banned for a while in the USA. Bakeries were obliged to sell bread at least 12 hours stale. The government thought these measures would lower bread consumption.
The UK Royal family follow some weird rules. Among the least known are that they cannot play Monopoly, cannot eat shellfish, and every royal bride should carry myrtle in her wedding bouquet.
In China, cinema employees flash a laser beam at anyone texting in the dark. When ushers spot a lighted mobile phone, they aim a laser pointer (usually red or green) at the glowing screen.
Russian doping is distinct from doping in other countries because the Russian state supplies steroids to athletes. Due to widespread violations, in 2019, the World Anti-Doping Agency banned Russia from all major sporting events for four years.
In 2014, 11% of Americans thought that HTML was a type of sexually transmitted disease.
Choose your pet smartly: having a snake as a pet could be good for the environment and your carbon footprint. A snake eats on average ten times less meat than a cat.
Roses are more susceptible to the same type of fungal disease (e.g. powdery mildew, downy mildew) than the grapevine. The roses grown in vineyards serve as an early warning sign to the vineyard manager to take action before the grapevines get infected.
Cockroaches find humans to be totally disgusting. When they see a human, cockroaches run away as quickly as possible, and if touched by a human, they wash themselves.
Canaries were extensively used in coalmines to detect the presence of carbon monoxide. The rapid breathing rate, small size, and high metabolism, led birds in dangerous mines to succumb much faster, thereby giving the miners time to escape.
Obese dog owners are twice as probable to raise obese dogs.
Every day, over 35 million chickens are slaughtered for food in the USA alone. The average life span of a broiler is 6-8 weeks. In contrast, cock fighters live for at least two years.
In 2018, after her calf’s death, an orca mother carried its cadaver with her for over a week across hundreds of kilometres.
