Craig Zablo

If you dig trivia you’ll get a kick out of the You’re Getting Old site.  Plug in your birth date and you’ll discover things like…

• How many days you’ve lived so far [20,379]

• The total number of candles on your birthday cakes so far [1,540]

• The approximate number of people on Earth when you were born [2,972,647,249] and now.

• How many miles you’ve traveled through space [689,300,000+] since you were born.

• The famous milestones you’ve been alive to witness.

• Out of 100,000 people born as the same day as you, the percentage still alive [89%].

• And more…

If you’re a Science nerd [like me] or just want to get a feel for the vastness of space, then click over to If the Moon Were Only One Pixel by Josh Worth.

Well played, Mr. Worth!

All my life I’ve had interesting dreams often with common recurring themes.

When I was a kid it wasn’t unusual for me to dream of being chased or being on a huge unsafe bridge that dipped into the water.

As an adult I still often dreamed of being chased, as well as seeing a nuclear missiles launched, being hidden or on the run from an invading army, or showing up for a college class unprepared for a test or worse yet at the end of a semester and realizing I had signed up for a class but never attended it.  Oh, and there’s the ever classic dream where I find myself somewhere important but not dressed appropriately.

Usually I can figure out what caused my dreams and what they symbolize.  Buzzfeed posted 9 Common Deam Symbols and What They Actually Mean.  It’s interesting that many people have the same types of dreams.  I guess even when sleeping great minds think alike.

When I read 10 Myths About Famous Explorers by Alex Hanton, I was reminded of some facts  that I had forgotten and I learned a few more along the way.

Here’s a taste of three Myths…

Myth: Robert Peary Was The First Man To Reach The North Pole.

• I knew this wasn’t true and that a black man named Matthew Henson was the first.  Since Peary was the leader of the expedition and Henson was black, Peary got the credit.   What I didn’t realize was that Peary was such a jerk that “he refused to answer Henson’s letters, help him get a job, or return the photos of the expedition that Henson had taken and paid for.”  I also didn’t know that there was another explorer who beat Henson and Peary and his backers used their power and the situation to get the credit!

Myth: Ponce De Leon Was Searching For The Fountain Of Youth

• He wasn’t.  “The story was made up by Ponce’s enemies in Spain after his death in order to make him look like a gullible, sexually impotent idiot. It worked—the story largely eclipsed his actual achievements, like discovering the Gulf Stream.”

Myth: Christopher Columbus Died in Poverty

• “The truth is that Columbus died an extremely wealthy aristocrat… The myth probably comes from Columbus’s own bitterness at not getting the insane 10 percent of all gold and silver from the Americas he believed he was entitled to. He spent the last years of his life compiling documents related to this claim, which his descendants used in a famous series of lawsuits against the crown.”

Source: Listverse.