Trivia 12:
Irrational Numbers



Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Meyerberg of Brooklyn, NY, discovered after their marriage that her social security number was 064-01-8089, and his was 064-01-8090.

Entirely by chance, identical license plates were issued to Stanley Golucki of Chicago, IL, in 1971 and 1972.

Karen Powell of Grandview, WA, was assigned, by chance, bank account number 38-9-14999-8, which is the same as her social security number 389-14-9998.

According to the odds, for a tossed coin to land heads 50 times in a row, it would require one million people tossing ten coins a minute for 40 hours a week, and then it would only happen once every nine centuries.

King Olaf of Norway and King Olof of Sweden rolled dice to decide ownership of the Island of Hisingen. Both threw double sixes, six times in a row. The Norwegian king finally threw down the dice with such force that one die split in two, and Hisingen has been Swedish ever since.

Could you arrange 15 books into all of their possible combinations? If you made one change per minute, it would take you 2,487,996 years to do it.

All the people in the world working day and night for a million years could not arrange five six-sided letter blocks (like the ones a child plays with) into all of their possible combinations.

President José María Reina Barrios of Guatemala was assassinated at 8:00pm on February 8, 1898, at No. 8 on 8th Street with a .38 caliber revolver. His assassin was shot 8 times.

If everyone who was told about a midnight murder told two other people within 12 minutes, everybody in the world would know about it before dawn.

In 1926, a cartoon carried the question, "If a bottle and a cork cost $1.05 and the bottle costs $1.00 more than the cork, what would be the cost of the cork?" A few days later, the newspaper received a letter from Calvin Coolidge's White House, inquiring what the answer was. If you haven't figured it out already, click here.



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