Apr. 29th mind blowing random thought of the day: In 1989, a man ran naked through the streets of Anchorage, Alaska, climbed to the top of a flagpole, and then jumped off to fall to his death. Police never found his belongings nor any matching records for his fingerprints. To this day, it remains unknown who he was or from where he came.
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Apr. 30th mind blowing random thought of the day: Instead of a president, Switzerland has a collective head of state made up of a 7 member council. As per tradition, a different council member takes on the role of president each year, but the position is purely ceremonial.
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May 1st mind blowing random thought of the day: Cult leader Charles Manson wrote the lyrics to the Beach Boys song “Never Learn Not to Love.”
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This one guy I met in rehab loves Charles Manson and thinks his music is great. He got a raw deal for being imprisoned for orchastrsing and directing a bunch of savage murders
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Wow. Mind definitely blown. How very strange!
May 2nd mind blowing random thought of the day: John C. Calhoun is the only person in U.S. history to have served as vice president under 2 different political parties: the Democratic-Republicans from 1825 to 1829, and then the Democrats from 1829 to 1832.
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May 3rd mind blowing random thought of the day: In New York City, it is against the law to carry an open can of spray paint out in public.
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May 4th mind blowing random thought of the day: The party game Twister was originally called “Pretzel,” but the word wasn’t available for registration and had to be changed. It became an instant success after being featured on an episode of The Johnny Carson Show in 1966, selling over 3 million copies in just 1 year.
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May 5th mind blowing random thought of the day: In 2014, a team of geologists used a confocal laser microscope in order to map the topography of an IHOP flapjack and determined that the state of Kansas is in fact flatter than a pancake.
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May 6th mind blowing random thought of the day: In her will, famed axe murderer Lizzie Borden left $30,000 to the Fall River Animal Rescue League. In today’s money, that would be almost $390,000.
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May 7th mind blowing random thought of the day: Approx. 85% of the inhabitants of China share the same 100 last names, the most popular being “Li” with around 100 million people, “Wang” with around 95 million people, and “Zhang” with around 90 million people.
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Here’s one I just figured while I was going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole:
The city of Juneau, Alaska (2,701.9 sq miles), is more than DOUBLE the land area of the entire state of Rhode Island (1,045 sq miles).
Anchorage, AK (1,704 sq miles) is also larger.
There are only two other towns in the US that share this distinction, both also located in – you guessed it – Alaska. Sitka (2,870 sq miles) and Wrangell (2,541 sq miles). Like Juneau, they are also more than double the land area of RI.
Because of how much it’s scaled down on the map, it’s easy to forget how astoundingly large Alaska is.
Based on 2010 census numbers, all 4 of the aforementioned cities have a population of under 335k COMBINED, compared to Rhode Island’s total population of over 1 million.
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May 8th mind blowing random thought of the day: On average, 1 in 5 organ donations comes from the victim of a vehicular accident.
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I’ve lived in both Juneau and Wrangell. I’m confused by these calculations. Whereas the land area of Wrangell Island is comparable in land area to Rhode Island, the actual city of Wrangell is incredibly small. The vast majority of the island is forest. The same could be said of Juneau or Sitka. Anchorage, as a city, could be compared to the size of RI, I suppose.
One thing is for sure though, Alaska is enormous. People just don’t realize how large it is. Almost half the size of the continental United States.
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Don’t know what to tell you, everywhere I’ve looked has indicated the land areas listed above (or actually greater, in some places).
In regards to Wrangell specifically, the area being referenced is below – so not the whole island. How much of that is town/city, I dont know. I’m assuming its likely a unified area being referred to under the blanket of the name “Wrangell”, but I dont know.
You’ve lived there so I’ll take your word for it
Also, pretty damn cool that you’ve lived in AK.
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Fact: Four out of three people have troubles with fractions
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Ok I screenshot Wikipedia for this because it has the nicer table, but the actual data is from US Census.
“Unified borough” in the table appears to be the more up to date area, and the two entries below that are the land and water constituents of that. As the City of Wrangell previously, it was a smaller area (70 sq mi, 45 of it being land), but is now incorporated (since 2008) as the City and Borough of Wrangell , encompassing a much larger area and now including a lot more than just the historic town. When @DungeonMaster lived there it was probably before the upgrade to borough status.
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Thanks for doing tge research amigo
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If you combine Canada’s three territories, it is larger than India by area but with only 124,000 residents, less than one for every 10,000 Indian residents by comparison.
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But there are 10,000 Tim Horton’s for every resident, so it kinda balances out.
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