I thought it would be fun for everyone to post any random facts they know (or something you Googled or whatever). It can be about anything as long as it's HP-appropriate. One player posts one fact. I'll start:

The Icelandic word for computer is tölva. It was coined in the '60s and is a combination of the words tala (to count) and völva (prophetess).

Most toilets flush in [the key of] E flat.

The Bauhaus school of design in Germany was forced to shut down in 1933 due to pressure from the Nazis. Because of this, many of the instructors emigrated to America and brought their design expertise with them!

The city of Tallinn used to be called Reval, which in old Germanic means deer's fall. This is because of a piece of the history/legends there.

The Danes and Germans were fighting for control of the city. One day, the Danes were out with their king, and he heard the bushes rustle, so he goes to investigate. A deer pops its head out, and naturally the king gives chase, being a hunter. The deer ends up at the edge of a cliff and the king thinks he's got this one, but no, the deer jumps. He was apparently amazed that not just the people, but the animals here would rather die on their own terms rather than at his hand.

Pteronophobia is the fear of being tickled by feathers. 

The fastest wind speed not related to tornadoes ever recorded was during the passage of Tropical Cyclone Olivia on 10 April 1996: an automatic weather station on Barrow Island, Australia, registered a maximum wind gust of 408 km/h (220 kn; 253 mph; 113 m/s).

It actually takes 142.18 licks to reach the center of a Tootsie pop.

The hole in the doughnut was invented by a 16-year-old sailor named Hanson Gregory. In 1916, the Washington Post interviewed Gregory, the man who claimed to have invented the modern donut back in 1847. Gregory was tired of eating greasy and undercooked donuts with raw dough on the insides.

You’ll likely eat more than 35,000 cookies in your lifetime.

Alvin and the Chipmunks is an American animated music group created by Ross Bagdasarian, Sr., for a novelty record in 1958.

It is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

The average hen lays one egg approximately every 26 hours, which is about 265 eggs per year.

No piece of square paper can be folded more than 7 times in half.

The mean volume of a mammal cell is estimated to be 4 billionths of a cubic centimeter. (To get a sense of that size, check out The Scale of the Universe.) Based on an adult man's typical volume, you might conclude that the human body contains 15 trillion cells.

Alaska law says that you can’t look at a moose from an airplane.

The only truly wild camels that still exist are Bactrian camels. These herds survive in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia and China.

I wonder how tana got camels on her mind. ;P

Minnie Mouse's full name is Minerva Mouse.

When light strikes an object, some of it penetrates the object, and some of it is reflected and reaches your eye. When an object is wet, more light penetrates the object, so less light is reflected. As a result, less light reaches your eye and so the wet object looks darker.

There are more plastic flamingos in the US than real ones...

The word "Manhattan" has been translated as "the place where we get bows" or "place for gathering the (wood to make) bows", from the Munsee dialect of the Lenape language 'manaháhtaan' (where 'manah-' means "gather", '-aht-' means "bow" and '-aan' is an abstract element used to form verb stems).