One of the World Trade Centres was built to be 1,776 feet tall on purpose to reference the year the Declaration of Independence was signed.
100 Mind-Blowing Reference Facts
Every Pixar movie contains a reference to the Pixar movie that comes after it.
The people who are currently alive are only 7% of the total number of people who have ever lived. One of the fun facts that’ll make you realize how long humans have been around: According to the Population Reference Bureau, over 108 billion people have ever been born. At 7.5 billion, that’s only a meagre 7% of the people who have ever lived.
There is a Superman in every episode of Seinfeld. There is also another myth that there is a Superman reference within every episode. This is because Jerry Seinfeld is an avid fan of Superman.
Because astronomical time and atomic time don’t always line up, every so often, we get a leap second. Earth’s spin speed can be a bit unpredictable. Atmospheric winds, Northern Hemisphere winters with heavy snow, and other big weather systems can affect how fast the planet rotates. To keep the difference between astronomical time and atomic time to less than .9 seconds, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service will occasionally announce the need for a leap second. Most people won’t notice a leap second, but they can be a huge pain for tech companies. Because leap seconds are added irregularly, developers have no way of working them into their codes, which has caused websites like LinkedIn and Reddit to crash in the past. A bug caused by 2012’s leap second created so much chaos on Qantas’s servers, more than 400 flights wound up being delayed.
Linus Torvalds originally wanted to name the operating system FreaX, which is a combination of free, freak, and X (as a reference to Unix).