Thin Mints alone account for 25% of Girl Scout Cookie sales!

It’s that time of year again: Girl Scout Cookie season. The time in which adorable little girls dressed in Girl Scout uniforms go door-to-door selling delicious cookies.

Beware anyone on a diet during this time. What’s your favorite cookie? The Tagalong? The Samoa? The Trefoil? More likely than not, you’re favorite is the Thin Mint.

Mint and smooth chocolate in cookie form. What could be more appetizing? If the Thin Mint is, in fact, your favorite, you’re not alone.

The Thin Mint actually accounts for 25% of all Girl Scout Cookie sales—far more than any other cookie. The next most frequently bought is the Samoa, which accounts for 19% of sales.

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Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness!

Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness killing between five and ten percent. Half of these deaths are by suicide and the other half are by way of medical complications.

Recognizing and treating the illness are crucial to prevent death, otherwise the illness can send someone so far down a rabbit hole that they can’t get out and end up dying.

If you think it’s only women who suffer it, you’d be wrong. Twenty percent of anorexics are men, and the number is rising. Men who face the illness struggle with the same issues that women facing it have, but their struggle isn’t recognize, they are vastly unseen and untreated.

There is also the stigma attached to the disease, and many men therefore refuse to see a doctor for the illness. Some treatment centers refuse to treat men, because they feel women will feel trauma or pressure to look a certain way and revert back to anorexia before they are finished with recovery.

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There’s a series of hieroglyphics on Easter Island that no one has managed to figure out yet!

Rongorongo is a series of glyphs found on Easter Island in the 19th century. The glyphs look to be actual writing or proto-writing. Many people have attempted to decipher the glyphs, but to no avail. Parts of the glyphs have been identified as calendar references and genealogical information. It isn’t even concrete yet that the glyphs are writing, but if they are found to be real writing, then they’d be an independent invention.

That would be a major finding and make them one of very few independent inventions of writing in human history. The Rongorongo glyphs were found on 24 or so objects. Some of the items had been burned, weathered, or damaged in other ways. Now, they are scattered throughout museums across the world and by some private collectors.

Oral history of Rapanui explains that only a very few elite were literate and that the tablets would be considered sacred by the people.

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Why are calculators with QWERTY keyboards banned from standardized tests?

Most high-schoolers know what a TI series calculator is. For those who don’t, it is a graphing calculator made by Texas Instruments. This series of calculators includes the TI-89, the TI-92, the TI-92 Plus, and the the Voyage 200. The TI-92’s came out in the mid and late 1990s while the Voyage 200 came out in 2002. There is one big difference between the TI-89 and the later series, though.

The TI-92s have a QWERTY keyboard. A QWERTY keyboard is the most common modern day keyboard layout. The name comes from the first six keys appearing in the top left letter row of the keyboard and read from left to right. It goes back as far as some of the first typewriters in 1878. However, while the success of the QWERTY keyboard has been proven, it didn’t work out so well for the TI-92 series calculators.

Since they had this type of keyboard, they were classified as “computers.” Students, then, were not allowed to use these calculators on standardized tests like the SAT or AP exams. The TI-89 on the other hand is acceptable because it doesn’t have a QWERTY keyboard.

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Astronauts in space for long periods of time are at risk for a very rare mental disorder!

Astronauts often spend extended periods of time away from home and even more time in isolation. As such, they are predisposed to Solipsism Syndrome. This is a psychological state in which the person does not believe the world is “real.” They do not believe that it exists external to his or her mind. The syndrome is characterized by feelings of indifference, loneliness and detachment. The American Psychiatric Association does not currently recognize it as a psychiatric disorder.

It does have similarities with depersonalization disorder though, which is a recognized disorder. This syndrome is different from solipsism, which is a philosophical position rather than a psychological state. People who take this position do not believe that anything exists or can be known to exist outside of one’s own mind. The fact that astronauts and cosmonauts are predisposed to this syndrome influences the design of their artificial environments.

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