2010 History, Trivia and Fun Facts

• War Room: In 2010 one of the fastest super computers in the entire US Defense Department was primarily compromised of 1760 PlayStation 3 Consoles.
• The Top Song was Tik Tok by Ke$ha
• The Big Movies included Toy Story 3, Alice in Wonderland and Iron Man 2
• Price of Nyquil liquicaps in 2010: $5.69/12
  Ground Beef (90%): $3.99/pound
• The World Population was ~ 6,860,000,000
• The somewhat annoying Vuvuzela Horn, used during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa became a Pop Culture Phenomenon.
• And... Moriusaq, Greenland had a population of 3 in 2009. A 2010 self defense case, ending in the death of one individual, dropped the population to 2 people.

Sandra Bullock accepted her Golden Raspberry Award in person for Worst Actress for her role in All About Steve. The following night, Bullock won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in The Blind Side.

Andre Geim won the satirical Ig Nobel Prize in 2000 for his work on using magnetism to levitate a frog. 10 years later, his experiments regarding graphene won him the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. This makes him the only ever recipient of both the Ig Nobel and Nobel Prizes.

McDonald's started offering free wifi throughout the USA in January 2010. Starbucks started with free wifi in July 2010.

Bill Murray walked into Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes at SXSW with RZA and GZA of the Wu Tang Clan and started bartending. No matter what anyone ordered, he gave them shots of tequila.

The KOR-fx, a device that sits around the shoulders, and translates stereo sound into stereo vibrations for gaming consoles, mp3s and more, was invented.

Kodak discontinued the famed Kodachrome film. The last roll was shot by acclaimed National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry best known for his portrait 'Afghan Girl'. The last 36 slides captured images around New York and a tribe in India on the verge of extinction.

The Plain Writing Act became law. It requires all federal agencies to use clear prose that the public can readily understand.

Microsoft banned a user from Xbox Live for putting Fort Gay (A real location in West Virginia) as his address. Microsoft refused to believe that Fort Gay actually existed, and eventually took an appeal from the towns Mayor David Thompson for the issue to be corrected.

The US Department of Defense connected 1,760 Playstation 3 consoles to create the Condor Cluster supercomputer. It cost $2 million to build, and only uses about 10% the energy consumption of a comparable supercomputer.

Finland became the first country in the world to make Internet access a legal right.

A Kansas State University professor went on a Twinkie diet, where he ate mainly Twinkies, Oreos, and Doritos to prove to his students that calorie counting is the important part of losing weight, not nutritional content. He lost 27 pounds in 2 months.

Earth is being shadowed by a minor planet called 2010 TK7, a 300 meter diameter trojan asteroid that orbits the sun in a spiral pattern every 365.3 days, 60° ahead of Earth's track through space. It has a gravitational force 1/20000 that of Earth and was only discovered in 2010.

The Republic of Fiji lost its declaration of independence, and so had to ask Britain for a photocopy.

Tupac's song Dear Mama was inducted into The Library of Congress Registry with The LOCR stating it is "a moving and eloquent homage to both the murdered rapper's own mother and all mothers struggling to maintain a family in the face of addiction, poverty and societal indifference."

Before 2010, proper nouns were not considered valid words for Scrabble, although many players still do not allow them.

Conan O'Brien follows only one person on Twitter, a randomly chosen fan (Sarah Killen) who, since being followed in 2010, has gone from 3 to over 300k followers.

Actress Emma Stone celebrated her mom being 2 years cancer free in 2010 by writing a letter to Paul McCartney asking him to sketch two birds' feet because The Beatles' song "Blackbird" was her mother's favorite. Paul sketched the birds which Emma and her mom took and used to get matching wrist tattoos.

Someone broke the Asteroids world record that had stood for 27 years. It took 58 hours.

England only abolished Slavery in 2010, and only did so as a formality, because the status of "Slave" never existed in English Common Law, and thus a person could not be charged with the practice of "Slavery". Owning a person was made illegal much, much earlier.

Sony was still producing the Cassette Walkman up until this year.

Five scientists observed 60,000 episodes combined of 73 cows lying down to determine that: (1) the longer the cow has been lying down, the more likely the cow will soon stand up, and (2) once the cow stands up you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again. (SAC Research, King's Buildings, West Mains Road, Edinburgh EH9 3JG, Scotland, UK)

Volvo Cars was owned by Ford since 1935, then sold to the Chinese company Geely in 2010. The Swedish owned Volvo only makes Trucks and Buses.

Alexander J. Yee & Shigeru K. broke a world record by calculating Pi to 5 trillion digits at home on a desktop computer (twin 6core Xeon processors, 96gb ram, and 20x 2TB hard drives.) It took 90 days; and 3.8 TB disk space was needed to store the final output of decimal and hex digits.

The violent 2010 film Machete is actually a spin-off of the 2001 childrens film Spy Kids.

Sugarcane is the world's largest crop. In 2010, it was cultivated on about 23.8 million hectares, in more than 90 countries, with a worldwide harvest of 1.69 billion tons.

Taco Bell secretly reduced the sodium content of its food at 150 Dallas area restaurants by 23%. Without telling anyone, they replaced the salt with "other spices and other ingredients." Two months later, they had received exactly zero complaints about the changes.

A mock political party (The Best Party) in Reykjavik, Iceland, openly stated they would keep none of their campaign promises. They won 34.7% of the city vote, with their founder, Jon Gnarr, becoming mayor.

26.5 million Canadians tuned into the gold medal final in men's hockey during the 2010 Winter Olympics. That's 80% of the entire country's population.

40.8% of children born in the US in 2010 were to unmarried women.

43% of British pilots admitted to falling asleep during flights, 33% of them reported waking up to find that their co-pilots had fallen asleep as well, according to a survey carried between 2010 and 2012.

Manhattan had 2.3 million residents in 1910 vs. 1.5 million in 2010.

If you bought ONE share of Coca-Cola stock in 1920, it would be worth $6.7 million by 2010.

According to a 2010 survey, Canadians were asked to chose if they would prefer bacon or sex. 43% chose bacon.

In 2010 in the United States, 3 out of every 5 people who died from gunshot wounds took their own life

3.2 billion people, or 46.4 per cent of the global population watched the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

50% of Harvard's entire class of 2010 went into finance and consulting.

Cost of a 30 second Superbowl ad: 3.1 Million dollars

The mummified corpse of Sogen Kato, thought to be Tokyo's oldest man, was found in his bedroom by government officials. He had actually died in 1978. The family pretended he was alive to continue getting his pension.

Mattel launched Computer Engineers Barbie. With the accompanying book we learned that CE Barbie needed the help of two men to code the game she was designing and they also needed to help her after she accidentally infected her and her sister Skipper's computers with a virus.

Abraham Lee Shakespeare was an American casual laborer who won a $30 million lottery jackpot, receiving $17 million in 2006. In 2009, his family declared him missing, and in January 2010 his body was found buried under a concrete slab in the backyard of an acquaintance.

A heat wave in Russia lead to the deaths of over 1,000 people, the majority of whom drowned as a result of swimming while they were drunk.

Vuvuzelas were so prolific during the 2010 Soccer World Cup that TV broadcasters received hundreds of complaints and had to work to filter the annoying sound out.

An unlucky 49-year-old un-named airline passenger was arrested in Ireland after Slovak security officials placed explosives in his luggage for training, then forgot to remove them before the plane took off.

MI6 spy Gareth Williams' decomposing corpse was found locked inside a duffle bag placed in the bathtub of a London flat. A re-investigation by the Metropolitan Police concluded that his death was "probably an accident"

A Chinese National Highway Traffic Jam was the longest duration traffic jam in history, lasting 12 days and locking up 62 miles of highway.

Haiti's second-largest airport is named after former leader of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. This was in part due to Venezuela's pledge to give $1.2 billion to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, of which $222 million has been released so far. Hugo Chavez died in 2013.

China had a traffic jam that lasted 12 days and spanned 62 miles.

In Paris, an un-named 18 month old boy fell from a 6th story window, bounced off the awning of a cafe below, and was then caught, unharmed, by a doctor who happened to be walking by.

Dave Grohl was admitted to hospital due to a drug overdose... He had consumed too much caffeine from coffee whilst recording a new album.

Over 9000 women were sterilized in Puning, China for violating China's one child policy during a 20-day campaign in 2010. Families of women (or men) refusing to report to sterilization clinics were forcibly detained until the parents complied.

Comcast has won the "Worst Company in America" award twice, first in 2010 and second in 2014.

New York City officials admitted they forgot about a stalled train during the 2010 blizzard, which left dozens of passengers stranded for 7 hours. The subway chief said at a hearing they simply "forgot about that train."

Comcast has won the "Worst Company in America" award twice, first in 2010 and second in 2014.

After Kenny Waters was convicted of murder, his sister put herself through college and law school to prove his innocence. She worked with the Innocence Project to get DNA tested, and he was freed. The 2010 movie "Conviction", starring Hillary Swank, was based on his story.

(according to boxofficemojo)
1. Toy Story 3
2. Alice In Wonderland
3. Iron Man 2
4. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
5. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1
6. Inception
7. Despicable Me
8. Shrek Forever After
9. How To Train Your Dragon
10. Tangled

Alice in Wonderland, Clash of the Titans, Despicable Me, Grown Ups, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 1, How to Train Your Dragon, Inception, Iron Man 2, The Karate Kid, The King's Speech, The Last Airbender, Little Fockers, Megamind, Shrek Forever After, Shutter Island, Tangles, Toy Story 3, Tron Legacy, True Grit, The Twighlight Saga: Eclipse