1. Cleopatra lived closer in time to the building of Pizza Hut than that of the pyramids. The Great Pyramid was built circa 2560 BC, while Cleopatra lived around 30 BC. The first Pizza Hut opened in 1958, which is about 500 years closer.
   
2. Every two minutes, we take as many photos as all of humanity took during the 1800s. It’s estimated that in 2014, humans will take 880 billion photos. In fact, 10% of all the photos ever taken were taken in the past 12 months.
   
3. Oxford University is older than the Aztecs. Teaching started in Oxford as early as 1096, and by 1249, the University was officially founded. The Aztec civilization as we know it began with the founding of Tenochtitlán in 1325.
   
4. In the span of 66 years, we went from taking flight to landing on the moon. In 1903 the Wright brothers successfully flew a plane for a whopping 59 seconds. 38 years later, in 1941, the Japanese used flight to bomb Pearl Harbor. Only 28 years after that, Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969.
   
5. The first pyramids were built while the woolly mammoth was still alive. While most mammoths died out long before civilizations arose, a small populations survived until 1650 BC. By that point, Egypt was halfway through its empire, and the Giza Pyramids were already 1000 years old.
   
6. France was still executing people by guillotine when Star Wars came out. Star Wars premiered in theaters in May 1977. The last execution by guillotine took place September 10th of the same year.
   
7. This is what the difference in Olympic Gold looks like across 56 years of women’s vault. On the left, Larisa Latinya wins gold for the USSR in 1956. On the right, McKayla Maroney wins gold for the US in 2012.
   

1. When Warner Brothers formed, the Ottoman Empire was still alive. Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner opened their first theater, the Cascade, in New Castle, Pennsylvania in 1903. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire spanned from 1299 to 1923, when Turkey became an independent nation.
   
2. Harvard University was founded before calculus was derived. Harvard is the oldest higher education institution in the US, founded in 1636. Calculus wasn't derived until later in the 17th century, with the work of Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton.
   
3. Humans never fully experience the "present" - we're always living in the past. Every human being is living at least 80 milliseconds in the past. David Eagleman believes that our consciousness lags behind actual events and that when you think an event occurs, it has already happened before your brain has a chance to create a cohesive picture of the world.
   
4. If you’re over 45, the world population has doubled in your lifetime. In 1968, the world population was 3,557,000,000. Today, the world population is 7,217,000,000 and grows by over 200,000 daily.
   
5. There are whales alive today who were born before Moby Dick was written. Some of the bowhead whales living off the coast of Alaska are well over 200 years old. They were born well before Moby Dick was written in 1851.
   
6. If the history of Earth were compressed to a single day, modern humans would appear at about 11:58pm. The human race has lived on Earth for only 0.004% of the planet's history.
   

1. This is what’s happening in the world at this very moment.
   

source: xkcd: Frequency