prompter: I am giving presentation tomorrow and tell me few random facts that I can use to grab an attention of attendees.

assistant: Here are some random facts that you can use to grab the attention of attendees during your presentation tomorrow:

1.    The average person will spend 6 months of their lifetime waiting for a red light to turn green.
2.    The first recorded use of the word “hello” was in 1827.
3.    The average person blinks 15-20 times per minute.
4.    The amount of data created every minute on the internet is equivalent to the entire contents of the New York Public Library every 14.4 days.
5.    The human brain has more connections than the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
6.    The average human heart beats 100,000 times per day.
7.    It takes the average person about 2 hours and 40 minutes to fall asleep.
8.    The average person dreams for 2 hours every night.
9.    The average person has over 70,000 thoughts a day.
10.    Humans can detect over one trillion distinct smells.

prompter: How many connections exist in the human brain?

assistant: What is the presentation about? Or do you want facts to other random topics?

prompter: It's a school presentation about technology patents in the US. I'd like facts about that topic like some attention grabbing technology patent that seems overly broad.

assistant: Here are some interesting facts about technology patents in the US that can grab attention:

• Amazon patented the process of taking a photograph against a white background. The patent is so broad it covers most product photography.
• Microsoft patented the concept of auto-complete on mobile devices. So when you type a few letters and see options to complete the word, that's covered by their patent.
• Apple patented the rectangular shape of its devices with rounded corners. At one point they even tried to sue Samsung for having similarly shaped phones and tablets.
• IBM patented Ecommerce itself by patenting the one-click checkout process. So essentially they patented the concept of buying things online with a single click.
• There are patents approved for algorithms and software that many argue are overly broad and not truly novel inventions. This has been an ongoing controversy around technology patents.

assistant: Sure!
* In 1790, while not overly broad, the very first US Patent was for a new method of making potash and pearl ash. The higher quality ash was increasingly exported to Britain, and the production of potash generally followed wherever forests were being cut down. This continued until around 1943, when Germany established large scale potash from mineral salt production.
* In 1991, David Kendrick was awarded a patent for a "life expectancy timepiece", which would calculate your date of death based on actuarial data, including factors such as "consuming fatty foods, over-eating, stress, jogging, exercising, etc.".
* In 1997, Amazon.com submitted their "one-click" patent, titled "A Method and System for Placing a Purchase Order Via a Communications Network", which was filed two years later. It was controversial due to how simple it was, in fact being rejected in Europe due to obviousness, but it secured building up a userbase in the US that would pay monthly fees for the convenience of not having to enter their information into a site multiple times. The patent was licensed to Apple and Barnes and Noble, and expired in 2017. PayPal managed to get around the patent by being technically different enough. For example, it doesn't need to "display information identifying the item", and may take more than "a single action", both of which are listed under claim one.
* In 2004, Eric D. Page was awarded the patent titled "Forehead support apparatus" (US6681419), which would support a man's forehead while he used the urinal.
* Apple has a "rounded corners" design patent (USD627777). It's ridiculed as being a patent for rounded corners, but is quite specific on the included buttons, ports, cameras, screen edges, and design of the rounded back. It would be surprising if the patent stood up in court if used against a new device without the exact same configuration of buttons and ports.
* In 1882, J. A. Williams was granted a patent for a mousetrap that pressed the trigger of a loaded gun instead of the regular spring system (US269766A). Leaving that out in the open would be a good way to shoot yourself in the foot.
* In 2002, Long, Iii Ross Eugene was awarded a patent titled "Animal toy", which shows images of and describes a stick.

assistant: Here are some facts about technology patents that might be helpful:
Microsoft has a patent for the following function: a new window opens when you click on a hyperlink. This patent expired in 2021.
As Apple is granted the “Slide-to-Unlock” patent, in a case against Motorola they argued that “a tap is a zero-length swipe”.
Amazon holds a patent on 1-click buying; Apple pays them licensing fees.
The public disclosure of patent applications allows other inventors to see what is already being done and come up with creative ways to work around the patent to foster new ideas and inventions. WD-40 is not patent protected, thereby avoiding completely disclosing its ingredients, making it harder for any other companies to mimic.
The discoverers of insulin chose not to patent their discovery so that inexpensive treatment of diabetes would spread worldwide.
From 1790 to 1880, the government required every patent application to be accompanied by a working scale model of the invention, no larger than 12 inches on each side. The Rothschild Petersen Patent Model Museum in Cazenovia, New York, maintains the largest private collection of patent models, with over 4,000 of them.
Now a patent doesn't need a corresponding working device to be filed - There exists a patent for a nuclear-powered drill that heats up the tip of the drill high enough to melt rocks and create a glass-coated tunnel.
The movie industry is based in Hollywood on the west coast because moviemakers were trying to get away from Thomas Edison (based in New Jersey). He had patents covering virtually all the movie-making process and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California was known to rule against patent claims.
The longest granted patent is numbered US6,314,440, titled, “Pseudo Random Number Generator”. It has 3,333 pages, out of which, 3,272 contain drawings. The title of the shortest patent is “Metoprolol Succinate”. Patent numbered US5,081,154 is just half of a page long.
The patent numbered US6,953,802 has a single claim with more than 17,000 words. The highest number of claims (887 claims) is in a patent numbered US6,684,189, titled “Apparatus and method using front-end network gateways and search criteria for efficient quoting at a remote location”, while in terms of published applications, US20030173072 achieved 8,958 claims (down to 90 when finally issued as a patent).

assistant: Here are some interesting random facts you can use in your presentation:

• The average human brain has about 100 billion neurons.

• There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body, enough to wrap around the world 2.5 times.

• Honey bees have to collect nectar from 2 million flowers to make 1 pound of honey.

• The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. It was the fashion in Renaissance Florence to shave them off.

• Butterflies taste with their feet.

• The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue.

• It takes glass one million years to decompose.

• It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open. Your eyelids reflexively close to prevent your eyeballs from popping out!

• 'Rhythm' is the longest English word without a vowel.

• Alaska is the state with the highest percentage of people who walk to work.

prompter: Thank you so much!
Can you tell me more about how butterflies taste with their feet?