home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Your Choice 3
/
Your Choice Software Collection 3.iso
/
dos
/
almanac
/
info.doc
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1993-06-17
|
84KB
|
1,683 lines
Fascinating Facts
Copyright 1993, Jeff Napier
Not for distribution outside of the Jeff's Almanac package
Americans use enough toilet paper in one day to wrap around
the world 9 times. If it were on one giant roll, we would be
unrolling it at the rate of 7600 miles per hour - roughly
mach 10, ten times the speed of sound.
Your hair grows 83 feet per day. Explanation: This is the
total growth of all your 120,000 hairs, which each grow
one-hundredth of an inch per day. If you figure that you
need a haircut after you hair grows out one-half inch, you
will need a haircut every 7 weeks.
The FDA considers chocolate acceptable for public consumption
as long as there are less than 60 microscopic insect
fragments per 100 grams (four ounces, or approximately one
candy bar).
Scientists tested vision in men with tight collars and ties
and found significant improvement in these mens' vision when
they loosened their ties and unbuttoned their collars.
One out of every four women fail in business. Four out of
every five men fail in business.
If you could stack up all the copies of the Guinness Book of
World Records made just in the year 1985, your pile would
reach into outer space. It would be 1006 miles high.
Try to say the alphabet without moving your lips or your
tongue. Every letter will sound exactly the same.
There are 1.3 billion cattle in the world, and they all
belch. This is a serious problem! Each of these cattle burp
up about 8 ounces of methane per day, which totals 1/3
million tons. According to one scientist's calculations,
this is enough methane to ruin the world's weather by raising
the temperature 5 degrees within 60 years, due to the
greenhouse effect.
One night in 1833 there were almost a quarter-million
shooting stars. (Don't you wish you were there to see it?)
When you look up into the sky on a moonless night, you see
even more stars than you think. That's because about 75% of
the 'stars' you see are actually groups of two, three, or
more stars orbiting around each other.
The Volkswagen was originally called the Strength-Through-
Joy-Wagon.
A computer with the job of issuing traffic citations goofed
in September, 1989 and sent notices to 41,000 residents of
Paris, France informing them that they were charged with
murder, prostitution and illegal sale of drugs.
All the information in this database is reliably calculated
from or based on what others have written. However, you may
wish to conduct your own research to make absolutely sure of
the facts.
The Pilgrims would have sailed beyond Plymouth Rock, but
their beer was all used up.
Paul Revere would have not made his famous (but incomplete)
ride, had he not been paid to do so. He was a mercenary.
Note: You can search for a specific word within this file by
pressing the [S] key.
For the first 19 years Crayola Crayons were produced, they
came in only one color - black.
Served at the first Thanksgiving meal in 1621 were lobster,
roasted pigeon, eel, stuffed cod, turkeys, pumpkins, sweet
potatoes, popcorn and cranberry sauce. There were 92 native
Americans at this breakfast.
During the 1920's there was a law in Russia that all
automobiles had to have a yellow stripe painted all the way
around the whole body.
Don't get caught chewing gum in Singapore. For this horrible
offense, you could be fined $6,250.00 or spend a year in
jail. The reason might be because politicians were tired of
cleaning gum off their shoes.
In Memphis, Tennessee, a woman cannot legally drive unless
there is a man running on foot ahead of her car with a red
flag to warn motorists that a woman is driving.
In Chaseville, New York, you may not "drive a goat past a
church in a ridiculous fashion."
It is illegal in Arizona to hunt camels.
Cataract surgery (removal of lens from eye) was first done in
1748. But the first anesthesia wasn't until 1842!
In 1976, doctors in Los Angeles went on strike because of the
rising cost of malpractice insurance. All elective and
non-emergency surgery and medical attention were canceled.
During that time, eighteen percent less people died than
usual.
Two of every five Americans have never been to a dentist.
Some scientists at Ohio State devised an experiment in which
volunteers were given an opportunity to give strangers
pleasure. It was set up so that one volunteer was seated in
a special chair with a vibration cushion that supposedly
would give a pleasurable vibration, if another volunteer, who
was not acquainted with the first, would press a button. Many
of the button pressers refused to press. One out of every ten
of the people confronted with the button not only refused to
press it, but also expressed moral outrage at the experiment
on one grounds or another.
In another experiment, conducted several years earlier,
other scientists had a similar arrangement between pairs of
unacquainted volunteers. The difference, however, was that
the button pressers were told that if they pressed the
button, the other volunteer would be given a painful,
possibly even dangerous electrical shock. Guess what? Most of
these button pressers gladly pressed the button!
Back to the pleasure experiments, it was also discovered
that men were more likely to give pleasure to attractive
female strangers than males, and women pushed the pleasure
button more for attractive males.
Your mouth produces about 16 ounces of saliva per day. Can
you imagine drinking it all at once?
Science has determined that fetuses can hear sounds while
still in the womb. Sometimes they remember. One two-year-old
girl was found sitting on the floor reciting, "breathe in,
breathe out, breathe in..." The only time she could have
heard this was when she was in the womb as her mother was
practicing the LaMaze exercises which help a mother during
childbirth.
One out of every 144 people in America has the last name of
Smith.
At a wedding in Los Angeles a woman legally married a rock.
In New York City, there are 37 taxi drivers who are each
named Amarjit Singh.
Approximately one out of every ten people who ever lived are
alive today.
Until recently in New Zealand, 66% of the children were
smoking cigarettes by age seven.
In Detroit, where three out of every four people are black,
24 out of every 25 people attending the local baseball
stadium are white.
One out of every 300 Americans is a millionaire.
Hollywood was founded in 1888 by Horace Wilcox. It was to be
a model city of people who did not drink alcohol. There
were only 500 residents until the movie industry came to
town.
The Chinese symbol which looks like two women standing in one
house means "trouble."
There is a place in Hong Kong so populated, that each person
has 42.69 square feet. It would seem that this allows only
about 6 X 7 feet floor space per person, but most buildings
are many stories high. If all the people came out on the
streets at once, such as during an earthquake, there will not
be enough room to stand.
In Tokyo, to buy a three-line classified in the newspaper
costs $3,000 per day.
Before the first atomic bomb was tested in the New Mexico
desert on on July 16, 1945, some of the scientists working
on the bomb thought there was a three in one million chance
that an atomic bomb might melt down the entire earth - yet
they went ahead and tested that first atomic bomb.
Windows were broken 125 miles away from the first
atomic test blast. If the test had been in Disneyland,
windows in Mexico would have broken from the noise.
A student at Iowa State University wrote to 37 scientists who
had published research studies. He requested their data for
verification. Five did not answer, and twenty-one of the
so-called scientists said that their data was lost or that
some accident made it unaccessible.
Some scientists trained a bunch of flatworms to react in a
special way to light. They noted how long it took the worms
to learn, then they cut the worms up and fed the pieces to
another batch of untrained worms. After their meal, the new
worms were taught the same lesson. The second batch learned
much faster. Wondering if this were a fluke (no, they were
plenaria), some other scientists tried similar
experimentation with mice. A batch of mice were trained to
run a maze. Then their brains were removed, an extract was
made from these brains and fed to another, untrained batch of
mice. Once again, the new mice learned the maze much more
quickly, up to twice as fast.
German researchers trained honey bees to expect food at a
certain time every day. Then they cut off the bees' heads
and transplanted a part of their brains into the brains of
other bees. The bees with the brain transplants then expected
the food at the same time of day.
Your brain is mostly water, 80 percent. Your blood actually
is less fluid (or more solid) than your brain.
If you could harness the power used by your brain, you could
power a 10-watt light bulb.
In November 1960, the sun released a multi-million mile thick
cloud of hydrogen that reached the earth two days later.
This cloud interfered with the electronic equipment of the
times, messing up teletype and radio communications and
affecting house current in many neighborhoods around the
world. If that cloud had happened in modern times (and a
repeat performance is certainly possible) it could very
seriously affect modern integrated circuitry throughout the
world.
A Japanese priest set a kimono on fire in Tokyo because it
carried bad luck. The flames spread until over 10,000
buildings were destroyed and 100,000 people died. (Year:
1657)
When Thomas Edison was 12 years old, a train conductor pulled
him aboard a train by his ears. "I felt something snap
inside my head," he said. From that time until his death, he
was hard of hearing.
Driving along at 55 miles per hour, if you have to slam on
the brakes, your car will continue 56 feet between the time
you decide to put on the brakes, and the time you get your
foot on the brake pedal.
Every day we total enough cars in America to fill a football
field.
If you are involved in a car accident, your chance of getting
hurt are only one out of ten. If you have an accident on a
motorcycle, your chances of getting hurt are nine out of ten.
An atomic bomb was tested in the desert of Nevada in 1953.
Nearby, (downwind) in St. George, Utah, a Howard Hughes
film was being made with a cast that included Pedro
Armendariz, Dick Powell, Agnes Moorhead, Ted de Corsia, John
Wayne, and Susan Hayword. All these members of the cast have
all died of cancer. There were 220 other people involved in
the film, and 91 of these folks have contracted cancer.
Howard Hughes became so compulsive about germs that he used
to spend hours swabbing his arms over and over again with
rubbing alcohol.
Although Howard Hughes had 15 personal attendants and three
doctors on full-time duty, he died of neglect and
malnutrition, caused by his intense desire to be left alone.
Bob Hail jumped out of an airplane. His main chute failed.
His back-up chute also failed. He smashed into the ground
face first. In a moment he got up and walked away with only
minor injuries.
People who live near airports and have to hear the noise of
planes taking off and landing are up to sixty percent more
likely to die than people who live elsewhere. The rate of
fatal heart attacks is eighteen percent higher. The rate of
crime related deaths and suicide is double. There are twice
as many fatal accidents in people who are over age 75.
In 1945, the Empire State Building was hit by an airplane,
which destroyed most of the seventy-eighth floor.
Men are six times more likely to be struck by lightning than
women.
Major earthquakes have hit Japan on: September 1, 827,
September 1, 859, September 1, 1185, September 1, 1649 and
September 1, 1923.
Young children are poisoned by houseplants more often than by
detergents and other chemicals.
If you had two people in a test, one was deprived of food,
and the other deprived of sleep, the one without sleep would
die sooner. We do not recommend you test this at home.
125,000 people are injured in or because of a bed every year.
In the past twenty years, there has been a 39 percent
increase in the number of overweight children. One major
reason is television. Not only does this lack of activity
take up more of kids' time, but while they watch, they tend
to eat the junk food that is constantly being advertised at
them.
According to many pediatricians, up to one third of all
children at age two may already be developing abnormally high
cholesterol levels.
Fifty percent of all turkeys and 37 percent of all chickens
that you can buy in grocery stores are contaminated with
Campylobacter (food poisoning) according to the Food and Drug
Administration.
Baseball players have the longest lives of all occupations.
Some gem merchants now use Geiger counters to inspect
precious stones before purchasing them. It seems that the
natural colors of some gems can be enhanced by exposure to
atomic radiation. Some unscrupulous dealers have done this.
Every thing about smoking cigarettes is dangerous. Last year
6,000 people suffered injuries caused by ashtrays.
A cure for cigarette smoking: learn to play a flute,
recorder, trumpet. Then play a little music until the urge
to smoke subsides every time you feel the temptation. Not
only will you soothe your oral desire, but you will become
involved in the music which will make you forget the urge,
and you will be calmed by the music and the feeling of
creativity.
Cigarette smokers catch colds 65 percent more often.
During World War II, 2,700,000 tons of bombs were dropped on
Germany, killing 300,000 people, and seriously injuring
780,000 more. If cars were dropped from the sky instead, by
weight the equivalent number of cars would be 1,800,000,
enough cars to give six to the families of every one who was
killed by a bomb. Altogether, Germany lost almost 12 million
people.
Liechtenstein used to have the world's smallest army. There
was one soldier. He served his country until his death at
age 95. Then the country no longer had an army.
68% of deaths in the United States are diet-related,
according to the US Surgeon Gnereal.
On the night of July 5, 1991, while sleeping soundly with his
wife, a police officer dreamed that someone was breaking into
their house. Half waking up, he grabbed his gun from his
nightstand and promptly shot himself in the leg. His wife
slept through it. He was reported in satisfactory condition
at the local hospital.
One day in August, 1892, in Germany, it started to rain.
This rainstorm was unusual because somehow there were
thousands of snails caught up in the clouds and they all came
crashing down with their shells breaking to bits as they hit
the ground.
A husband and wife from Switzerland stopped in a restaurant
in Hong Kong and asked that their poodle be taken to the
kitchen and fed something. Because of a misunderstanding,
the waiter did what he thought they wanted, and had the cooks
fry the dog for the couple.
Recently broadcast from a rural radio station:
"There is a tan and white cow wandering around the
corner of Brookhurst and E. Central. If it's yours, go get
it."
Abraham Lincoln's mother died from drinking milk from a cow
which when foraging in the woods, had eaten the poisonous
snakeroot.
Chevrolet could not sell Novas in South America. Upon looking
into the matter, their advertising department discovered that
Nova is "no va" in Spanish, which means: "no go."
A little grouchy, eh? 23% of American men are constipated,
but only 12% of American women.
In 1939 an author named Ernest Vincent wrote a 50,000 word
novel called Gadsby. The only thing unusual about the novel
is that there is not a single letter e in the whole thing.
The following words were invented by William Shakespeare:
hurry
boredom
disgraceful
hostile
money's worth
obscene
puke
perplex
on purpose
shooting star
sneak
Until his time, people had to make do in their conversations
without these words.
It took Noah Webster 36 years to write his first dictionary.
Jonathan Swift wrote a classic book called Gulliver's Travels
that boarders on science fiction although it was written
before science fiction was what you called such books. In
this book he wrote about two moons circling Mars. He
described their size and speed of orbit. He did this one
hundred years before they were described by astronomers.
Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr, a high-school dropout, posed as a
monk, a professor of psychology, a cancer researcher, a penal
officer, a teacher, and a surgeon, all without the proper
education or certification. As a surgeon he successfully
performed amputations and even thoracic surgery.
There is a policeman in Ontario, Canada who is blind.
In Portland, Oregon a man was arrested for car theft and
released on bail. Later the same day, he was arrested again
for trying to take another car.
American counterfeiters print over one-quarter million
dollars a day.
In New York City, car radio theft is so prevalent that many
people are putting signs in their cars that say, "NO RADIO."
This is supposed to discourage thieves who would break car
windows in order to steal a radio. One resident had such a
sign, but found a window broken one morning anyway. In the
car was a note that said, "JUST CHECKING."
Scientific research has been conducted which determined that
criminals convicted in court who are good-looking receive
lighter sentences than ugly criminals. Only in cases where
crooks used their attractiveness to swindle people did they
receive more severe sentences.
If you own a new Pontiac Firebird or Trans Am, you run an
unusual risk, 29.4 per thousand get stolen.
In English gambling dens they used to have employees whose
job it was to swallow the dice if the police arrived.
Nine percent of gun owners admit that they have fired their
guns is self-protection, and seven percent said they have
fired their guns to scare someone.
Thomas Edison's total school education consisted of three
months.
When Martin J. Spalding was fourteen years old, he was
appointed professor of mathematics at St. Mary's College in
Kentucky.
At the age of ten, Francois Auguste de Thou was appointed
Chief Librarian of France.
Sweden once had a supreme court justice who was nineteen
years old. When he was ten, he could speak fluently in 12
languages.
In a recent Gallop survey, Americans were asked to identify
America on an unmarked world map. 14 percent couldn't do it.
Approximately 66 percent of average prisoners end up in
prison again after release. In San Quentin prison where they
teach some of the prisoners computer programming, less than
six percent return to prison.
Here's an interesting item in the evolution of our language.
Butterflys used to be called "flutterbys."
The technical term for snapping your fingers is "fillip."
The French word "verre" which means glass is similar to the
word "vaire" which means fur. It makes more sense that
Cinderella's slippers were made of fur than glass. It is
assumed early translators of the story goofed.
If you have had a haircut, you can be called an acersecomic.
There are about twice as many words in the English language
to describe negative emotions such as sad, upset, and
disappointed as there are for positive ones, such delighted,
happy and elated.
When the trucking company PIE renamed their truckers,
warehousemen and clerical workers "craftsmen," they raised
their pride and cut a 60% rate of shipping mistakes down to
10%, thereby saving $250,000 per year.
John Brown, a dentist's epitaph:
Stranger! Approach this spot
with gravity!
John Brown is filling
his last cavity."
This epitaph was written for a young baby:
Ope'd my eyes, took a peep;
Didn't like it, went to sleep."
W.C. Fields' epitaph:
"On the whole I would rather be in Philadelphia."
Perhaps the most famous last words in all history were spoken
by Major general John Sedgwich in the Civil War battle of
Spottsylvania. He said, "Why, they couldn't hit an elephant
at this dist..."
H.G. Wells last words were, "Go away, I'm all right!" He
couldn't have been further from the truth.
The painting that won second place in a competition held by
the U.S. National Academy of Design was hanging upside down
when it was judged.
If you have ever looked at old Chinese art, you will note
that they were very free in painting eroticism. However, you
will never ever see a naked woman's foot. In their culture,
that would have been incredibly shocking.
3,500 years ago, not only did women in Egypt remove all the
hair from their heads, they also polished their heads to a
mirror-like finish. It would have been easier if they had
Lemon Pledge in those days.
At one time in Japan fashionable women painted their teeth
black.
Mayan Indians used to shape their teeth. They would make
their front teeth pointed and carve holes into which were
mounted jewels.
"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to
alter it every six months." -Oscar Wilde
The average American spends $1.23 per day, or $448.95 per
year on clothing.
Rubbing orange peels or lemon peels on yourself makes a good
mosquito repellent.
Velma Anstadt won a science fair when she made protein-rich
earthworm cookies.
Michel Lotito has eaten 7 tv sets.
82% of children list pizza as their favorite food.
When rats were fed only 60% of the food they would eat if
they could, they lived 40% longer than normal.
For years milk has been prescribed for ulcers, but recent
research finds that milk actually aggravates ulcers.
There is more alcohol in mouthwash than in wine.
So you eat a bowl of salad everyday, and you think this is
helping you get all the vitamins you need. In the 1800's
this would have been true, but latest evidence indicates that
the vegetables grown on modern industrial farms have less
nutritional value. They are carefully fertilized to the
minimum amount necessary to grow and look good. The land has
long been depleted of important trace elements.
Worlds worst meal: eating a bicycle. A man did this by
grinding it into powder.
In 1743 a teen-age boy was observed to have eaten 384 pounds
of food in one week. There was another boy (or perhaps
another report on this same boy) whose weight increased by
179 pounds in one year from 105 to 284. Like a cow, he ate
fifteen hours every day yet was still hungry.
In 1963 a man ate a single meal weighing 54 pounds.
There was an olympic hammer thrower who used to eat a dozen
raw eggs for breakfast, complete with shells.
In Japan, if you have enough money, you can order gourmet
beef from cattle that have been raised in darkness, fed
beer, and given daily massages by special masseurs.
The original reason for tablecloths was as a towel to wipe
one's fingers and hands on after eating.
Ketchup was originally made from fish broth and mushrooms.
Tomatoes were added later. Today, ketchup must contain
sugar, otherwise it must be called imitation ketchup.
Cherries taste great, but if you eat the leaves or twigs of a
cherry tree, you could die.
When the diets of inmates of a Virginia juvenile detention
center were changed from typical American junk food to
natural foods - cereal without sugar, fruit juice instead of
soda, etc, - kids who were chronic offenders decreased by 56
percent and kids who were well-mannered increased by 71
percent.
Just before a game, Babe Ruth had to be taken to a hospital
due to extreme stomach pain. He had eaten twelve hot dogs in
a row!
Most people don't realize that a hot dog may contain cow
brains, lips, eyes, stomachs or tails. Americans eat an
average of forty of these things per year, at a cost of six
hundred million dollars. If you lined them all up, that line
would be about a half million miles long, twice the distance
to the moon.
If the water used by the cattle business was not paid for by
American taxpayers, beef would cost $35 per pound.
These people were vegetarians:
Albert Einstein
George Bernard Shaw
Charles Manson
Leo Tolstoy
Clara Barton
Adolph Hitler
Mahatma Ghandi
Mr. Rogers
Leonardo da Vinci
Jeff Juliano, the original Ronald McDonald
We Americans drink three million gallons of orange juice per
day. We drink over fifteen million gallons of beer daily.
This means that on average, Americans drink five times more
beer than orange juice.
If everyone quit drinking alcoholic beverages, twenty million
starving people could be fed on the grain saved.
If you spin two eggs on a flat, hard surface, one raw, and
the other hard-boiled, the hard-boiled one will spin much
longer.
We don't know what goes on in most grocery stores, but at
least in the produce department of one supermarket we know
about, they wax the cucumbers with Johnson's Floor Polish.
We found a natural food which is truly amazing. It can be
made into delicious smoothies, toppings, mixed into salad
dressings, and even made into yummy snacks. It seems to give
you more mental clarity, strength, energy - in general, it
gives you more life! I've been eating algae for awhile, and
I know it has helped my energy levels and attitude! This
year's national aerobics champion says he couldn't have wone
without it. It balances your chemistry by providing the
trace materials you need. The stuff is blue green algae. If
you want to know more, please phone 503- 482- 3611, or e-mail
to CompuServe 71022,175, or America On-Line "Another Co." and
I'll send you more information.
For more information about eating well, see The Alternative
Health Guide, published as a computer disk by Another
Company.
The biggest improvement in computers in the near future is
likely to be large-scale parallel processing. Most
present-day computers process every thought through a single
chip, called the CPU or Central Processing Unit. Every byte
of information waits in line to be handled by the CPU.
Computers seem fast, but they're not - compared to the human
brain.
In the brain, thoughts, bits of information, are processed
in thousands, in fact millions, of locations simultaneously.
Furthermore, the logic is not digital, it is sort of
random-digital. It is the imperfections of information
handling in the brain that give rise to creativity. When
man-made computers can think fast, holding not megabytes but
millions of megabytes of information, and do it purposely
imperfectly, life as we know it is going to get real
interesting!
There are currently over 5 billion people on earth. Within a
century the population is expected to double.
People who can remember back to 1940 may tell you the
world felt less crowded then, and it's true, there were only
two people for every four who live today. Around the turn of
the century there were only 1.6 billion people. In George
Washington's time there were about 750 million people. In the
time Jesus lived, there were only about 200 million people on
earth, less than those just in the United States today. It is
estimated that around 10000 BC the total was only 5 million
people.
Two years after his famous paper was published, Albert
Einstein wanted a job as assistant professor of mathematics.
This job required the applicant to submit a thesis paper, so
Einstein submitted his Special Theory of Relativity. The
university rejected it.
George Washington was not America's first president. The
first was John Hanson, then came Elias Boudinot, Thomas
Mifflin, Richard Henry Lee, Nathan Gorham, Arthur St. Clair,
and Cyrus Griffin. George Washington was the first elected by
the people. The others were elected directly by the
Continental Congress, sort of as fill-in presidents until the
nation was cohesive enough to truly elect a president.
All the information in this database is reliably calculated
from or based on what others have written. However, you may
wish to conduct your own research to make absolutely sure of
the facts.
Adolf Hitler owned 8,960 acres in Colorado.
There used to be a state in America named Kanawha. It was
later renamed West Virginia.
At one time George Washington had over 300 slaves.
President Nixon was known to his fellow college students as
"Iron Butt."
During Richard Nixon's very first case as a lawyer, in
representing a client in court trying to recover a bad debt,
he lost. He was then sued by the client for inept handling of
her case.
The Rosetta stone was a slab covered with hyroglyphics found
in Egypt, that once deciphered, led to the unlocking of many
more ancient Egyptian mysteries. The prominent Egyptologist
who first managed to read it was 17 years old at the time.
One theory about the demise of the Mayan culture is that by
clearing large areas of forest where they lived, they
inadvertently changed their own climate enough to put
themselves out of business. About 20 years from now this
story might sound terribly familiar.
In the 1850's, some people used to chew paraffin wax the way
we chew gum today.
Until the late 18th century, orchestra musicians always
played at the same volume - there was no piano, forte,
crescendo, etc.
The first car tires were evolved from an invention by John
Dunlop, a veterinarian. In those days (1888), doctors and
vets had to make their own gloves from liquid rubber. He
adopted the technology to make air-filled tires for his son's
tricycle.
People didn't really understand early telephones. Therefore
one advertisement stated: "Its employment necessitates no
skilled labor, no technical education, and no special
attention."
This was in contrast to so much home equipment of the
era. If you had a camera, for instance, you had to have your
own darkroom to develop your pictures. You needed to know
chemistry to mix your own developing chemicals. There was no
one to send your film (actually individual plates) to for
development, you had to do it yourself. Later, Kodak
developed a model of camera in which you could send the film
to the factory for developing, but the film was sealed into
the camera. You had to send the whole camera to Kodak to get
your pictures developed.
Still later, when automobiles were invented, you didn't
get one unless you felt yourself rather competent in
mechanical work, because repairs were constantly necessary.
Often you had to repair your car several times in one trip.
I talked with one old timer who told me about a 100-mile
trip in a tin lizzy in which he had to stop 7 times to patch
flat tires.
California belongs to Great Britain. In 1579 Sir Francis
Drake landed near Laguna Beach and met with the Indians who
lived there. They thought he was a god and gave him all their
land. He made a brass plaque decreeing California as
property of the Queen. In 1933 a man found the plaque in the
sand and took it home as a piece of scrap metal that he might
be able to use to fix a car or something. Four years later,
still having no idea that the plate with the faint old
English lettering was anything of value, he junked it on the
beach north of San Francisco. Then another man found it and
took it to his home for possible car repair material.
Fortunately, he had experts examine the lettering and
discovered it was England's deed to California.
A few days before he was shot to death, Abraham Lincoln told
a friend, Ward Hill Lamon, of a disturbing dream he had. Mr.
Lamon wrote it down, and so this historical account exists.
In his dream, Lincoln wandered through the White House and
heard many invisible people sobbing. Looking for the source
of the trouble, he came upon a dead man in the East Room. He
asked a guard who had died and was told it was the President.
A few hours before he died, he told another friend,
William H. Crook, "I believe there are men who want to take
my life...And I have no doubt they will do it...If it is to
be done, it is impossible to prevent it."
A few hours before John F. Kennedy was shot to death,
he told his friend, Ken O'Donnell, "If somebody wants to
shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so
why worry about it?"
When Lincoln died, President (Andrew) Johnson took his
place. When Kennedy died, President (Lyndon) Johnson took
his place.
Sherlock Holmes was modeled after a real person, Dr Joseph
Bell, a famous surgeon and lecturer of author A Conan Doyle's
time. Dr Bell was known for highly tuned powers of
observation, often pointing out to medical students to pay
attention to seemingly trivial details and often able to
expose patients' lies. Dr. Bell said that any observant
doctor could often tell exactly what part of the body a
patient was going to start talking about. Elementary.
Knowing of Doyle's use of his character, when a
listener once told Dr. Bell that he sounded like Sherlock
Holmes, he replied, "I am Sherlock Holmes."
Sherlock Holmes was named after an acquaintance of Dr.
Doyle, Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Dr. Doyle was an eye doctor who could not make ends
meet, since medical specialties were still rather rare in
1880's England, so he took up writing in order to pay his
bills.
In 1637, one out of every four shops in New York City were
taverns.
Frank Tower was a shipworker who was on the Titanic when it
sank, the Empress of Ireland when it sank, and the Lusitania
when it sank. He escaped all three times.
Until 1687 clocks had no minute hand, just an hour hand.
In Thomas Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of
Independence, he included a proposal to put an end to
slavery. Other politicians forced him to delete that portion
in the final draft.
The $ was originally equipped with not one, but two vertical
lines. Sometimes you still see it used that way. The two
vertical lines represented a U superimposed over the S,
which stand for U.S., the United States. The United States
is the only country that incorporates its own name into its
monetary symbol.
The man who invented scissors was Leonardo da Vinci.
Most people think the Wright Brothers were first to fly. The
first real flight happened in France on October 9, 1890 by
Clement Ader in a steam powered airplane. The altitude was
only a few inches. The Wright Brothers. knew about and
studied this flight.
Lindbergh was the sixty-seventh man to make a non-stop flight
over the Atlantic Ocean. He was, however, the first to do it
solo.
Please note: The following material was compiled by me, a
person with no medical training. Do not use the information
I have written here as a replacement for proper professional
adivce.
In ancient Japan, teeth were extracted by dentists who used
only their fingers.
Hundreds of years ago, Chinese doctors were not paid by their
sick patients, but only by those who they kept healthy.
Before giving up on a patient they couldn't cure, doctors in
the Middle East used to display that patient in the center of
town, in case a passerby might speak up with a cure.
After reading the books that interested him, Hippocrates (for
whom the Hippocratic oath of medicine is named) supposedly
burned down a library, so that his competitors would not have
access to the same information.
In 1809, a woman had a twenty-two pound ovarian tumor removed
without anesthesia.
One hundred years ago (1890), in Connecticut, Idaho, North
Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia, it was
legal to practice medicine with no training whatsoever.
Texas, however, required a high school diploma.
As late as 34 years after the public introduction of
anesthesia, some doctors refused to use it. Some said that
the shock of pain is a necessary ingredient to recovery.
Others were afraid, because some preachers said that
anesthesia was the work of the devil.
The flu mutated into a killer in 1918 and killed 20 million
people. Over half a million Americans died.
In the future people will be able to regrow missing arms or
legs like a salamander can grow a new tail. Research has
shown promising results in getting bone to grow with the
application of electricity. Children under age five who lose
the tip of a finger up to half-way to the outermost joint, if
left untreated, the finger will completely regrow. If medical
attention is applied, stitches for example, the child's
finger will not regrow.
Of all the people who work in hospitals, only 1.78% are
doctors. 17.27% are clerical workers. So there are nine
times more people involved with the paperwork, than those
involved in the actual work!
A woman started showing a bunch of general symptoms that
doctors could not diagnose. She went from one doctor to
another. One recommended that she have her uterus removed.
Finally, her problem was relieved by a dentist. He
discovered she was suffering mercury poisoning from her
fillings. He removed the fillings and substituted another
material.
EEG and EKG machines are not perfect. In one study EKG
machines indicated a heart problem in healthy people 20% of
the time. Sometimes in a room with more than one EKG, one
machine will read the electrical leaks of another. In
another study a researcher hooked up an EEG to a mannequin
whose head was filled with lime jello and the EEG found signs
of life.
The average doctor goes to medical school for four years, yet
gets only two and a half hours of education on nutrition as
it applies to preventive medicine or curative medicine.
16 out of every 100 doctors will be sued this year.
Theoretically, a human can survive without the stomach, most
of the intestines, one kidney, 3/4 of the liver, and one
lung. Furthermore, the legs and arms and sex organs can be
removed successfully. Don't try this at home.
A Case of Do-it-Yourself Surgery
In the 1600's a locksmith was suffering from bladder stones.
Being a locksmith, he was used to logical repairs to
problems. He took matters into his own hands, and removed
his own bladder stone with a kitchen knife.
In Kenya, African fire ants are what doctors use to close
surgical wounds in place of sutures. The ant is induced to
bite the two sides of the wound with its mandibles, and hang
on.
The longest operation on record took 96 hours. During
February 4 - 8, 1951, surgeons in Michigan removed an
ovarian cyst from a woman. When they were done, she weighed
308 lbs less.
One out of every 88 births is twins.
"If you're pregnant, you go to the doctor and he treats you
as if you're sick. Childbirth is a nine-month disease which
must be treated, so you're sold on intravenous fluid bags,
fetal monitors, a host of drugs, the totally unnecessary
episiotomy, and - the top of the line product - the Caesarean
delivery!" - Dr. Robert S. Mendelsohn, from his book,
Confessions of a Medical Heretic
The infant mortality rate in Canada is 25 percent lower than
in America.
In 1793, in France a true cyclops was born. She was a girl
who lived to fifteen years old. She had a single eye in the
middle of her face.
In Finland babies were born in saunas until the 1920's. The
babies probably were more comfortable arriving in a dark,
warm room than in a bright, cold hospital room.
Dr. James Muatt lived to the age of 120 and spent 95 years in
the practice of medicine.
Giuseppe De Mai was a normal man in every respect except one:
He had two hearts.
A mathematics major with a higher than average IQ estimated
at 130, and seemingly normal in every other way, was referred
to a brain specialist because his head seemed a bit larger
than normal. The brain specialist was amazed to find that the
student had an extreme case of hydrocephalitis, also known as
"water on the brain." His brain cavity was mostly filled with
fluid, not neurons. The cortex, the main thinking part of his
brain, was merely a coating one twenty-fifth of an inch thick
on the inside of his skull!
One out of four second opinions by doctors don't confirm the
first doctor's opinion.
A child born to a mother under age 30 has a 10% chance of
being left-handed, but if the mother is over 40, there is a
20% chance the child will be left-handed.
It seems amazing that the little-tiny chains of DNA in each
cell of your body contain the complete blueprints for your
whole self. Even more amazing, scientists have determined
that only 1 percent of that DNA seems to contain all the
information for building, repair, fighting diseases and so
on, and the other 99 percent has no know function!
Many garden plants have more DNA in each of their cells than
we do in ours.
Where did the flu, influenza, get its name? At one time
people thought the sickness was caused by the 'influence' of
the stars and planets.
There is a woman in India who can multiply a 13-digit number
by another 13-digit number in her head in less than a minute
and come up with the right answer.
Some people with multiple personalities have exhibited an
interesting fact: Those who have a personality with diabetes
and another personality without diabetes change between
needing insulin regulation and not needing it depending on
which personality is active.
Four out of five patients surveyed leaving doctor's offices
say they did not receive sufficient treatment for their
problem.
Researchers at Ohio University accidentally proved that love
and attention is good preventive medicine. They were doing
experiments with rabbits to test effects of cholesterol
blocked arteries. All the groups of rabbits got sick as
expected except one group. Everything was the same for this
group except one thing: Each rabbit in this group was being
held and stroked by the student in charge of feeding them.
Later experiments specifically involving loving some rabbits
and ignoring others proved that the effect is real.
Almost 90% of people who consistently dye their hair develop
eye cataracts because of a chemical in the dye called
paraphenylenediamine.
Dr. David Weeks, a psychologist has studied eccentric people
extensively. He has discovered that eccentric people are
typically more intelligent and have a better sense of humor
than the average population, are healthier, visiting the
doctor only 1/24 as often as typical folks, and live from 5
to 10 years longer than average! When asked about their
happiness, eccentrics report that they are quite happy.
The youngest parents on record are a Chinese couple who gave
birth to a normal boy when the father was nine the mother was
eight years old.
A baby was born to parents in Turkey that weighed 24 pounds,
4 ounces at birth.
A woman in Russia had 69 children. (16 were quadruplets, 21
were triplets and 32 were twins.)
Shortest person: Pauline Musters, one foot, 9.65 inches tall.
Tallest person: Robert Wadlow, 8 feet, 11 inches tall.
Lightest person: lucia Zarate 13 pounds at age 20.
Heaviest person: Jon Minnoch, 1400 pounds.
Average life expectancy around the world in 1950 was 47.4
years.
In pre-historic times, people lived to an average age of
eighteen.
If you stretched out all the blood vessels and capillaries in
your body, they could wrap around the equator three times.
The smallest of your capillaries are one-fiftieth the
diameter of one of your hairs. If you weigh twenty-five
pounds more than average, your heart has to work to circulate
blood an extra 5,000 miles.
Your body is creating and killing 15 million red blood cells
per second.
If you start counting the ten trillion cells in your body at
the rate of ten per second, it will take you thirty-one
thousand years to finish.
Adults in childless households get less than 1/2 as many
colds as do mothers and fathers.
A scientific study has proven that blindfolded people can
figure out what sex another person is just by the other
person's smell.
25% of the 20,000 people who responded to a survey by Omni
Magazine said they can detect a difference between how each
nostril perceives smells.
We have four different kinds of taste buds. Each can taste
only one kind of flavor. Smell, texture and imagination make
up the rest of the variety of flavors we experience. If you
could feed a slice of raw potato to a blindfolded volunteer
who also had a plugged nose, and said the potato was an
apple, the volunteer would not say otherwise.
Some people have as many as 500 taste buds per square
centimeter, others as few as 5/cm2. Do pancakes with maple
syrup taste the same to you as they do to me?
A research project found that children were more likely to be
born male if their father was under less stress than their
mother at the time of their conception, and be female if
their mother was under less stress.
Men in Vermont are twice as likely to have high blood
pressure as the national average.
There about 1,800 thunderstorms occuring around the world at
any given moment.
If your alarm clock is not loud enough, put it on a tin pie
plate.
There is a house in Massachusetts which is made entirely from
newspapers. The floors, walls, even the furniture is made
from newspaper.
Another house, this one in Canada, is made of 18,000
discarded glass bottles.
One out of every 21 people in the world is an American.
World wide there are 1,006.7 men for every 1,000 women.
In a happiness survey based upon a scale of 1 to 10, lottery
winners rated their happiness 7; paraplegics 6!
According to some scientists in England, 70% of the dust in
your house is discarded skin cells.
Men dream more often about their male heroes, bosses, friends
or role models than about women.
A huge volcano erupted on an island called Krakatoa. It
was so loud the sound was audible 3000 miles away.
If you are a male, and you wish to be irresistible to
females, tie the udder of a hyena around your left arm. So
says a custom from ancient Greece.
There is an actual court case on record named: "The United
States v. 350 Cartons of Canned Sardines." It has something
to do with interstate commerce.
In Kentucky it is illegal to carry ice cream in your back
pocket.
What are the current human limits which we can use for
comparisons of feats? A good pitcher can throw a ball 100
miles per hour. (Roughly 13% of the speed of sound) A trained
sprinter can run 25 miles per hour for a short distance.
(Roughly 3% of the speed of sound.)
In the typical home, there are 8 clocks. How many do you
have?
There have been over 20,000 books written about the game of
Chess.
What's the most popular magazine in America? TV Guide.
Nine out of every 10 scientists who ever lived are alive
today.
In most cases, if you have two objects, equal in all
respects, except that one is white and the other is black,
the black one will usually look smaller.
In a study of people using telephone booths, researchers
found that when no one was waiting to use the phone, callers
averaged 90 seconds talking, then walked away. But if
someone was waiting around to make a call, the callers
averaged 4 minutes per call.
Real dollar bills have little red and blue fibers mixed into
the paper. You can quickly spot most counterfeits because
they do not have these fibers.
The paper U.S. money is printed on is not paper at all, but
cloth: 3/4 cotton and 1/4 linen.
One time the Federal Reserve accidentally printed bills worth
$5 on the front, but with $1 backs. Inspectors caught the
mistake before they were circulated.
In 1989, Americans spent an average of $5580.25 per family on
Christmas gifts.
Americans send three billion Christmas cards a year. If you
have the average number of friends, you should get at least
12 cards a year. How many do you get?
If a man could be paid minimum wage for shaving, he would
earn $11,222.50 in a lifetime, working 3,350 hours.
If the average housewife were paid one penny for every step
she takes as she works around the house, she would make
$64,240 per year.
How much is a million dollars? Since a dollar bill is
0.004375" thick, a million dollars in crisp new one dollar
bills stacked sideways would be a bit longer than a football
field. If you laid 1 million one-dollar bills end to end, it
would take you 31 hours to walk to the end of the line.
Parker Brothers have printed more money for their Monopoly
games than the Federal Reserve has issued in real money for
America. If you stacked up all the Monopoly sets they have
made, the pile would be over 1100 miles tall.
In the 1950's 65 percent of the American workforce was
blue-collar workers, the people who actually apply their
hands to the work or product. Now the figure is about 17
percent.
The United States Navy ordered a computerized bookkeeping
system that was to have cost $33 million. As the project was
being built the price climbed steadily higher. Finally, the
price grew so high, the Navy gave up without completing the
job. The Navy spent $230 million of our money and got
absolutely nothing. In a similar case, the Internal Revenue
Service spent $187 million just to decide if they should buy
a $1.8 billion computerized tax return system. They decided
no.
Taxpayers' money, in the amount of $121,000 was spent in a
scientific study to find out why people say "ain't."
The IRS offers free advice, but thirty percent of the advice
they give is wrong. If you fill out your forms incorrectly
based on what they have told you, you are still responsible
for the fines and penalties.
Hint: Before phoning a business establishment, phone
1-800-555-1212 and see if the place you are calling has a
toll-free 800 number. Many businesses have 800 numbers that
are not generally advertised. This keeps their phone cost
down but they can use the 800 number during promotions, etc.
1-800-555-1212 is free while most 1-XXX-555-1212 directory
assistance numbers are not free.
One out of 2 credit reports has an inaccuracy. One out of
every 5 has an inaccuracy bad enough to spoil a person's
credit.
Ellen Bloudreaux is blind, has an IQ of around 40, and cannot
talk, yet she has totally memmorized hundreds of songs and
can sing them while playing the piano. She has not had any
musical training.
When the scientist Nikola Tesla started messing around with
the newly discovered X-rays, he considered them beneficial
for the human brain, and spent sessions of as long as 40
minutes x-raying his head.
The desert country of Saudi Arabia must import sand from
other countries. This is because their desert sand is not
suitable for building construction.
Deep in the jungles of South America a tribe of primitive
people was discovered. Everyone had forgotten how to make
fire and therefore they carefully guarded piles of burning
embers. If all their fires went out, they would have been
doomed to existence without fire.
Reno, Nevada is farther west than Los Angeles, California.
24% of L.A. is road and parking lots for cars.
If you put all the pavement in America into one place, it
would more that totally cover the state of Georgia.
L.A. is an abbreviation, but most people don't know the full
name. It is, "El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los
Angeles de Porciuncula".
President James Garfield could do a neat trick: He could
write Greek with one hand while at the same time writing
Latin with his other hand.
In 1957, a senator, Strom Thurmond, made a speech that lasted
24 hours, 19 minutes.
"When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it
had happened or not." - Mark Twain
"The two most common things in the universe are hydrogen and
stupidity." - Harlan Ellison, science fiction author
"History is a race between education and catastrophe." - H.G.
Wells
"...is like trying to nail jelly to a tree." - from an
unknown book about a the difficulty of learning a computer
programming language.
"People with great minds talk about ideas.
People with average minds talk about events.
People with small minds talk about other people."
- Ann Landers
"If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys." - Armand Hammer
"A man with a watch knows what time it is; a man with two
watches isn't so sure." - unknown
"We have no system; we have no rules, but we have a big scrap
heap." - Thomas Edison
"Creative people must entertain lots of silly ideas in order
to receive the occasional strokes of genius." - Marshall Cook
What was this artist trying to say? "In my most recent
paintings, I find myself stressing the linear antipathy of
massive forms of light in contra-distinction to
cattogrammatic and syncogrammatic antipodes of stasis."
"Procrastination means never having to say you're sorry." -
Toni Epstein, New York
"I was afraid that we were at a place where we were no longer
going to be inheriting life from our fathers, but we were
going to be borrowing it from our children." - Robert Redford
"Overheard at a perfume counter in a large department store:
'If this stuff really worked, would I be standing here eight
hours a day?'" - Ann Landers
"There's no way to rule innocent men." - Ayn Rand
"When we first look straight on at all this [American
industrial and personal waste], it's easy to fall into
despair, overwhelmed at the picture of Yankee know-how run
amok, chopping up mountains and rivers to produce Barbie
Dolls and Screaming Yellow Zonkers. But before you crumple
up in a heap, notice the critical link in this awesome chain
of industrialism. The reason for overconsumption is
overconsumers. If the consumer refuses to be manipulated and
makes wise choices that are not based on advertising, he -
she - we! - can save the planet." - Laurel Robertson, in her
book Laurel's Kitchen
"It is dangerous for a national candidate to say things that
people might remember." - Eugene McCarthy
"Years ago my mother used to say to me, 'In this world you
must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.' For years I was
smart. I recommend pleasant." - James Stewart in Harvey
"Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise."
- Dr. Scholl of Dr. Scholl's Foot Aids
One of the most helpful people mankind has ever seen was
Emile Coue (1857-1926) of France. He told people to say to
themselves 20 times in a row, twice a day: "Every day, in
every way, I am getting better and better." This actually
cured thousands of people of an assortment of minor and major
ills.
In French if you prefer, "Tous les jours, a tous points
de vue, je vais de mieux en mieux."
Try it, it can't hurt you (unless somebody overhears, but
then you can do it silently), and it might just work to get
you over the flu, a toothache, cancer, whatever is bothering
you.
This is a serious suggestion. Scientists have proven
beyond doubt that people can improve their health with a
positive mental attitude.
"Keep your eyes wide open before marriage and half-shut
afterwards." - Ben Franklin
"Knowledge isn't power until it's applied." - Dale Carnegie
"Man is born to live and not to prepare to live."
- Boris Pasternak, from the book, "Doctor Zhivago"
"I'm seventy percent accurate forty percent of the time."
- Weatherman Willard Scott.
You'll never guess who said this:
"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in
favor of bringing about in any way the social and political
equality of the white and black races - that I am not nor
ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of
Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to
intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to
this that there is a physical difference between the white
and black races which I believe will forever forbid the 2
races living together on terms of social or political
equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do
remain together there must be the position of superior and
inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of
having the superior position assigned to the white race. I
say upon this occasion that I do not perceive that because
the white man is to have the superior position that the
Negro should be denied everything."
Here's a clue, he also said this:
"My policy is to have no policy."
Give up? It was President Abraham Lincoln!
"I fired MacArthur because he wouldn't respect the authority
of the President. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb
son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the
law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them
would be in jail." - Harry S Truman
Mozart composed a very popular opera called "All Women Behave
Thus."
A Conan Doyle never wrote, "Elementary, my dear Watson!"
James Cagney never said, "You dirty rat."
Humphrey Bogart never said, "Play it again, Sam."
"The reason that the all-American boy prefers beauty to
brains is that he can see better than he can think." - Farrah
Fawcett-Majors
"When we hate our enemies, we are giving them power over us;
Power over our sleep, our appetites, our blood pressure, our
health and our happiness." - Dale Carnegie
"I do not sleep eight hours a night. If you sleep eight hours
and live sixty years, that's twenty years of sleep!" - Nikita
Khrushchev
"I trained as a surgeon. I found that the saying about
surgeons is true: 'If your only tool is a hammer, everything
starts to look like a nail.' That's why surgeons always
recommend surgery - what other tools do they have for making
you well?" - Dr. Julian Whitaker
"If the doctors threw all their medicine into the sea, it
would be a horrible day for the fish." - unknown author
"A great artist is one who doesn't have to explain his work."
- Jeff
"What scientists have in their briefcases is terrifying." -
Nikita Khrushchev
"It is the great public which is demanding the utmost of
secrecy for modern science in all things which may touch its
military uses. This demand for secrecy is scarcely more than
the wish of a sick civilization not to learn the progress of
its own disease." - Norbert Wiener
Your brain uses 25 percent of all the oxygen that you
breathe.
Neanderthal men had brains larger than than ours.
Evidently, your kidneys use more energy that your heart. The
kidneys use twelve percent of your oxygen, yet the heart only
requires seven percent.
Bees may have a true sixth sense, one that people probably do
not have: They have magnetic crystals in their abdomens with
which they may feel direction relative to the earth's
magnetic field.
Mosquitoes like the scent of estrogen, hence, women get
bitten by mosquitoes more than men do. Only female
mosquitoes bite people.
1816 was known as the year without a summer. The weather was
unusual that year. In the Eastern United States and in
Europe there were days when the temperature was below
freezing in every month of the winter, spring, summer and
fall.
If you get into the bottom of a well or a tall chimney and
look up, you can see stars, even in the middle of the day.
The average density of the universe is one atom per cube of
nothingness measuring 27 inches on each side.
On May 10, 1879, making a deafening roar and giving off
tremendous light, a meteor weighing 431 pounds arrived in
Estherville, Iowa. It hit the ground so fast that it dug a
hole fourteen feet deep.
On the sun there are hurricanes bigger than 100 earths.
During major sunspot activity, compass readings can be
inaccurate by as much as ten degrees.
Helium was discovered in spectral analysis of the sun 14
years before anyone realized it also exists on the earth.
One of the most successful astronomers, Milton Humason, was
best known for measuring the speed at which stars are moving
away from each other. He was never formally trained as an
astronomer. He was a donkey driver who used to stop by the
Mount Wilson observatory in California on his journeys. He
was curious, and since the astronomers there realized he had
a lively mind, they were more than happy to answer his
questions. Eventually, they gave him a job.
Perhaps the Big Bang (theory of the beginning of the
universe) was before the onset of time. Perhaps all matter
was clumped together in a great big ball because until the
Big Bang there was never any time to spread out. Then time
developed, and - bang!
If an item moves very, very fast, it becomes smaller and
heavier.
Bug zappers, those high voltage cages that attract bugs to an
ultra-violet light, and then kill them by electrocution,
increase the likelihood that mosquitoes will bite you. The
light attracts hundreds of bugs to the area, but kills only
some of them.
In the 1920's a radio station in Schenectady, NY built a
powerful transmitter. In those days before the FCC
regulations, not knowing just how big to make a transmitter
in order for the signal to be received some distance away,
the station set up to broadcast at 500,000 watts. It
requires about one watt to be received four blocks away. This
station broadcast at such tremendous power that they could be
heard around the world. People in New York didn't even need
radios. They could sometimes hear voices transmitting from
the station in the fire pit of their furnaces. In
Schenectady, light bulbs lit up in people's houses even if
they were switched off.
As you break a window the cracks made in the glass travel at
speeds up to three thousand miles per hour.
As you might know, the inside of the earth is very hot. Under
the solid crust of the earth rock is liquid, but beneath that
it is mostly solid iron because of the tremendous pressure of
gravity. Scientists believe the core is still getting
hotter, not cooling, due to decay of radioactive elements.
Scientists have recently deduced that it is hotter in the
center of the earth than on the surface of the sun.
1/25 of the energy put out by a light bulb is light. The
rest is heat.
One of the chief scientists at the Manhattan Project, where
atom bombs were invented, spent his later years designing a
very simple air conditioning system. His technique was to
make a pit in the yard of a home, fill it with snow in the
winter, and then as the snow melted in the summer, the cold
water would be circulated throughout the house.
While working on the previous paragraph, your author
learned that an interesting typographical error can occur
when the w of snow is replaced with a t.
Try to imagine a pit in your yard filled with that!
85% of all the plants and animals of the earth live in the
sea.
Most tennis injuries actually happen after the game when the
winner tries to jump over the net.
When tennis was first invented in 1874, it was called
sphairistike.
I saw this in the newspaper one day:
"DEAR ANN LANDERS: My son is 6-foot-6 and never played
basketball. His answer to those tiresome questions is a
message on his T-shirt that reads: NO. DO YOU PLAY MINIATURE
GOLF? - R.W., Cleveland
The best matadors in Peru used to be women.
In the early days of baseball, there were four bases plus a
home plate. The bases were not sand bags, they were stakes
driven into the ground. There was no such thing as a foul
ball and fielders had to hit a runner with the ball in order
to tag him 'out.' The umpire sat in a rocking chair. The
batter would tell the pitcher where he wanted the ball, and
that's where the pitcher would try to throw it. The game
ended when one team scored 21 runs.
A research study found that out of 40 typical umpires tested,
12 needed new glasses.
In 1962 The New York Mets had two pitchers named Robert
Miller. The one they called Righty was Robert G. Miller and
Lefty was Robert L. Miller.
Ten percent of all Americans earn their livings in some way
associated with the automobile industry.
90% of car tires on the road are underinflated. How are
yours?
A newspaper reporter discovered that 41 commercial airline
pilots in Minnisota have had their car drivers licenses
revoked due to drunken driving, yet they are still flying
jumbo jets.
In 1978 Hans Millikin, a 39-year-old Baptist preacher
crawled 1592 miles on his hands and knees.
At age 98, Dimitrion Yordanidis of Greece could run a 26-mile
marathon (7 hours, 33 minutes)
A woman in England had to take her drivers' test 41 times
before she was awarded a license to drive. It sounds to me
like the only time she got to practice was when she was
taking her test. That's one way to get driving lessons
without paying for them. I'd say the examiner got taken for
a ride.
In the late 1800's drivers (of teams of horses) drove as much
as 84 hours a week.
In 1965, flying Gemini 4 in an orbit 90 miles above the
earth, astronaut James McDivitt sighted a UFO. He said it
looked like a cylinder with arms sticking out and appeared to
be 30 to 50 miles away. Thinking it was probably just a
man-made weather observation satellite, he took pictures
anyway. As it turns out, the closest satellite was more than
1200 miles away. Unfortunately, his camera was not well
equipped for photographing a relatively small object over 30
miles away, and so the pictures came out too fuzzy to
identify anything certain.
John Glenn was surprised to find a cloud of fine sparkly
things following him around in orbit until mission control
explained that they were droplets of the urine he had earlier
expelled from the craft.
A new technique has been born to reduce noise in luxury
automobiles. Actually, instead of actually reducing the
noise, it doubles it. A microphone is placed in the engine
compartment and a computer chip analyses the noise. Then it
makes sound waves that are opposite (phase) what it hears.
The reverse waves are played through the car's stereo system,
cancelling much of the noise in the car.
I found this item by an unknown author on a computer bulletin
board:
"A New Biologist was doing an experiment, he took a
frog, a tape measure, and a pad and pencil, and an
exact-o knife, He set the frog on the table, and slammed
his fist down on the table, behind the frog, and said
"Frog JUMP!", the frog Jumped, and he took his measuring
tape, and measured the distance, and wrote "Frog with 4
legs Jumps 12 feet". he then fetched the frog, and
chopped off one leghe put the frog back on the table,
and again slammed his fist down on the table and
shouted"Frog JUMP!", the Frog again Jumpped,and he again
measured and wrote "Frog with 3 legs jumps 8 feet", he
got the frog again, chopped off another leg, and went
thru the process again, measured it, and wrote"Frog with
2 legs jumps 6 feet", he got the frog, and chopped of
another leg, and again repeated the process, the frog
jumped, and he wrote "Frog with one leg jumps 3 feet",
he took the frog, and chopped off the last leg, he put
the frog down, and slammed his fist down on the table,
yelling "Frog Jump!", the frog just sat there, again he
hit the table "FROG JUMP!", the frog still didn't
budge, he dd this a final time, and still the frog
didn't move, he took his book, and write, Frog with No
legs CAN'T HEAR!"
Ronald Reagan summed up the future well when he stated that
soon Americans will be "computing to work instead of
commuting to work."
The catchphrase of the near-future may be 'disk-based
conferencing.' At ANOTHER COMPANY, we are ready! If you have
something to say, if you can be a world teacher, check out
our Media Magic and Writer's Dream programs. They may be
just what you were looking for!
_____________________________________________________________
end of file.
