A collection of strange and/or just plain interesting facts extensively modified and added to from a website apparently abandoned in 1997 (with no copyrights in sight....). Check back every now and then for new goodies i might dig up: enjoy! (especially now that i periodically correct my atrocious spelling using those annoying-but-useful spll ckers....) Sorry some of the entries are longer than on similar lists elsewhere on the web - brevity may be the soul of wit, but i find it a tad limiting at times! It may seem at times that I'm picking on the good ol' US of A, but that's mainly because they generate by far the most statistics and websites of any country in the world :--) - and to be completely honest, because they make such a large and multi-faceted target which i just happen to live next door to...
* The phenomenal success of the "Harry Potter" series of children's books has had some unintended side-effects, some of them quite comical. For example, Harry Potter knockoffs abound on the Chinese market, with titles like "Harry Potter and Leopard Walk Up to Dragon, "and "Harry Potter and the Big Funnel."
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* The so-called "War on Drugs" in the USA rings up perhaps $100 billion in direct and indirect societal costs (about half of that being related to the "justice" system's efforts to suppress drug use through enforcement of laws). However, the real costs are human, and minority groups bear the brunt of these. According to a 2006 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, African Americans make up an estimated 15% of drug users, but they account for 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted and 74% of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Or consider this: The U.S. has 260,000 people in state prisons on **nonviolent** drug charges (mostly simple posession, such as having a bit of wacky tabacky in one's pocket); 183,200 (more than 70%) of them are black or Latino. In many women's prisons, over half of the inmates have been convicted of non-violent drug charges, and 70%+ are black or Latino. I don't have time for another article on the topic, but it seems to me that a MUCH more sensible approach to the problem (and nobody is saying that substance abuse is not a huge problem in our society!!) would be to simply accept that many people are going to alter their mental states using drugs of one kind or another (alcohol, tobacco, pain killers, stimulants such as cocaine, pseudo-hallucinogens such as "magic mushrooms" and LSD....), and do whatever works best to reduce the overall harm such consumption does to individuals, families, communities and countries. Prohibition combined with harsh punishment and a strict "law and order" approach is probably the worst possible method to approach a problem of this intractability and magnitude - it was a complete dissaster for alcohol, enabling orgaized criminal groups to amass vast fortunes and cause general mahem in North American society, and it is similarly proving to be a highly disruptive method of dealing with the abuse of other substances by large segments of the general populace
* North Americans (ie, citizens of the wealthy countries of the US of A and its northern neighbour Canada, have developed some rather awesomely wasteful habits because of the abundance of resources they have (ok *we* - i plead guilty to not being as "eco-friendly" as many aware folks are these daze!!) at their fingertips. An excellent example is our truly profligate use of toilet paper (mot of the world's more "civilized" inhabitants use water....): though toilet paper was invented in China in the late 1300s, it was for emperors only, and everyone else around the globe used everything from corncobs to wool to newspaper to lace for the next five centuries. Widespread use of toilet paper didn't catch on until New York's Joseph Gayetty started selling it in 1857, with his name printed on every sheet. Now the U.S. alone uses a staggering 7.4 million tons of tissue per year -- over 20,000 sheets (about 50 lbs!!) of toilet paper per person (that's 55 sheets per day: obviously it is being used regularly for non-scatalogical purposes, along with several other kinds of disposeable paper products found in most houses) -- and North America, which contains less than 7 percent of the world's population, consumes half the world's tissue paper products. It takes about 6lbs. of wood, 1.30g of calcium carbonate, 85g of sulphur, 40g of chlorine and about 1,000 gallons of water to make just 2lbs of conventional toilet paper. The manufacturing of toilet paper uses large amounts of energy, water, and toxic chemicals that in turn generates vast amounts of air and water pollution and solid waste. If every household in North America used just one less roll of 500 sheet toilet paper, we could save almost 330,000 trees out of the over 15 million trees cut down yearly just for that ignoble purpose.
* In many species, individuals are occasionally found which seem to break the "law" or principle which states that evolution cannot run backwards - developed by a chap named Rollo in the 1890s, it is apropriately called "Rollo's Law" in case you are ever asked this on an episode of Jeopardy :---). However, it seems that this law is routinely repealed by Mother Nature: in 1919, for example, a humpback whale with well formed rear limbs was caught, recalling a period many moons earlier, when the ancestors of Cetaceans walked on land like normal mammals. Dolphins also sometimes sport rear limbs, as do several species of snakes on an occasional basis. In on particular species, folks are sometimes born with tails and other remnants of times gone by (and yes, we do indeed have genes, normally dormant, which code for tail-growning: if God micro-managed the creation process, as many Biblical literalists assert, this one would be difficult to explain except as a bit of Divine Comedy.....) such as the appendix and to some extent the tonsils: they can be removed with no noticeable effect upon the health of their former owners.
* There are over 200 conditions which can cause dwarfism, which refers to people who are short in stature yet some of whose body parts such as heads, are more normal in size than the other parts (as opposed to midgets, who are also vertically challenged, but who have normally proportioned bodies). Each of these causes have a different set of health problems associated with them: few true dwarfs are robustly healthy overall.
* The relationship between emotions and health has long been debated, and indeed, many articles and books have been written on the topic. The results of a wide variety of experiments and studies has been decidedly "mixed" - for example, it has been demonstrated that there is no such thing as a "cancerous personality" - people who are "type A", highly agressive and often angry, while they may have other health problems more frequently than more sanguine, happy folks, are NOT more cancer-prone than average. That said, a number of well-run studies are increasingly finding that there is indeed a correlation (although it is often unknown whether these are of a causitive nature or not...... trying hard to become a happier, more relaxed person may or may not produce health benefits (but that shouldn't stand in your way!!)) between emotions and certain categories of disease or disorder. For example, two recent articles in credible journals (sorry - lost the references!!) have reported that people with more frequent positive emotions and a generally positive outlook on life, do not develop as many or as intense cold or influenza symptoms - they are just as likely to become infected, but the symtoms, such as upset stomach, runny nose or headaches, are considerably reduced in all aspects. Also, people with severe depressions, who very seldom experience positive emotions, are more likely to have strokes than those who may seem equally depressed but who nevertheless have "up-beat" or positive periods. In any case, no matter how you look at it, a positive outlook on life will help you cope with almost any ill wind, illness-related or not, which comes your way in life :-+).
* 85 to 90% of sexual assaults on children are committed by people the child already knows and trusts - a relative (almost always male), family friend, baby sitter....... yet in the news and in many programs supposedly designed to help prevent sexual abuse, the emphasis is overwhelmingly upon avoiding, escaping from, and being wary of and around "strangers" - people whom the child DOESN'T know, and whom are responsible for a maximum of 15% of all child molestation - probably considerably less, since many cases where a child is harmed by a close relative (father, uncle, cousin) are never reported, but instead "dealt with" (or not, as the case may be) within the framework of the family itself, to avoid shame and other reality-distorting emotions which simply don't apply to "strangers". This sad and often tragic situation continues to perpetuate itself, via catchy slogans like "Stranger Danger" and miguided use of community resources to make children ultra-cautious about the one category of people responsible for the **least** amount of harm, while virtually ignoring the vast majority of dangerous people and situations which the child may encounter. The reasons for this sorry state of affairs are pretty obvious: 1) "Stranger" molestations are uncommon, unexpected, often random and unpredictable, and usually very public and dramatic in nature: they cause a lot of fear and uncertaincy in the general population, who do not usually use cold-blooded statistical analysis when deciding who or what to be afraid of, or how to prevent or minimize harm in general. 2) Molestation and indeed, all manner of harm by people close to the victim and trusted, is a much more common occurance than people are often willing to admit - and being common and often predictable (as in "Always thought uncle Jim was a bit *too* friendly with little Jennie...."), they don't make the news or cause alarm as often as the far less common, more "sensational" cases where "strangers" are involved., and 3) As mentioned above, most people are ashamed to admit that someone they know and trusted, took advantage of that trust to cause harm such as child molestation or "domestic" violence. Also, in many cases, especially where the father is the perpetrator, the victim often continues to feel affection for them and doesn't tell anyone that the abuse is happening - and even when they do, it is often a case of the child's word against their parent or relative, and for various reasons (fear, dependancy, misplaced affection...) the adult is often the one who is believed. That said, lawmakers and those entrusted with wise use of community resources, should put emotions and misconceptions aside and take a good hard look at the facts and figures - and act accordingly. Yes, they are "representatives" of their constituants, but they have also been entrusted with great responsibility, which they should exercise in accordance with reality, instead of personal or societal perception or prejudice.
* Wireless phones (which include "cell" phones) which use radio waves for transmitting information were invented have been around for 30 years or so now - longer if you count "walkie talkies"!! From the very beginning, there has been a furious debate as to whether the radio wave strenghts involved can cause cancers of the brain or blood: one study would raise questions, while the next one would find nothing at all. Now, it looks like the "nay" side is finally coming out in the lead.
A huge long-term study from Denmark offers the latest reassurance that cell phones don't trigger cancer. Scientists tracked 420,000 Danish cell phone users, including 52,000 who had gabbed on the gadgets for 10 years or more, and some who started using them 21 years ago. Among 420,000 callers tracked through 2002, there were 14,249 cancers diagnosed _ fewer than the 15,001 predicted from national cancer rates. Nor did the study find increased risks for any specific tumor type. Of course this won't silence ALL the nervous nellies who are still worried about getting lukemia from their cell phones and/or microwave ovens, but i for one will feel safer!!
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As if one supra-human sense - echolocation - was not enough, it turns out that bats have another. Like birds, they can navigate by sensing Earth's magnetic field. The only other mammals known to do this are naked mole rats and Siberian hamsters.
Ten big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) were exposed to artificial magnetic fields that twisted their perception of magnetic north by 90 degrees, either to the east or the west. The bats were then released 20 kilometres north of their usual roost, along with five control bats that had not been exposed to magnetic fields. The control bats soon found their way home, but the 10 magnetised bats remained lost for days because their internal magnetic compass had been reset. They all flew towards what they thought was south, but of course it wasn't (Nature, vol 444, p 702).
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[Directly nabbed from a Newscientist.com article, like the one above.] A rare South American bat turns out to have a spectacularly long tongue. At up to 150% the length of its body, it is proportionally the longest of any mammal.
The bat appears to have evolved its incredible tongue in order to feed exclusively from a tubular flower found in the "cloud forests" of Ecuador.
Nectar bats tongues have tiny hairs on the end, which they use to mop up nectar and pollen from within flowers. The plants gain from this relationship by depositing pollen on the bat s head, which it spreads from flower to flower.
Anoura fistulata is only the size of a mouse, but its tongue is around 8.5 centimetres long more than double the tongue-length of similar nectar bats. Compared with its body, a tongue of this size is second only to the chameleon in terms of vertebrates, and it is the longest of all the mammals.
It s like a cat being able to lap milk from two feet away, says Nathan Muchhala of University of Miami, Florida, US, who first discovered the species in 2003.
* If you think that manned space travel is becoming routine, and that the main obstacle to humans roaming around on Mars is lack of funding, think again. The obstacles to our species' exploration endeavors anywhere except our own little planet/moon system are formidable and still largely unsolved. They include radiation (on the earth's surface, we are protected by the earth's magnetic field and its atmosphere, from most radiation - in deep space, it is another matter entirely!!), bone and muscle loss (without artificial gravity, which is still unachievable on any long flights, most astronauts will lose over half of the bone density of their core body parts, such as their hips, and re-gaining this bone mass is devilishly difficult!! The body operates on a "use it or lose it" principle for the sake of efficiency: if you do not use your muscles much - as would be the case in space, even with exercise facilities - the body figures you don't need them, and they melt away.), space sickness, sleep disturbances which result from weightlessness, dangers from micro-meteorites which can punch holes in space craft (and people!!)..... the list is long, and there are undoubtedly some nasty things we don't even know about yet, which can or will result from long-lasting space voyages. Aside from the occasional trip to the moon, our exploration of "space" will likely be carried out mostly via machine-based reconaissance for the forseeable future.
* Some 24 billion gallons of untreated effluent enter the Great Lakes every year through combined sewage overflows, a recent study by the Sierra Legal Defense Fund found. Canada's worst offender was Windsor, Ontario, which -- along with U.S. cities Detroit and Cleveland -- performed "abysmally." Cities such as Toronto and Hamilton also earned below-average grades. The main culprits are aging storm runoff and sewer systems, many of which are combined, so that during a storm it is impossible to treat the resulting excess of effluent.
* Contrary to the usual image of overweight people sleeping and napping a lot, it is now looking like a LACK of sleep is related to people gaining too many extra pounds or kilos. Obese folks tend to sleep poorly, and they often end up with fewer hours of sleep than the average: this has been demonstrated in a number of studies, so the correlation is very strong, hence highy likely to represent reality. The cause and effect relationship between these insufficient sleep and excess "flesh baggage" is not completely known yet, however: does being overweight lead to poor sleep patterns, does a lack of sleep contribute to weight gain, or is it a revolving door sort of thing: one leads to the other, which in turn feeds back into the first condition: a "positive feedback loop", in scientific parlance? A majority of researchers in the excess fat field are now leaning towards the positive feedback hypothesis, and a recent study which i have misplaced has lent fuel to this particular fire: it seems that when people get sufficient sleep, a hormone which tells the mind how full or hungry the body is, achieves a significantly higher (about 20%) level than when that same person gets too little sleep - so when you get enough sleep you are just not as hungry!! Further, on the common sense level, it seems likely that a) The longer you are awake, the more you tend to eat, and b) the more sleep you get, the more energy you have, so the more likely you are to get out and do things which burn up some real calories - exercise, yard and house work, etc.
* Since their domestication about 5,000 years ago, cats have held a fascination for their human servants (one owns a dog - the same cannot be said of cats!!), and many legends, myths and false beliefs have swirled around them for millenia. One old joke imortalizes a certain facet of cat lore and legend: "Cats were worshipped in ancient Egypt. They have never forgotten this." In fact, the Egyptian goddess Bast was portrayed as being part woman, part cat. She represented the sacred eye of Horus, the God of Light. Regular feasts and holidays were celebrated in her honor, and for a long period in Egyptian history, cat-killers were executed!! // On the other end of the good-evil spectrum, cats have long been accused of nasty things such as embodying evil spirits, as in the belief that the "familiar spirits" (demons) of witches often took the form of cats, and the myth that cats could somehow steal a sleeping baby's breath, hence killing them. Similarly, most folks are familiar with the superstition that black cats crossing one's path portend bad luck, but few know that throwing a cat overboard at sea was regarded, along with whistling, as a good way to start a storm. (They were an indispensable means of rodent control on most ocean-going vessals, but were also feared and respected because of the myths associated with them - hence the rich body of feline-related nautical superstions. On the other side of the domestic animal fence, fishermen traditionally regard dogs as unlucky and will not take one out in a boat, or mention the word 'dog' whilst at sea.) The cat's aloof and mysterious character probably led to the many myths and superstitions surrounding it. Cat's eyes were believed to tell many things from the time of day to the state of the tides. Cats were also believed to be clairvoyant, and were used in charms and potions to bestow that talent on people. Many body parts and substances from the cat were used for healing. The tail was particularly favored. In parts of England they are still used to cure sties. // On the more practical side, it should be noted that milk is not all that good for cats: too much can quickly lead to diarrhea. Also, despite the indisputable fact that they are remarkably agile, they don't always land on their feet. The tale that they have 9 lives probably derives from their incredible ability to survive situations such as being trapped in walls for weeks, and the idea that witches could only take the form of a cat 9 times.
* I will not rehearse the long litany of atrocities perpetrated upon the native populations of the Americas, by the so-callled more "civilized" European invaders, but suffice it to say they are legion and to some extent continuing (as in the Indian Trust Fund scandals of the past few years). At least 95% of the indiginous population of North and South America were eliminated from the face of the earth by a combination of ruthless conquest and grinding warfare, enslavement, forced marches, broken treaties and diseases (sometimes deliberately spread) against which the peoples of the "New World" had no defence. The prevailing view of the Europeans who systematically displaced native Americans was that since they were more advanced in weaponry, learning and the componants of "civilization" as they concieved it, this was evidence of their superiority over all nations and peoples who posessed less of these charactaristics - natives around the world were viewed as being sub-human "savages" and "pagans": worshippers of gods and spirits not present in the Christian worldview. The way they seem to have seen it, this inate superiority gave them the "right" to conquer, displace and otherwise ill treat the semi-human inhabitants of all the lands they came across, by whatever means they saw fit. So pervasive was this attitude that even otherwise sensible and even "wise" men and leaders succumbed to its lure: for example, the "founding fathers" of the USA, in the preamble to their country's constitution, referred to "the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." - pretty strong stuff!! Benjamin Franklin, in 1783 said he preferred buying Indians' land rather than driving them off it because that was like driving "wild beasts" from the forest. He compared Indians to wolves, "both being beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape." During the Indian Wars of the 19th century, the slogan "The only good indian is a dead indian" won elections, and even Teddy Roosevelt showed his true colors when he declared: "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth." Canada of course doesn't come out lilly -white either: yes we generally made treaties with natives rather than making war against them, and yes we have a vast territory called Nunivut which is run by the Inuit, but for generations, an intensely distructive and misguided campaign of assimilation was waged against at least the more southerly native groups - the notorious "Residential Schools" beign the most perverse portion of the effort to eradicate native culture and languages in an attempt to assimilate the First Nations of Canada into the mainstream of society, which of course was European: native children were taken forcibly from their familes and sent to schools far from their homelands, where they were educated in European history, language, mythology and culture, and forbidden from speaking their own language for years at a time. Ironicaly, when native groups now try to gain a little bit of what they lost back through exploiting the outsiders' gullibility and proclivity to gamble away immoderate sums, many folks are crying foul and saying that they should "play by the same rules" as everyone else. I think we should be VERY happy that they don't follow the rule book many of our forefathers wrote in blood, slavery and genocide in years past.
* One of the numerous vampire legends claims that stealing someone's shadow (by measuring it against a wall and driving a nail through its head) can turn the victim into a vampire. (You can't do anything similar or analagous to a vampire of course, since they don't have shadows!!)
* While the use of isolated and often sythesized chemicals (aka "drugs") to treat undesired conditions of the human body is as old as medicine itself, it almost always produces unintended side effects, the vast majority of which are themselves quite undesirable. While the "cure" may not always be worse than the disease, these nasty side-effects can often be life-changing and substantial. For example, patients who have undergone chemotherapy for the treatment of cancer, have complained of lack of mental focus, memory loss and a general diminution of such abilities as "multi-tasking", attention span and general mental agility. These imparments are long-lasting, - some seem to be permanant in nature and they often substantially diminsh overall quality of life, and the ability to function in comlex environments. Cumulatively, they have been termed "chemo brain". Until now, there has been little evidence to point the finger at any specific set of brain damages, but recent research by Daniel Silverman at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, US and others, is showing that chemotherapy can cause a long-lasting decrease in activity in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain: the area which is responsible for most of the mind's "higher functions". While this may not happen if sufficient care is taken during treatment, it is nevertheless one factor to consider when deciding how to treat any particular cancer.
* The great Baroque composer J.S. Bach was an ardent admirer of several of his contemporaries, and assiduously studied their music and performances. Once, he walked 200 miles to attend an organ recital by Buxtehude, whose daughter he had a chance to marry - but there i no indication he ever considered such a thing! He did alright in the matrimonial department, however, ultimately having between 20 and 26 children, depending upon which source one believes.
* [Note: I may come across as a bit less than "neutral" in reporting this or other matters where people are being killed, maimed, lied to, discriminated against, manipulated or otherwise exploited by those who think that because they have the power to get a way with such abuses, that they are entied to do so in the pursuit of their sundry goals such as power and profit. I apologise if this offends some folks: it is not my goal to offend, merely to inform, and i hope the Gentle Reader will forgive my proclivity towards venturing the occasional personal opinion every now and then.] To quote the NY Times (and yes i think this fine newspaper is as "fair and balanced" in its reporting the majority of news-reporting establishments - probably even better than the North American average), "United Nations officials estimate that southern Lebanon is littered with one million unexploded bomblets, far outnumbering the 650,000 people living in the region. They are stuck in the branches of olive trees and the broad leaves of banana trees. They are on rooftops, mixed in with rubble and littered across fields, farms, driveways, roads and outside schools." It is a FACT (hence its inclusion in this fact-based feature) that cluster bombs, which are used by several unscrupulous nations in large numbers whenever they go to war, fit the definition of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" to a T - they kill and maim both innocents and combatants completely indiscriminately, and persist long after the war in question is over. It seems to me that it is hypocrtical and criminal for any country to scream blue murder over potential "WMD"s in one of their so-called enemy's territories, then turn around and use weapons of indiscrminate slaughter when invading them or someone else - and in the opinion of many, that the UN charter, the Geneva convention and other international treaties so routinely ignored these days, define the use of such weapons as "war crimes" which should be treated and prosecuted as such by the international community. The regrettable fact that very few countries have officially called a spade a pointy shovel in this and related cases (such as the use of tons of "depleted" uranium in recent conflicts, for amor-piercing purposes), speaks volumes about the state of fear, cowardice and complicity that international politics has degenerated into in these "interesting times" (as in the old Chinese curse "May you live in Interesting Times").
* "Scientific America" carried the first magazine automobile ad in 1898. The Winton Motor Car Company of Cleveland, OH, invited readers to "dispense with a horse".
* Since the discovery of the first planets outside of the solar system in the early 21st century, scientists have been dazzled by the surprising variety of planetary bodies they've found. That said, almost all have been very large, since we don't have the technology to detect earth-sized planets near other stars yet. The very largest are almost stars themselves: in fact there is a very thin dividing line between a true "planet" and a "brown dwarf" sub-star (see entry below) - the transition taking place between 13 and 15 times the mass of Jupiter, where the combination of temperature and pressure at the center of a ball of gas become sufficient to fuse duterium (a form of hydrogen containing both a neutron and a proton in its nuclei - normal hydrogen has only a proton.), but remain unequal to the task of fusing ordinary hydrogen - hence a low-grade fusion reaction occurs which doesn't last very long and emits almost no light in the visible range - their emissions peak in the infrared part of the spectrum. // Recently, a new type of planet has been found by the Hubble telescope (and confirmed by the "Very Large Array"), while surveying a dense star cluster in Saggitarius, located near the galactic core: planets which whip around their home star so closely and quickly that their "year" (defined as the time it takes to circle the star) is less than one of our days - 5 of the planets found in this survey take between 10 and 24 hours to complete their yearly journey.
* In June 1912, Novarupta one of a chain of volcanoes on the Alaska Peninsula erupted in what turned out to be the largest blast of the twentieth century. It was so powerful that it drained magma from under another volcano, Mount Katmai, six miles east, causing the summit of Katmai to collapse to form a caldera half a mile deep. Novarupta also expelled three cubic miles of magma and ash into the air, which fell to cover an area of 3,000 square miles more than a foot deep. Scientists using supercomputers have just proposed that the greatest climactic effect of arctic blasts such as this, which like their more tropical counterparts such as Pinatubo and Krakatoa, spew sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere in vast amounts, but unlike them, mainly result in increased sulphur compound particulates (which reflect sunlight, hence cool the climate - the year after Krakatoa was known as "the year without a summer") above 30 degrees of latitude. This bottling up of Novarupta's aerosols in the north would make itself felt, strangely enough, in India. According to the computer model, the Novarupta blast would have weakened India's summer monsoon, producing "an abnormally warm and dry summer over northern India," says Prof. Alan Robock of Rutgers University, who heads a team currently studying the matter.
* More than 5,000 years ago, the Chinese discovered how to make silk by boiling and unravelling silkworm cocoons. For about 3,000 years, they managed to keep this discovery a secret. Because poor people could not afford real silk, they tried to make other cloth look silky: folks would beat cotton with sticks to soften the fibers. Then they rubbed it against large stones to make it shiny. This shiny cotton was called "chintz." Because chintz was a poor imitation of silk, the term "chintzy" is now used to refer to something that it is cheap and not of high quality.
* The costs of war are always high - not only in terms of public-derived tax money, lives lost and ruined, truth murdered most foully or buried under a stinking pile of buzz-words and propaganda, etc., but in the general moral degradation of all involved or associated with them in any way shape or form: there are never any true "winners" in times of organized violent conflict - all are tainted and soiled by the multitude of shameful things which virtually inevitably proceed from the grisly business of imposing one's will upon another by means as lethal as deemed necessary at the time. [ok, call the run-on sentence and purple prose cops - see what i care!!] That said, the monetary resources associated with the invasion and occupations of Afganistan and especially Iraq, when all is factored in for all members of the "coalition of the willing", would projected to be well over a trillion dollars (if you counted at the rate of 1 per second, you would be 1688 years counting to a trillion - provided you went at it 24 hours out of each and every day!) if they withdrew all troops immediately (early Oct., 2006) - instead of remaining there indefinitely, as the construction of massive "enduring bases" would indicate. This includes not only the direct costs of bombs (smart, 2000 lb., cluster, incendiary and ordinary dumb versions), ammo (radioactive or not), fuel, salaries, base-related amounts, mercenaries of various ilk, transporting government officials to and from areas sufficiently isolated from the battlegrounds and Haliburton and their war-profiteering colleagues, but also the price of replacing or repairing destroyed and degraded equipment, pensions and medical expenses for wounded veterans, survivor benefits for those killed, and other longer-term obligations. By comparison, the reconstruction budgets for all countries involved (ie, reconstruction after the "coalition" bombed the heck out of anything which remained after the previous regimes), totals a tad over $25 billion - a ratio of 40 to 1 military force to more peaceful forms of assistance - in theory at least. In fact, let's take a look at the $18 billion the USA pledged for this obviously very secondary objective: 1) nearly a billion of it will be returned to the coffers of their government, remaining unspent 3.5 years after the initial occupation. 2) Vast amounts of it were mis-spent or "mis-appropriated" by the well-connected USA private contractors which were given largely untendered contracts to do the actual work, and the sub-contractors they farmed portions of the tasks out to (and the documentation on this is VERY solid, and can be easily looked up by the Gentle Reader), and 3) a full third of the reconstruction loot spent so far, has been doled out for "security" measures. Needless to say, precious few of the many essential services needed in a relatively civilized society - electricity, water infrastructure, medical clinics, roads, public-sector buildings of various types, etc., were ever restored in satisfactory form - and yes this is a **fact**, although all things considered, perhaps not a particularly "wierd" or unexpected outcome of the entire nasty affair. Ironically, despite the great care taken to protect the oil ministry building in the initial heat of the war, the oil-derived money originally envisioned to pay for the reconstruction of the country, has been largely lacking, due the inability of everyone involved to keep the country's oil infrastructure producing and exporting much in the way of "black gold" recently. No blood for no oil, anyone?
* It is well known that stress (which properly speaking, is an adverse response to strains ("stressors")) contributes to heart problems. However, the exact routes of that connection are poorly understood. One of the main culprits may have been identified now however: a study which i am too bone lazy to look up properly, has found that people who deal with everyday stresses poorly are far more likely to develop "severe gum disease" than more easy-going folks. The connection with heart disease is twofold; 1) Gum disease involves long-term inflammation which often causes a generalized immune-system over-reaction which leads to a generalized inflammatory condition in the body, which can lead or contribute to various cardio-vascular problems, and 2) Some of the bacteria involved with severe gum diseases (which some folks don't even realize they have!) can enter the blood stream, and travel to the heart where they cause hardening of the arteries and damage to the tissues of the heart. Treating the gum problems will of course help, but the underlying stress-related contributions should also be addressed wherever possible.
* People who laugh a lot are much healthier than those who don't. Dr. Lee Berk at the Loma Linda School of Public Health in California found that laughing lowers levels of stress hormones, and strengthens the immune system - not to mention a good belly-laugh is great exercise!! Six-year-olds have it best - they laugh an average of 300 times a day. Adults only laugh 15 to 100 times a day.
* The US of A, in the name of a "well regulated militia" (read the amendment CAREFULLY - the only rationale given for the "right to bear arms" is to provide the weaponry for militia, presumably to protect the country from invasion or from tyrannical governments which refuse to faithfully represent "the people" but instead prostrate themselves to and serve vested Special Interests who have power, wealth and influence and who use them to purchase and prop up unrepresentative regimes which mainly serve their supporters), has steadily moved, over the years, towards adopting the most liberal gun laws in the world - despite the fact that the only militias remaining in the country are most definitely not government-sanctioned, although they are admittedly often "well regulated". In most states it is now legal for folks to walk around with loaded hand guns tucked into their back pockets, and the purchase of weapons of warfare such as AK-47s and other automatic rifles is simple and legal these days. As a result of these ultra-liberal laws, gun crime in that country is rampant: nearly half a million victims of gun crime in 2005, and gun-facilitated homicide and suicide rates are consistently the highest in the "first world". One of the principal slogans of the proponents of "un-infringed" gun laws and regulations is "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." Are there no appropriately-armed police there, one wonders? If so, are they so incapable of enforcing the laws and pursuing "outlaws", so that they need everyone else to have loaded deadly weapons in their pockets or houses at all times? Although there is a rowdy statistics war going one between the militia supporters and those who believe that guns actually DO kill people, it is a well-established fact that the possession of guns do not make people safer in reality - yes, they may FEEL safer, but more normal, law-abiding (ie, not involved in criminal activities such as supplying narcotics ) folks and their friends and families are killed or injured by their own weapons, than by those of the "outlaws".
* The Roman emperor Caligula once made his horse a senator - now that's what i call a "political statement"!!
* Most babies are born with 250 bones. However, adults typically have only 206 bones in their bodies.
* Ever get the feeling that folks sometimes put their mouths on automatic pilot while their brains are elsewhere engaged (or disengaged, as the case may be.....)?? Here's a good example: "Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life." - Brooke Shields, during an interview to become spokesperson for a federal anti-smoking campaign. Here's another: "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." Guess who?? Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004. (And despite this and many other attempts to "make the pie higher" at least linguistically, he got elected to the most powerful position in the so-called "free world"!!)
* Some species of kangaroo can produce two different types of milk at the same time from adjacent teats to feed both younger and older offspring.
* People tend to fear or otherwise react to, and therefore to engage in extreme, unusual and often more or less irrational behaviors disproportionately in response to the unexpected and unpredictable: to things that take them by surprise, rather than things which may be far more dangerous or significant but which occur with predictable regularity. Thus, a few or even one death in a community by (to use a tad over the top example...) by say, a "stranger" abducting, raping, mutilating then cooking and eating a four year old, will cause far more fear, extreme reactions and subsequent expenditure of community and individual time, energy and resources than the steady, predictable background of many sordid, equally fatal and often quite easily prevented deaths from poverty, alcohol, automotive accidents, suicide, pollution of various sorts, medical errors (immense carnage - article to come soon) and the like - both despite and *because* of the fact that the former is likely an attention-grabbing, unique or at least an extremely infrequent event, while the latter tragedies occur on a daily, consistent basis. // Reactions are even *more* extreme to large, dramatic events, even if singular (one of a kind): hence, the events of Sept. 11, 2001, have literally "changed the world" in a number of very ugly and completely disproportionate ways. These rare, drama-charged moments become "the news" because they are note-worthy due to their "novelty": they stick out from the background and grab people's attention by the force of their unusualness. I argue that we should be educating people, starting from an early age, to take a much more objective and logical view of the world, hence allocating attention and resources in proportion to the actual frequency, prevalence and ultimate importance of events: if most people viewed the world in this manner, the 300,000 deaths per WEEK due to worldwide poverty, the 5 to 6 million deaths per year of children under 5 due to treatable diseases such as malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia, the 400 million cases of malaria per year, the 6,000 to 8,000 deaths and 8,000 to 10,000 new cases PER DAY of AIDS, and the stark, insane fact that fully one quarter of all human beings on the planet have very limited or absolutely no access to clean, safe drinking water - these everyday "background" facts and events would receive FAR more attention and be allocated far more resources than a few bombs, cases of cannibalism, bullets fired by disgruntled postal workers (although thank goodness most of them are gruntled enough to leave their guns at home.....) or hijacked planes: if people were more concerned about the everyday lives, health and welfare of themselves, their families and their fellow human beings instead of worrying and obsessing about such low-probability events as winning the lottery or being killed by suicidal terrorists, the world would be a VERY different place.
* Light can travel around the world 7 1/2 (seven and a half) times in a single second. Similarly, light can reach the moon and return, in about 3 seconds.
* The quickest thing in the universe would appear to be light, which zips along at almost 300,000 km/sec (about 670 million miles per hour) in a vacuum. That said, there are other things which move ALMOST as fast: in the mini-micro range, cosmic rays, which are mainly protons accelerated by close contact with black holes and such. Cosmic rays travel at 99.9999999999999999999% or so of the speed of light. On the other end of the size scale, blobs of gas about the mass of Jupiter, are routinely ejected from energetic "Blazer" galaxies at the rate of 99.9% light-speed. To get an idea of the amount of energy involved in processes such as these, consider that to accelerate an ordinary brick to this "blazing fast" speed, would require the **total** amount of energy generated by our species for a week.
* Most polar bears are left-handed. // Sticking to the topic of handedness, only a tiny handful of marine gastropods ("snails") are left-handed, while a much larger percentage of landsnais (gastropods which live on the land rather than in the sea) are left handed. Oddly enough, left-handed marine snails are much more common in the fossil record than at present.
* A lot of "stupid fact" lists really live up to their name: for example i just came across one which included the nifty nugget of nothingness that "Antarctica is the only continent where pumpkins can't be grown".
* Apropos of the notion of "stupid facts, as of September 13, 2006, The phrase "nifty nugget of nothingness" occurs in the 30+ billion Googled web-pages only once. (as does the non-word "glydibiphosphoroentericness".)
* "French" fries were most likely not invented in France or by a Frenchman. Various web-accessible stories peg their origin with the Belgians, the Spanish, the Dutch, an English company in 1682 named Fish & Chip Ltd., "an American guy with the last name of French", by Benjamin Franklin in France, by someone in Paris, Texas (the handle "French" being acquired by someone confusing Paris Texas with Paris France), or by Thomas Jefferson. My personal guess is that they were "invented" several times, by various people with a penchant for cooking things in hot grease. They ARE very tasty i must admit, but like any food associated with high-temperature fats, should probably be consumed sparingly: not only are the types of oil usually used to prepare them (peanut, palm, etc.) difficult to digest and artery-hardening when exposed to excessive temperatures, but several by-products of heating fatty acids such as acrylamide and trans-fats, are suspected or have been demonstrated to be carcinogens of various sorts. An interesting recent study along these lines found that girls who ate a lot of fries/chips when young, are at significantly greater risk of developing breast cancer when adult - and just to balance the books a bit, another study (oddly enough, not nearly as widely published in the mass media....) connects fries with testicular cancer, which is interestingly enough the fastest-growing cancer risk amongst men in our society: "Would you like cancer sticks with that?".
* Pillows tend to gain weight as they grow older. Up to 25% of the weight of an old pillow is skin flakes, the mites which eat them, and their waste products (which are what most folks are actually allergic to when it is said they have a "dust allergy").
* A good dairy cow produces about 200,000 glasses of milk in her lifetime.
* The biggest exporter of Brazil nuts is Bolivia.
* Prudery knows no bounds. For example, in upper-class Victorian England, piano legs were often covered to avoid embarrassing anyone. More recently, photos of kids in the bath have surprisingly frequently been labeled "child pornography". Somewhere inbetween, Donald Duck (the famous Disney character) was once banned in Finland because he wore no pants.
* Historically, our species has been hypothesized [a "hypothesis" is an initial idea proposed to explain any given set of information, data, evidence and/or observations. If a given hypothesis can be demonstrated to stand up to a rigorous battery of challenges which include testing which can be reliably replicated by anyone with resources similar to the original researchers, predictiveness (ex.: "If the main source of calories in soft drinks is sugar, then removing sugar from the formula for soda pop should eliminate most of the calories." ) and inclusiveness (a hypothesis must explain ALL relevant observations in order to be valid), it is up-graded to the status of "theory": in other words, a theory is an idea ("hypothesis") which has stood quite a bit of testing and probing - so for example, calling evolution "only a theory" is actually a compliment!! It is interesting to note in passing, that there is NO such thing as "scientific fact": there are only well supported and less well supported theories, and no end of hypotheses. ] to be divided into between 4 and 40 discernibly different "races", based upon a wide variety of charactarstics. However, many of the proponents of the usually ill-defined concept of "race" when applied to humans, would be taken aback if they knew that our species has far less genetic variability than many other primates, such as chimpanzees. A clear majority of modern-day theorists (2006) now agree that most if not all of the present-day populations of humankind most likely arose from a small number of small groups of Africans from one or more regions (probably around 3 distinct regions according the most recent research) leaving that continent around 100,000 years ago, and dispersing to the far-flung corners of the globe over the next 80 to 85,000 years (Australia is now thought to have been first inhabited around 50,000 years ago, not the 60,000+ years of older theories, and North and South America were likely colonized between 20 and 15,000 years B.P. (before present). As a result of this small number of ancestors, there is immensely more genetic variation present within even most small, local ethnic groups (85 to 90% of total human variability), than there is between even the most different populations or ethnicities. This relative homogeneity is not only the result of a small number of initial ancestors, but also reflects the continuous and substantial amount of inter-breeding between populations which has characterized human history as far back as can be traced. [NOTE: My apologies for not including sources in this brief article: that would be quite a task at the moment. Suffice it to say i used only information gleaned from scientific sources i deem reliable and substantially free of ideological bias.]
* While the loss of the Hubble space telescope through lack of maintenance (hasn't happened yet, but is seemingly only a matter of time now, given NASA's shifting priorities centering on manned space travel (a la "moon-Mars and beyond"....) and minimizing science-based missions and programs) may be quite regrettable, one shouldn't despair quite yet: a telescope called the OWL ("OverWhelmingly Large") is currently in the works which will blow the Hubble's capabilities right out of the water. The European Southern Observatory organization is hoping to situate this massive beast (with a primary lens 100 meters across) in the Atacama Desert in Chile, which is the driest place on earth and already hosts several large telescopes. It would be build at around 5,000 meters (16,400 feet), with a "base camp" for scientists at 3000 meters. Its 1500 mini-mirror components would each have active adjustment abilities, and the resolution of the beast would be around 40 times sharper than that of the Hubble. It's surface area will be over 10 times as large as the combined area of every major telescope every built, and it will be capable of seeing and analyzing the spectrum of objects thousands of times fainter than our species has seen before - such as earth-sized planets in our galaxy and supernovas all the way to the edge of the observable universe.
* The number of possible ways of playing the first four moves per side (i.e. the first 8 moves in total) in a game of chess is 318,979,564,000.
* The USA is the only "first world" country in which it is legal to ban "ex-felons" (people who have been found guilty of a certain set of crimes dubbed "felonies" (which varies from state to state), and have subsequently paid their debt to society through incarceration, restitution, fines, community service or otherwise) from voting, often for the remainder of their lives - a permanent disenfranchisement from participation in the civic life of their jurisdiction(s). About 5 million ex-criminals are currently affected by this practice. In many states which perpetrate this form of discrimination, procedures for re-enstatement do in fact exist but are often, shall we say "unrealistic" (to be kind!!) and arbitrary. For example, to become re-enfranchised in Mississippi, a felon has to 1) persuade his state senator or representative to author a bill personally re-enfranchising him, 2) has to get the bill approved by both houses, and then 3) has to get the governor to sign it. Since a much higher percentage of the members of many minority groups (particularly Blacks, First Nation citizens and Latinos) are involved with the law in ways that permanently label them as "ex-felons" - hence subject to various and sundry restrictions on their rights and freedoms depending upon where they live - these practices are de-facto discriminatory in nature.
* Dairy products account for almost 30% (by weight) of all the food consumed in North America.
* The number 57 on a Heinz ketchup bottle represents the number of varieties of pickle the company once had.
* According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 18 million courses of antibiotics are prescribed (by doctors, i.e.!!) for the common cold in the United States per year, despite the almost universal belief in medical circles that colds are caused by viruses. In addition, an estimated 50 million unnecessary antibiotics are prescribed for viral respiratory infections. These and other un-needed antibiotic prescriptions, in addition to the many "correct" ones, are responsible for the increasing resistance of many strains of bacteria to many widely-used antibiotics: especially in hospitals. In recent years, increasingly nasty bacteria which are resistant to nearly all known antibiotics have been dubbed "superbugs" by the media, and their surprisingly high incidence makes hospitals one of the most dangerous places on earth for sick people, who often have depressed immune systems. I am **not** advocating that people who NEED to be in a hospital for one reason or another should avoid them because of this or any other reason (such as the astounding number of medical mistakes of all kinds which occur within their walls.....but that's another article....), but in general i would opine that the shorter the stay in such places, the better.
* Actors are said to "love the limelight". Ever wonder where this phrase came from (alright, me neither!!)? Limelight was how stages were lit before electricity was invented: illumination was produced by heating blocks of lime until they glowed.
* Leonardo Da Vinci was reported to be absolutely ambidextrous: anything he could do with one hand, he could do equally well with the other. However, that was not the limit of his dexterity:he could even write with one hand and draw with the other at the same time!!
* If a teacher assigned 2 seconds of homework during the first week of school, then doubled it to 4 seconds the second week, 8 seconds the third week.... and so on for the 36-week school year, in the 36th week this sadistic teacher would be assigning 68619473796 seconds of homework, which works out to 2179 years and a few days.
* The first paperback book was printed by Penguin Publishing in 1935.
* According to a book with the dubious distinction of being titled: "The Illustrated Book of Sexual Records.", the most maligned and vilified sexual practice in the world is - brace yourselves................ masturbation. Folks, including some doctors, have tried to tell hormone-filled teens for centuries that "self abuse" can cause impotence, hairy fingers, shrinking sexual organs, stunting of growth, sexual obsessions, every variety of mental illness imaginable, tabes dorsalis (whatever that is....), pulmonary consumption, dyspepsia, dimness of sight or blindness, vertigo, epilepsy, hypochondriasis, loss of memory, fatuity, hysteria, asthma, melancholia, mania, dementia, paralysis and death! In order to preserve at least SOME modicum of decency in this otherwise family-friendly feature, i shall cut this article short - but suffice it to say that the laundry-list of supposed dangers (and "officially recommended" remedies for!!) related to masturbation is to sexual scare topics and tactics, what terrorism is to "shrub-related" policies and politics: a grain or two of truth which should be taken with a few tons of salt.
* In 1893, Chicago hired its first police woman. Her name was Marie Owens. While the city was progressive in its hiring practices, Chicago's female police officers were not allowed to wear uniforms until 1956. Complete equality under the law, even in so-called "civilized" nations, has remained an elusive goal for women: one that has been achieved only in a very small number of countries worldwide. In many USA jurisdictions, for example, until the mid 1970s (ie, well within my short lifespan!!) women were not permitted to serve on criminal juries. The extremes of gender equality or lack thereof, can be found in countries such as Sweeden or Denmark, where i know of few if any legal discrimination against people who just happen to have been born female, and many Islamic countries where the the Quran dictum of women being considered to be worth half the value of men is followed, and especially in places which practice variations of "Sharia law", women are placed under what many would consider severe legal constraints and are often in practice almost owned by their male "protectors". Fundamentalist Christians in some places are also trying to restrict the legal rights of women in various ways: the Age of Enlightenment may be drawing to a close, if the cause of women's rights and equality in all corners of the globe are not vigorously and continuously championed.
* The recent (August 2006) gathering of astronomers which was designed to settle what exactly is a "planet", has instead produced more comedy and controversy than useful definitions. First, they tried to say that a planet must merely a) be large enough for its gravity to have formed it into a nearly round shape, and b) orbit the sun instead of an another object (ie, it couldn't be a satellite). That would have produced 12 planets: the usual suspects plus the new kid on the the block - "Xena", Charon, which is nearly as large as Pluto itself, so they orbit each other as a binary system, making Pluto & Charon a "double planet", and the asteroid Ceres, for a total of 12. However, citing concerns such as as the fear that school children might have to memorize too many planets, and the certainty that more Kuiper Belt objects (of which Xena is an example) conforming to this definition would be found , thus inflating the total even further, it was finally decided that c) a celestial object must have "cleared the neighborhood around its orbit" in order to be worthy of the designation "planet". (Pluto, Xena, Charon and Ceres were demoted to the status of "dwarf planet", lacking the third requirement. All other heavenly bodies in orbit around the sun are collectively lumped under the moniker "Small Solar System Bodies". However, many astronomers are now expressing high levels of dissatisfaction with this definition, for three primary reasons: 1) The term "cleared the neighborhood around its orbit" was not clarified, thus making the definition quite vague, 2) The deed was done by show of hands at the meeting, meaning that a scant 5% of the IAU's 9000 members actually voted, 3) Of the remaining 8 "planets" under this vague definition, namely Earth, Saturn, Mars and Jupiter cannot be said to have truly "cleared the neighborhood around its orbit": each have lots of asteroids in their "orbital neigbourhood" and Jupiter and Saturn even have small planetoids sharing their orbit, on the opposite side of the sun, and 4) Many feel that Pluto, which has 3 satellites (well, technically the binary system Charon/Pluto has two satellites), a long history of being popularly accepted as a planet and perhaps even a rudimentary ring system, should still be officially designated as a full-fledged planet. So much controversy has been generated that the clearly inadequate new definition is not likely to gain wide acceptance..... stay tuned for round 2!!
* It has long been assumed that how long someone will live is related to how long their parents, other ancestors and family members managed to survive. However, this assumption that "good genes" are more related to longevity than environmental factors such as how well one looks after their bodies, is now being exposed as quite false (as is the case with many assumptions long held to be true, hence not closely and critically examined!!). I haven't time at the moment for a proper article on the topic, but researchers now believe that only about 5% of a person's realized age can be explained by genetic factors, while the rest is related to environment (such as exposure to heavy metals, pesticides, natural toxins such as arsenic, air pollution, etc.), so-called "life-style" choices such as smoking, drinking, diet, exercise, sleep patterns, general outlook on life, etc., and just plain chance - cancer caused by accidental exposure to a carcinogen for example. Identical twins illustrate this principle nicely: they tend to die at an average of 10 years apart, despite the fact that they have identical genes, grew up in the same household and often lead surprisingly similar lives.
* Those who are "germophobic" (ok, so i don't know the technical term.....) might wish to consider this the next time they go swimming: every mouthful of ocean water swallowed, may contain over 1,000 different species of bacteria and dozens of other kinds of microscopic life such as diatoms, planktonic foraminifera, viruses, one-celled organisms (protists), microscopic kinds of worms, different kinds of algae, and the larvae of larger animals such as as snails. Bon appetit!!
* The diversity of life in the oceans never ceases to amaze those fortunate enough to be studying it. That said, when sheer numbers of species are considered, bacteria most definitely come out on top. Recent research has indicated that there may be 10 to 100 times as many species of bacteria ("microbes") in the World Sea than previously thought - at least several and perhaps as many as 10 million of them!! Many are apparently quite rare, or occur only in very specialized habitats such as particular kinds of deep sea thermal vents, but it is still pretty awesome to consider the fact that we only know of the existence of a tiny fraction of the myriad forms of life in the sea.
* In the sea, as on land, the vast majority of life is microscopic. The millions of bacterial species which inhabit the world's oceans make up about 90% of all the bio-mass (weight of living organisms) in their depths.
* Only one in ten cancer deaths are due to the primary tumor: the vast majority of cancer mortality is caused by cells breaking away from the main tumor and traveling to other parts of the body, such as the brain, bones or liver. This process, called metastasis, is poorly understood but is vital to know about in our so-far rather disappointing battle against "the Big C".
* The letter combination "ough" can be pronounced in nine different ways in English (the most "hybridized" language in the world - each of these 9 versions probably comes from different "roots", several of them very likely from different languages). The following sentence contains them all: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."
* Anyone who thinks that modern science is the Cat's Meow and that we know a lot about the universe and world we live in, should think again: the more we learn, the more we realize that we hardly know anything at all!! A couple of examples from vastly different areas will suffice to illustrate this: 1) Astrophysicists tell us that not only do we not know how gravity works (we've never managed to detect a gravity wave, and the "Higg's Boson" thought to transmit gravitational forces remains as elusive as ever (i.e., it hasn't been caught or even seen so far....)), but they tell us our universe is made up of 5% stuff (matter and energy) which we actually know something about, 20% "dark matter" which nobody has a clue about except that it most certainly seems to exist, and 70% "dark energy", which seems to be causing the universe to expand faster than it "should" without it, but which is also completely uncharted territory, knowledge-wise. 2) In the Life Sciences, our knowledge is even more limited: it is estimated that there are somewhere between 5 and 20+ million species of life on our little planet (of which we are one species), but we have only "discovered" about 2 million of them and even of these, the VAST of them are almost completely unknown beyond the mere fact that they exist, and a few other semi-random teensy tiny tidbits of info we happen to have stumbled onto. Take fish, for example: we are finding hundreds of new species each year, and are also realizing that we know precious little about the species we thought we actually knew about..... a case in point is fish poisons: until only a few years ago, it was thought that only about 200 species of venomous fish in the world. However, according to recent research done by ictheologists Leo William Smith and Ward C. Wheeler of the Museum of Natural History in New York, there are at least 1,200! Many carry their venom in spines and barbs, some in fangs. Though the 1,200 species are not new, scientists did not know they were venomous. Now, biologists may need to rethink some of their old ideas, Dr. Smith said. With very few exceptions, everything we thought was wrong, he opined recently. While it may not be quite as bad as the famous "Everything you know is a lie" hypothesis, we must become more aware as a society that we have barely scratched the surface of the vast secrets of both the universe in general, and in particular the only planet we know of which harbors and nurtures life in that universe. There are many, some with substantial power in the world, who would respond to this "inconvenient truth" with notions such as "Who cares? God is going to re-make the earth soon anyway, so what's the point?" or "We have better things to occupy ourselves with than such knowledge. Look at the mess science has gotten us into so far: why do we need it anyway?". I would like to remind these folks that without knowledge of the world around us, we'd be still living in caves and running away from lions and tigers and bears - o my!! More knowledge gives us more choices, and enables us to make these choices in a more informed manner. We can't be simply waiting for God to "make all things new" and solve all our problems for us, or become too pre-occupied with more mundane, immediate matters both individually and as a semi-civilized society that we neglect or slight the search for knowledge and understanding, both in "applied" (ie, directed towards a well-defined goal such as developing more sustainable energy sources) and especially in "pure" forms - learning just for the joy of finding out what makes things tick!!
* Before the advent of cheap, reliable artificial lighting, it was common for people to sleep in two distinct segments or periods: they would retire shortly after sunset, say 9 or 10 p.m., and sleep for 3 or 4 hours before awakening for a while, conversing with neighbours, cooking up a light meal, or any number of other activities which didn't require a lot of bright light. Then they would go to bed again and snooze for a similar period before arising in the morning. These were called the first and second sleeps. The inbetween-period was especially noted for being the best time for "intimate relations" between spouses, since it was more relaxed, much quieter and one was rested and somewhat distanced from the cares and worries of the previous day. On the other side of the coin, many folks used this quiet time for the equally refreshing activity of prayer.
* Many very important discoveries of both science and everyday life, seem to occur partially or completely by accident. For example, the microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket. Penicillin however, is the most famous "accidental" discovery (ok, perhaps Chris Columbus bumping into North America on his way to the Orient also rates......): in 1929, Alexander Fleming found it growing quite uninvitedly in one of his bacterial cultures one fine day, and as they say the rest is history!! What is perhaps even more remarkable, and considerably lesser known, is that the first human patient (who died because of supply shortage) wasn't treated with penicillin until a full 12 years later, when the team of Ernest Chain, Howard Florey and Norman Hedtley, having managed to purify, stabilize and mass-produce it using stacks of ceramic bedpans as a production aid and successfully test it on both mice and men, fled jolly olde Englande to persuade the USA government to start producing the stuff on an industrial scale to treat war victims.
* If you ask most folks these daze why crime rates have decreased so dramatically in the past 12 or so years, they will look at you as if you had 6 eyes or 3 belly-buttons. The mass media has become so aggressive in reporting crime and bad news of all kinds, that to most observers it must seem that the world is taking the "hell in a hand-basket" express route to Armageddon. However, just the opposite is actually occurring when it comes to actual law-breaking, although this plain fact is often flatly denied by those whose ideological viewpoints might be threatened by such good news. Rates of violent and property crime in most "western" countries peaked in the early 1990s, and in most cases have steadily declined ever since. The numbers are quite dramatic: for example, the U.S. total violent crime rate dropped out of the sky, at 51.19 cases per 1,000 households in 1994, to just 22.30 in 2003!! The reasons for this general improvement in security of person and property are poorly understood: yes, there are proportionately fewer youth in the population than previously, but crimes by adults are also on the downturn. Increasing rates of incarceration are not a viable cause either, since crime rates are declining in equal measure in countries which do not put so many folks in prison. If any of the Gentle Readers out there knows of solid, credible research into this encouraging phenomenon, i would be VERY pleased to hear about it!! [update: It seems that exposure to lead, mostly via childhood exposure to exhaust from leaded gasoline and from lead-based paints, may be a major or perhaps even the most important determinant of criminal behavior later in life, especially in the 15 to 24 year old age group. No study to date has ruled this theory out, and several have found a solid relationship between early lead exposure and later criminal behavior. In one of the best, Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University in New York examined 3,000 factors for links to criminal behavior in 1,000 children, and found that lead poisoning was the best predictor of delinquent and violent behavior. She concluded that much criminal behavior has environmental origins and therefore could be eliminated, given societal will to do so. I hasten to add that findings such as these do not, in my opinion, absolve anyone from personal responsibility for their actions - yet, if simple measures such as banning leaded gasoline and removing most of the remaining lead and other brain-altering (as opposed to "mind-altering") substances from the environments of children in our society can diminish the likelihood that at-risk individuals will commit criminal acts, then we should by ALL means be vigorously pursuing this goal!!! It should be noted that childhood lead exposure can also contribute substantially to learning disabilities, attention deficit disorders, mental retardation, behavioral problems, reduced IQ levels and other nervous system-related disorders, as can mercury exposure: it is high time we as a so-called civilization took much stronger action to diminish the exposure of our children to such destructive substances: economics should have little to do with it: this goes beyond such mundane matters and to my mind, is assuming the strength of research even at this early stage, has become a moral imperative and a test of our civilization's basic character.]
* The first attack which succeeded in destroying a commercial airplane in mid-flight occurred on Oct. 6, 1976, when Cuban-American terrorists and mercenaries blew up a Cuban civilian airliner. All 73 on board went down to a fiery death, including the teenage members of the Cuban fencing team returning from a competition in Venezuela. Anti-Castro terrorists still periodically kill civilians in an attempt to draw attention to their cause, but for some unfathomable [LOL...] reason, are seldom prosecuted by USA authorities.
* [Extracted from the 1996 version of the Darwin Awards, which honor those who remove themselves from the human gene pool by exceptionally moronic means, thereby furthering the cause of human evolution.]: Some men will got to extraordinary lengths to prove how macho they are. Frenchman Pierre Pumpille recently shunted a stationary car two feet by headbutting it. "Women thought I was a god," he explained from his hospital bed. // Deity or not, however, Pumpille is a veritable girl's blouse compared to Polish farmer Krystof Azninski, who staked a strong claim to being Europe's most macho man by cutting off his own head in 1995. Azninski, 30, had been drinking with friends when it was suggested they strip naked and play some "men's games". Initially they hit each other over the head with frozen turnips, but then one man upped the ante by seizing a chainsaw and cutting off the end of his foot. Not to be outdone, Azninski grabbed the saw and, shouting "Watch this then," he swung at his own head and chopped it off. "It's funny," said one companion, "when he was young he put on his sister's underwear. But he died like a man." [Why do i have a sudden desire to play hopscotch.....?]
*
Report to document decline in armed conflict [worldwide, in recent years]
By Geoff McMaster, ExpressNews Staff
January 28, 2004 - Despite the media's relentless focus on recent wars, the number of armed conflicts in the world has actually dropped sharply over the past 10 years, says the director of the Human Security Project.
Pat Leidl of the University of British Columbia's Liu Institute for Global Issues, said that while wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia and Rwanda have attracted a great deal of attention, some 90 conflicts around the world have come to an end [or at least a stable truce] in the past decade. And in addition to a 40 per cent decline in their numbers, wars are also becoming less lethal, causing fewer total casualties, said Leidl.
Leidl spoke at the University of Alberta Tuesday as part of the U of A's International Week activities.
"Most of today's conventional wars are being fought by the U.S. and its allies, and because there is such an immense power imbalance between the U.S. and the countries it's invading, the fighting has been over relatively quickly with very few casualties comparatively. Position-guided munitions have also reduced casualties," Leidl noted. [She also gives much of the credit to U.N. interventions, which have been much less hobbled since the ending of the "cold war".]
* The intense focus on the massive bombing of Tokyo and the tragic use of nuclear weapons on Nagasaki and Hiroshima has tended to overshadow other losses of life amongst the Japanese population during WWII, both military as well as civilian. As with most modern wars, civilian deaths and injuries outnumbered those of actual combatants - for example, on August 21, 1944, the evacuation ship Tsushimamaru with 1700 passengers, among them 800 school children from Okinawa, was sunk by an American submarine off the Kyushu coast with more than 1500 victims (sounds like the Lusitania (sunk by German U-boat, WWI) re-visited...in a war, NOBODY is safe). The fire-bombing of Dresden, also by "the good guys", claimed more than 100,000 lives, most of them again civilian. The battle for Okinawa was also a real disaster for its inhabitants: there were not only 90,000 dead among Japanese soldiers but also 150,000 civilian dead (one quarter of the total population), besides innumerable historic buildings and cultural centers reduced to ashes like Shuri Castle. All told, the tally of civilian deaths in that war may have exceeded 20 million, including the following estimates of some of the major participants:
* * U.S. civilian deaths in World War II: 11,200
* UK civilian deaths in World War II: 67,800
* German civilian deaths in World War II: 1,840,000 (not including Holocaust genocide)
* Japanese civilian deaths in World War II: 600,000+.
* Russian civilian deaths are estimated at 7,000,000, Polish at 5,675,000, Yugoslav at 1,200,000.
* Pottery-making has often been associated with the sedentary lifestyle of agriculture, and indeed in many parts of the world, pottery became popular only after agriculture became the predominant way of life. However, the earliest pottery-making culture was that of the "incipient" or earliest Jomon period in Japan, dating to about 10,000 to 8,000 B.C. These people, who were the main inhabitants of the island until a wave of settlers from northern China (the Yayoi) imported their own culture and ended the Jomon era. The early Jomon were hunter-gatherers, and their tiny pots (of which no complete example is known) were decorated with intricate cord-like patterns which are also typical of later Jomon periods.
* Since the discovery of the first obesity gene in 1994, scientists have found about 50 genes involved in obesity. Some of them determine how individuals lay down fat and metabolize energy stores. Others regulate how much people want to eat in the first place, how they know when they ve had enough and how likely they are to use up calories through activities ranging from fidgeting to running marathons. People who can get fat on far fewer calories than the norm, may be genetically programmed to survive in harsher environments. When the human species got its start, it was an advantage to be efficient. Today, when food is plentiful, it is a hazard. Research into the causes of overweightedness (aka obesity) is being pursued full steam ahead these days, since 30 percent of the North American public is obese; that is, nearly a third of the inhabitants of the continent in question have a body-mass index over 30.
* Scientists believe people living in central Mexico developed corn at least 7000 years ago. It was started from a wild grass called teosinte. Teosinte looked very different from our corn today. The kernels were small and were not placed close together like kernels on the husked ear of modern corn. Also known as maize Indians throughout North and South America, eventually depended upon this crop for much of their food.
* Almost a ton/tonne of corn is produced in North America to provide for each citizen of the continent. Its uses are "legion" (over 3500 at last count!!) and incredibly diverse: fabrics used to make your clothing are strengthened by cornstarch. The chickens that laid the eggs often consumed for breakfast were fed corn, as were many of the cows whose various products pervade our society. Many soft drinks and myriads of other artificially sweetened products are laced with generous dollops of corn syrup. The textbooks you study from and the books you check out of the library are bound with cornstarch. The ink used to print them contains corn oil. Ethanol, touted by many as a key component in the battle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is made from corn. Corn is also used in such products as glue, shoe polish, aspirin, ink, marshmallows, ice cream and cosmetics. Some industrial uses of corn include: 1) a substitute for phosphate, corn-derived citric acid increases the cleaning power and decreases the volume of laundry detergents needed... 2) several companies offer light-weight "packing peanuts" made of nearly 100 percent corn. 3) corn-based ink is now replacing printer's ink that was made from 100 percent petroleum products. This product makes it safe for place mats and packaging where ink may come in contact with food. 4) Hydrosorb, a super-absorbent cornstarch, absorbs 300 times its weight and is used in some baby diapers and automobile fuel filters.
* A bushel of corn fed to different species of food animal, produces 5.6 pounds of retail beef, 13 pounds of retail pork, 19.6 pounds of chicken or 28 pounds of catfish.
* In the womb, humans are free of microbes. The colonization process begins during the passage through the birth canal, and is enhanced through every kiss, every caress and touch of mother or others, and although mostly complete by age 2 on the average, continues throughout life. However, this should not be cause for alarm: we could not live healthy lives in a sterile environment without them!! This is particularly true of the gut flora (see below). The gazillions of bacteria which inhabit our digestive tracts assume an extraordinary array of functions on our behalf functions that we couldn t manage on our own. They help create the capillaries that line and nourish the intestines. They produce vitamins such as thiamine, pyroxidine and vitamin K. They provide the enzymes necessary to metabolize cholesterol and bile acid, and they digest complex plant polysaccharides, the fiber found in grains, fruits and vegetables that would otherwise be indigestible. They also help extract calories from the food we eat and helps store those calories in fat cells for later use which gives them, in effect, a role in determining whether our diets will make us fat or thin. It is now thought that the composition of a given individual's teeming multitudes of gut bacteria, may have a significant effect upon how efficient a person's digestive system is in converting food to products our body can convert to energy: for example, if someone's gut contains unusually large populations of bacterial species particularly good at digesting difficult to assimilate food components such as the complex polysaccharides mentioned above, then they will require less food than normal, to equal a given number of calories - so a serving of grain, for example, which in most folks might equal 100 calories, for these people may produce sugars which the body can use to produce 110 or more calories. As a result, they are likely to gain weight more easily than most, even though they may actually eat less!! That said, it is believed that this mechanism is only important for a very small proportion of overweight people: most often, over-eating and under-exercising (i.e., more going in than coming out!) are still the main culprits in the Battle of the Bulge.
* Of the trillions and trillions of cells in a typical human body at least 10 times as many cells in a single individual as there are stars in our galaxy only about 1 in 10 is human. The other 90 percent are microbial. These microbes (a term that encompasses all forms of microscopic organisms, including bacteria & archaea, fungi, protozoa and tiny multi-cellular animals) exist everywhere and are found in the ears, nose, mouth, vagina, anus, as well as every inch of skin, especially the armpits, the groin and between the toes. The vast majority are in the gut, which harbors 10 trillion to 100 trillion of them, belonging to perhaps thousands of different species of bacteria. Microbes colonize our body surfaces from the moment of our birth, say the scientists who study such things. They are with us throughout our [physical] lives, and at the moment of our death they [start to consume our mortal coil].
* Religious extremists who believe in a doctrine called "Dominionism" (look it up: it's pretty scary!!) are releasing an ultra-violent video game in which "Tribulation Force" fighters battle the evil hordes of the United Nations' (oops - sorry!! I meant to say "Global Community"...) Antichrist-controlled forces ALSO bent on worldwide domination, in the streets of New York (this is of course after the "secret rapture", in which all true and faithful Christians are instantly taken to heaven in Phase One of Jesus' return to our troubled little planet, so they don't have to go through the Tribulation described in Matthew 24 (see Mt. 24 26-31. Note particularly the sequence of events which begins AFTER the tribulation, starting at v. 29), Luke 17 (v. 22 to 37. Note that contrary to the dispensationalist's theories, there will be a lot of dead bodies lying around after the events which occur "on the day the Son of Man is revealed". Whether they belong to those "raptured" or those "left behind", this passage puts a serious stumbling-stone in the way of their musings!), Daniel and Revelations). "Left Behind:Eternal Forces" is a real-time strategy video game, meaning that a player manipulates an entire army simultaneously, as opposed to the common first-person shooter games in which a player controls only one killer. In essence, the player becomes the commander of a virtual army, deciding when to unleash weapons from an arsenal of guns, tanks and helicopters. Of course, since this is an evangelical game, soldiers lose "spirit points" each time they kill an opponent, leaving them prey to the Antichrist's forces and in dire need of replenishment through prayer. To top it off, each time a soldier slays one of the Antichrist's soldiers (who are UN Peace keepers, remember), he triumphantly cries, "Praise the Lord!" (remember 'Allah Akbar'??) Methinks the Prince of Peace might be looking down upon certain factions of those folks calling themselves by His name just a BIT sadly right about now......
* Not a single major anti-abortion organization in North America (i.e., Canada and the US) actively teaches about or promotes contraception... "barefoot and pregnant" anyone?
* Sorry again to seem to be picking on the poor defenseless American federal Bush-league regime, but this bit of news was just too funny to resist. It seems someone official has compiled a long list of "potential terrorist targets" - a good idea to be sure...... however, it is a curious - even weird one might say - beastie in its currently published form. It includes not only more potential terrorist magnets in Indiana than in New York, but amongst its various "targets" are seemingly non-strategic localities such as "Old MacDonald's Petting Zoo", an Amish popcorn factory, the Mule Day Parade in some dusty corner of a Western state, the Sweetwater Flea Market and an unspecified ''Beach at End of a Street." I wonder if the goal of these downright strange potential target inclusions is to confuse potential terrorists?? If so, it just might work if they are all as competent as that one who tried to blow up his shoe a few years ago :-=).
* Work tends to expand to fill the time allotted to it.
* The banjo as we know it originated from a single-string, gourd-bodied African lute (sometimes called the "hodu") which the Griots of West Africa played to accompany storytelling. Later, banjo makers replaced the gourd with a wooden hoop with a skin stretched over it. A four-string version emerged as early as the late seventeenth century, and the fifth string (usually attributed to Scottish-American Joel Walker Sweeney, 1820) can be seen in paintings of black banjo players from between 1777 and 1800 (Linn 2). The five-string banjo is probably the first distinctly African-American instrument. It played a large role in the development of one of the best-loved music traditions of North American extraction, bluegrass, as musicians with Celtic (mainly Irish) cultural backgrounds worked, performed and freely swapped musician techniques with African-American musicians in the mountain regions of mid-19th to early 20th century Kentucky, N. Carolina, the Virginias and Tennessee. The stereotypical image of banjo-playing blacks which was so popular in the Minstrel-show tradition, became quite offensive to the Afro-American community as a whole in the turbulent post Civil War period, and as a result, the instrument gradually became less and less popular amongst blacks, and its use became instead stereotyped with the "poor mountaineer" "hillbilly" who "barely kept his family fed". The free-wheeling three-finger style of banjo-picking perfected and brought to great popularity by the legendary Earl Scruggs, was borrowed from three-finger guitar techniques of the post WWI period. He often played with Bill Munroe, pioneer of the modern Bluegrass tradition, at the Grand Ole Opry, and this was undoubtedly one of the reasons that the banjo is so closely linked to that cross-cultural musical genre.
* The intimate association between the banjo and Bluegrass is detailed above. The fiddle was a mainstay of the Irish-Americans who developed Bluegrass's antecedents (again, as per the above article), and was also extensively played by black slaves from the 17th century onwards, and from there found its way into the minstrelry tradition from the 1840s onward. Further, the fiddle, as well as the mandolin, were frequently found alongside each other in the pick-up "string bands" which propelled the fun forward at thousands of Southeastern USA hill-country gatherings from mid-19th century to the present. (The mandolin, which dates back to the Dark Ages where it was originally a miniature version of the many-stringed Lute, was the main instrument of Bill Munroe, it should also be noted, and was also one of the instruments favored by the Irish musicians who contributed so heavily to the development of the deep reservoir of musical tradition which spawned Bluegrass.) It is interesting to note that a) many blacks who forsook the banjo because of its stereotypical minstrelry-fostered associations, took up the guitar instead, as that instrument became more popular and affordable from he 1890s onwards. This trend accentuated the increasing segregation between "black" and "white" musical forms and associations. The mainly-black guitar-based musical community developed independently of the jazz folks, into what is now called "the Blues", which in the 1940s evolved through "Rockabilly" into the earliest forms of Rock and Roll in the mid-1950s. and b) Bluegrass quickly became, after it took shape in the 30s and 40s and then flowered in the 1950s due to the popularity of Bill Munroe's "Bluegrass Boys" group, one of the most white-dominated musical forms in the USA (although not to the same extent in Canada, which had never known legal segregation and where racism tends to take more subtle forms), despite its roots, which have been consistently downplayed in popular mythology. confederate flags and other trappings more consistent with KKK rallies than musical gatherings, are frequently seen at Bluegrass festivals, especially in the Deep South. Fortunately, this unhappy development is unravelling in the early part of the 21st Century, albeit more slowly than many would wish. and c) Those unique, enchanting Bluegrass harmonies which i and many others are so fond of [to be continued as soon as i find out about where they came from!!]
* A quick Googling will tell you that the general consensus amongst folks that like to ponder and research such things, is that there have been about 100 billion people who have lived upon the earth since the beginning of our species (Homo sapiens sapiens Linne, 1758). They usually start with the assumption that there was a very small population in northern Africa around 50,000 years ago, and work their way forward from there. This means that despite our immense "population boom", only about 6% of all the people who have ever lived, are alive at the present day - despite an "urban legend" which began in the 1970s which claimed that the figure was somewhere around 75%!!
* During the time of Queen Elizabeth I ((the early 1600s), northern European people didn't take baths, thinking it was unhealthy (it probably was, when you consider how cold their dwellings were). total immersion in a bath was considered the sort of thing to be done only for medicinal or remedial reasons - but that didn't mean people didn't keep clean!! They usually followed the method until recently popular with Japanese--that is, standing up and soaping themselves down from a bowl of water, using a damp cloth or sponge. poorer people would throw some Saponara leaves into the water (which made it foam). richer people often used perfumes of various sorts. (Source: Lydia Rivlin, a reader).
* Most people, even including some school teachers and writers of gradeschool text books, when asked what happened to the Dodo bird, will tell you without hesitation that the bird as a species was hunted to extinction - images of clueless hunters clubbing the last of the friendly (but somewhat stupid: their name itself is old Dutch for "dummy" or something similar!) birds to death in order to "put food on their families" come to mind. However, this is pure hokum: a semi-modern myth that most folks (myself included, until a few moments ago, i red-facedly admit!!) don't even bother to question, so ingrained in our cultural fabric this pseudo-fact has become. In truth (so far as i have been able to verify), the flightless critters tasted so bad they were often called "puke-birds" in honor of either their taste, or what it often caused its eaters to do. So, after an initial small rush to pop them into Dutch pots, they were not often hunted for meat, or in fact for their feathers. What REALLY did them in, according to most modern sources, were the animals the Europeans brought with them, both wittingly or not: dogs, cats, pigs which escaped their quarters, and rats which dined eagerly on the hapless Dodos' eggs.
* The world's "developed" countries, mainly the European Union and the USA, subsidize their agricultural industry at the rate of about $400 billion per year. To my mind, if the purpose of these immense subsidies (which in many cases amount to "corporate welfare", going mainly to large "agribusiness" corporations) was primarily to ensure food security for the citizens of the countries paying out this veritable mountain of taxpayers loot, it might be at least somewhat justified. However, the end result is often very large surpluses of everything from wine and cheese to refined sugar and grains (in France, vast amounts of excess wine are being converted into ethanol for use as a gasoline additive), which are often sold to poor countries at prices below the cost of production in the purchasing countries - the damage to local economies of this deliberate practice, is immense: local markets are flooded with cheap goods grown in developed countries, so that local farmers cannot compete and are driven out of business or into even greater poverty than before the flood of subsidized agricultural products was forced onto their countries by unfair trade practices and agreements made with the World Bank or via the WTO. In addition. in the rare cases where a product from a "developing" or "Third world" country manages to out-compete a similar one in the markets of a first-world nation, trade barriers in the form of tarrifs and quotas are often slapped on these imports. I haven't been able to find the appropriate number-crunching anywhere yet, but i would not be at **all** surprised if the effects of agricultural subsidies in first-world countries upon the economies of third world nations, especially when combined with those of tarrifs and other trade barriers, completely dwarfs the poverty-reducing impacts of all the so-called "development aid" sent to poor countries worldwide.
* The "web" is a wild and exceedingly strange place at times. For example, while searching for the word (ok, collection of letters in the form of a word) "glishiness", i tripped over a bizzare site containing pages and pages of passages such as the following: "...brash turnal rimenterpolatilder interfecting desponder boxtopsy gyroscopes bess displa nkness golf runneled screws happily extrine bargart smoker flagrance valent dori anis psychobic riskness babying begrudently profited ranted abstruthlands horrel ation optimidates dall face advise dioxidizes antistic cindy wendy cowardinaring manuel enger bookshelter hermost elimitations issuant phylocomputates opened dr apet preminationally oblithetic directive nonprofits inique burglar unwielding s atanicknament redentees discover pictural propels suspensed crocurious obviously notions denigratuity cursing masket ships burrow sording unwilliputing..." If you have a fear of made-up words, i would say to you "Be a flaid, be farey aflaid".
* The pseudo-word "fishyculture" appears only once, in all the 30 billion pages Google currently searches (as of June 18, 2006).
* The seven "deadly sins" of RC lore (sins serious enough to kill or seriosly damage one's soul) are currently anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust, gluttony, and covetousness. However, they have changed somewhat over time. Originally, there were eight deadly sins (as proposed by Avagrius of Pontus). In order of increasing severity they were gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, apathy, vainglory, and pride. Pope Gregory the Great later decided that vainglory and pride were too much alike to be counted separately and combined them. He added envy. Later still, theologians decided sadness wasn't a sin, and added sloth. Somewhere along the way, apathy was dropped as well - seems nobody cared enough to keep it.
* When measured by volume, ninety-nine percent of the living space on the planet is found in the oceans. Forty six percent of the world's water is in the Pacific Ocean. The Atlantic has 23.9 percent; the Indian, 20.3; the Arctic, 3.7 percent.
* Why walk when you can carry a lunch?
* The average depth of the oceans is 2.5 miles (4 km). The deepest point lies in the Mariana Trench, 6.8 miles (10.9 km) down. On land, Mount Everest is only 5.5 miles (8.8 km) high - but it is not the tallest mountain in the world: that honor goes to Mauna Kea in Hawaii: when measured from its base on the ocean floor, it rises over 9 km (5.6 mi), but only attains 4,170 m (13,681 ft) above sea level.
* The word "millipede" means "thousand legs" - but no millipede has more than 750 legs. Nobody knows why.
* A popular argument used by those who wish to invent excuses to continue to pursue wasteful and destructive (in almost every manner, i might add....) ways of life - such as the one declared by two USA presidents in the same family to be "not up for negotiation" when asked questions about conservation - goes something like "No matter what we do, natural processes dwarf our influence - for example, a major volcanic eruption can alter the world's climate more than all of human greenhouse gas output in a given year.". These folks apparently haven't considered such facts (well documented, i might add, although if any are wrong or misleading, i would be very happy to receive the correct figures or contexts!!) as these: [Note: a "megaton" is a million tons - 10% less if considering metric tonnes.]
* In the past hundred years, we have seen:
* The complete conversion of 15% of all ice-free land surface to human use.
* The partial conversion of 55% of all ice-free land surface to human use.
* The fixation (conversion of atmospheric nitrogen into fertilizer) of 160 -170 megatons of nitrogen per year, compared with pre-agricultural tterrestrial fixation of 150 -190 [need the correct figures here - i should think the absolute amount would be considerably more today than before massive chemical fertilization of crops became common - this leads to mass "blooms" of phyto-plankton in lakes and on continental shelves, which creates havoc in natural systems - including vast "dead zones" at the mouths of major rivers such as the Mississippi, and the premature "aging" (called eutrophication) of many lakes. Ditto for the release of massive amounts of phosphorous from agricultural runoff] megatons of nitrogen per year by natural processes (Smil, 2000: 248).
* The appropriation of 25% to 40% of total net primary productivity of the planet for human use.
* An almost doubling of the CO2 content of the atmosphere.
* The damming of almost all of the world's major rivers. Humans have extensively altered river systems through impoundments and diversions to meet their water, energy, and transportation needs. Today (2003), there are >45,000 dams above 15 m high, capable of holding back >6500 km3 of water (1), or about 15% of the total annual river runoff globally. (Nillson et al, 2005).
* The world's extinction rate has soared to about 100 times its estimated historical amount - about one species every 20 minutes (Wilson, 1992). One fifth of all species may be gone by 2030 if the present rate continues (Wilson, 2003: 102).
* The total biomass of the world's population increased to roughly 40 megatons of carbon. To put this number into perspective, consider: The biomass of all life is roughly 500 megatons of carbon, and the biomass of all vertebrates is roughly 5 megatons. We have ten time the mass of all other vertebrates on earth. Smil (2002: 186).
* The mass of all motor vehicles is roughly 1,000 megatons and exceeds the weight of all living organisms. We use 4,000 megatons of carbon per year [released into the air as CO2, which is driving the human-caused portion of the rapid global warming we are seeing increasing evidence of recently] to power these vehicles. Smil (2002: 269).
* The only nations whose names begin with an "A", but don't end in an "A" are Afghanistan and Azerbaijan.
* A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off. They are also nearly immune to radiation: if there was a nuclear war with lots of very tiny shrapnel flying around, they would be the last animals alive.
* Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie. However, since the glue used on stamps also contains 1/10th of a calorie...... stamp glue in most countries in the world is vegetarian, by the way.
* One quarter of the earth's land surface is desert (or is that dessert? - never could get those two straight!!), and over 40% is classified as "drylands", which means that they don't recieve enough rain for forests to grow. Much of our species' food is grown on these "dryland" areas, often using unsustainable methods which produce erosion and degrade the land to the point where agriculture is much less productive or sometimes not even possible: about 10-20 percent of drylands are already degraded.
- The total land area affected by desertification is estimated at 6-12 million sq kms (2.32-4.64 million sq miles), an area bigger than China or Canada. Each year an estimated 20 million hectares (49.4 million acres) of farmland becomes too degraded for crop production or is lost to urban sprawl.
- Asia and Africa are the continents worst affected by desertification. Land degradation causes an estimated loss of $42 billion a year from agricultural production.
- Experts say desertification can be muted by better management of crops, more careful irrigation and strategies to provide non-farming jobs.
- Some experts say that deserts could become new sources of power. An area 800 km by 800 km of the Sahara desert, for instance, could capture more than enough solar energy to generate all the world's electricity needs.
* Cats have over one hundred [can't verify this - must be at least 50, tho....] kinds of vocal sounds. Dogs only have about a dozen.
*
According to archaeologists, in the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.......and Leonardo DaVinci invented scissors. [How's THAT for a non-sequitor!!]
* To paraphrase the immortal Art Linkletter (again betraying my age...), "People believe the silliest things" at times, often completely contrary to plainly and easily verified facts. Quite often this is because people regarded as experts or authorities have taught these errors, and out of fear, respect, because of predisposing prejudices (a prime example of this is the tendency of many "Fundamentalists" to quote as "truth", the most insanely wrong conclusions of the pseudo-scientific anti-homosexual "research" of Paul Cameron: a sociologist/psychologist who has been ejected from or excoriated by dozens of scientific organizations. Another example regards the elaborate hoax of the fictitious booklet "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion", which is still believed to be true by many anti-Semites.), or just due to plain mental laziness, other people have therefore believed them. A great poem on this topic, which i shall call "Cowpaths of the Mind" (quoted here) tackles this phenomenon boldly!! Now, I am certain that the Gentle Reader can think of ***many*** examples by themselves, so i'll keep this article short. // Many folks are reported to have believed for centuries that spiders had 6 legs, despite there being oodles of spiders all around us at almost all times for anyone who can count up to eight to see. The story goes (but i don't really believe to be the WHOLE story - something is "fishy" here....) that the great observer of nature, Aristotle, wrote in 350 B.C. that spiders had six legs (hold on - i think i see the problem here: he DID include them under with the insects in his categorization of animals - so since insects have 6 legs (sometimes modified into wings), some people just assumed that Aristotle had specifically stated that spiders had only six as well: i'd be very surprised if he actually did, however!! (As an aside, it should be noted that other people at other times have included spiders under the general rubric of "insects", usually noting that they differed from most others, in having 8 legs)). Although traditions of various sorts (as in "That's the way its always been done around here........") have often been the cause of people believing untruths, half truths and outright lies, one HAS to wonder if some "official pronouncements", as well as a goodly portion of what comes out of some people's mouths, isn't either made up on the spot or simply made up period, for one reason or another, such as the absence of anything true which might support some of their other beliefs or actions. A classic example (and a neat segway to the next article) of this is when a Missouri judge in 1883 prevented an intermarriage, because, "It is stated as a well authenticated fact that if the [children] of a black man and white woman, and a white man and a black woman intermarry, they cannot possibly have any progeny, and such a fact sufficiently justifies those laws which forbid the intermarriage of blacks and whites." I rest my case.
* Still on the rich topic of dysfunctional or just plain silly beliefs, vampire lore is Count Chocula full of them. For example, according to folklore there are a number of ways to protect yourself from vampires, including the ever-popular wearing of garlic or a religious symbol such as a cross. You can slow a vampire down by giving him something to do, like pick up poppy seeds or unravel a net. (They're reportedly quite compulsive.) Cross water and he can't follow. If you can find the body, give it a bottle of whiskey or food so it doesn't have to travel. If that doesn't work, either shoot the corpse (may require a silver bullet) or drive a stake through the heart. And remember, the vampire won't enter your dwelling unless invited.
*
Trivia is the Roman goddess of sorcery, hounds and the crossroads. [How's THAT for trivia??]
* During the middle ages, it was widely believed that men had one less rib than woman. This is because of the story in the Bible that Eve had been created out of Adam's rib. Apparently, almost nobody ever thought to count the ribs of skeletons.......or, as per the above discussion, the legs of spiders!!
* In medieval times, many Europeans believed thunderstorms to be the work of demons. Accordingly, when it stormed, bell ringers would go up into their towers to ring the consecrated bells in an effort to stop the storm. This practice didn't always work out so well for them.
* [Note: my sincere apologies in advance to anyone who might be offended by this article. I have always firmly believed the undeniable truths that all humanity is related and each of us is unique, and have always been puzzled, repelled and appalled by bigotry and discrimination of any sort. For a variety of reasons, its prevalence in my close neighbor the USA has always been particularly disturbing to me. Yes, i realize their socio-historical background is unique amongst nations, but the tenacity of this particular type of intolerance in an era where we know better (science has convincingly discredited and demolished the idea of "race"), is truly shocking. Yes, Canada is in some ways little better as a whole, but it just seems more blatant and openly-practice in the USA, and in many ways distorts, disrupts and corrupts the socio-cultural landscape there to an alarming degree.] It seems paradoxical that in the country which invented the notion of the "melting pot" - a nation whose inhabitants are virtually all immigrants from all the corners of the world, there has from the beginning been fierce opposition to the marriage or mixing of people of different skin color. Humanity was viewed as a mosaic of "races" - caucasion or "white", negroid or "black", Amerindian or "red", Asian or "yellow", and various other slightly more nuanced definitions which usually mixed together a broad variety of genetic variability (The ultimate folly of this still widely practiced method of categorizing people can be seen in two related instances: a) the "black race" is often deemed to include people from India, SE Asia, native Australians and even Polynesians and Filipinos, strictly on the basis of the dark color of their skin, and b) In the immensely-simplified US Census terminology, the term "Asian Race" is strictly geographical - anyone whose ancestry is mostly from non-Russian Asian countries is encouraged to designate themselves as belonging to the "Asian Race" - Mongolians, Chinese, SE Asians, Polynesians, Indians of all kinds.....the government wants them all to be just "Asian", to satisfy the twin requirements of simplisticicity (if i may coin a word....) and maintaining the system of racial classification which has caused so much strife and sorrow throughout the history of Western countries. Anyway, to return to the notion of "racial mixing", 40 USA states at one time or another have passed laws forbidding the marriage of people of different "races" - most especially "black" and "white", but in areas such as California where Asians have emigrated to in large enough numbers to warrant repression, "whites" were also forbidden to take them as spouses. Indeed, when these laws were finally and very recently (June 12, 1967) declared illegal and unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, 15 states still maintained such laws. Even more revealingly, although rendered unenforceable by the 1967 ruling, some states kept these laws on their books for decades, Alabama only repealing theirs in 2005!!! // The reasons given for such arrangements were a combination of ignorance, arrogance, mis-application of Old Testament injunctions against the Hebrews mingling with the ethic groups around them, pseudo-religious excuses and fear (witness for example, the "reasoning" of Virginia's Judge Leon Bazile in the famous 1959 Loving case (in which a black man and white woman were sentenced to prison for trying to circumvent Virginia law by marrying in Washington DC), where he brazenly declared: "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Maylay and red, and he placed them on separate continents," he said. "And but for the interference with His arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriages.") - but they all boiled down to the wish to maintain social, cultural and economic domination by those of Western European descent (although even there, various groups were often discriminated against - the Irish, because they were traditional rivals of the English (and (gasp!) Catholic also), the Germans for similar reasons, Jews because of religious intolerance, and Italians for some reason i've never been able to figure out - perhaps because they look a bit different from the average Englishman.....pure-bread Spaniards (as opposed to "Hispanics", who are a mixture of Spanish, African and Native American bloodlines) were not often targeted, since they were usually wealthy and included in the socially dominant "class". // A curious example of how this way of thinking was, and to some extent still is, often taken to its illogical extreme, can be found in the "one drop rule" which was first proposed by owners of dark-skinned slaves as a means of maximizing their slave ranks while minimizing inheritance-related legal challenges resulting from "mixed race" marriages. Anyone with even "one drop" - any known ancestry at all, no matter how remote - of "black" blood was considered to be "black" for any and all purposes, most especially regarding miscegenation - "racially mixed" marriages as referred to above. Some states such as Florida softened it a little, however - there, if you had only one of your 16 great-great-grandparents deemed to be "black", then you yourself were viewed as "legally white". On a national level, the upper limit of offending "black blood" was set by the U.S. Supreme Court in its landmark 1896 Plessey vs. Ferguson ruling, in which Homer Plessey, who had one black great grandparent, was denied the right to ride in a railroad car reserved for whites, so long as there were "separate but equal" [LOL!!] accommodations. In more recent times, "blacks" have to some extent taken up this notion as well, perhaps as a means of swelling their ranks thus giving them more socio-cultural influence: if you have even a hint of brown in your skin, you are considered to be a "brother" or "sister" in most "black" circles these days - although in some communities social stratification still exists, based upon how dark one's skin is: indeed, according to the "paper bag rule", if your skin is darker than the color of an older-style paper bag (which have been getting "whiter" in recent years....), you were considered "too black". // In the USA of today, nearly all "blacks" can count one or more "whites" amongst their ancestry, while an estimated 20% of all "whites" would fail the "one drop rule" - perhaps 35% (ok, this is just a wild guesstimate......) if all the various other "races" are included. Thus, only a tiny minority of "Americans" [a term i habitually avoid using because it is confusing: all citizens of North and South America are "American", geographically-speaking] can be considered "racially pure", to use a hate-filled term popular amongst certain groups increasingly represented on the Internet. If the Arizona law highlighted below were rigidly applied, the Population Explosion in the USA as well as in most parts of the world, would become a swift and sudden "implosion", and the earth would have at least temporary relief from its domination by our often ecologically destructive species. [Note: a lot of the material used above, was appropriated from a splendid anonymous write-up of the exemplary PBS series "An American Love Story", which can be at least for now, found here: http://www.pbs.org/weblab/lovestories/digdeeper/pressinfo6.shtml]
* The first Gallup poll in the USA conducted on the issue of interracial marriage was in 1958 and showed that 94% of whites opposed such unions.
* In Arizona, persons of "mixed race" of any kind were once prohibited from marrying anyone, even each other. [Can you say "genocide".....how about "eugenics" (Ya ve are dee master race!!)?]
* As the proportion of Americans increasingly becomes "Hispanic", "black" and "Asian", inequalities grow. According to the Pew Hispanic Center's 2004 "The Wealth of Hispanic Households: 1996 to 2002" study, "the median net worth of Hispanic households in 2002 was $7,932. This was only nine percent of $88,651, the median wealth of non-Hispanic White households at the same time. The net worth of Non-Hispanic Blacks was only $5,988. Thus, the wealth of Latino and Black households is less than one-tenth the wealth of White households even though Census data show their income is two-thirds again as high."
* Many folks routinely confound (which means to use interchangeably by mistake) the terms "coastline", which means the general outline of the coast and often cuts off small bays and inlets, and "shoreline", which is a more exact term meaning the distance a person would walk if following the high tide line. Needless to say, the latter is considerably longer. So, per
http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/site.english/english/learningresources/facts/coastline.html, Canada's coastline is 202,080 km, and its shoreline is the figure often mis-represented as its "coastline": 243 042 km (151,485 miles) (which according to http://geography.about.com, includes the coastline of the country's 52,455 [supposedly marine] islands.). These three figures are by a wide margin, the largest of any country in the world: in fact, according to the CIA's "World Fact Book", Canada's coastline (used in its proper sense) represents 56.76 percent of the world's 356,000 km (221,500 miles ) of coasts. "For the record", Indonesia comes in second with a total of 54,716 km (33,925 miles) of coastline. I have no idea who's on third.
* Type 2 diabetes, which is most often caused by a diet rich in refined and processed foods combined with lack of exercise and excess weight, is the only major disease in the "developed" world which is killing more people each year: its incidence is up 20 to 30% over 1990 levels, and even more in some countries. In 2005, it is estimated to have killed (ie, shortened the life-span) about 250,000 people in North America alone (i.e., Canada and the USA - Mexican figures are more difficult to come by), and there are an estimated 20 million people living with the disease, many of whom are unaware of why they are experiencing such symptoms as chronic fatigue, poor circulation in their extremities, frequent urination, excessive thirst and slower healing rates. It is estimated that diabetes costs the US economy about $130 billion per year in treatment and lost productivity. Yet, research and prevention programs are increasingly being cut or short-funded, due to the massive deficit which has built up to nearly $400 billion per year since 2000. However, cutting prevention programs for diseases, crime, drug addiction, teen pregnancy, poverty or any other undesirable conditions one can think of, is an extremely short-sighted and harmful reaction to budget crunches: it has been estimated that for every dollar spent in prevention, between 5 and 15 dollars are saved in the future - not to mention untold suffering and societal problems which result from things which can be dealt with much easier, cheaper and more effectively by preventative instead of treatment methodologies .... yes, treatment is of course necessary, but prevention should be an equal or greater focus, considering how much more effective and economic it is. The old adage "A stitch in time saves nine." is simple common sense - yet in our ideologically-driven society, common sense is often over-ridden by stubbornly-held ideas, beliefs and notions which often serve as "blinders" and prevent people from seeing things which are right in front of our faces: it is a painful fact that many people see only what they believe in, rather than believing in what they see. (How's that for meandering away from a topic? I'm getting better at it by the day!)
* Yes, i live in Canada, but i still consider the way the USA was "assembled" bit by bit, to be nothing short of a convoluted marvel: even the agglomeration of the original 13 colonies into something approximating a country, took from 1774 (the date of the first Continental Congress) to 1790 (the year the states ratified the articles of the Constitution)!! By 1803, the borders were up to the Mississippi River. At that time, England, France, Russia and Spain claimed the rest of the continent, and native ethnic groups (the concept of "tribe" is a secondary one invented by the European invaders/settlers - this will be the topic of a later article) were also ready and willing to defend their home turf. At this juncture Napoleon, wanting loot for his neo-Roman quest to conquer all of Europe, double-crossed Spain and sold the fledgling country vast territories - roughly, the Missiissippi to the Rockies, minus Texas - in what is known as the Louisiana Purchase (to be continued: this is more tricky a topic than i had imagined... in a nutshell, Spain, Mexico, Russia and the sovereign nation of Hawaii lost, and jolly old England managed a draw. The Philippines had a rather nasty time of it in the process, but surprisingly, doesn't seem to hold much of a grudge. (France, on the other hand......))
* Wetlands all around the world have been under attack since the beginning of agriculture, but since the "industrial age" really took off in the 1950s, and the "population boom" exploded in the 1960s and '70s, the destruction of the world's wetlands has become a veritable slaughter: an estimated 50 to 60% of the planet's wetlands have been lost since 1900 alone, and in some jurisdictions, such as for example Iowa, up to 95% of the original wet areas (bogs, fens, swamps, salt marshes (ok, not in Iawa....), frequently-flooded plains....) have been "developed" for agricultural and other human-related uses. To many, a bog or swamp is just a waste of land, waiting to be filled in and "made useful" - all you have to do is dump some earth into it and voila, you have nice flat ground eminently suitable to almost any purpose you may wish it for: no blasting, hill-top removal, etc. required! However, their service to natural and human-related systems is diverse and absolutely vital: they absorb huge volumes of water during periods of flooding, they purify water for all and sundry, they act as "nurseries" for fish and other animals we and other species eat, and they support a huge variety of flora and fauna (plants and animals, i.e.): most wetlands are "biodiversity hot spots", meaning that the variety of life-forms they harbour/provide vital habitat for, is much higher than average. When wetlands are destroyed, floods become worse, water quality goes down, fish and other stocks (shellfish, crustaceans) are diminished, aquatic birds lose both homes and stopping places along migratory routes, and populations of huge numbers of species are killed outright, or denied places to live. // It should be noted that we are not talking about small areas either: when taken in aggregate, up to 8% of the world's land surface area can be categorized as some form of "wetlands" (14% in Canada - most of Manitoba is a big swamp.....). The amount that have been lost in some areas is amazing: for example, Mississippi has lost in the last century, an area of wetlands bigger than the state of Delaware!! (and especially along the coasts, they perform especially vital functions, such as bearing the brunt of hurricanes - much as the mangrove swamps of many parts of the world protect the land behind them from storms and large waves: when the tsunami of Christmas Day, 2004 hit the northern Indian Ocean, areas protected by intact mangrove swamps were FAR less damaged than those which had lost much of this kind of habitat.
* In the scientific world view (i.e., one which tries to assume as little as possible - a condition called "objectivity"), there are no such things as "facts": there are only observations and the ideas which are put forward in order to try and explain what is observed - by whatever means: instruments, senses, or otherwise. A proposed explanation which seems to support the available observations, but which has not been tested or verified very well, is called a "hypothesis". When a particular hypothesis has been challenged, tested by a variety of methods and researchers, and is still left standing afterwards (i.e., it has not been demonstrated to be false in any convincing fashion), and is thereby well-supported by diligent and repeated applications of what is regarded as "good" or "solid" science, it is then dubbed a "theory": hence we can say that any idea which is widely accepted by the scientific community at large (because it a) adequately explains *ALL* the observations deemed relevant, repeatable, and credible by the "mainstream" of said community, and b) has been repeatedly tested and challenged, and still survives), is permitted to graduate from the level of "hypothesis" to that of "theory". Hence, when mis-informed people deride ideas such as say, evolution as being "only a theory", they are in fact unwittingly praising it: the very fact that it is widely accepted as being credible enough to constitute a full-blooded theory, as opposed to the much more tentative category of hypothesis, indicates that is does indeed have wide and well-deserved acceptance within the mainstream of scientific thought: it has been repeatedly challenged (which is what "testing a hypothesis" is all about), and has stood its ground admirably - or at least adequately!
* The most recently-discovered "planet" (its small size and highly unusual orbit have led many scientists to cast doubts upon its claim to the status of "planet" - along with its nearest neighbour Pluto: this means that depending upon what criterion you accept, there are now either 8 or 10 full-fledged planets in the solar system of our home star) has been unofficially dubbed Zena (and its moon, Gabrielle) - its official designation is still the rather prosaic moniker "UB313". It was until recently believed to be up to 30% larger than Pluto, based upon its brightness. However, recent images captured by the space telescope Hubble in March 2006, have shown it to be only 5% larger than the previous outermost planet claimant - meaning its surface must be highly reflective: as bright as new-fallen snow!!! (In techno-speak, it has a very high "albedo" - a measure of what percentage of light is reflected by a given surface.). Richard Binzel, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, has declared this fact "a wonderful mystery", since no plausible explanation has been yet proposed for it. In order for a planet to be that reflective, it would likely have to have its surface very frequently "renewed", such as by atmospheric methane or other gases repeatedly evaporating and freezing, or via methane "geysers" spouting from the surface - but so far, nobody can figure out what might be going on, since all the hypotheses put forward so far have serious problems!!
* Over 150 moons are so far known to circle the 8 to 10 planets of our solar system, as of mid-2005. Jupiter is the planet with the most - 63 at the last count. Saturn now has 46. Uranus has 27 and Neptune 13. Pluto boasts at least 2, Mars the same, and earth has only one which we've found, despite diligent searching. Venus and Mercury are believed to be completely bereft of satellites.
* The history of our knowledge of Uranus is quite fascinating: English astronomer William Herschel discovered the planet in 1781 during a telescopic survey of the zodiac. He promptly named it the Georgium Sidus (the Georgian Planet) in honor of his patron, King George III. Later, to the everlasting delight of schoolchildren, George was re-named Uranus, the Greek god of the sky. The fascinating thing about it, is that it can be seen with the naked eye - so the ancients could have noticed that it is is a "wanderer" amongst the stars: a celestial object that changes position relative to the normal, constant-position stars. However, since it orbits the sun only once every 84 years it only changes position relative the stars VERY slowly. Also, it is extremely dim: just barely visible to the unaided eye - one would have had to be extremely diligent to have noticed, over a period of decades, that such a dim object was in fact a wandering rambler of a celestial light - in ancient Greek, a plan t s, which in English has been rendered "planet".
* The planet Uranus is unique, in that it rotates "on its side" - with its axis of rotation perpendicular to the plane of revolution around the sun - as if something had knocked it over! It has a "ring" system around it, as does Neptune and of course the famous Saturn, and 27 known moons (as of May, 2005) - 5 large (greater than 450 km (280 mi) in diameter) and 17 considerably smaller.
* A newly-developed form of CPR may be saving a LOT of lives soon: it is called "Cardiocerebral Resusication", and is designed to keep the blood circulating, especially to the brain, which can suffer permanent damage after as little as 3 minutes of little or no blood-flow. Normal CPR procedures follow the "ABC" model of first aid: 1) Ensure proper Air is getting to the lungs, 2) Stop large-scale Bleeding as much as possible, and 3) If the heart is stopped, try to start it again (the C is for Cardio). So, with classic CPR, breathing into the victim's lungs is given equal or more emphasis and priority compared to heart compressions. This is still the recommended course of action with drowning, drug overdose and trauma cases, but with cardiac arrests ("heart attacks"), time spent on getting air to the lungs is valuable time wasted and can even be harmful. It seems that if you witness someone having a "cardiac event" which results in their heart stopping, you should IMMEDIATELY begin vigorous, rapid, rhythmic heart compressions - at a rate of about 80 per minute - the rhythmic (i.e., regular) part is important, since it helps stimulate/renew the heart's regular action. A breath every half minute or so is good also, especially if you have someone else who can do this, but too much mouth to mouth during the process is not helpful. // If you have access to a defibrillator, start CR first, then use it afterwards, if you are un-successful after a couple of minutes: defibrillators work well, but they can cause a lot of damage in the process - so it is best to see if you can get the heart re-stated via natural processes first.
* The second most common cause of death in most developed nations, is "out of hospital cardiac arrest" - or various forms of "heart attack", taking place outside of a hospital setting where it can usually be treated rapidly. In the USA, for example, half a million (500,000) people die each year when their heart stops unexpectedly.
* When your heart suddenly stops (as in the above item), you have only a 10% statistical chance of survival overall. If paramedics or someone with a defibrillator handy (they are becoming more common all the time) is available, your chances of living doubles, to 20% - if normal procedures are followed: establish an airway first, then do the defibrillator and CPR if deemed necessary after that. HOWEVER, recent studies have shown that when the much more effective protocols (NOTE: a "protocol" is simply a "recommended" or recommended course of action - for example it is standard protocol to roll out the red carpet when a queen or other high dignitary comes to town or gets off an airplane) are used - leave the respirator and defib machine for later, and immediately begin vigorous, rapid cardiac compressions - the survival rate sky-rockets to an amazing 58%!! It should be noted that most of the time, the defibrillator machine is needed to re-start the heart, but the immediate compressions serve to keep blood flowing to the brain - which makes a huge difference in survival rate.
* Here's an extremely weird fact for you: Some people are their own twins! They have two distinct sets of DNA associated with different parts of their bodies. Two cases in point: 1) A women was undergoing a custody battle during an acrimonious divorce. The husband claimed that not all the children were his. In the course of paternity testing it was found that her DNA did not match either of the children. As Providence would have it, she happened to be pregnant at the time and when she gave birth, once again it was found that the DNA did not match. She nearly had her children taken away before this proof was given. 2) A man was accused of rape and murder; DNA evidence was recovered from the woman's body but was found to not match the DNA taken from the man via a cheek swab. It was subsequently found to match his DNA taken from a blood sample. ---- Apparently it has been found that on occasion the fertilized eggs of fraternal twins can join together to become a single embryo, with the different DNAs presenting in different parts and organs of the body. Something we would never have known without DNA testing.
* The enamel on teeth is the hardest natural substance produced by "life as we know it" - harder than a good many kinds of rock!! This is why teeth are the most commonly found type of vertebrate fossil: long after even the bones of a person or animal have decayed and returned to the earth, teeth often persevere and can be used to provide us with a surprising amount of information regarding their former owners.
* An estimated 1 in 4 (25%) of all North Americans has appeared on television in one way or another.
* Some rocks, most spiders, all unopened cans of beans, and eggs and potatoes are reported to be some of the things that tend to explode in microwave ovens. (Warning: do NOT try this at home.....)
* In their hey-day, the Beatles ('60s rock group) bragged that they had become "more popular than Jesus". While that was most certainly not true, the current leader of the USA could boast that on the World Wide Web (well, at least the 25+ billion pages of it indexed by Google in early 2006......), he is more popular (or at least well-known......) than even God!! A search for" Bush" will turn up some 700 million pages, of which about 600 million refer to "the Dubya guy"(number varies considerably over time) - while God only rates about 400 million. Jesus is only given a mention on some 200 million web pages - 250 million when his most frequently used other name (which is actually an attribute - Christ) is included.
* The last country in the world to get telephones was the mountainous nation of Bhutan, in the Himalayas. They didn't get connected with the rest of the world via this ubiquitous means of communication, until around 1981.
* Once every couple of generations, one or at most a very few exceptional people will dominate any given field of human endeavor - in music, for example, there are never more than 3 or 4 out of many thousands of composers who tower over their contemporaries and de-facto "define" their era: Bach and Handel in the late Baroque, Mozart in the Classical and Beethoven in the early Romantic period, for example. Often, these Exceptional People are either shaped by, or have to overcome great personal tragedies or difficulties in order to attain or maintain their dominance. Lance Armstrong (USA) is a good illustration of this: he holds the record as the only rider to have won the Tour de France - the most grueling bicycle race in the world - seven times (consecutively 1999 2005, when he retired at the top of his form). Remarkably, he did this despite being attacked by, and recovering from a nasty form of cancer that would have either killed or made an invalid of most of us!!
* Although most people, including most "environmentalists" don't realize it, one of the species which might easily become critically endangered (i.e., in danger of going extinct) is Homo sapiens sapiens - US!! In the long term, mother nature will replenish the supply of biodiversity (different kinds of life-forms) lost after even the worst nuclear war humankind could unleash: after all, at the end of the Permian geological period, about 240 million years ago if the geologists and paleontologists are correct, a whopping 90+% of all the life-forms on the planet were wiped out by a combination of immense natural disasters, and things were looking pretty bleak for a while. However, in the space of several tens of millions of years, life rebounded with a vengeance, and the age of the dinosaurs had begun. In fact, there have been 6 "mass extinction events" that we know about - each clearing the biosphere of 50% or more of all the teeming species inhabiting the earth at the time. Yet, today we find at least 10 million and as many as perhaps 50 million forms of life in a stunning display of biodiversity which truly boggles the mind. Now, our particular species ("humankind"), while being remarkably resilient in many respects, is still extremely Dependant upon relatively intact natural systems for its survival - as well as a certain degree of climate-related stability: our supply of fresh water, for example, is connected with natural wetlands (which don't include golf ponds and storm-sewer settling pools, by the way.... "no net loss of wetlands" is about as deceptive as, well, "We shouldn't' wait until the mushroom clouds start sprouting up before invading [insert name of appropriate Axis of Evil "rogue state" here...]"!!) and sun-polluted soil for filtration and purification, and the oxygen in the air we breathe is the product of trillions of plants which purify and replentish the atmosphere we need in order to live. A combination of pollution, habitat degredation, ozone depletion and increasing climactic instability and unpredictability largely due to global warming (whether caused by our wasteful civilization or by natural causes we don't understand, the effects will be the same....), may very well disrupt our food supplies, make clean air and drinkable water less and less common, and cause natural systems worldwide, to break down and become much less favorable for the survival of MANY species, including eventually our own...... it is sobering to realize that while in the long run, the natural world will do just fine - no matter what we do, life on earth will survive, and given enough time to recover, thrive again - but we humans may very well not be around to witness it!! (Of course, if the Biblical predictions of a New Earth where we'll at least begin our voyage into Eternity come true in a literal sense (per Rev. 21, and parallel OT prophecies of an eternal, paradise-like earth), then i am just babbling.... but if bible-based eschatology (i.e., end-time prophecies) is meant in allegorical or metaphorical senses, as they very well may be, then ..... we're in BIG trouble!!).
* Chewing gum has been around in various forms for at least 9,000 years, according to archaeologists. Most of it has historically been derived from the sap of various trees: .......The ancient Greeks chewed mastiche - a chewing gum made from the resin of the mastic tree.....The ancient Mayans chewed chicle which is the sap from the sapodilla tree....North American Indians chewed the sap from spruce trees and passed the habit along to the settlers. The modern form of gum so popular in North American society, has a colorful history: in 1869, General Antonio de Santa Anna, of "Remember the Alamo" fame (he lead the Mexicans in the USA-Mexican war which resulted in Mexico losing its northern territories to Texas) introduced chicle (see above) to photographer and inventor Thomas Adams, while staying at his house in New York state during a nice, comfortable exile, and told him he could get a steady supply of the stuff from his relatives back in Mexico. Mr. Adams tried for a year to turn chicle into various synthetic rubber products, without success. According to Adams family lore, when he was just about to throw out his last batch of raw chicle, he noticed a small girl buying flavored paraffin gum at the local drug store, and suddenly recalled that chicle had been chewed by Mexican natives for as long as anyone could recall. Voila!! He promptly chopped up a batch of chicle into little pieces and sold it to the local pharmacy as "Adams' New York Gum No. 1". The rest is history!! He soon added fruit flavors, started to sell it in vending machines by 1888, and a chap named Wrigley came up with the idea or adding minty flavors to chicle-based gum in 1914. Modern day gums, such as "Chiclets", boast lists of ingredients such as "Citrus Samba" (made from citrus-tree resin): Maltitol, Sorbitol, Gum Base (lots of ingredients, often including pine resins), Xylitol, Artificial and Natural Flavoring, and "less Than 2% of: Acacia, Acesulfame Potassium, Aspartame, BHT (To Maintain Freshness), Candelilla Wax, Glycerin, Soy Lecithin, Sucralose, Titanium Dioxide (Color) and Yellow 5." - but no chicle.
* Queen Elizabeth I regarded herself as a paragon of cleanliness. She declared that she bathed once every three months, whether she needed it or not.
* Like most folks, you were probably born with 300 bones, but by the time you become an adult, you had only 206.
* Horses have 19 muscles around each ear, that enable them to move them through 180 degrees. Humans, on the other hand, consider themselves talented if they can merely wiggle their ears!!
* The average lead pencil, if sharpened with minimal loss of graphite, will draw a line 35 miles long or write approximately 50,000 English words.
* What is called a "French kiss" in the English speaking world is known as an "English kiss" in France. Similarly, when syphilis was first recognized for what is actually is, it was called the "French disease" in England, and yes, the "English disease" in France.
* According to those who have treated these culinary possibilities, beetles taste like apples, wasps like pine nuts, and worms like fried bacon. Humans, by comparison, are reported to taste like piggies, while snakes have been compared to chicken. Wonder what the average politician tastes like?
* Current estimates of the number of people killed per year in California alone by "smog" - the nasty mixture of fine particulate matter spewed out by cars, trucks, locomotives, ships, planes, refineries and other sources, which lodges deep in the lungs and is widely considered the most lethal form of air pollution, are 9 to 10,000. This would seem to indicate that the overall number of folks whose lives are hastened to a premature end by all air pollution in the USA is considerably higher than the 50,000 usually claimed (not to mention the zillions of cases of asthma and other lung-related conditions that cause untold personal as well as economic harm......). However, things may actually be twice or three times as bad as these figures point to - recent studies all over the place are telling us that air pollution is even deadlier on the whole, than almost anyone realizes - it's not just a matter of inconvenience, poor visibility and paranoia, but truly one of life and death, as well as quality of life for a great many throughout the entire "civilized" world!! Now, let's be generous with our figures and say that a comparable number of people - 50,000 or so - are killed WORLDWIDE each year by ALL forms of terrorism combined, and maybe 500 per year on the average over the past decade, for the USA. If one was to objectively look at these figures and designate funding priorities appropriately.... well, you get the idea: the USA's "anti-terrorism" budget, including the insanely expensive invasion and occupation of Iraq and the vast increases in "security"-related spending since 2001, is probably around $200+ billion dollars per year. Wonder how much is being spent to drastically and swiftly reduce the death rate, damage and other risks associated with air pollution in that country, which annually kills at least 100 times the number of people that "terrorism" does?? Better yet, i wonder how much it would cost to reduce the number of air-pollution related deaths by say, two thirds (66%)? I'm betting it would be considerably less than most people would consider "fair and reasonable" - and most of it would be borne by the enormously profitable fossil fuel industry at any rate!!
* Our solar system's biggest storm is the "Great Red Spot" on Jupiter. Believed to have formed over 400 years ago, it is twice as wide as our entire planet. It has long been thought that the huge storms on this "gas giant" planet form when smaller storms merge - and precisely that has been observed recently: in 2000, three relatively small storms merged to form a larger one, about half as large as the Big One ("Red Jr."? The "Not so great Red Spot"?). At first it was white, as are most storms on the planet. But, this year it turned red and is now exactly the same color as its older brother. It is hypothesized that these huge, hurricane-like storms are stable on Jupiter because they never have to pass over land, and are constantly fed by the planets internal, gravity-based heat source.
* The largest oceanic current in the world is the Circum-antarctic current, which as its name suggests, circles the Antarctic continent. It transports over 100 times the flow of all the rivers of the world COMBINED - 130 million cubic meters of of water per second (for those still using the Olde Englishe system of weights and measures, that's 144.5 million tons of water per second - 4560 trillion tons of water per year!!). This huge current (actually just a part of the circum-polar circulation system, which mixes water from the world's oceans: Atlantic, Pacific, Indian) is very poorly understood, as are its influences upon the world's climate.
* The phrase "triple klutz jump", a fairly obvious figure skating pun, has seemingly only been coined once by someone who puts their thoughts on the Internet - a surprisingly popular blogger named Hal Stern.
* Hitler's widely ballyhooed dietary practices reportedly stemmed from the severe stomach cramps he acquired when in his fourties. Before then, he avidly consumed a rich diet heavy in meats (especially game birds) and pastries. According to reports, he refused to seek medical help for the condition and instead experimented with such things as elimination diets: first, he gave up the pastries, cakes and rich deserts he was so fond of, then went on to nix meats and dairy products. This seemed to help somewhat, but he reportedly relapsed into his old ways repeatedly, to the end of his days. He was by no means a "vegetarian" as is repeatedly and unadornedly reported in various "Stupid Facts" pages which litter the Internet with little factoids which are often either essentially meaningless due to their extreme brevity, or just plain wrong.
* The "black box" in commercial airliners is actually most often orange: it is far easier to find an orange box in the debris of a crash than a black one.
* All proteins are not created equal. The protein which derives from flesh foods ("red" meat, fish, birds) is almost identical to those which we are made of, hence easily and completely utilized by the body (although they are very difficult to digest and are often associated with some nasty saturated fats - and in most domestic animals are contaminated by antibiotics, steroids and other things most of you Gentle Readers DON'T really wish to know about...). Most plant proteins, on the other hand, are "incomplete": they contain proportions of the "essential" amino acids (methionine, lysine, threonine, leucine, valine, isoleucine, arginine, phenylalanine, histidine, and tryptophan) which the human body cannot manufacture by itself. Therefore, individual plant proteins by themselves, are only partially usable by our bodies. A well-balanced vegetarian diet, however, will contain "complementary" proteins: combinations of plant proteins which when combined in a given meal or within about 8 hours of each other, form a more complete blend of amino acids which we can more fully use to build our own proteins. The easiest and most commonly used "complementary protein" combination is that of grains (corn, wheat, rye, spelt, millet, rice......) and modest amounts of legumes (peas, beans, lentils, peanuts......): legumes are low in methionine and tryptophan, but high in lysine and isoleucine whereas, grains are high in lysine and isoleucine and low in tryptophan and methionine. So, when combined, they form a much more "complete" protein! It should be noted that grains are excellent sources of protein, and that it only takes between 5 and 10% of legume protein compared to the amount of grain proteins consumed, to produce a "complete" amino acid balance which ensures that almost none of the total amount of protein eaten in any given day is fully usable by out bodies. SO, when it comes to balancing out grain and legume proteins, "a little dab'll do ya" on the legume side!
* The most "complete" (see above discussion) plant protein comes from soybeans: they contain a balance of "essential" amino acids (i.e., those our bodies can't manufacture) which closely resembles meat, and therefore eating soybeans or soy protein isolate is essentially the same as eating meat, when it comes to the protein department!
* Sometimes i think we are living in the "disinformation age", rather than the opposite: while i wouldn't go nearly as far as Gurdjiefff's cynical dictum "Everything you know is a lie", a surprisingly large portion of what is offered as "fact" by sources of varying degrees of credibility are "in fact" simply false - yet still widely believed, even by many who consider themselves well educated. Some good examples (besides the classic "A duck's quack won't echo - nobody knows why" (partial truth - turns out the acoustic properties of the average quack make for poor but certainly not non-existent echoes.) are:
* 1) "You can't sneeze (or yawn) in your sleep": completely false: these are reflexive actions mediated by the brain stem, which is quite functional during sleep: the "sneeze reflex" is not turned off while we snooze.
* 2) George Washington had wooden teeth - - - - his teeth were made of an agglomeration of cow's and human teeth and ivory set in a lead base (and he didn't chop down a cherry tree when little, then fess up later either - nor did he throw a coin of any sort across the Delaware River!!)
* 3) Rates of violent crime have been increasing for years........ NOT!!! Since the late 70s in almost all industrialized countries, rates of violent crime (*especially* those not associated with drugs, i might add....) have been decreasing rather nicely. In the USA, for example, violent crime rates in 2000 were the lowest they had been since 1965. In that country there has been a slight increase in some kinds of violence since then (such as "hate crimes" of various sorts: crimes of intolerance), but on the whole, things are improving in most "first world" countries in this area.
* 4) Saddam was involved somehow in the World Trade Tower attacks in 2001 - - - while this hypothesis cannot be conclusively and absolutely disproven, there is in fact ZERO credible evidence to suggest that this was the case: according to **reliable** sources, he summarily dismissed out of hand, Al Queda representatives who came seeking his support - and there are no credible reports that he had kind words of any sort for Islamic militants. [Note: the man WAS a murderous dictator - this IS a well-established fact. He just wasn't very likely to have been involved with Islamic militants of any variety or flavor.)
* 5) You can catch a cold by getting cold - partial truth: while getting chilled by, for example being improperly clothed outside for a long time on a cold day, (interestingly enough, most especially if you get your *feet* extremely cold!) can temporarily depress your immune system so that you are more likely to succumb to common viruses such as colds and flues, simply doing something that can get you cold for a short period, such as "polar bear swimming", has little or no medium or long-term immune system effects and in many cases is quite beneficial overall.
* 6) We only use 10% of our brains on the average - - - complete tommyrot!!! The brain is an extremely complex organ, this is quite true, but a brief conversation with any neuroscientist will dispell any such notion in short order. That said, i would heartily agree with a variation of that notion - 90% of the time people don't critically examine the things they believe (often quite contrary to the most credible evidence....) to be "true"!! (or, to quote a famous North American "There is nothing so uncommon as common sense"....).
* 7) Wait a half hour after eating before you can safely go swimming. This one seemed almost universally accepted for some strange reason - and as with many other cherished fables, good luck trying to tell most people (especially mothers!) otherwise!!! The myth involves the possibility of suffering severe muscle cramping and drowning from swimming on a full stomach. While it s true that the digestive process does divert the circulation of the blood toward the gut and to a certain extent, away from the muscles, the fact is that an episode of drowning caused by swimming on a full stomach has **never** been documented. There s a theoretical possibility that one *could* develop a cramp while swimming with a full stomach, but a person swimming in a pool or controlled swimming area could easily exit the water if this happens. As with any exercise after eating, swimming right after a big meal might sometimes be uncomfortable, but it certainly won t cause you to drown.
* 8) "We're from the government and we're here to help".........to quote the immortal Bill Cosby, RIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT.
* The country (or entity of some sort - see end of article below) called the United States of America did not officially exist until March 11, 1781, when all the states finally ratified the Articles of Confederation, a document which set out the terms of confederation for the original 13 colonies. Although initially proposed on June 11, 1776, it was not agreed upon by Congress until November 15, 1777, and it took a hard-fought 3 and a half years before all involved finally agreed to form a new country based upon these terms. During this time, there was a "Congress", but no "real" president because the country did not really exist until the Articles were accepted by the first states.
* The "Articles of Confederation" which formed the basis of the first "version" of the USA, were NOT a resounding success: it seems that the individual states had too much power, making it REALLY difficult to agree on important issues. The way i understand it, a stronger union was needed since the center of the wheel (the federal government) was too weak to hold firmly. This was accomplished via the "Constitution", which was hammered out between May and September 1787, and ratified by the famous "13 states" over the following 3 years. The biggest bone of contention was to decide how the legislature would be structured. Some wanted representation to be based on population (Virginia Plan). Others wanted equal representation (New Jersey Plan). Roger Sherman from Connecticut proposed a legislature with two parts: States would have equal representation in the Senate. The population of states would determine representation in the House. It wasn't until May 29, 1790 when Rhode Island finally agreed to the terms of the Constitution that the famous 13 were finally joined together in a lasting, stable union.
* Massive tax slashing and huge expenditures for military adventures in the Middle East, have sparked cries for off-setting cuts to other government services and programs. A careful crunching of proposed 2006 budget numbers by the widely-respected (no comments from the Peanut Gallery now....) Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has come up with the following interesting information: Over five years, veterans' benefits would be cut 13 percent, or $10 billion. Despite all the political talk about energy research and alternate fuels, $4.4 billion would be cut from energy programs. Environmental spending, including for national parks, would be cut 22 percent, or $28 billion; housing, fuel, child care and nutrition programs for the poor and elderly would lose 13 percent, or $24 billion. Also included is a 13 percent cut $53 billion in education and job programs by 2011. This is all pretty interesting when compared to the $285 billion in additional mostly upper-bracket tax cuts which is also being vigorously sought by the Bushites, but not being spoken of very much in the numerous "information releases" and public announcements offered up by the current regime. One of the more baffling cuts is $2 million for the library and online information network (out of a current budget of $2.5 million) run by the EPA, which are critically vital to researchers in that environmental "watchdog" agency. What makes this destruction of information sources so unaccountable is the announced policy of increasing the budget for exactly the kind of information which so heavily relies upon such sources for their work. One might *almost* suspect either a) skulduggery of some sort in this matter, or b) gross incompetence (right hand having no clue as to what left hand is doing)......but perhaps this is going a bit too far - other suggestions are welcome here!!
* To many people, 'buffalo' is the popular name often used to describe North American bison; however, this is a misnomer. In fact, buffalo are distinctly different animals from bison. Although both bison and buffalo belong to the same family, Bovidae (as in "bovine" - cows and their relatives), true 'buffalo' are native only to Africa and Asia. The confusion most likely began when Europeans began calling them by the name of the animals they resembled, which they were already familiar with.
*
A particularly deadly plague that began in Ethiopia and passed through Egypt and Libya to Greece in 430-426 B.C. changed the balance of power between Athens and Sparta, ending the Golden Age of Athenian dominance in the ancient world. It is thought that up to one third of the Athenians, including their charismatic leader, Pericles, perished in the epidemic.
Until now our understanding of this outbreak was based on the account by the fifth century B.C. Greek historian Thucydides, who himself was taken ill with the plague but recovered. Despite Thucydides detailed description, researchers have not managed to agree on the identity of the plague and several diseases, including bubonic plague, smallpox, anthrax and measles have been blamed for the scourge.
A mass burial pit unearthed in the Kerameikos ancient cemetery of Athens and dated back to the time of the historical outbreak, provided the required skeletal material for the investigation of the ancient microbial DNA it still contained. Aided by modern DNA recovery and amplification techniques, Manolis J. Papagrigorakis et al used dental pulp to identify DNA sequences similar to those of the modern day bacteria which causes typhoid fever. The results of this study point to typhoid fever as the probable cause of the Plague of Athens.
Typhoid fever is transmitted by contaminated food or water, and nowadays the disease is most common in developing countries and in travelers returning from these countries.
* Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from blowing sand.
* The word "queue" is the only English word which is pronounced the same when it's last 2 or even 4 letters are removed.
* More people are allergic to various ingredients (such as casein and lactose) in cow's milk than any other food. Other foods which collectively account for more than 90% of all food allergies, are
o Peanuts (not actually a "nut" - they belong to the legume family, along with peas, beans and lentils)
o True nuts (such as almonds, cashews, pecans, and walnuts)
o Fish
o Shellfish
o Eggs
o "the Nightshade family" - tomatoes, potatoes, tobacco...
o Soy
o Wheat and other grains containing gluten.
* Malaria, which causes over 300 million illnesses and a million deaths per year (versus less than 10,000 for all terrorist attacks combined - but guess which one gets almost all the funding and media attention??), is caused by a small amoeba-like organism called a "plasmodium". It is transmitted via several species of tropical and sub-tropical mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles. The malaria parasite enters the human host when an infected mosquito takes a blood meal (female mosquitoes need blood to nourish their eggs. The much larger males do not trouble people at all). Inside the human host, the parasite undergoes a series of changes as part of its complex life-cycle. Its various stages allow the plasmodium to evade the immune system, infect the liver and red blood cells, and finally develop into a form that is able to infect a mosquito again when it bites an infected person. Inside the mosquito, the parasite matures until it reaches the sexual stage where it can again infect a human host when the mosquito takes her next blood meal - 10 to 14 or more days later. Malaria symptoms appear about 9 to 14 days after the infectious mosquito bite, although this varies with different plasmodium species. This clever parasite evades our immune system by continuously varying a protein which it deposits on infected cells, which is used by the immune system to identify and then destroy them. By the time out body produces antibodies to one of the 50 different identifying proteins, the malaria parasites are already using a different one... the body of the infected person can't keep up to the constant shifting, and malaria organisms can therefore hide from the immune system for up to years, to re-emerge and cause multiple bouts of the disease long after the first episode is past. // About 40% of humankind lives in malaria-infested areas, and both the plasmodiums and the mosquitoes that spread them are growing increasingly resistant to the chemicals used to treat and control them. The main reason that much more research isn't being done to find cures for malaria is quite simple: none of the world's wealthy countries is affected. Most of the appropriate research would normally be done by pharmaceutical companies, but since the overwhelming majority of people affected by this scourge are poor and live in impoverished countries, there is little economic incentive to spend large amounts of money developing treatments which few of the people who need it could afford! Also, since matters of "security" or "national interest" are not in question for the countries which could best afford to do non-commercialized research, there is similarly little incentive to fight the disease on the part of their public sectors (i.e., governments). // Call me a cynic, but it seems to me that except when confronted with the most dramatic of emergencies, most people are still asking the age-old question "Am i my brother's keeper?" when confronted with death and suffering, and still coming up with the answer "Not on you life!!"..... or perhaps "I gave at the office".
* Ever wonder how many diseases there are? As of 2003 or so, about 1450 different species of human pathogen (disease-causing organism - bacteria, viruses, ameboids, plasmodiums(see article on malaria, above), spirochetes (example: lyme disease) , etc.) were known, with many of them having a wide variety of "strains" or varieties. 60% of them can be contracted from animals, while the remaining 40% are associated only with humans.
* Newborn dolphins and killer whales - and their mothers - don't sleep for a month after birth. They surface every several seconds for air, and always keep an eye on each other. This contrasts with land mammals, who tend to spend as much time as possible in sleep in the earliest portion of their life. A newborn human offspring, for example, spends about 17 hours per day snoozing (and STILL manages to keep his or her mother up most of the night....).
* Workers in the world's poorest countries are about 70 times less productive (around the year 2000) than those in the world's wealthiest countries.
* The 48 poorest countries collectively account for less than 0.4 per cent of global exports.
* I may be like the proverbial broken record for saying so, but in the past 200 years the rich, both in terms of individuals and countries, have continually gotten richer, while the poor simply continue to multiply and supply the labor which ultimately enables the wealthy to multiply their material treasures. For a plethora of often depressing but nevertheless interesting and revealing comparisons between rich and poor, see this collection of information, extracted from the http://www.globalissues.org/ site, current to the early 21st century. The ratios in the meantime have become *much* more extreme since then, largely due to the swing to the political "right" ("conservative") amongst governments and to a certain extent, the general populace in wealthy countries around the world.
* Regular large doses of vitamin C, even up to levels many times the recommended daily average, don't have any significant effect in either the prevention or the cure or control of the common cold, according to several well-designed recent studies. As i point out below, taking vitamins and minerals in artificial form is of limited value in many cases, and in a gowning number of instances has been found to actually be harmful. It may cost a bit more, but it is most certainly **far** healthier (and tastier!!!) to simply eat a wide variety of nutritious foods, so that one gets the vitamins and minerals that we need, in a natural form that the body can use more easily and fully - and with fewer side effects!!
* The amount of money spent on drugs (alcohol, cocaine, heroin, cigarettes, caffeine, crystal meth, estacy, LSD.....) in the world annually, is well over two trillion dollars. The amount that would be required to provide decent sanitation, basic health care, clean water and secondary (high school) education to those in the world who lack them, would be, by contrast, less than 50 billion dollars per year. If this fact shocks you (and hopefully it will...), then a) "Just say NO.", and b) Get out there and do something about the situation.
* Antarctica is the windiest, driest and coldest place on the planet. Its lowest recorded temperature was -89.2°C (-128.6°F) at Russia's base Vostok in July 1983 - and that's without the wind chill factor!!! It's katabatik winds (Greek's kata meaning downwards) is the highest sustained wind velocity in the world which was recorded in French base of Dumond d'Urville in July 1972 at 327km/hr (203mph) (the highest absolute wid speed recorded, was a gust of 231mph at the summit of New Hampshire's Mount Washington on April 12, 1934). Katabatik winds is formed when air on the cold ice sheet in the higher plateaux becomes colder, denser and heavier. With gravitation pull, the heavy air spills over the mountain slopes towards the coastline with frightening speed, carrying up to 10,000 microscopic ice crystals particles per square inch with it - at 200 mph, the word OUCH comes to mind.......// The interior of the continent is classified as a desert, and gets a mere 50mm of precipitation (i.e., when converted to water instead of snow) per year - less than the center of the Sahara desert.
* If you want water, just come on over to Canada. We have about 32,000 lakes covering almost 9%, or 891,163 square km of the country - heck, Manitoba is basically a giant swamp with a couple of big lakes and Winnipeg attached!!
* Canada has the most fresh water per capita of any country in the world - over 90,000 cubic meters per year, as compared to Egypt, which has only 40.
* Australia has the interesting distinction of being the flattest country in the world. It is also one of the driest, although Namibia is sometimes touted as being supreme in this dusty category.
* Canada has 3 of the top 10 largest islands, 10 of the 40, and 22 of the 100 largest islands in the world. (not to make fun of the poor 'ole US of A, but they only have two islands in the top 100 - Hawaii, at #73 (but growing.....), and Alaska's famed, fabled Prince of Wales Island in the 96th spot.)
* If i may be permitted a bit of a rant.....and although it may be "politically incorrect" (and lots of people get fired for this proclivity these daze....), most people will agree that the American system of health care is an expensive, red-tape entangled nightmare which delivers vastly uneven care outcomes at greatly inflated prices - which rise about 10% each year. I could spend a **lot** of time and still not come up with anywhere near a comprehensive article, so a few basic stats will have to serve the purpose of illustrating the size and scope of the problem.
* --- In 1980, health care-related costs amounted to 9% of the GNP. By 2004, that tab was up to 16%. The total costs in 2004 were about 2 trillion (that's $2,000,000,000,000) dollars - an average of $6,300 per capita. This compares to about $4,000 per person in Canada, and less than $3,000 in many other industrialized countries in Europe and elsewhere, which have similar and in some cases superior overall health-related outcomes (such as infant mortality, average lifespan, percentage of people with long-term disabilities, etc.).
* --- Although about half of the total cost is government-financed, there are literally thousands of competing health-care systems in the country - in Seattle alone, for example, there are almost 800!! This is because health care is considered a commodity like any other, so it is largely left up to "market forces" to determine prices and structure in the sector.
* --- In some cases, fierce competition leads to greater efficiency and lower amdministrative costs. Health care is a notable exeption to this general rule. In the USA, an estimated 31% of all health-care expenses go to feed the beaurocracy - administrative costs for health care therefore consume nearly $600 billion dollars of the nation's expenditures. This rate is about twice the administrative percentage of Canada's health care system, by means of comparison.
* --- Over 45 million Americans currently (2005) have no health care insurance at all: they must rely upon emergency departments, charity and government aid of one kind or another - and a major health care emergency is often a one-way ticket to financial ruin.
* --- When a person goes into a hospital in the USA for treatment, he or she must deal with one of the highest rates of medical error and hospital-related dangers (many bacteria live mainly or exclusively in hospitals - especially strains highly resistant to most and in some cases ALL antibiotics) in the "first world", (and yes, this is a statement easily backed up by solid stats), but when it comes time to pay for it all, even for those with good health insurance plans things can get pretty scary: each doctor or specialist who has anything to do with a given patient bills them separately, along with sometimes several departments in the same hospital. Therefore, people fresh out of the hospital and trying hard to recover, are deluged with up to dozens of separate and often intricate bills which have to be deciphered and all the co-payments and deductibles taken care of. An entire industry of "hospital bill management" has sprung up to help the well-off deal with this beaurocratic bill blizzard of red tape!!
* --- The new system set up to help seniors pay for their prescription drugs is proving to be, well, nearly terminally complicated. It is market-based: the feds invited private companies to come up with their own programs, which were then negotiated with government agencies and individually approved. In any given state, up to several hundred competing plans, each with a myriad often radically differing details (formularies (lists of covered drugs), co-payments, covered procedures, deductibles.....), are available and choosing between them is NOT an easy or fun procedure. Furthermore, the total costs to everyone involved will be higher than before, since medicare plans BY LAW are forbidden to bargain with pharmaceutical companes to negotiate lower drug prices: each and every plan provider must simply pay whatever the drug companies demand for their wares on the so-called "open market". This is a bizzare case of ideology (that the "free market" system can provide goods and services better than government can) meeting "real politic" (pharmaceutical companies have excellent, well-organized lobbies and contribute a lot to political campaigns.....), to the detriment of all except for a few "special interests" who make out like far more than figurative bandits. In one instance of beaurocacy run amok, patients in nursing homes were RANDOMLY assigned (by the feds) to 43 different plans, meaning that the billing departments of many large nursing homes have to deal with up to 40 private companies in order to get medications to their clientelle. Preditably, the results haven't been pretty.
* As a general rule, the darker the color of a natural food, the more nutritious is is. Good examples include broccoli, liver, carrots, "dark green leafies" in general, pomegranites, blueberries, oranges and kiwis.
* Dogs may soon be used as a great help in the detection and diagnosis of cancer. Anecdotoal (i.e., based on stories peope tell) evidence has long pointed out that dogs and sometimes other animals can sometimes tell when their owners are ill even before they know it themselves. Now, at least three studies, the latest one by the Pine Street Foundation in San Anselmo, California, have given new credence to these observations. The study employed three Labrador retrievers and two Portuguese water dogs with no previous training, and over several weeks trained them using breath samples that had been exhaled into tubes by cancer patients. The human particpants were 55 people with lung cancer, 31 with breast cancer, and 83 with no known cancers at all. The dogs did amazingly well, detecting all but one of the lung cancer and 28 out of 31 of the breast cancer cases, with only 3 "false positives" - cases where they indicated someone had cancer who didn't. This is much better than non-invasive detection procedures (i.e., ones which don't involve getting inside the person's body in some way or the other) currently used, and also far cheaper. So, if you think that modern medicine is going to the dogs these days, you may be right!!
* One way to help visualize the relative sizes in the solar system, and our "place" in it correspondingly, is to imagine a model in which it is reduced in size by a factor of a billion (109). Then the Earth is about 1.3 cm in diameter (the size of a grape). The Moon orbits about a foot away. The Sun is 1.5 meters in diameter (about the height of a man) and 150 meters (about a city block) from the Earth. Jupiter is 15 cm in diameter (the size of a large grapefruit) and 5 blocks away from the Sun. Saturn (the size of an orange) is 10 blocks away; Uranus and Neptune (lemons) are 20 and 30 blocks away. A human on this scale is the size of an atom, while the nearest star would be found over 40,000 km (26,000 miles) from the atom-sized specks that represent us.
* The "war on Darwinism", by which most so-called "evangelical Christians" mean any form of science-based evolutionary theory, is heating up in the USA, with school boards being elected or defeated on the the issue, trials reminiscent of the "Scopes monkey trial" popping up to air the issue in a public forum on the national and international stage, and a hybrid hypothesis called "Intelligent design" (the "theistic evolution" of the 1970s - precisely the same arguments - trust me, i was there!!) charging up the middle in an attempt at a compromise which has a reasonable chance of making it into the public school system. In a nutshell, Theistic Design admits that the evidence points to the earth being very old, but argues that life as we know it is simply too complex and intricate to have developed through the processes of natural selection, via means of competition and other natural forces (no matter HOW long a time-frame is considered), therefore an external "intelligence" must have guided the process over the aeons - with the often unstated subtext that the only entity capable of guiding the development of life on a grand scale is God. This contrasts with traditional Judeo-Christian "young earth" creationism, which states that the history of the pre-Abrahamic world as described in Genesis is to be taken 100% literally, leading to the conclusion that the earth and every natural thing in it (and in extreme cases of this belief-path, the entire universe) was created in 7 days about 6,000 years ago, followed about 1500 years later by a world-wide flood which in most versions of the thesis, created most of the geological column within the span of less than a year. The main proponents of "Intelligent design" will swear up and down that they are not religiously motivated, and that they are trying to promote a serious, hard-core scientific theory. However, when it comes down to the crunch their own words proclaim their true motivation. A case in point is found in a fund raising letter sent out in late 2005 and/or early 2006 by Discovery Institute founder Phillip Johnson, which stated flat out that "our ultimate goal is to affirm God and defeat Darwinism...to shape public policy in accordance with conservative Christian philosophy and get it into our schools." // It should be noted that the majority of Christians on a worldwide basis, while of course believing that God created the universe (through some process of which we do not yet understand the nitty-gritty details), do not wish to "shape public policy" in their various political constituencies to the point where their particular viewpoint is taught in the public schools of their area or region.
* In Vietnam, the ratio of "mercenaries" (arms-bearing employees of "Private Military Companies" or more euphemistically "Security" firms) to regular forces was about 100 regular troops to 1 "quasi-military" fighting personell. In Iraq, that ratio is lower than 10 to 1, with up to 20,000 mercenaries being paid by the USA government at about 5 times the wage their armed forces counterparts get remunerated. One of the reasons they are needed because the regular forces couldn't, and still can't supply enough manpower to fight the war, due to low recruitment rates as potential soldiers/marines/Air Force folks/sailors start to realize: "Hey - there's a nasty war going on over there, and i could be killed or maimed for life if i take this career path!!" The typical mercenary in Iraq is older and far more experienced than the average regular forces personell, and they often get MUCH better equipment than standard issue for the public-sector military. This, and the above mentioned fact that they get paid extremely well, doesn't help the morale of troops in this war much - and this is a problem for even peace-loving people, since troops with poor morale are more likely to make mistakes or errors of judgment that cost lives and injuries on both sides of the conflict (or in Iraq, *all* of the various "sides".....).
* Our species' relationship with other large predators has always been a difficult one, with non-human predators nearly always ending up on the short end of the rope (or the long end of a rifle....). Wolves in particular have suffered from an anciently and extremely bad reputation, being vilified in myth and fable for millenia - from Little Red Riding Hood to stories of savage cattle-killing beasts which kill as much for pleasure as for food. HOWEVER (you knew that was coming, didn't you?), in factual act they are far less malign that 99% of the population supposes. For instance, they virtually never attack people: a recent study (Linnell J D C et al (2002): The fear of wolves: a review of wolf attacks on humans. NINA Oppdragsmelding, 731, 1-65.) showed that in all of Europe, North America and parts of western Asia, only 17 confirmed cases of wolves killing people have been reported in the past 50 years. Also, they kill FAR fewer of man's domestic food-animals than most people give them credit for - even less that packs of domestic dogs gone wild, for whose depredations wolves often take the fall. It is even a myth that people and wolves cannot live closely together in peaceful co-existence - although nowhere near as adaptable to human prescence than their dimunitive relatives the coyote, packs of wolves have often been reported to live near towns in Russia without incident - just as coyotes are often mistaken for dogs, so are wolves in such situations!
*
[The following is adapted from an editorial in the NY Times. I do not doubt the statistics - they are pretty easy to verify on the whole! I personally would virtually never approve of an abortion except in cases of rape, incest or where the mother's life is actually in danger, but i think that education and assistance to vulnerable populations is the key to reducing the number of abortions, rather than heavy-handed legislation which tends to treat it as a variety of murder.] --- Ethics and religious beliefs aside, pretty clear evidence that criminalizing abortion doesn't reduce abortion rates and only endangers the lives of women, can be found in Latin America. In most of the region, abortions are a crime, but the abortion rate is *far* higher than in Western Europe or the United States. Colombia - where abortion is illegal even if a woman's life is in danger - averages more than one abortion per woman over all of her fertile years. In Peru, the average is nearly two abortions per woman over the course of her reproductive years.
In a region where there is little sex education and social taboos keep unmarried women from seeking contraception, criminalizing abortion has not made it rare, only dangerous. Rich women can go to private doctors. The rest rely on quacks or amateurs or do it themselves. Up to 5,000 women die each year from abortions in Latin America, and hundreds of thousands more are hospitalized.
* Coyotes, those wily relative of dog and symbol of "dogged", determined survival, have dramatically expanded their range in recent decades because man has killed off most of their main competators - wolves and big cats in particular. They are nearly impossible to eradicate, because the more which are killed in any given population, the larger the litter size: the harder you try to get rid of them, the smarter the survivors (and recall they are pretty smart to begin with...) and the larger the average family size!
* There are a surprising number of coyotes in most cities in North America - for example, up to 2,000 in Chicago according to a recent study. They avoid people, travel and hunt mostly at night, and despite the fact that they pick off a few cherished pets every now and then, they perform the useful function of keeping down the population of "pest species" such as Canada Geese and rodents. They feast on the eggs of the geese, and often hide some for later retrieval, in the same way that domestic doggies hide bones. City coyotes tend to live longer than their country cousins, but are still considered "old" at the age of 3, and positively ancient at 4 years of age. Despite their reputation for being solitary hunters, they tend to travel in packs of a dozen or so individuals in order to defend their territories. They are quite fleet of foot, and can cover tens of km per night when "on the move".
* An adult tiger can weigh up to 450 kg (1000 lbs) and measure over 3 m (10 feet) from tip to tip. They can crush the skull of a full grown bull, but more often kill their prey by ripping out the jugular vein.
* Tigers, those quintessential symbols of wilderness and danger, are amongst the most endangered forms of life on the planet these days. Their numbers have declined from an estimated 100,000 worldwide at the turn of the century, to only 5 to 7 thousand in 2005. Habitat destruction, hunting and now poaching must bear the blame: just one tiger, divided up into pelt and parts, can fetch a good $50,000 USD on the black market in China, which is where the species is thought to have originated and paradoxically, where it is the most endangered!! Tiger meat is thought to bring strength and stamina, and the penises are prized as aphrodisiacs - nearly every portion of the magnificent animal is thought to have medicinal value in the orient.
* There are no tigers in Africa - never have been. Historically there were 8 subspecies living in various parts of Asia, from the jungles of Indonesia to the windswept steppes of Siberia. Three of these have since gone extinct: the Bali, Javan, and Caspian, in the past 70 years. The five remaining subspecies - Amur, Bengal, Indochinese, South China, and Sumatran - live only in Asia, and all are threatened by poaching and habitat loss. The South China tiger is on the verge of extinction, with just 20-30 estimated remaining in the wild.
* Venus is a pretty scary planet!! What makes it scary? For one thing, Venus has a bad case of global warming. Its thick carbon dioxide atmosphere traps solar heat, warming the planet's surface to a hellish 740 K (872 F). The atmosphere itself is crushing. Venus' air pressure at "sea level" is 90 times greater than air pressure on Earth. Oh, and those clouds floating overhead ... they're laced with sulfuric acid. If you were teleported to Venus you'd be dissolved, crushed and melted--not necessarily in that order.
* In 2004, the CEO of the notorious Haliburton mega-company, made $78 million buckeroonies off of his involvement with the corporation. By contrast, semi-skilled Filipino workers hired by Vice Prez Cheney's favorite cash cow were making wages which often boiled down to $2 per hour, when unpaid overtime is considered.
* True birds with proper feathers and such, lived at the same time as the winged lizards - pterosaurs, who are not now generally regarded as birds' ancestors, but rather simply as a group of lizards which developed flight independently of birds. Recent finds in China are suggesting that birds rapidly became more diverse and adaptive than their winged co-inhabitants, and that birds tended to live more inland, while pterosaurs dominated the coasts.
* The largest known Pterosaur or winged lizard had a wing span of over 18 meters - that's 60 feet!! Imagine what nightmares something like this beastie must have given to the early mammals living at the time!!
* The first recorded example of "scat" singing, where the words are replaced by playful nonsense syllables, is found in Heebie Jeebies, recorded on Feb. 26, 1926 by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Fives. The story goes that halfway through the song, Louis dropped the music and simply improvised pure nonsense for the rest of the take, instead of stopping altogether. The person doing the recording liked the result so much that he suggested they keep it - and the "modern" era of scat singing was born.
* Mercury is one of the most poisonous substances encountered by most people in large enough quantities in everyday life, to be hazardously toxic - especially to pregnant women and young children, since it can severely damage the developing nervous system, harming intelligence and other brain-determined functions of the body. **By far** the largest source of mercury pollution in our society is emissions from coal-fired power plants. However, many countries are virtually ignoring this source of "mass poisoning" (routes of ingestion include drinking water, particulates in air, and ingestion of fish which are high on the "food chain" such as tuna and bass), and others are actively reversing or "watering down" regulations previously enacted, which would effectively deal with power-plant mercury emissions. For example, the USA had an EPA rule in place which would require power plants to use the "best available technology" to remove about 90% of mercury emissions by 2015. However, an energy policy that concentrates on increased domestic production, deregulation and seemingly giving large energy corporations everything they want and then some, has led to a "revision" of these rules. The "revised" rules now state that NO reduction of mercury emissions is required until 2018, and only 70% of the emissions have to be eliminated by 2030 - almost a generation after the previous rules would have already eliminated 90%. (and yes i realize there is little "wierdness" in these sad facts, but to me it is strange how a government dominated by folks calling themselves "Christian" can do such things as permit known poisons to continue to harm children when it would be easy and affordable to do something positive about it on a scale of 10 instead of 25 years.).
*
The name of the horse in the American Christmas song "Jingle Bells" is Bob.
* Fruits of the rose family--including cherries, apples, plums, almonds, peaches, apricots (remember the cancer-cure scam laetrile? Apricot pits!!), and crab apples--contain in their seeds substances known as cyanogenetic glycosides. When eaten, they release hydrogen *cyanide* gas through an enzymatic reaction. (Note: this is the same gas as the notorious "Zyklon B" used by the Nazis to kill unsuspecting newbies to the death camps) Therefore, although they are otherwise extremely healthy and quite tasty, "muncher discretion is advised". So-called "bitter" almonds (much harder to find than the normal variety, fortunately!!) contain the most cyanide-producing glycosides, and 8 to 10 or them can kill a child. Roasting destroys these compounds, without affecting overall mineral content - so if you want to eat a cupful of apple seeds, at least give them a good toasting beforehand!! (Ever seen the Agatha Christie movie "Arsenic and Old Lace"? A couple of nasty elderly ladies poison men by feeding them cyanide-laced almond cookies (the cyanide-releasing compounds in almonds that give them their tasty "zing") - economic motives were involved, i think. (They modified the recipe by adding a half teaspoon of strychnine and "a pinch" of pure cyanide.) Wonder where they got the "arsenic" part from? Anyway, symptoms of cyanide poisoning can include excitement, convulsions, respiratory distress, and spasms and sudden death, which can occur without any of the other symptoms. In case you were wondering, Cyanide itself is a poison that kills by denying blood the ability to carry oxygen and thereby causes its victims to die of asphyxiation. At least within the realm of murder mysteries, cyanide is the darling of poisoners because it acts quickly and irrevocably once a fatal dose has been ingested, there is no effective antidote, and death takes place within minutes. Unlike arsenic, which is an element not a compound, it is metabolized in the body when ingested in sub-lethal amounts, so it cannot be accumulated over time - as some have posited regarding the early demise of Napoleon, whose hair has been found to be particularly arsenic-rich when relatively recently analyzed.)
* Winston Churchill, one of England's greatest politicians, historians and statesmen, was born in a ladies' room during a dance. He was also inordinately fond of roaming around his house naked - even while giving interviews!
* The longest one-syllable word in the English language is "screeched." No rhyme exists in English for month, purple (although one correspondent has suggested that "murple" in some dialect or the other might mean to shuffle one's feet.... no trace of this meaning on the internet, but this means little!) and of course orange. Dreamt is the only English word to end with the letters mt. A cat has 32 muscles in each ear. (just checking to see if you were still awake!).
* Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer. Although he killed oodles of folks, he was finally sent up the river to take up residence in the slammer because of income tax evasion (apparently he didn't pay much taxes on his somewhat less than legitimate business ventures....).
* The national anthem of Greece reportedly has 158 verses - and you thought those Lutheran hymns with 20 to 30 verses were long......
* There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.
* Lightning has long fascinated humans, and in recent years it has been found to be even stranger than previously thought - with the discovery of such exotic beasties as "red sprites" and "blue jets" making the news of late (see article somewhere below) Now, researchers have found that gamma rays bursts ("terrestrial gamma flashes") are also associated with lightning. (Gamma rays are the most energetic form of electromagnetic energy (other forms include microwaves, radio waves and light), and are normally produced by high-energy fusion interactions in stars, and in abundance by supernovae, black holes and such). In 1994, scientists using the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory satellite discovered gamma ray bursts originating from very low altitudes in the atmosphere - only a few km from the surface. Starting in 2002, scientists from Duke university using the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) satellite -- launched to study x-rays and gamma rays from the sun - started to track down these odd emanations, and in 2004 finally found them to be formed about 1 millisecond (thousandth of a second) *before* the emission of some forms of normal lightning, meaning they aren't caused by the lightning discharges themselves, but by the forces which immediately preceded, and perhaps trigger them. The exact mechanism of this fascinating process is still unknown.
* Buckwheat is one of the (in my opinion at least....) most under-rated crops in the world. Although not a grain (they belong to the same family of plants as rhubarb, knotweeds and all those yummy sorrels), their seeds have approximately the same nutritional content to the finest wheat, but with a much stronger, "nutty" flavor. They fix nitrogen from the air (something legumes do as well), which makes them great for planting on fallow land to reduce the amount of nitrogen fertilizer used: after the harvest, the plants are ploughed back into the soil as "green manure". Buckwheat honey is one of the greatest natural taste treats around, and when buckwheat is toasted, it becomes the delightful dish called "kasha", which for some reason is not as popular in North America as it is in some parts of Europe where strong natural flavors are appreciated a bit more, by palates a bit less wrecked by sawdust burgers and various versions of the ironically named "Real Thing".
* There are more bacteria in the average person's mouth than there are people on the planet. (but kissing will only be harmful in a small minority of cases - so don't let this little fact spoil your pursuit of osculatory pleasure....)
* The most difficult mountain to climb on the planet is K2, so named because it was the second peak measured for height in the Karakoram Range of northern Kashmir - on the border between Pakistan and China. Only 189 people have "summited" on this second highest of all mountains, and 49 have died in the attempt. Only 5 women have ever conquered K2, starting with Wanda Rutkiewicz in 1986. All 5 are now dead, leading some to speculate there is a "curse" on the mountain for women.....
* While most folks can identify Everest as the highest place on the earth's surface (see below), and almost every Jeopardy player knows that K2 comes in second at 28250 ft. /8611 m, the semi-mythical "average Joe in the street" would be hard pressed to name Kanchenjunga ( 8586 m 28,208 ft) as #3, and fewer than one in a hundred could name Lhotse I (8516 m /27,923 ft) and Makalu (8470 m /27,824 ft) as 4th and 5th in the race for the Top of the World.
* Smoking is beginning to look even worse than it used to - and that was pretty bad already!!! It not only aids and abets cardio-vascular diseases such as heart attacks and strokes, degrades sperm quality, dulls taste buds and stains teeth and fingers, causes cancers, asthma and other nasty respiratory problems, depresses the immune system and adds years and years to one's appearance (read Major Wrinkles here...), but now researchers are finding it doubles the risk of macular degenerative disease, makes it more difficult to conceive by artificial means, and even causes mutations which increase the risk of problems such as asthma in the grandchildren of smoking mothers!! Clearly, this is not an activity that one would voluntarily choose to engage in if one cares at all about about health, appearance, children..... yet for some reason it remains popular. I must admit to being puzzled.
* Russia has vast water resources, but even so, it is using them in an extravagant manner. Russians use about 500 liters of water per capita per day - vs a European average of 200 liters - and Germany uses only 120!! An aging, leaking infrastructure and inneficient industrial facilities are largely to blame for Russia's profligate water usage.
* The Neanderthal race, now widely regarded as the distinct species Homo neanderthalis, lived in Europe and Western Asia for about 260,000 years according to most of those who study such matters. They were joined by modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) throughout most of their territory for the last 10 to 15,000 years of this time-span, and died out around 30,000 years ago, as the northern hemisphere's climate was dramatically cooling in the run-up to the most recent glacial period. They were long regarded as clumsy and unintelligent, mainly because of their robust frame (they were far stronger than any other humans of their or our age), heavy eyebrows and a mistaken notion that they were of stooped stature (based upon an apparently arthritic skeleton!). Yet, recent research has shown them to be intelligent (brain size for Neanderthals averaged larger than for modern humans), capable of dexterous hand movements, and with an appreciation of music (see the entry below), and possibly even a rudimentary belief in an afterlife, as shown by a Neanderthal grave sites in Germany and Northern Iraq which feature grave goods such as bison artifacts, and carefully lain flowers atop the remains (as revealed by the patterns of pollen present). Yet, they never progressed past the stage of unsophisticated stone weapons and tools and it would appear that they suffered a competitive disadvantage against their human contemporaries. Many theories have been put forward to explain their demise, including an inability to adapt to the cooler temperatures, warfare with humans over dwindling resources, and the recent suggestion that they were done in by an early version of free trade: apparently the humans of this period engaged in extensive and systematic trading, and their dwellings showed specialization into separate areas for cooking, sleeping, etc., while corresponding Neanderthal homes were "unorganized" - far less specialized. It would appear that although they may have had the brainpower to progress further than they did in their long history, for some reason(s), they remained stuck in a rut and became extinct as a result!
* The world's oldest known musical instrument is a portion of a flute-like bone carving whose 4 holes are generally acknowledged to correspond to a portion of a natural, diatonic scale such as the one we use today. According to archaeologists, it is about 50,000 years old and was found in the famous "Cave Bear" Slovenian cave (as in the novel "Clan of the Cave Bear") which was supposedly inhabited by Neanderthals.
* An important part of scientific advances is the ability to measure things (light, sound, length, volume, weight, mass, electrical charge, velocity, angles, chemical concentrations, radiation, electromagnetic frequencies, etc.). A significant advance has been made at Caltech, in the field of measuring mass: a young genius by the name of Michael Roukes has modified the standard method of measuring attogram (10-18 g) masses, which involved using a very small silicon blade vibrating at a frequency of 33 Mherz (33 million vibrations per second) in a magnetic field (the addition of a small weight to the tip of the blade increases its mass , hence decreases its vibrational frequency by a tiny amount), and increased its accuracy by a thousandfold, to the point where individual protein molecules of various kinds, which weigh about a zeptogram (10-21 g). This increase in accuracy by three orders of magnitude was achieved simply by substituting the stiffer compound silicon carbide for the blade, which enables it to be made much smaller and lighter hence vibrating at a faster rate.
* With many patented chemical formulations, the primary or "active" ingredient may be fairly benign, but the overall effect of the compound may not be anywhere as harmless as advertised. For example, the highly-praised herbicide Roundup is not as "eco-friendly" as Monsanto would like us all to believe (Monsanto produces genetically modified crops which are "Roundup ready" - they are resistant to the herbicide formulation Roundup, which Monsanto has the patent for. The theory is that more of the chemical can be used without harming the plants, hence killing a greater percentage of the weeds in the bio-engineered fields, which can increase yields under some conditions). A recent (April 1, 2005) study by the University of Pittsburgh has shown that Roundup is highly lethal to most amphibians (except for spring peepers, for some reason!!), which considering that most of it is washed into wetlands and waterways, means it is significantly damaging natural aquatic systems wherever it is used. To tie this into the initial thread, they found that the culprit is not the active ingredient, glyphosate, but instead the surficant (which goes by the horrorshow moniker of polyethoxylated tallowamine), which enables the glyphosate to penetrate the waxy coating on some plant leaves.
* Quite often, a treatment or "cure" for one thing can cause problems somewhere else: "side effects" can be worse than the original condition. One such example is radiation therapy, which is often a bit of a "shot-gun" approach to killing cancerous cells: radiation is more deadly to cells which are actively dividing, since DNA is more vulnerable to radiation (and chemical, hence chemotherapy) damage when it is unraveled and replicating itself. The problem is that healthy tissues that also have a high rate of reproductive or renewal activity, are also killed, damaged or mutated at a higher rate than normal, when exposed to the radiation intended to preferentially kill the targeted cancer cells. This causes things such as hair loss, bone marrow damage - which leads to blood cell deficiencies, general weakening of entire systems in the body, and "secondary" cancer formation as a result of the radiation. A good example of this later effect was discovered in a study at the University of Minnesota Cancer Center (March, 2005). They found that men who had had radiation therapy for prostate cancer, developed rectal cancer at at least twice the normal rate, since cells in the lining of the digestive tract are in a more actively dividing state than that of surrounding tissues, hence more vulnerable to radiation damage.
* While nearly everyone in our society has heard of Albert Einstein, not one in a million can name the famous 5 articles he published in 1905, which changed the face of physics and the way we view the universe. For "The Record", they are 1) "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", which introduced the concept of Spacetime, and established that the speed of light was constant, and that time was variable, rather than being absolute as was thought up to that point. These concepts formed the basis of the special theory of relativity (the general theory of relativity, which is more complex, wasn't published until 1916). 2) "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content?" demonstrated that energy and matter are equivalent, and can be transformed into each other according to the most famous physics equation of all time: e = mc2, where e = energy, m = mass, and c is the speed of light. 3) "On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light" - this one proved that light (and all other electromagnetic radiation) consists of particles he called photons, and thus laid the foundation for quantum physics. (Light is in fact made of both particles and waves....). It was this paper that won Einstein a Nobel prize in 1921. 4) "On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat" . This paper concerns the semi-random Brownian motion of molecules and other small particles, which he developed equations regarding, and which revolutionized the way we regard fluids and gasses. and 5) "A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions", which was Einstein's doctoral thesis (contrary to urban legend, he did well at school, although his unique ways of thinking often drove his teachers to distraction....). This pivotal paper conclusively demonstrated the reality of molecules, and showed how to calculate the size of molecules and such physicsy things as Avogadro's number.
* The rich continue to get richer..... at least in the USA, where in 1960, the wealthiest 2% of the population [i lost the stats on the distribution of wealth in that country - could someone perhaps point me towards current, valid stats on this topic?
* [circa 2000] Bill Gates, now worth more than $80 billion, has more assets than America's poorest 150 million people. // 84 individuals have more combined wealth than China, with its 1.2 billion inhabitants and a GDP of $700 billion. // [2005] The world's 200 richest people now have a combined wealth of more than $1.3 trillion, equal to the annual income of the poorest half of the world - three billion people!
* The three richest people in the world own assets that exceed the *combined* gross domestic products of the world's poorest 48 countries.
* Russia is the only large industrialized country whose population is rapidly shrinking: birth rates are currently about 1.3 per woman, vs the 2.2 necessary to maintain the status quo. Causes include uncertainty regarding the future, socio-economic instability, the tendency for women to pursue a career before having children, and pervasive health problems due to massive pollution (much of it of a radioactive nature), inadequate nutrition and a decaying health care system: only 10 to 15% of the girls under 18 in the country have "good health".
* Despite the much-ballyhooed "easing of tensions" since the cold war ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, over 30,000 nuclear warheads (bombs by any other name...) are still stored in the arsenals of the world's nuclear powers. Russia has over half of these, the US of A (or is that B these days?), a third or more, Israel most likely 2,000+ (estimates range from 100 all the way to 5,000 - depending upon who is doing the math and what their political agenda is....) , the UK, China and France about 500 apiece, India 70+, Pakistan 15 to 20, North Korea a couple, and there may still be a few hiding out in South Africa, which is the only country to have officially destroyed its nukes. Three disturbing developments as of 2005, are a) the possibility of criminals/terrorists acquiring or building an "outlaw bomb", or getting their hands on one of the 100 or so "suitcase nukes" that the Soviet Union lost track of when it fragmented, b) the certainty that the so-called "underground" network of nuclear materials and technology operated by Pakistan, still exists in some form, and c) the fact that both the US and Russia are actively renewing and seeking to "modernize" their nuclear arsenals - developing new kinds of weapons as well as maintaining a hard-line attitude regarding the conditions under which they would feel justified in using them.
* In the US of A, they take the dictum "Do the crime, Do the time." seriously!! Of an estimated 10 million people in prisons worldwide (2004), about 2.2 million (93% of them men.....) of them are in USA lock-ups , for an official incarceration rate of about 710 per 100,000. The next highest rates are in Russia (about 600 per 100,000), various post - Soviet countries (Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, etc.), at 400 to 550, and a smattering of central and south American countries - Bermuda, Belize, Suriname and Dominica (400 to 450), and (surprise...) the U.S. Virgin Islands at 530. China and North Korea probably have higher rates of imprisonment, but accurate information is difficult to come by for these two..... // The average rate of imprisonment for Europe is about 100 per 100,000, with Jolly olde Englande leading the pack at 141, and Iceland taking the hindmost at 37 - which translates to a total prison population of around a hundred.
* About 25 percent of children aged 4 to 11 have an imaginary companion: an invisible friend or one embodied in a toy or stuffed animal. Although many parents try to discourage this in their children, research is now consistently showing that children who have had an imaginary friend, often develop language and cognitive skills at a faster pace than children who do not. Part of this beneficial effect is due to the fact that such children must make up BOTH sides of conversations and activities, hence they get more practice, and are actively engaged in mental activity of the kind most likely to lead to greater linguistic, social and mental skills, for a far greater proportion of time than those who interact only with real persons.
* Recent research has shown that the contestants who perform later in a contest, are scored higher than those who perform earlier, and that the one who goes last, often ends up in first place. This is called the "Serial position effect", and has long been noted in many fields, from sporting completions involving judging, to job interviews.
* An effective cure for AIDS may be further away than thought. Researchers at Johns Hopkins have just announced they have discovered a secondary "reservoir" of HIV viruses, in a category of immune system cells called CD4, which often become dormant for long periods of time. Therefore, unless a way can be found to rid the body of this inactive pool of viral particles, people with HIV infections will likely have to remain on anti-viral medication for the rest of their lives. // The HIV virus has proven to be a far more formidable opponent than initially anticipated: 20 years of intensive research by some pretty sharp minds, has failed to produce either a cure or a vaccine. The main reasons for this are because it mutates frequently in order to outsmart the body's immune defenses, and because it attacks the immune system from several different angles: it is the archaetypical "super-virus" that gives doctors and scientists nightmares.
* Farsi, the dominant language in Iran, has become the 4th most popular for "blogging" on the internet (after English, French and German), with over 100,000 inhabitants in the Blogosphere. This is because of the systematic suppression of free speech in Iran, where 70% of the population is under 30, and levels of education are higher than anywhere else in the Islamic world. A small cadre of aging clerics hold the reins of power in that country, but they cannot control everything. The internet, and most especially web logs, has become a popular and effective method for people to express and discuss "forbidden" topics and ideas. (By contrast, even though Iraq is also a highly educated country, there are only about 50 known bloggers there!)
* Afghanistan is still rather difficult place to live in these days. A just - released (Feb, 2005) study produced the following figures:
* -- Life expectancy in Afghanistan in 2004, was about 44 years - vs about 80 for the "first world".
* -- Only 5 countries (Mali, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Sierra Leone and Burundi) are considered less developed
* -- Half the population is "poor", as judged by local standards.
* -- 20% are chronically hungry.
* -- one quarter of the population has at some time sought refuge outside the country.
* -- 3.6 million out of 28 million citizens, are still refugees or "internally displaced".
* -- 1 in 5 children currently die under the age of 5, most from easily preventable diseases.
* -- 1 in 8 children die from causes related to unclean water.
* -- only 25% of the total population has access to clean water (i.e., three quarters don't!!).
* -- Adult literacy is under 29 percent.
* -- Per capita income is $190 USD (52 cents per day), and unemployment is at least 25%.
* -- Maternal mortality rates (women dying because of child birth complications) are 60 times that of Europe.
* That said, there are reasons for hope: 54 percent of children are now enrolled in school, including 4 million high school students - and non-drug related economic growth was 16 percent in 2003 and estimated to remain at 10 percent or more per year for a while. Key to further success, however, rests upon improved security, political reform, reduction of poppy production, and "bottom-up" economic development.
* Some humming birds' wings flap at a rate of nearly 100 beats per second.
* The average bed is home to over 6 billion dust mites. (Now THERE's a creepy thought.....)
* Saint Patrick - the patron saint of Ireland - was Scottish. However, the Scots as a people, originated in Ireland, so it all evens out in the end!!
* The average serving of broccoli (not a favorite of a certain "conservative" personality, but one of the all-time mega-yummies in my humble opinion....) contains twice the vitamin C of an average-sized orange - and a huge batch of B vitamins, anti-oxidants, iron, calcium and other minerals - it and indeed all the "dark green leafies" such as kale and swiss chard are truly "super-foods"!!
* Conservative estimates of the number of species of life which we share the planet with, range from 10 to 30 million. At present, we have only formally named about 2 million forms of life, and we have detailed knowledge of only a tenth of these.
* Type two diabetes, an a acquired impairment of the body's ability to produce and/or utilize insulin (which leads to uncontrolled sugar levels in the blood, with often-debilitating health consequences) has been on the rise worldwide in recent decades, due largely to changes in dietary patterns (processed, largely nutrition-free foods such as white sugar, white flour, "Big Macs", French and/or Freedom Fries, carbonated soda-pop with or without caffeine....) and increasing levels of inactivity. Aside from the personal and social effects, the world economy is estimated to lose more than a trillion dollars a year because of decreased work efficiency, lost days due to acute illness and complications due to this condition, and long-term disabilities such as glaucoma and extremely poor circulation. Now, an unlikely form of help for the regulation of blood glucose levels may have been confirmed by recent research (see http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050108/food.asp for some interesting details): vinegar!! It seems that two spoonfuls of vinegar taken before a meal can dramatically reduce the size of the blood sugar "spike" which occurs in the first couple of hours after eating, which can greatly help in the management and even the prevention of type two diabetes. A "spoonful of sugar" may help the medicine go down, but two spoonfuls of vinegar may in fact be medicine all by themselves!!
* Not to single out USA schools or their school system (things are as bad or worse in many countries!!) , but i just ran across a few interesting facts about the way 40 million children are taught these days in the richest, most powerful and most influential nation on the planet.
- Many high school teachers are responsible for 150 to 200 students, in classes of up to 40.
- over twice as much public money is spent upon the preparation for war ("defense"), than for all levels of education combined.
- 58 percent of the thirteen-year-olds tested by the National Assessment for Educational Progress (in 2003) think it is against the law to start a third political party in the USA.
- 63% of high school students attend classes at schools with over 5000 students (i recall when i was going to school, that many, myself included, thought it appalling when our local high school accommodating nearly a thousand students was built!). What price "efficiency"??
- Education used to be a highly local matter, with each community largely responsible for the education of its children, under general guidelines usually set by states. In 1932 there were 127,531 school districts in the USA. Today there are approximately 15,840 and declining. Local school boards are rendered increasingly obsolete and impotent by a nationwide push for "standardization" in what is taught, how it is taught, how it is tested and evaluated, and which books and literature are "approved" to be read by the nation's young minds, and used by their teachers. Revealingly, the book "1984" is not often on these usually ideologically selected reading lists....
- [Rant alert..... ] The more i read about the philosophy and principles of Thomas Jefferson, the more i am saddened that he is one of the most ignored (in practice, i.e. )of the "founding fathers" of the USA. (examples: " The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their rightful names." "The moment a person forms a theory [or more properly, starts to believe it to be absolutely true] , his imagination sees, in every object, only the traits that favor that theory.", "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.", "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to ... remain silent.", "Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.", and "Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.".) In the context of education, he advocated a broad, general education centered upon preparing the students for active, responsible citizenship and self-government. This would include such things as critical, independent thinking, a more-than-functional literacy focused upon comprehension and communication skills, and the ability to formulate independent ideas and solutions to everyday problems on various levels from the personal to the international, and to coherently and effectively communicate these to others. It is my general impression that these lofty yet practical ideals are being lost in an ill-considered drive to "produce a well educated workforce" or some such cant. A young person with a good, solid general education will be well equipped to learn any trade or profession they decide to pursue. He or she will also be well equipped to take an active and responsible part in the functioning of the society they live in - at all levels. If the reader will forgive me for editorializing a bit, i will ask you: are the young people YOU know being taught with goals such as these in mind?
* The sage observation that "There's a sucker born every minute." has been proven countless millions of times - especially around election time, it seems... that said, a Special Case of this dictum was demonstrated recently, when a 10 year old grilled cheese sandwich purporting to display an image of the Virgin May, was sold on eBay for $5,100. This same ancient tribute to [YOU decide what word or concept to put here...] was subsequently sold to an on-line casino for $28,000.
* When the Italian merchant Giovanni Caboto (aka "John Cabot") came to Newfoundland waters in 1497, he found the waters on the famous Grand Banks so thick with cod that they impeded the progress of his vessel. He reported back to Henry VII of England that there were enough cod to feed his kingdom "until the end of time", and it was estimated that the value of this resource was greater than all the gold and sugar that was extracted and grown in the Caribbean and South America. [NOTE: This rosy picture was recently confirmed when a study of fishing records from New England in the 1850s, indicated a Scotian Shelf stock of 1.3 million tons - over 20 times the meager 50,000 tons estimated today] M. Caboto did not count on the massive habitat destruction caused by the dragger fishery in the 1960s onwards, which was eagerly participated in by dozens of countries, quite heedless of the inevitable consequences of dragging destructive gear weighing up to 10 tons across the ocean bottom. The cod catch off Newfoundland peaked in the late 1980s at nearly 300,000 tons, then promptly crashed. A closure of the entire fishery in 1993 threw 40,000 people out of work and devastated coastal communities, but did little to restore the fortunes of the cod, which may yet be declared "commercially extinct": the stocks have not recovered. Although climate change is suspected of being partially responsible, it cannot be denied that decades of overfishing with thousands of "underwater bulldozers", as some have dubbed the massive fish trawling gear (ok, i just made the term up now - but it fits!!), was doubtless a leading cause of the collapse of one of the most prolific fisheries on the planet.
* Modern astronomers don't divide the sky the same way ancient astronomers did. According to modern star maps, the sun cuts through a 13th constellation, Ophiuchus the Serpent Bearer, between Nov. 30th and Dec. 17th. Astrologically speaking, if you were born between those dates you're no longer a Sagittarian, you're an Ophiuchi!
* The largest marine estuary in the USA - Chesapeake Bay, annually receives 44 million tons (40 million tonnes) of manure from chicken, hog and cow farms within its watershed. According to the most recent estimates it receives 2.5 times the amount of nitrogen, and twice the amount of phosphorous than it can absorb - leading to toxic algal blooms, chronically low oxygen levels due to rotting vegetation, and an overall poor level of health for this important natural system.
* The USA Forest Service has built more than 360,000 miles of various kinds of roads in national forests -- or eight (8) times the entire length of the U.S. interstate highway system.
* Each sea urchin spine is made of a single crystal of calcium carbonate. They are quickly re-grown after being broken. Sea urchins depend upon their spines for protection as well as locomotion.
* At any given time, about one quarter (25%) of the adult population of North America is suffering from back pain. In one quarter of these (over 6% of the population), the pain is chronic (i.e. , long-term) and unceasing.
* Researchers at Northwestern University have found that chronic back pain actually shrinks the "thinking" part of the brain - the Grey Matter. They calculated that for every year of constant back pain, about 1.2 cm2 of brain matter is lost - the equivalent of about 15 years of normal aging. It is not known if the loss is reversible when the pain finally goes away.
* Researchers at Oxford have developed the world's smallest test tube - teensy tiny carbon nanotubes with an inner diameter of approximately 1.2 nanometers (about a millionth of a mm, or 20 million of them to the inch), and a length of about 2 micrometers. Their volume is two zeptolitres (one zeptolitre is 10-21 liters), and they can accommodate around 2,000 molecules each. It has been found that polymerization reactions take place much differently within this confined space, and chemists expect that they can be used to produce interesting molecular reactions which could lead to new materials. While it is theoretically possible to make even smaller test tubes, these would not be very useful: the smallest practical size for reaction vessels has been reached.
* Heart attack is the leading cause of non-infectious death in infants under a year old, in North America.
* There are over 1 million heart attacks each year in the USA.
* Recent studies have calculated that about 50% of all food produced in the USA (***and the figures likely hold true for Canada as well***) is wasted, spoiled or discarded. Some is never harvested, due to market fluctuations (food destroyed in the field by pests, storms and other natural processes, was not included), some spoiled during storage at the various stages of its trip to the tummies of consumers, and about 500 lbs (225 kg) of food is thrown away by the average family during the course of a year (about 15% of all food that enters the household - a rate three times larger than during the 1980s.).
* In 1999, 31 million Americans lived in households experiencing "food insecurity", which is defined as frequently not being sure of where your next meal is coming from. However, through the vigilant and tireless application of the principles of "Compassionate Conservatism" in their unstinting War on Poverty, the Bush regime had managed to reduce this shocking figure to a mere 35 million by 2004.
* Recent studies (mid 2004) indicate that up to 24 billion tonnes of topsoil is lost annually from the world's arable land, due to poor agricultural practices which disturb the soil and expose it to erosion by wind and water far more than it would otherwise have been, in natural ecosystems.
[NOTE: repeat - lifted from its place below: too good not to "refresh" every now and then!!] Like the news of Mark Twain's death, the danger to humans that sharks represent, is ***greatly*** exaggerated. Worldwide, an average of 50 to 70 "unprovoked" shark attacks (If you grab a shark by the tail, as some divers/idiots have actually attempted, no matter what happens afterwards, it is not considered to be "unprovoked".) are reported each year, with a half dozen or so fatalities. By comparison, more people are killed by dogs in just the USA each year, than all the known shark fatalities in the world for the past 100 years. In 2002, the International Shark Attack File investigated 86 interactions between sharks and humans, and found 60 of them to be unprovoked. There were 3 fatalities. Relatively speaking, the most dangerous place was Florida, with 29 attacks, and a total of 47 were reported from the USA in general. On average, only 10% of shark attacks are fatal, and most involve relatively minor injuries. Contrary to popular opinion, sharks almost never eat people - apparently we are not considered very tasty by that category of Big Fish!! When one considers that worldwide, an estimated 2 million people were killed by alcohol in 2002 (but virtually NONE by marijuana.....NOT that i would recommend it to anyone, but one wonders why the far more deadly stuff is legal!!) , an innocent-looking glass of wine or beer should be considered far more dangerous than a 30 tonne great white shark - especially when combined with automobile keys :--).
* The very best archive of Astronomical photos on the web is maintained by Nasa, at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html. It has a positively SPLENDID variety of photos of objects and phenomenon found in the sky - one per day going all the way back to June 20, 1995.
The dynamics of guerrilla warfare can be quite fascinating at times: one one hand you have a very small number of determined fighters, doggedly pursuing a cause they value more than their own lives. They are experts at survival, know their territory inside out, use whatever cover they can, and kill via the precision use of small amounts of ammunition, usually fired from light, easily carried weapons. On the other hand you usually have a far larger invading or occupying force, much more concerned with their own safety, not knowing the terrain at all, and possessing large amounts of heavy weaponry and ammunition. Quite often, the upper hand belongs to the more mobile, well-hidden "resistance fighters", no matter what the odds might be against them. (Small wonder they often become Folk Heroes in societies which value violent resistance as an accepted means to achieving various ends). A case which demonstrates this rather well, has been reported in the early November, 20004 storming of the rebel city of Fallujah, Iraq, where a sniper kept 150 well armed troops at bay for nearly an complete day, despite their use of 500 lb bombs, dozens of artillery shells and shots from tanks, and an unbelievable 30,000 or so bullets fired mostly by machine guns. In the end, he was observed successfully retreating from the scene, riding a bicycle.
* In 1990, it was "conventional wisdom" that there were perhaps 5 billion galaxies in the known universe, or about 1 galaxy for each person on our little planet. However, observations by the Hubble space telescope have increased this estimate by a hundred fold, to nearly 500 billion galaxies. The already famous "Ultra Deep Field" photographs take by Hubble in early 2004, have revealed about 10,000 galaxies, some estimated to be nearly as old as the universe itself (the oldest appear to have formed a mere 500 million years after the so-called "Big Bang" - that's 13 billion years ago!!), in an area only 3 square arc seconds in area - about 1/10 of the diameter of the full moon. Since there are 3600 square arc seconds in a square arc minute, and in the full sphere of the sky, some 41,253 "square" degrees, the resulting equation would be: (3600/3) * 41,253 * 10000 galaxies = 495 billion galaxies in the universe. // Now, if we take the average number of stars per galaxy at a conservative 10 billion, that means there are about 5 trillion billion (1021) stars in the universe, although estimates vary all the way to 1024, which would be a mind boggling 150 trillion stars for every person on the earth. (and some people are concerned that finding life on other planets would somehow do harm to their particular religious beliefs...... i tend to think that it would take a pretty strange God to create zillions and gachillions of stars, yet place intelligent life on only one planet in all the universe!!)
* There more than 1,000 chemicals in a cup of coffee, and 3,000+ chemicals in cigarette smoke.
* There is about 200 times more gold in the worlds oceans, than has been mined in our entire history.
* On average, a 4-year-old child asks 437 questions a day. (somebody actually counted? Wonder how much taxpayer's money got spent on that particular "scientific study"??)
* There are more than 1,000 chemicals in a cup of coffee, and 3,000+ chemicals in cigarette smoke.
* Modern wars become deadlier to civilians as we approach the present. In WWI, only 5% of deaths were civilian. That number rose to 65% in W.W.II, and in the current war in Iraq, about 90% of all deaths so far are "non-combatants" (Since the occupying forces "don't do body counts", it has been difficult to establish just how many people have died because of the war. A study recently released by a reliable source which escapes me at the moment, finds that an estimated 100,000 "excess civilian deaths" over and above the number expected if death rates in the late Saddam period had remained in the period after the invasion) of which only 20% can be attributed to "terrorism". The other 80,000 "collateral damages" appear to have been caused by the invading and occupying forces, which have developed nasty little habits such as dropping 500 lb bombs on buildings suspected of harbouring "terrorists" (NOTE: It should be mentioned that death rates under Saddam were already quite elevated, due to executions and poor conditions caused by the strict embargo imposed by the UN. If the invasion had been successful in bringing stability to the country (ok, this wasn't the goal of the exercise, which was initially stated as being to protect folks from "Weapons of Mass Destruction" (like the ones sold to Saddam in the late 1980s?) ... - but one can assume it was at least a secondary objective), death rates would have gone down considerably.))
* In WWII, the Germans lost 126 generals. 84 of these were executed by Hitler.
* The Hubble Ultra Deep Field photograph is the most comprehensive look at any portion of sky since the beginning of astronomy, as briefly described above. It was achieved over a period of 3 months, during which time a million seconds (about 2 weeks) of observation time were used for this achievement. The light from the faintest of these, around magnitude 30, is so faint that it arrived at the rate of only one photon per minute striking the surface of the Hubble's main mirror, which is 4.5 square meters. By comparison, full sunlight is the equivalent of 10 billion trillion (1022) photons per square meter *per second*!! // For an excellent, high-resolution (for the web, i.e.!) image of the photo, see http://www.markelowitz.com/hudf.htm.
* In WWII, the Germans lost an estimated 40 to 50% of their planes to accidents. With the Allies, the figure was perhaps 10% at the most. One wonders how much effect this state of affairs had upon the course of the war in general......
* A normal chlorophyll molecule is capable of capturing 5 photons per second to use in converting CO2 (carbon dioxide) and water into sugar.
* The last person shot in WWI was a Chinese worker (they were used extensively to dig trenches and such) who was killed for "insubordination" while cleaning up a battle area.
* As any dark-skinned person who has ever tried to break into the upper echelons of society in many "Western" countries knows, old stereotypes and myths die hard. An excellent example of this is the wolf: long vilified in legend, popular imagination and even in nursery rhymes, wolves around the world have been shot, trapped, poisoned an otherwise exterminated for thousands of years. Indeed, the crusade against the "evil predator" wolf is very much alive today: in Alaska, wolves are shot from planes, and in Wyoming and other states, dozens of groups are calling for a renewed Open Season upon the few re-introduced wolves who have managed to survive harassment and a REALLY bad name. However, although they do indeed regard domestic animals as food from time to time, their tally when it comes to filling their bellies with animals which humankind has designated for other ends, is extremely limited. In Wyoming, for example, only 15 confirmed wolf kills of sheep occurred in 2003 - only one tenth as many as attributed to eagles, and one third of the number who succumbed to overeating. Recent studies in Europe have also found a similar lack of evidence to justify the persecution of these large, scary-looking animals with the big teeth featured so prominently in the tale of Little Red Ridding Hood. Similarly, large predators in other parts of the world, such as "big cats" in Africa, kill far fewer domestic animals than most people assume they do: they are NOT the enemy...... (Most of the time i agree with Pogo, who famously observed "We have seen the enemy, and he is us.")
* "Those that live by the sword, get shot."........ If you keep a gun in your home, you dramatically increase the odds that you will die of a gunshot wound, according to research published in the June issue of the Annals of Emergency Medicine. "Keeping guns at home is dangerous for adults regardless of age, sex, or race," said Douglas J. Wiebe, Ph.D., Instructor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and a fellow at Penn's Firearm Injury Center. Wiebe led the study by the Violence Prevention Research Group at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) before moving to Penn. Wiebe's study found that people with a gun in their home were almost twice as likely to die in a gun-related homicide, and 16 times more likely to use a gun to commit suicide, than people without a gun in their home.
* Genetically speaking, man and mouse are nearly identical: the "Wee sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous beastie" of fields, houses and churches shares 99% of its genes with us. Out of some 30,000 genes, only 300 have been found so far, which are unique to one or the other species. Evolutionary theorists have proposed that we shared a common ancestor - 75 to 125 million years ago, in the early era of the dinosaurs! We even share the gene which produces a tail, although in humans it is usually not "switched on" (although there are notable tales (pun intended..) of cases where this dormant gene has been activated - see http://www.visual-evolution.com/tails.htm for some photos of Humans with Tails.) Not surprisingly, over 90% of diseases which have a genetic component in humans, have also been found in mice, making them even more useful than previously thought, for medical research. Interestingly enough, the mouse genome is about 14% smaller than the 3 billion "base pairs" of the human genome. // Amongst the differences, Mice have many more genes for smell than humans, and they have more genes to produce frequent and large litters.
* Each human embryo has a tail about one sixth of its overall length. As the unborn child develops, his or her tail is absorbed into their bodies, except in very rare cases, discussed above.
* According to the Academy of General Dentistry in the USA, kissing , long reviled for spreading germs, helps prevent tooth decay. Kissing stimulates the production of saliva, which helps reduce the incidence of cavities. // "Kissing is nature's cleansing process," says Heidi Hausauer, a dentist and spokeswoman for the academy. "Saliva washes out the mouth and helps remove the cavity-causing food particles that accumulate after meals." Also, the minerals in saliva help repair minor cavities before they can develop into major ones. // If you have no one to kiss, try sugar-free gum. It's not quite as fun, but still very effective in encouraging saliva.
* The health of amphibians is considered a key gauge for the overall health of natural systems ("ecosystems") because their highly permeable skin makes them more immediately sensitive to environmental changes and pollutants than other creatures. Not surprisingly, a study by 500 of the worlds leading amphibian researchers shows that 1/3 (a third - 33%) of the world's 5,743 known amphibian species are in rapid decline, and in danger of extinction in the next few decades. Overall, only 27% of the species studied (there was insufficient data for an evaluation of 1300 or so species) had stable populations, with a mere 1% boasting increasing numbers. The remaining 72% of amphibian species were either in moderate or severe population decline. This is in comparison to 13% of bird and 23% of mammal species also judged to be endangered, according to similar recent studies. Source: The Global Amphibian Assessment, published online by the journal "Science" : 2nd week Oct., 2004.
* The following is quoted from a summary of the report presented at
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2004/2004-10-19-10.asp
Colombia has 208 threatened amphibian species - the most in
the world - followed by Mexico with 191, Ecuador with 163,
Brazil with 110, and China with 86.
Haiti has the highest percentage of threatened amphibians, with
92 percent of its species at risk of extinction.
The study notes that in the Americas, the Caribbean and
Australia, a highly infectious disease called chytridiomycosis
has hit amphibians especially hard.
New research is showing that in some regions outbreaks of the
disease may be linked to sustained drought, in part caused by
global warming.
But in most parts of the world - including Europe, Asia and
Africa - chytridiomycosis is currently less of a problem and the
decline of amphibians is cause for concern about the planet's
health in general.
* Aside from this page, which in this case doesn't really count, the word "hardcarp" appears only once on the web, in the immortal line: "Nekem extrem heavy hardcarp special 3,6 balzerem van beee." This is in contrast to the word "the", which is present and accounted for on "about 5,780,000,000 of the web pages which Google currently canoodles the content of. Many other words and phrases also apppear on a One Time Only basis in the 7 billion or so pages lucky enough to get googled - such as "hogy kell leszedni a zignort???": -- while "leszedni" graces over 16,000 pages, "zignort" is only found the one solitary time (and no, i don't know what language that is.....). Other single entry slobdorfs include glebnos, "amateur orgy furnace" (don't ask - i didn't!!), "grunge sculpture" (believe it or not!!) and of course "Snoringly good" (ok, this landed on two pages in the same site - but was just too good to pass up :-+)..
* Just as Superman's weakness is kryptonite, the super-strong bicycle lock Kryptonite also has an Achilles" Heel: the humble Bic ballpoint pen! Recently, someone came up with the idea that a ball point pen (the round end) might just fit into the round hole of these expensive yet popular locks (and their many lookalikes, as it turns out!!). Works perfectly (with a bit of modification) - now bike thieves will be having a field day until most folks have either replaced or "upgraded" their "unpickable" locks - the odd part of it all is that nobody thought of it years ago...
* IBM, the builder of 134 of the world's 500 fastest computers, hopes to build a petaflop machine by 2007: that's a quadrillion (a million billion) operations per second. They are currently working on something called the Blue Gene/L, which is projected to be finished by the end of 2004, and is predicted to be capable of 360 terraflops (360 trillion operations per second). For comparison, the combined computing speed of the world's 500 fastest computers is currently only 283 terraflops.
* Neutron stars (the ultra-compact remains of stars about 10 times more massive that of the sun) can spin around up to 600 times per second - a frequency equal to the E above middle C on a piano.
* In Atlanta, Georgia, it is illegal to tie a giraffe to a telephone pole or street lamp.
* The sun's surface has a relatively low temperature - 6000 K. However, the sun's corona - the layer of gas that extends from near the surface to hundreds of thousands of km into space, has a temperature of over 2 million degrees K. While scientists do not know the exact mechanism involved, it is highly likely that the sun's immensely powerful magnetic field is responsible for this unusual state of affairs.
* About half of the people who have suffered carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning, develop memory impairment and other serious neurological damage in the weeks and months following the poisoning. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have recently found the reason why this occurs: high levels of exposure to CO damage an important protein (called Myelin Basic protein, or "MBP") used to form myelin (the protective sheathing that surrounds neurons and prevents their electric charge from leaking out). Apparently, the body's immune system attacks this altered MBP in order to get rid of it, but when things return to normal, the immune system continues to attack NORMAL MBP, creating an auto-immune reaction that attacks the myelin sheathing of the nervous system. The result is a cluster of symptoms which are similar to Multiple Sclerosis, which is also a condition where the body's nervous system is weakened by an auto immune reaction which attacks the myelin sheaths of neurons.
* There are about 3,000 known species of termites in the world, nearly all of whom make a living by digesting cellulose - the main structural ingredient in trees, woody plants, and houses. Queens can live for up to 25 years, and in some species, can lay 2,000 or more eggs per day. They can squeeze through cracks as thin as 1/32 of an inch (less than 1 mm!), and their soldiers are capable of delivering fierce pinches, or in some species, spraying nasty chemicals on colony invaders.
* Every citizen of Kentucky is required by law to take a bath once a year.
* The USA has a bit of a problem with its heavy reliance upon oil for its primary energy source. Its proven reserves are only 20 billion barrels, while its yearly consumption is over 7 billion barrels (85% of which is divided between only 4 states: Texas, Alaska, California and Louisiana (including offshore reserves): you do the math!! Production peaked in 1970, and is not likely to ever increase significantly, because 150 years of oil and gas exploration has left very little land unevaluated for its potential. No matter what some people think or pretend to think in order to scam tens of billions of dollars worth of subsidies from the public purse, it is nearly impossible for the country to drill its way to energy self-sufficiency, even if every last square inch of wilderness is destroyed in the process: baring some incredible technological breakthrough such as commercially viable fusion reactors, only conservation and massive increases in renewable energy sources are capable of solving the "energy crisis" the richest country in the world is staring in the face. Like it or lump it, those are the facts of the matter.
* The leading producer of methane worldwide, is either cow or termite flatulence - depending upon who is doing the estimating!!
* The first "wonder drug,", acetylsalicylic acid - commonly known as ASA and widely marketed by Bayer Pharmaceuticals as Aspirin - was put together by Dr. Felix Hoffman in 18997. He was investigating the pain killing properties of salicylic acid, which is found naturally in willows and birches and has been used for pain relief in many societies for thousands of years. It is now being used for everything from heart attack prevention (it inhibits platelet aggregation, effectively "thinning" the blood) to the treatment of some cancers, and worldwide annual production is currently over 30,000 tonnes, which is the equivalent of 120 billion 250 mg tablets.
* Most heart attacks are quite preventable!! A comprehensive worldwide study (by Canadians!) scheduled to be published in the Sept. 11, 2004 edition of The Lancet, shows that 90% of all heart attack risk can be predicted using just 9 factors. Smoking and an abnormal ratio of blood lipids (Apolipoprotein B/APO lipoprotein A-1) predicted about two thirds of all heart attacks. Lack of exercise, excess abdominal fat, high stress levels, not eating enough fruits and veggies, high blood pressure and diabetes were also major risk factors, while a small amount of alcohol per day provided a little extra protection (minor, however: not worth starting to drink for!!). Since the lipid ratio involved is dependent to a large extent upon the other factors, the study concludes that appropriate life-style modifications can prevent 80% of all heart attacks - thereby preventing over 12 million premature deaths per year. Socio-economic status plays a role in overall stress levels, but to a great extent this can most likely be mitigated by attitudinal adjustment and the afore-mentioned lifestyle changes (which also protect against cancer, stroke, other cardiovascular diseases, etc. - so if you don't smoke, exercise regularly, maintain a slim figure, keep your stress levels down, and eat lots of yummy fruits and vegetables, (as well as drinking very sparingly or not at all and driving, walking and cycling defensively i might add!!) you can expect to live a LOT longer than you might otherwise. (While we're on the topic of living longer, vegetarianism, the stricter the better, has also been shown to DRAMATICALLY reduce the risk of major killers such as cancer - i'll cover that in another article.)
* The first few rounds of the modern Olympics games were pretty unsophisticated affairs by any standards: in the 1896 games in Athens, the man who won the 200 m swimming event said that his main opponents hadn't been the other competitors but rather the twelve foot (3.5 meter) waves and "terribly cold water" (the games were held in the first week in April!). Some of the 200 or so athletes representing 14 countries, were tourists who joined in at the last minute..... In the first French version in Paris (1904), the hurdle bars were made of used telephone poles - imagine tripping over one of those beasties!!
* In the early history of Olympic hockey, the dominant country was not surprisingly Canada, which won 4 out of the first 5 gold medals. Two victories stand out in particular: 1) In 1924, the Toronto Granites, an Ontario "Senior A" team, racked up 110 goals in only 5 games, and 2) in 1948, the RCAF (Royal Canadian Air Force) team volunteered to defend the country's hockey honor since no other amateur team had come forth. They won the gold, undefeated throughout the tournament. The Swiss referees were so biased that one member of the RCAF team quipped: "We played 8 opponents - the Swiss team and their referees, and STILL won!!".
* Astronomy is a science where amateurs can make valid and sometimes excellent contributions. A good example is the recent (August, 2004) discovery of a Jupiter-sized planet by a tiny 100 mm (4 inch) telescope, using the "transit" method - i.e., measuring the the dimming effect that occurs when the planet crosses in front of the star in question. The newfound planet is a Jupiter-sized gas giant orbiting a star located about 500 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Lyra. This world circles its star every 3. 03 days at a distance of only 4 million miles, much closer and faster than the planet Mercury in our solar system. Its surface temperature is estimated to be a scorching 1500 F (830 C) - hot enough to melt aluminium!
* In the wonderfully wacky world of deep-sea marine worms, some males truly ARE parasites: in a newly-discovered genus of bone-devouring critter which has no eyes, stomach or mouth and which use bacteria to dissolve the fat in whale bone so it can feed on them with strange root-like "limbs", each mature female found so far, has up to 100 microscopic males living inside their bodies. Like the drones of bees, their only function in life is to provide sperm for the female to use to perpetuate the species with.
* Most plastics are made up of tiny particles (usually 1 to 3 mm) called "nurdles". When plastic degrades, especially on the open ocean, where an astounding volume of plastic has accumulated over the past few decades, these particles are released. Other plastics are also battered by wind, waves and the energy from sunlight, and end up breaking into even smaller microparticles. Plastic pollution, including these small and extremely small pieces of plastic pose an unknown but rapidly increasing threat to many kinds of sea life. On the obvious side, animals from plankton to jellyfish, turtles and seabirds ingest plastic in its various forms, and their digestive tracts are clogged up with the indigestible pieces, which provide absolutely no nutrition. However, an even more dangerous effect of particulate plastic pollution results from their ability to absorb large amounts of toxic substances such as arsenic, DDE (a long-lasting breakdown product of DDT), antibiotics, and things such as estrogen from birth control pills (it passes through the body unchanged, and is causing havoc in many marine and fresh water eco-systems: in even extremely small concentrations, it can cause male sea life to become female, with predictable consequences for reproductive success in affected populations!!) and many other chemicals. When the particles are ingested (i.e., eaten) by sea-life, the toxins are absorbed into their bodies. // Plastic pollution is so far advanced already (scarcely 50 years after they first became commonly used!!), that in some areas of the open ocean, there are 6 times as much plastic as there are plankton, the tiny animals at the bottom of the food web. One would have to be willfully blind to declare, as many industry spokespersons (and their political allies) are straight-facedly doing, that plastic pollution is not a serious and rapidly increasing threat to the health of our planet's world-ocean.
* About 75 billion TONNES (about 100 billion tons) of plastic is produced each year. Three percent of it is recycled. The rest eventually ends up as litter and garbage. Since almost all plastics float, and since they last hundreds or even thousands of years, a surprisingly large percentage of those billions of tonnes/tons produced per year eventually find (or will find in the future) their way to the oceans, with a wide range of consequences we are just now beginning to discover. The few discussed above, are just the proverbial "tip of the iceberg". (and you thought jellyfish were icky - ha!!!)
* Human females are the only mammal which is a covert ovulator (not even she knows) (i.e., there is no outward signal that an egg has ripened and the female is thus ready to conceive); also, female humans are the only mammal whose mammaries (breasts) enlarge prior to the first pregnancy.
* Some good news, for a change!! Many scientists have been prediction the imminent demise of the world's coral reefs, due to their intolerance of rapid global warming. Corals form symbiotic relationships with algae to provide them with nutrients via photosynthesis. Many of these algae become considerably less effective at converting nutrients to more useable forms using the energy provided by sunlight, at temperatures only 1 degree C higher than the temperature they normally live at. This decrease in nutrient-conversion causes the corals to expel them from their colonies - a process called "bleaching", since it turns the colony white. Bleaching can kill a coral colony if it is too prolonged, or repeated too often. However, some strains of the species of algae normally used by corals are far more heat-resistant, exhibiting little or no reduction of photosynthetic efficiency at temperatures that send the normal forms into a tailspin. It now appears that corals can often switch to these more heat-tolerant strains or "clades", in order to avoid the negative effects of long-term higher water temperatures and the resultant loss of their primary food source. Since a very healthy chunk of the biodiversity of the oceans is connected with the high productivity and many kinds of habitats associated with coral reefs, the realization that they are not doomed to disappear in the next 50 years.
* The two classic "parasitic" birds - those avian cads which lay their eggs in other species' nests so they don't have to raise the kiddies themselves - are the European cookoo (hence the expression "cuckolded") and the American cowbird. Despite their similar lazy ways, they have very different strategies when it comes to getting the host mother and father to feed them: Cookoos chicks are typically much larger than their prospective nest mates, so when they hatch, they promptly kick their competitors' eggs (they hatch first) out of the nest, leaving the poor adoptive parents to feed a baby who isn't even of their own species! Cowbirds, however, employ a much more subtle strategy: they like to lay their eggs in the nests of species which generally only have two or three chicks, but when their invading young hatch (again first!), they let their "foster-siblings" hatch and live, then they hog the lion's share of the food the hard working parents bring to feed a family of three or four, by opening their much larger and more colorful mouth just as the mommy or daddy is trying to feed the others!! This way, they benefit by getting more food than they would have gotten if they were the only one in the nest. They let the host's kids get enough flies and worms to stay alive, so that they can continue to benefit from the extra work the parents put into trying to feed a larger family.
* An estimated 7 million dolphins have been killed by the tuna industry in the Americas, over the past 50 years or so. Despite government attempts to promote and ensure that "dolphin-safe tuna" truly is just that, many thousands of these amazing beings are still trapped in tuna nets and drowned each year. (and i'll refrain from any unnecessary comments regarding the way the current regime (summer, 2004) recently ignored scientific reports including its own, and loosened the regulations, which had to be set back in place by court action....).
* The fatigue you feel after prolonged exercise has traditionally been explained as a combination of a build up of lactic acid in the muscles, and plain old-fashioned dehydration. I've never bought into the lactic acid theory, since i've found that a bit of carefully targeted deep tissue massage - which breaks up scar tissues in muscles and connective tissues (tendons, ligaments), thus increasing circulation, decreasing inflammation and diminishing the pull of tightened muscles and tendons on attachment sites - to work wonders in decreasing feelings of fatigue after heavy exertion. Now, another contributing factor towards post exercise fatigue has been identified: a chemical in the brain is built up during exercise: "interleukin- 6", which can be up to 100 times as common in the blood after prolonged physical exertion. Also, injecting interleukin-6 into the bloodstream of athletes, decreases their performance quite a bit!! Scientists theorize that this is one way the mind protects the body from possible damage caused by too intense or too extended physical activity. It also explains why determined people can overcome their exhaustion - breaking through "the wall" which long-distance runners and others tend to hit after a while.
* Once again, a recent study has supported the fact that much of most people's attention and worries, and an absurd proportion of public and private resources, are focused upon statistically trivial dangers or relatively (i.e., by comparison to others) small problems - shark attacks, for example (worldwide, Falling coconuts kill a reported 150 people worldwide each year, 15 times the number of fatalities attributable to sharks - typically 10 or less per year, out of some 50 "unprovoked" attacks recorded) or abductions of children by evil "strangers" (about 5,000 per year in the USA, compared to 350,000 kidnappings by "non-custodial family members": i'm not at all saying that "stranger" abduction is not important - i'm just saying that it gets FAR more attention in our society than a similar problem 70 times more likely to occur!). Meanwhile, many truly important, major problems and probabilities are scarcely given a second thought by the "inappropriately concerned majority", and their elected representatives by extension. The study in question reported that an estimated 200,000 hospital patients are killed each year by mistakes made by hospital staff: doctors, nurses, orderlies, etc. About 150 billion dollars was spent by that country last year to fight "terrorism" around the globe, which killed maybe 5,000 people worldwide (vs about 3,000,000 killed by AIDS, for example), and in the neighbourhood of 0 (none, nada, zip) in the USA. Amount spent by the feds there to try and diminish the number , nature and lethality of hospital errors....... well, if you hear of any government programs specifically designed to cut down the number of people dying from these mostly inexcusable and often outright negligent mistakes, let me know. I rest my case - for now anyway!
* The old adage that blind people hear better has been proven true by recent research - but there's a catch: it only worlds for people who are blind from birth, or became blind very young in life. In the first few years of life, the brain is far more resilient and adaptable, and can compensate in a hard-wired manner, for damage or loss.
* Interest makes a difference! On a 30 year, $100,000 mortgage, for instance, if one were to pay an extra $100 per month above the nominal rate, over $50,000 in interest payments would be saved, and the loan would be paid off 9 years earlier.
* There are more than 100 language families in the world today - from Indo-European (English, Bengali, Urdu, German, French, Danish...) to Sino-Tibetian, Dravidian, and the 35 or so language families in the Americas. (California had representatives of about 20 families in pre-Columbian times: FAR greater linguistic diversity than all of Europe!). NOTE: This and the language facts below, are as found on the excellent site: http://www.krysstal.com/langfams.html
In 2003, the total number of languages in the world was estimated to be 6,809. // 90% of these languages are spoken by less than 100,000 people. Between 200 and 150 languages are spoken by more than a million people. There are 357 languages which have less than 50 speakers. The Cambap language (Central Cameroon) has 30 speakers; the Leco language (Bolivian Andes) has about 20 speakers. A total of 46 languages have just a single speaker remaining.
Over the last 500 years 4.5% of the world's described languages have disappeared completely. In North America, at least 52 languages have become extinct since 1600. In Australia, 31 of their 235 languages have vanished.
Even so, some countries and regions are still rich in linguistic diversity. Mexico has 52 languages spoken within its borders. The old USSR (Soviet Union) had 100. Nigeria has over 400. The island of Papua New Guinea has over 700, virtually a different one in each valley. India has over 800 languages in several families (Indo-European, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Asiatic).
* One of the most mysterious languages in the world is that spoken by the Basque people of northeastern Spain. It is not obviously related to any known language group, and many linguists think it may date all the way back to neolithic Europe: for example, its word for "axe" is closely related to the word for "stone".
* Turns out that space is a lot warmer (at least in spots) than most people tend to think: a recent study of an area of space near the galactic core of our Milky Way galaxy using NASA's x-ray telescope (named "Chandra"), has shown the region to be bathed in a "diffuse glow from a 10-million-degree Celsius gas cloud, embedded in a glow of higher-energy X-rays with a spectrum characteristic of 100-million-degree gas". The cooler, 10 million degree gas is produced from known sources (black holes, neutron stars, old supernovas, etc.), but the ten times warmer gas has no known source - suggesting we have a LOT to learn about our own little neigbourhood of the Universe!! (Lest one be concerned about this super-heated gas wafting or jetting into our own interstellar neck of the woods, while hot, this gas is so thin that nobody would notice any difference here on Earth even if it did.)
* Although to cite the studies in question is beyond the purvey of this "fun oriented" feature, it is becoming increasingly clear that the natural healing systems of the body are sometimes hindered rather than helped by the myriads of drugs ("pharmaceuticals" in medical jargonese) designed mostly to provide symptomatic relief of whatever ails , hurts or inconveniences us. Some of the most recent additions to the cautionary tales in this regard, are showing that common pain relievers such as ASA, Ibuprofen and more fancy beasties that go under the nom-de-guerre of "COX-2 inhibitors" can often seriously hinder the healing of many kinds of injuries - tendon, ligament, bone.... i've long suspected this (after breaking a collar bone, i was told it would take 6 to 8 weeks to get things back to normal, and was given some Serious Pain Killers. I ignored both the time table and the drugs and was back to my semi-athletic albeit weakling self in 3 weeks), but it is nice to see it supported by actual controlled studies!!
* The top search engine these daze (June, 2004) is Google.com. What is not commonly known about its success, is that it is due to a small army of Ph.D. superbrains. The ranks of programmers and marketing wizards that have made Google top dog in the cutthroat search category on the internet include not only a former rocket scientist, but also a former brain surgeon.
* The accuracy of scientists' measurements is critical to the reliability and overall usefulness of their observations. Hence, there is a constant drive in science to measure time, distance, velocity, acceleration, diversity, temperature, mass, gravity, wavelenth/frequency, etc. with greater and greater precision. Time is a particularly crucial parameter, so its measurement has been the focus of intense interest and corresponding research. Today's atomic clocks measure time so precisely that it would take over 40 million years before they would be wrong by a single second - that's about one part in 1300 trillion!! (and you thought your old Timex was accurate....)
* According to official figures, in the first 8 months of his presidency, George Dubya Bush was on vacation 42% of the time: more than any president in history, in the critical first few months of their administration.
* Over 25 distinct methods of altering seashells to make them look better and hence bring higher prices, are known. These include lip alterations ("smoothing", filing..), various kinds of repairs, gluing tips (protoconchs) on, polishing, painting, baking (which changes the color of the pigments), and bleaching to produce artificial "albino" specimens.
* 63.7182 % of all statistics used on this type of list are made up on the spot.
* "Jiffy" is an interesting word. Here is a comprehensive exploration of the concept as found in The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, © 1993-2003 Denis Howe: n. 1. The duration of one tick of the system clock on your computer . Often one AC (alternating current) cycle time (1/60 second in the U.S. and Canada, 1/50 most other places), but more recently 1/100 sec has become common. "The swapper runs every 6 jiffies" means that the virtual memory management routine is executed once for every 6 ticks of the clock, or about ten times a second. 2. Confusingly, the term is sometimes also used for a 1 millisecond wall time interval. 3. Even more confusingly, physicists semi-jokingly use `jiffy' to mean the time required for light to travel one foot in a vacuum, which turns out to be close to a nanosecond . 4. Indeterminate time from a few nano-seconds to forever. "I'll do it in a jiffy" means certainly not now and possibly never.
* There are two major pigments in humans: eumelanin (black) and phaeomelanin (yellow). For that matter, the same two pigments are present in virtually every mammal, from mice to tigers, and can be combined to produce any color from white to red to yellow to brown to black. I'm not sure how baboons get blue muzzles, but I'm hard put to think of any other examples of mammalian coloration outside the red-yellow-black-white spectrum.
* The post-WWII policies and actions of Joseph Stalin (or "uncle Joe", as one famous president liked to refer to him) resulted in the death of an estimated 30 million people in the Soviet Union, over an 8 year period to 1953.
* This gubblick contains many nonsklarkish English flutzpahs, but the overall pluggandisp can be glorked [sic] from context.
* Facts in isolation or improper contexts, are often VERY misleading. For example: Fact: About 1000 Ha of old growth forest is clear-cut on the island of Tasmania per year. What those who think this is unacceptable usually neglect to tell you is that there are almost 1.5 million Ha of old growth forest on this little chunk of Primaeval Paradise, with at least 70% of that total in National parks or other completely protected reserves. (so, it would take 500 years to cut down the 30% not protected!!) Context nearly ALWAYS makes a big difference in how we view or understand almost anything and everything: if the context is omitted, distorted, obscured, substituted, or otherwise bent, folded, spindled or mutilated, any fact, statement or statistic can be made to seem to mean pretty well anything at all!! (This is especially true when applied to sacred texts, politics and economics......)
* In the final days of WWII, before Japan became the first country in the world to be "nuked", the country's leaders repeatedly offered to surrender. Their requests were nixed because they wished to keep their emperor as their head of government - something the offered peace conditions did not permit.
* During the infamous McCarthy-Era (Feb. 1950 to late 1954, when the energetic but not terribly ethical senator was finally reined in by the senate) communist "witch hunts" in the early days of the so-called Cold War, over 6.5 million people in many walks of life, from movie stars to file clerks, were investigated to see if they were communist spies or otherwise "threats to national security". With the exeption of the infamous Rosenbergs, none (nada) were found to be guilty as charged or suspected - including the 200+ or 89 (take your pick - both were just semi-random numbers anyway!!) "spies" which the McCarthy-man initially claimed to have "documentation" regarding. I am not denying that there were most likely Soviet spies around during that period, but the paranoid, buckshot-like ideology and associated methodology of the times, were notably ineffective at finding and convicting them. (I **could** draw parallels to the present (2004), but i'm sure anyone who's read thus far on this page is quite capable of doing so themselves......).
* In the famous Beatles song "Paper Back Writer", the French folk song "Frere Jaques" can be heard in the background several times - the Beatles took great pleasure in putting little "surprises" in their work - such as the inclusion of a Bach fugue in the tangle of tunes which follows Strawberry fields, and the delicious double meanings in songs such as Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and A Day in the Life.
* If anyone doubts the power and wealth of "Big Business" (trans-national giant companies which are more or less a law unto themselves these days), the raw figures speak for themselves. Of the 100 largest "economies" in the world, 53 are giant corporations. The other 47 are nation states (i.e., countries.)
* Wal-Mart, the colossal retail chain, is the world s largest corporation. Last year its total income was $246.5 billion, a sum larger than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Sweden, Austria or Norway. It is the 19th largest economy in the world.
* The combined sales of the largest 200 companies constitute 29 percent of the world's economic activity, but they only employ 0.9 percent of the world's work force. This means that the other 28.1% of the world's economic activity that this handful of companies rake in, goes towards the enrichment of the owners (well, at least the net profit does - lest anyone accuse me of being simplistic here ;=)).
* Casual dating can be dangerous. A study of spiders shows female wolf spiders will eat strange-looking males that try to mate with them, but spare and even hook up with familiar-looking males. The findings provide not just an interesting insight into spider behavior, but may help explain actions by "higher" animals, said arachnologist Eileen Hebets of Cornell University in New York. "The female is using earlier experience that is going to affect her mate choice later," Hebets said in a telephone interview. "It is reasonable to expect that is a common thing in other animals." Hebets worked with Schizocosa uetzi arachnids, commonly known as wolf spiders. The female, which is slightly larger, can choose a) to mate, b) to run away or c) to eat her suitor. Apparently, running away is not a very frequently chosen option.....
* Since there is a low conversion rate between stored carbon in ancient plants and the oil we extract today, it takes an estimated ninety eight tons (88,000 kg) of prehistoric buried plant material to produce each U.S. gallon (3.9 liters) of gasoline, according to a new study. It finds that the total amount of fossil fuel burned in 1997 totaled 97 million billion pounds (4.36 x 10E16 kg) of carbon; a figure that is equivalent to more than 400 times all the plant matter that grows in the world in a year, including microscopic plant life in the world's oceans. // "Every day, people are using the fossil fuel equivalent of all the plant matter that grows on land and in the oceans over the course of a whole year," says study author Jeff Dukes, an ecologist at the University of Utah.
* A group of flightless Papua New Guinea birds known as "cassowaries" communicate through the dense foliage of the jungle by means of extra-low frequency sound waves - partly below the range of hearing of humans. People near a cassowarie calling in their lowest register, would feel, rather than hear the sound - much like the low-frequency calls of elephants, which can be heard up to 50 miles (80 km) away. Cassowaries are among the world's most dangerous birds: weighing up to 125 pounds (56 kg), they kick when fighting, and have a "spike" on their feet which can rip a person open, with sometimes fatal results. They are also nearly extinct, due to poaching and hunting by loggers and increasing populations of some native peoples in the region.
* "Reefer madness" apparently strikes both sides of the debate in the American War on Pot: in a recent (summer, 2003) investigation and raid on a factory producing glass pipes often used by marijuana smokers, 1200 (that's twelve hundred) local, state and national law enforcement officers were used in a massive campaign to shut down the operation, which was not a secret nor was its location difficult to discover. (Note: i do not condone smoking of anything at all, but it just seems to me that sometimes law enforcement ideologies related to certain activities are just a *tad* paranoid - not to mention a rather poor excuse to waste massive amounts of taxpayers' money......)
* Before the arrival of Columbus and the boyz, the population of the Americas was an estimated 100,000,000 native people. Only a few million of these remain today. The biggest contributor to their near-extinction was the arrival of European diseases such as smallpox, which killed (often intentionally, it should be noted) many more natives than all the slavery initiatives and "Indian Wars" combined. One of the most dramatic and least known tragedies related to disease introduction, was the eradication of a well-ordered and splendid civilization in the upper Amazon region, chronicled by an explorer whose name i can't remember (any takers? He was leading a gang of dissenters from the army of Pizzaro, which was invading the Inca civilization in Equador). It vanished almost literally "without a trace", due almost entirely to the effect of European diseases.
* Since 1978, populations of American, Asian and European eels have declined almost 99%, probably due to pollution and over fishing. Eels, like sharks, are an under-studied and under-appreciated part of our aquatic ecosystems. They spawn only once, in the Sargasso Sea and similar places in the Pacific, and the young then migrate to fresh water streams and estuaries where they live for the next 10 to 50 years, accumulating toxic chemicals in their gonads, which may be making successful reproduction increasingly difficult.
* Sharks are the "ultimate predator" of the ocean, but they can't outrun or outwit humans, who kill an estimated 100 million of the slowly-reproducing (hence vulnerable to population depletion) animals. Most of these are taken just for their fins, which are used to make an expensive soup in many countries, but most especially Asia. In some Japanese restaurants, a bowl of shark fin soup can set you back $100 USD. "Finning" is a particularly shocking form of killing: the animal is caught, its fins sliced off, and while it is still alive it is dumped overboard to sink to the bottom where it dies of suffocation (most sharks must be moving or holding still in a current, in order to breathe).
* Neutrons are not stable outside of the nucleus of an atom. On their own, neutrons have a half-life of just over 14 minutes - i.e., after 14 minutes, half of a given sample of neutrons will have "decayed" (split up) into protons and other particles, and after 28 minutes only a quarter of free neutrons (neutrons not connected with a nucleus) will remain.
* The life of a professional soccer player may seem glamorous, but there is a price to pay: nearly half of them will develop osteoarthritis at a young age, averaging around 40 years old.
* About 85% of the mass of the universe is a mysterious form of "dark" matter: it can be detected only through its gravitational force, and does not form stars. It may, however, play a major role in galaxy formation - especially of galaxies that are also "dark": clouds of hydrogen and other gases that do not coalesce into stars we can see. For example, there are 35 visible galaxies in our "local cluster" - but taking into account all the dark matter, there should be up to 500 galaxies!! Astronomers are now coming to suspect that many of the "missing" galaxies may be dwarfs with no stars, hence difficult for us to detect.
* Dolphins are being found these days with up to 2,000 (two thousand) parts per million of PCBs (a class of about 100 toxic chemicals formed by many industrial processes - they are very rare in nature) - 40 times the amount needed to classify their flesh as toxic waste, and 400 times the level deemed "safe" in humans. PCBs and other oil-soluble chemicals build up in the fat of living animals (including us!!) over a lifetime of exposure, and cause health problems such as cancer and toxic effects to a variety of organs including the brain and liver. Inuit who live a "traditional" lifestyle, eating large quantities of fat from marine mammals, have PCB concentrations in their bodies of 10 to 15 parts per million, while most people in North America and Europe have levels of less than 2 parts per million. People living beside toxic waste dumps can have over 30 ppm of the stuff cruising around in their blood.
* Those who believe in "smokers' rights" would be well advised to consider the case of Helena, Montana, a city of about 70,000 that banned indoor smoking in public places in June 2002. The heart attack rate immediately began to decline, and by 6 month's time there were 58% fewer heart attacks for people living inside the city limits - but NO decrease for people living in the same area, but in places without a similar ban!! When the Big Tobacco lobby succeeded in "persuading" the state legislature to make such bans illegal, the number of heart attacks in the city immediately began to climb again, and within a few months had returned to normal. // Exposure to smoke, whether first or second hand, causes platelets (the blood cells that cause clotting) to become stickier, which leads to more frequent clotting in a matter of 30 minutes, and hence an increase in blockage of blood vessels leading to the heart - heart attack!!
* Although good ol' Saddam of Iraq does not appear to have stored away much in the way of those scary "unconventional" weapons, they were most certainly not running short on the conventional variety. It is estimated that they left over a million tons of explosives and other weapons lying about Iraq in the wake of the most recent war with the USA. These are stockpiled in huge "weapons dumps" up to 25 km2 in size. For some reason that nobody wishes to give an official answer to, plans were not made to quickly secure and destroy this huge amount of weaponry after the invasion - so now [early 2004] they are being carted off by the truckfull by terrorists of all kinds, proving once again that war is quite often a way to create more violence and chaos, rather than diminishing the threat from ruthless people who will take whatever advantage they can, to further their warped objectives. Consider that a dandy suicide bomb can be made from only a few kilos of explosives - if only say, 10% of Saddam's largely unguarded weapons caches are diverted into the terrorist "underworld", that is still enough to make a LOT of bombs which could be transported to almost anywhere in the world - probably not what Mr. Bush had in mind when he set out to bring peace and democracy to one third of the "Axis of Evil"......
* The Yellowstone buffalo herd is descended from the only members of their species to survive in the continental USA: 23 individuals who somehow escaped the slaughter of between 40 and 70 million of their kind in the 1860s and 70s. Those that stray from the protection of the park in search of winter fodder, are still harassed and killed by government officials intent on protecting cattle from bovine tuberculosis, which still occurs in the herd - despite the fact that there is no known case of cross-species transmission of the disease.
* The record-breaking heat wave in Europe in the summer of 2003, killed an estimated 35,000 people. Temperatures reached 40 C (104 F) in many countries, and were far above normal for weeks.
* An analysis of more than 7 million recent discharge records from hospitals in 28 states reveals that a group of 18 medical injuries that occur during hospitalization may account for 2.4 million extra hospital days, $9.3 billion in excess charges, and almost 32,600 attributable deaths in the United States annually. The most serious offender is sepsis, a severe infection that sometimes develops after surgery. Sepsis occurs in approximately 11 per 1000 cases and is associated with the greatest increases in length of stay (11 days), charges ($57,727), and in-hospital mortality (22 percent of all sepsis cases are fatal.).
* The world's first moving picture film was shot in "early October", 1888, by Louis Aimé Augustin (Edmée Auguste) Le Prince, of his father in law's garden. The world's first commercial movie was La Sortie des Usines Lumiere ("Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory"), which aired in 1895. The tools necessary for this feat were developed a decade earlier by the physiologist Etienne Jules Marey, who wished to study human movement scientifically. // The first movie with an actual plot is considered to be "The Great Train Robbery" filmed in 1903 by Thomas Alva Edison.
* The first commercial film with spoken dialogue (a "talkie") first aired on Oct. 6, 1927 in New York. It was The Jazz Singer, staring the irrepressible Al Jolson.
* As women all over the world become more educated, politically active and gain more control over their lives - as well as access to birth control technology - birth rates are declining in almost all countries. If current trends continue, it is now predicted that instead of the population "explosion" predicted for the 21st century, global population should peak at about 9 billion by the year 2050, and decline after that. This century could actually end with fewer people alive than when it began - something that hasn't happened since the Black Plague in the 14th century. However, lest everyone jump for joy thinking that this automatically means a lessening of the human population's "ecological footprint", as standards of living rise for many countries, so does their consumption of goods and services, and correspondingly their appetite for more land, more water, more lumber, more metals..... we can never relax efforts to increase conservation measures and decrease the impact of each individual on the health of the biosphere in general.
Many More Wierd Facts!! (Page 2)
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In this new century, those who effectively utilize space will enjoy added prosperity and security and will hold a substantial advantage over those who do not. Freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power. In keeping with the more muscular stance, the administration is also opposing any negotiations on a treaty to prevent an arms race in outer space arguing that it may impede America s ability to defend its satellites from ground-based weapons.
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