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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."
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!!

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).
[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: