You Are One-Third Daffodil: And Other Facts to Amaze, Amuse, and Astound
Editat de Tom Nuttallen Limba Engleză Paperback – 31 aug 2009
Organized into witty categories, including “Battle of the Sexes: Facts About Men and Women” and “The Past Is a Foreign Country: Facts About History,” You Are One-third Daffodil contains hundreds of weird and wacky facts, including:
*In Milan, it is a legal requirement to smile at all times, except during funerals or hospital visits.
*The most expensive age of your life is thirty-four.
*Cuba will lift its ban on toasters in 2010.
*Thomas Jefferson invented the swivel chair.
*The “zip” of zip code stands for “zone improvement plan.”
*Counting up from zero, and excluding the word “and,” the first number to contain the letter “a” is one thousand.
*There are an estimated 10,000 trillion ants on earth–roughly 1.6 million ants for each person. Their combined weight is equivalent to the weight of the entire human population.
*In the Second World War, every Italian soldier in North Africa carried his own personal espresso machine.
So go ahead, become the office Einstein (though did you know Einstein didn’t learn to read until he was ten?) or the cocktail party trivia star with You Are One-third Daffodil. The words “did you know?” will never sound the same again!
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780767932462
ISBN-10: 0767932463
Pagini: 187
Dimensiuni: 130 x 192 x 17 mm
Greutate: 0.2 kg
Editura: BROADWAY BOOKS
ISBN-10: 0767932463
Pagini: 187
Dimensiuni: 130 x 192 x 17 mm
Greutate: 0.2 kg
Editura: BROADWAY BOOKS
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Notă biografică
Tom Nuttall compiled the In Fact column, upon which this book is based, for Prospect, a British magazine of politics and culture, between 2002 and 2008. He lives in London.
Extras
Coming into This World . . .
Facts About Birth and Babies
At birth, most babies cry at C or C-sharp.
—FINANCIAL TIMES, JULY 31, 2003
•
At a rough estimate, each newly conceived human has around three hundred harmful genetic mutations. —EDGE.ORG
•
The “happiness boost” that men gain from a firstborn son is 75 percent larger than from a firstborn daughter. Second and third children don’t contribute to the happiness of either parent.
—PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, APRIL 12, 2007
Every day, 44,000 babies are born in China—roughly the population of Canterbury.
—PROSPECT RESEARCH
•
Most babies in Britain are conceived without the conscious consent of the father.
—INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH
•
Sixty percent of newborn babies in India would be in intensive care if born in California.
—STATE OF THE WORLD 2000
•
A boy born in Russia in 2004 had a lower life expectancy than one born in Bangladesh.
—THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 11, 2004
•
In 2006, for the first time, more French children were born out of wedlock than to married parents.
—REUTERS, JANUARY 15, 2008
•
Hong Kong’s fertility rate—1.02 children per woman—is the second lowest in the world. The rate in Macau is 0.91
—CIA WORLD FACTBOOK
•
In Berlin, 20 percent more babies were born in March 2007—nine months after the World Cup—than in March 2006. —FINANCIAL TIMES, JUNE 9, 2007
•
American women are 70 percent more likely to die in childbirth than Europeans.
—TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, JUNE 1, 2007
•
Almost 1 percent of Guatemalan children are adopted by American families.
—THE NEW YORK TIMES, NOVEMBER 6, 2006
•
Eighty-six percent of fathers attend the birth of their children. —FATHERHOOD INSTITUTE
The fertility rate in the United States—2.1 children per woman—is the highest it has been for thirty-five years. —THE NEW YORK TIMES, FEBRUARY 1, 2008
•
In 2000, for the first time in more than two hundred years, more babies were born in France than in any other European country.
—OLD EUROPE? DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE AND PENSION REFORM BY DAVID WILLETTS, CENTER FOR EUROPEAN REFORM
•
New Zealand and Britain are two of the few countries in which a majority of married couples practicing family planning opt for male rather than female sterilization. —EARTH POLICY INSTITUTE
•
Forty-three percent of Americans approve of using gene therapy to enhance the physical and behavioral traits of children.
—THE PEW RESEARCH CENTER FOR THE PEOPLE & THE PRESS
•
By the age of fifteen, only half of American children live with both biological parents, compared with roughly two-thirds of Swedish, German, and French children and 90 percent of children in Spain and Italy. —THE AMERICAN PROSPECT, JUNE 2005
. . . And Leaving It
Facts About Death and Dying
Five people were killed by falling icicles in the central Russian town of Samara between February 23 and 25, 2008. —REUTERS, FEBRUARY 26, 2008
•
The Scottish suicide rate is almost double that of England: 21 per 100,000 people compared with 12 per 100,000. —FINANCIAL TIMES, JANUARY 16, 2004
•
The life expectancy of professional cyclists is about fifty. —THE NEW CRITERION, JUNE 2004
•
There are 87.4 violent deaths per 100,000 people in Lithuania: the highest figure in the world.
—WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION
•
Bird flu kills someone almost every week in Indonesia. —THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, APRIL 24, 2007
•
Venezuela has the highest per capita murder rate in the world. —FOREIGN POLICY, MAY/JUNE 2007
•
Americans have a 1 in 180 chance of dying from poisoning. The odds of dying in a car accident are 247 to 1, of drowning in the bath 9,377 to 1, and of being burned to death by ignited nightwear 538,523 to 1. —ECONOMIST.COM, SEPTEMBER 8, 2008
•
Between 20 and 50 percent of deaths from hypothermia involve “paradoxical undressing” (the sufferer removing their own clothes).
—NEW SCIENTIST, APRIL 21, 2007
Between 25,000 and 100,000 Indian farmers commit suicide every year. —THE HINDU, FEBRUARY 25, 2007
•
Suicide is the biggest killer among young Chinese. It also accounts for a third of all deaths among rural women. —MARGINAL REVOLUTION, JUNE 30, 2006
•
Every year 1.2 million people die in road accidents around the world. —THE OBSERVER, MARCH 23, 2008
•
In the United States, more than 90 percent of suicide attempts involving guns are successful. The success rate for jumping from high places is 34 percent, and for drug overdoses just 2 percent.
—TIME, JUNE 30, 2008
•
In the United States, on the third and fourth days after heavyweight championship bouts, the homicide rate rises by an average of 9 percent.
—HAPPINESS BY RICHARD LAYARD
•
Between 1948 and 1998, 20,362 Israelis were killed in wars with neighboring states while 20,852 were killed on the roads.
—THE JERUSALEM REPORT, NOVEMBER 22, 1999
•
More people die as a result of dog attacks in the United States each year than have been killed by sharks in the last hundred years.
—THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, AUGUST 5, 2007
•
Between 1969 and 2002, a citizen of Northern Ireland was over two hundred times more likely to die from sectarian violence than a citizen of India.
—PROSPECT, MAY 2002
•
In the United States in the twentieth century, five times more people were killed in traffic accidents than died in war. Total fatalities on the road as of 1997 were 2.98 million, compared with war deaths totaling 605,000. —PROSPECT RESEARCH
Seventy-one percent of dead bodies in Britain are cremated, but in Ireland the figure is only 5 percent.
—PROSPECT, APRIL 2003
•
A 2005 survey in Sweden found that for every two inches in height, men’s suicide rate decreased by 9 percent. But a more recent study has found an even stronger correlation between male body length at birth and the probability of an attempt at suicide in later life. —THE WILSON QUARTERLY, SPRING 2008
•
The three most common requests by British people planning their own funerals are to be cremated with their pet’s ashes, to have a mobile phone in the coffin, and for someone to ensure that they are dead.
—AGE CONCERN
•
The average American lives thirteen years longer than the average celebrity, who is four times as likely to commit suicide. — TIME.COM
•
It is forbidden to die in the Norwegian town of Longyearbyen. —BBC RADIO 4, JULY 12, 2008
•
Fifty-six percent of the world’s female suicides are in China. —CHINA SHAKES THE WORLD, BY JAMES KYNGE
•
An estimated 7,000 Americans a year die as a result of doctors’ bad handwriting. —HARPER’S, APRIL 2007
You Say Potato, I Say Potato
Facts About Languages and Words
On a QWERTY keyboard, 32 percent of keystrokes take place on the “home” (middle) row, 52 percent on the upper row, and 16 percent on the bottom row.
—JARED DIAMOND, DISCOVER MAGAZINE, APRIL 1997
•
Egyptians, Indians, and Turks search for “sex” on Google more than any other nationality. “Hitler” is most popular in Germany, Austria, and Mexico; “Nazi” in Chile, Australia, and Britain. “David Beckham” gets the most hits in Venezuela.
—REUTERS, OCTOBER 17, 2007
•
The insults “moron,” “idiot,” “imbecile,” and “cretin” were all once official medical diagnoses.
—BALDERDASH & PIFFLE, BBC 2
•
“Stewardesses” is the longest word typed with only the left hand and “lollipop” with the right.
—URBANDICTIONARY.COM
•
Counting up from zero, and excluding the word “and,” the first number to contain the letter A is “thousand.” —PROSPECT RESEARCH
•
In the Eskimo language Inuktitut, there is a single word meaning “I should try not to become an alcoholic”: Iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga.
—THE NEW YORK SUN, DECEMBER 28, 2006
•
The words “tomato,” “coyote,” “avocado,” and “chocolate” all come from the Aztec language Nahuatl.
—MARGINAL REVOLUTION, FEBRUARY 27, 2006
The highest possible legal score on a first turn in Scrabble is given by the word “muzjiks,” giving 128 points. The world record for the highest score on a single turn is “quixotry” (365 points).
—WIKIPEDIA/SLATE, OCTOBER 26, 2006
•
The collective noun for owls is “parliament.”
—WIKIPEDIA
•
No words in the English language rhyme with “orange,” “silver,” “purple,” or “month.”
—NEW SCIENTIST, DECEMBER 18, 2004
•
The word “boredom” did not exist in the English language until after 1750.
—BOREDOM: THE LITERARY HISTORY OF A STATE OF MIND BY PATRICIA M. SPACKS
•
There is no word for “please” in Gujarati.
—NEW STATESMAN, JULY 25, 2005
•
Because Chinese number words are so brief, the average Chinese speaker can hold nine digits in his or her active memory at once, compared to seven for English speakers. —THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2008
•
There are 500,000 words in The Oxford English Dictionary. French has less than a fifth of this number.
—THE DAY BRITAIN DIED BY ANDREW MARR
•
“Queueing” is the only word in English with five consecutive vowels. —PROSPECT RESEARCH
•
The word “paradise” comes from a Persian word meaning “walled around.”
—FENCING PARADISE BY RICHARD MABEY
•
The “zip” in “zip code” stands for “zone improvement plan.” —CHICAGO TRIBUNE, DECEMBER 2, 2002
An eighteen-year-old knows 60,000 words, which represents a learning rate of one word per ninety waking minutes from the age of one.
—THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT BY STEVEN PINKER
•
There are 823 languages spoken in Papua New Guinea, more than any other country in the world.
—LIMITS OF LANGUAGE BY MIKAEL PARKVALL
•
“Broadcast” is a term borrowed from farmers, describing what they do with seeds across a field.
—THE WEEKLY STANDARD, JUNE 14, 2004
•
By the age of five, children have acquired 85 percent of the language they will have as adults.
—JOHN BASTIANI, RSA LECTURE
•
The first written Afrikaans used Arabic script, rather than Roman. —PROSPECT, MAY 2004
•
Of all the words in The Oxford English Dictionary, 99 percent derive from languages other than Old English. However, words that derive from Old English make up 62 percent of the words most used.
—THE POWER OF BABEL BY JOHN MCWHORTER
•
The Finnish language has no future tense.
—WIKIPEDIA
•
There are no plurals in Chinese.
—WIRED, DECEMBER 2006
•
The five most-used nouns in the English language are “time,” “person,” “year,” “way,” and “day.”
—CNN, JUNE 22, 2006
•
The fourteenth most popular search term entered into Google is “Google.” —TIME, JUNE 6, 2007
The term “blockbuster” was coined in the 1920s, referring to a film whose queue of customers at the box office was so long that it could not be contained on a single city block.
—THE WASHINGTON POST, FEBRUARY 27, 2005
•
Jack Kerouac typed at one hundred words a minute.
—THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 9, 2007
•
Over just six days in August 1998, The Washington Post devoted 80,289 words to the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
—THE NEW REPUBLIC, SEPTEMBER 7, 1998
•
The condition of being unable to release a dart from one’s hand when throwing is known as dartitis.
—PROSPECT RESEARCH
Into the Wild
Facts About Animals
In ninety days, a single toad can consume nearly 10,000 insects. —STATE OF THE WORLD 2001
•
An amputated newt limb will grow back fully within ten weeks.
—THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, JANUARY 31, 2003
•
The fruit fly Drosophila bifurca is 1.5 millimeters long, while its sperm are 6 centimeters long.
—NATURE, JULY 6, 2000
•
A cow burps up to 280 liters of methane per day.
—THE GUARDIAN, JUNE 7, 2001
•
Seven percent of male zebra finches stutter.
—THE OBSERVER, FEBRUARY 24, 2008
•
The average bee produces one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey during its lifetime. —HORIZONS, MARCH 2003
•
Butterflies taste with their feet.
—TORONTO STAR, MAY 28, 2002
•
Garden worms have five pairs of hearts.
—CORNELL UNIVERSITY
•
Research on guinea pigs has resulted in twenty-three Nobel prizes.
—A GUINEA PIG’S HISTORY OF BIOLOGY BY JIM ENDERSBY
•
The penis of a barnacle may reach up to twenty times its body size. —THE INDEPENDENT, AUGUST 27, 2004
•
Rats can run a hundred yards in less than ten seconds and can jump six feet in the air.
—DAILY MIRROR, AUGUST 23, 2003
•
Neither rabbits nor mice can vomit.
—NATIONAL ANTI-VIVISECTION SOCIETY
•
A female ferret will die if it goes into heat and cannot find a mate. —FERRETSMAGAZINE.COM
•
The closest living relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex is the chicken. —THE GUARDIAN, APRIL 13, 2007
•
Half of all animal species are parasites.
—NATURE, JULY 6, 2000
•
Bacteria of the species Pseudomonas fluorescens can grow from a population of five hundred to two hundred million over the course of one night.
—THE WILD SIDE, MARCH 25, 2008
•
Ants spend only one-fifth of their day working.
—1,000 COMMON DELUSIONS BY CHRISTA POPPELMANN
•
Only 3 percent of male birds have a penis.
—THE ECONOMIST, MAY 5, 2007
•
Adult “paradoxical frogs,” which are found in the Amazon and Trinidad, are so named because they are a third of the size of their tadpoles.
—ENCARTA CONCISE ENGLISH DICTIONARY
•
The Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 killed 250,000 birds. This is approximately the same number that die colliding with plate glass every day in the United States. —PROSPECT, OCTOBER 2001
•
At any moment, there are almost twice as many chickens alive as humans.
—PLANET CHICKEN BY HATTIE ELLIS
•
There are twice as many privately owned tigers in America as there are in the wild across the world.
—THE GUARDIAN, FEBRUARY 2, 2007
•
Homosexual behavior occurs in more than 450 different kinds of animals.
—BIOLOGICAL EXUBERANCE BY BRUCE BAGEMIHL
•
In Japan, dogs now outnumber children age ten and under—there were 13.1 million dogs in 2006.
—ABC NEWS, AUGUST 28, 2007
In 2001, the year of the foot-and-mouth epidemic in the U.K., fewer animals were culled or slaughtered than in an average year.
—DAVID KING, FORMER CHIEF SCIENTIFIC ADVISER TO THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT
•
Elephants cannot jump. —DAILY MAIL, JANUARY 24, 2008
They Did What?!
Facts About Some
Illustrious Individuals
Hitler was on the short list for the 1938 Nobel Peace Prize. —THE GUARDIAN, DECEMBER 7, 2002
•
Vladimir Nabokov spent seven years as a research fellow in entomology at Harvard.
—AT LARGE AND AT SMALL: CONFESSIONS OF A LITERARY HEDONIST BY ANNE FADIMAN
•
In the 1930s, the Inland Revenue investigated William Butler Yeats’s tax returns because they could not believe a poet of his stature had sales that were so small. —THE GUARDIAN, OCTOBER 13, 2005
Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo was named after Ronald Reagan.
—UEFA EURO 2004 WEBSITE
•
Woodrow Wilson is the only president to have had a Ph.D.
—WOODROW WILSON INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR SCHOLARS
•
Casanova spent the last thirteen years of his life working as a librarian.
—THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE, APRIL 23, 2005
•
The only two people to have won both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar are George Bernard Shaw and Al Gore.
—THE INDEPENDENT, OCTOBER 13, 2007
•
Aldous Huxley died on the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. —THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 26, 2006
•
Einstein did not learn to read until he was ten.
—THE GUARDIAN, DECEMBER 6, 2001
•
Napoleon was actually five feet six and a half, taller than the average early nineteenth-century Frenchman. —THE OBSERVER, MARCH 25, 2007
•
Donald Rumsfeld, who served in both the Nixon and George W. Bush cabinets, is both the youngest and the oldest defense secretary in U.S. history.
—BBC.CO.UK, DECEMBER 28, 2006
•
Bill Gates gets 4 million emails a day.
—NEW STATESMAN, JANUARY 25, 2007
•
Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury avoids computers and ATMs and claims never to have driven a car. Isaac Asimov refused to board an airplane.
—DISCOVER, JANUARY 30, 2008
In 1996, Mahathir Mohamad, prime minister of Malaysia, threw the largest-ever dinner party. Twelve thousand guests celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Mahathir’s ruling party, the United Malays National Organization. —BBC WORLD SERVICE
•
The FBI had a 1,427-page dossier on Albert Einstein.
—FORWARD, JUNE 14, 2002
•
The musician Moby (real name Richard Melville Hall) is the great-great- grand-nephew of Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick. Moby was a childhood nickname. —SUCCESSWHOSMYDADDY.COM
•
Andrew Jackson personally fought in 103 duels.
—WASHINGTON MONTHLY, MARCH 2007
•
When Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, he ordered all Monopoly sets to be destroyed. —HASBRO
•
Catherine de Medici introduced knickers in France in the sixteenth century, as she preferred to ride horses sidesaddle. —THE SUNDAY TIMES, OCTOBER 23, 2005
•
Ronald Reagan was born six years before John F. Kennedy. — PROSPECT RESEARCH
•
Lauren Bacall and Shimon Peres are first cousins.
—JEWISH BULLETIN, MAY 16, 2003
•
The IRS has a computer devoted solely to Bill Gates’s tax return. —THE GUARDIAN, FEBRUARY 11, 2006
•
Walt Disney was a direct 22nd descendant of King Edward I.
—ON ROYALTY BY JEREMY PAXMAN
Paul Wolfowitz, formerly deputy defense secretary and head of the World Bank, speaks French, German, Arabic, Hebrew, and Indonesian.
—THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 9, 2007
•
Albert Einstein is the fifth highest-earning dead celebrity, “earning” $18 million in 2006 from use of his trademarked name on the Disney- owned “Baby Einstein” brand of videos and toys. Royalties go to Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, which was bequeathed the estate. —FORBES.COM, OCTOBER 29, 2007
•
Between thirty and forty-five paparazzi follow Britney Spears around on an average evening.
—THE ATLANTIC, APRIL 2008
•
In 2006, the richest person in mainland China was Zhang Yin, a paper recycling entrepreneur worth $3.4 billion. Zhang, the world’s richest self-made woman, is one of fifteen billionaires in China.
—FINANCIAL TIMES, OCTOBER 10, 2006
•
After Marilyn Monroe’s death in 1962, the suicide rate in the United States temporarily increased by 12 percent. —THE TIPPING POINT BY MALCOLM GLADWELL
•
One of Olivia Newton-John’s grandfathers was Max Born, a Nobel-winning physicist and one of the founders of quantum mechanics.
—THE DAILY DISH, NOVEMBER 6, 2006
•
Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest—and failed to make the finals.
—SNOPES.COM
•
Nelson Mandela was not removed from the U.S. terror watch list until 2008.
—THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, JULY 2, 2008
•
Elvis Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, stopped Elvis from touring abroad, as Parker was an illegal immigrant and believed he would not be allowed back into the United States. —BBC.CO.UK
Come Rain or Shine
Facts About the Weather
Two-thirds of the world’s people have never seen snow. — CANADIAN WEATHER TRIVIA CALENDAR 2008
•
In New York City, January 2008 was the first essentially snowless January in seventy-five years.
—LIVESCIENCE.COM, JANUARY 30, 2008
•
Per capita, Sudan has more rainfall than Britain.
—THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, MARCH 2, 2006
•
At any given moment, there are about 1,800 thunderstorms happening around the world. Approximately one hundred lightning bolts strike the Earth every second. —WEATHERMETRICS.COM
•
From a height of three kilometers, it takes thirty minutes for a snowflake to reach the ground.
—CANADIAN WEATHER TRIVIA CALENDAR 2008
•
When rainfall is significantly below normal, the risk of low-level conflict escalating to full-scale civil war approximately doubles in the following year.
—NEW SCIENTIST, JUNE 2, 2007
•
Each year, 30,000 to 80,000 meteorites land on Earth. — NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, LONDON
•
It rains twice as much in Sydney as in London.
—THE GUARDIAN, NOVEMBER 8, 2004
•
On average, London’s commuters get wet just twelve times a year. —TRANSPORT FOR LONDON
•
Between 8 and 15 percent of the increase in American life expectancy over the last thirty years is the result of people moving to warmer climates.
—THE NEW YORK TIMES, JANUARY 12, 2008
Facts About Birth and Babies
At birth, most babies cry at C or C-sharp.
—FINANCIAL TIMES, JULY 31, 2003
•
At a rough estimate, each newly conceived human has around three hundred harmful genetic mutations. —EDGE.ORG
•
The “happiness boost” that men gain from a firstborn son is 75 percent larger than from a firstborn daughter. Second and third children don’t contribute to the happiness of either parent.
—PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, APRIL 12, 2007
Every day, 44,000 babies are born in China—roughly the population of Canterbury.
—PROSPECT RESEARCH
•
Most babies in Britain are conceived without the conscious consent of the father.
—INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH
•
Sixty percent of newborn babies in India would be in intensive care if born in California.
—STATE OF THE WORLD 2000
•
A boy born in Russia in 2004 had a lower life expectancy than one born in Bangladesh.
—THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 11, 2004
•
In 2006, for the first time, more French children were born out of wedlock than to married parents.
—REUTERS, JANUARY 15, 2008
•
Hong Kong’s fertility rate—1.02 children per woman—is the second lowest in the world. The rate in Macau is 0.91
—CIA WORLD FACTBOOK
•
In Berlin, 20 percent more babies were born in March 2007—nine months after the World Cup—than in March 2006. —FINANCIAL TIMES, JUNE 9, 2007
•
American women are 70 percent more likely to die in childbirth than Europeans.
—TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, JUNE 1, 2007
•
Almost 1 percent of Guatemalan children are adopted by American families.
—THE NEW YORK TIMES, NOVEMBER 6, 2006
•
Eighty-six percent of fathers attend the birth of their children. —FATHERHOOD INSTITUTE
The fertility rate in the United States—2.1 children per woman—is the highest it has been for thirty-five years. —THE NEW YORK TIMES, FEBRUARY 1, 2008
•
In 2000, for the first time in more than two hundred years, more babies were born in France than in any other European country.
—OLD EUROPE? DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE AND PENSION REFORM BY DAVID WILLETTS, CENTER FOR EUROPEAN REFORM
•
New Zealand and Britain are two of the few countries in which a majority of married couples practicing family planning opt for male rather than female sterilization. —EARTH POLICY INSTITUTE
•
Forty-three percent of Americans approve of using gene therapy to enhance the physical and behavioral traits of children.
—THE PEW RESEARCH CENTER FOR THE PEOPLE & THE PRESS
•
By the age of fifteen, only half of American children live with both biological parents, compared with roughly two-thirds of Swedish, German, and French children and 90 percent of children in Spain and Italy. —THE AMERICAN PROSPECT, JUNE 2005
. . . And Leaving It
Facts About Death and Dying
Five people were killed by falling icicles in the central Russian town of Samara between February 23 and 25, 2008. —REUTERS, FEBRUARY 26, 2008
•
The Scottish suicide rate is almost double that of England: 21 per 100,000 people compared with 12 per 100,000. —FINANCIAL TIMES, JANUARY 16, 2004
•
The life expectancy of professional cyclists is about fifty. —THE NEW CRITERION, JUNE 2004
•
There are 87.4 violent deaths per 100,000 people in Lithuania: the highest figure in the world.
—WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION
•
Bird flu kills someone almost every week in Indonesia. —THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, APRIL 24, 2007
•
Venezuela has the highest per capita murder rate in the world. —FOREIGN POLICY, MAY/JUNE 2007
•
Americans have a 1 in 180 chance of dying from poisoning. The odds of dying in a car accident are 247 to 1, of drowning in the bath 9,377 to 1, and of being burned to death by ignited nightwear 538,523 to 1. —ECONOMIST.COM, SEPTEMBER 8, 2008
•
Between 20 and 50 percent of deaths from hypothermia involve “paradoxical undressing” (the sufferer removing their own clothes).
—NEW SCIENTIST, APRIL 21, 2007
Between 25,000 and 100,000 Indian farmers commit suicide every year. —THE HINDU, FEBRUARY 25, 2007
•
Suicide is the biggest killer among young Chinese. It also accounts for a third of all deaths among rural women. —MARGINAL REVOLUTION, JUNE 30, 2006
•
Every year 1.2 million people die in road accidents around the world. —THE OBSERVER, MARCH 23, 2008
•
In the United States, more than 90 percent of suicide attempts involving guns are successful. The success rate for jumping from high places is 34 percent, and for drug overdoses just 2 percent.
—TIME, JUNE 30, 2008
•
In the United States, on the third and fourth days after heavyweight championship bouts, the homicide rate rises by an average of 9 percent.
—HAPPINESS BY RICHARD LAYARD
•
Between 1948 and 1998, 20,362 Israelis were killed in wars with neighboring states while 20,852 were killed on the roads.
—THE JERUSALEM REPORT, NOVEMBER 22, 1999
•
More people die as a result of dog attacks in the United States each year than have been killed by sharks in the last hundred years.
—THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, AUGUST 5, 2007
•
Between 1969 and 2002, a citizen of Northern Ireland was over two hundred times more likely to die from sectarian violence than a citizen of India.
—PROSPECT, MAY 2002
•
In the United States in the twentieth century, five times more people were killed in traffic accidents than died in war. Total fatalities on the road as of 1997 were 2.98 million, compared with war deaths totaling 605,000. —PROSPECT RESEARCH
Seventy-one percent of dead bodies in Britain are cremated, but in Ireland the figure is only 5 percent.
—PROSPECT, APRIL 2003
•
A 2005 survey in Sweden found that for every two inches in height, men’s suicide rate decreased by 9 percent. But a more recent study has found an even stronger correlation between male body length at birth and the probability of an attempt at suicide in later life. —THE WILSON QUARTERLY, SPRING 2008
•
The three most common requests by British people planning their own funerals are to be cremated with their pet’s ashes, to have a mobile phone in the coffin, and for someone to ensure that they are dead.
—AGE CONCERN
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The average American lives thirteen years longer than the average celebrity, who is four times as likely to commit suicide. — TIME.COM
•
It is forbidden to die in the Norwegian town of Longyearbyen. —BBC RADIO 4, JULY 12, 2008
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Fifty-six percent of the world’s female suicides are in China. —CHINA SHAKES THE WORLD, BY JAMES KYNGE
•
An estimated 7,000 Americans a year die as a result of doctors’ bad handwriting. —HARPER’S, APRIL 2007
You Say Potato, I Say Potato
Facts About Languages and Words
On a QWERTY keyboard, 32 percent of keystrokes take place on the “home” (middle) row, 52 percent on the upper row, and 16 percent on the bottom row.
—JARED DIAMOND, DISCOVER MAGAZINE, APRIL 1997
•
Egyptians, Indians, and Turks search for “sex” on Google more than any other nationality. “Hitler” is most popular in Germany, Austria, and Mexico; “Nazi” in Chile, Australia, and Britain. “David Beckham” gets the most hits in Venezuela.
—REUTERS, OCTOBER 17, 2007
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The insults “moron,” “idiot,” “imbecile,” and “cretin” were all once official medical diagnoses.
—BALDERDASH & PIFFLE, BBC 2
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“Stewardesses” is the longest word typed with only the left hand and “lollipop” with the right.
—URBANDICTIONARY.COM
•
Counting up from zero, and excluding the word “and,” the first number to contain the letter A is “thousand.” —PROSPECT RESEARCH
•
In the Eskimo language Inuktitut, there is a single word meaning “I should try not to become an alcoholic”: Iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga.
—THE NEW YORK SUN, DECEMBER 28, 2006
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The words “tomato,” “coyote,” “avocado,” and “chocolate” all come from the Aztec language Nahuatl.
—MARGINAL REVOLUTION, FEBRUARY 27, 2006
The highest possible legal score on a first turn in Scrabble is given by the word “muzjiks,” giving 128 points. The world record for the highest score on a single turn is “quixotry” (365 points).
—WIKIPEDIA/SLATE, OCTOBER 26, 2006
•
The collective noun for owls is “parliament.”
—WIKIPEDIA
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No words in the English language rhyme with “orange,” “silver,” “purple,” or “month.”
—NEW SCIENTIST, DECEMBER 18, 2004
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The word “boredom” did not exist in the English language until after 1750.
—BOREDOM: THE LITERARY HISTORY OF A STATE OF MIND BY PATRICIA M. SPACKS
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There is no word for “please” in Gujarati.
—NEW STATESMAN, JULY 25, 2005
•
Because Chinese number words are so brief, the average Chinese speaker can hold nine digits in his or her active memory at once, compared to seven for English speakers. —THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2008
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There are 500,000 words in The Oxford English Dictionary. French has less than a fifth of this number.
—THE DAY BRITAIN DIED BY ANDREW MARR
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“Queueing” is the only word in English with five consecutive vowels. —PROSPECT RESEARCH
•
The word “paradise” comes from a Persian word meaning “walled around.”
—FENCING PARADISE BY RICHARD MABEY
•
The “zip” in “zip code” stands for “zone improvement plan.” —CHICAGO TRIBUNE, DECEMBER 2, 2002
An eighteen-year-old knows 60,000 words, which represents a learning rate of one word per ninety waking minutes from the age of one.
—THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT BY STEVEN PINKER
•
There are 823 languages spoken in Papua New Guinea, more than any other country in the world.
—LIMITS OF LANGUAGE BY MIKAEL PARKVALL
•
“Broadcast” is a term borrowed from farmers, describing what they do with seeds across a field.
—THE WEEKLY STANDARD, JUNE 14, 2004
•
By the age of five, children have acquired 85 percent of the language they will have as adults.
—JOHN BASTIANI, RSA LECTURE
•
The first written Afrikaans used Arabic script, rather than Roman. —PROSPECT, MAY 2004
•
Of all the words in The Oxford English Dictionary, 99 percent derive from languages other than Old English. However, words that derive from Old English make up 62 percent of the words most used.
—THE POWER OF BABEL BY JOHN MCWHORTER
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The Finnish language has no future tense.
—WIKIPEDIA
•
There are no plurals in Chinese.
—WIRED, DECEMBER 2006
•
The five most-used nouns in the English language are “time,” “person,” “year,” “way,” and “day.”
—CNN, JUNE 22, 2006
•
The fourteenth most popular search term entered into Google is “Google.” —TIME, JUNE 6, 2007
The term “blockbuster” was coined in the 1920s, referring to a film whose queue of customers at the box office was so long that it could not be contained on a single city block.
—THE WASHINGTON POST, FEBRUARY 27, 2005
•
Jack Kerouac typed at one hundred words a minute.
—THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 9, 2007
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Over just six days in August 1998, The Washington Post devoted 80,289 words to the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
—THE NEW REPUBLIC, SEPTEMBER 7, 1998
•
The condition of being unable to release a dart from one’s hand when throwing is known as dartitis.
—PROSPECT RESEARCH
Into the Wild
Facts About Animals
In ninety days, a single toad can consume nearly 10,000 insects. —STATE OF THE WORLD 2001
•
An amputated newt limb will grow back fully within ten weeks.
—THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, JANUARY 31, 2003
•
The fruit fly Drosophila bifurca is 1.5 millimeters long, while its sperm are 6 centimeters long.
—NATURE, JULY 6, 2000
•
A cow burps up to 280 liters of methane per day.
—THE GUARDIAN, JUNE 7, 2001
•
Seven percent of male zebra finches stutter.
—THE OBSERVER, FEBRUARY 24, 2008
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The average bee produces one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey during its lifetime. —HORIZONS, MARCH 2003
•
Butterflies taste with their feet.
—TORONTO STAR, MAY 28, 2002
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Garden worms have five pairs of hearts.
—CORNELL UNIVERSITY
•
Research on guinea pigs has resulted in twenty-three Nobel prizes.
—A GUINEA PIG’S HISTORY OF BIOLOGY BY JIM ENDERSBY
•
The penis of a barnacle may reach up to twenty times its body size. —THE INDEPENDENT, AUGUST 27, 2004
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Rats can run a hundred yards in less than ten seconds and can jump six feet in the air.
—DAILY MIRROR, AUGUST 23, 2003
•
Neither rabbits nor mice can vomit.
—NATIONAL ANTI-VIVISECTION SOCIETY
•
A female ferret will die if it goes into heat and cannot find a mate. —FERRETSMAGAZINE.COM
•
The closest living relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex is the chicken. —THE GUARDIAN, APRIL 13, 2007
•
Half of all animal species are parasites.
—NATURE, JULY 6, 2000
•
Bacteria of the species Pseudomonas fluorescens can grow from a population of five hundred to two hundred million over the course of one night.
—THE WILD SIDE, MARCH 25, 2008
•
Ants spend only one-fifth of their day working.
—1,000 COMMON DELUSIONS BY CHRISTA POPPELMANN
•
Only 3 percent of male birds have a penis.
—THE ECONOMIST, MAY 5, 2007
•
Adult “paradoxical frogs,” which are found in the Amazon and Trinidad, are so named because they are a third of the size of their tadpoles.
—ENCARTA CONCISE ENGLISH DICTIONARY
•
The Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 killed 250,000 birds. This is approximately the same number that die colliding with plate glass every day in the United States. —PROSPECT, OCTOBER 2001
•
At any moment, there are almost twice as many chickens alive as humans.
—PLANET CHICKEN BY HATTIE ELLIS
•
There are twice as many privately owned tigers in America as there are in the wild across the world.
—THE GUARDIAN, FEBRUARY 2, 2007
•
Homosexual behavior occurs in more than 450 different kinds of animals.
—BIOLOGICAL EXUBERANCE BY BRUCE BAGEMIHL
•
In Japan, dogs now outnumber children age ten and under—there were 13.1 million dogs in 2006.
—ABC NEWS, AUGUST 28, 2007
In 2001, the year of the foot-and-mouth epidemic in the U.K., fewer animals were culled or slaughtered than in an average year.
—DAVID KING, FORMER CHIEF SCIENTIFIC ADVISER TO THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT
•
Elephants cannot jump. —DAILY MAIL, JANUARY 24, 2008
They Did What?!
Facts About Some
Illustrious Individuals
Hitler was on the short list for the 1938 Nobel Peace Prize. —THE GUARDIAN, DECEMBER 7, 2002
•
Vladimir Nabokov spent seven years as a research fellow in entomology at Harvard.
—AT LARGE AND AT SMALL: CONFESSIONS OF A LITERARY HEDONIST BY ANNE FADIMAN
•
In the 1930s, the Inland Revenue investigated William Butler Yeats’s tax returns because they could not believe a poet of his stature had sales that were so small. —THE GUARDIAN, OCTOBER 13, 2005
Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo was named after Ronald Reagan.
—UEFA EURO 2004 WEBSITE
•
Woodrow Wilson is the only president to have had a Ph.D.
—WOODROW WILSON INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR SCHOLARS
•
Casanova spent the last thirteen years of his life working as a librarian.
—THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE, APRIL 23, 2005
•
The only two people to have won both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar are George Bernard Shaw and Al Gore.
—THE INDEPENDENT, OCTOBER 13, 2007
•
Aldous Huxley died on the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. —THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 26, 2006
•
Einstein did not learn to read until he was ten.
—THE GUARDIAN, DECEMBER 6, 2001
•
Napoleon was actually five feet six and a half, taller than the average early nineteenth-century Frenchman. —THE OBSERVER, MARCH 25, 2007
•
Donald Rumsfeld, who served in both the Nixon and George W. Bush cabinets, is both the youngest and the oldest defense secretary in U.S. history.
—BBC.CO.UK, DECEMBER 28, 2006
•
Bill Gates gets 4 million emails a day.
—NEW STATESMAN, JANUARY 25, 2007
•
Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury avoids computers and ATMs and claims never to have driven a car. Isaac Asimov refused to board an airplane.
—DISCOVER, JANUARY 30, 2008
In 1996, Mahathir Mohamad, prime minister of Malaysia, threw the largest-ever dinner party. Twelve thousand guests celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Mahathir’s ruling party, the United Malays National Organization. —BBC WORLD SERVICE
•
The FBI had a 1,427-page dossier on Albert Einstein.
—FORWARD, JUNE 14, 2002
•
The musician Moby (real name Richard Melville Hall) is the great-great- grand-nephew of Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick. Moby was a childhood nickname. —SUCCESSWHOSMYDADDY.COM
•
Andrew Jackson personally fought in 103 duels.
—WASHINGTON MONTHLY, MARCH 2007
•
When Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, he ordered all Monopoly sets to be destroyed. —HASBRO
•
Catherine de Medici introduced knickers in France in the sixteenth century, as she preferred to ride horses sidesaddle. —THE SUNDAY TIMES, OCTOBER 23, 2005
•
Ronald Reagan was born six years before John F. Kennedy. — PROSPECT RESEARCH
•
Lauren Bacall and Shimon Peres are first cousins.
—JEWISH BULLETIN, MAY 16, 2003
•
The IRS has a computer devoted solely to Bill Gates’s tax return. —THE GUARDIAN, FEBRUARY 11, 2006
•
Walt Disney was a direct 22nd descendant of King Edward I.
—ON ROYALTY BY JEREMY PAXMAN
Paul Wolfowitz, formerly deputy defense secretary and head of the World Bank, speaks French, German, Arabic, Hebrew, and Indonesian.
—THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 9, 2007
•
Albert Einstein is the fifth highest-earning dead celebrity, “earning” $18 million in 2006 from use of his trademarked name on the Disney- owned “Baby Einstein” brand of videos and toys. Royalties go to Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, which was bequeathed the estate. —FORBES.COM, OCTOBER 29, 2007
•
Between thirty and forty-five paparazzi follow Britney Spears around on an average evening.
—THE ATLANTIC, APRIL 2008
•
In 2006, the richest person in mainland China was Zhang Yin, a paper recycling entrepreneur worth $3.4 billion. Zhang, the world’s richest self-made woman, is one of fifteen billionaires in China.
—FINANCIAL TIMES, OCTOBER 10, 2006
•
After Marilyn Monroe’s death in 1962, the suicide rate in the United States temporarily increased by 12 percent. —THE TIPPING POINT BY MALCOLM GLADWELL
•
One of Olivia Newton-John’s grandfathers was Max Born, a Nobel-winning physicist and one of the founders of quantum mechanics.
—THE DAILY DISH, NOVEMBER 6, 2006
•
Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest—and failed to make the finals.
—SNOPES.COM
•
Nelson Mandela was not removed from the U.S. terror watch list until 2008.
—THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, JULY 2, 2008
•
Elvis Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, stopped Elvis from touring abroad, as Parker was an illegal immigrant and believed he would not be allowed back into the United States. —BBC.CO.UK
Come Rain or Shine
Facts About the Weather
Two-thirds of the world’s people have never seen snow. — CANADIAN WEATHER TRIVIA CALENDAR 2008
•
In New York City, January 2008 was the first essentially snowless January in seventy-five years.
—LIVESCIENCE.COM, JANUARY 30, 2008
•
Per capita, Sudan has more rainfall than Britain.
—THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, MARCH 2, 2006
•
At any given moment, there are about 1,800 thunderstorms happening around the world. Approximately one hundred lightning bolts strike the Earth every second. —WEATHERMETRICS.COM
•
From a height of three kilometers, it takes thirty minutes for a snowflake to reach the ground.
—CANADIAN WEATHER TRIVIA CALENDAR 2008
•
When rainfall is significantly below normal, the risk of low-level conflict escalating to full-scale civil war approximately doubles in the following year.
—NEW SCIENTIST, JUNE 2, 2007
•
Each year, 30,000 to 80,000 meteorites land on Earth. — NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, LONDON
•
It rains twice as much in Sydney as in London.
—THE GUARDIAN, NOVEMBER 8, 2004
•
On average, London’s commuters get wet just twelve times a year. —TRANSPORT FOR LONDON
•
Between 8 and 15 percent of the increase in American life expectancy over the last thirty years is the result of people moving to warmer climates.
—THE NEW YORK TIMES, JANUARY 12, 2008
Descriere
Does anyone know that most toilets flush in E-flat? Or that American Airlines had once saved $40,000 by removing a single olive from each salad served in first class? Well, now readers will with this clever, fun, and occasionally shocking compendium of facts from around the world.