Fastfacts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Thursday, February 19, 2004
Things you always never wanted to know
The official manual of the Internal Revenue Service has 38,000 pages. It has appropriately been described as "the world's most confusing publication."
Millions of meteorites hit the atmosphere every day and are destroyed by the friction.
Charles Darwin rarely used the term "evolution." It was popularized by the English sociologist Herbert Spencer, who also popularized the phrase "survival of the fittest."
Nature's most pervasive force ÷ gravity ÷ is also its weakest.
The French general whose name came to mean a strict military disciplinarian was killed by gunfire from his own men as he led a charge. General Jean Martinet beat soldiers of Louis XIV into shape by relentless drilling, and naturally, he became a hated man.
President Fillmore's mother feared her son might have been mentally retarded.
Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were heralded for being the first to climb Mount Everest. But they were accompanied by 12 climbers, 40 Sherpa guides and 700 porters.
There are 2,500,000 rivets in the Eiffel Tower.
In ancient Greece, women counted their age from the date on which they were married, not from the day they were born, signifying that the wedding marked the start of a woman's real life.
General Lew Wallace's best seller "Ben-Hur," published in 1880, was the first work of fiction blessed by a pope.
Pope John XXIII served as a sergeant in the Italian army during World War I.
There were at least 52 musicians in the family of Johann Sebastian Bach.