Illustration by Arnie Bermudez
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Arizona Daily Wildcat
Friday, March 26, 2004
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Things you always never wanted to know
As early as 1655, the Dutch used lotteries to raise money to relieve New York's poor.
Except for the oil sheikdoms, Bermuda has the highest per capita income in the world.
The first hydrogen bomb, tested in 1952, was as powerful as the total of all the bombs dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II.
Some insects, after their head is severed, may live for as long as a year. They react automatically to light, temperature, humidity, chemicals and other stimuli.
During the last ice age, 23,000 years ago, there were giant icebergs in the ocean as far south as Mexico City.
If 1 gram of matter could be converted into its equivalent of pure energy and the energy used with perfect efficiency to keep a 1,000-watt light bulb glowing, there would be enough energy to keep it lit for 2,850 years.
With few exceptions, birds do not sing while on the ground. They sing during flight or while sitting on an object off the ground. Exceptions include the turnstone, which is a shorebird, and some American field sparrows.
A "plaice," a large European flounder, can lie on a checkerboard and reproduce the same pattern of squares on its surface, for camouflage.
In 1826, Thomas Jefferson, then 83 years old, was flat broke and in debt $107,000. He convinced the Virginia Legislature to allow him to sell lottery tickets, and the winner would get Jefferson's land. The lottery was unsuccessful, and when Jefferson died, he left many unpaid debts.
By running a temperature as many as 25 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than its surroundings, the feverish skunk cabbage melts it way to the surface of snow.
When the Portuguese historian Joao de Barros wrote "Decadas da Asia," his monumental history of the Portuguese empire, King John III was so pleased he gave him an area of about 130,000 square miles - the whole state of Maranhao in Brazil.
There's an O. Henry bar in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, where the American writer lived for a few months in 1897 while a fugitive from justice, under indictment for embezzling bank funds in Texas. The bar's specialty is a drink called Lost Blend, after one of O. Henry's stories.
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