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Illustration by Arnie Bermudez
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Arizona Daily Wildcat
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
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Things you always never wanted to know
Englishmen of the 16th and 17th centuries believed that no one who lay upon feathers could die in peace. Therefore, as death approached, the pillow was withdrawn from under the dying person's head to ease the passing.
12,345,678,654,321 is the square of 11,111,111.
Euclid worked out virtually none of the theorems of "Euclidean" geometry. He was a collector of other men's works. His great virtue was that he arranged in so logical an order the geometrical theorems known in his time that they can scarcely be improved.
At the height of their power, before the Spanish conquest in 1532, the Incas ruled the entire sea in South America from Quito, Ecuador, to the Rio Maule, Chile. However, the Incas, experts at organization and engineering, did not have wheels, arches or writing.
Nerve signals may travel through nerve or muscle fibers at speeds as high as 200 mph.
Contrary to popular belief, there is little scientific evidence to suggest that the ages at which parents die have any correlation to the life spans of their offspring, according to studies made at the Duke University Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development.
The most popular exhibit in the 1939-40 New York World's Fair was the General Motors exhibit with its "Futurama" predictions of America in the 1960s: "Federal laws forbid wanton cutting of wooded hillsides. Two-month paid vacations. Cars are air-conditioned and cost as little as $200. The happiest people live in one-factory villages."
The temperamental captain of the Beagle, Robert Fitzroy, studied physiognomy and nearly rejected Charles Darwin as the ship's naturalist because of the shape of his nose.
The largest single industry during the Renaissance was the Venetian shipyards. Fifteen thousand people worked there, and 100 ships could be built or repaired at the same time.
In 1873, after 15 years, the English mathematician William Shanks calculated the value of the mathematical expression pi to 707 places. In 1949, the first electronic computers calculated it to 20,035 places in three days ÷ and found that Shanks had made a mistake. The last 100 or so figures in his calculation were wrong.
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