Fast Facts


Arizona Daily Wildcat
Friday, September 30, 2005

Things you've always never wanted to know

  • Signing a memorial to Congress for the abolition of slavery was Benjamin Franklin's last public act.

  • A vamp is the upper front top of a shoe.

  • In Paris horse meat was all the rage in the 1870s. Apparently, the Parisians were forced to eat it during the Franco-Prussian war when beef was unavailable, and discovered they liked it.

  • The number of possible ways of playing just the first four moves on each side in a chess game is 318,979,564,000.

  • To make a 1-pound comb of honey, bees must collect nectar from about 2 million flowers.

  • The average human heart beats about 100,000 times every 24 hours. In a 72-year lifetime, the heart beats more than 2.5 billion times.

  • The common male housefly completes its entire life cycle in just 17 days.

  • One hundred thousand cubic feet of water pours over Niagara Falls every second.

  • According to a survey, the most popular day for eating out in the United States is one's own birthday - 49 percent of American adults do. The least popular holiday for eating out is Grandparents' Day, with less than 5 percent participating.

  • The jet streams blow from the west with such a power that eastbound airliners fly across North America about an hour faster than airliners flying westward.