|
Illustration by Jennifer Kearny
|
|
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Monday, January 23, 2006
Print this
Things you've always never wanted to know
If a baseball-sized piece of a supernova (known to astronomers as a "pulsar") was brought to Earth, it would weigh more than the Empire State building.
A pipe 2 feet in diameter will allow four times more fluid to pass through it than a pipe 1 foot in diameter - the volume of pipe varies as the square of its diameter.
Some Chinese typewriters have 5,700 characters. The keyboard is almost 3 feet wide on some models, and all a person can type on such a machine is 11 words per minute.
Sound travels 15 times more swiftly through steel than through air.
"You sock-dologizing old mantrap" were the last words ever heard by Abraham Lincoln. They were spoken by an actor named Asa Trenchard in "Our American Cousin." The roar of laughter that followed these lines drowned out the sound of the gunshots fired by John Wilkes Booth.
Redwood trees sometimes grow to heights of 350 feet and produce bark that is more than 1 foot thick - but they spring from a seed that is only 1/16 of an inch long. These seeds are so small that 123,000 of them weigh barely a pound.
Doris Day's real name was Doris von Kappelhoff. Judy Garland's real name was Frances Gumm.
Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, John Marshall and Stephen A. Douglas, four of the most famous lawyers the U.S. has ever produced, never went to law school.
For every hour one listens to the radio in the U.S., one hears approximately 11,000 spoken words.
The following terms were coined during the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "bottleneck," "brain trust," "coordinator," "court-packing," "directive," "economic royalist" and "good-neighbor policy."
Four million tons of hydrogen dust are destroyed in the sun every second.
In the early days of baseball between 1840 and 1850, a fielder put a runner out by hitting him with the ball. Home base and the batter's plate were two separate spots (and thus the lineup included a fourth baseman), and there was no distinction between fair and foul balls.
Write a Letter to the Editor
|
|
|
