Fast facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Things you always never wanted to know
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."
"RSVP" is an abbreviation for the French "repondez s'il vous plait," meaning "please respond." It does not stand for "respond very promptly," as is often supposed.
If a baseball-sized piece of a supernova star (known to astronomers as a "pulsar") were brought to Earth, it would weigh more than the Empire State building.
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.
A pipe two feet in diameter will allow four times more fluid to pass through it than a pipe one foot in diameter - the volume of pipe varies as the square of its diameter.