Fast facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Monday, October 18, 2004
Things you always never wanted to know
Men are six times more likely than women to be struck by lightning.
One ounce of LSD is enough to make doses for 300,000 people.
Napoleon had conquered Italy by the time he was 26.
Both Josef Stalin and Kaiser Wilhelm had crippled left arms. Stalin, despite his popular image, was not a pipe smoker. He used the pipe only for effect at conferences and public appearances. In private he chain-smoked cigarettes.
When he was a child, Blaise Pascal once locked himself in his room for several days and would not allow anyone to enter. When he emerged, he had figured out all of Euclid's geometrical propositions totally on his own.
When the circus dwarf Lavinia Bump married circus dwarf Tom Thumb, more than 2,000 guests attended their wedding, including President and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln and the entire United States Cabinet. The famous ceremony was dubbed "The Fairy Wedding."
Charles Lindbergh was among the first to perfect a mechanical heart, a pumping apparatus that supplied blood to organs to keep them alive outside the body.
A ball of glass will bounce higher than a ball made out of rubber. A ball of solid steel will bounce higher than one made entirely of glass.
Dry ice does not melt - it evaporates.
When glass breaks, the cracks move faster than 3,000 miles per hour. To photograph the event a camera must shoot at a millionth of a second.
The teddy bear was named for Theodore Roosevelt. When presented with a koala from Australia, Roosevelt, whose fondness for animals was well known, so praised the creature that a copy of it was made for children. Called the "teddy bear" in the president's honor, the toy soon caught on and became a standard item of every child's shelf.