Fast facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Tuesday, November 9, 2004
Things you always never wanted to know
A 10-gallon hat holds less than a gallon.
There are two kinds of tons, a regular ton (2,000 pounds) and a long ton (2,240 pounds). There are also two kinds of pounds, an apothecary pound (12 ounces) and a troy pound (16 ounces).
Earthworms clear and aerate half a pound of soil in a day. There are, on average, 3 million worms per acre of fertile soil.
A snail mates only once in its entire life. When it does mate, however, it may take as long as 12 hours to consummate the act.
During the Civil War, Robert E. Lee was offered command of the Union Army before he accepted his post with the Confederacy.
The star known as LP 327-186, a white dwarf, is smaller than the state of Texas, yet so dense that if a cubic inch of it were brought to earth it would weigh more than 1.5 million tons.
A hundred tons of barnacles collect on the bottom of a steamship every year.
Where there is fire there is not always smoke. Smoke simply means a fire is not burning properly and that bits of unburned materials are escaping. A perfectly clean fire produces almost no smoke.
After mating, the female black widow spider turns on her partner and devours him. The female may dispatch as many as 25 suitors a day in this manner.
In 1915, the average annual family income in the United States was $687 a year.
If a person places a single coin on the first square of a chessboard, then places two on the second square, four on the third square, eight on the fourth square and so on until all 64 squares are covered, exactly 18,446,744,973,709,551,661 coins will be required to do the job – more than have been minted in the world since the beginning of recorded civilization.
The ampersand (&) was once a letter of the English alphabet.