Fast facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Things you always never wanted to know
A typical surgical skin graft is done with a slice of skin eight-thousandths of an inch thick.
The Hollywood director D. W. Griffith made 450 motion pictures between 1908 and 1913.
Between 1927 and 1935, more than 250 songs were written to honor Charles Lindbergh. One of them, “Lucky Lindy,” is still occasionally played today.
Baccilophobia is the fear of microbes. Iatrophobia is the fear of doctors.
A man named David Rice Atchison was president of the United States for one day and didn’t know it. According to a nineteenth-century law, if neither the president nor the vice-president for the president was in office, the president pro term of the Senate became chief executive. On March 4, 1849, President James Knox Polk’s term had lapsed, and the newly elected Zachary Taylor could not yet be sworn in (it was a Sunday). So for one day Atchison was president. It was not until several months later that Atchison learned of this, as the law was then an obscure one. It has since been changed.
James Buchanan was the only United States president never to marry. During his term in office, his niece Harriet Lane played the role of First Lady.
One-fourth of the world’s population lives on less than $200 a year. 90 million people survive on less than $75 a year.
Alfred Hitchcock directed the first talking film ever made in England. It was called “Blackmail” and was made in 1931.
Most dinosaurs lived to be more than 100 years old.
In one year, the average human heart circulates from 770,000 to 1.6 million gallons of blood through the body, enough fluid to fill 200 tank cars, each with a capacity of 8,000 gallons.
It has been estimated that if one cubic kilometer of a rich asteroid were brought to earth, it would be worth about $5 trillion. Such an asteroid would provide the world with about 200 years’ supply of nickel and enough steel to run industries in every country for the next 15 years, given the current rate of use.