Dr. Caoife's Personal Condensation of too much...
~Unnecessary and Sufficient~
•Bears can run very fast. A healthy bear outruns a racehorse. And a
racehorse outruns a lion. Bet on the bear.
•Twins are more likely to be left-handed than single babies.
•Pigeons drink without tilting their heads up; almost all birds tilt.
•A woman can touch her toes, back to a wall; a man cannot.
•The enamel on your teeth is harder than any dentist tool.
•Relative size and distance: If the Earth is the diameter of an orange, the Moon is the diameter of a quarter 10 feet away.
•"Those who distinguish education from entertainment don't know the first thing about either." Marshall McLuhan.
• A good education should produce more questions than answers.
•Warm water freezes faster than cool water. There is more air in cool water. Experiment: Fill and freeze two ice cube trays, one warm, one cool. Then notice the warm water tray has clear cubes and the cool water tray has opaque cubes. That's because of the unfrozen air in the cool water ice cubes.
•The average age at death of the American factory worker is 56.
•Gold is 19 times heavier than water.
•Favorite horses win 29% of the time.
•Of 43 presidents, 5 sets share the same surname: Harrisons, Adamses, (father, John and son, John Quincy,) Johnsons, Roosevelts (Theodore and Franklin, first cousins,) and Bushes (father, George Herbert, and son, George Walker.) You can count Grover Cleveland, the only one to serve two separated terms as another if you like.
•Deep Atlantic Ocean currents travel its length in 400 years, about .035 inches per second.
•Columbo's first name is Philip.
•In 1900, Miami had a population of 1600.
•There are more living people than have ever lived before.
•When you observe a sunset, that event took place 12 minutes earlier.
•In the '50's and '60's, psychologist James McConnel taught primitive flatworms (Planaria) to do tricks. Then he chopped them up and fed them to stupid worms. Then they could do the tricks.
•Elvis was blond and he notoriously stank. He could not play a guitar. It was a 'prop.'
•Three months after 79, you've lived 2.5 billion seconds.
•Heavy things do not fall faster. But big things do, in air, because of the lower relative surface area, and hence less air friction.
•A 747's wings curl 4 feet at the ends upon liftoff.
•From deep straight mine shafts you can see a dark sky with stars in it on a bright day.
•Bookies make money betting against all the horses in a race.
•Pope Pius X was nearly not sainted because he smoked cigarettes.
•Query: Is it that you have fewer 'deja vus' as you age, or, has everything really happened before?
•A water wave travels twice as fast as the wave train it's in.
•If you smoke a pack a day for 25 years, you smoke 10.8 miles of cigarette.
•At 60 mph, it takes 167 days to drive to the moon.
•"If you say you understand quantum physics, it only shows you don't know the first thing about it," Neils Bohr. "I think it is safe to say no one understands quantum physics," Richard Feynman.
•Left-handers have less hemispheric specialization than right-handers.
• 30,000 species of spiders are catalogued; and there are an estimated 30,000 more.
•The disease that has killed most humans is Malaria.
•Cats see only moving light (so do humans, in peripheral vision.) That's why a cat moves its head occasionally when otherwise dozing. It's been suggested that purring may be part of this also.
•There are fewer stations on the left side of your radio dial--the longer, lower frequency waves travel farther and would overlap other far stations using the same frequency.
•One inch of new ice will hold a horse.
•The most densely populated square mile in the U.S. is Central Falls, R.I.
•A mirror reflects in the dark--heat.
•Your 'leading' eye is the one that makes your finger appear to jump when you hold it up and blink that eye.
•Of 92 elements, only one won't freeze regardless of temperature--helium.
•You are very safe in a thunderstorm in a car or an airplane, but very unsafe on a golf course. If you get caught, the safest place is in a car--it's a 'Faraday Cage,' and cannot be penetrated by bolts of lightening. Same for an airplane. Military jets routinely fly directly through thunderstorms for various tests.
•Houseflies taste with their feet.
•Ivory billiard balls warp 'out of round.'
•Early mathematicians used 22/7 as an approximation of Pi. It is off by only 4/10,000 of Pi.
•Most people are dumber than average because very smart people skew the 'bell-shaped' curve, and its median and average, rightward.
•$24 for Manhattan wasn't such a bad deal. At 7% for 300 years, it amounts to 15.7 billion dollars.
•If your car accelerated as fast as it would fall, it'd go 0-60 in 2.75 seconds.
•Smart Fire Departments have light yellow trucks because red appears black at night.
•In Northern Hemisphere summers, we are farther from the sun than in winter.
•Fastest racehorse: 1+3/16 miles in 113.2 seconds at Pimlico, for 37.765 mph, by "Tank's Prospect" in 1955. But note that in 1973 ''Secretariat'' ran 1+1/4 miles at Churchill Downs at only .0133 mph less. Had she not had to run the extra 16th (330 feet), she might have beaten the 37.765 mark. Still, no horse, including all Triple Crowners, ran Pimlico as fast as "Tank's Prospect."
•Nearest Star: Alpha Centuri 1, 4 light-years (24 trillion miles) away.
•Florida summer days are shorter than Boston summer days.
•Houdini's fame came from a single trick: He trained his gag reflex with a key-shaped slice of potato so he could hide a key deep in his throat. That's all he had. He supposedly died of an unexpected punch in the stomach.
•If you're working on the top floor of a 100-story building, remember--you're lighter, with less gravity, and time goes by faster in a reduced gravitational field.
•Time does go backwards--but only at the atomic level. It's easily demonstrated that certain particles are received before they are emitted.
•If you tie a string around the equator then add 2 times Pi to the length, the new circle will be 1 foot higher all around the equator.
•"Men tire themselves in the pursuit of leisure."
•"That's when the trouble begins--when a man gets his life in order."
•A 'googolplex' is 1 followed by 10 quintillion octillion octillion octillion zeros.
•"You never get too old to find a new way of being stupid." J. D. Salinger.
•The U.S. aids other nations to the tune of one-tenth of 1% of it's GNP--One one-thousandth.
•1729 is the lowest number that is the sum of cubes in two ways: 9 cubed plus 10 cubed and 12 cubed plus 1 cubed.
•In music, 'pitch' is subjective. HZ's are objective. Doubling HZ's makes an octave--but it will sound flat because 'pitch' falls off with HZ's. 'Pitch' also falls off with volume. Some musicians alter instruments to suit themselves (playing alone!) Also singing 'off-key ' really means 'off-pitch.' It isn't singing in the wrong key--it's singing in the right key too flat or too sharp. Too flat sounds much worse than too sharp. Bands often tune up a couple HZ's high. A-440HZ is an international standard. Some bands tune up at A-442HZ or 443HZ.
•Big cars are usually more fuel-efficient than compacts. That is, a big car will carry X pounds for a gallon of fuel; a small car will carry X pounds for significantly more than a gallon.
•Light falls at 32'/sec per second near Earth. And it weighs 1 ounce per square mile on Earth.
•There is virtually no swimming North of Cape Cod. The water is way too cold, with no Gulf Stream warmth.
•The Earth makes a revolution on its axis in 23 hours 56 minutes, not the apparent 24 hours, observed by us relative to the Sun.
•To most people the moon appears larger on the horizon before it rises in the sky. A camera, a paper towel tube, or turning around and looking upside-down through your legs shows it stays the same size. psychologists insist physicists are wrong about it being atmospheric refraction, and insist it is a perceptual phenomenon. 800 years of study has not explained it.
•"When you think the moon is full, it's really the next night." A Maine saying. And it is truly full only when it is in the exact center of the sky for an instant before it begins its wane, on that 'next night.'
•Playing music on something always sounds different to the player than listeners because of the speed of sound. Violin players, say, play shriller than they like.
•You can't see Mercury because it is too close to the Sun. It has been observed, but under rare conditions.
•If you have a table with conical legs and push it across the floor, then invert the legs and push again, the force required is the same. Friction is independent of surface area.
•At 6:00 (AM or PM) the clock hands are perfectly in line with one another. After 6:00 they are in line again at 7:05.272727...not 7:05. For the daring, the algebra goes 5+X +(30-(5+1/12(5+X))) = 30.
•Making TV commercials is cheap; running them costs a lot.
1600
•Calico cats are females. A male with calico coloring is a fluke.
•In 1959 Bobby Darin sang "Mack the Knife." It is one of 5 all time blockbuster hits. His next song was supposed to be "Danke Schoen," but he knew he was ill and gave it to Wayne Newton who made it the hit of the summer of 1963, just before the "Beatles" upstaged a long American hegemony of jazz, swing, pop songs, novelty songs, etc. Credit should go to Little Richard and Elvis, who Paul said taught him to sing. And Paul very much liked "Dancing cheek to cheek." You can hear that song in his composition style--leaps and intervals.
•When the gravity of the Sun and Moon change alignment, a huge mound of Earth's ocean water formed in the North Atlantic, flattens, or rises. It also turns because of the Earth's rotation. It makes spiral ripples around itself called co-tidal currents. They are long, slow, low, ocean waves--tides. New England gets semidiurnal tides (two highs, two lows a day) while other mounds in other places result in diurnal tides (one high and low a day.)
•If you apply a tilting force to a gyroscope at a point, it will respond at a point 90 degrees away, in the direction of spin.
•A ball thrown exactly straight up, rises then falls. The time it is stopped is zero.
•Before Caesar, the best calendar was 365 days. It was 'slow,' saying it was later than it really was. Caesar's astronomers recognized that it was more like 365 1/4 days. So they added a day every 4 years--leap year. This made the calendar quite good but it was now 'fast' by 11 hours and 23 minutes a year. By 1582 it was 10 days early, saying the equinox was 10 days after it really was. In an ingenious stroke astronomer Clavius suggested dropping leap years in century years not divisible by four. 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not leap years; 2000 was. The simple change brought the calendar very close and we use it today. But it is still 'fast,' by 25.9 seconds per year. When the Times Square ball says 12:00 midnight, it's really 12:00:26. and real midnight occurred at 11:59:34. This amounts to a one-day error in 3333 years. 1582 years + 3333 years = the year 4951.
•Fastest warship: The submarine, by far. It has no surface tension to break and is cabable of speeds much faster than admitted. But they are altogether as fast as a car. Experiment: At the sink or in the tub, pinch a bar of soap on the surface and watch it flop along and halt quickly. Then pinch it under water and watch it shoot through the internal water, not impeded by surface tension--which is the same arrangement of molecules as water bubbles, and why you see waterbug legs seem to bend into the water they're on. Re carriers, Enterprise, the first nuclear carrier made it from the Mediterranian to Cuba in 1961 in 72 hours--that's 50mph, or 57.5 knots. And any sub beats any carrier.
•The atmosphere is about 25 miles high. Chuck Yeager flew to 104,000 feet, 19.7 miles, quite expectedly lost all aerodynamic control, was unable to regain it, and the plane crashed and burned, after he bailed out.
•If you were born on Friday January 13 in a leap year, that event won't recur for 28 years, exactly. In general On any date, and in any month in a leap year or any of the three years following, or before, you'll have three birthday/day/date recurrences in 28 years, but none in whatever year, leap year or any of the three years following or before that you chose to start with.
•Water boils in a vacuum at low temperatures, below freezing, so it can boil and freeze, at the same time! This must be seen to be appreciated.
•"Be careful before you say 'I understand' " Mortimer Adler.
•Original ideas come never to most, seldom to a few, and often to none.
•The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. Nikola Tesla
Sources: T. Caoife, or otherwise indicated.
•Bears can run very fast. A healthy bear outruns a racehorse. And a
racehorse outruns a lion. Bet on the bear.
•Twins are more likely to be left-handed than single babies.
•Pigeons drink without tilting their heads up; almost all birds tilt.
•A woman can touch her toes, back to a wall; a man cannot.
•The enamel on your teeth is harder than any dentist tool.
•Relative size and distance: If the Earth is the diameter of an orange, the Moon is the diameter of a quarter 10 feet away.
•"Those who distinguish education from entertainment don't know the first thing about either." Marshall McLuhan.
• A good education should produce more questions than answers.
•Warm water freezes faster than cool water. There is more air in cool water. Experiment: Fill and freeze two ice cube trays, one warm, one cool. Then notice the warm water tray has clear cubes and the cool water tray has opaque cubes. That's because of the unfrozen air in the cool water ice cubes.
•The average age at death of the American factory worker is 56.
•Gold is 19 times heavier than water.
•Favorite horses win 29% of the time.
•Of 43 presidents, 5 sets share the same surname: Harrisons, Adamses, (father, John and son, John Quincy,) Johnsons, Roosevelts (Theodore and Franklin, first cousins,) and Bushes (father, George Herbert, and son, George Walker.) You can count Grover Cleveland, the only one to serve two separated terms as another if you like.
•Deep Atlantic Ocean currents travel its length in 400 years, about .035 inches per second.
•Columbo's first name is Philip.
•In 1900, Miami had a population of 1600.
•There are more living people than have ever lived before.
•When you observe a sunset, that event took place 12 minutes earlier.
•In the '50's and '60's, psychologist James McConnel taught primitive flatworms (Planaria) to do tricks. Then he chopped them up and fed them to stupid worms. Then they could do the tricks.
•Elvis was blond and he notoriously stank. He could not play a guitar. It was a 'prop.'
•Three months after 79, you've lived 2.5 billion seconds.
•Heavy things do not fall faster. But big things do, in air, because of the lower relative surface area, and hence less air friction.
•A 747's wings curl 4 feet at the ends upon liftoff.
•From deep straight mine shafts you can see a dark sky with stars in it on a bright day.
•Bookies make money betting against all the horses in a race.
•Pope Pius X was nearly not sainted because he smoked cigarettes.
•Query: Is it that you have fewer 'deja vus' as you age, or, has everything really happened before?
•A water wave travels twice as fast as the wave train it's in.
•If you smoke a pack a day for 25 years, you smoke 10.8 miles of cigarette.
•At 60 mph, it takes 167 days to drive to the moon.
•"If you say you understand quantum physics, it only shows you don't know the first thing about it," Neils Bohr. "I think it is safe to say no one understands quantum physics," Richard Feynman.
•Left-handers have less hemispheric specialization than right-handers.
• 30,000 species of spiders are catalogued; and there are an estimated 30,000 more.
•The disease that has killed most humans is Malaria.
•Cats see only moving light (so do humans, in peripheral vision.) That's why a cat moves its head occasionally when otherwise dozing. It's been suggested that purring may be part of this also.
•There are fewer stations on the left side of your radio dial--the longer, lower frequency waves travel farther and would overlap other far stations using the same frequency.
•One inch of new ice will hold a horse.
•The most densely populated square mile in the U.S. is Central Falls, R.I.
•A mirror reflects in the dark--heat.
•Your 'leading' eye is the one that makes your finger appear to jump when you hold it up and blink that eye.
•Of 92 elements, only one won't freeze regardless of temperature--helium.
•You are very safe in a thunderstorm in a car or an airplane, but very unsafe on a golf course. If you get caught, the safest place is in a car--it's a 'Faraday Cage,' and cannot be penetrated by bolts of lightening. Same for an airplane. Military jets routinely fly directly through thunderstorms for various tests.
•Houseflies taste with their feet.
•Ivory billiard balls warp 'out of round.'
•Early mathematicians used 22/7 as an approximation of Pi. It is off by only 4/10,000 of Pi.
•Most people are dumber than average because very smart people skew the 'bell-shaped' curve, and its median and average, rightward.
•$24 for Manhattan wasn't such a bad deal. At 7% for 300 years, it amounts to 15.7 billion dollars.
•If your car accelerated as fast as it would fall, it'd go 0-60 in 2.75 seconds.
•Smart Fire Departments have light yellow trucks because red appears black at night.
•In Northern Hemisphere summers, we are farther from the sun than in winter.
•Fastest racehorse: 1+3/16 miles in 113.2 seconds at Pimlico, for 37.765 mph, by "Tank's Prospect" in 1955. But note that in 1973 ''Secretariat'' ran 1+1/4 miles at Churchill Downs at only .0133 mph less. Had she not had to run the extra 16th (330 feet), she might have beaten the 37.765 mark. Still, no horse, including all Triple Crowners, ran Pimlico as fast as "Tank's Prospect."
•Nearest Star: Alpha Centuri 1, 4 light-years (24 trillion miles) away.
•Florida summer days are shorter than Boston summer days.
•Houdini's fame came from a single trick: He trained his gag reflex with a key-shaped slice of potato so he could hide a key deep in his throat. That's all he had. He supposedly died of an unexpected punch in the stomach.
•If you're working on the top floor of a 100-story building, remember--you're lighter, with less gravity, and time goes by faster in a reduced gravitational field.
•Time does go backwards--but only at the atomic level. It's easily demonstrated that certain particles are received before they are emitted.
•If you tie a string around the equator then add 2 times Pi to the length, the new circle will be 1 foot higher all around the equator.
•"Men tire themselves in the pursuit of leisure."
•"That's when the trouble begins--when a man gets his life in order."
•A 'googolplex' is 1 followed by 10 quintillion octillion octillion octillion zeros.
•"You never get too old to find a new way of being stupid." J. D. Salinger.
•The U.S. aids other nations to the tune of one-tenth of 1% of it's GNP--One one-thousandth.
•1729 is the lowest number that is the sum of cubes in two ways: 9 cubed plus 10 cubed and 12 cubed plus 1 cubed.
•In music, 'pitch' is subjective. HZ's are objective. Doubling HZ's makes an octave--but it will sound flat because 'pitch' falls off with HZ's. 'Pitch' also falls off with volume. Some musicians alter instruments to suit themselves (playing alone!) Also singing 'off-key ' really means 'off-pitch.' It isn't singing in the wrong key--it's singing in the right key too flat or too sharp. Too flat sounds much worse than too sharp. Bands often tune up a couple HZ's high. A-440HZ is an international standard. Some bands tune up at A-442HZ or 443HZ.
•Big cars are usually more fuel-efficient than compacts. That is, a big car will carry X pounds for a gallon of fuel; a small car will carry X pounds for significantly more than a gallon.
•Light falls at 32'/sec per second near Earth. And it weighs 1 ounce per square mile on Earth.
•There is virtually no swimming North of Cape Cod. The water is way too cold, with no Gulf Stream warmth.
•The Earth makes a revolution on its axis in 23 hours 56 minutes, not the apparent 24 hours, observed by us relative to the Sun.
•To most people the moon appears larger on the horizon before it rises in the sky. A camera, a paper towel tube, or turning around and looking upside-down through your legs shows it stays the same size. psychologists insist physicists are wrong about it being atmospheric refraction, and insist it is a perceptual phenomenon. 800 years of study has not explained it.
•"When you think the moon is full, it's really the next night." A Maine saying. And it is truly full only when it is in the exact center of the sky for an instant before it begins its wane, on that 'next night.'
•Playing music on something always sounds different to the player than listeners because of the speed of sound. Violin players, say, play shriller than they like.
•You can't see Mercury because it is too close to the Sun. It has been observed, but under rare conditions.
•If you have a table with conical legs and push it across the floor, then invert the legs and push again, the force required is the same. Friction is independent of surface area.
•At 6:00 (AM or PM) the clock hands are perfectly in line with one another. After 6:00 they are in line again at 7:05.272727...not 7:05. For the daring, the algebra goes 5+X +(30-(5+1/12(5+X))) = 30.
•Making TV commercials is cheap; running them costs a lot.
1600
•Calico cats are females. A male with calico coloring is a fluke.
•In 1959 Bobby Darin sang "Mack the Knife." It is one of 5 all time blockbuster hits. His next song was supposed to be "Danke Schoen," but he knew he was ill and gave it to Wayne Newton who made it the hit of the summer of 1963, just before the "Beatles" upstaged a long American hegemony of jazz, swing, pop songs, novelty songs, etc. Credit should go to Little Richard and Elvis, who Paul said taught him to sing. And Paul very much liked "Dancing cheek to cheek." You can hear that song in his composition style--leaps and intervals.
•When the gravity of the Sun and Moon change alignment, a huge mound of Earth's ocean water formed in the North Atlantic, flattens, or rises. It also turns because of the Earth's rotation. It makes spiral ripples around itself called co-tidal currents. They are long, slow, low, ocean waves--tides. New England gets semidiurnal tides (two highs, two lows a day) while other mounds in other places result in diurnal tides (one high and low a day.)
•If you apply a tilting force to a gyroscope at a point, it will respond at a point 90 degrees away, in the direction of spin.
•A ball thrown exactly straight up, rises then falls. The time it is stopped is zero.
•Before Caesar, the best calendar was 365 days. It was 'slow,' saying it was later than it really was. Caesar's astronomers recognized that it was more like 365 1/4 days. So they added a day every 4 years--leap year. This made the calendar quite good but it was now 'fast' by 11 hours and 23 minutes a year. By 1582 it was 10 days early, saying the equinox was 10 days after it really was. In an ingenious stroke astronomer Clavius suggested dropping leap years in century years not divisible by four. 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not leap years; 2000 was. The simple change brought the calendar very close and we use it today. But it is still 'fast,' by 25.9 seconds per year. When the Times Square ball says 12:00 midnight, it's really 12:00:26. and real midnight occurred at 11:59:34. This amounts to a one-day error in 3333 years. 1582 years + 3333 years = the year 4951.
•Fastest warship: The submarine, by far. It has no surface tension to break and is cabable of speeds much faster than admitted. But they are altogether as fast as a car. Experiment: At the sink or in the tub, pinch a bar of soap on the surface and watch it flop along and halt quickly. Then pinch it under water and watch it shoot through the internal water, not impeded by surface tension--which is the same arrangement of molecules as water bubbles, and why you see waterbug legs seem to bend into the water they're on. Re carriers, Enterprise, the first nuclear carrier made it from the Mediterranian to Cuba in 1961 in 72 hours--that's 50mph, or 57.5 knots. And any sub beats any carrier.
•The atmosphere is about 25 miles high. Chuck Yeager flew to 104,000 feet, 19.7 miles, quite expectedly lost all aerodynamic control, was unable to regain it, and the plane crashed and burned, after he bailed out.
•If you were born on Friday January 13 in a leap year, that event won't recur for 28 years, exactly. In general On any date, and in any month in a leap year or any of the three years following, or before, you'll have three birthday/day/date recurrences in 28 years, but none in whatever year, leap year or any of the three years following or before that you chose to start with.
•Water boils in a vacuum at low temperatures, below freezing, so it can boil and freeze, at the same time! This must be seen to be appreciated.
•"Be careful before you say 'I understand' " Mortimer Adler.
•Original ideas come never to most, seldom to a few, and often to none.
•The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. Nikola Tesla
Sources: T. Caoife, or otherwise indicated.
posted by Tom at 5:11 PM
