Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (40 page)

Pinball game designers' rule of thumb: An average player should get about 45 seconds of play per ball. Too much more time and the machine loses money; less, and the players get discouraged and stop playing.

A little ball played a major role in the first successful artificial heart valve in the 1950s. The ball opened and shut the valve with each heartbeat. It worked well, but when patients opened their mouths, anybody nearby could hear the ball clicking.

In the sport of jai alai, the ball is made of goatskin sewed around rubber. That ball travels at up to 188 mph and can be dangerous, occasionally even killing players.

Drop a 100-pound ball of Silly Putty from a height of 100 feet, and the ball—flattened but intact—will bounce back about eight feet into the air.

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Every three minutes, five Barbie dolls are sold on eBay.

Musical Matters

Our musical scale is divided into 12 notes, of which we normally sing only seven in any given song (do-re-mi-fa…). Traditional Chinese music uses 5 notes; Indian, 7; and Arabic, 17.

Joni Mitchell didn't play the 1969 Woodstock music festival because her manager urged her to appear on the
Dick Cavett Show
instead. She still wrote a hit song about the festival (“Woodstock”) as if she'd been there.

Buddy Miles, Freddie Mercury, and Loudon Wainwright III were all born on September 5, 1946.

Struggling musician John Lennon shoplifted the harmonica he plays on the Beatles hit “Love Me Do.”

Louisiana governor Jimmie Davis, elected in 1944 and 1960, is the only governor in the Country Music Hall of Fame. He wrote more than 400 songs, including “You Are My Sunshine.”

The Thai Elephant Orchestra is a troupe of up to six elephants that play on large, sturdy versions of traditional Thai instruments—gongs, drums, and a xylophone. Proceeds of their CD sales go to an elephant conservation center in Thailand.

Emperor Nero was a bagpipe virtuoso, playing it regularly at public gatherings. The Romans loved the instrument and carried it all over the world, but most cultures rejected it…except the Scots.

Warner Music still earns up to $30,000 a day in royalties for the song “Happy Birthday to You.”

The Beach Boys once recorded a song written by Charles Manson, who had been an acquaintance of drummer Dennis Wilson before he turned murderous. The album now lists the song as “Never Learn Not to Love,” but Manson's original title was “Cease to Exist.”

Get to Work!

Ratio of pay between CEOs in Japan and their workers: 10 to 1. In America: 380 to 1. In general, your CEO will make more by early afternoon today than you'll make all year.

According to studies, work-related stress can be as bad for a person's health as smoking.

Tuesday is the most productive day of the workweek.

A 2010 study discovered that 33 percent of U.S. workers were chronically overworked.

The word “freelancer” comes from 12th-century knights who lost employment with royal houses and offered themselves as mercenaries to anyone who'd pay.

Odds that you've nearly fallen asleep at work in the last month: 1 out of 3.

The U.S. Congress is one of the few workplaces in the U.S. where it's still legal to smoke indoors.

The average employee switches tasks every three minutes and has a maximum uninterrupted time of about 12 minutes to focus on a task.

A New York City sanitation worker lifts about six tons of garbage every day.

People who love their jobs are called
ergophiles
.

But 25 percent of all Americans polled say their workplace is a “dictatorship.” Not coincidentally, 25 percent also say that they're always angry on the job.

If the minimum wage had risen as fast as the salaries of CEOs, the lowest-paid workers would be making $28 per hour.

1.6 million people live in Manhattan, and 1.6 million people commute to work there daily.

Of the people who die at work, 1 percent die by drowning.

Animal Zzzzzs

Which animals sleep the most? First is the brown bat, which sleeps 19.9 hours a day. Right behind are the giant armadillo (18.1 hours per day), python and North American opossum (18 hours), the owl monkey (17 hours), and the human infant (16 hours).

In comparison, your house cat sleeps very little…only about 12.1 hours a day.

Giraffes go into deep sleep for only a few minutes at a time.

Ducks sleep in rows, and the ones on the ends keep one eye open.

Termites never sleep—they work 24 hours a day.

Technically, bears don't hibernate—they just go “dormant” and sleep all winter.

Male gorillas prefer to sleep on the ground, but females nest in trees.

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YUK, YUK

In the early 1800s, nitrous oxide was used solely for entertainment purposes, and “laughing gas” parties became intoxicating pastimes. It wasn't until 1844 that Horace Wells, a dentist in Connecticut, tried some on himself and found that he could extract a tooth painlessly.

A Really Ice Season

According to studies, as much as 85 percent of winter air pollution comes from wood stoves. Particulates get lodged permanently in the lungs, decreasing breathing capacity and increasing the odds of cancer.

The lost settlers who named Death Valley called it that because they passed through in winter and nearly froze to death.

On December 26, 1620, the
Mayflower
landed at Plymouth Rock with 102 people. Unfortunately, they were ill prepared for the rigors of a Massachusetts winter, and 51 died before spring.

In 1873 fifteen-year-old Chester Greenwood came up with the idea of earmuffs while ice-skating near his home in frigid Farmington, Maine. He convinced his grandmother to sew fur ear coverings and attach them to wire, and then he patented the design and started a hometown factory that made his earmuffs for 60 years.

About 90 percent of public transit commuters suffer at least one cold every winter.

Because of its proximity to the North Pole, the town of Barrow, Alaska, sits in the dark for much of the winter and doesn't see the sun rise for 64 days.

In the 1600s, Russians built long, curvy slides out of ice in the winter for thrilling downhill rides. The fun eventually spread across Europe, inspiring the first roller coasters.

In winter, a shrew can lose 50 percent of its body weight, with even its bones, skull, and organs shrinking.

The air in the average American home during the winter is twice as dry as the air in the Sahara Desert.

What would be an inch of rain in warmer months can become 15 inches of dry, fluffy snow or about 5 inches of the soggy stuff in the winter.

Gobbled Up

Nearly 90 percent of American households eat turkey on Thanksgiving—that's about 45 million animals.

Only male turkeys gobble. The hens make a clicking noise.

The red part of a turkey's head is called the “snotter.”

The largest turkey on record weighed 86 pounds, about the size of a German shepherd.

More turkeys are raised in California than in any other state. (And Californians eat three pounds more turkey meat than the average American does.)

Unmated turkey hens can lay eggs that hatch into chicks, but the offspring are always sterile males.

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SAVED BY TURKEYS!

The dodo tree, native to the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, had been sliding toward extinction for centuries because its seeds had to pass through a dodo bird's digestive tract before they'd germinate. Because the bird has been extinct since the 1600s, the species had dwindled to just 13 very old trees. Finally, in 1977, a scientist found that a turkey's gullet worked just as well as a dodo's. At least that was the story at the time. It turned out that the seeds' hard outer layer just needed a good scraping. Turkeys are still sometimes used to digest the seeds, but hand-scraping or tumbling the seeds in a gem polisher also works.

Southpaw

More than 2,500 left-handers officially die from accidents caused by “using devices meant for right-handed people.”

If you have two left-handed parents, your chance of being left-handed more than doubles. But that still means only a 26 percent chance—leading to the conclusion that most left-handedness is not inherited.

A stressful birth can double the chances of a female baby being born left-handed.

College-educated left-handers earn 10 to 15 percent more than college-educated right-handers.

Left-handers have slightly faster reaction times than right-handers.

You're more likely to bobble a Frisbee thrown by a left-hander because the reverse-spin changes flight patterns and how the disc behaves when it strikes your hand.

Compared to right-handers, a higher percentage of lefties are mentally challenged.

The World's Smallest…

…Dinosaur
was about the size of a turkey.

…Bird
is the bee hummingbird, which weighs as much as two dimes.

…Game of Monopoly
took place on a one-inch-square game board. Players had to look through magnifying glasses to see their pieces during the 30-hour-long game.

…U.S. president
was James Madison, who stood 5'4" and weighed 98 pounds.

…Seeds
belong to the orchid. It would take about 1.25 million of them to equal one gram.

…Country
has 110 acres of land, 826 residents, and a birth rate of 0. It's Vatican City.

…State park:
Mills End State Park in Portland, Oregon, is 452 square inches.

…County
in the United States is Kalawao, Hawaii, only 14 square miles.

…U.S. post office
is a 7 x 8-foot shed in Ochopee, Florida. It serves a town of 11 on the edge of the Everglades, but it has a daily mail route that stretches 132 miles across three sparsely populated counties.

Octopus Danger!

Only about a third of an octopus's intelligence is in its brain. The rest of its neurons reside in its tentacles, each of which can act independently from the brain.

If an octopus loses an arm, it can regenerate a new one. And, because tentacles contain their own neurons, the detached tentacles sometimes continue to crawl along by themselves to distract a predator.

Blue-ringed octopuses live in the ocean between Japan and Australia. They typically have cream-colored skin with dozens of black, blue, and brown spots that look like targets. How do you know you're making them angry enough to bite? If their blue rings pulsate, swim away fast!

An octopus releases a thick, poisonous cloud of black ink in response to predators and then swims away.

If an octopus released its ink inside an aquarium, it would kill everything inside the glass walls…including the octopus.

The mimic octopus can change the shape and color of its body to look like other sea creatures. Their best impersonations are the lionfish, sea snake, or flounder—the octopuses even imitate their movements.

All octopuses use venom to overcome prey and enemies, but only the blue-ringed octopus is poisonous enough to kill humans.

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HANG LIKE AN EGYPTIAN?

In 17th-century England, you could be hanged for “impersonating an Egyptian.” How come? The government believed that the nomadic Romani people came from Egypt (they were actually probably from India) and so used the terms “Egyptian” and the shorter “gypsy” interchangeably. Since you could be hanged for impersonating a gypsy, Egyptian impersonators were also out of luck.

Summertime

Children's IQs typically drop a few points over summer vacation.

The “dog days of summer” come between July 3 and August 11. The Romans coined the term, believing that Sirius, the Dog Star, helped the sun warm the earth during that time.

One toad can eat about 10,000 insects in a single summer.

The 1967 “Summer of Love” actually began in January. The kick-off event was a “Human Be-In” free concert in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, featuring Timothy Leary, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.

In the summer, lawn mowers account for up to 5 percent of the nation's air pollution.

Because of its proximity to the North Pole, the town of Barrow, Alaska, sees sunshine for 84 straight days in the summer.

Of all the seasons, summer has the lowest mortality rate.

The International Space Station

Sixteen nations collaborated to build the International Space Station (ISS), which combined three separate stations into one: Japan's
Kibo lab
, the partially built Russian
Mir-2
, and the proposed European
Columbus
.