• Once every couple of generations, one or at most a very few exceptional people will dominate any given field of human endeavor - in music, for example, there are never more than 3 or 4 out of many thousands of composers who tower over their contemporaries and de-facto "define" their era: Bach and Handel in the late Baroque, Mozart in the Classical and  Beethoven in the early Romantic period, for example.  Often, these Exceptional People are either shaped by, or have to overcome great personal tragedies or difficulties in order to attain or maintain their dominance. Lance Armstrong (USA) is a good illustration of this: he holds the record as the only rider to have won the Tour de France - the most grueling bicycle race in the world  -  seven times (consecutively 1999 2005, when he retired at the top of his form).  Remarkably, he did this despite being attacked by, and recovering from a nasty form of cancer that would have either killed or made an invalid of most of us!!

• Although most people, including most "environmentalists" don't realize it, one of the species which might easily become critically endangered (i.e., in danger of going extinct) is Homo sapiens sapiens - US!!  In the long term,  mother nature will replenish the supply of biodiversity (different kinds of life-forms) lost after even the worst nuclear war humankind could unleash: after all,  at the end of the Permian geological period, about 240 million years ago if the geologists and paleontologists are correct,  a whopping 90+% of all the life-forms on the planet were wiped out by a combination of immense natural disasters, and things were looking pretty bleak for a while. However, in the space of several tens of millions of years, life rebounded with a vengeance, and the age of the dinosaurs had begun.  In fact, there have been 6 "mass extinction events" that we know about - each clearing the biosphere of 50% or more of all the teeming species inhabiting the earth at the time.  Yet, today we find at least 10 million and as many as perhaps 50 million forms of life in a stunning display of biodiversity which truly boggles the mind. Now, our particular species ("humankind"), while being remarkably resilient in many respects, is still extremely Dependant upon relatively intact natural systems for its survival - as well as a certain degree of climate-related stability:  our supply of fresh water, for example, is connected with natural wetlands (which don't include golf ponds and  storm-sewer settling pools, by the way.... "no net loss of wetlands" is about as deceptive as, well, "We shouldn't' wait until the mushroom clouds start sprouting up before invading [insert name of appropriate Axis of Evil "rogue state" here...]"!!) and sun-polluted soil for filtration and purification, and the oxygen in the air we breathe is the product of trillions of plants which purify and replentish the atmosphere we need in order to live. A combination of pollution, habitat degredation, ozone depletion and increasing climactic instability and unpredictability largely due to global warming (whether caused by our wasteful civilization or by natural causes we don't understand, the effects will be the same....), may very well disrupt our food supplies,  make clean air and drinkable water less and less common, and cause natural systems worldwide, to break down and become much less favorable for the survival of MANY species, including eventually our own...... it is sobering to realize that while in the long run, the natural world will do just fine - no matter what we do, life on earth will survive, and given enough time to recover, thrive again - but we humans may very well not be around to witness it!!  (Of course, if the Biblical predictions of a New Earth where we'll at least begin our voyage into Eternity come true in a literal sense (per Rev. 21, and parallel OT prophecies of an eternal, paradise-like earth),  then i am just babbling.... but if bible-based eschatology (i.e., end-time prophecies) is meant in allegorical or metaphorical senses, as they very well may be, then ..... we're in BIG trouble!!).

• Chewing gum has been around in various forms for at least 9,000 years, according to archaeologists.  Most of it has historically been derived from the sap of various trees: .......The ancient Greeks chewed mastiche - a chewing gum made from the resin of the mastic tree.....The ancient Mayans chewed chicle which is the sap from the sapodilla tree....North American Indians chewed the sap from spruce trees and passed the habit along to the settlers.  The modern form of gum so popular in North American society, has a colorful history: in 1869, General Antonio de Santa Anna, of "Remember the Alamo" fame (he lead the Mexicans in the USA-Mexican war which resulted in Mexico losing its northern territories to Texas) introduced chicle (see above) to photographer and inventor Thomas Adams, while staying at his house in New York state during a nice, comfortable exile, and told him he could get a steady supply of the stuff from his relatives back in Mexico. Mr. Adams tried for a year to turn chicle into various synthetic rubber products, without success.  According to Adams family lore, when he was just about to throw out his last batch of raw chicle, he noticed a small girl buying flavored paraffin gum at the local drug store, and suddenly recalled  that chicle had been chewed by Mexican natives for as long as anyone could recall.  Voila!! He promptly chopped up a batch of chicle into little pieces and sold it to the local pharmacy as "Adams' New York Gum No. 1".  The rest is history!!  He soon added fruit flavors, started to sell it in vending machines by 1888, and a chap named Wrigley came up with the idea or adding minty flavors to chicle-based gum in 1914.  Modern day gums, such as "Chiclets",  boast lists of ingredients such as "Citrus Samba" (made from citrus-tree resin): Maltitol, Sorbitol, Gum Base (lots of ingredients, often including pine resins), Xylitol, Artificial and Natural Flavoring, and "less Than 2% of: Acacia, Acesulfame Potassium, Aspartame, BHT (To Maintain Freshness), Candelilla Wax, Glycerin, Soy Lecithin, Sucralose, Titanium Dioxide (Color) and Yellow 5." - but no chicle.

• Queen Elizabeth I regarded herself as a paragon of cleanliness. She declared that she bathed once every three months, whether she needed it or not.

• Like most folks, you were probably born with 300 bones, but by the time you become an adult, you had only 206.

• Horses have 19 muscles around each ear, that enable them to move them through 180 degrees.  Humans, on the other hand, consider themselves talented if they can merely wiggle their ears!!

• The average lead pencil, if sharpened with minimal loss of graphite, will draw a line 35 miles long or write approximately 50,000 English words.

• What is called a "French kiss" in the English speaking world is known as an "English kiss" in France. Similarly, when syphilis was first recognized for what is actually is, it was called the "French disease" in England, and yes, the "English disease" in France.

• According to those who have treated these culinary possibilities, beetles taste like apples, wasps like pine nuts, and worms  like fried bacon.  Humans, by comparison, are reported to taste like piggies, while snakes have been compared to chicken.  Wonder what the average politician tastes like?

• Current estimates of the number of people killed per year in California alone by "smog" - the nasty mixture of fine particulate matter spewed out by cars, trucks, locomotives, ships, planes, refineries and other sources, which lodges deep in the lungs and is widely considered the most lethal form of air pollution, are 9 to 10,000.  This would seem to indicate that the overall number of folks whose lives are hastened to a premature end by all air pollution in the USA is considerably higher than the 50,000 usually claimed (not to mention the zillions of cases of asthma and other lung-related conditions that cause untold personal as well as economic harm......).  However, things may actually be twice or three times as bad as these figures point to - recent studies all over the place are telling us that air pollution is even deadlier on the whole, than almost anyone realizes - it's not just a matter of inconvenience, poor visibility and paranoia, but truly one of life and death, as well as quality of life for a great many throughout the entire "civilized" world!! Now, let's be generous with our figures and say that a comparable number of people - 50,000 or so - are killed WORLDWIDE each year by ALL forms of terrorism combined, and maybe 500 per year on the average over the past decade, for the USA.  If one was to objectively look at these figures and designate funding priorities appropriately.... well, you get the idea: the USA's "anti-terrorism" budget, including the insanely expensive invasion and occupation of Iraq and the vast increases in "security"-related spending since 2001, is probably around $200+ billion dollars per year.  Wonder how much is being spent to drastically and swiftly reduce the death rate, damage and other risks associated with air pollution in that country, which annually kills at least 100 times the number of people that "terrorism" does??  Better yet, i wonder how much it would cost to reduce the number of air-pollution related deaths by say, two thirds (66%)?  I'm betting it would be considerably less than most people would consider "fair and reasonable" - and most of it would be borne by the enormously profitable fossil fuel industry at any rate!!

• Our solar system's biggest storm is the "Great Red Spot" on Jupiter.  Believed to have formed over 400 years ago, it is twice as wide as our entire planet.  It has long been thought that the huge storms on this "gas giant" planet form when smaller storms merge - and precisely that has been observed recently: in 2000,  three relatively small storms merged to form a larger one, about half as large as the Big One ("Red Jr."? The "Not so great Red Spot"?). At first it was white, as are most storms on the planet. But, this year it turned red and is now exactly the same color as its older brother. It is hypothesized that these huge, hurricane-like storms are stable on Jupiter because they never have to pass over land, and are constantly fed by the planets internal, gravity-based heat source.

• The largest oceanic current in the world is the Circum-antarctic current, which as its name suggests, circles the Antarctic continent. It transports over 100 times the flow of all the rivers of the world COMBINED - 130 million cubic meters of of water per second (for those still using the Olde Englishe system of weights and measures, that's 144.5 million tons of water  per second - 4560 trillion tons of water per year!!). This huge current (actually just a part of the circum-polar circulation system, which mixes water from the world's oceans: Atlantic, Pacific, Indian) is very poorly understood, as are its influences upon the world's climate.

• The phrase "triple klutz jump", a fairly obvious figure skating pun, has seemingly only been coined once by someone who puts their thoughts on the Internet - a surprisingly popular blogger named Hal Stern.

• Hitler's widely ballyhooed dietary practices reportedly stemmed from the severe stomach cramps he acquired when in his fourties.  Before then, he avidly consumed a rich diet heavy in meats (especially game birds) and pastries. According to reports, he refused to seek medical help for the condition and instead experimented with such things as elimination diets: first, he gave up the pastries, cakes and rich deserts he was so fond of, then went on to nix meats and dairy products.  This seemed to help somewhat, but he reportedly relapsed into his old ways repeatedly, to the end of his days.  He was by no means a "vegetarian" as is repeatedly and unadornedly reported in various "Stupid Facts" pages which litter the Internet with little factoids which are often either essentially meaningless due to their extreme brevity, or just plain wrong.

• The "black box" in commercial airliners is actually most often orange: it is far easier to find an orange box in the debris of a crash than a black one.

• All proteins are not created equal.  The protein which derives from flesh foods ("red" meat, fish, birds) is almost identical to those which we are made of, hence easily and completely utilized by the body (although they are very difficult to digest and are often associated with some nasty saturated fats - and in most domestic animals are contaminated by antibiotics, steroids and other things most of you Gentle Readers DON'T really wish to know about...).  Most plant proteins, on the other hand, are "incomplete": they contain proportions of the "essential" amino acids (methionine, lysine, threonine, leucine, valine, isoleucine, arginine, phenylalanine, histidine, and tryptophan) which the human body cannot manufacture by itself. Therefore, individual plant proteins by themselves, are  only partially usable by our bodies.  A well-balanced vegetarian diet, however, will contain "complementary" proteins: combinations of plant proteins which when combined in a given meal or within about 8 hours of each other, form a more complete blend of amino acids which we can more fully use to build our own proteins.  The easiest and most commonly used "complementary protein" combination is that of grains (corn, wheat, rye, spelt, millet, rice......) and modest amounts of legumes (peas, beans, lentils, peanuts......): legumes are low in methionine and tryptophan, but high in lysine and isoleucine whereas, grains are high in lysine and isoleucine and low in tryptophan and methionine.  So, when combined, they form a much more "complete" protein!  It should be noted that grains are excellent sources of protein, and that it only takes between 5 and 10% of legume protein compared to the amount of grain proteins consumed, to produce a "complete" amino acid balance which ensures that almost none of the total amount of protein eaten in any given day is fully usable by out bodies. SO, when it comes to balancing out grain and legume proteins, "a little dab'll do ya" on the legume side!

• The most "complete" (see above discussion) plant protein comes from soybeans: they contain a balance of "essential" amino acids (i.e., those our bodies can't manufacture) which closely resembles meat, and therefore eating soybeans or soy protein isolate is essentially the same as eating meat, when it comes to the protein department!

• Sometimes i think we are living in the "disinformation age",  rather than the opposite: while i wouldn't go nearly as far as Gurdjiefff's cynical dictum "Everything you know is a lie", a surprisingly large portion of what is offered as "fact" by sources of varying degrees of credibility are "in fact" simply false - yet still widely believed, even by many who consider themselves well educated.  Some good examples (besides the classic "A duck's quack won't echo - nobody knows why" (partial truth - turns out the acoustic properties of the average quack make for poor but certainly not non-existent echoes.) are:
• 1) "You can't sneeze (or yawn) in your sleep": completely false: these are reflexive actions mediated by the brain stem, which is quite functional during sleep: the "sneeze reflex" is not turned off while we snooze.
• 2) George Washington had wooden teeth - - - - his teeth were made of an agglomeration of cow's and human teeth and ivory set in a lead base (and he didn't chop down a cherry tree when little, then fess up later either - nor did he throw a coin of any sort across the Delaware River!!)
• 3) Rates of violent crime have been increasing for years........ NOT!!!  Since the late 70s in almost all industrialized countries, rates of violent crime (*especially* those not associated with drugs, i might add....) have been decreasing rather nicely.  In the USA, for example, violent crime rates in 2000 were the lowest they had been since 1965.  In that country there has been a slight increase in some kinds of violence since then (such as "hate crimes" of various sorts: crimes of intolerance), but on the whole, things are improving in most "first world" countries in this area.
• 4) Saddam was involved somehow in the World Trade Tower attacks in 2001 - - - while this hypothesis cannot be conclusively and absolutely disproven, there is in fact ZERO credible evidence to suggest that this was the case: according to **reliable** sources, he summarily dismissed out of hand, Al Queda representatives who came seeking his support -  and there are no credible reports that he had kind words of any sort for Islamic militants.  [Note: the man WAS a murderous dictator - this IS a well-established fact.  He just wasn't very likely to have been involved with Islamic militants of any variety or flavor.)
• 5)  You can catch a cold by getting cold - partial truth: while getting chilled by, for example being improperly clothed outside for a long time on a cold day, (interestingly enough, most especially if you get your *feet* extremely cold!) can temporarily depress your immune system so that you are more likely to succumb to common viruses such as colds and flues,  simply doing something that can get you cold for a short period, such as "polar bear swimming",  has little or no medium or long-term immune system effects and in many cases is quite beneficial overall.
• 6) We only use 10% of our brains on the average - - - complete tommyrot!!!  The brain is an extremely complex organ, this is quite true, but a brief conversation with any neuroscientist will dispell any such notion in short order.  That said,  i would heartily agree with a variation of that notion - 90% of the time people don't critically examine the things they believe (often quite contrary to the most credible evidence....) to be "true"!! (or, to quote a famous North American "There is nothing so uncommon as common sense"....).
• 7) Wait a half hour after eating before you can safely go swimming. This one seemed almost universally accepted  for some strange reason - and as with many other cherished fables, good luck trying to tell most people (especially mothers!) otherwise!!! The myth involves the possibility of suffering severe muscle cramping and drowning from swimming on a full stomach. While it s true that the digestive process does divert the circulation of the blood toward the gut and to a certain extent, away from the muscles, the fact is that an episode of drowning caused by swimming on a full stomach has **never** been documented. There s a theoretical possibility that one *could* develop a cramp while swimming with a full stomach, but a person swimming in a pool or controlled swimming area could easily exit the water if this happens. As with any exercise after eating, swimming right after a big meal might sometimes be uncomfortable, but it certainly won t cause you to drown.
• 8)  "We're from the government and we're here to help".........to quote the immortal Bill Cosby, RIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT.

• The country (or entity of some sort - see end of article below) called the United States of America did not officially exist until March 11, 1781, when all the states finally ratified the Articles of Confederation, a document which set out the terms of confederation for the original 13 colonies. Although  initially proposed on June 11, 1776, it was not agreed upon by Congress until November 15, 1777, and it took a hard-fought 3 and a half years before all involved finally agreed to form a new country based upon these terms.  During this time, there was a "Congress", but no "real" president because the country did not really exist until the Articles were accepted by the first states.

• The "Articles of Confederation" which formed the basis of the first "version" of the USA, were NOT a resounding success: it seems that the individual states had too much power, making it REALLY difficult to agree on important issues.  The way i understand it, a stronger union was needed since the center of the wheel (the federal government) was too weak to hold firmly. This was accomplished via the "Constitution", which was hammered out between May and September 1787, and ratified by the famous "13 states" over the following 3 years.  The biggest bone of contention was to decide how the legislature would be structured. Some wanted representation to be based on population (Virginia Plan). Others wanted equal representation (New Jersey Plan). Roger Sherman from Connecticut proposed a legislature with two parts: States would have equal representation in the Senate. The population of states would determine representation in the House.  It wasn't until May 29, 1790 when Rhode Island finally agreed to the terms of the Constitution that the famous 13 were finally joined together in a lasting, stable union.

• Massive tax slashing and huge expenditures for military adventures in the Middle East, have sparked cries for off-setting cuts to other government services and programs.  A careful crunching of proposed 2006 budget numbers by the widely-respected (no comments from the Peanut Gallery now....) Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has come up with the following interesting information: Over five years, veterans' benefits would be cut 13 percent, or $10 billion. Despite all the political talk about energy research and alternate fuels, $4.4 billion would be cut from energy programs. Environmental spending, including for national parks, would be cut 22 percent, or $28 billion; housing, fuel, child care and nutrition programs for the poor and elderly would lose 13 percent, or $24 billion.  Also included is a 13 percent cut $53 billion in education and job programs by 2011. This is all pretty interesting when compared to the $285 billion in additional mostly upper-bracket tax cuts which is also being vigorously sought by the Bushites, but not being spoken of very much in the numerous "information releases" and public announcements offered up by the current regime.  One of the more baffling cuts is $2 million for the library and online information network (out of a current budget of $2.5 million) run by the EPA, which are critically vital to researchers in that environmental "watchdog" agency. What makes this destruction of information sources so unaccountable is the announced policy of increasing the budget for exactly the kind of information which so heavily relies upon such sources for their work. One might *almost* suspect either a) skulduggery of some sort in this matter, or b) gross incompetence (right hand having no clue as to what left hand is doing)......but perhaps this is going a bit too far - other suggestions are welcome here!!

• To many people, 'buffalo' is the popular name often used to describe North American bison; however, this is a misnomer. In fact, buffalo are distinctly different animals from bison. Although both bison and buffalo belong to the same family, Bovidae (as in "bovine" - cows and their relatives), true 'buffalo' are native only to Africa and Asia.  The confusion most likely began when Europeans began calling them by the name of the animals they resembled, which they were already familiar with.

• A particularly deadly plague that began in Ethiopia and passed through Egypt and Libya to Greece in 430-426 B.C. changed the balance of power between Athens and Sparta, ending the Golden Age of Athenian dominance in the ancient world. It is thought that up to one third of the Athenians, including their charismatic leader, Pericles, perished in the epidemic.

  Until now our understanding of this outbreak was based on the account by the fifth century B.C. Greek historian Thucydides, who himself was taken ill with the plague but recovered. Despite Thucydides detailed description, researchers have not managed to agree on the identity of the plague and several diseases, including bubonic plague, smallpox, anthrax and measles have been blamed for the scourge.

  A mass burial pit unearthed in the Kerameikos ancient cemetery of Athens and dated back to the time of the historical outbreak, provided the required skeletal material for the investigation of the ancient microbial DNA it still contained.  Aided by modern DNA recovery and amplification techniques, Manolis J. Papagrigorakis et al used dental pulp to identify DNA sequences similar to those of the modern day bacteria which causes typhoid fever.  The results of this study point to typhoid fever as the probable cause of the Plague of Athens.

  Typhoid fever is transmitted by contaminated food or water, and nowadays the disease is most common in developing countries and in travelers returning from these countries.

• Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from blowing sand.

• The word "queue" is the only English word which is pronounced the same when it's last 2 or even 4 letters are removed.

• More people are allergic to various ingredients (such as casein and lactose) in cow's milk than any other food.  Other foods which collectively account for more than 90% of all food allergies, are
  • Peanuts (not actually a "nut" - they belong to the legume family, along with peas, beans and lentils)
  • True nuts (such as almonds, cashews, pecans, and walnuts)
  • Fish
  • Shellfish
  • Eggs
  • "the Nightshade family"  - tomatoes, potatoes, tobacco...
  • Soy
  • Wheat and other grains containing gluten.

• Malaria, which causes over 300 million illnesses and a million deaths per year (versus less than 10,000 for all terrorist attacks combined - but guess which one gets almost all the funding and media attention??), is caused by a small amoeba-like organism called a "plasmodium".  It is transmitted via several species of tropical and sub-tropical mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles.  The malaria parasite enters the human host when an infected mosquito takes a blood meal (female mosquitoes need blood to nourish their eggs.  The much larger males do not trouble people at all). Inside the human host, the parasite undergoes a series of changes as part of its complex life-cycle. Its various stages allow the plasmodium to evade the immune system, infect the liver and red blood cells, and finally develop into a form that is able to infect a mosquito again when it bites an infected person. Inside the mosquito, the parasite matures until it reaches the sexual stage where it can again infect a human host when the mosquito takes her next blood meal - 10 to 14 or more days later. Malaria symptoms appear about 9 to 14 days after the infectious mosquito bite, although this varies with different plasmodium species. This clever parasite evades our immune system by continuously varying a protein which it deposits on infected cells, which is used by the immune system to  identify and then destroy them.  By the time out body produces antibodies to one of the 50 different identifying proteins, the malaria parasites are already using a different one... the body of the infected person can't keep up to the constant shifting, and malaria organisms can therefore hide from the immune system for up to years, to re-emerge and cause multiple bouts of the disease long after the first episode is past.  //  About 40% of humankind lives in malaria-infested areas, and both the plasmodiums and the mosquitoes that spread them are growing increasingly resistant to the chemicals used to treat and control them.  The main reason that much more research isn't being done to find cures for malaria is quite simple: none of the world's wealthy countries is affected.  Most of the appropriate research would normally be done by pharmaceutical companies,  but since the overwhelming majority of people affected by this scourge are poor and live in impoverished countries,  there is little economic incentive to spend large amounts of money developing treatments which few of the people who need it could afford!  Also, since matters of "security"  or "national interest" are not in question for the countries which could best afford to do non-commercialized research, there is similarly little incentive to fight the disease on the part of their public sectors (i.e., governments).  // Call me a cynic, but it seems to me that except when confronted with the most dramatic of emergencies, most people are still asking the age-old question "Am i my brother's keeper?" when confronted with death and suffering, and still coming up with the answer "Not on you life!!"..... or perhaps "I gave at the office".

• Ever wonder how many diseases there are?  As of 2003 or so,  about 1450 different species of human pathogen (disease-causing organism - bacteria, viruses, ameboids, plasmodiums(see article on malaria, above), spirochetes (example: lyme disease) , etc.) were known, with many of them having a wide variety of "strains" or varieties.  60% of them can be contracted from animals, while the remaining 40% are associated only with humans.

• Newborn dolphins and killer whales - and their mothers - don't sleep for a month after birth.  They surface every several seconds for air, and always keep an eye on each other.  This contrasts with land mammals, who tend to spend as much time as possible in sleep in the earliest portion of their life.  A newborn human offspring, for example, spends about 17 hours per day snoozing (and STILL manages to keep his or her mother up most of the night....).

• Workers in the world's poorest countries are about 70 times less productive (around the year 2000) than those in the world's wealthiest countries.

• The 48 poorest countries collectively account for less than 0.4 per cent of global exports.

• I may be like the proverbial broken record for saying so, but in the past 200 years the rich, both in terms of individuals and countries, have continually gotten richer, while the poor simply continue to multiply and supply the labor which ultimately enables the wealthy to multiply their material treasures.  For a plethora of often depressing but nevertheless interesting and revealing comparisons between rich and poor, see this collection of information, extracted from the http://www.globalissues.org/ site, current to the early 21st century.  The ratios in the meantime have become *much* more extreme since then, largely due to the swing to the political "right" ("conservative") amongst governments and to a certain extent, the general populace in wealthy countries around the world.

• Regular large doses of vitamin C, even up to levels many times the recommended daily average, don't have any significant effect in either the prevention or the cure or control of the common cold, according to several well-designed recent studies.  As i point out below,  taking vitamins and minerals in artificial form is of limited value in many cases, and in a gowning number of instances has been found to actually be harmful.  It may cost a bit more, but it is most certainly **far** healthier (and tastier!!!) to simply eat a wide variety of nutritious foods, so that one gets the vitamins and minerals that we need, in a natural form that the body can use more easily and fully - and with fewer side effects!!

• The amount of money spent on drugs (alcohol, cocaine, heroin, cigarettes, caffeine, crystal meth, estacy, LSD.....) in the world annually, is well over two trillion dollars.  The amount that would be required to provide decent sanitation, basic health care, clean water and secondary (high school) education to those in the world who lack them,  would be, by contrast, less than 50 billion dollars per year.  If this fact shocks you (and hopefully it will...), then a) "Just say NO.", and b) Get out there and do something about the situation.

• Antarctica is the windiest, driest and coldest place on the planet.  Its lowest recorded temperature was -89.2°C (-128.6°F) at Russia's base Vostok in July 1983 - and that's without the wind chill factor!!!  It's katabatik winds (Greek's kata meaning downwards) is the highest sustained wind velocity in the world which was recorded in French base of Dumond d'Urville in July 1972 at 327km/hr (203mph) (the highest absolute wid speed recorded, was a gust of 231mph at the summit of New Hampshire's Mount Washington on April 12, 1934). Katabatik winds is formed when air on the cold ice sheet in the higher plateaux becomes colder, denser and heavier. With gravitation pull, the heavy air spills over the mountain slopes towards the coastline with frightening speed, carrying up to 10,000 microscopic ice crystals particles per square inch with it - at 200 mph, the word OUCH comes to mind.......//  The interior of the continent is classified as a desert, and gets a mere 50mm of precipitation (i.e., when converted to water instead of snow) per year - less than the center of the Sahara desert.

• If you want water,  just come on over to Canada.  We have about 32,000 lakes covering almost 9%, or 891,163 square km of the country - heck, Manitoba is basically a giant swamp with a couple of big lakes and Winnipeg attached!!

• Canada has the most fresh water per capita of any country in the world - over 90,000 cubic meters per year, as compared to Egypt, which has only 40.

• Australia has the interesting distinction of being the flattest country in the world.  It is also one of the driest, although Namibia is sometimes touted as being supreme in this dusty category.

• Canada has 3 of the top 10 largest islands, 10 of the 40, and 22 of the 100 largest islands in the world.  (not to make fun of the poor 'ole US of A, but they only have two islands in the top 100 - Hawaii, at #73 (but growing.....), and Alaska's famed, fabled Prince of Wales Island in the 96th spot.)

• If i may be permitted a bit of a rant.....and although it may be "politically incorrect" (and lots of people get fired for this proclivity these daze....),  most people will agree that the American system of health care is an expensive,  red-tape entangled nightmare which delivers vastly uneven care outcomes at greatly inflated prices  - which rise about 10% each year.  I could spend a **lot** of time and still not come up with anywhere near a comprehensive article, so a few basic stats will have to serve the purpose of illustrating the size and scope of the problem.
• --- In 1980, health care-related costs amounted to 9% of the GNP.  By 2004, that tab was up to 16%. The total costs in 2004 were about 2 trillion (that's $2,000,000,000,000) dollars - an average of $6,300 per capita.  This compares to about $4,000 per person in Canada, and less than $3,000 in many other industrialized countries in Europe and elsewhere, which have similar and in some cases superior overall health-related outcomes (such as infant mortality, average lifespan,  percentage of people with long-term disabilities, etc.).
• ---  Although about half of the total cost is government-financed,  there are literally thousands of competing health-care systems in the country - in Seattle alone, for example, there are almost  800!!  This is because health care is considered a commodity like any other, so it is largely left up to "market forces" to determine prices and structure in the sector.
• --- In some cases,  fierce competition leads to greater efficiency and lower amdministrative costs.  Health care is a notable exeption to this general rule.  In the USA,  an estimated 31% of all health-care expenses go to feed the beaurocracy - administrative costs for health care therefore consume nearly $600 billion dollars of the nation's expenditures.   This rate is about twice the administrative percentage of Canada's health care system, by means of comparison.
• --- Over 45 million Americans currently (2005) have no health care insurance at all: they must rely upon emergency departments, charity and government aid of one kind or another - and a major health care emergency is often a one-way ticket to financial ruin.
• --- When a person goes into a hospital in the USA for treatment,  he or she must deal with one of the highest rates of medical error and hospital-related dangers (many bacteria live mainly or exclusively in hospitals - especially strains highly resistant to most and in some cases ALL antibiotics) in the "first world", (and yes, this is a statement easily backed up by solid stats), but when it comes time to pay for it all,  even for those with good health insurance plans things can get pretty scary: each doctor or specialist who has anything to do with a given patient bills them separately, along with sometimes several departments in the same hospital. Therefore,  people fresh out of the hospital and trying hard to recover, are deluged with up to dozens of separate and often intricate bills which have to be deciphered and all the co-payments and deductibles taken care of.  An entire industry of "hospital bill management" has sprung up to help the well-off deal with this beaurocratic bill blizzard of red tape!!
• --- The new system set up to help seniors pay for their prescription drugs is proving to be, well, nearly terminally complicated.  It is market-based: the feds invited private companies to come up with their own programs, which were then negotiated with government agencies and individually approved.  In any given state, up to several hundred competing plans, each with a myriad often radically differing details (formularies (lists of covered drugs), co-payments, covered procedures, deductibles.....), are available and choosing between them is NOT an easy or fun procedure.  Furthermore, the total costs to everyone involved will be higher than before, since medicare plans BY LAW are forbidden to bargain with pharmaceutical companes to negotiate lower drug prices: each and every plan provider must simply pay whatever the drug companies demand for their wares on the so-called "open market".  This is a bizzare case of ideology (that the "free market" system can provide goods and services better than government can) meeting "real politic" (pharmaceutical companies have excellent, well-organized lobbies and contribute a lot to political campaigns.....), to the detriment of all except for a few "special interests" who make out like far more than figurative bandits.  In one instance of beaurocacy run amok, patients in nursing homes were RANDOMLY assigned (by the feds) to 43 different plans, meaning that the billing departments of many large nursing homes have to deal with up to 40 private companies in order to get medications to their clientelle.  Preditably, the results haven't been pretty.

• As a general rule,  the darker the color of a natural food, the more nutritious is is.  Good examples include broccoli, liver, carrots, "dark green leafies" in general, pomegranites, blueberries, oranges and kiwis.

• Dogs may soon be used as a great help in the detection and diagnosis of cancer.  Anecdotoal (i.e., based on stories peope tell) evidence has long pointed out that dogs and sometimes other animals can sometimes tell when their owners are ill even before they know it themselves. Now, at least three studies, the latest one by the Pine Street Foundation in San Anselmo, California, have given new credence to these observations.  The study employed three Labrador retrievers and two Portuguese water dogs with no previous training, and over several weeks trained them using breath samples that had been exhaled into tubes by cancer patients.  The human particpants were 55 people with lung cancer,  31 with breast cancer, and 83 with no known cancers at all.  The dogs did amazingly well, detecting all but one of the lung cancer and 28 out of 31 of the breast cancer cases, with only 3 "false positives" - cases where they indicated someone had cancer who didn't.  This is much better than non-invasive detection procedures (i.e., ones which don't involve getting inside the person's body in some way or the other) currently used, and also far cheaper.  So, if you think that modern medicine is going to the dogs these days, you may be right!!

• One way to help visualize the relative sizes in the solar system, and our "place" in it correspondingly, is to imagine a model in which it is reduced in size by a factor of a billion (10⁹). Then the Earth is about 1.3 cm in diameter (the size of a grape). The Moon orbits about a foot away. The Sun is 1.5 meters in diameter (about the height of a man) and 150 meters (about a city block) from the Earth. Jupiter is 15 cm in diameter (the size of a large grapefruit) and 5 blocks away from the Sun. Saturn (the size of an orange) is 10 blocks away; Uranus and Neptune (lemons) are 20 and 30 blocks away. A human on this scale is the size of an atom, while the nearest star would be found over 40,000 km (26,000 miles) from the atom-sized specks that represent us.

• The "war on Darwinism", by which most so-called "evangelical Christians" mean any form of science-based evolutionary theory, is heating up in the USA, with school boards being elected or defeated on the the issue, trials reminiscent of the "Scopes monkey trial" popping up to air the issue in a public forum on the national and international stage, and a hybrid hypothesis called "Intelligent design" (the "theistic evolution" of the 1970s - precisely the same arguments - trust me, i was there!!) charging up the middle in an attempt at a compromise which has a reasonable chance of making it into the public school system.   In a nutshell, Theistic Design admits that the evidence points to the earth being very old, but argues that life as we know it is simply too complex and intricate to have developed through the processes of natural selection, via means of competition and other natural forces (no matter HOW long a time-frame is considered), therefore an external "intelligence"  must have guided the process over the aeons - with the often unstated subtext that the only entity capable of guiding the development of life on a grand scale is God.  This contrasts with traditional Judeo-Christian "young earth" creationism, which states that the history of the pre-Abrahamic world as described in Genesis is to be taken 100% literally, leading to the conclusion that the earth and every natural thing in it (and in extreme cases of this belief-path, the entire universe) was created in 7 days about 6,000 years ago, followed about 1500 years later by a world-wide flood which in most versions of the thesis, created most of the geological column within the span of less than a year. The main proponents of "Intelligent design" will swear up and down that they are not religiously motivated, and that they are trying to promote a serious, hard-core scientific theory.  However, when it comes down to the crunch their own words proclaim their true motivation.  A case in point is found in a fund raising letter sent out in late 2005 and/or early 2006 by Discovery Institute founder Phillip Johnson, which stated flat out that "our ultimate goal is to affirm God and defeat Darwinism...to shape public policy in accordance with conservative Christian philosophy and get it into our schools."  //  It should be noted that the majority of Christians on a worldwide basis,  while of course believing that God created the universe (through some process of which we do not yet understand the nitty-gritty details), do not wish to "shape public policy" in their various political constituencies to the point where their particular viewpoint is taught in the public schools of their area or region.

• In Vietnam, the ratio of "mercenaries" (arms-bearing employees of "Private Military Companies" or more euphemistically "Security" firms) to regular forces was about 100 regular troops to 1 "quasi-military" fighting personell.  In Iraq, that ratio is lower than 10 to 1, with up to 20,000 mercenaries being paid by the USA government at about 5 times the wage their armed forces counterparts get remunerated.  One of the reasons they are needed because the regular forces couldn't, and still can't supply enough manpower to fight the war, due to low recruitment rates as potential soldiers/marines/Air Force folks/sailors start to realize: "Hey - there's a nasty war going on over there, and i could be killed or maimed for life if i take this career path!!" The typical mercenary in Iraq is older and far more experienced than the average regular forces personell, and they often get MUCH better equipment than standard issue for the public-sector military.  This, and the above mentioned fact that they get paid extremely well,  doesn't help the morale of troops in this war much - and this is a problem for even peace-loving people, since troops with poor morale are more likely to make mistakes or errors of judgment that cost lives and injuries on both sides of the conflict (or in Iraq,  *all* of the various "sides".....).

• Our species' relationship with other large predators has always been a difficult one, with non-human predators nearly always ending up on the short end of the rope (or the long end of a rifle....).  Wolves in particular have suffered from an anciently and extremely bad reputation, being vilified in myth and fable for millenia - from Little Red Riding Hood to stories of savage cattle-killing beasts which kill as much for pleasure as for food.  HOWEVER (you knew that was coming, didn't you?),  in factual act they are far less malign that 99% of the population supposes.  For instance, they virtually never attack people: a recent study (Linnell J D C et al (2002): The fear of wolves: a review of wolf attacks on humans. NINA Oppdragsmelding, 731, 1-65.) showed that in all of Europe, North America and parts of western Asia, only 17 confirmed cases of wolves killing people have been reported in the past 50 years.  Also, they kill FAR fewer of man's domestic food-animals than most people give them credit for - even less that packs of domestic dogs gone wild, for whose depredations wolves often take the fall.  It is even a myth that people and wolves cannot live closely together in peaceful co-existence - although nowhere near as adaptable to human prescence than their dimunitive relatives the coyote, packs of wolves have often been reported to live near towns in Russia without incident - just as coyotes are often mistaken for dogs, so are wolves in such situations!

• [The following is adapted from an editorial in the NY Times.  I do not doubt the statistics - they are pretty easy to verify on the whole!  I personally would virtually never approve of an abortion except in cases of rape, incest or where the mother's life is actually in danger,  but i think that education and assistance to vulnerable populations is the key to reducing the number of abortions, rather than heavy-handed legislation which tends to treat it as a variety of murder.]  --- Ethics and religious beliefs aside, pretty clear evidence that criminalizing abortion doesn't reduce abortion rates and only endangers the lives of women, can be found in Latin America. In most of the region, abortions are a crime, but the abortion rate is *far* higher than in Western Europe or the United States. Colombia - where abortion is illegal even if a woman's life is in danger - averages more than one abortion per woman over all of her fertile years. In Peru, the average is nearly two abortions per woman over the course of her reproductive years.
  In a region where there is little sex education and social taboos keep unmarried women from seeking contraception, criminalizing abortion has not made it rare, only dangerous. Rich women can go to private doctors. The rest rely on quacks or amateurs or do it themselves. Up to 5,000 women die each year from abortions in Latin America, and hundreds of thousands more are hospitalized.

• Coyotes, those wily relative of dog and symbol of "dogged", determined survival,  have dramatically expanded their range in recent decades because man has killed off most of their main competators - wolves and big cats in particular. They are nearly impossible to eradicate, because the more which are killed in any given population, the larger the litter size: the harder you try to get rid of them, the smarter the survivors (and recall they are pretty smart to begin with...) and the larger the average family size!

• There are a surprising number of coyotes in most cities in North America - for example, up to 2,000 in Chicago according to a recent study. They avoid people, travel and hunt mostly at night, and despite the fact that they pick off a few cherished pets every now and then, they perform the useful function of keeping down the population of "pest species" such as Canada Geese and rodents.  They feast on the eggs of the geese, and often hide some for later retrieval, in the same way that domestic doggies hide bones.  City coyotes tend to live longer than their country cousins, but are still considered "old" at the age of 3, and positively ancient at 4 years of age.  Despite their reputation for being solitary hunters, they tend to travel in packs of a dozen or so individuals in order to defend their territories.  They are quite fleet of foot,  and can cover tens of km per night when "on the move".

• An adult tiger can weigh up to 450 kg (1000 lbs) and measure over 3 m (10 feet) from tip to tip.  They can crush the skull of a full grown bull, but more often kill their prey by ripping out the jugular vein.

• Tigers, those quintessential symbols of wilderness and danger, are amongst the most endangered forms of life on the planet these days.  Their numbers have declined from an estimated 100,000 worldwide at the turn of the century, to only 5 to 7 thousand in 2005. Habitat destruction, hunting and now poaching must bear the blame: just one tiger, divided up into pelt and parts, can fetch  a  good $50,000 USD on the black market in China, which is where the species is thought to have originated and paradoxically, where it is the most endangered!!  Tiger meat is thought to bring strength and stamina, and the penises are prized as aphrodisiacs - nearly every portion of the magnificent animal is thought to have medicinal value in the orient.

• There are no tigers in Africa - never have been.  Historically there were 8 subspecies living in various parts of Asia, from the jungles of Indonesia to the windswept steppes of Siberia.  Three of these have since gone extinct: the Bali, Javan, and Caspian, in the past 70 years. The five remaining subspecies - Amur, Bengal, Indochinese, South China, and Sumatran - live only in Asia, and all are threatened by poaching and habitat loss. The South China tiger is on the verge of extinction, with just 20-30 estimated remaining in the wild.

• Venus is a pretty scary planet!!  What makes it scary? For one thing, Venus has a bad case of global warming. Its thick carbon dioxide atmosphere traps solar heat, warming the planet's surface to a hellish 740 K (872 F). The atmosphere itself is crushing. Venus' air pressure at "sea level" is 90 times greater than air pressure on Earth. Oh, and those clouds floating overhead ... they're laced with sulfuric acid. If you were teleported to Venus you'd be dissolved, crushed and melted--not necessarily in that order.

• In 2004, the CEO of the notorious Haliburton mega-company, made $78 million buckeroonies off of his involvement with the corporation.  By contrast, semi-skilled Filipino workers hired by Vice Prez  Cheney's favorite cash cow were making wages which often boiled down to $2 per hour, when unpaid overtime is considered.

• True birds with proper feathers and such, lived at the same time as the winged lizards - pterosaurs, who are not now generally regarded as birds' ancestors, but rather simply as a group of lizards which developed flight independently of birds.  Recent finds in China are suggesting that birds rapidly became more diverse and adaptive than their winged co-inhabitants, and that birds tended to live more inland, while pterosaurs dominated the coasts.

• The largest known Pterosaur or winged lizard had a wing span of over 18 meters - that's 60 feet!!  Imagine what nightmares something like this beastie must have given to the early mammals living at the time!!

• The first recorded example of "scat" singing, where the words are replaced by playful nonsense syllables, is found in Heebie Jeebies, recorded on Feb. 26, 1926 by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Fives.  The story goes that halfway through the song, Louis dropped the music and simply improvised pure nonsense for the rest of the take, instead of stopping altogether.  The person doing the recording liked the result so much that he suggested they keep it - and the "modern" era of scat singing was born.

• Mercury is one of the most poisonous substances encountered by most people in large enough quantities in everyday life, to be hazardously toxic - especially to pregnant women and young children,  since it can severely damage the developing nervous system,  harming intelligence and other brain-determined functions of the body.  **By far** the largest source of mercury pollution in our society is emissions from coal-fired power plants.  However,  many countries are virtually ignoring this source of "mass poisoning" (routes of ingestion include drinking water, particulates in air, and ingestion of fish which are high on the "food chain" such as tuna and bass), and others are actively reversing or "watering down" regulations previously enacted, which would effectively deal with power-plant mercury emissions.  For example, the USA had an EPA rule in place which would require power plants to use the "best available technology" to remove about 90% of mercury emissions by 2015.  However, an energy policy that concentrates on increased domestic production, deregulation and seemingly giving large energy corporations everything they want and then some,  has led to a "revision" of these rules.  The "revised" rules now state that NO reduction of mercury emissions is required until 2018, and only 70% of the emissions have to be eliminated by 2030 - almost a generation after the previous rules would have already eliminated 90%.  (and yes i realize there is little "wierdness" in these sad facts,  but to me it is strange how a government dominated by folks calling themselves "Christian" can do such things as permit known poisons to continue to harm children when it would be easy and affordable to do something positive about it on a scale of 10 instead of 25 years.).

• The name of the horse in the American Christmas song "Jingle Bells" is Bob.
  
  

• Fruits of the rose family--including cherries, apples, plums, almonds, peaches, apricots (remember the cancer-cure scam laetrile?  Apricot pits!!), and crab apples--contain in their seeds substances known as cyanogenetic glycosides. When eaten, they release hydrogen *cyanide* gas through an enzymatic reaction. (Note: this is the same gas as the notorious "Zyklon B" used by the Nazis to kill unsuspecting newbies to the death camps)  Therefore, although they are otherwise extremely healthy and quite tasty, "muncher discretion is advised".  So-called "bitter" almonds (much harder to find than the normal variety, fortunately!!) contain the most cyanide-producing glycosides, and 8 to 10 or them can kill a child.  Roasting destroys these compounds, without affecting overall mineral content - so if you want to eat a cupful of apple seeds, at least give them a good toasting beforehand!!  (Ever seen the Agatha Christie movie "Arsenic and Old Lace"?  A couple of nasty elderly ladies poison men by feeding them cyanide-laced almond cookies (the cyanide-releasing compounds in almonds that give them their tasty "zing") - economic motives were involved, i think. (They modified the recipe by adding a half teaspoon of strychnine and "a pinch" of pure cyanide.)  Wonder where they got the "arsenic" part from? Anyway,  symptoms of cyanide poisoning can include excitement, convulsions, respiratory distress, and spasms and sudden  death, which can occur without any of the other symptoms.  In case you were wondering, Cyanide itself is a poison that kills by denying blood the ability to carry oxygen and thereby causes its victims to die of  asphyxiation. At least within the realm of murder mysteries, cyanide is the darling of poisoners because it acts quickly and irrevocably once a fatal dose has been ingested, there is no effective antidote, and death takes place within minutes.  Unlike arsenic, which is an element not a compound, it is metabolized in the body when ingested in sub-lethal amounts, so it cannot be accumulated over time - as some have posited regarding the early demise of Napoleon, whose hair has been found to be particularly arsenic-rich when relatively recently analyzed.)

• Winston Churchill, one of England's greatest politicians, historians and statesmen, was born in a ladies' room during a dance.  He was also inordinately fond of roaming around his house naked - even while giving interviews!

• The longest one-syllable word in the English language is "screeched."  No rhyme exists in English for month, purple (although one correspondent has suggested that "murple" in some dialect or the other might mean to shuffle one's feet.... no trace of this meaning on the internet, but this means little!) and of course orange.  Dreamt is the only English word to end with the letters mt. A cat has 32 muscles in each ear. (just checking to see if you were still awake!).

• Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer.  Although he killed oodles of folks, he was finally sent up the river to take up residence in the slammer because of income tax evasion (apparently he didn't pay much taxes on his somewhat less than legitimate business ventures....).

• The national anthem of Greece reportedly has 158 verses - and you thought those Lutheran hymns with 20 to 30 verses were long......

• There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.

• Lightning has long fascinated humans, and in recent years it has been found to be even stranger than previously thought - with the discovery of such exotic beasties as "red sprites" and "blue jets" making the news of late (see article somewhere below) Now, researchers have found that gamma rays bursts ("terrestrial gamma flashes") are also associated with lightning.  (Gamma rays are the most energetic form of electromagnetic energy (other forms include microwaves, radio waves and light), and are normally produced by high-energy fusion interactions in stars, and in abundance by supernovae, black holes and such).  In 1994, scientists using the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory satellite discovered gamma ray bursts originating from very low altitudes in the atmosphere - only a few km from the surface.  Starting in 2002, scientists from Duke university using the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) satellite -- launched to study x-rays and gamma rays from the sun - started to track down these odd emanations, and in 2004 finally found them to be formed about 1 millisecond (thousandth of a second) *before* the emission of some forms of normal lightning, meaning they aren't caused by the lightning discharges themselves, but by the forces which immediately preceded, and perhaps trigger them.  The exact mechanism of this fascinating process is still unknown.

• Buckwheat is one of the (in my opinion at least....) most under-rated crops in the world.  Although not a grain (they belong to the same family of plants as rhubarb, knotweeds and all those yummy sorrels), their seeds have approximately the same nutritional content to the finest wheat, but with a much stronger, "nutty" flavor.  They fix nitrogen from the air (something legumes do as well), which makes them great for planting on fallow land to reduce the amount of nitrogen fertilizer used: after the harvest, the plants are ploughed back into the soil as "green manure".  Buckwheat honey is one of the greatest natural taste treats around, and when buckwheat is toasted, it becomes the delightful dish called "kasha", which for some reason is not as popular in North America as it is in some parts of Europe where strong natural flavors are appreciated a bit more, by palates a bit less wrecked by sawdust burgers and various versions of the ironically named "Real Thing".

• There are more bacteria in the average person's mouth than there are people on the planet. (but kissing will only be harmful in a small minority of cases - so don't let this little fact spoil your pursuit of osculatory pleasure....)

• The most difficult mountain to climb on the planet is K2, so named because it was the second peak measured for height in the Karakoram Range of northern Kashmir - on the border between Pakistan and China.  Only 189 people have "summited" on this second highest of all mountains, and 49 have died in the attempt.  Only 5 women have ever conquered K2,  starting with Wanda Rutkiewicz in 1986.  All 5 are now dead, leading some to speculate there is a "curse" on the mountain for women.....

• While most folks can identify Everest as the highest place on the earth's surface (see below), and almost every Jeopardy player knows that K2 comes in second at 28250 ft. /8611 m, the semi-mythical "average Joe in the street" would be hard pressed to name Kanchenjunga ( 8586 m 28,208 ft) as #3, and fewer than one in a hundred could name Lhotse I (8516 m /27,923 ft) and Makalu (8470 m /27,824 ft) as 4th and 5th in the race for the Top of the World.

• Smoking is beginning to look even worse than it used to - and that was pretty bad already!!!  It not only aids and abets cardio-vascular diseases such as heart attacks and strokes, degrades sperm quality, dulls taste buds and stains teeth and fingers, causes cancers, asthma and other nasty respiratory problems, depresses the immune system and adds years and years to one's appearance (read Major Wrinkles here...), but now researchers are finding it doubles the risk of macular degenerative disease, makes it more difficult to conceive by artificial means, and even causes mutations which increase the risk of problems such as asthma in the grandchildren of smoking mothers!!  Clearly, this is not an activity that one would voluntarily choose to engage in if one cares at all about about health, appearance, children..... yet for some reason it remains popular.  I must admit to being puzzled.

• Russia has vast water resources, but even so, it is using them in an extravagant manner.  Russians use about 500 liters of water per capita per day - vs a European average of 200 liters - and Germany uses only 120!!  An aging, leaking infrastructure and inneficient industrial facilities are largely to blame for Russia's profligate water usage.

• The Neanderthal race, now widely regarded as the distinct species Homo neanderthalis, lived in Europe and Western Asia for about 260,000 years according to most of those who study such matters.  They were joined by modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) throughout most of their territory for the last 10 to 15,000 years of this time-span, and  died out around 30,000 years ago, as the northern hemisphere's climate was dramatically cooling in the run-up to the most recent glacial period.  They were long regarded as clumsy and unintelligent, mainly because of their robust frame (they were far stronger than any other humans of their or our age), heavy eyebrows and a mistaken  notion that they were of stooped stature (based upon an apparently arthritic skeleton!).  Yet, recent research has shown them to be intelligent (brain size for Neanderthals averaged larger than for modern humans), capable of dexterous hand movements, and with an appreciation of music (see the entry below), and possibly even a rudimentary belief in an afterlife, as shown by a Neanderthal grave sites in Germany and Northern Iraq which feature grave goods such as bison artifacts, and carefully lain flowers atop the remains (as revealed by the patterns of pollen present).  Yet, they never progressed past the stage of unsophisticated stone weapons and tools and it would appear that they suffered a competitive disadvantage against their human contemporaries.  Many theories have been put forward to explain their demise, including an inability to adapt to the cooler temperatures, warfare with humans over dwindling resources, and the recent suggestion that they were done in by an early version of free trade: apparently the humans of this period engaged in extensive and systematic trading, and their dwellings showed specialization into separate areas for cooking, sleeping, etc., while corresponding Neanderthal homes were "unorganized" - far less specialized.  It would appear that although they may have had the brainpower to progress further than they did in their long history, for some reason(s), they remained stuck in a rut and became extinct as a result!

• The world's oldest known musical instrument is a portion of a flute-like bone carving whose 4 holes are generally acknowledged to correspond to a portion of a natural, diatonic scale such as the one we use today.  According to archaeologists,  it is about 50,000 years old and was found in the famous "Cave Bear" Slovenian cave  (as in the novel "Clan of the Cave Bear") which was supposedly inhabited by Neanderthals.

• An important part of scientific advances is the ability to measure things (light, sound, length, volume, weight, mass, electrical charge, velocity, angles, chemical concentrations, radiation, electromagnetic frequencies, etc.).  A significant advance has been made at Caltech, in the field of measuring mass: a young genius by the name of Michael Roukes has modified the standard method of measuring attogram (10^-18 g) masses, which involved using a very small silicon blade vibrating at a frequency of 33 Mherz (33 million vibrations per second) in a magnetic field (the addition of a small weight to the tip of the blade increases its mass , hence decreases its vibrational frequency by a tiny amount), and increased its accuracy by a thousandfold, to the point where individual protein  molecules of various kinds, which weigh about a zeptogram (10^-21 g).  This increase in accuracy by three orders of magnitude was achieved simply by substituting the stiffer compound silicon carbide for the blade, which enables it to be made much smaller and lighter hence vibrating at a faster rate.

• With many patented chemical formulations, the primary or "active" ingredient may be fairly benign, but the overall effect of the  compound may not be anywhere as harmless as advertised.  For example, the highly-praised herbicide Roundup is not as "eco-friendly" as Monsanto would like us all to believe (Monsanto produces genetically modified crops which are "Roundup ready" - they are resistant to the herbicide formulation Roundup, which Monsanto has the patent for.  The theory is that more of the chemical can be used without harming the plants, hence killing a greater percentage of the weeds in the bio-engineered fields, which  can increase yields under some conditions).  A recent (April 1, 2005) study by the University of Pittsburgh has shown that Roundup is highly lethal to most amphibians (except for spring peepers, for some reason!!), which considering that most of it is washed into wetlands and waterways, means it is significantly damaging natural aquatic systems wherever it is used.  To tie this into the initial thread, they found that the culprit is not the active ingredient, glyphosate, but instead the surficant (which goes by the horrorshow moniker of polyethoxylated tallowamine), which enables the glyphosate to penetrate the waxy coating on some plant leaves.

• Quite often, a treatment or "cure"  for one thing can cause problems somewhere else: "side effects" can be worse than the original condition.  One such example is radiation therapy, which is often a bit of a "shot-gun" approach to killing cancerous cells:  radiation is more deadly to cells which are actively dividing, since DNA is more vulnerable to radiation (and chemical, hence chemotherapy) damage when it is unraveled and replicating itself.  The problem is  that healthy tissues that also have a high rate of reproductive or renewal activity, are also killed, damaged or mutated at a higher rate than normal, when exposed to the radiation intended to preferentially kill the targeted cancer cells.  This causes things such as hair loss, bone marrow damage  - which leads to blood cell deficiencies,  general weakening of entire systems in the body, and "secondary" cancer formation as a result of the radiation.  A good example of this later effect was discovered in a study at the University of Minnesota Cancer Center (March, 2005).  They found that men who had had radiation therapy for prostate cancer, developed rectal cancer at at least twice the normal rate, since cells in the lining of the digestive tract are in a more actively dividing state than that of surrounding tissues, hence more vulnerable to radiation damage.

• While nearly everyone in our society has heard of Albert Einstein, not one in a million can name the famous 5 articles he published in 1905, which changed the face of physics and the way we view the universe.  For "The Record", they are 1) "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", which introduced the concept of Spacetime, and established that the speed of light was constant, and that time was variable, rather than  being absolute as was thought up to that point.  These concepts formed the basis of the special theory of relativity (the general theory of relativity, which is more complex, wasn't published until 1916).  2) "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content?"  demonstrated that energy and matter are equivalent, and can be transformed into each other according to the most famous physics  equation of all time: e = mc², where e = energy, m =  mass, and c is the speed of light. 3) "On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light"  - this one proved that light (and all other electromagnetic radiation) consists of particles he called photons, and thus laid the foundation for quantum physics.  (Light is in fact made of both particles and waves....).  It was this paper that won Einstein a Nobel prize in 1921.  4)  "On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat" . This paper concerns the semi-random Brownian motion of molecules and other small particles, which he developed equations regarding, and which revolutionized the way we regard fluids and gasses. and 5) "A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions", which was Einstein's doctoral thesis (contrary to urban legend, he did well at school, although his unique ways of thinking often drove his teachers to distraction....). This pivotal paper conclusively demonstrated the reality of molecules, and showed how to calculate the size of molecules and such physicsy things as Avogadro's number.

• The rich continue to get richer..... at least in the USA, where in 1960, the wealthiest 2% of the population [i lost the stats on the distribution of wealth in that country - could someone perhaps point me towards current, valid stats on this topic?

• [circa 2000]  Bill Gates, now worth more than $80 billion, has more assets than America's poorest 150 million people. //   84 individuals have more combined wealth than China, with its 1.2 billion inhabitants and a GDP of $700 billion.  // [2005] The world's 200 richest people now have a combined wealth of more than $1.3 trillion, equal to the annual income of the poorest half of the world - three billion people!

• The three richest people in the world own assets that exceed the *combined* gross domestic products of the world's poorest 48 countries.

• Russia is the only large industrialized country whose population is rapidly shrinking: birth rates are currently about 1.3 per woman, vs the 2.2 necessary to maintain the status quo.  Causes include uncertainty regarding the future, socio-economic instability, the tendency for women to pursue a career before having children, and pervasive health problems due to massive pollution (much of it of a radioactive nature),  inadequate nutrition and a decaying health care system: only 10 to 15% of the girls under 18 in the country have "good health".

• Despite the much-ballyhooed "easing of tensions" since the cold war ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, over 30,000 nuclear warheads (bombs by any other name...)  are still stored in the arsenals of the world's nuclear powers.  Russia has over half of these, the US of A (or is that B these days?), a third or more, Israel most likely 2,000+ (estimates range from 100 all the way to 5,000 - depending upon who is doing the math and what their political agenda is....) , the UK, China and France about 500 apiece, India 70+, Pakistan 15 to 20, North Korea a couple, and there may still be a few hiding out in South Africa, which is the only country to have officially destroyed its nukes.  Three disturbing developments as of 2005, are a) the possibility of criminals/terrorists acquiring or building an "outlaw bomb", or getting their hands on one of the 100 or so "suitcase nukes" that the Soviet Union lost track of when it fragmented, b) the certainty that the  so-called "underground" network of nuclear materials and technology operated by Pakistan, still exists in some form, and c) the fact that both the US and Russia are actively renewing and seeking to "modernize" their nuclear arsenals - developing new kinds of weapons as well as maintaining a hard-line attitude regarding the conditions under which they would feel justified in using them.

• In the US of A, they take the dictum "Do the crime, Do the time." seriously!!  Of an estimated 10 million people in prisons worldwide (2004), about 2.2 million (93% of them men.....) of them are in USA lock-ups , for an official incarceration rate of  about 710 per 100,000.  The next highest rates are in Russia (about 600 per 100,000), various post - Soviet countries (Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, etc.), at 400 to 550, and a smattering of central and south American countries - Bermuda, Belize, Suriname and Dominica (400 to 450), and (surprise...) the U.S. Virgin Islands at 530.  China and North Korea probably have higher rates of imprisonment, but accurate information is difficult to come by for these two..... // The average rate of imprisonment for Europe is about 100 per 100,000, with Jolly olde Englande leading the pack at 141, and Iceland taking the hindmost at 37 - which translates to a total prison population of around a hundred.

• About 25 percent of children aged 4 to 11 have an imaginary companion: an invisible friend or one embodied in a toy or stuffed animal.  Although many parents try to discourage this in their children,  research is now consistently showing that children who have had an imaginary friend, often develop language and cognitive skills at a faster pace than children who do not.  Part of this beneficial effect is due to the fact that such children must make up BOTH sides of conversations and activities, hence they get more practice, and are actively engaged in mental activity of the kind most likely to lead to greater linguistic, social and mental skills, for a far greater proportion of time than those who interact only with real persons.

• Recent research has shown that the contestants who perform later in a contest, are scored higher than those who perform earlier, and that the one who goes last, often ends up in first place. This is called the "Serial position effect", and has long been noted in many fields, from sporting completions involving judging, to job interviews.

• An effective cure for AIDS may be further away than thought.  Researchers at Johns Hopkins have just announced they have discovered a secondary "reservoir" of HIV viruses, in a category of immune system cells called CD4, which often become dormant for long periods of time.  Therefore, unless a way can be found to rid the body of this inactive pool of viral particles, people with HIV infections will likely have to remain on anti-viral medication for the rest of their lives.  //  The HIV virus has proven to be a far more formidable opponent than initially anticipated:  20 years of intensive research by some pretty sharp minds, has failed to produce either a cure or a vaccine.  The main reasons for this are because it mutates frequently in order to outsmart the body's immune defenses, and because it attacks the immune system from several different angles: it is the archaetypical "super-virus" that gives doctors and scientists nightmares.

• Farsi, the dominant language in Iran, has become the 4th most popular for "blogging" on the internet (after English, French and German), with over 100,000 inhabitants in the Blogosphere.  This is because of the systematic suppression of free speech in Iran, where 70% of the population is under 30, and levels of education are higher than anywhere else in the Islamic world.  A small cadre of aging clerics hold the reins of power in that country, but they cannot control everything.  The internet, and most especially web logs, has become a popular and effective method for people to express and discuss "forbidden" topics and ideas.  (By contrast, even though Iraq is also a highly educated country, there are only about 50 known bloggers there!)

• Afghanistan is still rather difficult place to live in these days. A just - released (Feb, 2005) study produced the following figures:
•   -- Life expectancy in Afghanistan in 2004, was about 44 years - vs  about 80 for the "first world".
•   -- Only 5 countries (Mali, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Sierra Leone and Burundi) are considered less developed
•   -- Half the population is "poor", as judged by local standards.
•   -- 20% are chronically hungry.
•   -- one quarter of the population has at some time sought refuge outside the country.
•   -- 3.6 million out of 28 million citizens, are still refugees or "internally displaced".
•   -- 1 in 5 children currently die under the age of 5, most from easily preventable diseases.
•   -- 1 in 8 children die from causes related to unclean water.
•   -- only 25% of the total population has access to clean water (i.e., three quarters don't!!).
•   -- Adult literacy is under 29 percent.
•   -- Per capita income is $190 USD (52 cents per  day), and unemployment is at least 25%.
•   --  Maternal mortality rates (women dying because of child birth complications) are 60 times that of Europe.
• That said, there are reasons for hope: 54 percent of children are now enrolled in school, including 4 million  high school students - and non-drug related economic growth was 16 percent in 2003 and estimated to remain at 10 percent or more per year for a while.  Key to further success, however, rests upon improved security, political reform, reduction of poppy production, and "bottom-up" economic development.

• Some humming birds' wings flap at a rate of nearly 100 beats per second.

• The average bed is home to over 6 billion dust mites. (Now THERE's a creepy thought.....)

• Saint Patrick - the patron saint of Ireland - was Scottish.  However, the Scots as a people, originated in Ireland, so it all  evens out in the end!!

• The average serving of broccoli (not a favorite of  a certain "conservative" personality, but one of the all-time mega-yummies in my humble opinion....) contains twice the vitamin C of an average-sized orange - and a huge batch of B vitamins, anti-oxidants, iron, calcium and other minerals - it and indeed all the "dark green leafies" such as kale and swiss chard are truly "super-foods"!!

•  Conservative estimates of the number of species of life which we share the planet with, range from 10 to 30 million. At present, we have only formally named about 2 million forms of life, and we have detailed knowledge of only a tenth of these.

• Type two diabetes, an a acquired impairment of the body's ability to produce and/or utilize insulin (which leads to uncontrolled sugar levels in the blood, with often-debilitating health consequences) has been on the rise worldwide in recent decades, due largely to changes in dietary patterns (processed, largely nutrition-free foods such as white sugar, white flour, "Big Macs", French and/or Freedom Fries, carbonated soda-pop with or without caffeine....) and increasing levels of inactivity.  Aside from the personal and social effects, the world economy is estimated to lose more than a trillion dollars a year because of decreased  work efficiency, lost days due to acute illness and complications due to this condition, and long-term disabilities such as glaucoma and extremely poor circulation.  Now, an unlikely form of help for the regulation of blood glucose levels may have been confirmed by recent research (see http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050108/food.asp  for some interesting details): vinegar!!  It seems that two spoonfuls of vinegar taken before a meal can dramatically reduce the size of the blood sugar "spike" which occurs in the first couple of hours after eating, which can greatly help in the management and even the prevention of type two diabetes.  A "spoonful of sugar" may help the medicine go down, but two spoonfuls of vinegar may in fact be medicine all by themselves!!

• Not to single out USA schools or their school system (things are as bad or worse in many countries!!) , but i just ran across a few interesting facts about the way 40 million children are taught these days in the richest, most powerful and most influential nation on the planet.
   -  Many high school teachers are responsible for 150 to 200 students, in classes of up to  40.
  -  over twice as much public money is spent upon the preparation for war ("defense"), than for all levels of education combined.
  -  58 percent of the thirteen-year-olds tested by the National Assessment for Educational Progress (in 2003) think it is against the law to start a third political party in the USA.
   - 63% of high school students attend classes at schools with over 5000 students (i recall when i was going to school,  that many, myself included, thought it appalling  when our local high school accommodating  nearly a thousand students was built!).  What price "efficiency"??
   - Education used to be a highly local matter, with each community largely responsible for the education of its children, under general guidelines usually set by states.  In 1932 there were 127,531 school districts in the USA. Today there are approximately 15,840 and declining.  Local school boards are rendered increasingly obsolete and impotent by a nationwide push for "standardization" in what is taught, how it is taught, how it is tested and evaluated, and which books and literature are "approved" to be read by the nation's young minds, and used by their teachers.  Revealingly, the book "1984" is not often on these usually ideologically selected reading lists....
  - [Rant alert..... ] The more i read about the philosophy and principles of Thomas Jefferson, the more i am saddened that he is one of the most ignored (in practice, i.e. )of the "founding fathers" of the USA. (examples:  " The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their rightful names."   "The moment a person forms a theory  [or more properly, starts to believe it to be absolutely true] , his imagination sees, in every object, only the traits that favor that theory.",  "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.",  "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to ... remain silent.",  "Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.", and "Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.".) In the context of education, he advocated a broad, general education centered upon preparing the students for active, responsible citizenship and self-government.  This would include such things as critical, independent thinking, a more-than-functional literacy focused upon comprehension and communication skills, and the ability  to  formulate independent ideas and solutions to everyday problems on various levels from the personal to the international, and to coherently and effectively communicate these to others.  It is my general impression that these lofty yet practical ideals are being lost in an ill-considered drive to "produce a well educated workforce" or some such cant.  A young person with a good, solid general education will be well equipped to learn any trade or profession they decide to pursue.  He or she will also be well equipped to take an active and responsible part in the functioning of the society they live in - at all levels.  If  the reader will forgive me for editorializing a bit,  i will ask you: are the young people YOU know being taught with goals such as these in mind?

• The sage  observation that "There's a sucker born every minute." has been proven countless millions of times - especially around election time, it seems... that said, a Special Case of this dictum was demonstrated recently, when a 10 year old grilled cheese sandwich purporting to display an image of the Virgin May, was sold on eBay for $5,100.  This same ancient tribute to [YOU decide what word or concept to put here...] was subsequently sold to an on-line casino for $28,000.

• When the Italian merchant Giovanni Caboto  (aka "John Cabot") came to Newfoundland waters in 1497,  he found the waters on the famous Grand Banks so thick with cod that they impeded the progress of his vessel.  He reported back to Henry VII of England that there were enough cod to feed his kingdom "until the end of time", and it was estimated that the value of this resource was greater than all the gold and sugar that was extracted and grown in the Caribbean and South America.  [NOTE:  This rosy picture was recently confirmed when a study of fishing records from New England in the 1850s, indicated a Scotian Shelf stock of 1.3 million tons - over 20 times the meager 50,000 tons estimated today] M. Caboto did not count on the massive habitat destruction caused by the dragger fishery in the 1960s onwards, which was eagerly  participated in by dozens of countries, quite heedless of the inevitable consequences of dragging destructive gear weighing up to 10 tons across the ocean bottom.  The cod catch off Newfoundland peaked in the late 1980s at nearly 300,000 tons, then promptly crashed.  A closure of the entire fishery in 1993 threw 40,000 people out of work and devastated coastal communities, but did little to restore the fortunes of the cod, which may yet be declared "commercially extinct": the stocks have not recovered.  Although climate change is suspected  of being partially responsible, it cannot be denied that decades of overfishing with  thousands of "underwater bulldozers", as some have dubbed the massive fish trawling gear (ok, i just made the term up now - but it fits!!), was doubtless a leading cause of the collapse of one of the most prolific fisheries on the planet.

• Modern astronomers don't divide the sky the same way ancient astronomers did. According to modern star maps, the sun cuts through a 13th  constellation, Ophiuchus the Serpent Bearer, between Nov. 30th and Dec.  17th. Astrologically speaking, if you were born between those dates you're no longer a Sagittarian, you're an Ophiuchi!

• The largest marine estuary in the USA - Chesapeake Bay, annually receives 44 million tons (40 million tonnes) of manure from chicken, hog and cow farms within its watershed.  According to the most recent estimates it receives 2.5 times the amount of nitrogen, and twice the amount of phosphorous than it can absorb - leading to toxic algal blooms, chronically low oxygen levels due to rotting vegetation, and an overall poor level of health for this important natural system.

• The USA Forest Service has built more than 360,000 miles of various kinds of roads in national forests -- or eight (8) times the entire length of the U.S. interstate highway system.

• Each sea urchin spine is made of a single crystal of calcium carbonate.  They are quickly re-grown after being broken.  Sea urchins depend upon their spines for protection as well as locomotion.

• At any given time, about one quarter (25%) of the adult population of North America is suffering from back pain.  In one quarter of these (over 6% of the population), the pain is chronic (i.e. , long-term) and unceasing.

• Researchers at Northwestern University have found that chronic back pain actually shrinks the "thinking" part of the brain - the Grey Matter.  They calculated that for every year of constant back pain, about 1.2 cm²  of brain matter is lost - the equivalent of about 15 years of normal aging.  It is not known if the loss is reversible when the pain finally goes away.

• Researchers at Oxford have developed the world's smallest test tube - teensy tiny carbon nanotubes with an inner diameter of approximately 1.2 nanometers (about a millionth of a mm, or 20 million of them to the inch), and a length of about 2 micrometers.  Their volume is two zeptolitres (one zeptolitre is 10^-21 liters), and they  can accommodate around 2,000 molecules each.  It has been found that polymerization reactions take place much differently within this confined space, and chemists expect that they can be used to produce interesting molecular reactions which could lead to new materials.  While it is theoretically possible to make even smaller test tubes, these would not be very useful: the smallest practical size for reaction vessels has been reached.

• Heart attack is the leading cause of non-infectious death in infants under a year old, in North America.

• There are over 1 million heart attacks each year in the USA.

• Recent studies have calculated that about 50% of all food produced in the USA (***and the figures likely hold true for Canada as well***) is wasted, spoiled or discarded.  Some is never harvested, due to market fluctuations  (food destroyed in the field by pests, storms and other natural processes, was not included), some spoiled during storage at the various stages of its trip to the tummies of consumers, and about 500 lbs (225 kg) of food is thrown away by the average family during the course of a year (about 15% of all food that enters the household - a rate three times larger than during the 1980s.).

• In 1999, 31 million Americans lived in households experiencing "food insecurity", which is defined as frequently not being sure of where your next meal is coming from. However, through the vigilant and tireless application of  the principles of "Compassionate Conservatism" in their unstinting War on Poverty, the Bush regime had managed to reduce this shocking figure to a mere 35 million by 2004.

• Recent studies (mid 2004) indicate that up to 24 billion tonnes of topsoil is lost annually from the world's arable land, due to poor agricultural practices which disturb the soil and expose it to erosion by wind and water far more than it would otherwise have been, in natural ecosystems.

[NOTE:  repeat - lifted from its place below: too good not to "refresh" every now and then!!]  Like the news of Mark Twain's death, the danger to humans that sharks represent, is ***greatly*** exaggerated.  Worldwide, an average of 50 to 70 "unprovoked" shark attacks (If you grab a shark by the tail, as some divers/idiots have actually attempted, no matter what happens afterwards, it is not considered to be "unprovoked".) are reported each year, with a half dozen or so fatalities.  By comparison, more people are killed by dogs in just the USA each year, than all the known shark fatalities in the world for the past 100 years.  In 2002, the International Shark Attack File investigated 86 interactions between sharks and humans, and found 60 of them to be unprovoked.  There were 3 fatalities. Relatively speaking, the most dangerous place was Florida, with 29 attacks, and a total of 47 were reported from the USA in general.  On average, only 10% of shark attacks are fatal, and most involve relatively minor injuries.  Contrary to popular opinion, sharks almost never eat people - apparently we are not considered very tasty by that category of Big Fish!!  When one considers that worldwide, an estimated 2 million people were killed by alcohol in 2002 (but virtually NONE by marijuana.....NOT that i would recommend it to anyone, but one wonders why the far more deadly stuff is legal!!) ,  an innocent-looking glass of wine or beer should be considered far more dangerous than a 30 tonne great white shark - especially when combined with automobile keys :--).

•  The very best archive of Astronomical photos on the web is maintained by Nasa, at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html.  It has a positively SPLENDID variety of photos of  objects and phenomenon found in the sky - one per day going all the way back to June 20, 1995.

The dynamics of guerrilla warfare can be quite fascinating at times: one one hand you have a very small number of determined fighters, doggedly pursuing a cause they value more than their own lives. They are experts at survival, know their territory inside out, use whatever cover they can, and kill via the precision use of small amounts of ammunition, usually fired from light, easily carried weapons.  On the other hand you usually have a far larger invading or occupying force, much more concerned with their own safety, not knowing the terrain at all, and possessing large amounts of heavy weaponry and ammunition.  Quite often, the upper hand belongs to the more mobile, well-hidden "resistance fighters", no matter what the odds might be against them.  (Small wonder they often become Folk Heroes in societies which value violent resistance as an accepted means to achieving  various ends).  A case which demonstrates this rather well, has been reported in the early November, 20004 storming of the rebel city of Fallujah, Iraq, where a sniper kept 150 well armed troops at bay for nearly an complete day, despite their use of 500 lb bombs, dozens of artillery shells and shots from tanks, and an unbelievable 30,000 or so bullets fired mostly by machine guns.  In the end, he was observed successfully retreating from the scene, riding a bicycle.

• In 1990, it was "conventional wisdom" that there were perhaps 5 billion galaxies in the known universe, or about 1 galaxy for each person on our little planet.  However, observations by the Hubble space telescope have increased this estimate by a hundred fold, to nearly 500 billion galaxies.  The already famous "Ultra Deep Field" photographs take by Hubble in early 2004, have revealed about 10,000 galaxies, some estimated to be nearly as old as the universe itself (the oldest appear to have formed a mere 500 million years after the so-called "Big Bang" - that's 13 billion years ago!!), in an area only 3 square arc seconds in area - about 1/10 of the diameter of the full moon.  Since there are 3600 square arc seconds in a square arc minute, and in the full sphere of the sky, some 41,253 "square" degrees, the resulting equation would be: (3600/3) * 41,253 * 10000 galaxies = 495 billion galaxies in the universe.  //  Now, if we take the average number of stars per galaxy at a conservative 10 billion, that means there are about 5 trillion billion (10²¹⁾ stars in the universe,  although estimates vary all the way to 10²⁴, which would be a mind boggling 150 trillion stars for every person on the earth.  (and some people are concerned that finding life on other planets would somehow do harm to their  particular religious beliefs...... i tend to think that it would take a pretty strange God to create zillions and gachillions of stars, yet place intelligent life on only one planet in all the universe!!)

• There more than 1,000 chemicals in a cup of coffee, and 3,000+ chemicals in cigarette smoke.

•   There is about 200 times more gold in the worlds oceans, than has been mined in our entire history.

• On average, a 4-year-old child asks 437 questions a day.  (somebody actually counted?  Wonder how much taxpayer's money got spent on that particular "scientific study"??)

• There are more than 1,000 chemicals in a cup of coffee, and 3,000+ chemicals in cigarette smoke.

•  Modern wars become deadlier to civilians as we approach the present.  In WWI, only 5% of deaths were civilian.  That number rose to 65% in W.W.II, and in the current war in Iraq,  about 90% of all deaths so far are "non-combatants" (Since the occupying forces "don't do body counts", it has been difficult to establish just how many people have died because of the war.  A study recently released by a reliable source which escapes me at the moment, finds that an estimated 100,000  "excess civilian deaths" over and above the number expected if death rates in the late Saddam period had remained in the period after the invasion) of which only 20% can be attributed to "terrorism".  The other 80,000 "collateral damages" appear to have been caused by the invading and occupying forces, which have developed nasty little habits such as dropping 500 lb bombs on buildings suspected of harbouring "terrorists" (NOTE:  It should be mentioned that death rates under Saddam were already quite elevated, due to executions and poor conditions caused by the strict embargo imposed by the UN.  If the invasion had been successful in bringing stability to the country (ok, this wasn't the goal of the exercise,  which was initially stated as being to protect folks from "Weapons of Mass Destruction" (like the ones sold to Saddam in the late 1980s?) ... - but one can assume it was at least a secondary objective), death rates would have gone down considerably.))

• In WWII, the Germans lost 126 generals.  84 of these were executed by Hitler.

• The Hubble Ultra Deep Field photograph is the most comprehensive look at any portion of sky since the beginning of astronomy, as briefly described above.  It was achieved over a period of 3 months, during which time a million seconds (about 2 weeks) of observation time were used for this achievement.  The light from the faintest of these, around magnitude 30, is so faint that it arrived at the rate of only one photon per minute striking the surface of the Hubble's main mirror, which is 4.5 square meters.  By comparison, full sunlight is the equivalent of 10 billion trillion  (10²²) photons per square meter *per second*!!  //  For an excellent, high-resolution (for the web, i.e.!) image of the photo, see http://www.markelowitz.com/hudf.htm.

• In WWII, the Germans lost an estimated 40 to 50% of their planes to accidents.  With the Allies, the figure was perhaps 10% at the most.  One wonders how much effect this state of affairs had upon the course of the war in general......

• A normal chlorophyll molecule is capable of capturing 5 photons per second to use in converting CO2 (carbon dioxide) and water into sugar.

• The last person shot in WWI was a Chinese worker (they were used extensively to dig trenches and such) who was killed for "insubordination" while cleaning up a battle area.

• As any dark-skinned person who has ever tried to break into the upper echelons of society in many "Western" countries knows, old stereotypes and myths die hard.  An excellent example of this is the wolf: long vilified in legend, popular imagination and even in nursery rhymes, wolves around the world have been shot, trapped, poisoned an otherwise exterminated for thousands of years.  Indeed, the crusade against the "evil predator" wolf is very much alive today: in Alaska, wolves are shot from planes, and in Wyoming and other states,  dozens of groups are calling for a renewed Open Season upon the few re-introduced wolves who have managed to survive harassment and a REALLY bad name.  However, although they do indeed regard domestic animals as food from time to time, their tally when it comes to filling their bellies with animals which humankind has designated for other ends, is extremely limited.  In Wyoming, for example, only 15 confirmed wolf kills of sheep occurred in 2003 - only one tenth as many as attributed to eagles, and  one third of the number who succumbed to overeating.  Recent studies in Europe have also found a similar lack of evidence to justify the persecution of these large, scary-looking animals with the big teeth featured so prominently  in the tale of Little Red Ridding  Hood.  Similarly,  large predators in other parts of the world, such as "big cats" in Africa, kill far fewer domestic animals than most people assume they do: they are NOT the enemy......  (Most of the time i agree with Pogo, who famously observed  "We have seen the enemy, and he is us.")

• "Those that live by the sword, get shot."........  If you keep a gun in your home, you dramatically increase the odds that you will die of a gunshot wound, according to research published in the June issue of the Annals of Emergency Medicine.  "Keeping guns at home is dangerous for adults regardless of age, sex, or race," said Douglas J. Wiebe, Ph.D., Instructor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and a fellow at Penn's Firearm Injury Center. Wiebe led the study by the Violence Prevention Research Group at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) before moving to Penn.  Wiebe's study found that people with a gun in their home were almost twice as likely to die in a gun-related homicide, and 16 times more likely to use a gun to commit suicide, than people without a gun in their home.

• Genetically speaking, man and mouse are nearly identical:  the "Wee sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous beastie" of fields, houses and churches shares 99% of its genes with us. Out of some 30,000 genes, only 300 have been found so far, which are unique to one or the other species.  Evolutionary theorists have proposed that we shared a common ancestor - 75 to 125 million years ago, in the early era of the dinosaurs!  We even share the gene which produces a tail, although in humans it is usually not "switched on" (although there are notable tales (pun intended..) of cases where this dormant gene has been activated - see http://www.visual-evolution.com/tails.htm for some photos of Humans with Tails.)  Not surprisingly,  over 90% of diseases which have a genetic component in humans, have also been found in mice, making them even more useful than previously thought, for medical research. Interestingly enough,  the mouse genome is  about 14% smaller than the 3 billion "base pairs" of the human genome.  // Amongst the differences, Mice have many more genes for smell than humans, and they have more genes to produce frequent and large litters.

• Each human embryo has a tail about one sixth of its overall length.  As the unborn child develops, his or her tail is absorbed into their bodies, except in very rare cases, discussed above.

• According to the Academy of General Dentistry in the USA,  kissing , long reviled for spreading germs, helps prevent tooth decay. Kissing stimulates the production of saliva, which helps reduce the incidence of cavities. // "Kissing is nature's cleansing process," says Heidi Hausauer, a dentist and spokeswoman for the academy. "Saliva washes out the mouth and helps remove the cavity-causing food particles  that accumulate after meals." Also, the minerals in saliva help repair  minor cavities before they can develop into major ones. // If you have no one to kiss, try sugar-free gum. It's not quite as fun, but still very effective in encouraging saliva.

• The health of amphibians is considered a key gauge for the overall health of natural systems ("ecosystems") because their highly permeable skin makes them more immediately sensitive to environmental changes and pollutants than other creatures. Not surprisingly, a study by 500 of the worlds leading amphibian researchers shows that 1/3 (a third - 33%) of the world's 5,743 known amphibian species are in rapid decline, and in danger of extinction in the next few decades.  Overall, only 27% of the species studied (there was insufficient data for an evaluation of  1300 or so species) had stable populations, with a mere 1% boasting increasing numbers.  The remaining  72% of amphibian species were either in moderate or severe population decline.  This is in comparison to  13% of bird and 23% of mammal species also judged to be endangered, according to similar recent studies.  Source: The Global Amphibian Assessment, published online by the  journal "Science" : 2nd week Oct., 2004.
• The following is quoted from a summary of the report presented at
  http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2004/2004-10-19-10.asp

Colombia has 208 threatened amphibian species - the most in
the world - followed by Mexico with 191, Ecuador with 163,
Brazil with 110, and China with 86.

Haiti has the highest percentage of threatened amphibians, with
92 percent of its species at risk of extinction.

The study notes that in the Americas, the Caribbean and
Australia, a highly infectious disease called chytridiomycosis
has hit amphibians especially hard.

New research is showing that in some regions outbreaks of the
disease may be linked to sustained drought, in part caused by
global warming.

But in most parts of the world - including Europe, Asia and
Africa - chytridiomycosis is currently less of a problem and the
decline of amphibians is cause for concern about the planet's
health in general.

• Aside from this page, which in this case doesn't really count, the word "hardcarp" appears only once on the web, in the immortal line: "Nekem extrem heavy hardcarp special 3,6 balzerem van beee."  This is in contrast to the word "the", which is present and accounted for on "about 5,780,000,000  of the web pages which Google currently canoodles the content of. Many other words and phrases also apppear on a One Time Only basis in the 7 billion  or so pages lucky enough to get googled - such as "hogy kell leszedni a zignort???": -- while "leszedni" graces over 16,000 pages,  "zignort" is only found the one solitary time (and no, i don't know what language that is.....).  Other single entry slobdorfs include glebnos, "amateur orgy furnace" (don't ask - i didn't!!),  "grunge sculpture" (believe it or not!!) and of course "Snoringly good" (ok, this landed on two pages in the same site - but was just too good to pass up :-+)..

• Just as Superman's weakness is kryptonite, the super-strong bicycle lock Kryptonite also has an Achilles" Heel: the humble Bic ballpoint pen!  Recently, someone came up with the idea that a ball point pen (the round end) might just fit into the round hole of these expensive yet popular locks (and their many lookalikes, as it turns out!!).  Works perfectly  (with a bit of modification) - now bike thieves will be having a field day until most folks have either replaced or "upgraded" their "unpickable" locks - the odd part of it all is that nobody thought of it years ago...

• IBM, the builder of 134 of the world's 500 fastest computers, hopes to build a petaflop machine by 2007: that's a quadrillion (a million billion) operations per second.  They are currently working on something called the Blue Gene/L, which is projected to be finished by the end of 2004, and is predicted to be capable of 360 terraflops (360 trillion operations per second).  For comparison, the combined computing speed of the world's 500 fastest computers is currently only 283 terraflops.

• Neutron stars (the ultra-compact remains of stars about 10 times  more massive that of the sun) can spin around up to 600 times per second - a frequency equal to the E above middle  C on a piano.

• In Atlanta, Georgia, it is illegal to tie a giraffe to a telephone pole or street lamp.

• The sun's surface has a relatively  low temperature - 6000 K.  However, the sun's corona - the layer of gas that extends from near the surface to hundreds of thousands of km into space, has a temperature of over 2 million degrees K.  While scientists do not know the exact mechanism involved, it is highly likely that the sun's immensely powerful magnetic field is responsible for this unusual state of affairs.

• About half of the people who have suffered carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning, develop memory impairment and other serious neurological damage in the weeks and months following the poisoning.  Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have recently found the reason why this occurs: high levels of exposure to CO damage an important protein (called Myelin Basic protein, or "MBP") used to form myelin (the protective sheathing that surrounds neurons and prevents their electric charge from leaking out). Apparently, the body's immune system attacks this altered MBP in order to get rid of it, but when things return to normal, the immune system continues to attack NORMAL MBP,  creating an auto-immune reaction that attacks the myelin sheathing of the nervous system. The result is a cluster of symptoms which are similar to  Multiple Sclerosis, which is also a condition where the body's nervous system is weakened by an auto immune reaction which attacks the myelin sheaths of neurons.

• There are about 3,000 known species of termites in the world, nearly all of  whom make a living by digesting cellulose - the main structural ingredient in trees, woody plants, and houses.  Queens can live for up to 25 years, and in some species, can lay 2,000 or more eggs per day.  They can squeeze through cracks as thin as 1/32 of an inch (less than 1 mm!), and their soldiers are capable of delivering fierce pinches, or in some species, spraying nasty chemicals on colony invaders.

• Every citizen of Kentucky is required by law to take a bath once a year.

• The USA has a bit of a problem with its heavy reliance upon oil for its primary energy source.  Its proven reserves are only 20 billion barrels,  while its yearly consumption is over 7 billion barrels (85% of which is divided between only 4 states: Texas, Alaska, California and Louisiana (including offshore reserves):  you do the math!!  Production peaked in 1970, and is not likely to ever increase significantly, because 150 years of oil and gas exploration has left very little land unevaluated for its potential.  No matter what some people think or pretend to think in order to scam tens of billions of dollars worth of subsidies from the public purse,  it is nearly impossible for the country to drill its way to energy self-sufficiency, even if every last square inch of wilderness is destroyed in the process:  baring some incredible technological breakthrough such as commercially  viable fusion reactors, only conservation and massive increases in renewable energy sources are capable of  solving the "energy crisis" the richest country in the world is staring in the face.  Like it or lump it, those are the facts of the matter.

• The leading producer of methane worldwide, is either cow or termite flatulence - depending upon who is doing the estimating!!

• The first "wonder drug,", acetylsalicylic acid -  commonly known as ASA and widely marketed by Bayer Pharmaceuticals as Aspirin - was put together by Dr. Felix Hoffman in 18997.  He was investigating the pain killing properties of salicylic acid, which is found naturally in willows and birches and has been used for pain relief in many societies for thousands of years.  It is now being used for everything from heart attack prevention (it inhibits platelet aggregation, effectively "thinning" the blood) to the treatment of some cancers, and worldwide annual production is currently over 30,000 tonnes, which is the equivalent of 120 billion 250 mg tablets.

• Most heart attacks are quite preventable!!  A comprehensive worldwide study (by Canadians!) scheduled to be published in the Sept. 11, 2004 edition of The Lancet, shows that 90% of all heart attack risk can be predicted using just 9 factors.  Smoking and an abnormal ratio of blood lipids (Apolipoprotein B/APO lipoprotein A-1) predicted about two thirds of all heart attacks.  Lack of exercise, excess abdominal fat, high stress levels, not eating enough fruits and veggies, high blood pressure and diabetes were also major risk factors, while a small amount of alcohol per day provided a little extra protection (minor, however: not worth starting to drink for!!).  Since the lipid ratio involved is dependent to a large extent upon the other factors, the study concludes that appropriate life-style modifications can prevent 80% of all heart attacks - thereby preventing over 12 million premature deaths per year.  Socio-economic status plays a role in overall stress levels, but to a great extent this can most likely be mitigated by attitudinal adjustment and the afore-mentioned lifestyle changes (which also protect against cancer, stroke, other cardiovascular diseases, etc. - so if you don't smoke, exercise regularly, maintain a slim figure, keep your stress levels down, and eat lots of yummy fruits and vegetables, (as well as drinking very sparingly or not at all and driving, walking and cycling defensively i might add!!) you can expect to live a LOT longer than you might otherwise.  (While we're on the topic of living longer, vegetarianism, the stricter the better, has also been shown to DRAMATICALLY reduce the risk of major killers such as cancer - i'll cover that in another article.)

• The first few rounds of the modern Olympics games were pretty unsophisticated affairs by any standards:  in the 1896 games in Athens, the man who won the 200 m swimming event said that his main opponents hadn't been the other competitors but rather the twelve foot (3.5 meter) waves and "terribly  cold water" (the games were held in the first week in April!).  Some of the 200 or so athletes representing 14 countries, were tourists who joined in at the last minute..... In the first French version in Paris (1904), the hurdle bars were made of used telephone poles - imagine tripping over one of those beasties!!

• In the early history of Olympic hockey,  the dominant country was not surprisingly Canada, which won 4 out of the first 5 gold medals.  Two victories stand out in particular: 1) In 1924, the Toronto Granites, an Ontario "Senior A" team, racked up 110 goals in only 5 games, and 2) in 1948, the RCAF (Royal Canadian Air Force) team volunteered to defend the country's hockey honor since no other amateur team had come forth.  They won the gold, undefeated throughout the tournament.  The Swiss referees were so biased that one member of the RCAF team quipped: "We played 8 opponents - the Swiss team and their referees, and STILL won!!".

• Astronomy is a science where amateurs can make valid and sometimes excellent contributions.  A good example is the recent (August, 2004) discovery of a Jupiter-sized planet by a tiny 100 mm (4 inch) telescope, using the "transit" method - i.e., measuring the the dimming effect that occurs when the planet crosses in front of the star in question.  The newfound planet is a Jupiter-sized gas giant orbiting a star located about 500 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Lyra. This world circles its star every 3. 03 days at a distance of only 4 million miles, much closer and faster than the planet Mercury in our solar system. Its surface temperature is estimated to be a scorching 1500 F (830 C) -  hot enough to melt aluminium!

• In the wonderfully wacky world of deep-sea marine worms, some males truly ARE parasites:  in a newly-discovered genus of bone-devouring critter which has no eyes, stomach or mouth and which use bacteria to dissolve the fat in whale bone so it can feed on them with strange root-like "limbs",  each mature female found so far, has up to 100 microscopic males living inside their bodies.  Like the drones of bees, their only function in life is to provide sperm for the female to use to perpetuate the species with.

• Most plastics are made up of tiny particles (usually 1 to 3 mm) called "nurdles".  When plastic degrades, especially on the open ocean, where an astounding volume of plastic has accumulated over the past few decades, these  particles are released.  Other plastics are also battered by wind, waves and the energy from sunlight, and end up breaking into even smaller microparticles.  Plastic pollution, including these small and extremely small pieces of plastic pose an unknown but rapidly increasing threat to many kinds of sea life.  On the obvious side,  animals from plankton to jellyfish, turtles and seabirds ingest plastic in its various forms, and their digestive tracts are clogged up with the indigestible pieces, which provide absolutely no nutrition.  However, an even more dangerous effect of particulate plastic pollution results from their ability to absorb large amounts of toxic substances such as arsenic, DDE (a long-lasting breakdown product of DDT), antibiotics, and things such as estrogen from birth control pills (it passes through the body unchanged, and is causing havoc in many marine and fresh water eco-systems: in even extremely small concentrations, it can cause male sea life to become female, with predictable consequences for reproductive success in affected populations!!) and many other chemicals.  When the particles are ingested (i.e., eaten) by sea-life, the toxins are absorbed into their bodies.  // Plastic pollution is so far advanced already (scarcely 50 years after they first became commonly used!!), that in some areas of the open ocean, there are 6 times as much plastic as there are plankton, the tiny animals at the bottom of the food web.  One would have to be willfully blind to declare, as many industry spokespersons  (and their political allies) are straight-facedly doing, that plastic pollution is not a serious  and rapidly increasing threat to the health of our planet's world-ocean.

• About 75 billion TONNES (about 100 billion tons) of plastic is produced each year.  Three percent of it is recycled.  The rest eventually ends up as litter and garbage.  Since almost all plastics float, and since they last hundreds or even thousands of years, a surprisingly large percentage of those billions of tonnes/tons produced per year eventually find (or will find in the future) their way to the oceans, with a wide range of consequences we are just now beginning to discover.  The few discussed above, are just the proverbial "tip of the iceberg".  (and you thought jellyfish were icky - ha!!!)

• Human females are the only mammal which is a covert ovulator (not even she knows) (i.e., there is no outward signal that an egg has ripened and the female is thus ready to conceive);  also,  female humans are the only mammal whose mammaries (breasts) enlarge prior to the first pregnancy.

• Some good news, for a change!!  Many scientists have been prediction the imminent demise of the world's coral reefs, due to their intolerance of rapid global warming.  Corals form symbiotic relationships with algae to provide them with nutrients via photosynthesis. Many of these algae become considerably less effective at converting nutrients to more useable forms using the energy provided by sunlight, at temperatures only 1  degree C higher than the temperature they normally live at.  This decrease in nutrient-conversion causes the corals to expel them from their colonies - a process called "bleaching", since it turns the colony white.  Bleaching can kill a coral colony if it is too prolonged, or repeated too often.  However, some strains of the species of algae normally used by corals are far more heat-resistant,  exhibiting little or no reduction of photosynthetic efficiency at temperatures that send the normal forms into a tailspin.  It now appears that corals can often switch to these more heat-tolerant strains or "clades", in order to avoid the negative effects of long-term higher water temperatures and the resultant loss of their primary food source.  Since a very healthy chunk of the biodiversity of the oceans is connected with the high productivity and many kinds of habitats associated with coral reefs, the realization that they are not doomed to disappear  in the next 50 years.

• The two classic "parasitic" birds - those avian cads which lay their eggs in other species' nests so they don't have to raise the kiddies themselves - are the European cookoo (hence the expression "cuckolded") and the American cowbird. Despite their similar lazy ways, they have very different strategies when it comes to getting the host mother and father to feed them:  Cookoos chicks are typically much larger than their prospective nest mates, so when they hatch, they promptly kick their competitors' eggs  (they hatch first) out of the nest, leaving the poor adoptive parents to feed a baby who isn't even of their own species!  Cowbirds, however, employ a much more subtle strategy: they like to lay their eggs in the nests of species which generally only have two or three chicks, but when their invading young hatch (again first!),  they let their "foster-siblings" hatch and live, then they hog the lion's share of the food the hard working parents bring to feed a family of three or four, by opening their much larger and more colorful mouth just as the mommy or daddy is trying to feed the others!!  This way, they benefit by getting more food than they would have gotten if they were the only one in the nest.  They let the host's kids get enough flies and worms to stay alive, so that they can continue to benefit from the extra work the parents put into trying to feed a larger family.

• An estimated 7 million dolphins have been killed by the tuna industry in the Americas, over the past 50 years or so.  Despite government attempts to promote and ensure that "dolphin-safe tuna" truly is just that, many thousands of these amazing beings are still trapped in tuna nets and drowned each year.  (and i'll refrain from any unnecessary comments regarding the way the current regime (summer,  2004)  recently ignored scientific reports including its own, and loosened the regulations, which had to be set back in place by court action....).

• The fatigue you feel after prolonged exercise has traditionally been explained as a combination of a build up of lactic acid in the muscles, and plain old-fashioned dehydration.  I've never bought into the lactic acid theory, since i've found that a bit of carefully targeted deep tissue massage - which  breaks up scar tissues in muscles and connective tissues (tendons, ligaments), thus increasing circulation, decreasing inflammation and diminishing the pull of tightened muscles and tendons on attachment sites - to work wonders in decreasing feelings of fatigue after heavy exertion.  Now, another contributing factor towards post exercise fatigue has been identified: a chemical in the brain is built up during exercise: "interleukin- 6", which can be up to 100 times as common in the blood after prolonged physical exertion. Also, injecting interleukin-6 into the bloodstream of athletes, decreases their performance quite a bit!!  Scientists theorize that this is one way the mind protects the body from possible damage caused by too intense or too extended physical activity.  It also explains why determined people can overcome their exhaustion - breaking through "the wall" which long-distance runners and others tend to hit after a while.

• Once again, a recent study has supported the fact that much of most people's attention and worries, and an absurd proportion of public and private resources, are focused upon statistically trivial dangers or relatively (i.e., by  comparison to others) small problems - shark attacks, for example (worldwide, Falling coconuts kill a reported 150 people worldwide each year, 15 times the number of fatalities attributable to sharks - typically 10 or less per year, out of some 50 "unprovoked" attacks recorded) or abductions of children by evil "strangers" (about 5,000 per year in the USA,  compared to 350,000 kidnappings by "non-custodial family members":  i'm not at all saying that "stranger" abduction is not important - i'm just saying that it gets FAR more attention in our society than a similar problem 70 times more likely to occur!). Meanwhile, many truly important, major problems and probabilities are scarcely given a second thought by the "inappropriately concerned majority", and their elected representatives by extension.  The study in question reported that an estimated 200,000 hospital patients are killed each year by mistakes made by hospital staff: doctors, nurses, orderlies, etc.  About 150 billion dollars was spent by that country last year to fight "terrorism" around the globe, which killed maybe 5,000 people worldwide (vs about 3,000,000 killed by AIDS, for example),  and  in the neighbourhood of 0 (none, nada, zip) in the USA.  Amount spent by the feds there to try and diminish the number , nature and lethality of hospital errors....... well, if you hear of any government programs specifically designed to cut down the number of people dying from these mostly inexcusable and often outright negligent mistakes,  let me know.  I rest my case - for now anyway!

• The old adage that blind people hear better has been proven true by recent research - but there's a catch: it only worlds for people who are blind from birth, or became blind very young in life.  In the first few years of life, the brain is far more resilient and adaptable, and can compensate in a hard-wired manner, for damage or loss.

• Interest makes a difference!  On a 30 year, $100,000  mortgage, for instance, if one were to pay an extra $100 per month above the nominal rate,  over $50,000 in interest payments would be saved, and the loan would be paid off 9 years earlier.

• There are more than 100 language families in the world today - from Indo-European (English, Bengali, Urdu, German, French, Danish...) to Sino-Tibetian, Dravidian, and the 35 or so language families in the Americas. (California had representatives of about 20 families in pre-Columbian times: FAR greater linguistic diversity than all of Europe!). NOTE: This and the language facts below, are as found on the excellent site: http://www.krysstal.com/langfams.html

In 2003, the total number of languages in the world was estimated to be 6,809.  // 90% of these languages are spoken by less than 100,000 people. Between 200 and 150 languages are spoken by more than a million people. There are 357 languages which have less than 50 speakers. The Cambap language (Central Cameroon) has 30 speakers; the Leco language (Bolivian Andes) has about 20 speakers. A total of 46 languages have just a single speaker remaining.

Over the last 500 years 4.5% of the world's described languages have disappeared completely.  In North America, at least 52 languages have become extinct since 1600. In Australia, 31 of their 235 languages have vanished.

Even so, some countries and regions are still rich in linguistic diversity. Mexico has 52 languages spoken within its borders.  The old USSR (Soviet Union) had 100. Nigeria has over 400. The island of Papua New Guinea has over 700, virtually a  different one in each valley. India has over 800 languages in several families (Indo-European, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan,  Austro-Asiatic).

• One of the most mysterious languages in the world is that spoken by the Basque people of northeastern Spain.  It is not  obviously related to any known language group, and many linguists think it may date all the way back to neolithic Europe: for example, its word for "axe" is closely related to the word for "stone".

• Turns out that space is a lot warmer (at least in spots) than most people tend to think: a recent study of an area of space near the galactic core of  our Milky Way galaxy using NASA's x-ray telescope (named "Chandra"), has shown the region to be  bathed in a "diffuse glow from a 10-million-degree Celsius gas cloud, embedded in a glow of higher-energy X-rays with a spectrum characteristic of 100-million-degree gas".  The cooler, 10 million degree gas is produced from known sources (black holes, neutron stars, old supernovas, etc.), but the ten times warmer gas  has no known source - suggesting we have a LOT to learn about our own little neigbourhood of the Universe!!  (Lest one be concerned about this super-heated gas wafting or jetting into our own interstellar neck of the woods, while hot,  this gas is so thin that nobody would notice any difference here on Earth even if it did.)

• Although to cite the studies in question is beyond the purvey of this "fun oriented" feature, it is becoming increasingly clear that the natural healing systems of the body are sometimes hindered rather than helped by the myriads of  drugs  ("pharmaceuticals" in medical jargonese) designed  mostly to provide symptomatic relief of whatever ails , hurts or inconveniences us. Some of the most recent additions to the cautionary tales in this regard,  are showing that  common pain relievers such as ASA, Ibuprofen and more fancy beasties that go under the nom-de-guerre of "COX-2 inhibitors" can often seriously hinder the healing of many kinds of injuries - tendon, ligament, bone....  i've long suspected this  (after breaking a collar bone,  i was told it would take 6 to 8 weeks to get things back to normal, and was given some Serious Pain Killers. I ignored both the time table and the drugs and was back to my semi-athletic albeit weakling self in 3 weeks), but it is nice to see it supported by actual controlled studies!!

• The top search engine these daze (June, 2004) is Google.com.  What is not commonly known about its success, is that it is due to a small army of Ph.D. superbrains.  The ranks of programmers and marketing wizards that have made Google top dog in the cutthroat search category on the internet  include not only a former rocket scientist, but also a former brain surgeon.

• The accuracy of scientists' measurements is critical to the reliability and  overall usefulness of their observations.  Hence, there is a constant drive in science to measure time, distance, velocity,  acceleration, diversity, temperature,  mass, gravity, wavelenth/frequency, etc.  with greater and greater precision.  Time is a particularly crucial parameter, so its measurement has been the focus of intense interest and corresponding research.  Today's atomic clocks measure time so precisely that it would take over 40 million years before they would be wrong by a single second - that's about one part in 1300 trillion!! (and you thought your old Timex was accurate....)

• According to official figures, in the first 8 months of his presidency,  George Dubya Bush was on vacation 42% of the time: more than any president in history, in the critical first few months of their administration.

• Over 25 distinct methods of altering seashells to make them look better and hence bring higher prices, are known.  These include lip alterations ("smoothing", filing..), various kinds of repairs, gluing tips (protoconchs) on, polishing, painting, baking (which changes the color of the pigments),  and bleaching to produce artificial "albino" specimens.

• 63.7182 % of all statistics used on this type of list are made up on the spot.

• "Jiffy" is an interesting word.  Here is a comprehensive exploration of the concept as found in The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, © 1993-2003 Denis Howe: n. 1. The duration of one tick of the system clock on your computer . Often one AC  (alternating current) cycle time (1/60 second in the U.S. and Canada, 1/50 most other places), but more recently  1/100 sec has become common. "The swapper runs every 6 jiffies" means that the virtual memory management routine is executed once for every 6 ticks of the clock, or about ten times a second. 2.  Confusingly, the term is sometimes also used for a 1 millisecond wall time interval. 3. Even more confusingly, physicists semi-jokingly use `jiffy' to mean the time required for light to travel one foot in a vacuum, which turns out to be close to a nanosecond . 4. Indeterminate time from a few nano-seconds to forever.  "I'll do it in a jiffy" means certainly not now and possibly never.

• There are two major pigments in humans:  eumelanin (black) and phaeomelanin  (yellow).  For that matter, the same two pigments are present in virtually  every mammal, from mice to tigers, and can be combined to produce any  color from white to red to yellow to brown to black.  I'm not sure how  baboons get blue muzzles, but I'm hard put to think of any other examples  of mammalian coloration outside the red-yellow-black-white spectrum.

• The post-WWII policies and actions of Joseph Stalin (or "uncle Joe", as one famous president liked to refer to him) resulted in the death of an estimated 30 million people in the Soviet Union, over an 8 year period to 1953.

• This gubblick contains many nonsklarkish English flutzpahs, but the overall pluggandisp can be glorked [sic] from context.

• Facts in isolation or improper contexts, are often VERY misleading.  For example:  Fact:  About 1000 Ha of old growth forest is clear-cut on the island of Tasmania per year.  What those who think this is unacceptable usually neglect to tell you is that there are almost 1.5 million Ha of old growth forest on this little chunk of Primaeval Paradise, with at least 70% of that total in National parks or other completely protected reserves. (so, it would take 500 years to cut down the 30% not protected!!)  Context nearly ALWAYS makes a big difference in how we view or understand almost anything and everything: if the context is omitted, distorted, obscured, substituted, or otherwise bent, folded, spindled or mutilated, any fact, statement or statistic can be made to seem to mean pretty well anything at all!!  (This is especially true when applied to sacred texts, politics and economics......)

•   In the final days of WWII, before Japan became the first country in the world to be "nuked", the country's leaders  repeatedly offered to surrender.  Their requests were nixed because they wished to keep their emperor as their head of government - something the offered peace conditions did not permit.

• During the infamous McCarthy-Era (Feb. 1950 to late 1954, when the energetic but not terribly ethical senator was finally reined in by the senate) communist "witch hunts" in the early days of the so-called Cold War, over 6.5 million people in many walks of life, from movie stars to file clerks, were investigated to see if they were communist spies or otherwise "threats to national security". With the exeption of the infamous Rosenbergs,  none (nada) were found to be guilty as charged or suspected - including the 200+ or 89 (take your pick - both were just semi-random numbers anyway!!)  "spies" which the McCarthy-man initially claimed to have "documentation" regarding.  I am not denying that there were most likely  Soviet spies around  during that period, but the paranoid, buckshot-like ideology and associated methodology of the times, were notably ineffective at finding and convicting them.  (I **could** draw parallels to the present (2004), but i'm sure anyone who's read thus far on this page is quite capable of doing so themselves......).

• In the famous Beatles song "Paper Back Writer", the French folk song "Frere Jaques" can be heard in the background several times - the Beatles took great pleasure in putting little "surprises" in their work - such as the inclusion of a Bach fugue in the tangle of tunes which follows Strawberry fields, and the delicious double meanings in songs such as Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and A Day in the Life.

• If anyone doubts the power and wealth of "Big Business" (trans-national giant companies which are more or less a law unto themselves these days), the raw figures speak for themselves.  Of the 100 largest "economies" in the world, 53 are giant corporations.  The other 47 are nation states (i.e., countries.)

• Wal-Mart, the colossal retail chain, is the world s largest corporation. Last year its total income was $246.5 billion, a sum larger than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Sweden, Austria or Norway. It is the 19th largest economy in the world.

• The combined sales of the largest 200 companies constitute 29 percent of the world's economic activity, but they only employ 0.9 percent of the world's work force.  This means that the other 28.1% of the world's economic activity that this handful of companies rake in, goes towards the enrichment of the owners (well, at least the net profit does - lest anyone accuse me of being simplistic here ;=)).

• Casual dating can be dangerous. A study of spiders shows female wolf  spiders will eat strange-looking males that try to mate with them, but spare and even hook  up with familiar-looking males. The findings provide not just an interesting insight into spider behavior, but may help explain actions by "higher" animals, said arachnologist Eileen Hebets of Cornell University in New  York.  "The female is using earlier experience that is going to affect her mate choice later," Hebets  said in a telephone interview. "It is reasonable to expect that is a common thing in other animals." Hebets worked with Schizocosa uetzi arachnids,  commonly known as wolf spiders. The female, which is slightly larger, can choose a) to mate, b) to run away or c) to eat her suitor. Apparently, running away is not a very frequently chosen option.....

•  Since there is a low conversion rate between stored carbon in ancient plants and the oil we extract today, it takes an estimated ninety eight tons (88,000 kg) of prehistoric buried plant material to produce each U.S. gallon (3.9 liters) of gasoline, according to a new study.  It finds that the total amount of fossil fuel burned in 1997 totaled 97 million billion pounds (4.36 x 10E16 kg) of carbon; a figure that is equivalent to more than 400 times all the  plant matter that grows in the world in a  year, including microscopic plant life in the world's oceans. // "Every day, people are using the fossil fuel equivalent of all the plant matter that grows on land and in the oceans over the course of a whole year," says study author Jeff Dukes, an ecologist at the University of Utah.

• A group of flightless Papua New Guinea birds known as "cassowaries" communicate through the dense foliage of the jungle by means of extra-low frequency sound waves - partly below the range of hearing of humans.  People near a cassowarie calling in their lowest register, would feel, rather than hear the sound - much like the low-frequency calls of elephants, which can be heard up to 50 miles (80 km) away. Cassowaries are among the world's most dangerous birds: weighing up to 125 pounds (56 kg), they kick when fighting, and have a "spike" on their feet which can rip a person open, with sometimes fatal results.  They are also nearly extinct, due to poaching and hunting by loggers and increasing populations of some native peoples in the region.

• "Reefer madness" apparently strikes both sides of the debate in the American War on Pot:  in a recent (summer, 2003) investigation and raid on a factory producing glass pipes often used by marijuana smokers, 1200 (that's twelve hundred)  local, state and national  law enforcement officers were used in a massive campaign to shut down the operation, which was not a secret nor was its location difficult to discover. (Note: i do not condone smoking of anything at all, but it just seems to me that sometimes law enforcement ideologies related to certain activities are just a *tad* paranoid - not to mention a rather poor excuse to waste massive amounts of taxpayers' money......)

• Before the arrival of Columbus and the boyz, the population of the Americas was an estimated 100,000,000 native people. Only a few million of these remain today.  The biggest contributor to their near-extinction was the arrival of European diseases such as smallpox, which killed (often intentionally, it should be noted) many more natives than all the slavery initiatives and "Indian Wars" combined.  One of the most dramatic and least known tragedies related to disease introduction, was the eradication of a well-ordered and splendid civilization in the upper Amazon region, chronicled by an explorer whose name i can't remember (any takers? He was leading a gang of dissenters from the army of Pizzaro, which was invading the Inca civilization in Equador).  It vanished almost literally "without a trace", due almost entirely to the effect of European diseases.

• Since 1978, populations of American, Asian and European eels have declined almost 99%, probably due to pollution and over fishing.  Eels, like sharks, are an under-studied and under-appreciated part of our aquatic ecosystems.  They spawn only once, in the Sargasso Sea and similar places in the Pacific, and the young then migrate to fresh water streams and estuaries where they live for the next 10 to 50 years, accumulating toxic chemicals in their gonads, which may be making successful reproduction increasingly difficult.

• Sharks are the "ultimate predator" of the ocean, but they can't outrun or outwit humans, who kill an estimated 100 million of the slowly-reproducing (hence vulnerable to population depletion) animals.  Most of these are taken just for their fins, which are used to make an expensive soup in many countries, but most especially Asia.  In some Japanese restaurants, a bowl of shark fin soup can set you back $100 USD.  "Finning" is a particularly shocking form of killing: the animal is caught, its fins sliced off, and while it is still alive it is dumped overboard to sink to the bottom where it dies of suffocation (most sharks must be moving or holding still in a current, in order to breathe).

• Neutrons are not stable outside of the nucleus of an atom.  On their own, neutrons have a half-life of just over 14 minutes - i.e., after 14 minutes, half of a given sample of neutrons will have "decayed" (split up) into protons and other particles, and after 28 minutes only a quarter of free neutrons (neutrons not connected with a nucleus) will remain.

• The life of a professional soccer player may seem glamorous, but there is a price to pay: nearly half of them will develop osteoarthritis at a young age, averaging around 40 years old.

• About 85% of the mass of the universe is a mysterious form of "dark" matter: it can be detected only through its gravitational force, and does not form stars.  It may, however, play a major role in galaxy formation - especially of galaxies that are also "dark": clouds of hydrogen and other gases that do not coalesce into stars we can see.  For example, there are 35 visible galaxies in our "local cluster" - but taking into account all the dark matter, there should be up to 500 galaxies!! Astronomers are now coming to suspect that many of the "missing" galaxies may be dwarfs with no stars, hence difficult for us to detect.

• Dolphins are being found these days with up to 2,000 (two thousand) parts per million of PCBs (a class of about 100 toxic chemicals formed by many industrial processes - they are very rare in nature) - 40 times the amount needed to classify their flesh as toxic waste, and 400 times the level deemed "safe" in humans.  PCBs and other oil-soluble chemicals build up in the fat of living animals (including us!!) over a lifetime of exposure, and cause health problems such as cancer and toxic effects to a variety of organs including the brain and liver.  Inuit who live a "traditional" lifestyle, eating large quantities of fat from marine mammals, have PCB concentrations in their bodies of 10 to 15 parts per million, while most people in North America and Europe have levels of less than 2 parts per million.  People living beside toxic waste dumps can have over 30 ppm of the stuff cruising around in their blood.

• Those who believe in "smokers' rights" would be well advised to consider the case of Helena, Montana, a city of about 70,000 that banned indoor smoking in public places in June 2002.  The heart attack rate immediately began to decline, and by 6 month's time there were 58% fewer heart attacks for people living inside the city limits - but NO decrease for people living in the same area, but in places without a similar ban!!  When the Big Tobacco lobby succeeded in "persuading" the state legislature to make such bans illegal, the number of heart attacks in the city immediately began to climb again, and within a few months had returned to normal. // Exposure to smoke, whether first or second hand, causes platelets (the blood cells that cause clotting) to become stickier, which leads to more frequent clotting in a matter of 30 minutes, and hence an increase in blockage of blood vessels leading to the heart - heart attack!!

• Although good ol' Saddam of Iraq does not appear to have stored away much in the way of those scary "unconventional" weapons, they were most certainly not running short on the conventional variety.  It is estimated that they left over a million tons of explosives and other weapons lying about Iraq in the wake of the most recent war with the USA.  These are stockpiled in huge "weapons dumps" up to 25 km² in size.  For some reason that nobody wishes to give an official answer to, plans were not made to quickly secure and destroy this huge amount of weaponry after the invasion - so now [early 2004] they are being carted off by the truckfull by terrorists of all kinds, proving once again that war is quite often a way to create more violence and chaos, rather than diminishing the threat from ruthless people who will take whatever advantage they can, to further their warped objectives.  Consider that  a dandy suicide bomb can be made from only a few kilos of explosives - if only say,  10% of Saddam's largely unguarded weapons caches are diverted into the terrorist "underworld", that is still enough to make a LOT of bombs which could be transported to almost anywhere in the world - probably not what Mr. Bush had in mind when he set out to bring peace and democracy to one third of the "Axis of Evil"......

• The Yellowstone buffalo herd is descended from the only members of their species to survive in the continental USA: 23 individuals who somehow escaped the slaughter of between 40 and 70 million of their kind in the 1860s and 70s.  Those that stray from the protection of the park in search of winter fodder, are still harassed and killed by government officials intent on protecting cattle from bovine tuberculosis, which still occurs in the herd - despite the fact that there is no known case of cross-species transmission of the disease.

• The record-breaking heat wave in Europe in the summer of 2003, killed an estimated 35,000 people.  Temperatures reached 40 C (104 F) in many countries, and were far above normal for weeks.

• An analysis of more than 7 million recent discharge records from hospitals in 28 states reveals that a group of 18 medical injuries that occur during hospitalization may account for 2.4 million extra hospital days, $9.3 billion in excess charges, and almost 32,600 attributable deaths in the United States annually. The most serious offender is sepsis, a severe infection that sometimes develops after surgery.  Sepsis occurs in approximately 11 per 1000 cases and is associated with the greatest increases in length of stay (11 days),  charges ($57,727), and in-hospital mortality (22 percent of all sepsis cases are fatal.).

• The world's first moving picture film was shot in "early October", 1888, by Louis Aimé Augustin (Edmée Auguste) Le Prince, of his father in law's garden.  The world's first commercial movie was La Sortie des Usines Lumiere ("Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory"), which aired in 1895.  The tools necessary for this feat were developed a decade earlier by the physiologist Etienne Jules Marey, who wished to study human movement scientifically.  // The first movie with an actual plot is considered to be "The Great Train Robbery" filmed in 1903 by Thomas Alva Edison.

• The first commercial film with spoken dialogue (a "talkie") first aired on Oct. 6, 1927 in New York.  It was The Jazz Singer, staring the irrepressible Al Jolson.

• As women all over the world become more educated, politically active and gain more control over their lives - as well as access to birth control technology - birth rates are declining in almost all countries.  If current trends continue, it is now predicted that instead of the population "explosion" predicted for the 21st century, global population should peak at about 9 billion by the year 2050, and decline after that.  This century could actually end with fewer people alive than when it began - something that hasn't happened since the Black Plague in the 14th century.  However, lest everyone jump for joy thinking that this automatically means a lessening of the human population's "ecological footprint", as standards of living rise for many countries, so does their consumption of goods and services, and correspondingly their appetite for more land, more water, more lumber, more metals..... we can never relax efforts to increase conservation measures and decrease the impact of each individual on the health of the biosphere in general.

Many More Wierd Facts!! (Page 2)

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In this new century, those who effectively utilize space will enjoy added prosperity and security and will hold a substantial advantage over those who do not. Freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power.   In keeping with the more muscular stance, the administration is also opposing any negotiations on a treaty to prevent an arms race in outer space arguing that it may impede America s ability to defend its satellites from ground-based weapons.