The World's Greatest Book of Useless Information (11 page)

A WEATHER EYE

A normal raindrop falls at about seven miles per hour.

A downburst is a downward-?blowing wind that sometimes comes blasting out of a thunderstorm. The damage looks like tornado damage, because the wind can be as strong as an F2 tornado, but debris is blown straight away from a point on the ground, not lifted into the air and transported downwind.

A wind with a speed of seventy-?four miles per hour or more is designated a hurricane.

An inch of snow falling evenly on 1 acre of ground is equivalent to about 2,715 gallons of water.

At any given time, there are eighteen hundred thunderstorms in progress over the earth’s atmosphere.

A cubic mile of fog is made up of less than a gallon of water.

The two hottest months at the equator are March and September.

A rainbow can only occur when the sun is forty degrees or less above the horizon.

Meteorologists claim they’re right 85 percent of the time.

ROCKETMEN

Astronauts in orbit around the earth can see the wakes of ships.

Buzz Aldrin’s mother’s maiden name was Moon.

Buzz Aldrin was the first man to pee his pants on the moon.

Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon with his left foot first.

The first man to return safely from space was Yuri Gagarin.

Three astronauts manned each Apollo flight.

The Saturn V moon rocket consumed fifteen tons of fuel per second.

The Apollo 11 had only twenty seconds of fuel left when it landed.

The external tank on the space shuttle is not painted.

A manned rocket can reach the moon in less time than it took a stagecoach to travel the length of England.

Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to enter space.

A SPACE ODYSSEY

All the stars in the Milky Way revolve around the center of the galaxy every two hundred million years.

Astronomers classify stars by their spectra.

Three stars make up Orion’s belt.

French astronomer Adrien Auzout once considered building a telescope that was one thousand feet long in the 1600s. He thought the magnification would be so great he would see animals on the moon.

A neutron star has such a powerful gravitational pull that it can spin on its axis in one-?thirtieth of a second without tearing itself apart. A pulsar is a neutron star, and it gets its energy from its rotation.

Stars come in different colors; hot stars give off blue light, and the cooler stars give off red light.

Earth is traveling through space at 660,000 miles per hour.

MOON RIVER

A full moon always rises at sunset.

A full moon is nine times brighter than a half moon.

February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.

Carolyn Shoemaker has discovered thirty-?two comets and approximately three hundred asteroids.

Any free-?moving liquid in outer space will form itself into a sphere because of its surface tension.

The total quantity of energy in the universe is constant.

If you attempted to count the stars in a galaxy at a rate of one every second, it would take around three thousand years to count them all.

A syzygy occurs when three astronomical bodies line up.

The sixteenth-?century astronomer Tycho Brahe lost his nose in a duel with one of his students over a mathematical computation. He wore a silver replacement nose for the rest of his life.

HERE COMES THE SUN

By weight, the sun is 70 percent hydrogen; 28 percent helium; 1.5 percent carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen; and 0.5 percent all other elements.

It takes eight and a half minutes for light to get from the sun to Earth. All totaled, the sunlight that strikes Earth at any given moment weighs as much as an ocean liner.

Galileo became totally blind just before his death. This is probably because of his constant gazing at the sun through his telescope.

Sunbeams that shine down through clouds are called crepuscular rays.

THE ELECTRIC SLIDE

One of the first lightbulbs was a thread of sheep’s wool coated with carbon.

A bolt of lightning can strike the earth with a force as great as one hundred million volts and generates temperatures five times hotter than those found on the sun’s surface.

You are more likely to lose your hearing than any of the other senses if you are hit by lightning.

TECHNOLOGICALLY ADVANCED

The first computer ever made was called ENIAC. A silicon chip a quarter-?inch square has the capacity of the original 1949 ENIAC computer, which occupied a city block.

In 1961, MIT student Steve Russell created Space-?wars, the first interactive computer game, on a Digital PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1) mainframe computer. Limited by the computer technology of the time, ASCII text characters were the “graphics” and people could only play the game on a device that took up the floor space of a small house.

In 1949, forecasting the relentless march of science, Popular Mechanics said computers in the future may weigh no more than five tons.

Approximately 98 percent of software in China is pirated.

Back in the mid to late 1980s, an IBM-?compatible computer wasn’t considered 100 percent compatible unless it could run Microsoft’s Flight Simulator.

Toronto was the first city in the world with a computerized traffic signal system.

The first product Motorola started to develop was a record player for automobiles. At that time, the most well-?known player on the market was the Victrola, so they called themselves Motorola.

Experts at Intel say that microprocessor speed will double every eighteen months for at least ten years.

A third of ninety-?five developing countries have a waiting period of six years or more for a telephone connection, compared with less than a month in developed countries.

When CBS broadcast the first television show in color, no one other than CBS owned a color television set.

In 1977, Cairo only had 208,000 telephones and no telephone books.

THE THIRD “R”

All snow crystals are hexagonal.

An enneahedron is solid with nine faces.

The billionth digit of pi is nine.

René Descartes came up with the theory of coordinate geometry by looking at a fly walk across a tiled ceiling.

LEAVING ON A JET PLANE

A jumbo jet uses four thousand gallons of fuel to take off.

A Boeing 747’s wingspan is longer than the distance of the Wright Brothers’ first flight.

The tail section of an airplane gives the bumpiest ride.

The condensed water vapor left by jets in the sky is called a contrail.

American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first class.

The Boeing 737 jet is nicknamed “Fat Albert.”

The Boeing 747 has been in commercial service since 1970.

The shortest intercontinental commercial flight in the world is from Gibraltar in Europe to Tangier in Africa at a distance of thirty-?four miles and a flight time of twenty minutes.

I FEEL THE EARTH MOVE

April is Earthquake Preparedness Month. For a little added incentive, consider this: the most powerful earthquake to strike the United States occurred in 1811 in New Madrid, Missouri. The quake shook more than one million square miles and was felt as far as one thousand miles away.

A REAL GEM

A large, flawless emerald is worth more than a similarly large flawless diamond.

Gold was the first metal to be discovered. South Africa produces two-?thirds of the world’s gold. All the gold produced in the past five hundred years, if melted, could be compressed into a fifty-?foot cube. A lump of pure gold the size of a Matchbox car can be flattened into a sheet the size of a tennis court. India has the world’s largest stock of privately hoarded gold.

Diamonds are composed of just one chemical element, carbon. The color of diamond dust is black. According to the Gemological Institute of America, up until 1896, India was the only source of diamonds in the world.

The company Kodak is the largest user of silver.

GREEN THUMB

Bamboo (the world’s tallest grass) can grow up to ninety centimeters in a day.

It takes the insect-?eating Venus flytrap plant only half a second to shut its trap on its prey. The Venus flytrap can eat a whole cheeseburger.

The Siberian larch accounts for more than 20 percent of all the world’s trees.

The Sitka spruce is Britain’s most commonly planted tree.

The Saguaro Cactus, found in the southwestern United States, doesn’t grow branches until it is seventy-?five years old.

The leaves of the Victorian water lily are sometimes more than six feet in diameter.

The bark of a redwood tree is fireproof. Fires that occur in a redwood forest take place inside the trees.

Orchids are grown from seeds so small it would take thirty thousand to weigh as much as one grain of wheat.

It takes one fifteen-?to twenty-?year-?old tree to produce seven hundred paper grocery bags.

One ragweed plant can release as many as one billion grains of pollen.

LET’S GET PHYSIC-?AL

A cesium atom in an atomic clock beats 9,192,631,770 times a second.

A temperature of 70 million degrees Celsius was generated at Princeton University in 1978. This was during a fusion experiment and is the highest man-?made temperature ever.

During the time that the atomic bomb was being hatched by the United States at Alamogordo, New Mexico, applicants for routine jobs like janitors were disqualified if they could read. Illiteracy was a job requirement. The reason: the authorities did not want their rubbish or other papers read.

The radioactive substance Americanium-241 is used in many smoke detectors.

The average life of a nuclear plant is forty years.

CHEMICAL REACTIONS

German chemist Hennig Brand discovered phosphorus while he was examining urine.

A “creep” is a metallurgical term for when something that is normally very strong bends because of gravity. This happens to many metals at high temperatures, where they won’t melt but they will creep.

All organic compounds contain carbon.

Almost all the helium that exists in the world today is from natural gas wells in the United States.

DuPont is the world’s largest chemical company.

Hydrogen is the most common atom in the universe.

Mercury is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature.

Methane gas can often be seen bubbling up from the bottom of ponds. It is produced by the decomposition of dead plants and animals in the mud.

The ashes of the metal magnesium are heavier than magnesium itself.

There are five trillion trillion atoms in one pound of iron.

The densest substance on Earth is the metal osmium.

The metal part at the end of a pencil is 20 percent sulfur.

The 111th element is known as unnilenilenium.

The U.S. Bureau of Standards says that the electron is the fastest thing in the world.

The shockwave from a nitroglycerine explosion travels at seventeen thousand miles per hour.

Marie Curie, the Nobel Prize–winning scientist who discovered radium, died on July 4, 1934, of radiation poisoning.

CHILLY WATERS

H2O expands as it freezes and contracts as it melts, displacing the exact same amount of fluid in either state. So if the northern ice cap did melt, it would cause absolutely no rise in the level of the ocean.

Hot water is heavier than cold.

An iceberg contains more heat than a match.

WEIRD SCIENCE

One hundred seven incorrect medical procedures will be performed by the end of the day today.

Because of the rotation of the earth, an object can be thrown farther if it is thrown west.

Two and five are the only prime numbers that end in two or five.

Fifty-?one percent of turns are right turns.

If you toss a penny 10,000 times, it will not be heads 5,000 times but more like 4,950. The head picture weighs more, so it ends up on the bottom.

If you yelled for eight years, seven months, and six days, you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee.

The strength of early lasers was measured in Gillettes, the number of blue razor blades a given beam could puncture.

The tip of a bullwhip moves so fast that it breaks the sound barrier; the crack of the whip is actually a tiny sonic boom.

Clouds fly higher during the day than at night.

Moisture, not air, causes superglue to dry.

Recycling one glass jar saves enough energy to power a TV for three hours.

Iron nails cannot be used in oak because the acid in the wood corrodes them.

Bacteria, the tiniest free-?living cells, are so small that a single drop of liquid contains as many as fifty million of them.

Life on Earth probably developed in an oxygen-?free atmosphere. Even today there are microorganisms that can live only in the absence of oxygen.

Stainless steel was discovered by accident in 1913.

If we had the same mortality rate as in the 1900s, more than half the people in the world today would not be alive.

SYNTHETIC MATERIALS

Edmonton, Canada, was the first city in North America with a population of less than one million to open a Light Rail Transit System, in 1978.

Russia built more than ten thousand miles of railroad between 1896 and 1900.

The U.S. standard railroad gauge (the distance between rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches.

A fully loaded supertanker traveling at normal speed takes at least twenty minutes to stop.

The first American submarine was built around 1776.

About seven million cars are junked each year in the United States.

Robots in Japan pay union dues.

The metal instrument used in shoe stores to measure feet is called the Brannock device.

The CN Tower in Toronto is the tallest free-?standing structure in the world.

A standard grave measures 7’8“ by 3’2” by 6’.

Man releases more than a billion tons of pollutants into the earth’s atmosphere every year.