Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (18 page)

Purr-fection

What do one-third of people allergic to cats have in common? They own a cat.

People in China eat cats. They are an ingredient in a traditional dish called “Dragon, Tiger, & Phoenix,” which, besides cat meat (“Tiger”), also includes snake (“Dragon”) and chicken (“Phoenix”).

Each year in the U.S., about 40,000 people get rabies vaccinations after being bitten by cats and other animals.

Cats enjoy TV and computer monitors more than dogs do. That's probably because cats are more visual than dogs.

South Korean scientists have cloned cats that glow red when exposed to ultraviolet light.

In one cat taste test, black-and-white birds were the cats' least favorite.

Cats are not mentioned in the Bible even once.

Witch-burning Europeans believed that cats were the devil's animals, so hundreds of thousands were put to death during the 14th century. Shortly afterward, the rat population exploded, and the bubonic plague, likely transmitted by fleas on black rats, killed about a quarter of Europe's people.

How do cats move their ears like that? They have 32 muscles around each ear that allow each to move independently of the other.

A gathering of cats is called a “clowder” or a “glaring.”

In about eight hours of sleep, you dream once every 90 minutes. Cats sleep nearly 16 hours a day and dream every 12 to 15 minutes.

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Alarm clocks have been known to trigger heart attacks.

Roadwork

Combined, the lanes of public roads in the U.S. constitute more than 4 million miles.

Half of the cars on U.S. roads are driven 25 miles or less a day.

Ancient Roman roads had rest stops with inns and stables for travelers about every 15 miles.

In 1908 Detroit laid asphalt on the first paved road in America: a stretch of Woodward Avenue between Six and Seven Mile Roads.

A mathematical formula called Braess's paradox shows that adding more lanes to roads can actually lead to more traffic jams.

There are more roads in national forests than in the national interstate system.

Roadside billboards are prohibited in Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, and Vermont.

States with the poorest road conditions: #1) Louisiana, #2) North Carolina, #3) Oklahoma.

Indiana has more miles of interstate highway per square mile than any other state.

Before crash-test dummies, pig cadavers were used to simulate accident victims.

Safest place in the world to drive: Sweden.

In 2008 Ankeny, Iowa, deiced roads with expired garlic salt, keeping it out of landfills.

An icy road becomes less slippery the more below freezing the temperature drops.

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IS IT ASPHALT, TAR, OR CONCRETE?

Asphalt, a byproduct of oil production, flexes slightly with the weight of vehicles, reducing cracks. Tar, a byproduct of changing coal to coke (or fuel), is used mostly as a sealant. And concrete, a mixture of limestone, clay, and gypsum, is used on most sidewalks.

Serious as a Heart Attack

A healthy heart weighs about 10.5 ounces. Hearts struggling to pump grow more muscle to do the job. A really bad ticker can weigh more than two pounds.

In 1941, Winston Churchill had a heart attack in the White House while opening a window. He recovered.

Med students remember the most likely triggers of ischemia, cramping of the heart muscles, by the four Es: exertion, eating, excitement, and exposure to cold.

Three Es of prevention: exercise, eating regularly, and eschewing smoking.

In the United States, someone has a heart attack about every 20 seconds.

The real-life survival rate of using CPR outside of a hospital setting: about 15 percent. On TV shows: about 67 percent.

3 to 4 orgasms a week substantially reduce the risk of cardiac arrest.

If you get to the hospital alive after a heart attack, there's a 90 percent chance you'll survive.

Most likely time to have a heart attack: 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. Most likely day: Monday. (Saturday is #2).

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A SWEET STORY ABOUT A FATAL HEART ATTACK

In 1983 Buckminster Fuller, on hearing that his wife Anne's cancer had worsened, rushed back from a speaking tour to be with her, but by then, she was in a coma. He sat holding her limp hand, when he suddenly felt it tighten around his. “She's squeezing my hand!” he told his daughter, jumped to his feet…and then immediately crumpled to the ground. Fuller had suffered a massive heart attack and, according to his daughter, “died with an exquisitely happy smile on his face.” Anne, still in a coma, died 36 hours later.

Doggin' It

Only two animals get prostate cancer: male humans and male dogs.

Kublai Khan owned the most dogs in history—he had 5,000 mastiffs.

That poofy poodle haircut comes from when the dogs were water retrievers. They floated better with half their hair shorn, but the tufts on their bodies and joints protected them from injury and cold.

Dogs with pointed faces typically live longer than dogs with flat faces.

According to dog breeders, Afghan hounds are the dumbest breed; border collies are the smartest.

83 percent of dog owners say they'd risk their lives for Fido. 70 percent say Fido would risk his life for them.

In 1859 Belgium became the first country to use police dogs. They protected officers on the night shift.

Not so long ago, a dogsled was the most dependable vehicle for Canadian Mounties patrolling the Yukon's frozen wilderness, but the snowmobile phased them out. The Mounties last used sled dogs in 1969.

I Hear a Symphony

There's only one known opera about native Greenlanders:
Kaddara
, by Danish composer Hakon Borresen, premiered in 1921.

Famed composer Franz Joseph Haydn wrote 340 hours of music in 45 years…about 1 minute and 14 seconds written each day. If you started listening to his collection for eight hours a day, you'd be done in just over six weeks.

April 27, 1749, marked the premiere of George Frederick Handel's
Music for the Royal Fireworks
during an event in London's Green Park. A short time later, the event's fireworks display ignited the spot where the orchestra had been playing, and it burned down.

Franz Schubert wrote music so quickly and effortlessly that he often wouldn't recognize his own compositions when they were set before him.

The first musical superstar to inspire screaming and fainting females was 19th-century pianist Franz Liszt. When he got tired of all the hysteria, he put his talents to composing.

Sandstorm

An
arenophile
collects sand.

The word “arena” comes from the Latin word
harena
, meaning “sand.” Roman arenas included a sand floor to absorb and hide blood from gladiator battles.

“Singing sand” is the phenomenon by which sand actually makes noise. Described as barks, whistles, squeaks, roars, or booms, the sounds depend on the sand's composition, grain size and shape, and humidity.

The number of grains of sand on all of the world's beaches is about 7.5 quintillion.

Napoleon plotted many of his battles in a sandbox.

Before dentist William Lowell patented the wooden golf tee in 1924, most golfers hit their first shots from little piles of wet sand.

According to FEMA in the 1960s, six inches of sand blocked atomic radiation. (They were wrong.)

America's tallest sand dunes are located in Colorado's Great Sand Dunes National Park. They're 750 feet high.

19,000 square miles of grass-stabilized sand dunes make up a quarter of the landlocked state of Nebraska.

A 1950s Quaker Oats promotion sent a small packet of “real Yukon sand” to kids who sent in a box top or 25¢. The sand was dug up near Whitehorse in Canada, packed into small pouches, and then trucked to Anchorage, Alaska, for mailing.

There's no actual sand on sandpaper.

Hawaii and the Galápagos Islands contain the earth's only green sand beaches. The sand is composed of olivine, a gemlike volcanic by-product.

Pure sand melts into glass at about 3,500°F. When lightning strikes a beach or sand dune, it can create hollow glass tubes called “fulgurites” (or “petrified lightning”).

Animals That Changed History

FLEAS AND RATS

Impact:
Plagues, ending the Middle Ages

From 1347 to 1350, the a virulent disease ravaged the populations of Asia and Europe, killing more than 25 million in Europe alone—about a third of the population. Most people died just three days after becoming infected. Scientists remain perplexed by the outbreak, but many agree that the disease was probably the bubonic plague (or the “black death”) and it was probably spread all over the world by infected fleas traveling on rats. In those days, rats thrived among people—on ships and in cities. Infected fleas, the thinking goes, simply hopped off of dying rats and onto people.

The disruption to medieval society was immense and the outbreak helped bring about the end of the feudalism. Muslims in Crimea, in what's now the Ukraine, blamed Christians and expelled them from trading cities, spreading the disease deep into Europe. The Christians blamed Jews and burned many of them alive, killing crucial tradesmen and leaving towns without blacksmiths, innkeepers, bakers, millers, and weavers. Many towns and farms were abandoned, leading to food shortages. Ultimately, the nobles couldn't enforce control on their surviving peasant laborers. So, despite laws aimed at keeping serfs' wages low, the desperate noblemen began doubling and tripling wages, encouraging the serfs of other noblemen to jump ship. Over time, the serfs were able to demand and get a higher standard of living and new rights, loosening the binds that kept them enslaved to one estate and bringing an end to the economic system of feudalism.

DOGS

Impact:
Hunting, herding, self-defense

Humans began welcoming dogs into their settlements about 14,000 years ago, the first animals to be domesticated. At first, groups of wolves probably began scavenging human settlements, snatching up
the scraps, bones, and other perfectly good animal parts that humans threw out after hunting. Eventually, people discovered that dogs also made good watch animals at night. Humans favored the friendlier, less skittish animals and their puppies, unintentionally breeding dogs that were tame. About 3,000 years ago, people began breeding dogs intentionally, choosing specialized hunting and herding functions. The results were affectionate, efficient hunting animals, and the ability for one person to control an entire herd of sheep, goats, cows, or swine. This allowed tribes to own more livestock and freed up shepherds to pursue other needed occupations like hunting, farming, and metalworking.

CATS

Impact:
Made agriculture possible, prevented plagues

Historians believe that about 10,000 years ago a few African wildcats decided to adopt humans. Genetic studies indicate that all of the world's 600 million house cats descend from as few as five original cat pioneers. As a result of this very restricted inbreeding, house cats developed all kinds of quirks and defects, including an inability to taste sweetness.

This all happened in the Fertile Crescent—an unusually fertile area in otherwise barren Egypt and Mesopotamia—at about the same time that people began growing wheat, rye, and barley. These crops provided humans with food stability and allowed them to stop wandering and erect permanent settlements. A few wildcats discovered that the barns and homes in these settlements offered sunny places to sleep, protection from larger animals, scraps of food, and huge quantities of big, juicy mice and rats. Humans, bedeviled by rodents that ate and contaminated the crops they stored after harvests, learned to value their feline friends. Ancient Egyptians even grew to worship cats, making it a crime to kill one. The Romans spread cats across Europe, and the Europeans took them to ports around the world.

Cats went through a dark period in Europe during the Middle Ages, when people began seeing them as evil spirits and companions to witches, resulting in widespread extermination of entire cat populations. But the result was a continent overrun with rats and the diseases they brought, which eventually caused humans to forgive cats and welcome them home.

CATTLE

Impact:
Food, clothing, tools, and fuel

For about 8,000 years, cows have provided humans with food from meat and milk; clothes, blankets, and tents from their hides; fertilizer and cooking fuel from their dung; tools from their horns, teeth, and bones; and transportation and power. And they do it all by eating grasses that humans can't digest. Like cats, cattle were adopted by humans after people organized into permanent settlements. That's because, unlike sheep and goats (which had been herded for more than a thousand years before), cattle like to graze familiar fields and return to the same shelter each night. So nomadic lifestyles don't really suit them.