Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (21 page)

It's currently impossible to make foods absolutely bug-free, so food and health laws allow a certain number of bugs and bug parts. For example, the FDA allows up to 210 insect fragments in a 25-ounce jar of peanut butter.

Many bugs contain large quantities of lysine, an amino acid often deficient in people whose diets are heavy on grains.

A typical American already eats one to two pounds of bugs every year without knowing it.

Cicada connoisseurs say the bugs are good stir-fried or even picked fresh off the tree.

Crickets can be roasted and eaten whole, or they can be ground into a paste for sauces.

In Judaism, most bugs are not considered kosher, except (according to the Torah) four species of locusts.

Many bug growers for human consumption don't want their creatures to be called “bugs” or “insects”—they prefer the term “mini livestock.”

People in Thailand eat about 200 insect species, most notably crickets, grasshoppers, and bamboo caterpillars. Cricket farming is a $30 million industry there.

History's Richest Sports Star

FAMOUS LONG AGO

It's unbelievable how much some professional athletes are making these days—for example, Tiger Woods recently hit (pre-tax, pre-expenses, pre-alimony) career earnings of
one billion
dollars. Even rookie baseball players can become multimillionaires before setting foot on a professional field. But highly paid sports figures aren't a modern invention. In fact, history's all-time top earner by far lived many centuries before baseball or golf even existed.

Gaius Appuleius Diocles lived in the second century AD, when sporting events were becoming more popular. Diocles was a chariot racer, a sport that was roughly the equivalent of a NASCAR today. And like NASCAR drivers, charioteers required expensive equipment and a support team. As a result, they depended on sponsorship by the big businesses of the time. The charioteers could become rich during their short careers, but because chariot races were so dangerous, few lived long enough to retire.

GLORIOUS GAIUS

Gaius Appuleius Diocles became a rich celebrity not only for surviving long enough to have a full career, but for consistently being very successful. For an incredible 24 years, he represented Rome's red, green, and white teams against its blue team. Diocles's record was 1,462 wins out of 4,257 races—a ratio better than one victory in every three starts. When he retired at 42 in the year 146, Diocles's fellow charioteers erected a monument to him that said Diocles was the “champion of all charioteers” and had amassed earnings of 35,863,120 sesterces.

RACE PEEL-OFF

So how much is 35,863,120 sesterces worth today? That can be hard to determine, but some historians have tried: One sesterce
was defined at its introduction as being worth 2½ highly prized jackasses. (“Sesterce” came from
semis-tertius
, the Latin word for 2½.) We also know from ancient budget records that 35,863,120 sesterces was enough to supply the entire city of Rome with grain for a year, or to pay the wages of the entire Roman imperial army for 72 days. So with those figures in mind, Diocles's net worth may be the equivalent of up to $5 billion in today's money—some historians go as high as $15 billion.

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ARCHAEOLOGICALLY SPEAKING

“Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been.”

—Jim Bishop

“An archaeologist is someone whose career lies in ruins.”

—Anonymous

“I married an archaeologist because the older I grow, the more he appreciates me.”

—Agatha Christie

“Archaeologists will date any old thing.”

—Bumper sticker

“If you're an archaeologist, I bet it's real embarrassing to put together a skull from a bunch of ancient bone fragments, but then it turns out it's not a skull but just an old dried-out potato.”

—Jack Handy

Hearing Voices

About 10 percent of people in the world have, at one time, heard voices talking inside their heads. Here are some of the most famous
.

PHILOSOPHERS & THINKERS

Socrates

Pythagoras

Descartes

Goethe

Sigmund Freud

Carl Gustav Jung

Mahatma Gandhi

Jean-Paul Sartre

CREATIVE FOLK

Beethoven

William Blake

Robert Schumann

Lord Byron

Frederic Chopin

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Charles Dickens

Virginia Woolf

Evelyn Waugh

Philip K. Dick

Anthony Hopkins

Zoe Wanamaker

Paul McCartney

Brian Wilson

SPIRITUAL & RELIGIOUS FIGURES

Moses

Joan of Arc

Martin Luther

St. Augustine

St. Francis

Joseph Smith

Martin Luther King Jr.

LEADERS & RULERS

Alexander the Great

Julius Caesar

Attila the Hun

Charlemagne

Oliver Cromwell

Napoleon Bonaparte

Adolf Hitler

Winston Churchill

SCIENTISTS & EXPLORERS

Galileo

Isaac Newton

Christopher Columbus

John Forbes Nash Jr.

Gone Fishing

The ancient Egyptians used electric catfish to treat certain nervous disorders. Since the big ones can generate up to 400 volts, enough to knock a person unconscious or even kill someone, they used only small ones.

There are jellyfish in every ocean in the world. On top of that, there are freshwater jellyfish that live in lakes.

A five-foot wooden codfish hangs over the entrance to the Massachusetts House of Representatives. “The Sacred Cod” commemorates the importance of fish to the state's economy and is actually the cod's third incarnation: the first was lost in a 1747 fire and the second to British troops during the Revolutionary War.

About 500 species of fish can generate electricity.

Oils from the orange roughy, a deep-sea fish from New Zealand, are used to make shampoo.

How did a fish become a symbol of Christianity? Early Christians discovered that the Greek word for fish,
ichthus
, could be used as a loose acronym for
Iesous Christos, Theou Huios, Soter
(“Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior”). Since Jesus was already associated with fish and fishermen, it made sense.

Pregnant goldfish are called “twits.”

Fish go belly-up when they die because oxygen remains in the fish's swim bladder and gases from decay or sickness collect in internal organs located in their belly, making them float.

Maine is the source of 90 percent of the nation's lobsters.

Most fish for freshwater aquariums are farm-raised. However, each year, 20 million fish are captured from the ocean for saltwater aquariums.

The garfish (or needlefish) has green bones.

Halls of Medicine

Infections caught in hospitals kill about 48,000 Americans a year.

A CDC study found that soap and water tackled germs better than disinfectants.

Studies suggest that proper hand washing could reduce hospital infection rates by up to 50 percent.

The U.S. Navy has two hospital ships:
Mercy
and
Comfort
.

About 25 percent of veterans admitted to VA psychiatric hospitals are homeless.

Sick people in Switzerland are hospitalized longer than those in many other countries: more than nine days, on average.

A survey asked nurses if they'd willingly choose to be a patient in their own hospitals—38 percent said “absolutely not.”

According to a British study, hospital admissions rise by up to 52 percent on Friday the 13th.

In the 12th century, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, head doctor of the Roman Catholic Church, forbade the monks in his hospitals from studying medical texts and prohibited the use of any remedy but prayer.

Originally, Blue Shield covered doctors' fees, and Blue Cross covered the expenses of a hospital stay. In most states, the two merged in 1982.

In an average year, influenza causes 114,000 hospital admissions in the United States. (Of these, 36,000 die.)

Births in hospitals instead of at home are a relatively new thing. The first president born in a hospital was Jimmy Carter in 1924.

To choose the healthiest location for a hospital in ninth-century Baghdad, physician Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi hung pieces of meat at possible sites. The location where the meat stayed freshest the longest was the one he chose.

Nazi TV

RACING THE ENGLISH CHANNEL

On January 31, 1935, a minor panel within the British government made a routine announcement that had little impact in England, but sent the Germans into panicked frenzy. After half a year of inquiry and spirited debate, Britain's Television Advisory Committee issued a report in which it determined that the BBC should start a regular TV broadcasting service. Those were still the very early days of television, but the decision would make the BBC the first national TV broadcaster in the world.

It's not that the Germans particularly cared about television, but they did care about propaganda. The government had invested heavily in the message that its master Aryan race was more advanced in
everything
, particularly technological achievement. And so Germany's Reich Broadcasting Corporation (RRG) suddenly came under pressure to set up its own broadcasting service before the British got up and running. That way, Germany would get the bragging rights that came with being the first nation to create its own TV network.

THE TORTOISE VS. THE HARE

The British took their time and worked on creating a usable system, but the Germans had no such priorities. Instead, they rushed in to at least simulate that they were ready for prime time. On March 22, 1935, just over two months after the British announcement, the RRG presented a demonstration of its “first television program service on earth.” The program was all propaganda—it began with Reich Program Director Eugen Hadamovsky announcing that, no matter what the Americans and British claimed, television had
really
been invented by a German named Paul Nipkow way back in 1884 with his patent for an “electrical telescope.”

The claim wasn't completely a lie. Nipkow had come up with a mechanical scanning wheel—a rapidly rotating disk with a spiral of holes in it that “scanned” images. But American Philo Farnsworth made that contraption obsolete when he invented all-electronic
scanning in 1927. Nipkow—still alive in 1935, but somewhat senile—went along with the German myth-making, posing in front of TV sets and not objecting as the government created a legend around him. According to one story, Nipkow had invented TV one lonely Christmas Eve as a way for people to see their families from afar.

THE DEMONSTRATION

“Today, National Socialist broadcasting, in cooperation with the Reichpost and industry, starts regular television broadcasting, as the first broadcasting system on earth,” announced Hadamovsky in that March 1935 address. “In this hour, this broadcast will bring to fruition the largest and holiest mission: to plant in all German hearts the picture of their führer.”

However, there were problems with this “first” broadcast. First, it used equipment that was already obsolete because of the insistence that the technology had to include Nipkow's spinning disk. As a result, the image was muddy and had few details compared to the all-electric video cameras the British were using. Furthermore, Germany's “regular” broadcasts were just the same tests of old feature films and newsreels over and over again.

Plus, because the German technology required huge amounts of light in a small space, the danger of fire was a constant worry…that came to fruition in the summer of 1935, when the studio caught fire and destroyed most of the equipment. This turned out to be a blessing for the Germans because they closed everything down for six months and replaced the Nipkow disk cameras with modern all-electronic ones based on British and American designs. They also named the newly upgraded broadcasting unit the “Paul Nipkow
Fernsehsender
” (TV station).

GERMANY'S GOT TALENT

Like many things, television was only interesting to the Nazi leaders as long as it was useful for propaganda purposes. Once they'd laid claim to the technological triumph, they weren't particularly interested in providing TV sets for viewing or coming up with programs that would attract viewers. But that changed in the summer of 1936 when Berlin hosted the Olympics and mounting a few cameras pointing down at the field seemed like another good
propaganda coup. The RRG also set up 28 public viewing rooms in Berlin, each big enough to hold about 40 people at a time. In all, about 150,000 Germans watched the events.