Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (41 page)

Pieces of the station began arriving in space in 1998 via Russian modules and the space shuttle. By November 2000, the ISS was habitable, and people have been living there ever since.

The ISS circles Earth every 93 minutes and can be seen from the ground on a clear night. Stargazers can sign up with NASA to get e-mail or text alerts when it's going to be whizzing over their location.

Each astronaut is allotted a personal food stash for his or her visit: 1,900 calories (for a small woman) to 3,200 calories (for a large man) each day.

Water on the ISS comes at room temperature or hot, but not chilled. Cooling uses too much energy, so there's no refrigerator. That's also why food comes dehydrated, or in cans or pouches.

They choose their food before they leave, but better not grow tired of it. Astronauts pick eight days' worth of a menu that repeats for their entire stay. (The eight-day menu ensures that they don't have the exact thing every Sunday, for example, giving the illusion of variety.)

The ISS is larger than a five-bedroom house and orbits the Earth at 17,500 mph.

It's the ninth and largest space station so far.

ISS astronauts often change their underwear only twice a week.

Higher Education

When Aristotle opened his school, the Lyceum, people nicknamed it the “Peripatetic School” because “peripatetic” means “walking around” and the teachers taught while leisurely strolling the grounds.

The University of Rochester was once offered $100,000 by a patent medicine company to change its name to Hops Bitters University. The regents declined.

During the Middle Ages, western European university professors taught their lessons orally, so literacy was not a college prerequisite. In fact, many students decided to put off learning to read until after they'd gotten college out of the way.

The Internet started in 1969 as a link among just four schools: Stanford University, the University of California–Santa Barbara, the University of California–Los Angeles, and the University of Utah.

With more than 14 million books, Harvard University has the largest academic library in the world.

In 1960 there were only 16 female students attending Harvard Law School (including future attorney general Janet Reno). Today, women make up about half the student body.

Medieval schools for knights taught jousting and sword fighting, as well as reading, writing, basic math, chess, lute playing, and chivalry.

In 1925 tobacco tycoon James Duke donated $107 million to Trinity College in Durham, NC. Soon after, the administrators changed the school's name…to Duke University.

College with the most U.S. presidents as alumni: Harvard.

The older you are when you graduate from a law school, the more likely you are to take an academic job with a university.

President Millard Fillmore had no formal education. When Oxford University in England offered him an honorary doctorate, he turned it down, saying, “No man should accept a degree he cannot read.”

Kid Stuff

During Puritan times, children who cursed at their parents could be put to death.

The United States ranks 84th worldwide in childhood immunizations against measles. It ranks even worse in immunizing children against polio—89th.

The United States passed its first comprehensive law against child labor in 1938. Business owners at the time argued that working in coal mines and textile mills was good for a child's character.

A law in Georgia specifically forbids “selling a minor under age 12…to rope or wire walk, beg, be a gymnast, contortionist, circus rider, acrobat, or clown.”

In 2008 South Africa passed a law making it illegal for kids under the age of 16 to kiss.

When Muhammad Ali was a child, he had his brother throw rocks at him to practice his dodging skills. His brother never passed up the opportunity…but never actually hit the future boxer either.

Fluoridated water once decreased tooth decay among kids by 29.1 percent, but now that number is creeping up. One culprit, dentists say, is that many kids now drink bottled water.

Before educator Friedrich Froebel coined the word
kindergarten
(“garden of children”), he called his new classroom
kleinkinderbeschaftigungsanstalt
(“institution where children are occupied”).

Known as the “Boy Pope,” Benedict IX was only 11 or 12 years old when took the papal seat in 1032.

“La Cucaracha,” the Mexican children's song, is about a cockroach that wastes his life away smoking marijuana. As the song ends, the cockroach dies and is carried for burial among buzzards and a church mouse.

The average American kid eats 23 pounds of pizza each year.

Until the 1400s, children of either sex were called “girls.”

Paper View

It wasn't until the 1880s that most paper was made of wood pulp. Before that, papermakers generally used recycled rags, making paper expensive and shortages common.

Americans use, toss out, and recycle more than 100 million tons of paper each year. That's enough to build a wall 12 feet high from Los Angeles to New York.

A single mature tree yields about 700 paper grocery bags.

The little paper socks some chefs like to put on the legs of broiled chickens to keep them from drying out are called
papillotes
.

If you keep the string taut, tin-can phones can work pretty well…but paper-cup phones work much better.

What we call “parchment paper” is actually a poor imitation of the real thing. Real parchment is the pressed skin of a goat, sheep, or calf, and it doesn't work well in an ink-jet printer.

It takes 70 percent less energy to produce a ton of paper from recycled paper than from trees.

Setting up a paper-recycling plant is also about 80 percent cheaper than building a new paper mill.

Fears to You

Eisoptrophobia:
Fear of seeing yourself in a mirror.

Venustraphobia:
Fear of beautiful women.

Gephyrophobia:
Fear of crossing bridges.

Porphyrophobia:
Fear of the color purple.

Ephebiphobia:
Fear of young people.

Octophobia:
Fear of the number 8.

Lutraphobia:
Fear of otters.

Cynophobia:
Fear of dogs.

Apeirophobia:
Fear of infinity.

Phobophobia:
Fear of having phobias.

Zemmiphobia:
Fear of the great mole rat.

Taphophobia:
Fear of being buried alive.

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia:
Fear of the number 666.

Money Talk

In 1912 a penny was worth about what a quarter is worth now.

In the late 1960s, when Canada experienced a dime shortage, the Royal Canadian Mint contracted with the U.S. Mint to produce half of its 1968 dimes in Philadelphia. Coin collectors can tell which are American-made by the lack of mint marks.

From 1870 to 1923, Canada issued 25-cent banknotes to reduce the circulation of U.S. quarters within the country.

The first U.S. circulating coin to honor a woman appeared in 1979 and featured suffragette Susan B. Anthony. Alas, Susan B. Anthony's dollar got poor circulation and disappeared. Another woman so honored on a dollar coin, Sacagawea, suffered a similar fate.

But despite its disuse in the U.S., the Sacagawea coin is popular in El Salvador and Ecuador, both of which use U.S. money as their official currency instead of issuing their own.

Largest gold coin ever minted: the Canadian $1 million Maple Leaf (diameter: about 20 inches).

A dime used to be 90 percent silver, which is why it's smaller than a penny or a nickel; anything larger would have made the metal worth more than its face value.

The Canadian “Toonie” coin's outer ring is made of nickel—the middle is aluminum, copper, and nickel.

It costs the same to mint a nickel and a quarter, but a dime is a bargain. According to the U.S. Mint, a penny costs about 2.5¢; a nickel, 11¢; a dime, 6¢; a quarter, 11¢; and a dollar coin, 18¢.

The first U.S. coin to feature an African American was the Booker T. Washington Memorial Half Dollar (1946). More than 1.5 million sold, primarily to coin collectors, to fund the Booker T. Washington National Memorial near Hardy, Virginia, the site of the plantation where Washington was born into slavery.

The Undead

Night of the Living Dead
(1968), directed by 28-year-old George A. Romero, changed the image of zombies in popular culture from enslaved workers of Caribbean voodoo wizards to hungry all-American flesh-eaters.

The film's budget was tiny: just $114,000. It eventually grossed $30 million worldwide.

The actors who played the zombies were friends and clients of Romero's struggling film production company. They had to provide their own costumes. Their pay? $1 and a T-shirt.

The blood was chocolate syrup, and the gory body parts came from one of the producers who was also a butcher.

The word “zombie” never appears in the movie.

Night of the Living Dead
featured an African American as the lead of an otherwise all-white cast. That was almost unheard of in 1968.

The film entered the public domain early because its distributor made a mistake with the copyright. Before copyright laws changed in 1978, creators had to place a specific copyright symbol prominently on their work or it wouldn't be protected. Romero did so in his title sequence, but when the distributor decided at the last minute to change the movie's title (it was originally called
Night of the Flesh Eaters
), he didn't add the copyright symbol and the film lapsed into the public domain.

What's My Lion?

Mountain lions aren't directly related to lions—they're more closely related to house cats.

Mountain lions can weigh between 64 (for a small adult female) and 220 (a large male) pounds.

Mountain lions that live near the equator are the smallest—the animals get progressively larger the closer they live to the North and South Poles.

The mountain lion
(Puma concolor)
has more than 40 other names. Some of the best known include puma, cougar, catamount, mountain screamer, and painter. It's also one of the two separate big cats called a “panther.” (Leopards are the other.)

One of the reasons the mountain lion has so many names is that its habitat is so large, ranging across North and South America. Different regions have independently come up with their own names.

Mountain lions can't roar. They're usually silent, but can hiss, growl, purr, snarl, and scream.

Mountain lions usually avoid people, but more reports of encounters arise as people infringe deeper into the cats' isolated habitats. And mountain lions are not to be trifled with: They can leap as high as 18 feet, and 30 feet horizontally. They can run 40 to 50 mph for short intervals, climb trees quickly, and even swim.

The Taj Mahal

The Taj Mahal was built as a domed mausoleum by a grieving emperor, Shah Jahan, to honor his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died while giving birth to their 14th child.

More than 1,000 elephants helped haul in building materials, including jewels and huge quantities of white marble.

To complete the Taj Mahal, 20,000 jewelers, sculptors, calligraphers, and masons worked for more than 22 years, finishing in 1653.

Workmen building the Taj Mahal constructed a large brick scaffold to raise the building. When they were done, Shah Jahan decreed that the scaffold's bricks were free to anyone who could haul them away. According to legend, hordes of people dismantled the scaffold overnight.

Several often-reported “facts” about the Taj Mahal that aren't really true: that there was supposed to be an identical building built in black marble and meant to be Jahan's mausoleum; that the workmen were blinded, dismembered, and/or killed to keep them from building anything that would rival the building; and that British colonial authorities had intended to demolish it and sell off the marble and jewels.

Shortly after the Taj Mahal was finished, Shah Jahan fell ill and was deposed by his son, Aurangzeb, who placed him under luxurious house arrest…with his daughter and his jewels.

When Jahan died at age 74, he was interred next to his wife inside the masterpiece he had commissioned.

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58 percent of divorced men
say they're happier after the divorce, but 85 percent of divorced women say they are.

Watch Out!

The first spring-powered clocks appeared in the 1400s. But it wasn't until the 1600s that they became small enough to be put into a pocket, and then the watch was born.

Quartz crystal in a wristwatch vibrates at a rate of 32,768 times per second. That vibration keeps the speed of the watch constant.