Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Extraordinary Book of Facts: And Bizarre Information (29 page)

About 10 percent of American women keep their last name when they marry.

Life expectancy for women in the United States: 80.1 years. In 1900 it was 48.7 years.

The average female mannequin is 8 feet tall. The average woman is 5 feet 4 inches tall.

The average American female will have 3.3 pregnancies in her lifetime.

A woman can detect the odor of musk, which is associated with male bodies, better than any other smell.

Eighty percent of migraine sufferers are women.

In 1950 only 7 percent of American women dyed their hair. Today 75 percent do.

As of 2003, more than 11 million American women earned more than their husbands.

In 1960, 3 percent of American lawyers were women. In 2005 the number was up to 30 percent.

Seventy-five percent of divorced women will remarry.

America’s four favorite leftovers: pasta (including lasagna), pizza, chicken, and meatloaf.

America’s least favorite veggie: brussels sprouts.

More than 50 percent of Americans say they take 15 minutes or less for lunch every day.

Top three most hated foods in the United States: tofu, liver, and yogurt.

About a third of all ethnic restaurants in the United States are Chinese.

About 1 million people drink cola for breakfast.

If you feed a rhesus monkey a “typical American diet” it will die within two years.

The average American eats 82 pounds of chicken a year.

A New Yorker could eat out every night of his or her life and never eat at the same restaurant twice.

Potato chips are the biggest-selling snack food in the United States and Canada. In fact, of 100 people eating snack food, 70 of them are eating potato chips.

Americans eat 12 billion bananas a year.

A typical supermarket displays more than 25,000 items.

Only 55 percent of dinners served in the United States include even one homemade dish.

Ninety-five percent of the creatures on earth are smaller than a chicken egg.

Animal in your house closest to the average-size animal in the entire animal kingdom: the housefly.

Only about 3 percent of mammals practice monogamy.

Mammals have been on the earth 200 million years. Homo sapiens: 150,000 years.

If it’s a mammal, it has a tongue (or at least had one at one point).

If it has hair, feathers, or skin, it also has dandruff (dander).

Ninety percent of the wildlife species on the island of Madagascar are found nowhere else.

The E. coli bacteria has the fewest chromosomes: one pair.

Six of the most-hated creatures in the United States: cockroaches, mosquitoes, rats, wasps, rattlesnakes, and bats.

Seven thousand new insect species are discovered every year.

Last animal in the dictionary: the zyzzyva, a tropical American weevil.

What made the Dickin Medal for Valor unique during and after World War II? It was awarded to animals. From 1945 to 1949, 32 carrier pigeons, 18 dogs, three horses, and one cat were recipients of the medal.

MYTH:
Bats are blind.

FACT:
Bats aren’t blind. But they have evolved as nocturnal hunters, and can see better in half-light than in daylight.

MYTH:
Monkeys remove fleas in each other’s fur during grooming.

FACT:
Monkeys don’t have fleas. They’re removing dead skin—which they eat.

MYTH:
Male sea horses can become pregnant and give birth.

FACT:
Actually, the female sea horse expels eggs into the male’s brood pouch, where they are fertilized. And while the male does carry the gestating embryos until they are born 10 days later, he doesn’t feed them through a placenta or similar organ (as had previously been thought). Instead, the embryos feed off nourishment in the egg itself—food provided by the female. Basically, the male acts as an incubator.

MYTH:
Porcupines can shoot their quills when provoked.

FACT:
A frightened porcupine tends to run from danger. If a hunter catches it, though, a porcupine will tighten its skin to make the quills stand up . . . ready to lodge in anything that touches them.

MYTH:
Whales spout water.

FACT:
Whales actually exhale air through their blowholes. This creates a mist or fog that looks like a waterspout.

MYTH:
Moths eat clothes.

FACT:
Moths lay their eggs, which eventually develop into larva, on your clothes. It’s the larvae that eat tiny parts of your clothes; adult moths do not eat cloth.

MYTH:
Bumblebee flight violates the laws of aerodynamics.

FACT:
Nothing that flies violates the laws of aerodynamics.

I
n 1949 the U.S. Air Force decided to conduct a series of tests on the effect of rapid deceleration on pilots so they could get a better understanding of how much force people’s bodies can tolerate in a plane crash. Volunteers were to wear a special harness fitted with 16 sensors that measured the acceleration, or g-forces, on different parts of their body. The harness was the invention of an air force captain named Edward A. Murphy—but it was assembled by someone else. The tests went off as expected, but no one will ever know the results because all 16 of the sensors failed. Each one gave a zero reading.

When Murphy examined the harness, he discovered that the sensors had been wired backward. There are varying accounts of what he said next, but at a press conference a few days later, he was quoted as having said, “If there are two or more ways to do something and one of those results in a catastrophe, then someone will do it that way.”

Within months the expression became known throughout the aerospace industry as Murphy’s Law and from there it spread to the rest of the world. But as it spread it also evolved into the popular, more pessimistic form, “If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.”

Since 1949 any number of permutations of Murphy’s Law have arisen, dealing with subjects as diverse as missing socks and buttered bread falling to the floor. Some of these laws are grounded in very solid science:

MURPHY’S LAW OF BUTTERED BREAD:
A dropped piece of bread will always land butter side down.

Scientific analysis:
The behavior of a piece of bread dropped from table height is fairly predictable: As it falls to the ground it is more likely than not to rotate on its axis, and the distance to the ground is not sufficient for the bread to rotate the full 360 degrees needed for it to land face up. So more often than not, it will land face down.

MURPHY’S LAW OF LINES:
The line next to you will move more quickly than the one you’re in. (This also applies with a line of traffic.)

Scientific analysis:
On average, all the lanes of traffic, or lines at a Wal-Mart, move at roughly the same rate. This means that if there’s a checkout line on either side of you, there’s a two in three chance that one of them will move faster than the one you’re in.

MURPHY’S LAW OF SOCKS:
If you lose a sock, it’s always from a complete pair.

Scientific analysis:
Start with a drawer containing 10 complete pairs of socks, for a total of 20 socks. Now lose one sock, creating one incomplete pair. The drawer now contains 19 socks, 18 of which belong to a complete pair. Now lose a second sock. If all of the remaining socks have the same odds of being lost, there’s only one chance out of 18 that this lost sock is the mate of the first one that was lost. That means there’s a 94.4 percent chance that it’s from one of the complete pairs.

MURPHY’S LAW OF MAPS:
The place you’re looking for on the map will be located at the most inconvenient place on the map, such as an edge, a corner, or near a fold.

Scientific analysis:
If you measure out an inch or so from each edge of the map and from each fold, and then calculate the total area of these portions of the map, they’ll account for more than half the total area of the map. So if you pick a point at random, there’s a better than 50 percent chance that it will be in an inconvenient-to-read part of the map.

The praying mantis is the only insect that can turn its head like a human.

The hairs on the butt of a cockroach are so sensitive that they can detect air currents made by the onrushing tongue of a toad.

Mating soapberry bugs remain locked in embrace for up to 11 days, which exceeds the life span of many other insects.

Forty-one percent of people ages 18 to 24 wear seat belts. Only 18 percent of people over age 65 do.

If your car is more than 42 feet long, you can’t drive it on U.S. public roads.

First American car race: Chicago, in 1895. Average speed: 7.5 mph.

Divide the U.S. population by two—that’s how many cars there are in America.

Chance that a driver will swerve out of their lane of traffic while talking on a cell phone: 7 percent.

In 1920 Detroit became the first city in the United States to put in a stoplight.

Busiest stretch of highway in the United States: New York’s George Washington Bridge.

The average car in Japan is driven 4,400 miles a year. In the United States, it’s 9,500 miles a year.

Sport-utility vehicle drivers are twice as likely to talk on a cell phone as are drivers of other kinds of cars.

According to one study, 85 percent of parents use child car–safety seats incorrectly.

Chance that a public road in the United States is unpaved: 1 percent.

There are more fatal traffic accidents in July than in any other month.

More road rage incidents occur on Friday between 4 and 6 p.m. than at any other time.

If it’s a drug, it has a side effect.

Aspirin has never been approved by the FDA. It has never been rejected, either.

Fifth most popular plastic surgery performed on U.S. males: breast reduction.

You can’t get athlete’s foot if you don’t wear shoes.

Chocolate is good for you: It has more antioxidant properties than green tea. The darker the better—and the warmer the better, as in a nice cup of hot chocolate.

The swine flu vaccine of 1976 caused more sickness and death than the flu itself did.

What do pediatricians do when their kids get colds? Sixty-three percent say they “let them run their course.”

A few drops of tincture of mullein, easy to find at a vitamin or health food store, will stop a dry cough every time.

Crushed cockroaches, when applied to a stinging wound, are said to ease the pain.