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May 27, 2004

Ministry of Dubious Factoids

A friend sent me this email. I can't really vouch for its accuracy, but then, I'm a blogger. I don't sweat accuracy.

Sort of like the New York Times.

Anyway, here's a list of "facts" which may either be true or false. Decide which are the true ones, and which are the fake ones.

1. Apples, not caffeine, are more efficient at waking you up in the morning.

2. Alfred Hitchcock didn't have a belly button.

3. A pack-a-day smoker will lose approximately 2 teeth every 10 years.

4. People do not get sick from cold weather; it's from being indoors a lot more.

5. When you sneeze, all bodily functions stop, even your heart!

6. Only 7 per cent of the population are lefties.

7. Forty people are sent to the hospital for dog bites every minute.

8. Babies are born without kneecaps. They don't appear until they are 2-6 years old.

9. The average person over 50 will have spent 5 years waiting in lines.

10. The toothbrush was invented in 1498.

11. The average housefly lives for one month.

12. 40,000 Americans are injured by toilets each year.

13. A coat hanger is 44 inches long when straightened.

14. The average computer user blinks 7 times a minute.

15. Your feet are bigger in the afternoon than any other time of day.

16. Most of us have eaten a spider in our sleep.

17. The REAL reason ostriches stick their head in the sand is to search for water.

18. The only two animals that can see behind themselves without turning their heads are the rabbit and the parrot.

19. John Travolta turned down the starring roles in "An Officer and a Gentleman" and "Tootsie."

20. Michael Jackson owns the rights to the South Carolina State anthem.

21. In most television commercials advertising milk, a mixture of white paint and a little thinner is used in place of the milk.

22 Prince Charles and Prince William NEVER travel on the same airplane, just in case there is a crash.

23. The first Harley Davidson motorcycle built in 1903 used a tomato can for a carburetor.

24. Most hospitals make money by selling the umbilical cords cut from women who give birth. They are used in vein transplant surgery.

25. Humphrey Bogart was related to Princess Diana. They were 7th cousins.

26. If coloring weren't added to Coca-Cola, it would be green.

....

ANSWERS IN WHITE FONT (Highlight to read): Supposedly, all of them are true, which I sora doubt. But what the heck.

Re: 19, I know Travolta turned down the roles for "Officer" and "An American Gigolo." I never heard Tootsie before.

But it's possible.

If you think from going from John Travolta to Dustin Hoffman is weird, how about going from Dustin Hoffman to Harrison Ford?

Dustin Hoffman was attached for quite a long time -- throughout most of the film's development, actually -- as the star of Blade Runner.

Yes. Dustin Hoffman. Blade Runner. Fighting androids.

And it wasn't even called "Blade Runner" at the time. It was called "Dangerous Days." They bought the title, and just the title, from a William "Naked Lunch" Burroughs novella called Blade Runner, which had nothing to do with robots.

posted by Ace at 06:25 PM

Comments

Sniff, sniff. I think I smell a Top 10 "Little Known Facts" in our future. Keep up the good work, buddy.

(And you MUST check out the video of the chick losing her cellphone) -- click over for the link.

Later.

[Ace's Warning: If you go to son of nixon's site, you'll find links to stuff on Entensity.net. Some of this stuff is funny, some of it isn't, and some of it is actually pornographic, as in hard-core.

So, it's not work-safe. Unless you work at, say, Juggs magazine.]

Posted by: sonofnixon on May 27, 2004 06:47 PM

P.S. "Abu Ghraib HQ" is a nice touch. Cute.

Posted by: sonofnixon on May 27, 2004 06:59 PM

Son of Nixon,

Thanks for the tip. (Nice site design, by the way.)

Try to give a warning, though, if the site you're linking to contains stuff that isn't safe for work.

Posted by: ace on May 27, 2004 07:03 PM

Re: #18
Chameleon's eyes "provide nearly 360 degree vision without turning the head, and allow the chameleon to see in front of and behind him."

http://chamownersweb.com/misc/likkinlizerds1.htm

Posted by: Terry Notus on May 27, 2004 07:10 PM

Also,
"The highly developed [octopus] eyes have monocular vision but are so big that the field of view for both eyes reaches almost 360 degrees."
http://bss.sfsu.edu:224/courses/Fall01%20projects/giantoctopus.htm

Posted by: Terry Notus on May 27, 2004 07:34 PM

OK, last time and I swear I will give it a rest.
"Together, the ommatidia sample the surrounding visual environment, forming an almost complete picture (i.e., almost 4pi steradian)."

That means a blowfly can see behind itself without turning its head.

http://www.ub.rug.nl/eldoc/dis/science/c.schilstra/c1.pdf

Posted by: Terry Notus on May 27, 2004 07:41 PM

Pfft. My mom can see behind her without turning her head either. At least it always seemed that way growing up.

#2 must be at least marginally false, as one would at the very least have a scar from the umbilical cord.

#5 is an urban legend/old wives tale.

I don't buy #9. That would suggest that 10% of every day is spent in a line. From the day you're born.

#20 logically, I'm assuming that the state anthems of all 50 states are in the public domain, and as such, are not ownable. This would be especially true for a state as old as SC. He may have title to a specific RECORDING of the anthem, but couldn't possibly own complete rights to the song.

#21 is true, and what's more, when you see a Turkey coming out of an oven in a TV commercial, typically the turkey has been wrapped in duct tape and painted the desired "roasted looking" color. Also, any time a restaurant brings out a desert tray which includes ice cream, it's actually usually crisco, not real ice cream (to avoid melting).

Posted by: Beck on May 27, 2004 10:07 PM

#24 is right out - it is highly illegal to sell human body parts.

Posted by: Jim on May 28, 2004 09:42 AM

FWIW, the actual story of Blade Runner the movie is based on the Philip K. Dick story "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". In fact, Dick is probably one of the most successfuly adapted writers in SF history. check out the link for additional info:

http://www.philipkdick.com/films_intro.html

Posted by: David on May 28, 2004 12:24 PM

10-4. Duly noted.

Posted by: sonofnixon on May 28, 2004 02:53 PM

#8 is False. Newborns do have kneecaps. Kneecaps form about the fourth month of fetal life. However, they don’t show up on x-ray very well because they’re not ossified, or bony. At this point in life, the kneecaps are made of a cartilaginous material. The growth centers surrounding the kneecap form late in developmental life in utero and may not appear until just before or just after the infant is born.

Posted by: Chad on June 21, 2004 10:44 AM

#7 is Not True. According to a 1998 article in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), during a three-year study, there were 914 new dog bite injuries requiring emergency room visits per day. With 1,440 minutes in a day, that's less than one bite per minute.

Posted by: Chad on June 21, 2004 10:45 AM

#9 is clearly false. This means that one tenth of ones life would have been wasted in line. An average of about 8 hours per night. We can assume that no one is waiting in line while they are home in bed. So now we have 16 hours per day x 50 years. This gives us 292000 hours of available waking time. 5 Years is 24 hours x 365 days. This works out to be 43800 hours. This means that 15% of our waking hours for 50 years would have to be spent in line. This means, every day of our lives for half a century we would have to have spent an averade of 3.6 hours in line. I have to call this one false.

Posted by: Chad on June 21, 2004 10:45 AM

#24 False. The original formula called for caramel to give Coca-Cola its rich brown color, and although the recipe has undergone some changes through the years, none of them affected the ultimate color of the product.

Posted by: Chad on June 21, 2004 10:48 AM

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In a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of scientists announced the detection of dimethyl sulfide (along with a similar detection of dimethyl disulfide) in the atmosphere of an exoplanet called K2-18b. This is actually the second detection of dimethyl sulfide made on this planet, following a tentative detection in 2023.
Tons of chemicals are detected in the atmospheres of celestial objects every day. But dimethyl sulfide is different, because on Earth, it's only produced by living organisms.
"It is a shock to the system," Nikku Madhusudhan, first author on the paper, told the New York Times. "We spent an enormous amount of time just trying to get rid of the signal."

He means they tried to prove the signal was caused by things other than dimethyl sulfide but they could not.

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Good rickroll

What? Skeleton of the most famous Musketeer, D'Artagnan, possibly discovered in Dutch church closet.
Dumas picked four names of real musketeers out of a history book, D'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. So there was an actual D'Artagnan, though he made most of the story up. (Or, you know, all of it.)*

Charles de Batz de Castelmore, known as d'Artagnan, the famous musketeer of Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV, spent his life in the service of the French crown.
The Gascon nobleman inspired Alexandre Dumas's hero in "The Three Musketeers" in the 19th century, a character now known worldwide thanks to the novel and numerous film adaptations.
D'Artagnan was killed during the siege of Maastricht in 1673, and there is a statue honoring the musketeer in the city. His final resting place has remained a mystery ever since.

A lot of Dumas's stories are based on bits of real history. The plot of the >Three Musketeers, about trying to recover lost diamonds from the queen's necklace, was cribbed from the then-almost-contemporaneous Affair of the Queen's Necklace. And the Man in the Iron Mask is based on real accounts of a prisoner forced to wear a mask (though I think it was a velvet mask).
* Oh, I should mention, Dumas says all this, about finding the names in an old book, in the prologue to his novel. But authors lie a lot. They frequently present fictions as based on historic fact. The twist is, he was actually telling the truth here. At least about these four musketeers having actually existed and served under Louis XIV.
Fun fact: You know the beginning of A Fistful of Dollars where the local gunslingers make fun of Clint Eastwood's donkey and Eastwood demands they apologize to the donkey? That's lifted from The Three Musketeers. Rochefort mocks D'Artagnan's old, brokedown farm horse and D'Artagnan is incensed.

A commenter asked which should be read first, The Hobbit of LOTR?
Easy, no question -- read The Hobbit first. It's actually the start of the story and comes first chronologically. It sets up some major characters and major pieces in play in LOTR.
Also, the Hobbit is Beginner-Friendly, which LOTR isn't. The Hobbit really is a delightful book, and a fast read. It's chatty, it's casual, it's exciting, and it's funny. In that dry cheeky British humor way. I love that the narrator is constantly making little asides and commentary, like he's just sitting next to you telling you this story as it occurs to him.
LOTR is a very long story. Fifteen hundred pages or so. The Hobbit is relatively short and very punchy and easy to read. If you don't like The Hobbit, you can skip out on LOTR. If you do like it, you'll be primed to read LOTR.
Oh, I should say: The Hobbit is written as if it's for children, but one of those smart children's stories that are also for adults. Don't worry, there's also real fighting and violence and horror in it, too.
LOTR is written for adults. (It's said that Tolkien wrote both for his children, but LOTR was written 17 years later, when his children were adults.) Some might not like The Hobbit due to its sometimes frivolous tone. Me, I love it. I find it constantly amusing. Both are really good but there is a starkly different tone to both. LOTR is epic, grand, and serious, about a world war, The Hobbit is light and breezy, and about a heist. Though a heist that culminates in a war for the spoils.

The Hobbit Challenge: Read two more chapters. I didn't have much time. Bilbo got the ring.
I noticed a continuity problem. Maybe. Now, as of the time of The Hobbit, it was unknown that this magic ring was in fact a Ring of Power, and it was doubly unknown that it was the Ring of Power, the Master Ring that controlled the others.
But the narrator -- who we will learn in LOTR was none of than Bilbo himself, who wrote the book as "There and Back Again" -- says this about Gollum's ring:
"But who knows how Gollum had come by that present [the Ring], ages ago in the old days when such rings were still at large in the world? Perhaps even the Master who ruled them could not have said."
In another passage, the ring is identified as a "ring of power."
I don't know, I always thought there was a distinction between mere magic rings and the Rings of Power created by Sauron. But this suggests that Bilbo knew this was a ring of power created by Sauron.
Now I don't remember when Bilbo wrote the Hobbit. In the movie, he shows Frodo the book in Rivendell, and I guess he wrote it after he left the Shire. I guess he might have added in the part about the ring being a ring of power created by "the Master" after Gandalf appraised him of his research into the ring.
I never noticed this before. I know Tolkien re-wrote this chapter while he was writing LOTR to make the ring important from the start. And also to make Gollum more sinister and evil, and also to remove the part where Gollum actually offers Bilbo the ring as a "present" -- Bilbo had already found it on his own, but Gollum was wiling to give it away, which obviously is not something the rewritten Gollum would ever do.
But I had no memory of the ring being suggested to be The Ring so early in the tale.

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Tomorrow is March 25th, "Tolkien Reading Day," because March 25th is the day when the Ring is destroyed in the book. I think I'm going to start the Hobbit tomorrow and read all four books this time.
The only bad part of the trilogy are the Frodo/Sam chapters in The Two Towers. They're repetitive, slow, and mostly about the weather and terrain. But most everything else is good. Weirdly, the Frodo-Sam chapters in Return of the King are exciting and action-packed and among the best in the trilogy. (Though the chapters with everyone else in Return of the King get pretty slow again. Mostly people talking about marching towards war, and then marching towards war.)

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[Hat Tip: Diogenes] [CBD]