I’ve just finished reading The Salmon of Doubt, a delightful copendium of writings and interviews of the late Douglas Adams.
In the beginning of one essay Adams claims to have a favorite piece of information. He describes it thusly:
I got to wondering if I had a SINGLE favorite piece of information, and found it hard to nail down. Not because I know very many - rather I’d just never thought to rate them. But my current favorite is this:
The SR-71 Blackbird spy plane leaked fuel on the ground. But when flying at speeds above Mach 3 the air friction heated up the airframe, causing it to expand and seal the leaks. I think that’s pretty cool.
Octopuses sometimes walk on the ocean floor. They walk on two legs, hold two legs to the side as arms and wrap the other four legs around their neck. How wacky is that?
0.7 sq feet/bird is the optimal density for cost-effective growth of chickens. I’ve never thought of it as my favorite piece of info, but I’ve gotten to use it a lot more than I ever thought I would.
Euler’s Identity:
e[sup]*itheta[/sup] = cos(theta) - isin(theta), which, when theta is set to pi, reduces to e[sup]*ipi[/sup] + 1 = 0
It just brings together everything in trigonometry, analytical geometry, natural mathematics, et cetera, and gives you the five more important numbers in mathematics.
A close second is transmissable genetic coding in DNA. I believe I first came across this while watching Cosmos when I was 8 or 9, and it just crystalized everything I’d observed about life before, and made evolution (and later, when I came to understand the disctinction natural selection) a slam-dunk, much to the frustration and agitation of various family and community who sought to convince me, by force if necessary, that we were not, in fact, descended from monkeys (as they put it).
I would have said Peru for sure, but maybe that’s because of seeing that documentary obout ex-President Fujimori. (I mean, how many people go into exile in Japan???)
One of my favourite Odd Facts:
On Highway 7 west of Ottawa, Canada, there is a little town called Perth. If you follow a line drawn straight through the centre of the earth from that town, you will emerge in the Indian Ocean. The closest largish city will be Perth, Australia.
Mine is probably simple math formulas. It used to be the quadratic formula and then the distance formula. Now, since my major is Finance my favorite formula is the time value of money: Future value (1+rate)^t and the reverse (present value). I never even was a huge fan of math but these little formulas were so simple and elegant.
Shakespeare and Cervantes both died on April 23, 1616. But they didn’t die on the same day. That’s because England was still using the Julian Calendar but Spain had changed to the Gregorian. April 23 in Spain was April 13 in England.
Yes - radius (in the sense of the distance from the centre of a circle to its perimeter) has no synonym, as far as I know. I don’t know if it’s particularly unusual - I suspect it isn’t - I just happen to like it, that’s all.
Christopher “Kit” Marlowe, Elizabethan poet/playwright, was a spy for Her Majesty, and his mysterious death in a bar fight may have been an assassination.
…it’s so COOL! He writes plays! He joins secret societies at the university! He FIGHTS CRIME!
São Paulo, a city much larger than NYC. It’s the financial center of Brazil – Rio is for partying, São Paulo is for business.
There are many Japanese in areas around that city; banking and business is their game. My wife says that the Brazilians joke that when they go back to Japan, the other Japanese say that Brazil made them lazy.
