Science, technology and public policy class

• Japan used to think that it was religiously important to have the same number of hours of daylight and night... darkness? Anyhow, they changed the length of hours depending on the season/ day to night time ratio. Once they started trading with the rest of the world, they changed to standard time.
  
• It used to be that when you went to get shoes, they would x-ray your feet to see if there was anything wrong with your bones. (That was before they figured out that there was a link between cancer and x-rays.)
• The 'qwerty' keyboard was actually created to slow down the typing process. For old typewriters, if you typed too quickly the letter key things would get tangled (okay, jammed) with each other. Then, when keyboards for computers came up, they tried to create a keyboard that was friendlier to speedy typers like myself; however, the new keyboard was rejected because we have been socially acclimated to the qwerty keyboard.
  
• The reason engines are in the front of cars (okay, minus some models of Porsches) is because people were socialized to think the power in a mode of transportation came from the front of the car. With the engine in the back, there would be no driveshaft, and, ladies and gentlemen, no driveshaft for me to break!!!! Yaaay! Oh and I suppose the oil pan would also be in the back, thus eliminating that small stumbling block. So really, whoever decided that engines had to go in the front owes me approximately, let's see... $400 for the driveshaft, and atleast $400 for oil pan. So yeah, roughly $800.
  

I should now be done catching up on all the facts I missed! Hooray!

breathing

Right after being born the initial rush of oxygen causes the main oxygen sensors to fail and it takes a couple of days for them to adjust so they can once again measure oxygen in the blood and act accordingly.

colds and TB

Most adults have 2-3 colds a year. For children this number can be up to 12. Also, 19-43% of the world's population is infected with TB

Delightful tidbits from public sector economics!

• In 2002, it was discovered that Ukraine and Belarus charge only $0.02 per cubic meter of water used. Because it was so cheap to use water, Ukrainians and Belorussians used almost 100 gallons per person per day!
• The EPA was created in 1970.
• St. Petersburg was the Baltic Sea's single largest polluter because it couldn't raise the funds to complete its sewage treatment plant.
  

Elliot is lazy

The longest word in the English language is 189,819 letters long, and is so long that Wikipedia won't even tell you all the letters in it. It is 'titin' for short, apparently, which is some sort of protein.

Peeing

Men's bladders are larger than women's bladders.

Which is funny, because Elliot pees a lot more than I.

Just saying.

Nurses' drug dependency

The rate of drug dependency for nurses is about twice as great as the general population.

The Golden Gate Bridge

On the 50th anniversary of the completion of the Golden Gate Bridge, it was opened up to pedestrians. Some 250,000 people came out to stand on the bridge (stand, my professor says, because there were so many people that you couldn't walk). There was going to be a special boat ride, where one of the builders of the bridge was to be boat-ed under the bridge. However, he looked up and saw that instead of the nice natural curve that the bridge had when he'd helped build it, there was no arch- it was flat because the weight of 250,000 people was more than the bridge had been built to withstand.

time to play a little catch up

Here are four facts from my reading for the week:
1)Hypertension affects about 1 billion people worldwide (50 million in the US alone).
2)The blood pressure for a newborn is only about 50/40
3)There is a 2% chance that a person will develop Parkinson's disease in his/her lifetime.
4)Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Charles Dickens and Vincent Van Gogh were all affected by epilepsy

Sorry they are all from my pharmacology/pathophysiology readings and not very exciting

pickled peppers

There once was a dude who peddled pickled vegetables to sailors, because apparently pickled vegetables are high in vitamin c, which prevents you from getting scurvy. That dude's name was Amerigo Vespucci. (Amerigo Vespucci, for those of you don't know, is the actual dude who discovered America, hence, America. )

We're sorry that we have been rather remiss about facts.... We just got carried away doing other things. Like homework.

Shelby can see palm trees

The luke in luke-warm means tepid, but using it alone has fallen out of use.
--Telephoned in from Shelby who is in LA

An adult blue whale's heart beats about 5-6 times a minute.
--Elliot

Anthropomorphize

Today I learned from Jenny that 'anthropomorphize' is when an inanimate object has physical human qualities (such as the five-fingered fern). (Personification is when an inanimate object performs human action, such as, the cold bites my nose.)

Thanks Jenny!

one trillion

In light of the stimulus package that is being pushed through congress, I thought I would write a fact that I learned a little while back. The package is worth almost 1 trillion dollars. To put that in perspective, 1 billion seconds ago was around Nixon's time in office. One trillion seconds ago is about 30,000BC (or BCE, whatever it is these days). So if you make 1 dollar every second ($3600 an hour!) you would have had to have been born in 30,000BC to make 1 trillion dollars. That's a lot of money our government is about to spend!

30,000BC according to wikipedia is when the bow and arrow where invented...and Neanderthals are not extinct yet.

If you don't like snakes

Then Maine is a good place to go, because Maine is the only state in the US that doesn't have venomous snakes.

Supposedly. I don't think I learned any good blog-worthy facts today, so I had to steal that from my computer.

medication errors

As of 2004: 10 to 18% of all hospital injuries are attributed to medication errors. 44,000 to 98,000 people die in US hospitals each year because of medication errors.

"A Farewell to Arms"

Hemingway's original transcript for "A Farewell to Arms" was stolen when his wife came to visit him on the train. Subsequently, he was a little irritated when he rewrote it, and claims that his second version of the novel was not as good as the first, and readers will note that it lacks Hemingway's flowery and more expansive language.

Bites!

28 to 80% of cat bites become infected. However, only about 3 to 18% of dog bites become infected.

Coconuts = plasma?

Shelby: The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as substitute for blood plasma.

(Supposedly.)



Elliot: Wyoming is the least populous state in the US, at just over .5 million. (We figure this is about how many people's houses we can see around Lake Merritt.)

Katrina's Ice

According to my Public Finance and Public Policy book, the government spent $100 million on ice in the relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina... Interestingly, 60% of that ice never made it anywhere New Orleans, and some of it even ended up in Maine, which, in case you're not good at geography, is about 1700 miles away from New Orleans.


View Larger Map

Map thanks to Google. (I'm not sure what their copyright and citation deal-i-os are, and I definitely want to avoid this plagiarism thing.)

NSAIDs and Analgesics

The most common prescribed use of aspirin is to reduce platelet aggregation, not for its anti-inflammatory or pain-relieving properties. Also, acetaminophen poisoning is the most common type of poisoning for children.

Two facts in one post

It's late and we're tired, so these are both in one post tonight.


Elliot: 1 in 7 Americans don't take their prescriptions.

Shelby: The average American CEO makes 475 times the workers' salaries. Britain has the next highest CEO pay, with 22 times their workers' salaries. A little ridiculous? I think so. (I have a list of about 5 of these, but my computer isn't on, so I'll get it later).

***Update!*** The average CEO's salary in the US is 475 times greater than the average worker's salary. In Japan, it is 11 times greater; France, 15; Canada, 20; South Africa, 21; Britain, 22.

Green Eggs and Ham

Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham because his editor made a bet with him that he couldn't write a book using 50 words or less. Dr. Seuss had just published The Cat in the Hat using 325. Green Eggs and Ham uses 50 words:

a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you.

You can find 9 more facts about Dr. Seuss here.

Mexican Jumping beans

Mexican jumping beans are a type of seed in which a moth egg has been laid. What makes them 'jump' is the larva inside reacting to uv light in an attempt to not have the seed dry out. Apparently the larva can live inside the seed for years.

Jaywalking

According to someone on NPR today, males tend to jaywalk more often when females are around. Apparently it has to do with trying to appear all tough or something.

Multiple facts! From Science, Technology and Public Policy class

Today was my first science, technology and public policy class... We didn't get into anything too serious because it was only the first day, but here is what I learned from the intro to the class:

The 'war on cancer' was started in 1971 by President Nixon.

President Lincoln patented a machine for lifting sunken barges. This makes him the only president to have a patent (hint hint, Obama).

President Carter was a nuclear physicist.

In 1840, an act (sorry, can't find the name) created state universities... Which are all technical colleges oriented at creating a technical force, as opposed to liberal arts colleges, which are popular in Europe, because they create a more well-rounded population.

Barbed wire was very important in the settlement of the west because it contained/ kept out cattle.

Science accounts for as much as 50% of US economic growth over the past 50 years.

Automobiles were originally thought to be the solution to cities' pollution problems, because they don't create the piles of... waste... in the streets that horses do.

Yay! I beat Elliot tonight!

Economics

Today I had my first public sector econ class... I learned what it means for the market to be 'efficient.' As long as there is the possibility that one person could be better off without another person becoming worse off as a result, the market is considered inefficient. Also, we learned that basically... the idea of a free market working right is a fairy tale. It's pretty much impossible.

Also, apparently San Francisco is considering a 'congestion tax' to tax cars going into downtown SF, because traffic is so bad. (HEY BAY AREA... How about a congestion tax on the dummies who cause the congestion?)

More blood facts

About 1% of the body's red blood cells is produced by bone marrow each day. That means that about 1% of the body's red blood cells is also destroyed each day.

Yep, another fact about blood. I can't really help it, it's what I am studying right now for class.

Recovering luggage

I can't think of one.

Barack and Michelle Obama are the second cutest couple in the world.

Sorry, but Elliot's curly hair and my naturally tanned swimmer skin makes us cuter.

NEWSFLASH! I have just been informed that the above does not constitute a fact.

I have this random facts widget on my computer (yay Vista!) that gives you a random fact every day. Some of them are quite stupid. Today's is "women blink nearly twice as much as men." But it doesn't give any support for this statement. I think it's dumb.

Okay, I found one. After digging through all the Obama-mania, I found this on CNN: you know that airplane that landed in the Hudson river last week? It's going to be weeks before they can recover peoples' stuff because first everything has to be weighed, then it all has to be dried, and then it has to be weighed again. Can someone explain why the need for the double-weighing? It says it's to verify the weight and balancing of the airplane (I think the 'balancing' might not be determinable at this point, people).

Blood Coagulation

Plasminogen in an inactive form of the enzyme plasmin. When plasminogen caught in a blood clot gets converted to plasmin it begins to break down the clot. Plasmin is also helpful in removing tiny clots in tiny blood vessels that would otherwise cause some problems.

Maybe not the most amazing fact but I had to write about clot retraction today so it was on my mind.

Our Blog

Hi!

The concept behind our blog is pretty simple. Every night, Elliot and I each try to come up with a fact we've learned throughout the day, and share it with each other. Going beyond just that, we thought we'd try blogging about it instead, to record these facts and share them with other unsuspecting people. Enjoy!