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.