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Factoids

Saturday, October 04, 2008

I didn’t know what to call this page. It contains some facts, some thoughts, generally, “Things that astound me”. The page is updated as I come across new facts, almost always from the books I read.

If it works, there’ll be a reference to each book near the foot of THIS PAGE, so you can purchase the book, or borrow it from your local lending library.

If you get the feeling that quotes from a book are “bunched together”, it’s because they are. As I read a book I am struck by one or more factoids, and, of course, record them here.

Here's one I made up myself this morning:

• Remind every teenager (younger than you) that everyone they meet who is older than them was once much younger than them!

Traveler (page 12)

“The main cells in the brain are approximately 12 billion neurons, or nerve cells.” ... “A single neuron can directly communicate with as many as four thousand or even five thousand other neurons.”

Language Instinct (page 16)

"The best definition comes from the linguist Max Weinreich: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy."

Language Instinct (page 300)

"Metabolically, the brain is a pig. It consumes a fifth of the body’s oxygen and similarly large portions of its calories and phospholipids. Greedy neuron tissue lying around beyond its point of usefulness is a good candidate for the recycling bin.".

Castles (page 198)

“The map of the world in the Admiralty War Room measured nearly twenty feet by thirty feet ... the enormous area of the Pacific [ocean] filling upwards of three hundred square feet. On this map the head of a pin represented the full view to be obtained from the masts of a ship on a clear day” Winston Churchill wrote after the war.

[Next time I read the original in Churchill I’ll replace this quotation]

Greatest Show (page 92)

A favourite analogy portrays the nucleus [of an atom] as a fly in the middle of a sports stadium. The nearest neighbouring nucleus is another fly in the middle of an adjacent stadium. The electrons of each atom are buzzing about in orbit around their respective flies, smaller than the tiniest gnats, too small to be seen on the same scale as the flies.

Plausibility (page 156)

To put things in perspective, the number of neurons in the human brain is estimated to be a hundred billion and the total number of synapses to be a million billion.

Toronto Star Friday, July 09, 2010

Twenty-six weeks after conception, the brain is at a critical period of development. It is still producing more than 50,000 neurons every second.

… a newborn's brain has 20 billion neurons and a trillion synaptic connections, and the fetal brain must create a profusion of brain cells during intrauterine life — about 250,000 each minute — to meet those demands.

Plausibility (page 118)

Humans, for example, have more than three hundred recognizable cell types and consist of about one hundred trillion cells in complex arrangements.

Plausibility (page 29)

“ … the important distinction that only the genotype is inherited but only the phenotype is selected”.

Ancestor’s (page 390)

As Robert May, the current President of the Royal Society has said, to a first approximation, all species are insects

Ancestor’s (page 198)

Under favorable conditions the lake of a beaver can span several miles, which may make it the largest phenotype of any gene in the world.

Devil's (page 45)

The military metaphor lets us think of each soldier [CG: an atom in an array of atoms in a crystal] as a metre or two from his neighbour. But actually almost all the interior of a crystal is empty space. My head is 18 centimetres in diameter. To keep to scale, my nearest neighbour in the crystalline parade would have to be standing more than a kilometre away.

Watchmaker (page 22)

There are about three million ganglion cells in the electronic interface (of each of our eyes) gathering data from about 125 million photocells. The figure of 125 million photocells is about 5,000 times the number of separately-resolvable points in a good-quality magazine photograph.

Watchmaker (page 22)

Each nucleus (of a human cell) contains a digitally-coded database larger, in information content, that all 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica put together. And this figure is for each cell, not all the cells of a body put together.

Watchmaker (page 96)

Some 1,000 million of these (electrical impulses) are transmitted every second, by means which are not properly understood, to a brain, which then takes the appropriate action.

Watchmaker (page 141)

Some species of the unjustly called 'primitive' amoebas have as much information in their DNA as 1,000 Encyclopedia Brittanicas.

Watchmaker (page 150)

Cows and pea plants (and, indeed, all the rest of us) have an almost identical gene called the Histone H4 gene. ... We don't know how long ago the common ancestor lived ... call it 1.5 billion years. ... letters carved on gravestones become unreadable in mere hundreds of years.

First Word (page 169)

(No animal communication system has an equivalent for "No", argues Jackendoff, but it tends to be one of the first words in any child's repertoire).

First Word (page 196)

All of us alive today share at least one grandmother who lived 150,000 years ago in East Africa. We also share at least one grandfather, and African man who lived 60,000 years ago.

(Ed: I know what you're thinking ... but it ain't so!)

First Word (page 279)

Nilsson and Pelger ... calculated that it would take about 1,829 separate evolutionary steps for the flat-patch eye to evolve into a stereo-vision globe. That amounts to less than 364,000 years, not long at all from an evolutionary perspective.

(Ed: I'm not at all sure that "evolutionary step" translates one-to-one to "generation").

Nature's Numbers (page 44)

(On prime numbers) The first proof of this fact worked only when the numbers got bigger than 10'10'10'10'46, where to avoid giving the printer kittens I've used the ' sign to indicate forming a power. This number is utterly gigantic. Written out in full, it would go 10000...000, with a very large number of zeroes. If all the matter in the universe were turned into paper, and a zero could be inscribed on every electron, there wouldn't be enough of them to hold even a tiny fraction of the necessary zeroes.

Boston Globe (December 1, 2009, Image 9 )

"Messier 104 (M104), the Sombrero galaxy" has a brilliant white, bulbous core encircled by the thick dust lanes comprising the spiral structure of the galaxy. As seen from Earth, the galaxy is tilted nearly edge-on. We view it from just six degrees north of its equatorial plane. At a relatively bright magnitude of +8, M104 is just beyond the limit of naked-eye visibility and is easily seen through small telescopes.

The Sombrero lies at the southern edge of the rich Virgo cluster of galaxies and is one of the most massive objects in that group, equivalent to 800 billion suns. The galaxy is 50,000 light-years across and is located 28 million light-years from Earth.

X-ray emission suggests that there is material falling into the compact core, where a 1-billion-solar-mass black hole resides. In the 19th century, some astronomers speculated that M104 was simply an edge-on disk of luminous gas surrounding a young star, which is prototypical of the genesis of our solar system. But in 1912, astronomer V. M. Slipher discovered that the hat-like object appeared to be rushing away from us at 700 miles per second.

This enormous velocity offered some of the earliest clues that the Sombrero was really another galaxy, and that the universe was expanding in all directions. (NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team, STScI/AURA) More (see this on Google Sky ).

Language Instinct (page 145)

"A bit of arithmetic shows that pre-literate children, who are limited to ambient speech, must be lexical vacuum cleaners, inhaling a new word every two waking hours, day in, day out.".

"Think of having to memorize a new batting average or treaty date or phone number every ninety minutes of your waking life since you took your first steps.".

Beneath Flanders Fields (page 266)

"In the process five unexploded shells per square metre were uncovered".

Tower (p xiv)

… but I can offer the reader a simple rule based on adequate research: all statements of how lovely it was in that [pre-war] era made by persons contemporary with it will be found to have been made after 1914.

Recognition (Mind Works page 85)

You find two crumpled balls of paper to be similar, even though their shapes are completely different, and find two people’s faces different, though their shapes are almost the same.

Men (Back To The Front page 186)

The war was over. Princip’s bullet had caused some 67 million men to don uniforms and go to fight. One in every six of these men was killed. Of the remainder, approximately half were wounded. On the Western Front alone, more than 4 million had died in their ditches.

Mixotricha (Unweaving page 229-230)

Mixotricha paradoxa is a flagellate protozoan which lives in the guts of the Australian termite Mastotermes darwiniensis. (snip!) A single Mixotricha individual, therefore, is a colony containing at least half a million symbiotic bacteria of various kinds. ... a single termite is a colony of perhaps as many symbiotic oranisms in its gut.

[ 500,000 times 500,000 is 2,500,000,000] [That’s one termite!]

Communities (Unweaving page 229)

Each individual animal or plant is a community. It is a community of billions of cells, and each one of those billions of cells is a community of thousands of bacteria.

Drink A Glass Of Water (Unweaving page 179)

For example, every time you drink a glass of water you are imbibing at least one molecule that passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell. This follows from extrapolation from Wolpert’s observation that ‘there are many more molecules in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in the sea’.

DNA (Galileo page 64)

If the human DNA in one set of twenty-three chromosomes (with one DNA molecule in each chromosome) is stretched out and joined together, then it would be about one meter long, and all that stuff has to be confined to the cell nucleus. Because the chromosomes are doubled and there are about a hundred trillion cells in a human body ...

Matter (Unweaving page 118)

Isaac Asimov has a dramatic illustration: it is as if all the matter of the universe were a single grain of sand, set in the middle of an empty room 20 miles long 20 miles wide and 20 miles high.

Yet, at the same time, it is as if that single grain of sand were pulverized into a thousand million million million fragments, for that is approximately the number of stars in the universe.

These are some of the sobering facts of astronomy, and you can see that they are beautiful.

Bar Codes On The Air (Unweaving page 72)

Think what is happening when you listen to a whole orchestra. Imagine that, superimposed on a hundred instruments, your neighbour in the concert is whispering learned music criticism in your ear, others are coughing and, lamentably, somebody behind you is rustling a chocolate wrapper.

All these sounds, simultaneously, are vibrating your eardrum and they are summed into a single, very complicated wriggling wave of pressure change.

We know it is one wave because a full orchestra, and all the noises off, can be rendered into a single wavy groove on a phonograph disc, or a single fluctuating trace of magnetic substance on a tape.

The entire set of vibrations sums up into a single wiggly line on the graph of air pressure against time, as recorded by your eardrum.

Mirabile dicta, the brain manages to sort out the rustling from the whispering, the coughing from the door banging, the instruments of the orchestra from each other.

Such a feat of unweaving and reweaving, or analysis and synthesis, is almost beyond belief, but we all do it effortlessly and without thinking.

Preface (Somme page xix)

Were one to write

a third

of a page

about every soldier

killed

on the Somme,

It would require

at least

six hundred books

as long as this one.

We are going to die (Unweaving page 1)

… and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.

Our eyes are open (Unweaving page 5)

We are granted (the privilege and) the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, and why they see what they do, in the short time before they close for ever.

Cells (Unweaving page 8)

A (human) cell is not just a bag of juice. It is packed with solid structures, mazes of intricately folded membranes.. There are about 100 million million [not a typo!] cells in a human body, and the total area of membranous structure inside one of us (humans) works out at more than 200 acres. That’s a respectable farm.

(page 9) Each one of us is a city of cells, and each cell a town of bacteria. You are a gigantic megalopolis of bacteria.

Bloody (Unweaving page 35)

The total length of capillaries round which the heart pumps the blood, from ventricle to ventricle, is more than 50 miles. If 50 miles of tubing are packed inside a human body, ...

Key to Titles

Key	Title	Author	Publisher	ISBN
Traveler	The Mathematical Traveler	Calvin C. Clawson	Perseus	0-7382-0835-3
Castles	Castles of Steel	Robert K. Massie	Random House	0-679-45671-6
Greatest Show	The Greatest Show On earth	Richard Dawkins	Free press (Simon & Schuster)	978-1-4165-9479-6
Plausibility	The Plausibility of Life	Kirschener/Gerhart	Yale University Press	0-300-10865-6
Ancestor’s	The Ancestor’s Tale	Richard Dawkins	Phoenix	0 75381 996 1
Devil's	A Devil's Chaplain	Richard Dawkins	Mariner	0-618-48539-2
Watchmaker	The Blind Watchmaker	Richard Dawkins	Penguin
First Word	The First Word	Christine Kenneally	Penguin	978-0-14-311374-4
Nature's Numbers	Nature's Numbers	Ian Stewart	Basic Books (Science masters series)	0-465-07273-9
Language Instinct	The Language Instinct	Steven Pinker	Harper Collins	0-06-095833-2
Beneath	Beneath Flanders Fields	Barton, Doyle, Vandewalle	McGill-Queens University Press	0-7735-2949-7
Tower	The Proud Tower	Barbara W. Tuchman	Macmillan New York	LC 65-23074
Unweaving	Unweaving The Rainbow	Richard Dawkins	Mariner	0-618-05673-4
Somme	The Battle of the Somme (330+p)	Martin Gilbert	McClelland & Stewart	ISBN-13;978-0-7710-3547-0
Galileo	Galileo’s Finger	Peter Atkins	Oxford University Press	ISBN 0 19 860664 8 (hb)
Back To The Front	Back To The Front	Stephen O’Shea	Avon Books	ISBN 0-380-73167-3
Mind Works	How The Mind Works	Steven Pinker	W.W. Norton and Company	ISBN 0-393-04535-8
Boston Globe	The Big Picture (web site)	Alan Taylor	http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/

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Toronto and Mississauga, Monday, November 07, 2011 9:35 AM

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