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May 17, 2004:
Fascinating
Facts
Interview
with Will Pearson editor of Condensed
Knowledge
Mike
Carruthers:
Typically when you want to buy a pencil you want it to have an
eraser on the end, however...
Will
Pearson:
Many pencils in Europe do not have erasers even to this day.
That dates back to around the Civil War the U.S. began producing
pencils with erasers on them.
Will Pearson,
editor of Mental Floss Magazine, which has put out a new book
called Condensed
Knowledge.
But people
in European countries felt that would make their students lazy,
and so even to this day, as I mentioned, most pencils there
do not have erasers.
Will's book
and magazine specialize in this kind of quirky information.
Things
like the strongest muscle in your body is your tongue. The amount
of time it takes blood to make a complete circuit through your
body, which is 60 seconds, which is pretty quick actually. And
the amount of saliva produced everyday is 2 quarts. The length
human hair grows on the top of a head a month is one inch. The
average number of blinks per minute is 25. The number of bones
a human is born with is 30, and the number of bones an adult
human has is 206.
You know
doubt heard the story that Mama Cass died from choking on a
ham sandwich, that story apparently started because a ham sandwich
was found on her beside table.
An autopsy
determined that she died of heart failure due to fatty myocardial
degeneration, a condition caused by her obesity.
Tomorrow
why the snooze time on virtually every alarm clock is always
nine minutes. I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should
Know.
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