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May 18, 2004:
Fascinating
Facts II
Interview
with Will Pearson editor of Condensed
Knowledge
Mike
Carruthers:
Here's a fact you'll probably find surprising...
Will
Pearson:
That the forth most popular tourist attraction in the world
is the gateway arches in St. Louis, that's very surprising to
most people.
Will Pearson,
editor of Mental Floss magazine, which has put out a book called
Condensed
Knowledge.
In addition
to being the forth most visited monument, it's also the tallest
national monument in the United States.
When you
hit the snooze button on your alarm clock you likely get an
extra 9 minutes of sleep.
Well
this has to do with when the snooze feature was originally added,
and the inside of the standard flat style alarm clock had long
been standardized, and this meant that the teeth on the snooze
gear had to mesh in a certain way. The gears basically left
open the option of either letting people sleep for 9 more minutes,
or almost 11 more minutes. And after some studies where done,
they decided that 11 more minutes would allow people to go into
a deeper sleep, and so they settled on 9 minutes. And so even
though today with our digital clocks you could set it to just
about anything, out of tradition we've kept that 9 minute time
period.
And here
are some interesting facts about the animal kingdom you can
use to impress people with your knowledge.
A goldfish
has a memory span of 3 seconds. After sleeping for 17 years
a cicada will awake, mate and then die within 2 weeks. Dragonflies
live for only 24 hours. And humans and dolphins are the only
species that have sex for pleasure.
At somethingyoushouldknow.net,
I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.
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