By Sam Wein
• The term encyclopedia is derived from the Greek, ‘Enkuklios Paideia’ meaning general education.
• It can take a deep-sea clam up to 100 years to reach 0.3 inches (8 millimeters). This clam is among the slowest growing yet longest living species on the planet.
• If you started by placing one penny on one square of a chessboard, and two on the next, four on the next and so on doubling each time, by the 64th square you would need 20 million, million, million pennies.
• The largest single flower is the rafflesia or corpse flower. They are generally 3 feet in diameter, with the record being 42 inches.
• Formication is the hallucination that bugs or snakes are crawling on or under the skin and is common to amphetamine and cocaine users. This hallucination is also referred to as “crank bugs.”
• An aubade, the opposite of a serenade, is sung to alert illicit lovers of the coming of dawn and discovery.
• The only one of his sculptures that Michelangelo signed was “The Pieta,” completed in 1500.
• A law in Fairbanks, Alaska, does not allow moose to have sex on city streets.
• Retokes, a South Pacific language, has 11 letters and only six consonants.
• In 1884 Charles Dow made a list of the average closing prices of 11 stocks he thought represented the economic strength of the nation. The list consisted of nine railroads and two manufacturing firms.
• In 1902, the population of Las Vegas was 30.
• Centuries before Christ, the Chinese were using natural gas for lighting. Gas was brought to the surface from beds of rock salt 1.600 feet beneath the ground, conveyed through bamboo pipes and used for illuminating home interiors in Szechwan province.
• The New York phone book had 22 Hitlers listed before World War II and none after that.
• If a person were to write out the entire human genome, allocating a millimeter for each letter, the text would be as long as the Danube River, yet it all fits inside the microscopic nucleus of a tiny cell that fits easily upon the head of a pin.
• From the Victorian Era comes the word “greade” for a woman’s bosom.
• The yo-yo originated as a weapon in the Philippine Islands in the 16th century. It weighed 4 pounds and had a 20-foot cord. Louis Marx, a toy maker, introduced it to America in 1919.
• The largest item on any menu in the world is probably the roast camel, sometimes served at Bedouin wedding feasts. The camel is stuffed with a sheep’s carcass, which is stuffed with chickens, which are stuffed with fish, which are stuffed with eggs.
Wein is a Los Altos resident.
