| 2321/
A home run that travelled 400 feet at Yankee Stadium on a
windless day would fly about 430 feet in Denver. If a batter
hit that same home run in Mexico City, at an elevation of
7,800 feet, it would sail 450 feet.
2322/ Gold is so elastic
that one troy ounce can be hammered into a sheet of gold leaf
that covers 250 square feet.
2323/ Gold is 19.3 times
heavier than water by volume.
2324/ A cubic foot of
gold, which would fit easily into a plastic milk crate, weighs
more than 1,200 pounds. A cubic inch weighs nearly a pound.
2325/ Only about 20 percent
of gold mined today is used for circuitry, window-coating,
and other non-jewelry purposes.
2326/ The centigrade
scale Celsius introduced was accepted first in Sweden and
France. Soon, people across the globe began using it. Celsius
wasn't immortalized until 1948, when the Ninth General Conference
of Weights and Measures declared "degrees centigrade"
should thereafter be referred to as "degrees Celsius."
2327/ Touch-tone phones
have up to 33 electrical contact points made of gold.
2328/ Satellites that
carry many of our phone calls and live television programs
are stationed about 22,240 miles away.
2329/ Julius Caesar established
the leap year as part of his Julian calendar in 45 B.C.
2330/ Caesar's astronomer,
Sosigenes, developed the Julian calendar based on the fact
that it takes the earth 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and
46 seconds to revolve around the sun. This time was abbreviated
to 365 1/4 days, and a calendar year was defined as 365 days,
with one "leap day" added every four years to compensate
for the lost quarter day.
2331/ As time ticked
on, people began noticing the flaws of the Julian calendar.
In 1582, Pope Gregory XII noticed that the spring equinox---when
day and night are of equal length. The pope fixed the problem
by erasing 10 days, declaring that the day following Oct.
4, 1582 would be known as Oct. 15, 1583.
2332/ If the first year
of a century is divisible by 400, it is a leap year; if it's
not, then that year isn't a leap year.
2333/ Although most Roman
Catholic countries adopted it at once because it recalibrated
the beginning of spring and restored Easter to its proper
time, Protestant countries didn't make the change for 200
years. England resisted the switch until 1752, and the loss
of 11 days caused by the date adjustment spurred riots in
the streets. Russia didn't accept the Gregorian calendar until
1918, which means that when the U.S. purchased Alaska in 1867,
11 days were lost in the transition from the Julian calendar.
2334/ It takes 11-and-one-half
days for one million seconds to pass. For a clock to tick
away a billion seconds, it takes 32 years.
2335/ One trillion seconds
ago, Neanderthal man (and woman) walked the earth. The 1,000,000,000,000
seconds since then add up to 31,709 years.
2336/ Human hair grows
at the rate of .00000001 miles per hour.
2337/ Americans smoke
about 500,000,000,000 cigarettes a year.
2338/ Red has the longest
visible wavelength of light, at about 0.7 micrometers.
2339/ When the sun is
directly overhead, its rays travel 93 million miles through
space and then penetrate the atmosphere, a 20-mile thick layer
of air that coats the planet. When the sun is sitting just
above the horizon, its rays penetrate about 12 times more
atmosphere than at midday.
2340/ When an object
is moving slower than the speed of sound, which is about 1,100
feet per second at sea level (about 768 miles per hour), sound
waves precede the object like ripples in a pond. A moving
car, for example, sends out waves of noise that can alert
a raven standing on the road to its approach, allowing the
raven to fly away before getting hit.
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