BY JAMES K. WHITE | JANUARY 23, 2013
Dimples on a golf ball
The U.S.A. is approximately 27 times as large as Norway, yet those tricky Norwegians have somehow managed to possess a coastline longer than ours.
“St.-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!” is the actual name of a town in Canada. Population 1300 ( Tee-Hee).
The lifespan of a typical hurricane is nine days.
The number of dimples on a golf ball varies (usually between 300 and 500). Most golf balls have exactly 336.
William Penn founded Pennsylvania (January 5, 1681) as a colony for his religious group who called themselves “Society of Friends.” The sect is more commonly called “Quakers.” Towards Penn’s credit, I should like to mention that all religious groups were welcomed into Pennsylvania, William Penn did pay Native Americans for the land he occupied and Penn opposed slavery during an era when such behavior was not popular with many of the wealthy in the New World. Pennsylvania means “Penn’s Woods.”
Another reason why we should not bite each other: Biologists recently obtained a scraping from the surface of an adult human’s tongue and from that sample identified 7,947 distinct species of bacteria.
Each year, approximately 1.5 million Americans suffer from aortic valve stenosis, a condition that often leads to fatal heart attacks. One of the best remedies thus far has involved open-heart surgery to replace the defective valve. One big problem has been that the patients are frequently so frail that they cannot endure such an invasive procedure. Enter the Sapien Transcatheter Heart Valve. The new device can be inserted through a femoral artery, making thousands of patients previously ineligible for valve replacement surgery to receive the treatment they desperately need.
The first Easter Baskets were intended to look like bird nests, replete with straw, grass and eggs. Those earlier baskets have affected the modern day products with cellophane grass, various candies and the ridiculous children’s tale that rabbits lay chocolate eggs. Fairies bring those.
Centuries ago the Huron Indians planted hundreds of saplings in the shallow waters of a lake in order to trap fish. After the Iroquois “acquired” the territory (results of local warring), they named the lake and the region with a word that means “place where trees stand in water.” That word is Toronto. In 2010, the Toronto metropolitan area had a population of 2.6 million (people, not saplings). Well, don’t contract a headache while counting ball dimples – and have a great week.
James White is a retired mathematics teacher who enjoys sharing fascinating trivia. He can be reached at [email protected].
