Curiosities #3

Alcohol can be cold-distilled as well as heat-distilled. Place a fermented mixture of weak spirits in closed container, freeze, and the alcohol will concentrate in the center of the container. Siphon out or crack open.

How to do the Macarena:
Right hand forward
Left hand forward
Right hand on left arm
Left hand on right arm
Right hand on head
Left hand on head
Right hand on behind
Left hand on behind
Sway three times
Jump to face left, and start again.

All the letters of the alphabet:
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. (35 letters + 8 spaces)
Victors flank gypsy who mixed up on job quiz. (35 letters + 8 spaces)
Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs. (32 letters + 7 spaces)
Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz. (31 letters + 6 spaces)
DJs flock by when MTV ax quiz prog. (27 letters)
(these are known as pangrams. Now Wiki has a huge list of them here.

At a depth of 24,000 kilometers below the cloud surface, a third of the way to Jupiter’s center, the temperature is 20,000 degreesC. At the center itself the temperature has reached a whopping 54,000 degreesC, nine times that of the surface of the Sun. (from Azimov, The Collapsing Universe)

If the Earth had an even density throughout, the gravitational pull would decline steadily as we penetrated beneath the surface and would reach zero at the center. Because of the changing density in Earth’s interior this is not quite so. So much of the Earth’s mass is concentrated in the relatively small liquid core - which contains 31.5 percent of the Earth’s mass in 16.2 percent of its volume - that the gravitational pull actually goes up slightly as one penetrates the Earth. In fact, by the time we found ourselves on the boundary between the mantle and the core, the gravitational pull on us would be 1.06 times what it is on the surface. As, however, we penetrated the core, the gravitational pull would finally begin to decrease and would reach zero at the center. (from Asimov, The Collapsing Universe)

The Earth tends to gain some mass as it collides with and retains meteoric matter to the tune of some 35,000,000 kilograms a day. (from Azimov, The Collapsing Universe)

The solitary wasp, Sphex, paralyzes its victim, carries it off, and descends to deposit it precisely in front of the door of the round burrow. She drops the beast, enters the burrow, inspects the interior for last-minute irregularities, then comes out to pull it in for the egg-laying. It has the orderly, stepwise look of a well-thought-out business. But if, while she is inside inspecting, you move the caterpillar a short distance, she has a less sensible second thought about the matter. She emerges, searches for a moment, finds it, drags it back to the original spot, drops it again, and runs inside to check the burrow again. If you move the caterpillar again, she will repeat the program, and you can keep her totally preoccupied for as long as you have the patience and the heart for it. It is a compulsive, essentially neurotic kind of behavior, as mindless as an Ionesco character, but the wasp cannot imagine any other way of doing the thing. (from Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell)

The Puritans brought from England a dislike of Christmas. They declared it "an extreme forgetfulness of Christ, by giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights." The celebration of Christmas was made a crime in Massachusetts in 1659; this statute was repealed in 1686. It was not until 1885 until Christmas was given official recognition as a holiday for government workers.

The world's second-highest per capita income (after the United Arab Emirates) is in the tiny South Pacific island of Nauru (8000 residents), as a result of their sale of seagull guano.

Our destination was the westernmost of the Aleutian Islands, the farthest west extension of the North American Continent and the farthest east, too, because in mid-sweep the archipelago crosses into east longitude.