The average human eyelash lives about 150 days.
The average person’s hair will grow approximately 590 inches in a lifetime.
The average woman’s thighs are 1.5 times larger in circumference than the average man’s.
An average person uses the bathroom six times per day.
In The 1500′s:
England is old and small and they started running out of places to bury people. So, they would dig up coffins and would take their bones to a house and reuse the grave. In reopening these coffins, one out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they thought they would tie a string on their wrist and lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night to listen for the bell. Hence on the “graveyard shift” they would know that someone was “saved by the bell” or he was a “dead ringer”.
You can’t get much older than 6 million years. That is when the first human beings, known as Hominidae, evolved. They were not like apes; they had bigger brains, different teeth, and walked upright. Would you like an introduction to some of your ancestors?
Australopithecus, also called “southern ape,” lived in Africa in 3 million B.C. Some were the size of modern people; others were as small as chimpanzees. Their heads were apelike with low foreheads, flat noses, and jutting jaws. “Lucy” was a complete australopithecus found in Ethiopia in 1974. (She was named for the Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” which was playing in the camp when she was excavated.) Lucy was 20 years old when she died.
Homo habilis, or “Handymen,” lived 2 million years ago and used tools. Their brain was half the size of the human brain today. Their heads were rounder and faces smaller than those of australopithecus. Homo habilis was the first to build huts for shelter. “Piltdown Man” was long accepted as a skeleton of Homo habilis. In 1953 he was shown to be a hoax made from a human skull, ape’s jaw, and the bones of extinct animals.
Homo erectus, the “stand-up people,” lived 1 million years ago and were the first people to use fire. Their skulls were thick, their faces flat, and they had a sloping forehead with no chin. They lived in China, Japan, Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia.
Neanderthals lived in Europe about 150,000 years ago and were the first to wear clothes. They looked much like modern people except that their skulls bulged more at the back and they had receding chins, larger cheeks, and more pronounced eyebrow ridges. They were also smaller and stockier and had heavier features. They cared for their sick and buried their dead. Less than half the population reached the age of 20.
Homo sapiens means “wise humans.” We are Homo sapiens and first lived on earth about 100,000 years ago. By 33000 B.C. we were the dominant species, living everywhere but in North and South America. We look different from our ancestors because of our smaller teeth, flat foreheads, straight faces, and rounded heads. We were the first of the earth’s inhabitants to communicate through art, the spoken word, and religion.
Cro-Magnon people were named after the Cro-Magnon caves near Dordogne, France, where their remains were discovered. They were early Homo sapiens, quite tall and erect.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Born: 5/29/1917
Birthplace: Brookline, Mass.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born in Brookline, Mass., on May 29, 1917. His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was ambassador to Great Britain from 1937 to 1940.
Kennedy was graduated from Harvard University in 1940 and joined the navy the next year. He became skipper of a PT boat that was sunk in the Pacific by a Japanese destroyer. Although given up for lost, he swam to a safe island, towing an injured enlisted man.
After recovering from a war-aggravated spinal injury, Kennedy entered politics in 1946 and was elected to Congress. In 1952, he ran against Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of Massachusetts, and won.
Kennedy was married on Sept. 12, 1953, to Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, by whom he had three children: Caroline, John Fitzgerald, Jr. (died in a 1999 plane crash), and Patrick Bouvier (died in infancy).
In 1957 Kennedy won the Pulitzer Prize for a book he had written earlier, Profiles in Courage.
After strenuous primary battles, Kennedy won the Democratic presidential nomination on the first ballot at the 1960 Los Angeles convention. With a plurality of only 118,574 votes, he carried the election over Vice President Richard M. Nixon and became the first Roman Catholic president.
Kennedy brought to the White House the dynamic idea of a “New Frontier” approach in dealing with problems at home, abroad, and in the dimensions of space. Out of his leadership in his first few months in office came the 10-year Alliance for Progress to aid Latin America, the Peace Corps, and accelerated programs that brought the first Americans into orbit in the race in space.
Failure of the U.S.-supported Cuban invasion in April 1961 led to the entrenchment of the Communist-backed Castro regime, only 90 mi from United States soil. When it became known that Soviet offensive missiles were being installed in Cuba in 1962, Kennedy ordered a naval “quarantine” of the island and moved troops into position to eliminate this threat to U.S. security. The world seemed on the brink of a nuclear war until Soviet premier Khrushchev ordered the removal of the missiles.
A sudden “thaw,” or the appearance of one, in the cold war came with the agreement with the Soviet Union on a limited test-ban treaty signed in Moscow on Aug. 6, 1963.
In his domestic policies, Kennedy’s proposals for medical care for the aged and aid to education were defeated, but on minimum wage, trade legislation, and other measures he won important victories.
Widespread racial disorders and demonstrations led to Kennedy’s proposing sweeping civil rights legislation. As his third year in office drew to a close, he also recommended an $11-billion tax cut to bolster the economy. Both measures were pending in Congress when Kennedy, looking forward to a second term, journeyed to Texas for a series of speeches.
While riding in an automobile procession in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, he was shot to death by an assassin firing from an upper floor of a building. The alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was killed two days later in the Dallas city jail by Jack Ruby, owner of a strip-tease club.
At 46 years of age, Kennedy became the fourth president to be assassinated and the eighth to die in office.
Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain smoked forty cigars a day for the last years of his life.
Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain was born on a day in 1835 when Haley’s Comet came into view. When He died in 1910, Haley’s Comet came into view again.
The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
- Albert Einstein
“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”
- Albert Einstein