- The population of the Earth can be a source of many interesting statistics. In the year 8,000 B.C., there were only 5 million people on Earth. Four thousand years later, the population had only risen by 2 million people, to 7 million people. Nowadays, Earth's population rises by 2 million roughly every nine days.
- Worldwide, around 265 people are born every minute and 115 people die, for a net increase in population of 150 people every minute.
- The average American spends 18% of his or her income on transportation, and only 13% on food.
- Around 40% of murders occur during arguments.
- A 1947 study found that during the Second World War, only about 15 to 25 percent of the American infantry ever fired their rifles in combat.
- One's lifetime risk of dying due to living with a smoker is 1 in 4,200. Getting struck by lightning over the course of a lifetime is more likely, with odds of 1 in 3,000.
- Around 1,900,000,000 Christmas cards are given in the United States of America yearly, making it the largest card-sending occasion in the country. The second-largest is Valentine's Day, with approximately 192 million cards being given.
- The story of Cinderella first appears in a Chinese book written in the 850s.
- William Shakespeare's average annual income as a playwright was under £20, which works out to about £8 per play. However, he made about twice as much from writing plays as Ben Jonson, the only contemporary playwright who was better known at the time than Shakespeare.
- Shakespeare used around 29,000 different words in his plays. About 6,000 words only appear once. About 10,000 words are not found in any surviving English literature prior to Shakespeare.
- Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short story in 1838, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket", in which three shipwreck survivors in an open boat kill and eat the fourth, a man named Richard Parker. In 1884, in the real world, three shipwreck survivors in an open boat killed and ate the fourth, whose name was Richard Parker.
- It is estimated that over 7,500,000,000 copies of the Bible have been made.
- Winnie-the-Pooh is based on a real bear. On August 24th, 1914, a Canadian soldier and veterinarian named Harry Colebourn, en route to a training camp in Valcartier, Quebec, purchased an orphaned black bear cub for $20 in White River, Ontario, which he named Winnipeg, or Winnie for short. When his unit was sent over to France during World War I, Colebourn loaned her to the London Zoo, intending to take her back to Canada after the war. However, Winnie's gentle disposition made her the zoo's top attraction, and on December 1, 1919, he donated her to the zoo. In the mid 1920's, writer A. A. Milne often took his young son, Christopher Robin, to the zoo, and Christopher named his teddy bear "Winnie-the-Pooh" after Winnie. A. A. Milne went on to write several best-selling children's books about Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh. (where did "Pooh" come from?)
- Emily Dickinson wrote over 1,800 poems. Only seven were published in her lifetime, all without her consent.
- Shakespeare makes Lear, an early Anglo-Saxon King, speak of not wanting spectacles. In relating Macbeth's death, in 1054, and King John's reign in 1200, he mentions cannons. In Julius Caesar, he makes the clock strike three. However, these three inventions were not invented until the fourteenth century. (this one gets me....)
- In 1991, the Art Loss Register, a database of stolen works of art, was created. The database now contains over 300,000 works of art, including hundreds of pieces by Picasso.
- Around one in three murder cases are never solved.
- In 1877, during the height of violent labour unrest in the United States, three men were found guilty of the murder of a foreman of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company and sentenced to hang. Two of them went stoically to their deaths, but the third, Alexander Campbell, swore that he was innocent. As he was being dragged from his cell to the gallows, Campbell rubbed his left hand in dust from the floor and pressed his palm against the plaster wall, and shouted repeatedly, "This handprint will remain here for all time as proof of my innocence." Even after Campbell's death, the handprint remained. In 1931, Carbon County Sheriff Robert L. Bowman undertook a renovation of the cell, removing the section of plaster wall containing the handprint, replacing it with a new section of fresh plaster. However, the handprint still came back, and still exists today.
- In 1865, William E. Brockway printed a counterfeit $100 bill so perfect that the Treasury Department's only recourse was to withdraw all authentic $100 bills from circulation.
- In ancient Babylonia, if a poorly-built home collapsed on the owner, killing him, the architect was executed. If the owner's son was killed in the house collapse, the architect's son was put to death. If the homeowner's wife or daughter was killed, the architect was merely fined. (wow. just wow.)
Okay. I'm done. Feel free to not read any of these. no big deal. And, as always, I leave you all with an invitation to ask me advice, or give me subjects you would like me to address, ooooor even if you would like to do a guest post. :D
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