Factoids

Saturday, October 04, 2008

I didn’t know what to call this page. It contains some facts, some thoughts, generally, “Things that astound me”. The page is updated as I come across new facts, almost always from the books I read.

If it works, there’ll be a reference to each book near the foot of THIS PAGE, so you can purchase the book, or borrow it from your local lending library.

If you get the feeling that quotes from a book are “bunched together”, it’s because they are. As I read a book I am struck by one or more factoids, and, of course, record them here.

Here's one I made up this morning:

• Remind every teenager (younger than you) that everyone they meet who is older than them was once much younger than them!

Nano (preface)

A nanometer is a billionth of a meter; if a marble represents a nanometre, then The Earth represents a metre.

A Hydrodgen atom (as in H2O) is about 1/10th of a nanometre

A DNA molecule is 2 to 3 nanometres THICK.

A virus is 20 to 400 nanometres thick.

Salmonella (typhoid fever) is about 2,500 nanometres in length and about 500 nanometres thick.

Human blood - red cells - about 7,000 nanometres diameter

Nano (page 50)

Human fingernails grow at a rate of one nanometre per second.

[I believe that continental drift is at the rate of growth of human fingernails]

Briefer (page 53)

If each star were a grain of salt, you could fit all the stars visible to the naked eye on a teaspoon, but all the stars in the universe would fill a ball more than eight miles wide.

Briefer (page 82)

On the average, hundreds of thousands of supernovas explode somewhere in the universe each day. A supernova happens in any particular galaxy about once a century.

Briefer (page 120)

The electro-magnetic force is about a million million million million million million million times bigger than the gravitational force. (That’s a one with forty-two zeroes after it)

Violinists (page 6)

There’s enough DNA in some plant cells to stretch three hundred feet, enough DNA in one human body to stretch roughly from Pluto to the sun and back; enough DNA on earth to stretch across the known universe, many times.

Note: The dust jacket says “... we learn that there’s enough DNA in a single cell to stretch six feet, and enough DNA in our bodies to stretch almost to the moon.

Violinists (page 77)

Zipf’s Law: The most common word in a language appears roughly twice as often as the second most common word, roughly three times as often as the third most common word, a hundred times as often as the hundredth most common word, and so on,

Violinists (page 6)

Violinists (page 6)

Caesar’s (page 17)

Sulfur dioxide (SO2) – currently 0.00001 parts per million in the air; you inhale 120 billion molecules every time you breathe.

[There are thirty or more factoids of this model in the book, far too many for me to reproduce. I recommend you buy or borrow the book and see for yourself.]

Caesar’s (page 23)

Gravity eventually sucked 99.9 percent of that gas to form a new star, our sun.

[Which means that planets, satellites, asteroids, comets et al account for about 0.01 percent!].

Caesar’s (page 23)

An average molecule of air at 72ºF zips around at a thousand miles an hour.

Caesar’s (page 103)

... a human being needs to take one breath every four seconds, about 20,000 breaths each day. That means that each one of us burns through one septillion (1,000,000,000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000) oxygen molecules every twenty four hours.

Multitudes (page 8)

There are more bacteria in your gut than there are stars in our galaxy.

Multitudes (page 10)

The latest estimates suggest that we have [in our body] around 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion microbial ones – a roughly even split.

Multitudes (page 17)

Speaking of palms, your right hand shares just a sixth of its microbial species with your left hand.

Multitudes (page 251)

Every person aerosolizes around 37 million bacteria per hour.

Reality (page 153)

[Planck Length] If we enlarged a walnut shell until it had become as big as the whole observable universe, we would still not see the Planck length. It would still be a million times smaller than the actual walnut shell was before magnification.

Gut (page 71)

Our bodies create 2.4 million new blood corpuscles every day. [Since there are 24 hours in a day you can do the arithmetic yourself]

Gut (page 82)

The most powerful muscles in our body are the jaw muscles; the body’s most flexible striated muscles is the tongue.

Gut (page 148)

Our gut’s microbiome can weight up to two kilograms and contains about 100 trillion bacteria. One gram of faeces contains more bacteria than there e people on earth.

Gut (page 216)

Strangely, we can dream all sensory experiences except smells. Our dreams are always odorless.

Side (page 279)

Most of the universe is dark energy (71%), the next largest constituent is dark matter (24%), and last is everything we can see: ourselves, planets, stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies and so on. All the visible part amounts to only 4% of the total universe.

Stranger (page 310)

A human body, for example, contains ten times more non-human bacteria than it does human cells.

Lucky (page 131)

In the last hour, for instance, about one billion cells in your body were replaced without your having to think about it.

Notebooks (page 247)

70 percent of the raw material that feeds the North American auto industry, in the form of iron ore, passes below [the International Bridge that joins Sault Ste. Marie Ontario to Sault Ste. Marie Michigan].

Foolproof (page 196)

The bottom line, [Brad Spellberg] says, is that “we are not going to win a war against a species that outnumber us by 10 to the power of 22, outweigh us by 100 million, replicate 500,000 times faster than we do, and have been doing this for 10,000 times longer than our species has existed. We need to achieve peaceful co-existence.”

Cooked (page 300)

Did you know you have more bacteria in your body than human cells? By a factor of ten!

Cooked (page 323)

... microbiologists discovered that nine out of every ten cells in our bodies belong not to us, but to these microbial species (most of them residents of our gut), and that 99% of the DNA we’re carrying around belongs to these microbes.

Stranger (page 123)

An atom is 99.9999999999999 per cent nothing. If an atom is as big as St Paul’s Cathedral, then the nucleus will be the size of a cricket ball, and the electrons orbiting it will be like flies buzzing around an otherwise empty cathedral.

Stranger (page 123)

If you take the entire human race and compress them to remove all that empty space from their atoms, then the remaining matter will be about the size of a sugar cube.

Stranger (page 123)

It is an odd thought that when you trust a chair to hold your weight, that the chair barely exists in any way. It is an even odder thought to realize that neither do you.

Stranger (page 191)

[On the Apollo 8 mission around the moon] In the twentieth century mankind went to the moon and in doing so they discovered the earth.

Quotable (page 60)

The nucleus is very small. The atom in its diameter is 10-8 cm, and the nucleus in its diameter is in the order of magnitude is 10-13 cm. What does that mean? If you had an atom and you wanted to see the nucleus, you’d have to expand it so the whole atom is the size of this room, and then the nucleus is a bare speck that you can just about make out with the eye – 1/100th of an inch across.

Quotable (page 68)

If you take an apple and magnify it to the size of the earth, then the atoms in the apple are approximately the size of the original apple.

Quotable (page 93)

There are 1011 stars in the [our] galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

Quotable (page 211)

It used to be thought that atoms were small, and that was a limit of measurement, but at the present time [1979] the [measurable] distances can be described this way: If the atom is made one hundred kilometres on a side, then we’re measuring with one-centimetre accuracy.

Atlantic (page 21)

Geologists believe that when all is done the Atlantic Ocean will have lived for a grand total of about 370 million years’ It first split open and filled with water and started to achieve proper oceanic dimensions about 190 million years ago.

(To see photos of a river that is older than the Atlantic Ocean visit my page www.chrisgreaves.com\Tripping\DrivingNorthAmerica\Susquehanna and scroll to about half-way down)

Men (page 277)

The Bailey Yard, eight miles long, three thousand acres. Said to be the largest in the world.

Men (page 427)

Two percent of America’s electricity now goes to keeping the Internet cool

Incognito (page 1)

Each one of your hundreds of billions of brain cells ... is as complicated as a city. Each one of these cells contains the entire human genome and traffics billions of molecules in intricate economies.

Incognito (page 32)

Don’t assume that your blind spot is small. It’s huge. Imagine the diameter of the moon in the night sky. You can fit seventeen moons into your blind spot.

Incognito (page 37)

[Baseball] outfielders use an unconscious program that tells them not where to end up but simply how to keep running. They move in such a way that the parabolic path of the ball always progresses in a straight line from their point of view. If the ball’s path looks like it is deviating from a straight line, they modify their running path.

Incognito (page 173)

In a single cubic millimetre [millimetre!] of brain tissue, there are some one hundred million synaptic connections between neurons.

Incognito (page 199)

... your peripheral nervous system employs one hundred million neurons to control the activities in your gut. One hundred million neurons, and no amount of your introspection can touch this.

Brain (page 34)

Because our [brain matter] is constantly changing, we are too. We’re not fixed. From cradle to grave, we are works in progress.

Brain (page 56)

Brains are expensive, energy-wise. Twenty percent of the calories we consume are used to power the brain.

Brain (page 96)

Each individual brain [with all its complexity] is embedded in a world of other brains. Across the space of a dinner-table, or the length of a lecture-hall, or the reach of the internet, all the human neurons on the planet are influencing one another, creating a system of unimaginable complexity

Brain (page 116)

Time travel is something the brain does relentlessly. When faced with a decision our brains simulate different outcomes to generate a mockup of what our future might be. ... The key business of brains is to predict.

Brain (page 178)

The typical brain has about eighty-six billion neurons, each making about ten thousand connections.

Brain (page 181)

To store a high-resolution architecture of a single human brain would require a zetabyte of capacity. That’s the same size as all the digital content of the planet right now (2015). Consider the enormity of the connectome, and then multiply that by the vast number of things happening every second at every one of those connections and you’ll get a sense of the magnitude of the problem.

Brain (page 199)

Uploading [your brain to silicon] may not be that different from what happens to you each night when you go to sleep you experience a little death of your consciousness, and the person who wakes up on your pillow the next morning inherits all your memories and believes himself to be you.

Universe (page 20)

[Make a circle about one centimetre diameter with your thumb and forefinger and hold it up to the night sky]. Hold it up to a dark patch of the sky where there are no visible stars. In that dark patch with a large enough telescope of the type we have in service today [ in 2012 ], you could discern perhaps 100,000 galaxies, each containing billions of stars. Since supernovae explode once per hundred years per galaxy, with 100,000 galaxies on view, you should expect to see, on average, about three stars explode on a given night.

Vital (page 7)

Proteins are assembled on remarkable nanomachines found in all cells, called Ribosomes. ... The ribosome is unimaginably tiny. ... You have 13 million of them in a single cell from your liver.

Vital (page 8)

Ribosomes have an error rate of about one [DNA] letter in 10,000, far lower than the defect rate in our own high-quality manufacturing process.

Ribosomes operate at a rate of about 10 amino acids per second, building whole proteins with chains comprising hundreds of amino acids in less than a minute.

Vital (page 63)

The energy ‘currency’ used by all living cells is a molecule called ATP. ... A single cell consumes about 10 million molecules of ATP every second! ... There are about 40 trillion cells in the human body, giving a total turnover of ATP of around 60-100 kilograms per day – roughly our own body-weight.

Vital (page 158)

Most compellingly, the bacteria and archea have barely changed in 4 billion years of evolution. There have been massive environmental upheavals in that time ... rise of oxygen ...glaciations on a global scale ... The Cambrian explosion ... Yet throughout these shifts the bacteria remained resolutely bacterial. Never did they give rise to something as large as a flea. Nothing is more conservative than a bacterium.

Gut (page 39)

If all this – the folds, the villi and the microvilli – were ironed out to a smooth surface, our small intestine would have to be seven kilometres long.

Gut (page 82)

The most powerful muscles in our body are the jaw muscles, the body’s most flexible striated [ that is, controllable] muscle is the tongue.

Gut (page 83)

Tooth enamel is the hardest substance produced by the human body ... our jaws can exert a pressure of up to 80 kilograms on each of our molars – or approximately the weight of a grown man!

Gut (page 148)

Our gut’s microbiome can weigh up to two kilograms and contains about 100 trillion bacteria. One thirty-second of an ounce of feces contains more bacteria than there are people on Earth.

Musicophilia (page 132)

The Organ Of Corti contains about thirty-five hundred inner hair cells, the ultimate auditory receptors. A youthful ear can hear about ten octaves of sound, spanning a range from about thirty to twelve thousand vibrations per second. The average ear can distinguish sounds a seventeenth of a tone apart. From top to bottom we hear about fourteen hundred discriminable tones.

Genome (page 7)

If I wrote out the human genome, one letter per millimetre, my text would be as long as the River Danube.

Inside each cell a nucleus. Inside each nucleus two complete sets of the human genome. If the genome is thought of as a book, there are twenty-three chapters called CHROMOSOMES; each chapter contains several thousand stories called GENES; each story is made up of paragraphs called EXONS which are interrupted by advertisements called INTRONS; each paragraph is made up of words called CODONS; each word is written in letters called BASES.

The human body contains approximately 100 million MILLION cells.

Pieces (page 51)

Thanks to the work of Nobel Laureates Richard Axel and Linda Buck, we know that the human olfactory system can encode around ten thousand different smell patterns, due to the concerted operation of around four hundred different olfactory genes, each of which controls the production of a single specialized protein receptor.

Touch (page 35)

The skin of an individual human being is surprisingly big ... my resultant hide would weigh about as much as a bowling ball (14 pounds), making it the largest organ in the human body.

Touch (page 60)

... the axon (nerve cell) of a mechanosensory neuron that innervates the heel ... runs from the heel up the leg into the pelvis and through the dorsal root ganglion to enter the spinal chord at the first sacral spinal nerve ... terminating and framing synapses in a region of the brain called the gracile nucleus. In a typical person that nerve [cell] is about five feet long.

Preposterous (Page 23)

This area of the brain, known as the “third anterior nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus” is smaller than the dot at the end of this sentence.

Devils (footnote to page 109)

[quoting Ralph Buchsbaum’s “Animals without backbones”] There are probably more than half a million species of nematodes, hugely outnumbering the species in all the vertebrate classes together.

Now (page 156)

The width of a human hair is about a hundred microns (a hundred times one millionth of a meter). A skin cell is about thirty microns. A cholera bacterium is about three microns. The pathways and transistors through which electricity flows on a microchip can be as small as one tenth of a single micron. There is no such thing as a hand-crafted microprocessor. A speck of dust landing on a delicate silicon wafer would be comparable to Mount Everest landing in Manhattan.

Now (page 30)

(on the thinness of fiberglass cable) You can hold the entire collection of all the voice and data traffic travelling between North America and Europe in the palm of one hand.

Stuff (page 18)

As you bend a paper-clip, you are causing approximately 100,000,000,000,000 dislocations to move at a speed of thousands of hundreds of metres per second.

Stuff (page 46)

My back-of-the-envelope calculation of the number of atoms in the earth which I calculate to be 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms.

Grand (page 31)

The roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans [is] a simple creature made of only 959 cells.

Grand (page 70)

... even a 1-watt nightlight emits a billion billion photons each second. [Yes, 10^18]

Being (page 47)

(DNA is a metres-long molecule like a long twisted ladder) If we were to imagine the rungs [of DNA] as being the length of actual rungs on a typical ladder, then the molecule would be a ladder long enough to reach to the Moon.

Being (page 49)

Our imagined Moon-distance-long molecule is coiled up inside a cell nucleus that, on the same scale, is a sphere about one kilometre in diameter.

Sapiens (page 9)

... the brain accounts for about 2% to 3% of total body weight, but it consumed 25% of the body’s energy when the body is at rest.

Sapiens (page 339)

A joule is about the amount of energy you need to lift an apple through one metre. 3,766,800 billion billion joules of energy reach the earth from the sun each year. All the world’s plants capture only about 3 billion billion joules. All human activities and industries put together consume about 500 billion billion joules each year.

Cosmos (page 261)

The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground.

NOTE: (a) This is a 1980 publication; much radio-astronomy has been carried on since then (b) The (presumably kinetic) energy is calculated as a fall from what altitude? No matter how those two questions change things, it is still going to be an amazingly small amount of energy, isn’t it?

Hidden (page 282)

The human retina (is) a thin slab of 100 million neurons that’s smaller than a dime and about as thick as a few sheets of paper.

Bonkers (1m 48s)

“There’s something like a hundred million million (neutrinos) going through my thumb every second”. That’s 100,000,000,000,000.

Bonkers (4m 25s)

“Photons take about 30,000 years to get from the interior of the sun to the surface.” (Then 8 minutes to reach the earth)

Bonkers (6m 0s)

“An atom is about 99.9999999999999 % empty”.

Bonkers (8m 26s)

“If the sun was made of bananas it wouldn’t make any/much difference”.

Bonkers (14m 15s)

“On average, it takes two protons (i.e. two hydrogen two nuclei) about ten billion years to find each other and stick (fuse together).”

Bonkers (45m 35s)

“The observable universe contains about a hundred billion galaxies like our own Milky Way”.

Words Rules (page 3)

By their second birthday children Hoover up words at a rate of one every two hours.

The meaning of a spoken word is accessed by a listener’s brain in about a fifth of a second, before the speaker has finished pronouncing it.

Cosmos (page 196)

The total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.

Three (page 90)

There are 3.3x1022 molecules per cubic centimetre of water.

Gene (page 13)

A haemoglobin molecule ... is a definite invariant structure with not a twig or a twist out of place, over six thousand million million million times in an average human body.

Gene (page 13)

Haemoglobin (molecules) are springing into their 'preferred' shape in your body at the rate of about four hundred million million per second, and others are being destroyed at the same rate.

Gene (page 22)

There are about a thousand million million cells making up an average human body, and ... every one of those cells contains a complete copy of that body's DNA.

Gene (page 48)

...there are some ten thousand million neurons in the human brain.

Naked (page 100)

“Typically, people remember up to ten thousand faces ...”

Traveler (page 12)

“The main cells in the brain are approximately 12 billion neurons, or nerve cells.” ... “A single neuron can directly communicate with as many as four thousand or even five thousand other neurons.”

Language Instinct (page 16)

"The best definition comes from the linguist Max Weinreich: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy."

Language Instinct (page 300)

"Metabolically, the brain is a pig. It consumes a fifth of the body’s oxygen and similarly large portions of its calories and phospholipids. Greedy neuron tissue lying around beyond its point of usefulness is a good candidate for the recycling bin.".

Castles (page 198)

“The map of the world in the Admiralty War Room measured nearly twenty feet by thirty feet ... the enormous area of the Pacific [ocean] filling upwards of three hundred square feet. On this map the head of a pin represented the full view to be obtained from the masts of a ship on a clear day” Winston Churchill wrote after the war.

[Next time I read the original in Churchill I’ll replace this quotation]

Greatest Show (page 92)

A favourite analogy portrays the nucleus [of an atom] as a fly in the middle of a sports stadium. The nearest neighbouring nucleus is another fly in the middle of an adjacent stadium. The electrons of each atom are buzzing about in orbit around their respective flies, smaller than the tiniest gnats, too small to be seen on the same scale as the flies.

Plausibility (page 156)

To put things in perspective, the number of neurons in the human brain is estimated to be a hundred billion and the total number of synapses to be a million billion.

Toronto Star Friday, July 09, 2010

Twenty-six weeks after conception, the brain is at a critical period of development. It is still producing more than 50,000 neurons every second.

… a newborn's brain has 20 billion neurons and a trillion synaptic connections, and the fetal brain must create a profusion of brain cells during intrauterine life — about 250,000 each minute — to meet those demands.

Plausibility (page 118)

Humans, for example, have more than three hundred recognizable cell types and consist of about one hundred trillion cells in complex arrangements.

Plausibility (page 29)

“ … the important distinction that only the genotype is inherited but only the phenotype is selected”.

Ancestor’s (page 390)

As Robert May, the current President of the Royal Society has said, to a first approximation, all species are insects

Ancestor’s (page 198)

Under favorable conditions the lake of a beaver can span several miles, which may make it the largest phenotype of any gene in the world.

Devil's (page 45)

The military metaphor lets us think of each soldier [CG: an atom in an array of atoms in a crystal] as a metre or two from his neighbour. But actually almost all the interior of a crystal is empty space. My head is 18 centimetres in diameter. To keep to scale, my nearest neighbour in the crystalline parade would have to be standing more than a kilometre away.

Watchmaker (page 22)

There are about three million ganglion cells in the electronic interface (of each of our eyes) gathering data from about 125 million photocells. The figure of 125 million photocells is about 5,000 times the number of separately-resolvable points in a good-quality magazine photograph.

Watchmaker (page 22)

Each nucleus (of a human cell) contains a digitally-coded database larger, in information content, that all 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica put together. And this figure is for each cell, not all the cells of a body put together.

Watchmaker (page 96)

Some 1,000 million of these (electrical impulses) are transmitted every second, by means which are not properly understood, to a brain, which then takes the appropriate action.

Watchmaker (page 141)

Some species of the unjustly called 'primitive' amoebas have as much information in their DNA as 1,000 Encyclopedia Brittanicas.

Watchmaker (page 150)

Cows and pea plants (and, indeed, all the rest of us) have an almost identical gene called the Histone H4 gene. ... We don't know how long ago the common ancestor lived ... call it 1.5 billion years. ... letters carved on gravestones become unreadable in mere hundreds of years.

First Word (page 169)

(No animal communication system has an equivalent for "No", argues Jackendoff, but it tends to be one of the first words in any child's repertoire).

First Word (page 196)

All of us alive today share at least one grandmother who lived 150,000 years ago in East Africa. We also share at least one grandfather, and African man who lived 60,000 years ago.

(Ed: I know what you're thinking ... but it ain't so!)

First Word (page 279)

Nilsson and Pelger ... calculated that it would take about 1,829 separate evolutionary steps for the flat-patch eye to evolve into a stereo-vision globe. That amounts to less than 364,000 years, not long at all from an evolutionary perspective.

(Ed: I'm not at all sure that "evolutionary step" translates one-to-one to "generation").

Nature's Numbers (page 44)

(On prime numbers) The first proof of this fact worked only when the numbers got bigger than 10'10'10'10'46, where to avoid giving the printer kittens I've used the ' sign to indicate forming a power. This number is utterly gigantic. Written out in full, it would go 10000...000, with a very large number of zeroes. If all the matter in the universe were turned into paper, and a zero could be inscribed on every electron, there wouldn't be enough of them to hold even a tiny fraction of the necessary zeroes.

Boston Globe (December 1, 2009, Image 9 )

"Messier 104 (M104), the Sombrero galaxy" has a brilliant white, bulbous core encircled by the thick dust lanes comprising the spiral structure of the galaxy. As seen from Earth, the galaxy is tilted nearly edge-on. We view it from just six degrees north of its equatorial plane. At a relatively bright magnitude of +8, M104 is just beyond the limit of naked-eye visibility and is easily seen through small telescopes.

The Sombrero lies at the southern edge of the rich Virgo cluster of galaxies and is one of the most massive objects in that group, equivalent to 800 billion suns. The galaxy is 50,000 light-years across and is located 28 million light-years from Earth.

X-ray emission suggests that there is material falling into the compact core, where a 1-billion-solar-mass black hole resides. In the 19th century, some astronomers speculated that M104 was simply an edge-on disk of luminous gas surrounding a young star, which is prototypical of the genesis of our solar system. But in 1912, astronomer V. M. Slipher discovered that the hat-like object appeared to be rushing away from us at 700 miles per second.

This enormous velocity offered some of the earliest clues that the Sombrero was really another galaxy, and that the universe was expanding in all directions. (NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team, STScI/AURA) More (see this on Google Sky ).

Language Instinct (page 145)

"A bit of arithmetic shows that pre-literate children, who are limited to ambient speech, must be lexical vacuum cleaners, inhaling a new word every two waking hours, day in, day out.".

"Think of having to memorize a new batting average or treaty date or phone number every ninety minutes of your waking life since you took your first steps.".

Beneath Flanders Fields (page 266)

"In the process five unexploded shells per square metre were uncovered".

Tower (p xiv)

… but I can offer the reader a simple rule based on adequate research: all statements of how lovely it was in that [pre-war] era made by persons contemporary with it will be found to have been made after 1914.

Recognition (Mind Works page 85)

You find two crumpled balls of paper to be similar, even though their shapes are completely different, and find two people’s faces different, though their shapes are almost the same.

Men (Back To The Front page 186)

The war was over. Princip’s bullet had caused some 67 million men to don uniforms and go to fight. One in every six of these men was killed. Of the remainder, approximately half were wounded. On the Western Front alone, more than 4 million had died in their ditches.

Mixotricha (Unweaving page 229-230)

Mixotricha paradoxa is a flagellate protozoan which lives in the guts of the Australian termite Mastotermes darwiniensis. (snip!) A single Mixotricha individual, therefore, is a colony containing at least half a million symbiotic bacteria of various kinds. ... a single termite is a colony of perhaps as many symbiotic oranisms in its gut.

[ 500,000 times 500,000 is 2,500,000,000] [That’s one termite!]

Communities (Unweaving page 229)

Each individual animal or plant is a community. It is a community of billions of cells, and each one of those billions of cells is a community of thousands of bacteria.

Drink A Glass Of Water (Unweaving page 179)

For example, every time you drink a glass of water you are imbibing at least one molecule that passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell. This follows from extrapolation from Wolpert’s observation that ‘there are many more molecules in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in the sea’.

DNA (Galileo page 64)

If the human DNA in one set of twenty-three chromosomes (with one DNA molecule in each chromosome) is stretched out and joined together, then it would be about one meter long, and all that stuff has to be confined to the cell nucleus. Because the chromosomes are doubled and there are about a hundred trillion cells in a human body ...

Matter (Unweaving page 118)

Isaac Asimov has a dramatic illustration: it is as if all the matter of the universe were a single grain of sand, set in the middle of an empty room 20 miles long 20 miles wide and 20 miles high.

Yet, at the same time, it is as if that single grain of sand were pulverized into a thousand million million million fragments, for that is approximately the number of stars in the universe.

These are some of the sobering facts of astronomy, and you can see that they are beautiful.

Bar Codes On The Air (Unweaving page 72)

Think what is happening when you listen to a whole orchestra. Imagine that, superimposed on a hundred instruments, your neighbour in the concert is whispering learned music criticism in your ear, others are coughing and, lamentably, somebody behind you is rustling a chocolate wrapper.

All these sounds, simultaneously, are vibrating your eardrum and they are summed into a single, very complicated wriggling wave of pressure change.

We know it is one wave because a full orchestra, and all the noises off, can be rendered into a single wavy groove on a phonograph disc, or a single fluctuating trace of magnetic substance on a tape.

The entire set of vibrations sums up into a single wiggly line on the graph of air pressure against time, as recorded by your eardrum.

Mirabile dicta, the brain manages to sort out the rustling from the whispering, the coughing from the door banging, the instruments of the orchestra from each other.

Such a feat of unweaving and reweaving, or analysis and synthesis, is almost beyond belief, but we all do it effortlessly and without thinking.

Preface (Somme page xix)

Were one to write

a third

of a page

about every soldier

killed

on the Somme,

It would require

at least

six hundred books

as long as this one.

We are going to die (Unweaving page 1)

… and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.

Our eyes are open (Unweaving page 5)

We are granted (the privilege and) the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, and why they see what they do, in the short time before they close for ever.

Cells (Unweaving page 8)

A (human) cell is not just a bag of juice. It is packed with solid structures, mazes of intricately folded membranes.. There are about 100 million million [not a typo!] cells in a human body, and the total area of membranous structure inside one of us (humans) works out at more than 200 acres. That’s a respectable farm.

(page 9) Each one of us is a city of cells, and each cell a town of bacteria. You are a gigantic megalopolis of bacteria.

Bloody (Unweaving page 35)

The total length of capillaries round which the heart pumps the blood, from ventricle to ventricle, is more than 50 miles. If 50 miles of tubing are packed inside a human body, ...

Electrons (Atoms p 8)

It takes about 6,000,000,000,000,000,000 electrons per second to keep a 100-watt light bulb going.

Emptiness of atoms (Atoms p 21)

Imagine putting a bowling ball in the center of a city and then scattering ten peas around through the rest of the city and then you will have some idea of how empty an atom really is.

[ed: We are really talking about a three-dimensional city, 20 miles diameter …]

Per Cubic Millimeter (Feces p15)

There are somewhere in the vicinity of 10^11 bacteria per cubic millimeter of human feces. [Ed. Note that is ten raised to the power 11, or 100,000,000,000; note too that this is per cubic millimeter]

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