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There's nothing like scientific discovery to twist a perfectly good day into a tumult of terror.
Take, for example, this little pleasantry: "The average person accidentally eats 430 bugs each year of his life."
That's 430 accidental buggy bites. Every. Single. Year. Almost one and a quarter creepy crawlies a day.
Which means I've personally popped close to 24,000 flies, gnats, spiders, ants and possibly centipedes during my lifetime. So far.
Gee, Science, thanks for letting me know.
I learned this lovely little lump of lore after plugging the words "weird science facts" into a computer search engine. Sites ranging from Huffington Post to Science Kids to Urban Times to Oddee to Viralnova raked up a barrage of bothersome brain blasts from sources that seem to range from the book "1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off" to Victor Frankenstein's doctoral thesis.
I shuddered over factoids like this:
* It really can rain cats and dogs. Well, fish and frogs, anyway, when the wind and rain are just right. Science Kids reports the "most recent occurrences include the rain of frogs and toads in Serbia (2005) and London (1998), and rains of fish in India (2006) and Wales (2004).
I'm going to start carrying an umbrella. Reinforced.
* "A hippopotamus can run faster than a man." A hippo, at about 3,300 pounds, averages 19 mph. Man, at about 190 pounds, averages 15 mph.
* "The average person walks the equivalent of three times around the world in a lifetime." That totals nearly 75,000 (bug-filled) miles. Probably more if you wander too closely to a nest of hippos -- and can make 20 mph.
* "Potatoes have two more chromosomes than humans."
* "Brains begin to deteriorate at about age 27."
So I've been on a downward spiral for more than half my life. But I bet even with its chromosomal bragging rights, a 27-year-old potato looks a lot more shriveled than my gray matter. I hope.
* "The human brain soaks up 11 million bits of information every second but is conscious of only 40." This is why I can never remember everything on the shopping list.
* "The more you know a subject, the more difficult it is to talk about it with someone who doesn't."
This is why the person without a clue is always the loudest goofball in the room. He doesn't have to consider any facts.
* "If someone jumped into a tunnel drilled straight through the Earth, it would take 42 minutes and 12 seconds to reach the other side."
That's not true because you can't fall up, which is what you'd be doing about halfway through the dive. So instead of blasting out of the hole like a Whac-A-Mole on the other side of the planet, you'd start falling the other way again once you passed the halfway point.
No, wait. Then you'd be falling up again. You can't fall up the hole you jumped down any more than you can fall up the hole on the other side of the world. So at about 21 minutes and six seconds, you'd end up floating in the center of Earth forever. Yeah, that's gotta be a fact.
I'd look it up, but the more you know about a subject…
Personally, I can't recommend looking up any scientific facts. It's not an amusement for those of squeamish sensibilities.
— Burt's brain is remarkable. Let's leave it at that. Find more of his wisdom at the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook or by writing him at burtseyeview@tribtoday.com.