AWESOME FACTS ABOUT EVERYTHING X

1. How quick is a wink?
The duration of of a wink ranges from .3 second to .4 second, according to Adler's Physiology of the Eye: Clinical Application, edited by Robert A. Moses

2. How many pickled peppers in a peck?
Whole hot peppers are packed 18 to 20 to the quart jar. That would give you 144 to 160 hot pickled peppers per peck.

3. How deep is skin-deep?
The dermis is one-sixteenth to one-eighth inch deep.

4. How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky?
At its deepest, in he Mariana Trench, located in the Pacific, the ocean reaches 6.856 miles. The troposphere, which includes the layer of air we breathe, is about ten miles high. The atmosphere, the layer of gasses surrounding earth, is composed of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 1% other gasses, extends upward more than 600 miles.

5. How fast is a snail's pace?
The average land snail moves at about two inches per minute - or .0019 m.p.h. The speediest, the Costa Rican Mountain Snail, can race along at 18 inches a minute, or .017 m.p.h.

6. At what point did the straw break the camel's back?
In his Treatise on One-Humped Camels in Health and in Disease, A.S. Leese reports that camels can generally carry from 240 up to 1200 pounds - which only "the very best animals" can manage. The record for camel capacity in Australia is 1904 pounds. Any straws beyond this would probably do the trick. The Bactrian (two-humped) camel can routinely carry loads up to 1,000 pounds - about twice as much as a one-humped Dromedary can carry. Dromedary camels make up 94% of the world's camel population. Camels can sense if there is too much weight, and will refuse to stand up if that's the case. It's not a good idea to try to force a camel to stand up. If you have trouble remembering which is which, the B in Bactrian - if you lay it flat - has two humps, and the D in Dromedary has one.


7. How far is it between the devil and the deep blue sea?
"The devil" refers to Scylla, an Italian rock just across the Strait of Messina from the whirlpool located off Cape Peloro, Sicily, that is referred to as "the deep blue sea." In classical Greek mythology, Scylla was a horrible, six-headed monster who lived on a rock on one side of the strait. Charybdis was a whirlpool on the other side. When ships passed close to Scylla's rock in order to avoid Chaybdis, she would seize and devour their sailors. Aeneas, Jason, and Odysseus all had to pass between Scylla and Charybdis. "Being between Scylla and Charybdis" is an idiom deriving from the myth that is associated with the proverbial advice "to choose the lesser of two evils." The distance between Scylla (the rock) and Charybdis (the whirlpool) - the devil and the deep blue sea - is four miles.