Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, December 8, 1994                   TAG: 9412190003
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: JOEL ACHENBACH
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IT'S TIME TO REVIEW WHAT WE'VE LEARNED

Today we will review but a sampling of what we have learned to date. In the same sense that the Why column is a bold distillation of all that humankind has learned lo these many millennia, so too will today's installment seek to distill everything we have written lo these six years.

The skin on your fingers doesn't shrivel in a bathtub; it expands. Sound moves seven to eight times faster underwater than in the atmosphere. Of all the human beings who have ever been born, 7.7 percent are alive today.

There are only two types of clouds: Layer and convective. The Halsey-Taylor two-hole water fountain is designed to make the two streams of water converge at the apex of the arc of water, thus creating a fuller, wider, broader, rounder, more watery drink.

Although Herb Woodley and the mailman in ``Blondie'' look disturbingly alike, they are not, repeat, not the same person, and Herb, on closer examination, has a stronger jawline and a cleft chin. The reason Nixon taped his own nefarious conversations was he figured he could edit the tapes later. As turkeys have been bred for fatness they have lost some of their innate cunning.

The birth of Jesus is celebrated on Dec. 25, as opposed to some other day, because the Romans needed to replace the pagan holiday called the Feast of the Unconquered Sun.

The lowest score one can get on either the math or verbal SAT is 200 because the College Board didn't want anyone to feel that he or she had zero intelligence.

Some socks droop on the ankle because they are made of ``air-entangled'' nylon rather than ``twisted'' nylon. You get a runny nose when you cry because the tears drain into the nose through the tiny hole at the corner of your eye, called the puncta lacrimalia.

Heat is more efficiently transferred through the hull (``pericarp'') of popcorn than through the hull of regular sweet corn or feed corn. Porous objects get darker when they get wet because they become more transparent to light, thus reflecting less of it.

The myth of mass suicide by lemmings was promulgated in part by a filmmaker who herded a bunch of lemmings off a cliff for the 1958 Disney documentary ``White Wilderness.'' Because movie producers used to get top billing instead of directors, nobody remembers who directed ``Gone With The Wind'' and ``The Wizard of Oz''; it was Victor Fleming. The giant fetus at the end of ``2001: A Space Odyssey'' is the ultimate evolved human, a Nietzschean Superman, capable of surviving in the vacuum of space.

Within an 80-light-year radius of the Earth are about 1,000 sun-like stars that conceivably could have planets with intelligent civilizations. If you go out to 160 light-years the number increases by a factor of 10. Scientists are listening for signals from these star systems but they do not send any intentional signals themselves for fear that aliens would come to Earth and either kill or enslave us.

The last wild cow died in Poland in 1627.

Birds do not love their mates, and in fact will try to kill one another in a caged environment because they don't even recognize each other.

A monkey pounding randomly on a typewriter would very likely write ``Hamlet'' given an infinite amount of time -but that outcome is not quite an absolute certainty.

If you went back in time, you could conceivably alter the course of history -but you wouldn't. Because you didn't.

Philosophers are divided about the nature of truth; one camp says there is such a thing as objective truth that accurately describes reality, while another camps says truth is merely a useful descriptive tool within certain self-consistent systems.

Some quarters have residual red or black paint on them because they have been used by bar owners in jukeboxes to get the joint jumping; they belong to the bar rather than the vending machine company.

Humor is funny because of overlapping but incompatible frames of reference.

We exist to spread love in a large, cold universe.

Washington Post Writers Group