An All-Purpose Anthem

Americans think of the song “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” as a patriotic anthem — which is ironic, because everyone else does, too. We stole the tune from the British, who know it as “God Save the Queen,” and the same melody has served as the national anthem of Denmark, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, and Liechtenstein.

When England met Liechtenstein in a Euro 2004 qualifying football match, they had to play the same music twice.

| Art · Trivia

Largest Organism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:General_Sherman_tree.jpg

What’s the largest living thing in the world? It depends:

  • Savannah elephants get up to 26,400 pounds, and of course some land dinosaurs were far larger.
  • In the ocean, the blue whale can reach 100 feet and weigh 150 tons. It’s thought to be the largest animal that’s ever lived.
  • There’s a fungus in Oregon’s Malheur National Forest that fills 2,200 acres, but technically it’s not one individual organism.
  • Likewise, there are some stands of aspens that grow from one gigantic root system. One covers 200 acres and weighs an estimated 6,600 tons.
  • Australia’s Great Barrier Reef stretches for 2000 kilometers — it’s not a single creature, but it’s certainly the world’s largest “superorganism.”
  • The overall winning candidate is probably this tree, California’s “General Sherman.” It’s 274 feet tall and 36 feet thick at the base, with a trunk volume of 1,487 cubic meters.

The largest bacterium ever discovered, by the way, is Thiomargarita namibiensis — it grows to 0.75 mm in diameter, which means you can see it with the naked eye. Eww.

| Science & Math · Trivia

Chicken Hypnotism

http://books.google.com/books?id=jREEAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

One can hypnotize a chicken by holding its head against the ground and drawing a line straight outward from its beak.

“I recollect particularly a case of catalepsy produced in a cock,” writes Gaston Tissandier in Popular Scientific Recreations (1882). “We place a cock on a table of dark colour, rest its beak on the surface, where it is firmly held, and with a piece of chalk slowly draw a white line in continuation from the beak, as shown in our engraving. If the crest is thick, it is necessary to draw it back, so that the animal may follow with his eyes the tracing of the line. When the line has reached a length of about two feet the cock has become cataleptic. He is absolutely motionless, his eyes are fixed, and he will remain from thirty to sixty seconds in the same posture in which he had at first only been held by force.”

Most chickens will stand immobile and stare at the line for about 30 minutes. The record, reported by Hamilton Bertie Gibson in Hypnosis: Its Nature and Therapeutic Uses (1980), is 3 hours 47 minutes.

| Oddities · Trivia