Strange BUT TRUE

• It was writer and cartoonist James Thurber who made the following sage observation: “Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.”

• A single pound of sequoia seeds contains roughly 90,000 individual seeds.

• The Romans were a bit wordy, it seems, when it came to naming certain foods. Would you recognize “oryza sativa” if you saw it? It’s Latin for “rice.” How about “solanum tuberosum”? That’s what they called a potato.

• You might be surprised to learn that sloths can hold their breath longer than dolphins — much longer. Dolphins come up to the surface for air about every 10 minutes, while sloths can go 40 minutes without taking a breath.

• Evidently it’s not just humans who associate a deeper voice with maturity (and desirability) in males. It seems that male owls try to appear more macho and attract females by lowering the tone of their hoots.

• Did you know that in a random group of 23 people, there’s a 50% likelihood that two will share a birthday? It seems counterintuitive — there are, after all, 365 days in a year — but the number-crunchers assert that it’s true. In a group of 57 people, it’s almost certain that two of them will have the same birthday — the chances are more than 99%. Once you get up to 124 people, the chances are only 1 in 100 trillion that there won’t be a duplicated birthday.

• The largest structure ever built by living creatures isn’t man-made — it’s Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

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Thought for the Day: “There’s only one way to have a happy marriage — and as soon as I learn what it is, I’ll get married again.” — Clint Eastwood