It’s a fact – life is a lottery

IN THE modern world, facts change all of the time, according to Samuel Arbesman, author of The Half-Life of Facts, sub-titled Why Everything we Know has an Expiration Date.

Arbesman, a senior academic at the Kaufmann Foundation and at Harvard, has looked at how facts are refashioned in the modern world.

Since fact-making is speeding up, he has written that most of us don’t keep abreast, and accordingly base our decisions on facts we dimly remember that turn out to be wrong.

Well this column can sympathise with that and wants to help. So we’re going to start with five travel facts that I can anorakly confirm are true.

1ALTHOUGH more than 200 establishments around the world are called ‘Hotel Bristol’ or similar, the city of Bristol didn’t have one until 2007, when Jury’s changed its name simply to The Bristol.

In the hotel context, the word ‘Bristol’ has a Derry connection. It is a synonym for poshness because of one John Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry. The Bishop was so widely famed as a connoisseur of all good things, that ‘Bristol’ became a byword for luxury.

2WILLIAM Congreve was educated at Kilkenny College, where he met Jonathan Swift, and at Trinity College Dublin. Ireland

suited him very well. As a poet, he was very good: ‘Music has charms to soothe the savage breast.’

3THERE are ten Martian craters named after Irish locations: Clogh, Dromore, Fenagh, Glendore, Beltra,

4TINTINNABULATION time now, and we’re not talking Hergé here. Tintinnabulation is all about bells, and Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin has a choice of three separate 12-bell peals, unique in the world.

The man in charge of Dublin’s ding-a-ling is the Ringing Master of the Tower. 5 CICADAS — tropical flying insects, pictured — go through either a 17-year or a 13-year life cycle. Evolution has taught their gene-pool the advantage of the prime numbers 13 and 17, so that their lifetimes are not divisible by that of a predator.

Cicada broods often emerge together, the University of Connecticut says, but 2024 will mark an important year when Brood XIX, which arrives every 13 years, and Brood XIII, which arrives every 17 years, will emerge at the same time. The next coemergence of these broods won’t happen for another 221 years. For more information on where and when to head, go to Cicada Safari website at