Despite their aggressive nature, large groups of Homo Sapiens have proven capable of successful cooperation when united by the belief in a common myth. All recorded examples of large-scale collaboration in the species – from the formation of tribes, to the design of religions, and economies - have been based on common myths that only exist in the group's collective imagination.
The image above is a photograph of a hairless chimpanzee taken by Tim Flach
Noah Strycker, the author of “The Thing With Feathers,” a book about birds, recently told an interviewer that the domestic chicken “has more numbers” than any other vertebrate.
He put the planetary figure at 24 billion - or 3.5 chickens for every person.
While that’s a big number, it’s nowhere close to the record. In terms of total population, the winner is a bristlemouth — a fish that lives in the middle depths of the world’s oceans.
Biologists put the global figure for bristlemouths at hundreds of trillions — perhaps quadrillions or thousands of trillions.
“They’re everywhere,” Bruce H. Robison, a senior marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, said of the bony little fish. “Everybody agrees. It’s the most abundant on the planet.”
It makes sense that the winner is a fish. Habitats on land — rain forests, steppes, woodlands, deserts, alpine meadows, all well explored over the centuries — make up less than 1 percent of the planet’s biosphere. The band of life is narrow. Fertile soil goes down only a few feet, and even the tallest trees stretch up only a few hundred feet.
Water, however, is a different story. It covers more than 70 percent of the earth’s surface and goes down miles. Scientists put the ocean’s share of the biosphere at more than 99 percent.
From William H. Broad’s ‘An Ocean Mystery in the Trillions’
The man credited with the ‘invention’ of the numbering sequence of the modern standard dartboard is Brian Gamlin. Gamlin was a carpenter and showman from the County of Lancashire, England and came up with the sequence at the age of 44.
He introduced the numbering variation at a county fair in 1896. Though darts were already a popular fairground activity, Gamlin built the board for a new game he called ‘round the clock’ in which players have to score with darts in numerical order.
Gamlin designed the numbering in such a way as to cut down the incidence of ‘lucky shots’ and reduce the element of chance. The numbers are placed in such a way as to encourage accuracy - the placing of small numbers on either side of large numbers.
There are 2,432,902,008,176,640,000 different possible arrangements of the 20 segments on a standard dartboard, so it's impressive that Gamlin’s arrangement of the numbers is almost perfect.
From a mathematical perspective, total of the difference between adjacent numbers on Gamlin's board is 196, only 4 away from the maximum possible total of 200.
The best way to improve the board would be by moving the 14 and placing it between the 6 and the 10.
Between 1845 and 1855 Ireland lost a third of its population—1 million people died from starvation and disease and 2 million emigrated. The decimation of the potato crop in the 1840s brought on the danger of mass starvation, but it was Britain's calculated response that perpetuated the tragedy.
Contrary to popular opinion, the conditions of a famine did not truly exist in Ireland during this time. During the ten year period, researchers have estimated that the island produced enough food to feed 18 million people, more than double its population at the time. English protestant landowners had access to a varied diet and the Irish economy as a whole remained a profitable exporter of grain, pork, beef and fish.
The problem for the Irish people was that they had limited access to these native food resources. British penal law, first instituted in 1695, made it illegal for Irish Catholics to own land, apply for fishing or hunting licenses or to enter trades or professions. This forced the Irish to remain as sharecropping farmers subsisting on small rented farms owned by English Protestants. They relied almost exclusively on the sale of potatoes to pay rent to their landlords and buy food.
When a devastating water mold (phytophthora infestans) struck the potato harvest in 1845, the Irish were deprived of their only cash-crop. Many tried to eat the rotten potatoes and fell ill to cholera and typhus. Landlords evicted the starving tenants, or sent them to workhouses where overcrowding and poor conditions led to more starvation, sickness, and ultimately death. More sympathetic landlords paid the passage for their tenants to emigrate to America, Canada, and Australia. Ship owners took advantage of the situation and wedged hundreds of diseased and desperate Irish into ships that were hardly sea-worthy. These ships became known as "coffin ships" as more than one-third of the passengers died on the voyage.
The belief that the famine was God’s intention guided much of Britain’s policy in their management of the crisis. They viewed the crop failures as “a Visitation of Providence, an expression of divine displeasure” with Ireland and its mostly Catholic peasant population.
The British government in Ireland, led by Sir Charles Trevelyan, was far more concerned with modernizing the Irish economy and reforming its people’s “aboriginal” nature than with saving lives. Trevelyn described the famine as an "effective mechanism for reducing surplus population" and that "the real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people".
Trevelyan and other leading British officials had a direct hand in filling newspapers with the idea that the famine was the result of a flaw in the Irish character. Punch, a satirical magazine, regularly portrayed 'Paddy’ as a simian in a tailcoat and a derby, engaged in plotting murder, battening on the labour of the English workingman, and generally living a life of indolent treason. The result of such dehumanizing propaganda was to make unreasonable policy seem more reasonable and just.
Trevelyan never expressed remorse for his policies even after the full scope (approximately 1 million lives) of the Irish famine became known.
Sources: John Kelly's 'The Graves are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People' and Tim Pat Coogan's 'The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy'
No. Unlike sugar that will melt at 366 °F (186 °C), salt remains in a solid state during the cooking process. Salt's melting point is 1545 °F (841 °C) which is significantly higher than the melting point of an aluminum frying pan. The reason that salt seems to disappear after you sprinkle it in a pan is that when salt comes into contact with water, the H2O will pull apart the sodium chloride on a molecular scale appearing to dissolve it. The salt, however, will remain intact, once the water is removed.
Note: The header image is table salt (sodium chloride) at 150x magnification.