PETWHAC

PETWHAC stands for Population of Events That Would Have Appeared Coincidental. Population may seem an odd word, but it is the correct statistical term. I won't keep using capital letters because they stand so unattractively on the page. Somebody's watch stopping within ten seconds of the psychic's incantation obviously belongs within the petwhac, but so do many other events. Strictly speaking, the grandfather clock's stopping should not be included. The mystic did not claim that he could stop...

 Science of a Second

The old definition of a second was based on the rotation of the Earth. As it takes the Sun one day to rise in the east, set in the west and rise again, a day was almost arbitrarily divided into 24 hours, the hour into 60 minutes, and the minute into 60 seconds. However, the Earth doesn’t rotate uniformly. In fact, it’s rotation decreases at a rate of about 20 millionths of a second every calendar year due to tidal friction caused by the Moon. Atomic time relies on the energy transition w...

 12X Spiral

The theory is that numbers are self-organized around the smallest, most highly composite number, 12. The number 12 and many of its multiples (24, 36, 48, 60, etc.) are HCNs: highly composite numbers (with lots of divisors), which are extremely useful for measuring and proportions. Why are there 12 eggs in a carton, 12 inches in a foot, 12 months in a year, 24 hours in a day, 360 degrees in a circle, 60 seconds in minute? Because highly composite numbers can be divided evenly in many ways. For...

 Adventists Live Longer

In America here, life expectancy for the average woman is 80. But for an Adventist woman, their life expectancy is 89. And the difference is even more pronounced among men, who are expected to live about 11 years longer than their American counterparts. Now, this is a study that followed about 70,000 people for 30 years. Sterling study. And I think it supremely illustrates the premise of this Blue Zone project. This is a heterogeneous community. It's white, black, Hispanic, Asian. The only t...

 The Charcoal Produced by Respiration

A man in twenty-four hours converts as much as seven ounces of carbon into carbonic acid; a milch cow will convert seventy ounces, and a horse seventy-nine ounces, solely by the act of respiration. That is, the horse in twenty-four hours burns seventy-nine ounces of charcoal, or carbon, in his organs of respiration to supply his natural warmth in that time ..., not in a free state, but in a state of combination.

 Demoivre's Death

The manner of Demoivre's death has a certain interest for psychologists. Shortly before it, he declared that it was necessary for him to sleep some ten minutes or a quarter of an hour longer each day than the preceding one: the day after he had thus reached a total of something over twenty-three hours he slept up to the limit of twenty-four hours, and then died in his sleep.