Curious Facts

Page 13

In 1984 a New York psychiatrist, Casper Schmidt, published a paper in the Journal of Psychohistory entitled “The Group-Fantasy of AIDS”, in which he argued that AIDS was not a real disease but a product of “epidemic hysteria”. He died of AIDS ten years later.
In1644 John Lightfoot (1602-1675), Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, published his calculation that the world was created "on October 23, 4004 B.C., at nine o'clock in the morning."
[source: A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom By Andrew Dickson White]
According to James Ussher, who became Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of Ireland in 1625, the Creation began on Saturday 22 October, 4004 BC. This calculation was accepted by the Church of England. From 1701 it was printed in their authorised version of the Bible. It could still be found in the margin of the King James Bible at the beginning of the 20th century.
[Sources: The Age of the Earth by G. Brent Dalrymple; The Annals of the World by J. Ussher (1658)]
Scientists calculate the age of the Earth to be approximately 4.54 billion years (4.54 x 10⁹). The age of the Universe is estimated to be 13.75 billion years (13.75 x 10⁹).
In 1961 Raymond Queneau published one hundred thousand billion sonnets in one book. The book was called "Cent mille milliards de poèmes". The book consists of ten wholly unique sonnets, but each line of each sonnet is printed on a different strip of card, giving the reader 10 choices for each of the 14 lines. Each of the 10 choices for each line has the same rhythm and rhyme, enabling the reading create up to 100, 000, 000, 000, 000 different sonnets. It would take over 360 million years to read every one of these sonnets, reading one sonnet per minute for 12 hours every day.
In 1969 George Perec wrote La Disparition (The Dissappearance), a 300 page novel which does not contain the letter e, apart from in the printing of the author's name.
George Perec's La Disparition has been translated into several language, including English, German, Spanish, Turkish, Swedish, Russian and Dutch, in which the translators have imposed the same rule as the original of excluding the most commonly used letter in the language in which it is written.

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