Walking

Brisk walking helps reduce body fat, lower blood pressure, and increase high-density lipoprotein.h The longest walk around the world was completed by a former neon-sign salesman, Jean Beliveau. He walked 46,600 miles around 64 countries. The trip took him 11 years.l Fire walking, or the act of walking over hot stones or embers with bare feet, is a religious ceremony practiced in several parts of the world, including the Indian subcontinent, China, Fiji Islands, New Zealand. It was also practiced in ancient Greece and India. Fire walking is said to help guarantee a good harvest or purify the participants.k Racewalking has been an official Olympic sport or over 90 years. Distances vary from 1 mile to 95 miles. Racewalking usually is not the most popular sport of the Olympics.j Modern literary theorists see a similarity between walking and writing. As Michel de Certeau observes, “writing is one way of making the world our own, and walking is another.”m The average Japanese takes 7,168 steps per day The United States walks the least of any industrialized nation. The average Australian takes 9, 695 steps per day (just a few short of the ideal 10,000), the average Japanese takes 7,168; the average Swiss: 9,650; and the average American just 5,117.o In modern traffic engineering, pedestrians have often been described as “pedestrian impedance,” or “vehicular delay.” Researchers note that walking has become a casualty of modern life. With the loss of walking as a cultural activity, there is a loss of an ancient and profound relationship with the body, world, and imagination.o Given that the world is about 25,000 miles in circumference and that the average walking rate is 3 miles per hour, it would take a person walking nonstop approximately 347 days to walk around the world.h It would take about 225 million years to walk one light-year at the pace of a 20-minute mile. It would take 95,000 years to travel one light-year on NASA’s Mach 9.68 X-43, a hypersonic scramjet that is the fastest aircraft in the wild. One light-year is about 5.9 trillion miles.c A typical pair of tennis shoes will last 500 miles of walking.c

Sleep

Humans spend a third of their life sleeping (25 years or more).h Humans can survive longer without food than they can without sleep.e During the first two years of a baby’s life, new parents will miss six months of sleep on average.e In 1894, Russian scientist Marie Mikhaïlovna de Manacééne conducted one of the earliest experiments on extreme sleep deprivation. She found that when she deprived puppies of sleep, they all died within four or five days, despite every effort to keep them alive. The younger the puppy, the more quickly it died.k Giraffes sleep just 1.9 hours a day while koalas sleep up to 22 hours a day Giraffes sleep only 1.9 hours a day in five- to 10-minute sessions. Koalas, however, are the longest-sleeping mammals, sleeping up to 22 hours a day.a,b The word “sleep” derives from the Proto-European base *sleb, “to be weak,” and is related to “slack.” “To sleep around” was first recorded in 1928.j Sleep is a universal characteristic of complex living organisms and has been observed in insects, mollusks, fish, amphibians, birds, and mammals.f Only one half of a dolphin’s brain goes to sleep at a time. Dolphins are capable of what is known as unihemispheric sleep, in which one hemisphere of the brain goes into a deep sleep while the other hemisphere remains awake. This allows dolphins to sleep under water without drowning. Dolphins spend approximately one third of their lives asleep.k Slow-wave sleep appeared about 180 million years ago. REM sleep is believed to have appeared 50 million years later. Humans most likely developed a monophasic sleep/wake pattern in the Neolithic period (10,000 B.C.).k In Greek mythology, Hypnos (Somnus in Roman mythology) was the god of sleep. Thanatos, or death, was his twin. Poppies and other sleep-inducing plants grew at the entrance of Hypnos’ cave.k

The Human Mind

The mind is typically defined as the organized totality or system of all mental processes or psychic activities of an individual.c Many philosophers hold that the brain is a detector of the mind and that the mind is an inner, subjective state of consciousness.h Philosophers have used a variety of metaphors to describe the mind, including a blank sheet, a hydraulic device with different forces operating in it, or a television switchboard.h Attempts to understand the mind go back at least to the ancient Greeks. Plato, for example, believed that the mind acquired knowledge through virtue, independently of sense experience. Descartes and Leibniz also believed the mind gained knowledge through thinking and reasoning—or, in other words, rationalism.c In contrast to rationalists, empiricists, such as Aristotle, John Locke, and David Hume, believe that the mind gains knowledge from experience.c Combining both rationalism and empiricism, Kant argued that human knowledge depends on both sense experience and innate capacities of the mind.c Scientists are unsure if other types of animals have a mind or if some man-made machines could ever possess a mind.h Historically, there have been three major schools of thought that describe the relationship of the brain and the mind: 1) dualism, which holds that the mind exists independently from the brain; 2) materialism, which argues that the mind is identical to the physical processes of the brain; and 3) idealism, which posits that only mental phenomena exist.i Scientists propose that the human mind evolved largely through the sexual choices our ancestors made, similar to the way a peacock’s tail evolved through sexual selection.h Brand names have a strong influence on the mind In one study, a group of experimenters were given unlabeled samples of both Pepsi and Coke. Not a single tester could tell the difference between the two. The test was repeated with the correct labels attached. Three out of the four testers chose Coke. In fact, the Coke label activated parts of the brain associated with the mind (memory, self-image, and culture) that the Pepsi label didn’t.i

Left-Handedness & Left-Handed People

Between 10-12% of people on earth are “lefties.” Women are more likely to be right-handed than men by about 4 percentage points.i August 13th is “Left-Hander’s Day.” Launched in 1996, this yearly event celebrates left-handedness and raises awareness of the difficulties and frustrations left-handers experience every day in a world designed for right-handers.e At various times in history, left-handedness has been seen as many things: a nasty habit, a mark of the devil, a sign of neurosis, rebellion, criminality, and homosexuality. It has also been seen as a trait indicating creativity and musical abilities.b Some scholars note that left-handers may be one of the last unorganized minorities in society because they have no collective power and no real sense of common identity. Additionally, left-handers are often discriminated against by social, educational, and religious institutions. Social customs and even language set the left-hander apart as “different” and even “bad.”b The word left is from the Anglo-Saxon lyft, meaning weak or broken Many sources claim that left-handers may die as many as nine years earlier than right-handers.b The word left in English comes from the Anglo-Saxon word lyft, which means weak or broken. The Oxford English Dictionary defines left-handed as meaning crippled, defective, awkward, clumsy, inapt, characterized by underhanded dealings, ambiguous, doubtful, questionable, ill-omened, inauspicious, and illegitimate.b Phrases in English suggest a negative view of left-handedness. For example, a “left-handed complement” is actually an insult. A “left-handed marriage” is not a marriage but an adulterous sexual liaison, as in a “left-handed honeymoon with someone else’s husband.” A “left-handed wife” is actually a mistress.b Research has shown a link between trauma during gestation or during birth with an increased chance of being left-handed.b Tests conducted by St. Lawrence University in New York found that there were more left-handed people with IQs over 140 than right-handed people. Famous left-handed intellectuals include Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Benjamin Franklin.b Mothers who are over 40 at the time of a child’s birth are 128% more likely to have a left-handed baby than a woman in her 20s.b

The Korean War

The Korean War began on June 25, 1950, when 75,000 North Korean soldiers poured over the 38th parallel into South Korea to impose communism on its neighbor.l The Korean War was the first military action of the Cold War.d The Korean War began at 4:30 a.m. on June 25, 1950, and ended on July 27, 1953. There are still more than 7,000 U.S. soldier missing in action from the war.a The North Korean film Unsung Heroes (1978) glorifies members of the North Korean military while depicting war crimes by South Korean and the U.S. In its cast were several U.S. soldiers who had defected to North Korea.j The 38th parallel was first suggested as a dividing line in 1896 The Korean War took a heavy toll—up to a total of 5 million dead, wounded, or missing, and half of them civilians.a Although actual hostilities during the Korean War ended on July 27, 1953, Congress lengthened the war period to January 31, 1955, to extend benefit eligibility for soldiers because peace was so uncertain after the 1953 peace negotiations.b Compared to WW II, there are few movies about the Korean War. Some of the most well known include The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Pork Chop Hill (1959), andBirthday Boy (2004). a North Koreans who were born after the Korean War in the late 1950s are on average about 2 inches shorter than South Koreans.g In March 2013, North Korea declared the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War invalid.k At the end of the conflict, the combatants signed a cease-fire at 10:00 a.m. on July 27, 1953. There was not a treatise or an official end to the Korean War.d

Civil War

The Civil War was the bloodiest war ever fought on American soil. During an average day during the war, approximately 600 people were killed. By the end of the war, over 618,000 people had died. This is more Americans than WWI, WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined.b If the names of the Civil War dead were organized similar to the names on the Vietnam Memorial wall, the Civil War memorial would be over 10 times longer.J During the Civil War, 2% of the U.S. population died. This is equivalent to 6 million men today. While rifles were the deadliest weapons during the war, disease killed more men. Camps became breeding grounds for measles, chicken pox, and mumps. One million Union solders contracted malaria.d One of every 65 Federals and 1 of every 45 Confederates were killed in action.d The Civil War is also known as "The Boy's War" The youngest soldier in the Civil War was a 9-year-old boy from Mississippi. The oldest was an 80-year-old from Iowa. More than 10,000 soldiers serving in the Union Army were under 18 years old.g A Civil War soldier’s chance of surviving the war was about 1 in 4.e More Americans died at the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania, Virginia, in May 1864 than at Omaha Beach on D-Day in 1944.d Both the war’s bloodiest day (Antietam) and its bloodiest battle (Gettysburg) occurred in Union states. More than 5,000 soldiers died at Antietam, making September 17, 1862, the single bloodiest day in U.S. military history.d Gettysburg was the largest battle ever fought in North America. It’s victor, General Meade, was born in Spain.d The most common operation performed on soldiers during the Civil War was amputation. The best surgeon could have a limb severed and discard within five minutes. Civil War doctors were nicknamed “sawbones.” There were 60,000 partial or complete amputations during the war.h

The Holocaust

The Holocaust began in January 1933 when Hitler came to power and technically ended on May 8, 1945 (VE Day).i Between 1933 and 1945, more than 11 million men, women, and children were murdered in the Holocaust. Approximately six million of these were Jews.f Over 1.1 million children died during the Holocaust.c Young children were particularly targeted by the Nazis to be murdered during the Holocaust. They posed a unique threat because if they lived, they would grow up to parent a new generation of Jews. Many children suffocated in the crowded cattle cars on the way to the camps. Those who survived were immediately taken to the gas chambers.e The Holocaust would not have been possible without mass transportation The majority of people who were deported to labor and death camps were transported in cattle wagons. These wagons did not have water, food, a toilet, or ventilation. Sometimes there were not enough cars for a major transport, so victims waited at a switching yard, often with standing room only, for several days. The longest transport of the war took 18 days. When the transport doors were open, everyone was already dead.b The most intensive Holocaust killing took place in September 1941 at the Babi Yar Ravine just outside of Kiev, Ukraine, where more than 33,000 Jews were killed in just two days. Jews were forced to undress and walk to the ravine’s edge. When German troops shot them, they fell into the abyss. The Nazis then pushed the wall of the ravine over, burying the dead and the living. Police grabbed children and threw them into the ravine as well.a Carbon monoxide was originally used in gas chambers. Later, the insecticide Zyklon B was developed to kill inmates. Once the inmates were in the chamber, the doors were screwed shut and pellets of Zyklong B were dropped into vents in the side of the walls, releasing toxic gas. SS doctor Joann Kremmler reported that victims would scream and fight for their lives. Victims were found half-squatting in the standing room only chambers, with blood coming out their ears and foam out of their mouths.b In 1946, two partners in a leading pest control company, Tesch and Stabenow (Testa), were tried before a British military court on charges of genocide. It was argued that the accused must have realized that the massive supply of Zyklon B they provided to concentration camps was far above the quantity required for delousing. They were convicted and hanged.e Auschwitz was the largest of the German concentration camps Over one million people were murdered at the Auschwitz complex, more than at any other place. The Auschwitz complex included three large camps: Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Monowitz.b Prisoners, mainly Jews, called Sonderkommando were forced to bury corpses or burn them in ovens. Because the Nazis did not want eyewitnesses, most Sonderkommandos were regularly gassed, and fewer than 20 of the several thousand survived. Some Sonderkommandos buried their testimony in jars before their deaths. Ironically, the Sonderkommandos were dependent on continued shipment of Jews to the concentration camps for staying alive.e