Deaths from preventable causes, US, 1990s.
It costs drug pushers an average of $4,500 in loss leader giveaways, shopkeeper bribes and such to addict just -one- child to nicotine. But that child will take an average of twenty-five years to break the addiction or die, so it is still a profitable investment.
The probability that two numbers have no common factors but 1 is 6/(pi^2), about 61%. (Cited in 95Apr20 _Nature_.)
Oldest living creature: Bacteria revived from spores in bee entombed in amber: 25-40,000,000 years old. (95May19 Science.)
US Spending on nuclear weapons: $3.9 trillion. (95Jul12 Seattle Times)
US National Debt:
$4.9 trillion.
According to the annual Firearms Discharge Assault Report of the New York Police Department, disclosed by New York Newsday in June, city officers fired 155 shots at dogs in 1993 (mostly pit bulls), scoring hits 72% of the time. However, of the 1,195 shots at human perpetrators, the success rate was only 19%, and in gunfights in which the target was less than three feet away, the officers' success rate was still only 29%. [New York Newsday, 6-23-94, 6-27-94]
Carrying on a Seattle tradition, an investigative board decided that six Seattle cops were entirely justified in shooting a man with a water pistol 19 times in "self defense," according to today's (95Aug01) paper... since they've previous shot a completely unarmed man more times than that in the back and gotten full approval, the verdict is no particular surprise.
"According to the US department of Commerce, 1990 was
the first year that capital spending on the information
economy -- that is, on computers and telecommunications
equipment -- exceeded capital spending on all other parts
of the nation's industrial infrastructure."
-- Scientific American 1995 Sept p 202.
Hutterites, the "human bee colonies".
American prison population in 1980: 500,000
American prison population in 1995: 1,500,000
Americans on probation or parole in 1980: 2,500,000
Americans on probation or parole in 1995: 5,000,000
American spending on prisons in 1980: $6,000,000,000
American spendong on prisons in 1995: $30,000,000,000
Fraction of young African-American men in prison or on parole: About 1/3.
Science quiz which most American adults flunked.