A Few Things I Learned This Week

And the week isn't even over yet!


----- 60 hours of video are now uploaded to YouTube every minute. That's five months of video every hour - or about 10 years every day. (According to Time magazine, more video is uploaded to YouTube every month than has been broadcast by CBS, NBC, and ABC in the last 60 years.)

----- Voyager 1 (launched in 1977) is now 11 billion miles out in space. Voyager 2 (launched at about the same time) is 9 billion miles away. (Pluto is less than 4 billion miles away.) The Voyagers travel about a billion miles every 3 years now - almost a million miles a day. It is estimated that they'll escape the last remnants of the solar system - the solar wind - when they pass the 12-billion-mile mark. At their current distance, it takes about 13 and a half hours for a radio signal to reach them. (I'm guessing that this means that neither one of them has won a radio call-in contest for some time.)

----- Ohio produced 125,000 gallons of maple syrup in 2011. That's about 1/100th of a gallon for every Ohioan. (Sorry, I'm not sharing my 1/100th!)

----- Ohio's Franklin County (home of Columbus) now has 16,769 street names. That's up 7% in just the last 10 years. (Apparently we're doing a better job producing new streets than we are at producing jobs. Or Ohioans.)

----- The average price of a hotel room in Columbus is $81.42. (Maple syrup is extra. But radio reception is generally good.)

----- There are an estimated 1000 bobcats in Ohio. (Here, kitty, kitty, kit - OWWW!)

----- Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta is a fine pianist.

----- Queen Elizabeth collects pepper grinders.

----- About 30,000 Americans have cystic fibrosis.