To: WSFAlist at keithlynch.net
Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2002 08:19:59 -0500
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Leonardo Da Vinci
From: ronkean at juno.com
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

On Tue, 2 Apr 2002 20:21:48 -0500 (EST) "Keith F. Lynch"
<kfl at keithlynch.net> writes:

...how  much longer would Reagan (the oldest ever ex-president) have to
live so
> that he will not have been dead longer than he was alive until some
> time in the 22nd century.
>
> The answer is "four more years".  Now where have I heard that
> phrase before?
>

RR was born Feb. 6, 1911.  Four years from now, he will be 95.  And 95
years beyond 2006 puts the date in the 22nd century.

> Concerning the Equal Rights Amendment, I'll confess to not noticing
> that it was no longer a current issue.  It was only when you guys
> reminded me of it that I realized that I haven't heard much about
> it lately.  It's considered a dead issue?
>

It's not talked about much these days, and it is in a sense officially
dead, because the deadline for ratification was June 30, 1982.
Thirty-five of the needed 38 states have ratified it.  It takes
two-thirds of each House of Congress to propose an amendment, and that
was achieved in 1972.  The equal rights amendment had been introduced
each year in Congress since 1923.  The ERA continues to be introduced
each year in Congress, now that the deadline under the resolution of 1972
has passed.  The website is http://www.equalrightsamendment.org/ .

> Some people were impressed by my computer history exhibit.  But I
> have fossils more than ten million times older than those PDP-11
> manuals, punched cards, and Nixie tubes.  And yet those fossils all
came
> from the most recent ten percent of our planet's history.
> --

Almost all of the matter we encounter in our daily lives is, in a sense,
billions of years old.  Neutrinos, presumably, don't count because we
don't notice them.  Our bodies are mostly water.  Many of the water
molecules in someone alive today were at one time in the body of Leonardo
Da Vinci, when he was alive.  Approximately how many molecules would that
be, for a person who today weighs 70 kg, assuming that Leonardo lived 68
years, and consumed 3 kg of water per day, and assuming that the
biosphere contains 1.3E18 tons of mobile water?  I figure that Leonardo
consumed about 75 tons of water during his lifetime, and that each of us
today (weighing 70 kg) have about 100 billion of Leonardo's water
molecules in our body.  Also, I figure that in a twelve ounce bottle of
Pepsi, there would be about 650 million molecules of Leonardo water.  Of
those 650 million molecules, about 26,000 would have been consumed by
Leonardo on the day he finished painting the Mona Lisa, assuming he drank
3 kg of water that day.

Ron Kean

.

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