Rats can tread water for three days.

According to the 1998 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, men 26 and older are twice as likely to smoke pot as their female counterparts.

In 1887, Ambrose Bierce wrote an essay titled “For Brevity and Clarity,” in which he suggests ways to alter punctuation to better represent tone. He proposed a single parenthesis flipped horizontally for wry smiles, “to be appended, with the full stop, to every jocular or ironical sentence.”

In 1860, slaves in America were worth $3.5 billion (in today’s dollars, about $80 billion).

More than 30% of voice mails remain unheard for three days or more, according to uReach Technologies, which designs voice mail systems for several phone companies. Further, more than 20% of people with voice mail rarely check their mailboxes.

This article appears in July 9 • 2010.

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