Serendipitous Factoids 3

Here's the third installment of my ongoing series of posts called Serendipitous Factoids*

• In 2010, the Philip Morris plant in Richmond that I drive past twice a day produced 146 BILLION cigarettes (a).  Those were only for domestic sale (Altria has plants overseas for “export”).  Some quick math: The population of the US in 2010 was 309 million people (b).  Subtract 35 million for kids up through 8th grade (who are less likely to have taken up regular smoking), this leaves 274 million people (c).  The rate of smoking is 15%, or 41.1 million people (d).  That’s 3,552 cigarettes per smoker annually, just shy of 10 a day.  From one company.  There are also cigarettes being produced by Brown & Williamson, Lorillard, RJ Reynolds and a couple of smaller companies, not to mention cigars, pipe tobacco and smokeless tobacco. E-cigarettes are a whole other topic.

(a) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Morris_USA

(b) https://www.census.gov/popclock/

(c) https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372

(d) https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/adult_data/cig_smoking/index.htm

• Everybody should understand this, the Gartner Hype Cycle: https://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hype-cycle.jsp

• ‘Manatee History Link’ is an anagram of my full name, as are 'Inky Rhino Stalemate', 'Skinny Aloha Emitter' and 'Horny Kitten Malaise'.  The name I usually go by can be anagrammed to ‘I Reset Mink’.  Serendipitous Factoids rearranges to 'Dissociated Pot Infuser.'  You can find all these - and more! - at the Internet Anagram Server (I, Rearrangement Servant): https://wordsmith.org/anagram/ 

• If that big trip you took years and years ago seems like it was just a couple of years back, here’s why: https://kottke.org/18/01/the-telescoping-effect

• Scottish grocers would stock selected single malts in their shops, often creating their own blends of single malts. Those blends evolved into modern blended whisky. George Ballantine (Ballantine’s), the Chivas Brothers (Chivas), William Teacher (Teacher’s) and Matthew Gloag (The Famous Grouse) were all grocers who developed their own whiskies.  So, too, was Johnnie Walker, a grocer in Kilmarnock, whose whisky blend would become the bestselling Scotch whisky in the world. https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemicallef/2018/02/01/gordon-macphail-scotch-whiskys-trailblazers/#68eb5a3a78e5

*Growing up I used to read a weekly column called, "Strictly Personal" by Sydney J. Harris.  I was especially fond of his recurring ''Things I Learned En Route to Looking Up Other Things.''  The tidbits he put into those columns filled my young head, or as my sister Diane called it, my "trivial brain."

I recalled Harris' work one day when I found myself down the rabbit hole of the internet, finding interesting fact after interesting fact, forgetting why I was surfing to start with.  I realized that I should emulate Harris and start keeping track of these things.  So I did, and here we are.

Previous Factoid editions:
Part 1
Part 2