270 Knee Jerk Trivia

Bob Smith 0:00
What literary reference resource dating from the 18th century is not only surviving but thriving in the digital age,

Marcia Smith 0:08
and how old was the longest recorded life in human history?

Bob Smith 0:13
Wow, answers to those and other questions coming up in this episode of the off ramp with Bob and Marcia Smith.

Bob Smith 0:36
Welcome to the off ramp. A chance to slow down, steer clear of crazy, take a side road to sanity and get some perspective on life with fascinating facts and tantalizing trivia. This is the podcast dedicated to life long learning. I’m still learning, are you

Unknown Speaker 0:55
I’m alive? Yes, and I’m learning speaking

Bob Smith 0:57
of life. So how long is the longest a person has

Marcia Smith 1:01
ever lived? Yes, you want me to answer that? Or do you want to go,

Bob Smith 1:04
I’m gonna try. Okay, could you read the question again? So I know I’ve got it, right. Sure.

Marcia Smith 1:08
How old was the longest recorded life in human history? The

Bob Smith 1:14
longest recorded life now we’re not talking about the Bible and all these people recorded. Yeah, okay, okay, so I would say 115 years. Yeah, maybe 117 Wow. No, maybe 123 years. Probably a slave, a former slave. Seems like these people live longer. Okay, okay, when

Marcia Smith 1:34
Gene Calmit was born in France on February 21 1875 the Eiffel tower had yet to be built and the telephone wouldn’t be invented for another year. When she died in 1997 she lived the longest life in recorded human history, 122 years and 164 days. Wow, I had it. You did 122 and a half a longevity expert who knew Calment, attributed her record setting lifespan to the facts that she was wealthy.

Speaker 1 2:07
Well, what wealthy? Oh, wealthy. She was wealthy.

Marcia Smith 2:11
Didn’t smoke much later in life, and had absolutely nothing to do except take care of herself and tour around France and have social activities also

Bob Smith 2:21
so be rich and carefree. Yeah, that probably is a good prescription

Unknown Speaker 2:25
for a long health she probably ate well too.

Bob Smith 2:29
I thought you said she was well feed. I thought that’s what you were saying, instead of wealthy. Oh, okay,

Marcia Smith 2:33
as of 2025, the US is number two, with over 101,000 centenarians. Number one is Japan. They have 146,000 centenarians. So 146,000

Bob Smith 2:46
people over 100 years of age living in Japan. Yeah.

Marcia Smith 2:49
And here we’re number two, with over 100,000 and some scientists believe recent medical advancements have made a lifespan of 150 years feasible. Wow, and that the first person to reach that age has already been born. Do you think

Bob Smith 3:05
you would like to live that long? I mean, just knowing what you know about life so far, well,

Marcia Smith 3:10
if they have cured a few things more, yeah, okay, would I, I don’t know, see,

Bob Smith 3:16
I don’t think I would, yeah. I mean, you, you outlive almost everybody who’s ever lived, yeah, all your friends are gone, yeah? Well, you’ve probably outlived your children for God, yeah,

Marcia Smith 3:26
yeah, no, I don’t want to do that. I’d want to only if everybody was living longer, if I was the anomaly, that wouldn’t be any fun. But if I’m perky and don’t have arthritis and, you know, and, and it’s decaying disease, now it might be interesting, but no, I’m already No, I don’t think I would. Is the answer? The short answer,

Bob Smith 3:49
okay, let’s go to where you would go to find more information on that. What literary reference resource dating from the 18th century is not only surviving, but thriving in this digital age.

Marcia Smith 4:04
Well, I take find it online. Merriam webster.com, no,

Bob Smith 4:08
no. Merriam Webster, that’s a good one. Yeah, I don’t Webster dictionary has been around for a long time. Yeah? Encyclopedia Britannica. Oh, really, it is not only surviving, it is thriving for nearly 250 years. It was what the New York Times described as a bookshelf bursting series of gilt lettered Tomes. But the last print edition was published in 2010 really 32 volumes, 2010 it weighed 129 pounds and cost $1,400

Marcia Smith 4:40
so people weren’t buying that for their kids anymore, but

Bob Smith 4:42
today it’s a heavyweight in the digital age. And the answer is AI. There were many skeptics when they announced they were ending their print edition to go digital. They had launched britannica.com as a website in 1994 but many wondered how long it could compete with Wikipedia. You know, yeah. They adopted their model of experts writing articles for free and well, today, Britannica is not just surviving. It’s thriving. It’s making money. That’s because the Swiss financier who bought the company in 1995 a man named Jacob Safra, invested early on in what artificial intelligence, way back in 2000 really, he bought Melango, a company it admired for its natural language processing and machine learning capabilities. The company has multiple websites driven by milling goes AI software agent, websites with 7 billion annual pay views from users in over 150 countries. Okay. Sites include the britannica.com and the Merriam Webster dictionary. They own that too. Those are both very good resources on the web these days, and today, Britannic uses AI to create fact check and translate its content. I’ll be darn Oh my gosh. It’s nice to know that something so many of us used when we were like, in high school to do term papers is still around and still vibrant. I think it’s great. Yeah,

Marcia Smith 5:59
you are correct. Okay, Bob, you’ll like this. Several biotech labs are trying to develop a more sustainable and ethical leather handbag.

Bob Smith 6:12
Well, that’s very important. We need that as we know, what are they trying to do? They’re trying to develop a more sustainable leather hand. Remember when I

Marcia Smith 6:20
brought home a vegan, yeah, vegan handbag. And I said, What? It’s vinyl. What? How can that be vegan? I don’t know. This is a sustainable leather handbag,

Bob Smith 6:29
yeah, how can that be? I don’t know. Explain, explain. Lucy, okay,

Marcia Smith 6:32
I will. Well, I’m not sure I want this for Christmas, Bob, but they’re trying to get the T Rex DNA leather handbag made. What? Yeah. According to Science alert.com a team of biotech startups are trying to create a lab grown leather based on fossil remnants of the T Rex. Oh, my

Bob Smith 6:53
God. God. What a great idea. Yeah. Well, what could possibly go

Marcia Smith 6:59
wrong? Killing anything. We’re just taking goodness. All right, go ahead. They’ve been having some bumpy times here, but they’re still working on it. I can only imagine the the Macy’s display of these handbags, what it would look like, you know, but fun, you could

Bob Smith 7:14
some animatronics here, yeah, big dinosaurs. Wow. So they’re and that is the purpose for trying to breed or grow this dinosaur leather handbag. Yeah, yeah. Oh, my goodness, that

Marcia Smith 7:29
sounds like a waste of money to me. Oh, my God, I’m gonna go back to my vegan

Bob Smith 7:33
All right. More science. Marcia, okay, you know, the other day, we said, Which planet is surrounded by rings? And you said, Well, it’s Saturn or Jupiter. And I said, No, it’s all four of the giant planets of the solar system have rings. You know, that’s been discovered as we’ve had our space telescopes out there. Well, we and our Sun are in the Milky Way galaxy. But how many other suns are in the Milky

Marcia Smith 7:56
Way? Oh, I thought you meant our Sun. Okay, I see, I see where you’re going Earth

Bob Smith 8:00
and its sun, Marsha, are both in the Milky Way. Okay, so what’s the question? How many other suns are in the Milky Way galaxy? Oh, gosh. Well, according to NASA 12, our Sun is one of at least 100 Oh, dear billions. Oh, my stars off a bit in the Milky Way slight. Whoops. Now our Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light years across, so the chances of us coming in contact with any of these other suns is pretty sparse. How do they know there’s that many suns? Well, the telescopes, I think there’s, are showing a lot,

Marcia Smith 8:35
you know, a herb, your job for today, go count the suns. And I

Bob Smith 8:39
think it’s all automated by now. March AI working on it up there. Well, what’s herb got to do then? And where are we in the Milky Way, our Sun lies near a small partial arm called the Orion arm, or the Orion spur, located between the Sagittarius and the Perseus arms.

Marcia Smith 8:55
Okay, tell me this. Obi Wan, what state is the only state without any natural lakes. There’s only one, there’s only

Bob Smith 9:03
one state with no natural lakes, and that is a sea, yes, and they actually had an artificial lake that they developed there. What state is that it’s not Utah, something like that. It’s not out west, it’s east, isn’t it? Yes, is it Alabama? No, this is east of us. It’s

Marcia Smith 9:22
not Vermont or New Hampshire. No, it’s not Maine. No, where is it Maryland? Maryland has no lakes. One, not one. Wow. All their lakes are man made by damming rivers, okay, which is pretty amazing. Whereas Wisconsin and Minnesota both have over 10,000 lakes, yeah, but no state compares to what what state, Alaska, that’s right, they have more than 3 million natural lakes. Oh, my

Bob Smith 9:51
God, how can you That place is amazing. It’s more more national parks than any other state, more peaks over a certain height than any. Other state and more lakes than any other state.

Marcia Smith 10:01
I How can you have millions of lakes? That’s amazing to me.

Bob Smith 10:05
All right? Marcia, what medical malady is daylight savings time associated? Oh, yes,

Marcia Smith 10:11
it has a pheromone insomnia. That

Bob Smith 10:15
would make sense. Yeah. Well, I guess that’s a medical malady. But if you have this, it’s a dangerous thing.

Marcia Smith 10:20
It is okay. What medical malady is it heart it has to do with hearts, heart rhythms, heart

Bob Smith 10:25
attacks. Oh, dear. According to guess who, britannica.com One study of hospital admissions in Michigan found a 24% uptick in heart attacks on the Monday following the switch to daylight savings time. So it’s a stress thing, and the exact cause is unknown, but some doctors speculate it’s connected to the disruption of the body’s internal clock. We were talking about Merriam Webster. The Merriam Webster site is amazing. Go to Merriam webster.com and type in a word, and instantly you can hear it pronounced, learn its definition, usage and origins, and read a half dozen examples of how it’s been used recently online with footnotes. Wow, it’s a great resource. I mean, I’ve used it for numerous things, plus there are word quizzes, a word of the day feature you can subscribe to for free, and a dynamic list of the top words being looked at on the web at any moment. My favorite feature is their time travel page. You ever heard of this? No, what’s that? Okay. You can enter a century or a year, say 1593, and you can see all the words that were first used in that year. And you’ll be amazed at some of the things we think are modern. Go back four or 500 years, really?

Marcia Smith 11:35
Yeah, wow. Okay, all right, Bobby, it’s time for speaking of words, aka, also known as, that’s right, okay, card game that Marcia likes, and the category today is parts of a book. Parts of a book. Okay, How complicated can this be?

Bob Smith 11:53
Okay, chapters, verse, things like that. We’ll see. Okay, all right, so

Marcia Smith 11:57
if I said the word bedspread, what’s another name for a book that’s a bed spread cover? That’s it. Book cover, okay? Backbone, spine, correct. Local fraternity branch. What’s that? Again? Local fraternity branch, a chapter that’s very good. Gotcha now think about this glass cleaner minus W.

Bob Smith 12:22
Index, yes, an index like Windex, Okay, gotcha Led

Marcia Smith 12:26
Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, yeah, prison terms, a sentence, that’s right. And last, you’re doing very well. Useless body part

Bob Smith 12:38
my brain. Useless body part. Appendix, that’s it. All right, all of that can be found in a book. That’s right. Ding, ding, not at all funny. All right. Back to more solar system facts. Marcia, what Solar System planet is twice as massive as all the others combined. This planet in our solar system is two times larger than all the other planets combined. Geez Louise, it’s the fifth planet from our sun. You know, I never did get that largest planet in the solar system. Oh God, I’ll just, I don’t, I’ll say Neptune. No Venus, no Mars, no earth, no. Sad, no, it’s Jupiter. Yes, Jupiter is what I meant. It’s more than twice as massive as all the other planets combined. Its stripes and swirls are cold, windy clouds of ammonia and water floating in an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium. It’s surrounded by dozens of moons. It also has several rings, but unlike the famous rings of Saturn, Jupiter’s rings are very faint and made out of dust, not Ice

Speaker 2 13:47
Dust. Time for a break, Bob,

Bob Smith 13:52
you’re listening to the off ramp with Bob and Marcia Smith, we’ll be back in just a moment. We’re back indeed after our break. Okay, all right, Marsh, I have yet more more information. Oh, wait, it’s

Marcia Smith 14:03
my turn. Bob, okay, okay, it’s hard you to give it up, isn’t it? What was the original phrase of Keeping Up with the Joneses? Keeping

Bob Smith 14:12
Up with the Joneses? Was it keeping up with the Smiths? Maybe it was really, Yeah, no kidding. Did

Marcia Smith 14:18
you just guess? I just guessed that is right. It’s absolutely right. The phrase, which alludes to keeping up with your neighbors in material possession, actually started out as keeping up with the Smiths. I’ll be tired if you live next to us. You know you’d understand that you’d want to go out and buy a 10 year old car. The expressions come from a comic strip Bob that ran between 1913 and 1931 and it chronicled the experiences of a newly married man in Cedarhurst, New York. During its run, it was decided that Jones’s sounded better than Smith’s, and it did funny, and it did because the phrase is still in existence. Since today. Yeah,

Bob Smith 15:00
keeping up with the Joneses. Yeah, it sounds better, too. Smith’s this kind of lays there’s snooty. I was just looking here again. I found this is interesting. On britannica.com they have a lot of different products in their pipeline, and English language tutoring software they’re working on that will customize lessons per student, a program to help teachers create lesson plans and an improved online thesaurus for Merriam Webster, but I love that idea of an English language tutoring software that will customize lessons to you as a student, if

Marcia Smith 15:34
you’re wonderful trying to learn English, anything that helps people learn.

Bob Smith 15:37
And the good news about britannica.com is they are. They are financially in the black. According to The New York Times, they make between 100 and $500 million annually. They recently filed paperwork for an initial public offering that hopes would bring in more than a billion dollars of investment funds. So they’re trying to get people to invest. Not bad for a company founded by a Scottish printer and engraver in 1768 but anyway, from its first print edition to its last, more than 7 million sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica were printed, including a record 120,000 sets in 1990 and it bought that artificial intelligence company In 2000 just in time, and the following year Wikipedia launched. So all right, Bob, here’s another question on the solar system. Our distance from the sun isn’t measured in light years. What is it measured in?

Marcia Smith 16:34
It’s not measured in light years. No, it’s measured in,

Bob Smith 16:39
I don’t know, light minutes oh, really, it’s a real thing. Yeah, Earth is the third planet from the sun. It’s eight light minutes away from the sun. And that is an actual term scientists use, huh, eight light minutes away. I never heard that before. What is the definition of a planet?

Marcia Smith 16:57
Good question. Tell me it’s a

Bob Smith 16:59
celestial body that is in orbit around a sun has to have enough mass to be roughly round in shape and significantly more gravitational attraction than anything else near it. And there are only eight celestial bodies that qualify as planets. Lots of other things are actually orbiting the sun, yeah, but only Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are the planets, okay? Pluto was taken away. It was discovered, I don’t know when, in the 30s or something like that, but it never really qualified as a planet.

Marcia Smith 17:33
Requirements, okay. Bob, why are many Americans familiar with the 1883 poem The New Colossus, written by Emma Lazarus,

Bob Smith 17:44
the New Colossus, because that’s on the Statue of Liberty. Parts of it are, how did you know that? Well, that’s what it’s called. It’s a colossus astride. Yeah, it’s standing there, yes,

Marcia Smith 17:53
because her words are written on a bronze plaque in the base of the Statue of Liberty. Quote, give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. Great

Bob Smith 18:05
poetry too, isn’t it? Yes, it is. Now it’s funny. You hear about people like her, Emma Lazarus, and then the woman who did America for beautiful, for spacious skies, but I don’t think we are familiar with anything else they did. Were they and their time? Were they well known as being poets? I guess that’s a good question. All right, for another day, apparently, another day. All right, I have a heartwarming story. This is about a man and how he got the ride of his life. And it comes from AARP magazine. Yes, back in 1961 Ed Dwight was an African American Air Force Test Pilot. He received a letter from President JFK, John F Kennedy, encouraging him to apply to the NASA astronaut training program, because JFK wanted some black astronauts in the astronaut corps, so he joined. He trained, and he fished seventh out of a class of 17 people, so he had an excellent chance of being named to NASA’s astronaut group number three, which was going to be released in 1963 In fact, he became famous among African Americans. His face was on the cover of jet magazine and sepia magazine. He received 1000s of fan letters, and then JFK assassination came, and that changed everything. How so because NASA announced no black astronauts, what? They just dropped that from the protein never. And in fact, he said he began experiencing racism and veiled threats from some NASA training leadership. Oh, my. So after three years, three more years went by, he resigned in frustration from the military. He went to work for IBM, and that was it, no more Ed Dwight, never to be heard from again, not really. He later became a sculptor specializing in figures from African American history, and no astronauts of color went into space until 1983 20 years after JFK was trying to put a black person. And in the cockpit. African Americans have been in space missions ever since, well along the way, something funny happened. Those black astronauts started seeking out Ed Dwight. They called him up. They talked to him. Some brought him flags. They took to space. Others even took his sculptures to space. They knew that Ed White could have been what he should have been, the first among them. So eventually that became possible. Last year, did he go? Yeah, I’ll be darned. Then, that whole thing about space as a tourist? Well, a group of black astronauts talked about trying to make a flight happen for Ed. Eventually, nonprofit sponsorships were lined up, and in May 2024, Ed Dwight, who was once destined to be America’s first black astronaut finally went into space at the age of 90. Oh, my word, yeah, he’s the oldest person to have gone into space, several months older than William Shatner was when he was I’ll be darned, this was in the recent AARP magazine. So that’s how Ed White, who was supposed to be America’s first black astronaut, finally got his right of his life 60 years later. He says it was amazing. You look down on the planet, you wonder, Why can’t people get along down there?

Marcia Smith 21:09
Yeah, it’s so, so small and insignificant in the scheme of things. Can

Bob Smith 21:12
he propose that every politician that’s running go up there? Yeah, make three orbits and think about things before you come back down. Yeah. Okay,

Marcia Smith 21:20
Bob, what material is on the top of the Washington Monument in Washington, DC, there’s

Bob Smith 21:25
a, I think it’s a metal cap. It’s made of tungsten or something not.

Marcia Smith 21:29
No, it is made of aluminum. Aluminum. The tip of the Washington Monument was constructed out of material that in 1884 was one of the rarest, most precious substances on Earth,

Bob Smith 21:42
aluminum. And it was like a high tech metal at the time. Yeah, they put it right up there. I’ll be darned, people don’t think about that. Aluminum hadn’t been around. That was something like steel. It was developed.

Marcia Smith 21:52
You know why the monument changes colors halfway up?

Bob Smith 21:55
Yes, because the Washington Monument was put on hold for years. Yeah,

Marcia Smith 21:59
they had to go to another quarry for their marble, and then

Bob Smith 22:02
when they came back, they couldn’t get the same cuts of stone. And so, right, yeah, okay, Marcia, what noise is not allowed on television. The FCC laws. It can’t

Marcia Smith 22:12
be a siren, because I’m forever hearing that.

Bob Smith 22:15
Yeah, they try to discourage sirens, yeah, yeah. So that’s but the FCC forbids this.

Marcia Smith 22:21
This particular one, it’s not, well, if it’s not sirens, it’s not telephones, it’s not

Bob Smith 22:28
cannot do this sound. You will be, you will be fined. Okay, what is it? The Emergency Alert System tones? Oh, yeah, those discordant tones. And if you break that rule, the penalties are really steep in 2014 a trailer for the film Olympus Has Fallen. Used the Emergency Alert System. Tone. They were fine, $1.9 million Wow. So you don’t want to do that.

Marcia Smith 22:53
What discourage you? Yes, it would Okay. Bob. How did the two party animal symbols, Democrat donkey and the Republican elephant evolved. How did the

Bob Smith 23:02
Evolver? What’s the origin? What’s the origin? Okay, I believe it was in a comic drawn by the same guy. Drew Uncle Sam. He was a political cartoonist. What was his name? Thomas Nast, yes. Ah, is it Thomas Nast? Well,

Marcia Smith 23:16
he did. Yes, you’re right. You’re on the right track. But during the election of 1828, opponents of President Andrew Jackson labeled him a jackass, and that amused Jackson, and he used that image on some of his campaign posters. Oh, no, kidding. Yeah. And so Thomas Nast, perhaps the most famous political cartoonist in our history, used the donkey in his cartoons as a symbol of the Democrats as a whole, and then four years later, he drew a picture of the donkey scaring away all the animals in the zoo, and the elephant was labeled as, quote, the Republican vote. And that’s all it took for each party to suddenly have an enduring symbol for their parties. Isn’t

Bob Smith 23:59
that funny? Yeah. So something in pop culture at the time, yeah, a cartoonist, and it

Marcia Smith 24:03
was four years apart. They weren’t, you know, at the same time, they just evolved. I

Bob Smith 24:08
see, I had no idea that Andrew Jackson had anything to do with it. That’s fascinating. He liked it. He thought it was funny. Oh, yeah, he’s a stubborn guy, and if somebody made fun of him, and he thought, well, I can use that, yeah, jackass, that’s funny. Okay, Marcia, what famous inventor set a land speed record? This is somebody you don’t think of in terms of speed. He was an inventor. What famous inventor set a land speed record? This was in 1904

Unknown Speaker 24:36
I don’t know. This was a few years

Bob Smith 24:37
before the Model T became popular. Henry Ford, he earned publicity for his motor company by setting a land speed record. He drove for a mile across a frozen lake at an average speed of 91.37 miles per hour. Wow, the car did not have a windshield, and for the record, he did not wear goggles. Thomas, so he was really. You know, devil. He was pretty much a daredevil. Almost all those early car guys were, they were, they were really speed freaks. And Henry Ford was one of them. I just never think of him that way. Think of him as the old man and yeah,

Marcia Smith 25:11
and the business guy, yeah, and yelling at Edsel all the time.

Bob Smith 25:14
That’s right. Okay,

Marcia Smith 25:16
famed physicist Bob Sir Isaac Newton used what to develop his theory of light.

Bob Smith 25:25
Isaac Newton theory of light,

Marcia Smith 25:27
yes, okay, theory of light. Who did gravity? Was that him? Yes, that was an apple. Yeah. But what did he use? He didn’t use an apple.

Bob Smith 25:36
Theory of light. It wasn’t a telescope. He didn’t use that. No, no. All right, what did he use bubbles?

Marcia Smith 25:41
What? Yeah, he observed the iridescent colors on soap bubbles and how they changed as the bubble film thinned. Newton’s work with soap bubbles played a crucial role in the development of scientific advancements in optics. See, I never think of that. You ever look at bubbles and they have different colors. Yeah, right, it’s beautiful, yeah, as a kid, especially when you had blue bubbles, and he focused on that, and he that’s how he developed his whole theory of light. I

Bob Smith 26:10
never associate him with a light. That’s interesting, but he was a scientist about many different things, all right,

Marcia Smith 26:16
I’m finishing up with a couple of quotes from a couple of good guys, Pope, Francis and Buddha, okay, all right. Pope Francis said, Life is good when you are happy, but much better when others are happy because of you. That’s

Bob Smith 26:30
a good one. I like that. Yeah, that was from Pope Francis. Pope Francis

Marcia Smith 26:34
and Bucha said holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

Bob Smith 26:45
I like that one too. Isn’t that great, though, you know, and have you ever gotten to a point where you finally just said, I forgive that person for that? You don’t even have to tell them that? Just let go. It makes it you feel so much better. Oh, my God, you’re not worrying about that anymore. Yeah, like holding poison and thinking, well, and I’ve tried to tell certain friends I know who still are holding on to things, they just don’t get it. You know, they don’t get it. None of it is good. I’d love that thought though, drinking poison, expecting the other person to die. All right, well, we hope you’ll join us again next time, when we return with more fascinating facts and tantalizing trivia. I’m Bob Smith. I’m Marcia Smith, you’ve been listening to the off ramp.

Bob Smith 27:37
The off ramp is produced in association with the Cedarburg Public Library Cedarburg, Wisconsin, visit us on the web at the offramp dot show at.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai