Your favorite statistics and bits of trivia

Just checking the package of Kraft Singles in the fridge... Cheddar cheese is the first item on the ingredient list. That's followed by a long parenthesized list of things that went into whatever they're calling cheddar cheese, but milk is the first ingredient.

Rats. I'm waiting for Mary to come along here and whoop my ass, anyway.
 
Something I find fascinating is that the US had a syphilis epidemic in the late 19th century and early 20th century, comparable in severity to the AIDS epidemic.
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For the longest time, I had no idea that the US had had a syphilis epidemic. I've read a lot of history and historical novels, and it was something that was never mentioned. I only found out about it because one day I stumbled across a reference to a syphilis asylum where people with tertiary stage syphilis were locked up due to their erratic behavior and terrifying mental decline.

I read something yesterday that implied that the US also had a Gonorrhea epidemic in the same time frame.
When the American Medical Association (AMA) held its forty-fourth annual meeting in Milwaukee in 1893, gynecologist Charles P. Noble of Philadelphia read a paper naming gonorrhea one of the top five causes of diseases of women.

It's really easy to believe that people in the US in the 1800's and 1900's rarely had sex outside of marriage because that's how those times are presented to us. But the evidence about STD's tells a very different story.

Bonus unmentioned fact - the US gave its troops condoms like they were candy, and it still struggled with a high rate of STD's. The answer to "What'd you do in the war, Dad?" is "A lot of fucking".
 
It's really easy to believe that people in the US in the 1800's and 1900's rarely had sex outside of marriage because that's how those times are presented to us. But the evidence about STD's tells a very different story.

Bonus unmentioned fact - the US gave its troops condoms like they were candy, and it still struggled with a high rate of STD's. The answer to "What'd you do in the war, Dad?" is "A lot of fucking".

Is that really the story? You are talking about 1% of the population or so. Those stats also include congenital syphilis.
I suspect both are situations where you had a high prevalence in a small subset of the population, it's not indicative of the population as a whole.
 
Is that really the story? You are talking about 1% of the population or so. Those stats also include congenital syphilis.
I suspect both are situations where you had a high prevalence in a small subset of the population, it's not indicative of the population as a whole.
The statistics for syphilis are probably badly understated for multiple reasons. Many people weren't diagnosed with syphilis and would die before they hit tertiary stage syphilis. Even if they hit tertiary stage syphilis, they might die before a doctor made a diagnosis of it. And even if a doctor made a diagnosis of syphilis, doctors for much of that period weren't required to report their diagnosis.

Switching back to Gonorrhea:
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[D]octors diagnosed gonorrhea vulvovaginitis so often that by 1904 an epidemiologist writing in the Journal of Infectious Diseases declared it “epidemic” among girls. That same year the Babies’ Hospital in New York City, which had implemented pre-admission testing for girls, discovered that at least 5 or 6 of the 125 girls seeking admission each month were infected, including 5 in just one day. These figures led Dr. Holt, the hospital’s leading pediatrician and one of the country’s most respected physicians, to conclude that the actual incidence of infection, not merely doctors’ ability to detect it, was “steadily rising.”

Other physicians agreed, and they citied even more alarming figures. In 1909 Dr. Flora Pollack, who treated girls at the Johns Hopkins Hospital Dispensary, estimated that at least a thousand girls in Baltimore became newly infected each year, and she visited police stations and met with community groups to press for more aggressive prosecution of their assailants. During the winter of 1911–12, the fifty-bed Children’s Venereal Disease Ward at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, which Jane Addams called the “most piteous . . . of all children’s wards,” placed girls three to a bed and turned away many more. And in just one month, September 1926, the Vanderbilt Clinic on Manhattan’s West Side, the city’s major provider of outpatient treatment for girls infected with gonorrhea, saw 218 new cases.

But knowing how to diagnose the disease did not enable doctors to stop its spread. By 1927 the American Journal of Diseases of Children ranked gonorrhea vulvovaginitis the second most common contagious disease, after measles, among children. Yet two years later the New York City Department of Health called it “the most neglected and poorly managed condition seen in medical practice.” Part of the neglect may have arisen from a combination of factors, including the historically low professional status of doctors who specialized in venereal disease and the lack of data collected to track its incidence. Before 1911, no state laws required doctors to report gonorrhea infections, and no agency collected statistics on infection. The New York City Health Department began to collect data on venereal infection after a 1913 law required it to do so, but even then the only doctors who made reports were those employed by the department. By the 1920s, only Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts had developed useful systems for tracking infection—and they consistently determined that girls accounted for approximately 10 percent of reported infections among females.
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My son's partner holds a british passport and likewise contributes more than her share to that stat. Generating from her, it is more like 3.39 cups a day get left to get cold.
 
Tea bags were first popularized by an American tea merchant who gave out samples of his products in single serving silk bags, with the intention the bags would be opened and the loose contents would be steeped. Many customers misunderstood and steeped the samples in the bags, then requested more tea in the convenient single serving packages.
 
I don't. Way too many restaurants - not just fast food - use "American" cheese. That's not cheese, it's a contrived "cheese food," assembled in large-scale laboratories from vegetable oils.
So when the Amish market sells me actual cheese labelled as "yellow American" or "white American" that's fraud?
 
I don't. Way too many restaurants - not just fast food - use "American" cheese. That's not cheese, it's a contrived "cheese food," assembled in large-scale laboratories from vegetable oils. When we're talking about reasonable-quality beef in a real restaurant, usually one where the cheeseburger is > $10, the slice o' crappy imitation... whatever... ruins the experience.

Now the places where Swiss or provolone is an option, okay, let's get it on.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Actually, no. American cheese is a blend of other cheeses then processed. There is cheese food, which is of questionable content. FYI Kraft Singles can't be called cheese.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cheese
 
Texas has been under six flags. Not the theme park - actual flags!
  • Spain
  • France
  • Mexico
  • Republic of Texas
  • Confederacy
  • USA

And what is frequently referred to as the "Confederate Flag" was actually the Battle Flag of the Army of Northen Virginia.
The Confederacy went through several flags in their brief existence but not the "stars and bars".
 
And what is frequently referred to as the "Confederate Flag" was actually the Battle Flag of the Army of Northen Virginia.
The Confederacy went through several flags in their brief existence but not the "stars and bars".
Thanks! They taught us all sorts of nonsense at school….😒
 
Could you explain this???

Timezones my friend, timezones!
There are 24 timezones around the world (more or less there are some special cases but they are supposed to be 15 degrees each.
 
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