Gary Jackson plaintively asks:

> Who has all the time time figure these things out??
>
>
>  * The Eisenhower interstate system requires that one mile in every five
must
>  be straight. These straight sections are usable as airstrips in times of
war
>  or other emergencies.

That's absolutely true. Indeed, the original name for the Interstate System
(and it still appears on some road maps) is the Interstate Defense Highway
System. All overpasses had to be a certain minimum height, the height of a
tank being borne on a tank carrier.

The western U.S. is particularly heavily populated (all out of proportion to
its population) with Interstates because they run from major defense
installation to major defense installation (I sit here writing this in the
New Mexico desert, at the confluence of I-10 and I-25, "America's Nuclear
Highway"). Early on, the U.S. Department of Defense footed most of the bill
for the Interstate Highway System.


>  * Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears
never
>  stop growing.

Indeed, it has been noticed for some time among biologists that the eyes in
all species of mammals are very much the same size (a phenotypic structure
that is said to be heavily "conserved"). The explanation is believed to be
due to the complexity of putting the eye together. Virtually the entire
genome (all of the code that resides in every cell in an individual's body)
directly participates in the construction of the eye during embryogenesis and
development.


>  * No word in the English language rhymes with month.

No word in the English language rhymes with "orange", either.


>  * Babies are born without knee caps. They don't appear until the child
>  reaches 2-6 years of age.

The decision on when to be "born" is a primary optimization decision that
each species must make. In fact, in humans, you aren't really fully "born"
until you reach a period a few years past puberty, when you stop growing and
become sexually aggressive.


>  * The highest point in Pennsylvania is lower than the lowest point in
> Colorado.

The highest point in Texas is mountain in New Mexico that happens to just lop
over into Texas a bit, thus leading to the old saying that you see here on
the ski ranges in New Mexico: "If God wanted Texans to ski, he would have
given them a mountain."


>  * Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously

But what the heck, so is air.


All of this in response from someone who has had a really fine case of the
flu for the past few weeks and is now beginning to feel a little better :-).

Wirt Atmar