When Silvia Morello de Palma was seven months pregnant, she flew to Antarctica to join her husband, the commander of Argentina’s Esperanza research base.
When their son, Emilio Marcos Palma, was born safely on Jan. 7, 1978, he became the world’s southernmost birth — and the only person in recorded history to be the firstborn on a continent.
The highest point in the contiguous United States is less than 80 miles from the lowest point.
Mount Whitney, in California’s Sequoia National Park, rises 14,505 feet above sea level.
It’s 76 miles west of Badwater, in Death Valley National Park, which is 282 feet below sea level.
On Aug. 10, 2004, Cincinnati Reds first baseman Adam Dunn hit a ball entirely out of Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park. It landed on Mehring Way, 535 feet from home plate, hopped another 200 feet or so, and came to rest on a piece of driftwood on the edge of the Ohio River.
That part of the river belongs to Kentucky. This makes Dunn the only player in major league history to hit the ball into another state.
See Pop Fly and Four-Dimensional Basketball.
Short film titles, from Patrick Robertson’s Film Facts (2001):
Darren Aronofsky’s 1998 film π concerns a mathematician who seeks patterns in strings of numbers.
Its running time is 1:23:45.
The highest point in Pennsylvania is lower than the lowest point in Colorado.
Only 23 U.S. states are entirely south of Canada’s southernmost point, Middle Island in Lake Erie.
Three of the first five U.S. presidents died on Independence Day.
