Herring, Einstein, Clinton, Poets and Numbers

• Herrings break wind to communicate and help form nightly protective shoals. Ben Wilson, a marine biologist says, "We know [herring] have excellent hearing but little about what they actually use it for. . . . It turns out that herring make unusual farting sounds at night." The fish gulp air from the surface which they store in their swim bladders. The herring expel the air from an opening next to their anus and produce a high-pitched raspberry sound. Source.
• Yoda's appearance is based on Albert Einstein. Source.
• In his time as president, Bill Clinton only sent two e-mails. One was an e-mail to astronaut John Glenn aboard the space shuttle. The other was not really an e-mail, but a test to see if Clinton "knew how to push the button on an e-mail." His staff sent 39,999,998 e-mails. Source.
• Dr Kaufman,an assistant professor of psychology at California State University, researched 1,987 deaths of writers. He found that, "[o]n average, poets lived 62 years, playwrights 63 years, novelists 66 years, and non-fiction writers lived 68 years. . . . [But} poets produce twice as much of their lifetime output in their 20s as novelists do." Source.
  
• The Piraha of the Amazon only have tree words for numbers: one, two and many. Peter Gordon, the psychologist at Columbia University in New York City, tried the following experiment. ""Gordon . . . sat opposite an individual and laid out a random number of familiar objects, including batteries, sticks and nuts, in a row. The Pirahã were supposed to respond by laying out the same number of objects from their own pile.For one, two and three objects, members of the tribe consistently matched Gordon’s pile correctly. But for four and five and up to ten, they could only match it approximately, deviating more from the correct number as the row got longer. The Pirahã also failed to remember whether a box they had been shown seconds ago had four or five fish drawn on the top. When Gordon’s colleagues tapped on the floor three times, the Pirahã were able to imitate this precisely, but failed to mimic strings of four or five taps." Source.