There are 318,979,564,000 ways of playing the first four turns in a game of chess. There are 169,518,829,100,544,000,000,000,000,000 ways of playing the first ten turns of a game of chess. [ Sports and Games | Statistics ] (source)
In the year 10,000 B.C., there were only 5 million people on earth. In 8,000 B.C., this figure had risen to only 8 million.
Currently there are more than 6,000,000,000 people on earth. Around 1900 there were only 1,600,000,000 people.
Girolamo Cardano, a sixteenth-century Italian physician and mathematician, asserted that each face of a die will turn up exactly once in any given six rolls, despite the fact that he was a notorious gambler and should have observed quite the opposite at the gambling tables.
The average American spends 18% of his or her income on transportation, and only 13% on food. [ Statistics | Food and Drink | Transportation ]
The total number of different bridge hands possible is roughly 54,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. [ Sports and Games | Statistics ] (source)
On August 18, 1913, on an unbiased roulette wheel at Monte Carlo, evens came up 26 times in a row. The probability of this occurring is 1 in 136,823,184.
Thirteen percent of the world's population lives in deserts, which account for about one-third of the Earth's land surface.
Over 85% of the world's population lives north of the Equator. (source)
In 1985, NASA estimated that the probability of an accident occurring to the space shuttle was 1 in 100,000. However, on January 28, 1986, only the 25th shuttle launch, Challenger exploded after take-off, killing all seven astronauts aboard, and on February 1, 2003, the 113rd mission, Columbia exploded on re-entry, again killing all seven astronauts. Earlier estimates by other groups had estimated the probability as being closer to 1 in 100, a probability that seems more reasonable. [ Exploration | Misconceptions | Statistics ]
Half of those who are killed by bombs are the people who were trying to make or set the bombs. [ Statistics | Weapons ]
In a study of 3,000 people that made New Year's resolutions in 2007, only 12% stuck to them. The resolution with the greatest chance of success was "to enjoy life more". (source)
In 1936, Literary Digest magazine polled 10 million people using the telephone and its mailing list to attempt to predict the outcome of the United States presidential election, more people than in any previous survey to predict the outcome of a presidential election. Their results indicated that Alf Landon would defeat Franklin Roosevelt by a margin of 370 electoral votes to 161; however, in the election, Landon was trounced by Roosevelt by a margin of 523 electoral votes to 8, at the time the largest landslide in a presidential election. The problem with the survey was that, during the Great Depression, telephones and magazine subscriptions were luxuries that not everyone could afford. Those that were affluent enough to afford them tended to have Republican leanings, but the voting public in general was more inclined to vote Democrat. (source)
In 1938, a United States presidential commission concluded that the population of the U.S. would never reach 140 million. (source)
The chances of winning a lottery in which six numbers are drawn from 49 is 1 in 13,983,816. (source)
The number of television sets in American homes increased around 10,000% between 1947 and 1952. (source)
For every 100,000 girls, 223 will become doctors and 17,475 will become nurses. [ Medicine and Health | Statistics ]
Around 40% of murders occur during arguments. (source)
In 1662, John Graunt, a London merchant, published the first set of actuarial tables in his book Observations on the Bills of Mortality. In his list of deaths in London in 1632, seven people are listed as being murdered, 10 people as having died from cancer, and no specific mention is made of heart ailments. On the other hand, 13 people are listed as having died from "planet", 38 from "king's evil", and 98 from "rising of the lights". Possibly the saddest statistic, however, is that out of 9,535 deaths that year, 2,268 of them were of infants. [ Statistics | Firsts ] (source)
A 1947 study found that during the Second World War, only about 15 to 25 percent of the American infantry ever fired their rifles in combat. [ Weapons | Statistics ] (source)
A group of researchers, counting the number of troubles in the world, came up with a total of 2,653.
One's lifetime risk of dying due to living with a smoker is 1 in 4,200. Getting struck by lightning over the course of a lifetime is more likely, with odds of 1 in 3,000. [ Medicine and Health | Statistics ] (source)
In 1915, the average American worker earned $687 yearly; however, there were 44 families that year with an income of $1,000,000 or greater, and 1,598 families wih an income between $100,000 and $1,000,000. (source)
Around 1,900,000,000 Christmas cards are sent in the United States of America yearly, making it the largest card-sending occasion in the country. The second-largest is Valentine's Day, with approximately 192 million cards being given. (source)
In 1915, when 100 million people lived in the United States of America, there were 6.5 million farms. In 2006, when 300 million people lived in the United States of America, there were only 2.1 million farms. (source)