Sweet Facts about Easter

Easter is the second most important candy-eating occasion of the year for Americans, who consumed 7 billion pounds of candy in 2001, according to the National Confectioner's Association.

• Ninety million chocolate Easter bunnies are produced each year.
• Chocolate bunnies should be eaten ears first, according to 76% of Americans. Five percent said bunnies should be eaten feet first, while 4% favored eating the tail first.
• Each Easter season, Americans buy more than 700 million Marshmallow Peeps, shaped like chicks, as well as Marshmallow Bunnies and Marshmallow Eggs, making them the most popular non-chocolate Easter candy.
• Americans consume 16 billion jellybeans at Easter, many of them hidden in baskets.
• If all the Easter jellybeans were lined end to end, they would circle the globe nearly three times.
• Jellybeans did not become an Easter tradition until the 1930s. They were probably first made in America by Boston candy maker William Schrafft, who ran advertisements urging people to send jellybeans to soldiers fighting in the Civil War.
  
  Find out more fun Easter facts at Infoplease.com

Top Ten Tuesday - Easter Top Tens

In no particular order, here are ten popular Easter candies:

1. Marshmallow Peeps
2. Chocolate Bunnies
3. Jelly Beans
4. M&M’s – Easter pastels
5. Cadbury Crème Eggs (see photo)
6. malted milk chocolate speckled Robins' Eggs
7. Nestle Crunch Nest Eggs
8. Reese’s Peanut Butter Egg
9. Reester Bunnies
10. Reese's Pieces Carrot

(OK, so I like Reese’s, and this list is entirely made up. That's what happens when you cover for Top Ten Tracy - who is out of town - and discover what you'd planned to post has already been posted, and now it's Wednesday!)

A virtual "Easter egg" is a hidden feature, picture, or sound clip found in nearly all pieces of software. Easter eggs can be a hidden mini game, a funny picture of the development crew, or simply a programmer's name. Easter eggs are also found in DVD movies, so look out for them in the menus. Here are the Top Ten Software Easter Eggs and the Top Ten DVD Easter Eggs.

Want to be serious or silly?

Do you wonder about the veracity of 'truths' that journalists rush to tell us? How do they KNOW this is truth? Says who? To determine fact from fiction, science has developed a system of observation and investigation, and you too can be a scientist, or at least you can be a more critical consumer of science news.

A website that educates the reader on the scientific method is from Exploratorium, the Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception. To help the reader understand the scientific method, Exploratorium folks have developed a project which uses case studies to examine how scientists construct a functional understanding of the world by gathering, assessing, and making use of scientific evidence. Here's your starting place How Do We Know What We Know. Look particularly at the sections 'How Science Works' and 'Can You Believe It' to understand the principles.

On the other hand, it is nearly Easter, and the Chicago Tribune has an annual contest of creating stuff from those marshmallow peeps, Fun with Peeps!