Ballpark
Puzzle #45 · 3 November 2026
The five questions from that day's Ballpark, each with its answer, the fact behind it and a link to the source. Rather play it first? It is in the archive.
1. How many times does the average person blink per day?
15,000 blinks
Roughly 13,400 to 16,300 by Cleveland Clinic's numbers (14 to 17 blinks a minute over 16 waking hours); 15,000 is the midpoint. Source
2. About how many parts make up a single saxophone, according to the instrument maker Yamaha?
600 parts
About 600 parts. A saxophone has 25 tone holes, far more than a player has fingers, so keys and levers close the distant ones. Source
Image: T1616 · CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped
3. How many characters could IBM's RAMAC, the first hard disk drive (1956), store?
5M characters
5 million characters, roughly 5 MB, in a machine the size of two refrigerators that weighed over a ton. Source
Image: Mikaël Restoux · CC BY 2.5, cropped
4. How many times did Australia's James Harrison, the 'Man with the Golden Arm', donate blood and plasma between 1954 and 2018?
1,173 donations
1,173 times. His plasma held a rare antibody, Anti-D, used in a medicine for mothers-to-be, and is credited with saving 2.4 million Australian babies. Source
5. How many consecutive Major League Baseball games did Cal Ripken Jr. play, the all-time record?
2,632 games
2,632 in a row, from May 1982 to September 1998. He passed Lou Gehrig's long-standing mark of 2,130 on September 6, 1995. Source
Image: Rick Dikeman · CC BY-SA 3.0, cropped