(FORTUNE Magazine) – Weltanschauung confirmation. Yes, friends, that's what it's all about. What any columnizer remembers and cherishes, and keeps going to bat for, is the stuff that confirms and sustains his own world-view. So here we are, memorializing the 20th anniversary of this act--which began in the December 1976 issue of the old monthly FORTUNE--with a sampler of large facts and sneaky details that made it into the column because they were so palpably confirmatory.

--Average cost, a few years ago, of a life being saved by federal regulations on use of formaldehyde: $72 billion.

--Correlation between federal spending on education and verbal scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test from 1968 through 1976: -0.95. (Yes, that's a minus sign.)

--Immortal question broached by Tom Harkin of Iowa when he had to ask something that expert witness Meryl Streep could answer after her 1990 Senate testimony about the menace of pesticides to apple eaters: Would she be willing to "reach out" to farm families?

--Typical result of pardoning guys on death row: Their life expectancy suddenly declines (because, as demonstrated by Arthur Altschuler of the University of Chicago Law School, the world they return to is so often more dangerous than death row itself, where the endless appeals and reviews result in a mortality rate of only about 1% or 2%).

--Statement issued in 1990 by the famously airheaded California Task Force on Self-Esteem and Social Responsibility: esteem levels can be bolstered by staying in touch with Mother Nature and "the cosmos."

--Arguably the most astounding example of affirmative action in the Eighties: the insistence of John Paul II on beatifying Kateri Tekakwitha and thereby placing her on the road to canonization even though this 17th-century Mohawk Indian maiden appeared not to have performed any of the miracles traditionally required for sainthood.

--Number of antidiscrimination suits Exxon was hit with after proclaiming tough new drug and alcohol standards for employees in safety-sensitive jobs, in the wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster: 107.

--The two occupations of characters in television dramas who are most likely to commit murders: gangsters and businessmen (according to a random sample of 600 shows that ran between 1955 and 1986).

--Number of Nexis citations mentioning "Quayle" within 30 words of "heartbeat" (as in "only a heartbeat away from the presidency") during the 1988 campaign: 231 through October 26. Comparable figure for "Ferraro" in the 1984 campaign: 31.

--The organization that was way out front in offering counseling and support to members of the armed forces who suddenly became interested in conscientious objection when the Gulf war began in 1991: Americans for Democratic Action.

--Size of the "poverty wedge" when we first started babbling about it in 1986: $50 billion. This amazing figure, derived by taking the annual cost of all government antipoverty programs and subtracting therefrom the dollar amount needed to get every poor household in America out of poverty, is now running around $80 billion.

--Proportion of young women who put up a certain amount of token resistance even while planning amour with the guy: more than one-third. (Data courtesy of University of Kansas psychologist Charlene Muehlenhard, possibly the only academic one has ever spoken to who seemed unhappy to learn that her scholarly handiwork was going to be quoted in this magazine.)

--Name of the Vietnamese official who said in 1989 that rent control had done more damage to the Hanoi housing stock than had American bombing during the war: Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach.

--The payoff on looks: highly significant, according to a 1989 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which found that male lawyers who were rated one standard deviation above the average in handsomeness (meaning that they were at the 84th percentile) earned 12% more than their unfortunate colleagues located one standard deviation below the average (16th percentile), a datum hypothesized by Keeping Up to reflect the strong positive correlation between physical attractiveness and IQ.

--Crossing lines: As was observed by Mr. Statistics a few years ago, the 2.7% long-term rate of growth in Department of Agriculture employment, combined with the 2% rate of decline among farm practitioners, will, if continued, cause the bureaucrats to outnumber the producers in 2059 (when each team will number around 800,000).