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DIDJA KNOW...?
Long before the printing press, people were
interested in the latest news of
the day. In the Roman empire the way to
diseminate news was by posting messages at
crossroads. Back when "all roads led to Rome"
a particularly heavily trafficked spot was
the intersection of three roads, or
"TRI-VIA"...
Why can't you use your U.S. computer monitor in Australia?
Power considerations not withstanding, it's because the colors would be wrong. The earth's magnetic field pulls the electron beams hitting the cathode ray tube in computer monitors. Each one has to be calibrated relative to its position in the earth's magnetic field. Adjust a monitor in the northern hemisphere and its colors will be wrong if you plug it into a computer in the southern hemisphere.
Almost 70% of the population of the planet
have never used a telephone
Mel Blanc (the voice of Bugs Bunny, Porky
Pig, et al) was allergic to carrots; his
epitaph: "That's All Folks!"
Did you know that whenever you use an
ampersand (&), you're actually writing in
Latin? The ampersand is a ligature
(combination) of the cursive letters "e" and
"t" to spell the Latin word et!
Does anybody really know what time it is? Probably not in Malta, where churches with two towers are fitted with a clock face in each but the two clocks always tell different times to confuse the Devil about the time of the service.
The world's population at the beginning of
the twentieth century was 1.6 billion. A boy
born October 13th, 1999 in Sarajevo is being
hailed as Earth's six-billionth
living person. The choice of the
child as the world's six-billionth living
citizen was arbitrary...since there are three
children born every second. It was based on
where U-N Secretary-General Kofi Annan
happened to be at the given time; Annan was
then in the Balkans as part of a two-day
tour. The population has doubled
since 1960 and is expected to increase by
about three-billion in the next
50 years.
When Parker Pen marketed a ball-point pen in
Mexico, its ads were supposed to say "It
won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you."
However, the company mistakenly thought the
Spanish word "embarazar" meant embarrass.
Instead the ads said that "It won't leak in
your pocket and make you pregnant."
...And Clairol's "Mist~Stick" curling iron was a big flop in Germany... where "mist" is slang for manure.
Jeremy Bentham, the hedonist philosopher,
left money to have his body stuffed; for
years, it presided over the annual meeting of
the Royal Philosophical Society.
"Good bye" came from "God b'ye" (contraction
of "God be with ye". "So-long" came from the
Arabic "salaam" and the Hebrew "shalom",
(peace).
The origin of the word "Eskimo" comes from
the Algonquin word for "he eats it raw" or
"eats raw flesh."
In the early days of English law, why did grand juries sometimes write the word "ignoramus" on the back of indictments?
No, it wasn't a commentary on the defense lawyer. "Ignoramus" is Latin for "we do not know." Jurors wrote the word on indictments when they found insufficient evidence to indict.
ENIAC, the first electronic computer,
appeared 50 years ago. The original ENIAC was
about 80 feet long, weighed 30 tons, had
17,000 tubes.By comparison, a desktop
computer today can store a million times more
information than an ENIAC, and is 50,000
times faster.
The word "algebra" is a Latin variant of the
Arabic word al-jabr. This came from the title
of a book, Hidab al-jabr wal-muqubala,
written in Baghdad about 825 A.D. by the Arab
mathematician Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khowarizm,
from whose name we also get the word
"algorithm".
In 1895 the Royal Society (in England) passed
a resolution to the effect that man's
knowledge of the universe was complete and
that everything worthwhile had been invented.
The doctrine of solipsism says that all that
is truly knowable is the self, and that
anything that seems to be outside is a
projection of the mind. In other words, only
the self exists and all else is merely
images. There is also a more recent meaning
of solipsism, in which it describes a
self-indulgent attitude.
The word first appeared in English in the
late 1800s. It came over from France, where
the philosopher Rene Descartes developed the
concept of solipsism as a inquiry into the
nature of reality. The word is a combination
of two Latin words: solus (alone) and ipse
(self).
In medieval times, a common way to kill an
enemy was to offer him a poisoned drink. To
prove to the guest that a drink was safe, the
host would receive a small amount of the
guest's drink in his own glass, and both
would drink at the same time.
If the guest trusted the host, rather than
pouring some of his drink into the host's
glass he would simply clink his glass against
it. Although offering a poisoned drink is no
longer a popular way to kill someone, the
custom of clinking glasses still remains.
Contrary to popular belief, the radio
distress call "SOS" does not stand for
anything. It was adopted as an international
distress signal because of its easy
transmission and interpretation.
The insect called the praying mantis (or
mantid) got its name because of the
"prayerful" way it holds its forelegs while
waiting to catch prey, and from the Greek
"mantis" (seer, prophet) which was derived
from "manteuesthai" (to prophesy).
Here are more words related to the telling of
fortunes:
oneiromancy: from dreams
lithomancy: from the patterns of scattered
stones
spodomancy: from the patterns of ashes
halomancy: from spilled salt
bibliomancy: from random pages in a book
rhapsodomancy: from random pages in a poetry
book
In an effort to westernize his society,
Turkish leader Kamal Ataturk banned the fez
from daily use in Turkey in 1925. Turkish
citizens, protesting the denial of tradition,
wore them anyway. The Turkish government
responded by imposing martial law,
executions, and labor camps were set up by
Ataturk's successor, Ismet Inonu.
The ironic thing that the fez was itself an
attempt to modernize the turban, and had been
forcibly imposed less than a century before,
amid similar protests and punishments. People
have short memories.
thanks Robin! :-)
Percentage of the continent of Africa that is
wilderness: 28%; Percentage of the continent
of North America that is wilderness: 38%
Average number of people airborne over the
United States at any given hour: 61,000.
Intelligent people have more zinc and copper
in their hair.
Mathematical curiosity: 111,111,111 x
111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
The cruise liner, Queen Elizabeth II, moves
only six inches for each gallon of diesel
that it burns.
The process of freeze-drying was first used
by the Incas of Peru who stored their
vegetables near the peaks of high mountains.
There, they froze solid. Over time, the
frozen water sublimated into the thin
mountain air (converted directly to vapor
without passing through the liquid state),
leaving behind the perfectly preserved,
dessicated vegetables.
The Washington Post's Style Invitational
asked readers to take any word from the
dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting
or changing one letter, and supply a new
definition. Here are some recent winners:
Sarchasm: The gulf between the author
of
sarcastic wit and the reader
who
doesn't get it.
Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody
is
sending off all these really
bad
vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth
explodes and it's like a serious bummer.
Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid
ideas
to seem smarter when they come at you
rapidly.
thanks Bill! :-)
Neptune's moon Triton is the coldest place in
the solar system, with a surface temperature
of -235 degrees Celsius (-390 degrees
Fahrenheit). As cold as it is, there are
active volcanoes on Triton in which the
erupting liquid is frigidly cold liquid
nitrogen.
While it is widely considered to be the
greatest and most influential scientific book
ever written, Sir Issac Newton's six hundred
page "Mathematical Principles of Natural
Philosophy" sells fewer than seven hundred
copies annually.
The number of possible ways of playing the
first
four moves per
side in a game of chess is 318,979,564,000.
Upper and lower case letters are named
"upper" and "lower" because in the time when
all original print had to be set in
individual letters, the upper case letters
were stored in the case on top of the case
that stored the lower case letters.
At some places in Chile's Atacama Desert, it does
not rain for centuries at a time. A long, narrow
strip of land along the western coast of South
America, the Atacama is protected from clouds by the
Andes Mountains, the world's second highest mountain
range.
Many parts of the Atacama Desert receive average
annual rainfall of less than 0.004 inches (0.1 mm),
and some spots have not seen rain in 400
years!
The first vending machine was invented by Hero of Alexandria around 215 BC. When a coin was dropped into a slot, its weight would pull a cork out of a spigot and the machine would dispense a trickle of water. Got any spare Roman Imperial coinage? Change for a Tetradracm?
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