• On the average a fart is composed of about 59% nitrogen, 21% hydrogen, 9% carbon dioxide, 7% methane, and 4% oxygen. Less than 1% is what makes them stink.
• Queen Isabella of Spain was the first woman to be featured on a U.S. postage stamp. (1893)
• The name Reebok was named after the African Gazelle.
• Alexander the Great made his troops eat onions as he believed it would prove their vitality.
• A quality, fully-faceted round brilliant diamond has at least 58 facets. These are important for the maximum sparkle and brilliance of the stone.
• A shark must keep moving forward to stay alive.
• The average rainfall around the world is 40 inches per year.
• There was no punctuation until the 15th century.
• Leonardo da Vinci spent twelve years painting the Mona Lisa's lips.
• "Hallow" is an old word meaning holy, while "e'en" is Scottish for evening.
• On February 17, 1959, Vanguard II was the first satellite to send weather information back to Earth.
• Orange and black became Halloween colors because orange is associated with harvests and black is associated with death.
• The full name of the Titanic ship is R.M.S. Titanic, which stands for Royal Mail Steamship.
• It takes about five years for an oyster to produce a medium-sized pearl.
• The adult human body requires about 88 pounds of oxygen daily.
• The average diameter of a one-carat diamond is 6.42 mm
• The real name of the Bill Gates is William Henry Gates III.
• "Peladophobia" is the fear of becoming bald.
• The white part of your fingernail is called the Lunula.
• It's physically impossible for you to lick your elbow.
• If you keep a Goldfish in the dark room, it will eventually turn white.
• The note with the most zeros is a Yugoslavia 500,000,000,000 Dinara, issued in 1993 with 11 zeros
*Bombay Duck is not actually duck at all, but dried fish called bummalo.
• One thousand Americans stop smoking every day - by dying.
• Dogs only see shades of grey and most of them are short-sighted.
• In the early days of motion pictures, movies were the people who worked on films.
• A woman's arthritic pain will almost always disappear as soon as she becomes pregnant.
• A puff of smoke, such as that produced when someone smokes a pipe, is called a "lunt."
• Most oysters are ambisexual. They begin life as males, then become females, and change back and forth many times.
• The metal cesium will melt in your hand and catch fire due to the temperature of your skin.
• The first man to die during construction of the Hoover Dam was the father of the last man to die during its construction.
• With few exceptions, birds do not sing while on the ground. They sing during flight or while sitting on an object off the ground.
• The first competition in the world's first Olympic games, 776 B.C., was a foot race. The participants were all males, and ran in the nude.
• Roulette was invented by French mathematician Blaise Pascal. The popular game of chance was a byproduct of his experiments with perpetual motion.
• The average 60-minute audio cassette tape has 562.5 feet of tape in it.
• Only men were allowed to eat at the first self-service restaurant, the Exchange Buffet in New York, opened in 1885.
• In 200 BC, when the Greek city of Sparta was at the height of its power there were 20 slaves for every citizen.
• If you could count the number of times a cricket chirps in one minute, divide by 2, add 9 and divide by 2 again, you would have the correct temperature in celcius degrees.
• The standard escalator moves 120 feet per minute.
• The Nobel Peace prize was first awarded in 1901 to Jean Henry Dunant, who was the founder of the Swiss Red Cross.
• A rainbow can only occur when the sun is 40 degrees or less above the horizon.
• The heart of a peanut, that little nub that holds the two halves together, contains a high amount of a chemical that is know to cause migraine headaches in some people.
Termite queens are fertilized regularly by the same mate for life, unlike bee and ant queens, whose male partners die after the first and only mating.
Monday, November 12, 2007
Monday, September 10, 2007
Some More Interesting Facts !
Continuing with some more amazing facts, collected from the net. Enjoy !
• In France, Christmas is called Noel.
• It is a British Christmas tradition that a wish made while mixing Christmas pudding will come true only if the ingredients are stirred clockwise.
• Christmas trees are grown much like any other agricultural crop. About 112,000 acres in the northwest United States are planted with about 11 million trees.
• Roulette was invented by French mathematician Blaise Pascal. The popular game of chance was a byproduct of his experiments with perpetual motion.
• "Hybristophilia" is arousal derived by having sex with people who have committed crimes.
• According to international definition, fog occurs when visibility is 600 feet (200m) or less.
• The symbol on the "pound" key (#) is called an octothorpe.
• The blueprints for the Eiffel Tower covered more than 14,000 square feet of drafting paper.
• The little hole in the sink that lets the water drain out, instead of flowing over the side, is called a porcelator.
• The nest in which spiders or other insects deposit their eggs is called a ‘nidus’
• The word "toast," meaning a wish of good health, started in ancient Rome, where a piece of toasted bread was dropped into wine.
• Joseph Priestley, the English chemist, invented carbonated water. It was a by-product of his investigations into the chemistry of air.
* In 1935, Jesse Owens set six track and field world records in less than one hour.
• The metal part of a lamp that surrounds the bulb and supports the shade is called a harp.
• Guinness is considered an aphrodisiac in some African countries, and is marketed under the slogan "a baby in every bottle."
• In ancient Egypt, the only person who was allowed to wear cotton was the High Priest.
• During World War II, Russians used dogs strapped with explosives to blow up German tanks. They trained the dogs to associate the tanks with food and ended up destroying about 25 German tanks using this method.
• The distance between an alligator's eyes, in inches, is directly proportional to the length of the alligator, in feet.
• A chemical (isothiocyanates) found in cabbages may lower the risk of lung cancer in smokers by as much as 38%.
• In fourth century Sparta, in Greece, males 20 years of age and over were required by law to eat 2 pounds of meat a day. It was believed to make one brave.
• The origins of the soldier term "G.I." is an abbreviation for "Government Issue," which was stamped on all government kits supplied to recruits in the US Army during World War II.
• In the Middle Ages, young men and women drew names from a bowl to see who their valentines would be. They would wear these names on their sleeves for one week. Thus the origin of the phrase “to wear your heart on your sleeve.”
• Limousines originally got their name because they were first built in the Limousin region of France.
• The reason most mosquito bites itch is because mosquitoes inject saliva into the persons skin before they suck your blood. They take it out once they are done, but if they are forced to fly away, they don't get a chance to draw the saliva out. And it is their saliva that causes the itch.
• Rattlesnakes gather in groups to sleep through the winter. Sometimes up to 1,000 of them will coil up together to keep warm.
• In France, Christmas is called Noel.
• It is a British Christmas tradition that a wish made while mixing Christmas pudding will come true only if the ingredients are stirred clockwise.
• Christmas trees are grown much like any other agricultural crop. About 112,000 acres in the northwest United States are planted with about 11 million trees.
• Roulette was invented by French mathematician Blaise Pascal. The popular game of chance was a byproduct of his experiments with perpetual motion.
• "Hybristophilia" is arousal derived by having sex with people who have committed crimes.
• According to international definition, fog occurs when visibility is 600 feet (200m) or less.
• The symbol on the "pound" key (#) is called an octothorpe.
• The blueprints for the Eiffel Tower covered more than 14,000 square feet of drafting paper.
• The little hole in the sink that lets the water drain out, instead of flowing over the side, is called a porcelator.
• The nest in which spiders or other insects deposit their eggs is called a ‘nidus’
• The word "toast," meaning a wish of good health, started in ancient Rome, where a piece of toasted bread was dropped into wine.
• Joseph Priestley, the English chemist, invented carbonated water. It was a by-product of his investigations into the chemistry of air.
* In 1935, Jesse Owens set six track and field world records in less than one hour.
• The metal part of a lamp that surrounds the bulb and supports the shade is called a harp.
• Guinness is considered an aphrodisiac in some African countries, and is marketed under the slogan "a baby in every bottle."
• In ancient Egypt, the only person who was allowed to wear cotton was the High Priest.
• During World War II, Russians used dogs strapped with explosives to blow up German tanks. They trained the dogs to associate the tanks with food and ended up destroying about 25 German tanks using this method.
• The distance between an alligator's eyes, in inches, is directly proportional to the length of the alligator, in feet.
• A chemical (isothiocyanates) found in cabbages may lower the risk of lung cancer in smokers by as much as 38%.
• In fourth century Sparta, in Greece, males 20 years of age and over were required by law to eat 2 pounds of meat a day. It was believed to make one brave.
• The origins of the soldier term "G.I." is an abbreviation for "Government Issue," which was stamped on all government kits supplied to recruits in the US Army during World War II.
• In the Middle Ages, young men and women drew names from a bowl to see who their valentines would be. They would wear these names on their sleeves for one week. Thus the origin of the phrase “to wear your heart on your sleeve.”
• Limousines originally got their name because they were first built in the Limousin region of France.
• The reason most mosquito bites itch is because mosquitoes inject saliva into the persons skin before they suck your blood. They take it out once they are done, but if they are forced to fly away, they don't get a chance to draw the saliva out. And it is their saliva that causes the itch.
• Rattlesnakes gather in groups to sleep through the winter. Sometimes up to 1,000 of them will coil up together to keep warm.
Sunday, September 2, 2007
Some interesting facts !
I am sharing some interesting facts , collected on the net. Enjoy!
Adobe - Came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.
Apache - It got its name because its founders got started by applying patches to code written for NCSA’s httpd daemon. The result was ‘A PAtCHy’ server -– thus, the name Apache.
Apple Computers - Steve Jobs was three months late in filing a name for the business because he didn’t get any better name for his new company. So one day he told to the staff: “If I’ll not get better name by 5 o’clock today, our company’s name will be anything he likes…” So at 5 o’clcok nobody come up with better name, and he was eating Apple that time… so he keep the name of the company ‘Apple Computers’.
CISCO - Its not an acronym but the short for San Francisco.
Google - The name started as a jokey boast about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named ‘Googol’, a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders – Stanford grad students Sergey Brin and Larry Page resented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to ‘Google’
Hotmail - Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in ‘mail’ and finally settled for hotmail as it included the letters “html” - the programming language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.
Hewlett-Packard (HP) - Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett, and the winner was NOT Bill…the winner was Dave.
Intel - Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company ‘Moore Noyce’ but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain, so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics = INTEL
Lotus (Notes) - Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from ‘The Lotus Position’ or ‘Padmasana’. Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Microsoft - Coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the ‘-‘ was removed later on.
Motorola - Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was called Victrola.
ORACLE - Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or something such). Acronym for: One Real A****** Called Larry Ellison??
Red Hat - Company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) while at college by his grandfather. He lost it and had to search for it desperately. The manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux had an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone!
SAP - “Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing”, formed by 4 ex-IBM employees who used to work in the ‘Systems/Applications/Projects’ group of IBM.
Sony - From the Latin word ’sonus’ meaning sound, and ’sonny’ a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.
SUN - Founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network.
Xerox - The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his product trying to say dry’ (as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing wet copying). The Greek root `xer‘ means dry.
Yahoo! - The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.
The Titanic's whistles could be heard from 11 miles away.
• A "quidnunc" is a person who is eager to know the latest news and gossip
• The fear of Friday the 13th is called paraskavedekatriaphobia.
• A cosmic year is the amount of time it takes the Sun to revolve around the center of the Milky Way, about 225 million years.
• The praying mantis is the only insect that can turn its head.
• Virga are streaks of water drops or ice particles falling out of a cloud and evaporating before reaching the ground.
• A snowflake can take up to a hour to fall from the cloud to the surface of the Earth.
• "Jingle Bells" was originally written as a song for Thanksgiving
Adobe - Came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.
Apache - It got its name because its founders got started by applying patches to code written for NCSA’s httpd daemon. The result was ‘A PAtCHy’ server -– thus, the name Apache.
Apple Computers - Steve Jobs was three months late in filing a name for the business because he didn’t get any better name for his new company. So one day he told to the staff: “If I’ll not get better name by 5 o’clock today, our company’s name will be anything he likes…” So at 5 o’clcok nobody come up with better name, and he was eating Apple that time… so he keep the name of the company ‘Apple Computers’.
CISCO - Its not an acronym but the short for San Francisco.
Google - The name started as a jokey boast about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named ‘Googol’, a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders – Stanford grad students Sergey Brin and Larry Page resented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to ‘Google’
Hotmail - Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in ‘mail’ and finally settled for hotmail as it included the letters “html” - the programming language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.
Hewlett-Packard (HP) - Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett, and the winner was NOT Bill…the winner was Dave.
Intel - Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company ‘Moore Noyce’ but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain, so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics = INTEL
Lotus (Notes) - Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from ‘The Lotus Position’ or ‘Padmasana’. Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Microsoft - Coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the ‘-‘ was removed later on.
Motorola - Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was called Victrola.
ORACLE - Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or something such). Acronym for: One Real A****** Called Larry Ellison??
Red Hat - Company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) while at college by his grandfather. He lost it and had to search for it desperately. The manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux had an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone!
SAP - “Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing”, formed by 4 ex-IBM employees who used to work in the ‘Systems/Applications/Projects’ group of IBM.
Sony - From the Latin word ’sonus’ meaning sound, and ’sonny’ a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.
SUN - Founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network.
Xerox - The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his product trying to say dry’ (as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing wet copying). The Greek root `xer‘ means dry.
Yahoo! - The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.
The Titanic's whistles could be heard from 11 miles away.
• A "quidnunc" is a person who is eager to know the latest news and gossip
• The fear of Friday the 13th is called paraskavedekatriaphobia.
• A cosmic year is the amount of time it takes the Sun to revolve around the center of the Milky Way, about 225 million years.
• The praying mantis is the only insect that can turn its head.
• Virga are streaks of water drops or ice particles falling out of a cloud and evaporating before reaching the ground.
• A snowflake can take up to a hour to fall from the cloud to the surface of the Earth.
• "Jingle Bells" was originally written as a song for Thanksgiving
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Twenty Twenty cricket
Looking forward to the 2o-20 world cup. Its high time cricket was less than nine hours.It will make the game more interesting and save a lot of productive time. Hope it will erase the dredful memory of the last world cup.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
favourite characters in Harry potter
My two favourite harry potter characters are Sirius Black and Dobby. I like them for their selflessness and bravery. Black was brave enough to go against his familys historical leanings and Dobbys first attempt to get away from slavery.
Truth about harry potter
Well I just reread all the seven books of the Harry potter series, and truely it is worthy of all the hype and publicity it normally generates. The three things why the book is universally appealing :
1) The humour of course, cut the jokes and the book becomes as bland as a report on soil erosion.
2) Great plot, suspense and control of Rowlling. She can give any scriptwriter a run for their money.
3) Finally it is a great simple story.
I hope you enjoyed my views, any comments?
1) The humour of course, cut the jokes and the book becomes as bland as a report on soil erosion.
2) Great plot, suspense and control of Rowlling. She can give any scriptwriter a run for their money.
3) Finally it is a great simple story.
I hope you enjoyed my views, any comments?
First entry
Hi , Readers welcome to my very own blog on the net. My blogs will tresspass from the mundane to the sophisticated, from the ordinary to well you know the next word.
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