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.

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