My friend David emailed me this fact list and ask me to post it up. Well, he knows that BlogIsEverything.com is a factoids dump

OK, here they are…

1. Between 1942 and 1944, Academy Awards were made of plaster.
2. Any month that has a Friday the 13th also has a Wednesday the 25th.
3. John Madden is an accomplished ballroom dancer.
4. In 21 states, Wal-Mart is the single largest employer.
5. Jim Gordon, drummer of Derek and the Dominos (”Layla”), killed his mother with a claw hammer.
6. One of Hewlett Packard’s first ideas was an automatic urinal flusher.
7. Eric Clapton did not play the very famous first riff on the song “Layla”. That was Duane Allman. Clapton comes in later.
8. As you age, your eye color gets lighter.
9. There are more cars in Southern California than there are cows in India.
10. The two-foot long bird called a Kea that lives in New Zealand likes to eat the strips of rubber around car windows.
11. The province of Alberta, Canada is completely free of rats.
12. Illinois has the most personalized license plates of any state.
13. If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.
14. There are two credit cards for every person in the United States.
15. The international telephone dialing code for Antarctica is 672.
16. The average chocolate bar has 8 insect legs in it.
17. There are 206 bones in the adult human body, but 300 in children (some of the bones fuse together as a child grows).
18. Fleas can jump 130 times higher than their own height. In human terms this is equal to a 6 foot person jumping 780 feet into the air.
19. Snakes are true carnivores as they eat nothing but other animals. They do not eat any type of plant material.
20. There are no venomous snakes in Maine.
21. The blue whale can produce sounds up to 188 decibels. This is the loudest sound produced by a living animal and has been detected as far away as 530 miles.
22. The human eye blinks an average of 4,200,000 times a year.
23. It takes approximately 12 hours for food to entirely digest.
24. Erosion at the base of Niagara Falls (USA) undermines the shale cliffs and as a result, the falls have receded approximately 7 miles over the last 10,000 years.
25. The longest living cells in the body are brain cells which can live an entire lifetime.
26. The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.
27. North Dakota has never had an earthquake.
28. Alexander Graham Bell (who invented the telephone) also set a world water-speed record of over seventy miles an hour at the age of 72.
29. There is enough fuel in a full tank of a jumbo jet to drive an average car four times around the world.
30. Hawaii is moving toward Japan 4 inches every year.
31. Chimps are the only animals that can recognize themselves in a mirror.
32. The leg bones of a bat are so thin that no bat can walk.
33. There are more living organisms on the skin of a single human being than there are human beings on the surface of the earth.
34. Marilyn Monroe had six toes on one foot.

Enjoy!

Related Readings:

Economic Facts and Fallacies

After the Fact, with Primary Source Investigator CD: The Art of Historical Detection

Late Show Fun Facts

Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

The Big Book of Hoaxes: True Tales of the Greatest Lies Ever Told! (Factoid Books)

I’ve posted some amazing facts and figures about almost anything some time ago. Here are some equally amazing and interesting factoids, you and especially the Indians out there did not know much about.

My Indian friend, Kareet emailed me this and I thought it will be great to share with you guys instead of keeping it in my Gmail inbox.

OK, interesting facts and figures about India and Indians - roll on!

• There are 3.22 Million Indians in America
• 38% of Doctors in America are Indians.
• 12% of Scientists in America are Indians.
• 36% of NASA employees are Indians.
• 34% of MICROSOFT employees are Indians
• 28% of IBM employees are Indians
• 17% of INTEL employees are Indians
• 13% of XEROX employees are Indians

Continue Reading →

Related Readings:

The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2009

Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire

The Indian in the Cupboard (Teacher Guide)

2008 NFL Record & Fact Book (Official National Football League Record and Fact Book)

The Truth About Chuck Norris: 400 Facts About the World's Greatest Human

Do you know that number 0 to 9999 has its own special meaning? I came across this page, What’s Special About This Number? and found out this interesting stuff.

Here are some unique numbers:

0 is the additive identity.

7 is the smallest number of faces of a regular polygon that is not constructible by straightedge and compass.

10 is the base of our number system.

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First of all, should I use the word ‘useless’? Maybe not, or maybe it’s useless to know but interesting in some way.

1. In Shakespeare’s time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes. When you pulled on the ropes the mattress tightened, making the bed firmer to sleep on. That’s where the phrase, “goodnight, sleep tight” came from.

2. The sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Uses every letter in the alphabet.
(developed by Western Union to test telex/twx communications.)

3. The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.

4. The term “the whole 9 yards” came from W.W.II fighter pilots in the Pacific. When arming their airplanes on the ground, the..50 caliber machine gun ammo belts measured exactly 27 feet, before being loaded into the fuselage. If the pilots fired all their ammo at a target, it got “the whole 9 yards.”

5. The phrase “rule of thumb” is derived from an old English law which stated that you couldn’t beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.

6. The name Jeep came from the abbreviation used in the army for the “General Purpose” vehicle, GP.

7. The first toilet ever seen on television was on “Leave It To Beaver.”

8. It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride’s father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer, and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the “honey month” or what we know today as the “honeymoon.”

9. In English pubs, ale is ordered by pints and quarts. So in old England, when customers got unruly, the bartender would yell at them to mind their own pints and quarts and settle down. It’s where we get the phrase “mind your P’s and Q’s.”

10. Many years ago in England, pub frequenters had a whistle baked into the rim or handle of their ceramic cups. When they needed a refill, they used the whistle to get some service. “Wet your whistle,” is the phrase inspired by this practice.

Here are some really interesting facts about Bill Gates, the world’s richest man since 1995, the co-founder and currently the chairman of Microsoft.

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Trust me this is interesting, I found this slideshow – Shift Happens, ya, it’s a 67 slides slideshow covering many things you may not and might want to know about the past and future trends of the world.

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