RANDOM FACTS

- The plastic casing at the end of a shoelace is called an "aglet."

- Scandinavia consists of Denmark, Norway, & Sweden.  Scandinavia & Finland
  together make Fennoscandia.  Fennoscandia & Iceland comprise Norden.

- The Greeks invented punctuation.

- A neologism initially created only for a present need is called a "nonce
  word."

- 'rc' (the ending of most configuration files) stands for "run commands."

- The speed of light in a vacuum is 186,282 miles per second.

- Odd random Latin word: smaragdus - green precious stone, esp. an emerald

- 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63

- As coined by Charles Howard Hinton, the four-dimensional directions are "ana"
  (Greek, up) and "kata" (Greek, down).

- UNIX timestamps stored as 4 byte signed integers will run out at Tue 19 Jan
  2038 03:14:07 UTC.

- Hebrew vowel marks are called "nikud."

- Absolute zero is -273.15 degrees Celsius.

- The OpenDNS nameservers are at 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.

- When diluting acid, the acid should be poured into the water and not the
  other way around.

- The purity of gold is measured in karats, with 24 karats indicating pure gold
  and 0 karats indicating no gold at all.

- The gene for producing more than five digits per limb is dominant over the
  gene to produce exactly five.

- 900 pencils could be made from the carbon in your body.

- The average person blinks 20,000 times each day.

- 100,000,000 microorganisms are swimming, feeding, reproducing, & depositing
  waste inside your mouth right now.

- Although it's covered in ice, Antarctica is a desert.

- The total earthworm population in the U.S. weighs 10 times more than the
  human population.

- Your digestive system is nearly 30 feet long.

- A honey bee produces 1/8 tsp. of honey in its lifetime.

- Every year, the average American drinks enough soda pop to fill a bathtub.

- 400 years is how long it takes for cloth to decompose.

- 1,679 lbs. is the amount of garbage that an average U.S. citizen produces in
  a year.

- 27,000,000,000 is the number of bottles & jars Americans throw away every
  year.

- Your brain is 75% water.

- Of all other animals, the pig has a diet most like a human's.

- French fries came from Belgium.

- The seeds of the coco de mer palm can weigh up to 44 pounds.

- It takes 65 muscles to frown and 13 to smile.

- Non-Orthodox Easter occurs on the first Sunday after the first full moon
  after the vernal equinox.

- To make a file "invisible" in Mac OS X (i.e., to keep it from being displayed
  in the Finder or other GUI elements), run the following from the command
  line:
	$ chflags hidden filename
  To make the file visible again, run the command again, but replace "hidden"
  with "nohidden".

- The code names for the different versions of Mac OS X are as follows:
 - 10.0 - Cheetah
 - 10.1 - Puma
 - 10.2 - Jaguar
 - 10.3 - Panther
 - 10.4 - Tiger
 - 10.5 - Leopard
 - 10.6 - Snow Leopard

- An atomic second is defined as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the
  radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of
  the ground state of the cesium 133 atom."

- New Jersey and Oregon are the only states that do not permit "self-serve" gas
  stations.

- The "Konami Code" or "Contra Code" used as a cheat in most of Konami's video
  games (and elsewhere) is Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A,
  often followed by Start or Select to unpause the game or set a menu option.

- The C programming language allows certain character pairs, called "digraphs,"
  to be used in place of certain characters that do not necessarily occur in
  all standard character sets.  The digraphs and the characters that they
  represent are:

    <:  [
    :>  ]
    <%  {
    %>  }
    %:  #

  There is also a set of three-character sequences called "trigraphs" that
  fills a similar purpose but for a larger set of characters (at the expense of
  being less readable).  Unlike digraphs, trigraphs are interpreted even within
  character & string literals (and ??/ even functions as an escape character).
  The trigraphs & the characters they represent are:

    ??=   #
    ??(   [
    ??/   \
    ??)   ]
    ??'   ^
    ??<   {
    ??!   |
    ??>   }
    ??-   ~

- Elvis had a twin brother named Garon, who died at birth, which is why Elvis'
  middle name was spelled Aron, in honor of his brother.

- Pythagoras forbade his followers from eating beans because they reminded him
  of testicles.

- The color codes on a resistor consist of four bands specifying its resistance
  in ohms.  When viewing a resistor with the gold or silver band on the right,
  each band from left to right represents:

 - first band - first digit
 - second band - second digit
 - third band - power of ten to multiply by
 - fourth band - the tolerance, i.e., the margin of error of the color codes;
   gold = ±5%, silver = ±10%

  The colors used by the first three bands are as follows:

 - black - 0
 - brown - 1
 - red - 2
 - orange - 3
 - yellow - 4
 - green - 5
 - blue - 6
 - violet - 7
 - grey - 8
 - white - 9

- The federal reserve bank codes used on American paper money are as follows:
 - A - Boston, MA
 - B - New York City, NY
 - C - Philadelphia, PA
 - D - Cleveland, OH
 - E - Richmond, VA
 - F - Atlanta, GA
 - G - Chicago, IL
 - H - St. Louis, MO
 - I - Minneapolis, MN
 - J - Kansas City, MO
 - K - Dallas, TX
 - L - San Francisco, CA

- The books of the Apocrypha are:
 - I Esdras
 - II Esdras
 - Tobit
 - The Wisdom of Solomon
 - The Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach (Ecclesiasticus)
 - Judith
 - Baruch
 - The Song of the Three Children
 - Susanna and the Elders
 - Bel and the Dragon
 - The Prayer of Manasses
 - I Maccabees
 - II Maccabees
 - (additions to) Esther

- The shortest war in history was between Zanzibar and England on 27 August
  1896.  Zanzibar surrendered after 38 minutes.

- A rhinoceros' horn is made of compacted hair.

- Vatican City is the smallest country in the world, with a population of 1,000
  & a size of 108.7 acres.

- Nebraska is the only state with a unicameral legislature.


$Id: facts.txt 32 2008-12-12 00:02:03Z jwodder $