Jump off the Golden Gate Bridge and you'll fall for four seconds and hit the water at 75 mph.
More than 1,300 people have attempted suicide in this way, and as of 2003, at least 26 have survived the jump. Many say they changed their minds in midair.
|W|P|112811788922900000|W|P|Golden Gate Suicides|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThere was a young man of St. Bees
Who was stung in the arm by a wasp.
When they asked, "Does it hurt?"
He replied, "No, it doesn't;
I'm so glad it wasn't a hornet."
-- W.S. Gilbert
|W|P|112808924035144261|W|P|Limerick|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"I'd rather be dead than singing 'Satisfaction' when I'm 45." -- Mick Jagger
|W|P|112325420796612575|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
"This coffee plunges into the stomach ... the mind is aroused, and ideas pour forth like the battalions of the Grand Army on the field of battle." So wrote Balzac, who wrote for up to 15 hours a day wired on black coffee.
If anything, he was ahead of his time. Today we drink more than 400 billion cups of coffee every year, making it the world's most popular beverage. It's second only to oil as the world's largest traded commodity.
So, is it safe to consume that much of anything? Well, yes and no.
Generally, one dose of caffeine is 100 mg. That's what you'd get in one shot of espresso, 5 ounces of coffee, or 2.5 cans of soda. The lowest dose that's ever killed someone is 32 times that -- and that was delivered intravenously. Even with strong coffee, you'd have to drink 3 cups an hour for 100 hours even to come close to killing yourself.
But that's not all that can happen. At lower doses you might develop "caffeinism," a condition that mimics mental illnesses ranging from anxiety and bipolar disorder to schizophrenia and psychosis.
(And that's just humans. Dogs, horses and parrots have much more trouble metabolizing caffeine, and it hits spiders harder than even LSD, marijuana, benzedrine and chloral hydrate, as you can see here.)
And, as always, there's no accounting for craziness. Jason Allen, a student at a North Carolina community college, died after swallowing almost 90 pills -- about 18 grams of pure caffeine. That's the equivalent of about 250 cups of coffee, a gallon and a half of espresso, or 22 gallons of Mountain Dew. That's a serious all-nighter.
|W|P|112778859003094489|W|P|Caffeinism|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comFamous diabetics:
- Jack Benny
- James Cagney
- Johnny Cash
- Paul Cezanne
- Ty Cobb
- Miles Davis
- Thomas Edison
- Joe Frazier
- Dizzy Gillespie
- Ernest Hemingway
- Howard Hughes
- Elvis Presley
- Giacomo Puccini
- Elizabeth Taylor
- H.G. Wells
- Mae West
Vesuvius erupted during Vulcanalia -- the festival of the Roman god of fire.
|W|P|112796112266654326|W|P|Pompeii|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
This is a little embarrassing -- the CIA is having trouble decrypting a sculpture on its own grounds.
The piece, called Kryptos, was dedicated 15 years ago by American artist James Sanborn. It's inscribed with four different messages, each encrypted with a different cipher. Sanborn would say only that the sculpture contains a riddle within a riddle, which will be solvable only after the four passages have been decrypted. He gave the complete solution to CIA director William H. Webster, who has passed it on to his successors.
The first three messages have been solved by CIA analysts, but the fourth -- and the final riddle -- remains open.
If you don't want to work on this yourself, you can wait for Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown -- reportedly it's the subject of his next book.
|W|P|112742045057449771|W|P|A CIA Mystery|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comOn Dec. 17, 2004, Alexis Lemaire computed the 13th root of a 100-digit number in his head.
He gave the correct answer -- 45,792,573 -- in 3.625 seconds.
|W|P|112776580768781089|W|P|Mental Calculator|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIn the film Lifeboat, the action is set entirely in a small boat. This left director Alfred Hitchcock momentarily at a loss how to make his traditional cameo appearance.
Finally, inspired by a recent diet, he hit on a solution -- Hitchcock can be seen briefly in a newspaper advertisement for "Reduco, the Obesity Slayer."
|W|P|112782245256217243|W|P|Hitchcock's Lifeboat Cameo|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
"Intellectual passion dries out sensuality," wrote Leonardo da Vinci. Someone took him literally -- and carved this likeness of the Last Supper into the wall of a Polish salt mine.
|W|P|112766942275850256|W|P|Jesus Carved in Salt|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe Indian mathematical prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan showed an almost supernatural facility with numbers. British mathematician G.H. Hardy once visited him in the hospital:
I had ridden in taxicab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."
"Every positive integer," remarked J.E. Littlewood, "is one of Ramanujan's personal friends."
|W|P|112776561418931243|W|P|"The 1729 Anecdote"|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comBaseball players who died on their birthdays:
- Bucky Harris, 81
- Gabby Hartnett, 72
- Bob Moose, 29
- Joe Tinker, 68
Besieged by Prussians in 1870, Paris found a clever way to get mail to the outside world. For 20 centimes you could write a letter on a thin piece of green paper; these were collected and sent hopefully upward on unguided mail balloons. Each 4-gram postcard carried an address; the Parisians hoped that the balloons would drift to earth somewhere and that whoever found the messages would forward them.
It worked. During the four-month siege they sent up 65 balloons, and only two went missing.
|W|P|112742181496638026|W|P|Balloon Mail|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comRudolph Valentino's real name was Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Piero Filiberto Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antoguolla.
|W|P|112776040412287140|W|P|Valentino's Real Name|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comYou can write a message to future generations at the KEO project. It'll be launched on a satellite that won't return to Earth for 50,000 years.
Even more ambitious is the LAGEOS satellite, which will re-enter our atmosphere in 8.4 million years bearing a plaque that shows the arrangement of the continents. Let's hope our descendants still have catcher's mitts.
|W|P|112674830065622936|W|P|A Spaceborne Time Capsule|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
"By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher." -- Socrates
|W|P|112741795644879668|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Tecumseh's curse" refers to an odd coincidence in U.S. history: Every 20 years, we elect a president who dies in office:
- William Henry Harrison, elected in 1840, died of pneumonia in 1841.
- Abraham Lincoln, elected in 1860, was assassinated in 1865.
- James Garfield, elected in 1880, was assassinated in 1881.
- William McKinley, elected in 1900, was assassinated in 1901.
- Warren G. Harding, elected in 1920, died of a heart attack in 1923.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected in 1940, died of cerebral hemorrhage in 1945.
- John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960, was assassinated in 1963.
The curse was supposedly invoked by a Native American chief's mother as he died. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, for some reason, seem to have escaped.
|W|P|112742078892704237|W|P|Tecumseh's Curse|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIn the 16th century, the English navy would put messages in bottles to send information ashore about enemy positions.
Queen Elizabeth I even created the official position "Uncorker of Ocean Bottles." Anyone else caught opening them faced the death penalty.
|W|P|112742173310657223|W|P|Uncorker of Ocean Bottles|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
In 1897 the English composer Edward Elgar sent this enciphered message to his friend Dora Penny. Dora couldn't decipher it, and neither can anyone else. Can you?
|W|P|112742033596238480|W|P|Dorabella Cipher|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comMaking toast at the fireside,
Nurse fell in the grate and died;
And, what makes it ten times worse,
All the toast was burned with Nurse.
-- Col. D. Streamer
|W|P|111878830119739548|W|P|Misfortunes Never Come Singly|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comspatch�cock
v. to insert into a text too hurriedly
Early space missions that passed over the featureless Sahara were surprised to see a 30-mile eye staring up at them. No one's quite sure what it is. It's too flat to be a crater or a volcano. If it's simply an uplift laid bare by erosion, why is it so nearly circular? For now they're just calling it the Richat Structure.
|W|P|112726396686009522|W|P|"The Eye of Africa"|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comPeople who were cremated:
- Neville Chamberlain
- Wyatt Earp
- Albert Einstein
- W.C. Fields
- Sigmund Freud
- Greta Garbo
- Adolf Hitler
- Henry James
- John Maynard Keynes
- Rudyard Kipling
- Timothy Leary
- Nelson Rockefeller
- Carl Sagan
- Dr. Seuss
- George Bernard Shaw
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- John Steinbeck
In 2004, Ashley Revell of London sold all his possessions, including his clothing, went to the roulette table at the Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas, and put down $135,300 in a double-or-nothing bet on red.
The ball landed on red 7. Revell collected $270,600 and walked away.
|W|P|112611523640010806|W|P|An All-or-Nothing Bet Pays Off|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
There's evidence of polar bears throughout the arctic. These three surprised the submarine U.S.S. Honolulu in 2003, only 280 miles from the North Pole.
|W|P|112726389068889008|W|P|Polar Bears|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comSecretariat's time in the 1973 Kentucky Derby set a record that still stands: 1 minute 59.4 seconds. But few people realize he was actually accelerating throughout the race. His successive quarter-mile times were 25.2, 24, 23.8, 23.4, and 23 seconds.
On autopsy, it was discovered that his heart weighed 21 pounds, three times the size of a normal horse's.
|W|P|112726409735714417|W|P|Secretariat|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comNext year, Walt Disney World will lose its claim as the largest theme park resort in the world.
Dubai Land, under construction in the United Arab Emirates, will be twice as big, a full-featured city costing $5 billion and covering 72 square miles.
It's seen as a way to phase out the sheikhdom's dependence on oil revenues.
|W|P|112726946717460942|W|P|World's Largest Theme Park|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
If Ebenezer Scrooge were a woman, he'd look like this. Hetty Green (1834-1916) amassed more than $100 million as a shrewd businesswoman, but today she's remembered mostly for her breathtaking stinginess.
Born into a Massachusetts whaling family, Hetty was reading financial papers to her father at age 6 and keeping the family books at 13. She inherited $7.5 million on her father's death, and reportedly married only to keep her relatives at bay (she made her fiance sign a prenup). When her husband divorced her and then died, she moved to Hoboken and basically went nuts.
Legends say she never heated her house or used hot water; that she wore one old black dress; that she rode in an old carriage. Rather than pay rent, she sat on the floor of New York's Seaboard National Bank and ate only oatmeal heated on the office radiator, and she would travel thousands of miles to collect a debt of a few hundred dollars.
Almost no expense was worthwhile. Her son's leg had to be amputated when she tried to treat him at home. She herself refused treatment for a hernia because it cost $150.
When she died, at age 80, she may have been the richest woman in the world. Unfortunately, you can't take it with you.
|W|P|112733200803393101|W|P|"The Witch of Wall Street"|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWilliam Whewell was a giant of 19th-century science, but he may have missed his true calling. Someone pointed out that his classic Elementary Treatise on Mechanics contains the following poetic sentence:
And hence no force, however great,
can stretch a cord, however fine,
into a horizontal line
that shall be absolutely straight.
Then again, maybe not: Whewell quietly changed the wording in the next edition.
|W|P|112724422602346935|W|P|Found Poetry|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"I don't even know what street Canada is on." -- Al Capone
|W|P|111886733513250771|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
A sunset on Mars. A day on the Red Planet is almost the same length as one on Earth: 24 hours, 39 minutes, 35.244 seconds.
|W|P|112629939010697369|W|P|Martian Sunset|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comOn average, the Empire State Building is struck by lightning 25 times each year.
During one storm it was struck 15 times in 15 minutes.
|W|P|112593996572956141|W|P|Lightning and the Empire State Building|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe top 10 most offensive British profanities, according to a 2000 study:
- cunt
- motherfucker
- fuck
- wanker
- nigger
- bastard
- prick
- bollocks
- arsehole
- Paki
Only 10 percent regarded crap as "very severe"; 32 percent said it was "not swearing."
|W|P|112723025495949814|W|P|British Swearing|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Virgil's Aeneid contains arguably the first written reference to pizza:
Their homely fare dispatch'd, the hungry band|W|P|112700417276275721|W|P|Virgil's Pizza|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Invade their trenchers next, and soon devour,
To mend the scanty meal, their cakes of flour.
Ascanius this observ'd, and smiling said:
"See, we devour the plates on which we fed."
On New Year's Day, 1963, two bodies were found in a lovers' lane in Sydney, Australia. They belonged to Gilbert Bogle, a top research physicist, and his mistress. Both were partially undressed and covered with clothes and cardboard. Police could find no trace of poison; their hearts had simply stopped beating.
To this day, no one has determined whether they were murdered, and if so, how or why. It is a perfect mystery.
|W|P|112675077364440650|W|P|The Ultimate Murder Mystery|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comi�san�ge�lous
equal to the angels
"The great affair, we always find, is to get money." So wrote Adam Smith, but he might have been surprised to visit the Micronesian island of Yap, where a coin's value is determined by its size. If a native pays you a large debt, you might find yourself with a limestone coin 12 feet in diameter and weighing several tons. You might display it outside your home, as a status symbol -- or you might just leave it where it is (even underwater) and agree that ownership has been transferred. Easier on the back.
|W|P|112698751408524392|W|P|Yap Stone Money|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com355/113 is sometimes referred to as "not pi, but an incredible simulation."
It yields 3.1415929.
|W|P|112579359930543055|W|P|Pi Lite|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comA Zen koan:
|W|P|112663591002775098|W|P|Koan: "Muddy Road"|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comTanzan and Ekido were once traveling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was still falling.
Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection.
"Come on, girl," said Tanzan at once. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud.
Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he no longer could restrain himself.
"We monks don't go near females," he told Tanzan, "especially not young and lovely ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?"
"I left the girl there," said Tanzan. "Are you still carrying her?"
An optical illusion. The gray bar is the same shade throughout.
|W|P|112217366946497864|W|P|Optical Illusion|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"When I see a pretty girl walking down the street, I think two things: One part of me wants to take her home, be real nice and treat her right; the other part wonders what her head would look like on a stick." -- Serial killer Edmund Kemper
|W|P|112276245407048029|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comObscure two-letter Scrabble words:
- aa n. Lava having a rough surface.
- ai n. A three-toed sloth of South and Central America.
- ar n. In the metric system, a surface measure equal to 100 square meters.
- ba n. In Egyptian mythology, the soul, believed to return to and reanimate the preserved body.
- ex prep. In finance, without the right to have or participate in.
A message in a bottle: This plaque, intended to identify us to alien civilizations, just left the solar system aboard Pioneer 10. It's now the most distant man-made object in the universe.
It'll be eons before it's found, and even then we'll have to wait while the aliens try to figure it out. It took us centuries just to understand our own Egyptians' hieroglyphics; the figure above baffled even some human scientists.
But maybe that's a good thing, some say. Hungry aliens could see it as a map -- and a menu.
|W|P|112674861146505569|W|P|Pioneer Plaque|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIn 1961, Henri Matisse's painting Le Bateau was accidentally hung upside down in New York's Museum of Modern Art for 47 days. 116,000 visitors had passed through the gallery before the mistake was discovered.
|W|P|112674945128398840|W|P|Matisse Inverted|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comOnly children:
- Burt Bacharach
- Elizabeth Bishop
- Dick Cavett
- Van Cliburn
- Robert De Niro
- Clark Gable
- John Kenneth Galbraith
- William Randolph Hearst
- Lillian Hellman
- Elton John
- Vivien Leigh
- James Michener
- Rex Reed
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Frank Sinatra
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- Roger Staubach
- Robert Louis Stevenson
- Paul Verlaine
- Emile Zola
Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy, in Klingon:
taH pagh taHbe'. DaH mu'tlheghvam vIqelnIS.
quv'a', yabDaq San vaQ cha, pu' je SIQDI'?
pagh, Seng bIQ'a'Hey SuvmeH nuHmey SuqDI',
'ej, Suvmo', rInmoHDI'? Hegh. Qong -- Qong neH --
'ej QongDI', tIq 'oy', wa'SanID Daw''e' je
cho'nISbogh porghDaj rInmoHlaH net Har.
yIn mevbogh mIwvam'e' wIruchqangbej.
Hegh. Qong. QongDI' chaq naj. toH, waQlaw' ghu'vam!
HeghDaq maQongtaHvIS, tugh nuq wInajlaH,
volchaHmajvo' jubbe'wI' bep wIwoDDI';
'e' wIqelDI', maHeDnIS. Qugh DISIQnIS,
SIQmoHmo' qechvam. Qugh yIn nI'moH 'oH.
It either endures, or it does not endure. Now, I must consider this sentence.
Is it honorable, when one endures the torpedoes and phasers of agressive fate?
Or, when one obtains weapons to fight a seeming ocean of troubles,
And when, by fighting, one finishes them? One dies. One sleeps. One merely sleeps.
And when one sleeps, it is believed that one can finish the pain of the heart
And the thousand revolts which one's body must succeed to.
We are certainly willing to initiate this way to finish life.
One dies. One sleeps. When one sleeps, perhaps one dreams. Well, this situation seems to be the obstacle!
What we can soon dream of, while sleeping in death,
Having thrown away from our shoulders the cargo of the mortal --
When we consider that, we must retreat. We must endure disasters,
Because this idea makes us endure them. It lengthens the life of the disasters.
seek�sor�row
n. one who contrives to give himself vexation
All mammals have tongues.
|W|P|112661195932815923|W|P|Trivium|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
"I can't say I was ever lost, but I was bewildered once for three days." -- Daniel Boone
|W|P|111696344990587628|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comDoes this describe you?
You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.
If you said yes, you've been had. The description was assembled from random horoscopes by psychologist B.R. Forer in 1948. He found that if you give someone a vague, mostly positive personality description, and tell him it's tailored specifically to him, he'll rate it as highly accurate. It's called "the Forer effect."
|W|P|112649042528718231|W|P|The Forer Effect|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
The largest desert in the world is Antarctica.
|W|P|112649105954689759|W|P|Not the Sahara|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe last surviving American veteran of the ...
- ... American Revolutionary War, Daniel F. Bakeman, died in 1869 at age 109.
- ... War of 1812, Hiram Cronk, died in 1905 at age 105.
- ... Mexican-American War, Owen Thomas Edgar, died in 1929 at age 98.
- ... Spanish-American War, Jones Morgan, died in 1993 at age 111.
The last surviving Union veteran of the American Civil War was Albert Woolson, who died in 1956 at age 109. Amazingly, the last surviving Confederate, John B. Salling, survived until 1959, when he died at age 113.
|W|P|112649033232651823|W|P|Veteran Longevity|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIn 1942, Chinese sailor Poon Lim survived 130 days drifting alone in the South Atlantic. A German U-boat torpedoed his ship and he climbed into a life raft. Lim stayed alive by catching rainwater in a canvas tarp and fishing with a bent nail. At first he counted the days by tying knots in a rope, but then simply began counting full moons. He reached Brazil in April 1943, 20 pounds lighter but able to walk unaided. "I hope no one will ever have to break that record," he said.
|W|P|112649039455346868|W|P|Four Months Adrift|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
There's no Marvin Gardens in Atlantic City. Most properties in Monopoly correspond to real locations in that town, but Charles Darrow accidentally misspelled Marven Gardens, a local housing area, when he created his homemade prototype of the game in 1935. The error persisted until 1995, when Parker Brothers formally apologized to the residents of Marven Gardens for the misspelling.
In 1974, San Francisco State University professor Ralph Anspach released a variant of the game called Anti-Monopoly, in which the board is "monopolized" at the start and players compete to return to a free market system. Parker Brothers tried to suppress Anspach's game, essentially claiming a monopoly on the word monopoly. Apparently that was too much irony for the Supreme Court, which ruled in Anspach's favor in 1983.
|W|P|112649107854476595|W|P|Get Out of Jail Free|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comCountries with the densest populations:
- Monaco - 16,620 inhabitants per square kilometer
- Singapore - 6,389
- Vatican City - 2,093
- Malta - 1,261
- Maldives - 1,163
- Bahrain - 1,035
- Bangladesh - 1,002
- Barbados - 647
- Republic of China (Taiwan) - 636
- Nauru - 621
... and the least dense:
- Guyana - 3 inhabitants per square kilometer
- Canada - 3
- Libya - 3
- Mauritania - 2
- Iceland - 2
- Botswana - 2
- Suriname - 2
- Australia - 2
- Namibia - 2
- Mongolia - 1
Taken as a whole, the population density of the planet is 43 inhabitants per square kilometer.
|W|P|112629786460041914|W|P|The Madness of Crowds|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
missy|W|P|Amazing what you have collected here! Well done!Contradictory proverbs:
Look before you leap.
He who hesitates is lost.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Out of sight, out of mind.
You're never too old to learn.
You can't teach an old dog new tricks.
Better safe than sorry.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
Nice guys finish last.
Many hands make light work.
Too many cooks spoil the broth.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Silence is golden.
In 1911, Bobby Leach survived a plunge over Niagara Falls in a steel barrel.
Fourteen years later, in New Zealand, he died after slipping on an orange peel.
|W|P|112644279322845987|W|P|Niagara in a Barrel|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comCountries bordered by only one other country:
- Lesotho - by South Africa
- San Marino - by Italy
- Vatican City - by Italy
- Qatar - by Saudi Arabia
- South Korea - by North Korea (across the demilitarized zone)
- Denmark - by Germany
- The Gambia - by Senegal
- Monaco - by France
- Brunei - by Malaysia
- Canada - by the United States
- Portugal - by Spain
- Dominican Republic - by Haiti
- Haiti - by Dominican Republic
- Brunei - by Malaysia
- Papua New Guinea - by Indonesia
- East Timor - by Indonesia
- Republic of Ireland - by the United Kingdom
"The greatest escape I ever made was when I left Appleton, Wisconsin." -- Harry Houdini
|W|P|111661318134530257|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Everyone likes a good riddle. In Chapter 7 of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter poses a famous one: "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" Lewis Carroll intended that it should have no solution, but puzzle maven Sam Loyd offered these anyway:
- Because the notes for which they are noted are not noted for being musical notes.
- Poe wrote on both.
- Bills and tales are among their characteristics.
- Because they both stand on their legs, conceal their steels (steals), and ought to be made to shut up.
In 1896, Carroll proposed an answer himself: "Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front!" ("Nevar" is "raven" spelled backward.)
|W|P|112611775576579195|W|P|Alice's Riddle|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comFor most Japanese, World War II ended in 1945. But not for some:
- Shoichi Yokoi, a soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army, was discovered in a remote section of Guam in 1972. He had been hiding in an underground jungle cave for 28 years, refusing to believe leaflets that said the war had ended.
- 2nd. Lt. Hiroo Onoda hid in the Philippines jungle for 29 years. He finally gave up in 1974, when his old commanding officer convinced him the war was over. He surrendered in his dress uniform and sword, with his Arisaka rifle still in operating condition, 500 rounds of ammunition, and several hand grenades.
- The last holdout, Capt. Fumio Nakahira of the Japanese Imperial Army, was discovered on Mindoro Island in the Philippines in April 1980 -- 35 years after V-J Day.
"It is with much embarrassment that I have returned alive," Yokoi said on returning to Japan. He got $300 in back pay.
|W|P|112629701545785473|W|P|Belated Surrenders|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comquer�ci�vo�rous
adj. feeding on oak trees
"Outer space is no place for a person of breeding." -- Lady Violet Bonham Carter (1887-1969)
|W|P|112383811442688982|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAverage human lifespan, by era:
- Neanderthal: 20 years
- Neolithic: 20 years
- Classical Greece: 28 years
- Classical Rome: 28 years
- Medieval England: 33 years
- End of 18th century: 37 years
- Early 20th century: 50 years
- Circa 1940: 65 years
- Current (in the West): 77-81 years
Today the average Zambian dies at age 37, the average Japanese at age 81.
|W|P|112627601794421887|W|P|Human Life Expectancy|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAn immortally bad poem by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673):
What Is Liquid?
All that doth flow we cannot liquid name
Or else would fire and water be the same;
But that is liquid which is moist and wet
Fire that property can never get.
Then 'tis not cold that doth the fire put out
But 'tis the wet that makes it die, no doubt.
Samuel Pepys called it "the most ridiculous thing that ever was wrote."
|W|P|112402524154471053|W|P|Cavendish Verse|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Albert Einstein said, "You cannot beat a roulette table unless you steal money from it." He might have been surprised. Roulette wheels have subtle flaws, and in this technological age a sophisticated observer can make some serious money:
- In 1873, British engineer Joseph Jaggers hired six clerks to study the wheels at the Beaux-Arts Casino in Monte Carlo. One wheel showed a clear bias, which Jaggers exploited to the tune of $325,000.
- As early as 1961, mathematician Claude Shannon had built a wearable computer to find likely numbers.
- By the late 1970s, a group of computer hackers known as the Eudaemons were frequenting casinos wearing computers in their shoes.
- In the early 1990s, Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo used a computer to analyze the roulette wheels at the Casino de Madrid. He won more than $1 million over a period of several years.
- In 2004, a group in London was using a special laser cameraphone and microchip to predict a ball's path, a technique called sector targeting. They won �1.3 million.
In both of the latter two cases, the casinos mounted legal challenges -- and lost. If you're not influencing the ball, the courts ruled, you're not cheating. Modern casinos monitor their wheels to keep them as random as possible, but the long-term odds favor the engineers.
|W|P|112606129096033412|W|P|Roulette in the Age of Science|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
|W|P|Terrific web site! I hope you like these two quotes relating to roulette: " ... consider a dramatic evening at the casino in Monte Carlo on August 18, 1913. A roulette wheel when spun has an equal of showing a red or a black number. On this evening, black came up 26 times in a row. ... A frantic rush to bet on red considerably enriched the casino.
quoted from "Educated Guessing - How to Cope in an Uncertain World" by Samuel Kotz and Donna E. Stroup (1983), page 8
"If you had it to do over, would you change anything?" "Yes, I wish had played the black instead of the red at Cannes and Monte Carlo." -- Winston Churchill
"Educated Guessing", page 60
The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened at 40.94 on May 26, 1896. Milestones since then:
- 100.25 - Jan. 12, 1906
- 200.93 - Dec. 19, 1927
- 300.00 - Dec. 31, 1928
- 401.97 - Dec. 28, 1954
- 500.24 - March 12, 1956
- 602.21 - Feb. 20, 1959
- 705.52 - May 17, 1961
- 800.14 - Feb. 28, 1964
- 900.95 - Jan. 28, 1965
- 1,003.16 - Nov. 14, 1972
- 2,002.25 - Jan. 8, 1987
- 3,004.46 - April 17, 1991
- 4,003.33 - Feb. 23, 1995
- 5,023.55 - Nov. 21, 1995
- 6,010.00 - Oct. 14, 1996
- 7,022.44 - Feb. 13, 1997
- 8,038.88 - July 16, 1997
- 9,033.23 - April 6, 1998
- 10,006.78 - March 29, 1999
- 11,107.19 - May 13, 1999
The index has not hit an all-time high since January 2000.
|W|P|112603925932570638|W|P|Dow Jones Closing Milestones|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIn 1732, Alexander Pope gave a greyhound to King George II, to be kept at the royal kennels near Hampton Court. He engraved this on the dog's collar:
|W|P|112596026451055190|W|P|Pope's Saucy Cur|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI am his Highness' dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?
At full power, a space shuttle's engines generate as much energy as 23 Hoover Dams.
|W|P|112579029884368442|W|P|Shuttle Power|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe vocal harmonies in Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" required 84 hours to record.
|W|P|112603965713756741|W|P|Bohemian Rhapsody|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIn 1897, Indiana physician Edward J. Goodwin decided that pi was wrong. It's not clear why he thought so; evidently he felt that irrational numbers were impractical. He gamely proposed a bill to the state legislature deriving three new values for pi:
- The ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference, he said, is 5/4 to 4. (So pi would be 16/5 or 3.2.)
- At the same time, Goodwin decided that the area of a circle equals the area of a square whose side is 1/4 the circumference of the circle. (In other words, pi is 4.)
- Also, he said, the ratio of the length of a 90 degree arc to the length of a segment connecting the arc's two endpoints is 8 to 7. (I.e., pi equals the square root of 2 x 16/7, or about 3.23.)
Why three different values? Who knows? The Indiana House of Representatives wryly referred the bill to its Committee on Swamp Lands, which transferred it to the Committee on Education ... which approved it. Whereupon the whole house passed it unanimously.
There's no telling how far this might have gone had not a Purdue math professor, C.A. Waldo, happened to pass through Indianapolis. Waldo later wrote, "A member then showed the writer [i.e., Waldo] a copy of the bill just passed and asked him if he would like an introduction to the learned doctor, its author. He declined the courtesy with thanks, remarking that he was acquainted with as many crazy people as he cared to know." It stopped there.
|W|P|112579352526136718|W|P|Pi Redux|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Design your own custom road sign at customroadsign.com.
|W|P|112436604707067200|W|P|Keep Left|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com Nice Guy|W|P|Visit http://www.SpareSomeChange.com/Funny/ where you will find 50 other sign generators (can be used as free email greeting cards) where you can manipulate the caption on signs ranging from professor John Frink (Simpsons character) writing theories on a chalk/black board or even morbid makers like make your own custom/personalized tombstone!si�a�go�no�lo�gy
n. the study of jawbones
"I mean, it's a great story. It's got some great things in it. I mean, there's something like eight violent deaths." -- Mel Gibson, on reasons to like Hamlet
|W|P|111711374146224033|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
The average lightning bolt carries enough energy to light a 100-watt light bulb for two months.
|W|P|112579040229901652|W|P|Lightning Strikes|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIn 1955, the merchant vessel Joyita disappeared en route from Samoa to the Tokelau Islands, about 270 miles away.
A search and rescue mission found nothing, but five weeks later she was sighted more than 600 miles from her scheduled route. The ship was partially submerged and there was no trace of her 16 crewmembers or 9 passengers, including two children.
An inquiry found that the disappearance of the passengers and crew was "inexplicable on the evidence submitted." The Fiji Times and Herald quoted an "impeccable source" saying that the Joyita had passed through a fleet of Japanese fishing boats and "had observed something the Japanese did not want them to see."
What was it? No one knows.
|W|P|112424425527440700|W|P|MV Joyita|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWeb sites with a Google PageRank of 10:
- adobe.com - Adobe software
- apple.com - Apple Computer (including iTunes Music Store)
- energy.gov - U.S. Department of Energy
- firstgov.gov - U.S. government portal
- keio.ac.jp - Keio University, Tokyo
- harvard.edu - Harvard University
- macromedia.com - Macromedia software
- nasa.gov - U.S. space agency
- nsf.gov - U.S. National Science Foundation
- nytimes.com - The New York Times
- real.com - RealPlayer software
- statcounter.com - web traffic tracking service
- w3.org - World Wide Web Consortium
- webstandards.org - Web standards project
And, of course, Google itself.
|W|P|112560799791693853|W|P|High PageRanks|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Most people know that Yellowstone National Park is geologically active, but few realize that it sits atop a gigantic volcano. No one knows when it will blow next, but past eruptions have been huge, up to 2,500 times the size of Mount St. Helens in 1980. Today that would kill millions and change the worldwide climate catastrophically.
For now, we just have to wait -- the problem is far too big for today's engineers to tackle.
|W|P|112584886546138312|W|P|Yellowstone Caldera|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comMost common surnames in the United States ...
- Smith
- Johnson
- Williams
- Jones
- Brown
- Davis
- Miller
- Wilson
- Moore
- Taylor
... and in the United Kingdom:
- Smith
- Jones
- Williams
- Taylor
- Brown
- Davies
- Evans
- Wilson
- Thomas
- Johnson
The world record for going without sleep was set in 1965 by 17-year-old high school student Randy Gardner, who stayed awake for 264 hours, or 11 days.
He spent it playing pinball.
|W|P|112560636011321621|W|P|Wide Awake|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Like mermaids, trolls probably joined the culture when people misperceived perfectly natural phenomena. This one "lives" on the coast of the island of Hamar�y in Norway.
|W|P|112431109199688246|W|P|A Natural Troll|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comDeath tolls:
- 300 million - smallpox, worldwide, 20th century
- 200 million - bubonic plague, worldwide, 1300s
- 68 million - World War II
- 60 million - Mongol conquests, 13th century
- 19 million - AIDS, worldwide to date
- 1 million - Irish potato famine, 1846-1849
- 830,000 - Shaanxi earthquake, China, 1556
- 650,000 - Deaths in the Roman Colosseum for public entertainment, 80�404
- 36,000 - Krakatoa eruption, Indonesia, 1883
- 15,000 - Holy Inquisition, 1184-1800
- 1,517 - RMS Titanic, 1912
- 300 - Great Chicago Fire, 1871
- 270 - Pan Am Flight 103, Lockerbie, Scotland, 1988
- 36 - Hindenburg disaster, Lakehurst, N.J., 1937
- 7 - Space shuttle Challenger, Florida, 1986
- 4 - Kent State shootings
re�da�man�cy
n. the act of loving in return
An optical illusion. There's no spiral, just concentric circles.
|W|P|112217430016557720|W|P|Fraser Spiral|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comTallest U.S. presidents:
- Abraham Lincoln 6'3.75"
- Lyndon B. Johnson 6'3.5"
- Thomas Jefferson 6'2.5"
- Chester A. Arthur 6'2"
- George H.W. Bush 6'2"
- Franklin D. Roosevelt 6'2"
And shortest:
- John Adams 5'7"
- John Quincy Adams 5'7"
- William McKinley 5'7"
- Benjamin Harrison 5'6"
- Martin Van Buren 5'6"
- James Madison 5'4"
The world's most popular languages, by number of native speakers:
- Chinese, 937 million
- English, 335 million
- Spanish, 332 million
- Hindi/Urdu, 291 million
- Arabic, 193 million
- Bengali, 189 million
- Malay/Indonesian, 176 million
- Portuguese, 170 million
- Russian, 165 million
- Japanese, 125 million
"The great thing about human language," wrote Lewis Thomas, "is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
|W|P|112560793881764501|W|P|Top Languages|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
"Years ago it meant something to be crazy; now everybody's crazy." -- Charles Manson
|W|P|111834479167567311|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com