Useless Misc

The Statue of Liberty's fingernails weigh about one hundred pounds apiece.

The screwdriver was invented before the screw.

Two common objects have the same function, but one has a thousand moving parts, while the other has absolutely no moving parts-an hour glass and a sundial.

The earliest known image of a fishing pole is from Chinese records circa AD 1195.

Silly Putty was invented in 1943 by an engineer at General Electric named James Wright, who was looking to create a substitute for natural rubber, which was difficult to obtain during World War II. the compound was created by combining silicone oil with boric acid. it did not end up being viable as a rubber substitute, but caught on as a novelty when a toy seller introduced it at the 1950 International Toy Fair.

The largest concrete structure in the United States is the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River in Washington. Three times the bulk of the Hoover Dam and four times the volume of the Great Pyramid, it is nearly a mile long and 550 feet high-more then twice as tall as Niagara Falls. its thirty-acre base is 500 feet wide and it consumed 12 million cubic yards of concrete.

In 1924, Clarence Birdseye invented the quick-freezing method, which allows us to enjoy delicious frozen dinners to this day.

The first disposable diaper was patented in 1946 by housewife Marion Donovan.

Kevlar, the material used in bullet-proof vests, was invented in 1965 by Stephanie Kwolek, a researcher for the DuPont Company.

In 1905, prior to the production of Ford's Model A, Mary Anderson received a patent for manual windshield wipers.

The test used to assess a newborn's health is known as an Apgar Score, so called in honor of its inventor, Dr. Virginia Apgar.

James Dyson has invented a vacuum cleaner that can order its own spare parts.

A German supermarket chain has introduced a new way of allowing customers to pay using just their fingerprints.

Insurance company Esure announce plans to use voice stress analysis technology to weed out fraudulent claims.

Scientists in Australia have found that rotten bananas could provide enough energy for five-hundred homes.

A German-based doctor has invented breast implants made from titanium.

Scientists in Australia have developed software that allows people to log on to person computers by laughing.

There is/was a trend in the Netherlands where you have tiny jewels implanted directly into the eye.

The first plan in the United Kingdoms that allows drivers to pay for parking by cell phone was launched in Scotland.

Russian scientists have developed a new drug that prolongs drunkenness and intoxication.

A German company has built the world's first washing machine that talks and recognizes spoken commands.

Scientists have performed a surgical operation on a single living cell, using a needle that is just a few millionths of a meter wide.

Researchers have found that doctors who spend at least three hours a week playing video games make about 37 percent fewer mistakes in laparoscopic surgery then surgeons who didn't play video games at all.

As much as 80 percent of microwaves from cell phones are said to be absorbed by your head.

A Belgian couple got married by short message service (SMS) because text messaging played such a big part in their relationship.

Approximately 1,314 phone calls are misplaced by telecom services every minute.

There are 150 million cell phones in use in the United States, more than one for every two human beings in the country.

More than 50 percent of the people in the world have never made or received a telephone call.

The "save" icon on Microsoft Word shows a floppy disk with the shutter on backward.

Every five seconds a computer is infected with a virus.

The first microcomputer was called the Altair 8800 and was made by a company called MITS in 1974. It came in a kit and had to be assembled by the user.

IBM introduced their first personal computer in 1981.

The basis of the Macintosh computer was Apple's Lisa, which was released in 1983. This was the first system to utilize a GUI or graphical user interface. The first Macintosh was released in 1984.

The name Intel stems from the company's former name Integrated Electronics.

The annual growth of Internet traffic is 314,000 percent.

Thirty-two percent of singles think they will meet their future mate online.

A remote tribe in the Brazilian jungle is now online after a charity gave them five batter-powered computers.

The Church of England has appointed its first web pastor to oversee a new parish that will exist only on the net.

Thirty-five billion emails are sent each day throughout the world.

The first domain name ever registered was Symbolics.com.

Ever single "all-a" domain name, from a.com to aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com (63 a's), has been registered.

Ever single possible three-character .com domain (more than 50,000) has long since been registered.

The highest publicly reported amount of money paid for a domain name is $7.5 million in stock options, to buybusiness.com.

A single individual, Dr Lieven P. Van Neste, reportedly owns more than 200,000 domain names.

The town of Halfway, Oregon, temporarily changed its name to Half.com as a publicity stunt for the website of the same name.

Scandinavia leads the world in Internet access, according to the United Nations' communications agency.

Twenty-seven percent of all web transactions are abandoned at the payment screen.

Four out of five visitors never come back to a website.

Space on a big company's homepage is worth about 1,300 times as much as land in the business districts of Tokyo.

The time spent deleting spam emails costs U.S. businesses about $10 billion annually.

Spam filters that catch the word "Cialis" will not allow many work-related emails through because that word is embedded in the word "specialist".

Replying more then one hundred times to the same piece of spam email will overwhelm the sender's system and interfere with their ability to send any more spam.

An X-ray security scanner that sees through people's clothes has been deployed at Heathrow Airport.

The cruise liner Queen Elizabeth II burns a gallon of diesel for every six inches it moves.

An employee of the Alabama department of Transportation installed spy-ware on his boss's computer and proved that the boss spent 10 percent of his time working, 20 percent of his time checking stocks, and 70 percent of his time playing solitaire. The employee was fired, but the boss kept his job.

Monster truck engines are custom-built, alcohol-injected, and usually cost around $35,000. They burn 2 to 2.5 gallons of methanol per run (approx. 250 feet).

Airbags inflate at a rate of 200 miles per hour.

The air force's F-117 fighter uses aerodynamics discovered during research into how bumblebee's fly.

It took approx. 2.5 million stones to build the Pyramid of Giza, the oldest and largest of the pyramids on the Giza Plateau, and the only remaining Wonder of the Ancient Worlds. If you disassemble it, you would get enough stones to encircle the earth with a brick wall twenty inches high.

The Netherlands has built 800 miles of massive dikes and seawalls to hold back the sea.

Humans have dammed up more then 10 trillion gallons or water over the past four decades.

Some large clouds store enough water for 500,000 showers.

The world's windiest place is Commonwealth Bay, Antarctica. Winds generally exceed 150 miles per hour.

The average diameter of a raindrop is 1 to 2 millimeters, and they fall from the sky on average 21 feet per second.

The animals most likely to fall from the sky during a rainstorm are fish and frogs. Occasionally the animals survive the fall. In 1894 jellyfish fell from the sky in Bath, England.

Lightning strikes the ground about six thousand times per minute.

Half of all forest fires are started by lightning.

It is thought that the sound of thunder is cause by the rapid expansion of air surrounding the path of a lightning bolt.

Each year, 16 million gallons of oil run off pavements into streams, rivers, and eventually oceans in the United States. That is more oil then was spilled by the Exxon Valdez.

The rain from New York carries so much acid from pollution that it has killed all the fish in two hundred lakes in the Adirondack State Park.

Two to four million tons of oil leak into the water table every year from the Siberian pipeline.

Natural gas has no odor. The smell is added artificially so that leaks can be detected.

Siberia contains more then 25 percent of the world's forests.

The dioxin 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin is 150,000 times deadlier then cyanide.

The only rock that floats in water is pumice.

Electricity doesn't move through a wire but through the field around the wire.

Physicists have already performed a simple type of teleportation, transferring the quantum characteristics of one atom onto another atom at a different location.

The light from your computer monitor streams at you at almost 186,000 miles a second.

An ounce of gold can be stretched into a wire 50 miles long.

Sound carries so well in the Arctic that, on a calm day, a conversation can be heard from 1.8 miles away.

If you are standing on a mountaintop and the conditions were just right, you can see a lit match from 50 miles away.

If you were to count off 1 billion seconds, it would take you 31.7 years.

If Mount Everest were at the bottom of the ocean, its peak would be more then a mile underwater.

In 1783, a volcanic eruption on Iceland threw up enough dust to temporarily block out the sun over Europe.

There is an average of two earthquakes every minute in the world.

After the Krakatoa volcano eruption in 1883 in Indonesia, many people reported that, because of the dust, the sunset appeared green and the moon blue.

A coal-mine fire in Haas Canyon, Colorado, was ignited by spontaneous combustion in 1916 and withstood all efforts to put it out. The 900 to 1,700 degree fire was eventually quenched by heat-resistant foam mixed with grout in 2000.

An iceberg the size of Long Island once broke off Antarctica and blocked sea lanes used by both ships and penguins.

The winter of 1932 was so cold the Niagara Falls froze completely solid.

About 1 percent of the land area in the United States has been hit by tornadoes in the last century.

In 2003, there were eighty-six days of below freezing weather in Hell, Michigan. However, residents (called "Hellions") determine whether Hell has "frozen over" by whether a certain dam stops flowing. This has only happened once so far, on January 24, 2004.

The magnetic North Pole changes position by about twenty feet everyday.

The Eiffel Tower shrinks six inches in winter.

Mexico City sinks about six inches every year.

Orthodox rabbis warn that New York City drinking water might not be kosher; it contains harmless microorganisms that are technically shellfish.

A small child could crawl through a blue whale's major arteries.

Urea is found in mammalian and amphibian urine, as well as some fish, but not in birds or reptiles.

Plants that are not cared for will cry for help; a thirsty plant will make a high-pitched sound that is too high for humans to hear.

Plants can suffer from jet lag.


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