Saturday, October 18, 2008
Nixon's resignation
Mat: Here's something you don't often see - a resignation letter from a US president. According to the user who originally posted it to Wikipedia:"When Nixon resigned, someone took a photocopy of the letter. Someone else took a photocopy of the copy and gradually it spread, mostly from lawyer to lawyer until I saw it at my lawyer's office. I asked for a copy which I kept ever since. Behind such few words, what remarkable history. "
Short and sweet, what a great way to go.
View the letter
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Hyperinflation
I've been following Zimbabwe's slide into hyperinflation since our friend Marcus (a Zim native) told us about it in 2006. Today the official exchange rate has breached a billion Zimbabwe dollars to the pound (£1 buys you 1,141,626,604.16 ZWD at the time of writing), with the black market rate significantly higher. I was amazed to read on Wikipedia that this isn't the most severe hyperinflation ever.Zimbabwe is currently running at just over a million percent per year, which may seem high but is pretty low compared to Hungary's hyperinflation after WWII. The rate of inflation in mid-1946 was 4.19 quintillion (4.19 x 10^18) percent, meaning that prices doubled every 15 hours. When the currency was replaced in August 1946, the total value of all Hungarian banknotes in circulation amounted to one-thousandth of one US cent.
Read more
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Horsepower
The rather vague power definition Horsepower was first coined by the engineer James Watt, while looking for a measurement for his steam engines. He found that an average pit pony could lift 22,000 ft lbs/min, but rather than call it Ponypower, he scaled it up by 50% and called it Horsepower. It is somewhat ironic that the power definition ended up named after him! The modern definition of 1 horsepower = 745 Watts.Saturday, February 09, 2008
Bank of England
The Bank of England's statistics page contains too many interesting facts to list here, but here are a couple:- In 2007 there was a total of £38.4bn in cash in the UK. This is significantly less than the
UK government lent Northern Rock recently... - In the same year, the bank destroyed £9.5bn of damaged banknotes
- Also in 2007, the Bank received claims totalling £92,000 for notes that had been chewed or eaten
Friday, October 26, 2007
Little Fluffy Clouds
As an avid Star Trek fan and an avid Orb fan, you can imagine my excitement when I discovered that LeVar Burton (Geordi La Forge) provided one of the voices on the track Little Fluffy Clouds! He's the guy who says "What were the skies like when you were young?" at the beginning of the song, which was recorded during an interview with Rickie Lee Jones on a US TV show that Burton presented.The skies always had little fluffy clouds in them...
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Number of humans that have ever lived
Many people have told me that there are more people alive today than have ever lived, and since it sounded like a nice statistic I always believed it, until now. But according to Wikipedia, the estimates range from 90 to 110 billion. So there you go.More info
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Lostwithiel
The name of our new home village comes from the Cornish Lostwydhyel which apparently means place at the tail-end of the forest. What a compact language, it's a shame there are only an estimated 3,500 people left to speak it.Learn it
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Caen Hill
Caen Hill Locks, in Wiltshire, are the steepest flight of locks in the world. The 29 locks rise a total of 72m in 3.2km. Having just come back from a stag weekend on a narrow boat, I can tell you definitively that 29 locks in a row would be rather tiring.Read more
Saturday, November 11, 2006
Abraham Lincoln's beard
Along with his top hat, Abraham Lincoln's beard is one of his signature features. But for most of his life he was clean-shaven, and he only grew a beard at the suggestion of an 11-year-old girl. In October 1860, a few weeks before he was elected president, Grace Bedell wrote him a lettter urging him to grow a beard:"I am a little girl only 11 years old, but want you should be President of the United States very much ... if you let your whiskers grow ... you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President."
In his reply he made no promises, but within a month he was sporting a full beard. He met Grace in February 1861 in New York:
"The President left the car, and the crowd making way for him, he reached her, and gave her several hearty kisses, and amid the yells of delight from the excited crowd, he bade her good-bye, and on we rushed."
Do you think if you wrote to George Bush asking him to grow a beard, he'd do it?
More info
Friday, October 27, 2006
Hypochondria & Hysteria
The word hypochondria has its origins in the Greek hypo- (below) and chondros (cartilage - of the breast bone). The term was originally used to describe unidentifiable stomach pains - thought by ancient Greek physicians to be caused by the movement of the spleen. During the 19th century this became the male equivalent of hysteria.Hysteria has its origins in the Greek word for uterus, hystera. An ancient Greek myth tells of the uterus wandering throughout a woman's body, strangling the victim as it reaches the chest and causing disease.
More info on hypochondria and hysteria
Friday, October 13, 2006
Atoms
Today's fact is inspired from Joel V:If an atom were the size of a stadium, the nucleus would be the size of a marble. If you took out all of the empty space inside all of the atoms that make up the 6.5 billion people on the planet - you could fit the entire world population into a volume the size of a sugar cube.
Argh, my brain hurts.
More info
Friday, October 06, 2006
Gems
Sapphires are aluminium oxide (Al2O3) crystals, with trace amounts of other elements such as iron and titanium producing the different colours in the stone. Rubies are also aluminium oxide crystals with trace amounts of chromium giving the red hue.Al2O3 crystals are generically called Corundum, which is naturally clear when there are no impurities and is used in sandpaper and emery boards because of its hardness. Now there's a luxury item - sapphire or ruby emery boards!
Monday, September 25, 2006
Osama bin Laden
His full name, Osama bin Muhammad bin 'Awad bin Laden means Osama, son of Mohammed, son of 'Awad, son of Laden. Mat's amazing fact for today is that he has somewhere around 55 siblings (no-one seems to know precisely) and at least 24 children of his own! Buying Christmas presents must be a logistical nightmare in his family...More info
Saturday, September 23, 2006
Hell Bank Notes
Hell Bank Notes are a Chinese tradition of sending money to departed relatives. They often feature colourful designs and enormous denominations (e.g. $500 million) and can be thrown to the wind during funerals or burnt as an offering. Some mythology holds that people in the afterlife need money to spend, while others state the money is used to bribe the king of hell for a shorter stay or to escape punishment.More info
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
The wheel
The wheel is thought to date to some time around 6000 BCE, invented by the Sumerians. The first use was as a potter's wheel - initially just to turn the pot being made, but later with the addition of a flywheel to spin the wheel and leave the hands free. In ancient Egyptian mythology, the first humans were said to have been made on a potter's wheel.More info
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Booting
Ever wondered why starting your computer is called booting? It comes from the Baron Münchhausen tale where he escapes from a swamp by pulling himself up by his own bootstraps.When you turn your computer on there is no operating system in memory, and the computer can't load anything without it. The apparent paradox is solved by loading a very small program called a boot loader which calls successively more complex programs until the operating system can be started.
More info
Saturday, September 16, 2006
Welcome to Mat's facts
Welcome to my new blog, which is a collection of random facts that I find and horde, like the magpie that I am. My only worry is that you're going to realise just how much time I spend on Wikipedia!Today's fact is about Jabba The Hutt, from the Star Wars movies:
"The sound effects of Jabba's body movements were created by a hand running through a bowl of cheese casserole and a muddy towel scraping along the inside of a garbage can."
More info
Being a sound designer must be a great job!