Random weekly facts/comments

[Kuroos]

The English word pajamas has it's origin in Persian. It is a combination of the Persian words pa (leg) and jamah (garment).

The ZIP in zip code stands for "Zone Improvement Plan."

The custom of saying "Bless you" when someone sneezes was first used by ancients when they believed that breath was the essence of life, and when you sneeze a part of you life is escaping. Evil spirits rush into your body and occupy the empty space. By saying "God bless you" the speaker is protecting the sneezer from that spirits.  

[Kuroos]

The longest word used by Shakespeare in any of his works is "honorificabilitudinitatibus," found in "Love's Labors Lost." Unfortunately he's no longer around to tell us what it means.

When Coca-Cola began to be sold in China, they used characters that would sound like "Coca-Cola" when spoken. Unfortunately, what they turned out to mean was "Bite the wax tadpole".  

[Kuroos]

Pokemon stands for "pocket monster."

A coward was originally a boy who took care of cows.  

[Kuroos]

MAFIA is an acronym for Morte Alla Francia Italia Anela, or "Death to the French is Italy's Cry"

The Sanskrit word for "war" means "desire for more cows."

"Hara kiri" is an impolite way of saying the Japanese word "seppuku" which means, literally, "belly splitting."

When two words are combined to form a single word (e.g., motor + hotel = motel, breakfast + lunch = brunch) the new word is called a "portmanteau."

The slash character is called a virgule, or solidus. A URL uses slash characters, not back slash characters.  

[Kuroos]

Telephone is derived from two Greek words, tele + phone, meaning far off voice or sound.(Tele, far off + phone, voice or sound).

The word for "name" in Japanese is "na-ma-e," in Mongolian "nameg."

"Polish" is the only word in the English language that when capitalized is changed from a noun or a verb to a nationality.  

[Kuroos]

The final resting-place for Dr. Eugene Shoemaker - the Moon. The famed U.S. Geological Survey astronomer, trained the Apollo astronauts about craters, but never made it into space. Mr. Shoemaker had wanted to be an astronaut but was rejected because of a medical problem. His ashes were placed on board the Lunar Prospector spacecraft before it was launched on January 6, 1998. NASA crashed the probe into a crater on the moon in an attempt to learn if there is water on the moon.  

[Kuroos]

Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.

Every year about 98% of atoms in your body are replaced.

Hot water is heavier than cold.

Sound travels 15 times faster through steel than through the air.  

[Kuroos]

If you went out into space, you would explode before you suffocated because there's no air pressure.

Only one satellite has been ever been destroyed by a meteor: the European Space Agency's Olympus in 1993.

Starch is used as a binder in the production of paper. It is the use of a starch coating that controls ink penetration when printing. Cheaper papers do not use as much starch, and this is why your elbows get black when you are leaning over your morning paper.  

[Kuroos]

Sterling silver is not pure silver. Because pure silver is too soft to be used in most tableware it is mixed with copper in the proportion of 92.5 percent silver to 7.5 percent copper.

A ball of glass will bounce higher than a ball of rubber. A ball of solid steel will bounce higher than one made entirely of glass.  

[Kuroos]

At a glance, the Celsius scale makes more sense than the Fahrenheit scale for temperature measuring. But its creator, Anders Celsius, was an oddball scientist. When he first developed his scale, he made freezing 100 degrees and boiling 0 degrees, or upside down. No one dared point this out to him, so fellow scientists waited until Celsius died to change the scale.  

[Kuroos]

At a jet plane's speed of 1,000 km (620mi) per hour, the length of the plane becomes one atom shorter than its original length.  

[Kuroos]

Time slows down near a black hole; inside it stops completely.

Tiny dust particles surround a comet. They are swept into a long tail by the solar wind, which consists of subatomic particles speeding from the sum at speed of hundred of miles per second.

To an observer standing on Pluto, the sun would appear no brighter than Venus appears in our evening sky.  

[Kuroos]

A bucket filled with earth would weigh about 5 time more than the same bucket filled with the substance of the sun. However, the force of gravity is so much greater on the sun that the man weighing 150 pounds on our planet would weigh 2 tons on the sun.

A car traveling at a constant speed of 60 miles per hour would take over 48 million years to reach the nearest star (other than our sun), Proxima Centauri. This is about 685,000 average human lifetimes.

A cosmic year is the amount of time it takes the sun to revolve around the center of the Milky Way, about 225 million years.

A day on the planet Mercury is twice as long as its year. Mercury rotates very slowly but revolves around the sun in slightly less than 88 days.  

[Kuroos]

A dog was killed by a meteor at Nakhla, Egypt, in 1911. The unlucky canine is the only creature known to have been killed by a meteor.

You know the three physical dimensions, and the fourth dimension, time. For years, people have speculated about other dimensions. Experts in theoretical physics now say the major theories about the universe make sense together - and all the math seems to work - if there are 10 dimensions.

A scientist at Michigan State University has calculated that the production of a single hen egg requires about 120 gallons of water, a loaf of bread requires 300 gallons, and a pound of beef, 3,500.

Portland cement is used for underwater work. It hardens because of a chemical reaction it has with the water, not because the water mixed with it evaporates. The amount of water that reacts with the cement is crucial for this process, and the physical structure of this cement enables it to control exactly how much water gets into the reaction. So it doesn't matter at all how much water surrounds the cement as long as it has enough to set.  

[Kuroos]

Rain contains vitamin B12.

ENIAC, the first electronic computer, appeared 50 years ago. The original ENIAC was about 80 feet long, weighed 30 tons, had 17,000 tubes. By comparison, a desktop computer today can store a million times more information than an ENIAC, and 50,000 times faster.