Today's Installment of Random Facts
- On the Canadian Two Dollar bill, the flag flying over the Parliament Building is an American flag.
- On the American One Dollar bill, there is an owl in the upper left hand corner of the "1" encased in the shield and a spider hidden in the front upper right hand corner.
- On average, right handed people live nine years longer than left handed people.
- Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.
(By the way, I have yet to confirm any of these. If anyone has any suggestions on how I could go about confirming #3, I'd be most interested ;-))
Google Mars
This is too cool. Granted, it's a very small map and was done more for the heck of it than anything, but still - it's cool.
I also liked the headline: "Google claims its next planet with defeat of House of Atreides."
It's so sad that not all of you get that reference . . . . . . . . . . . .
Random Facts
- Coca-cola was originally green.
- Every day, more money is printed for Monopoly than for the US Treasury.
- Statistically, one is more likely to be killed by a champagne cork than by a poisonous spider.
- Dreamt is the only word in English that ends in "mt."
- Elephants are the only animals that can't jump.
- In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak.
- It would take 8 years, 7 months, and 6 days of continuous yelling to heat one cup of coffee via sound energy.
Classic Movies Available for Download - Free & Legal
There are a couple of sites that offer free, legal downloads of old, public domain movies. These movies are public domain because either they were never protected in the first place or their copyrights have expired.
Veoh was originally intended to be a place where people could post their own home videos (and they have - 10,000 of them), but it has also become the platform for old cult movies.
Public Domain Torrents, on the other hand, is devoted to Classic and B-rate movies.
New Personalized Web Page Creation Tool
This looks like it could be quite cool: the site requests that you input a subject in which you are interested and your five favorite news articles, blogs, images, etc. concerning that topic, and it automatically generates a personalized start page that includes RSS feeds, links to news articles, etc. The site, Boxxet, is currently a by-invitation-only, preview site. It should be up by the end of April. You can read more about it here.
Surprise: More Money Doesn't Equal Smarter Students
Oh wait, everyone with half a brain already knew that. My bad.
The American Legislative Exchange Council (which, I admit, I don't know very much about) has released a series of statistics that show that, over the last 22 years, the states that have poured the most money into their public school systems have not even come close to producing the best students. Moreover, the states that did the best at reducing the student to teacher ratio likewise did not end up at the top of the list of best-student producing schools.
Hairy Lobster
Last year, a team of divers, diving in 7500 deep waters 900 miles south of Easter Island, discovered what can be described as a 6 inch long, hairy lobster. The creature, which is so distinct from other known crustaceans, merited a new family and genus. Kiwa Hirsuta is the first member of the family Kiwaida, named after Kiwa, the Polynesian goddess of crustaceans.
Ave Maria Op-Ed
An interesting take on the recent flurry of anti-Ave Maria activity.
On a slightly different note, I love how it took the rest of the world so many years to even hear about it - but when they did, boy did they jump on the mass-media-story-of-the-week-to-blow-out-of-proportion bandwagon :-)
Complaining Customers
"Statistics suggest that, when customers complain, business owners and managers ought to get excited about it. The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business." - Zig Ziglar, U.S. author and speaker
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