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Posted: July 31st, 2009, 4:56am EDT
Nearly one fifth of people on an eight megabits per second (Mbps) broadband connection in the UK actually receive less than 2Mbps.
(Because of the use of copper wiring instead of fibre optic, the signal degrades the further it travels, so to get 8Mps you would need to be located no further than 2km from an exchange. That is of course assuming they are sending out an 8Mbps signal in the first place.)
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Posted: July 29th, 2009, 3:29am EDT
According to the UN, "desertification is the greatest environmental challenge of our times."
(Desertification is the gradual transformation of habitable land into desert. It is usually caused by climate change or by destructive use of the land. In order to combat it they have set up the UNCCD (The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification). They will achieve their aims by holding lots of scientific consultations and conferences, building a website, coming up with lots of accronyms, like WDCD, DLDD and COPD. They will also publish reams and reams of papers and designate a special day to combat desertification where we will all be asked to go out with a bucket and spade to build sandcastles.)
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Posted: July 22nd, 2009, 4:11am EDT
According to the BBC the new costume for Doctor Who will consist of a tweed jacket, bow tie, rolled up trousers and black boots.
(Why is this interesting? I hear you cry. Well it is, so much so that Doctor Who's new clothes was a well-kept secret until now. It's a "British" thing.)
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Posted: July 22nd, 2009, 3:22am EDT
According to the British Beer and Pub Association, in the UK pubs are closing at the rate of 52 per week.
(Posh, upmarket, cafe style bars are opening at a rate of 2 per week.)
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Posted: July 12th, 2009, 7:32am EDT
Computerised scanners around 15 Tokyo railway stations have introduced a system to check that staff are smiling enough.
(The system measures the smile's curvature to ensure it is broad enough. Say "cheese" everyone.)
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Posted: July 7th, 2009, 9:03am EDT
According to a survey by CareerNet, almost three-quarters of South Korean male office workers feel uncomfortable when female colleagues show too much leg or cleavage in the workplace.
( 56 % objected to micro-miniskirts (I call them belts) and 51% objected to excessive cleavage (you don't hear that complaint much in the UK). Hipster trousers revealing underwear, "killer heels" and flashy outfits in general were also cause for complaint. Women complained about stains on the shirts and ties of their male colleagues, but I'm sure they'd complain if their male colleagues turned up in high heels and low cut blouses.)
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Posted: July 6th, 2009, 5:13am EDT
The BBC spent a massive £14m on taxis in 2008.
(That works out at more than £38,000 a day. BBC staff took more than 406,000 taxi rides. I wonder how many times round the world that would go?)
Source - Daily Mirror
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Posted: June 29th, 2009, 5:22am EDT
According to a spokesperson for the All England Club, physical attractiveness is taken into consideration when deciding who gets to play centre court at Wimbledon.
(This only seems to apply to the ladies. In the men's tournament, five-times winner Roger Federer and British hope Andy Murray invariably play on Centre. But, after Federer left the court on Friday, the next match was Victoria Azarenka of Belarus against Romania's Sorana Cirstea. While both 19-year-olds have top form in the glamour department, Miss Cirstea was seeded 28 while Miss Azarenka, who won, is ranked and seeded eighth. That same day, second seed Serena Williams was relegated to the new No 2 Court for her win over Italian Roberta Vinci. On Wednesday, Centre delivered exactly that - the so-called Battle of the Babes between unseeded Gisela Dulko (world ranking 45) and unseeded Maria Sharapova (ranking 60). Then on Thursday, ninth seed Caroline Wozniacki defeated Russian Maria Kirilenko, 59 in the world, on Centre while No 1 seed Dinara Safina was downgraded to an outer court. I guess the good news is that it's easier to get tickets for the outer courts if you're a real tennis fan and not just an ogler.)
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Posted: June 29th, 2009, 5:00am EDT
Britain's Trident missile has a range of more than 4,600 miles (7,400km).
(Allegedly they are accurate to within a few feet, but considering their destructive power is estimated as the equivalent of eight Hiroshimas I don't think they really need to be.)
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Posted: June 25th, 2009, 3:51am EDT
More than 13,000 red rubber bands are to be sent back to Royal Mail.
(It's part of a protest by the Keep Britain Tidy campaign, because postmen in the UK keep littering the streets and people's front gardens with the red rubber bands that are used to hold mail together. Interestingly Deutsche Post seem to use the same bands, and we have the same problem. I'm going to start gathering them up for my own little protest.)
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Posted: June 23rd, 2009, 2:57am EDT
According to retail research firm Experian, up to 35,000 shops could close in the UK this year.
(After surveying British town centres, they discovered that the high streets in Walkden - Greater Manchester, Harwich - Essex and Gateshead - Tyneside had the most vacant shops with almost 60% of retail premises standing empty. As the recession starts to really bite people have stopped shopping till they drop.)
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Posted: June 22nd, 2009, 3:24pm EDT
When photographing a group of heads of state, protocol decrees that the host should stand in the centre at the front and next to him should be the longest-serving leaders.
(At the recent G20 summit, Gordon Brown, as host, stood front and centre, with the dignitaries radiating out from him in order of seniority and length of service, meaning the positions on either side of Brown were reserved for the heads of state who had been in harness the longest - President Luis "Lula" Ignacio de Silva of Brazil and Hu Jintao of China. As the new kid on the block, Barack Obama was shuffled slightly off centre.)
Source -
The Guardian
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Posted: June 15th, 2009, 4:47am EDT
According to a UN report; "Risk and Poverty in a Changing Climate", between 1990 and 2007, loss of life and property from weather-related disasters rose significantly.
(Floods were the biggest single cause and developing countries, led by China, India, Bangladesh and Indonesia, suffered the biggest mortality in absolute terms, but in relation to population, the highest tolls were in Dominica, Vanuatu and Myanmar.)
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Posted: June 13th, 2009, 7:39am EDT
A survey by the Washington-based Pew Internet and American Life Project found that the median age of a user of micro-blogging service Twitter is 31 years old as opposed to 27 for MySpace, 26 for Facebook and 40 for LinkedIn.
(Ha! I put on my MySpace account that I was 99 years old - so much for statistics!)
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Posted: June 3rd, 2009, 4:38am EDT
People in the UK prefer to drink their tea at a temperature of 56-60°C.
(It's probably why we add cold milk to it and it is lucky, as adding cold milk makes it cool enough to reduce the risk of developing cancer of the oesophagus. According to research at the University of Tehran, drinking hot tea (65-69°C) is associated with twice the risk of developing oesophageal cancer, and drinking very hot tea (70°C or more) is associated with an eight-fold increased risk. I'm glad I drink my tea with milk.)
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Posted: May 31st, 2009, 10:48am EDT
There are only 19 countries in the G20.
(There are actually 20 members of the G-20, but these include the finance ministers and central bank governors of only 19 countries. So who gets double billing? Well the 20th member is the European Union, which is represented by the rotating Council presidency and the European Central Bank.)
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Posted: May 31st, 2009, 10:45am EDT
You can overdose on chewing gum.
(According to the Lancet, a teenager was admitted to hospital suffering from a rapid heart beat, prickling sensations in his legs and raised blood pressure. He had eaten two packets of gum within a four hour period while at school, taking in 320 mg of caffeine, more than contained in three cups of coffee and was suffering from caffeine intoxication.)
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Posted: May 28th, 2009, 3:31pm EDT
According to the Daily Telegraph, Britons spend, on average, six months of their lives queueing.
(The average adult wastes around five hours and 35 minutes each month queueing, and queueing at the supermarket takes up the most time. Waiting for a bus or train, queuing to get a drink at a bar and paying for goods in a shop also emerged as things we spend the most time waiting for. I'm surprised it's only six months, sometimes it seems much, much longer.)
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Posted: May 28th, 2009, 11:22am EDT
According to researchers at Oxford University we are all capable of "hearing" shapes and sizes and perhaps even "tasting" sounds.
(Synaesthesia is a physiological or psychological condition whereby a particular sensory stimulus triggers a second kind of sensation, it's thought to affect less than 1% of the population, but according to Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University, we are all "synaesthetes" up to a point. I just found my point as I walked into a wall whilst munching on a Nirvana song.)
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Posted: May 24th, 2009, 6:01pm EDT
Official statistics in the UK say that 29% of women have never used the internet, but only 20% of men.
(I wonder why that might be.)
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Posted: May 20th, 2009, 9:45am EDT
According to figures from the Office for National Statistics an extra 111,000 16 to 29-year-old Brits either moved back in with their parents or decided not to move out in the 12 months to December 2008.
(One in four men and one in six women in their 20s now live with their parents. I know this is true, my nephew is one of them.)
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Posted: May 20th, 2009, 9:30am EDT
Scientists at Cambridge University say they have located the brain areas that may determine how sociable a person is.
(Warm, sentimental people tend to have more brain tissue in the outer strip of the brain just above the eyes and in a structure deep in the brain's centre. Interestingly these are the same zones that allow people to enjoy chocolate and sex. So, being sociable has its own rewards.)
Source: European Journal of Neuroscience.
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Posted: May 15th, 2009, 5:38am EDT
According to research at Imperial College London, bird flu may not have become the threat to humans that some predicted because our noses are too cold for the virus to thrive.
(Seemingly at 32° Celsius, avian flu viruses lose function and cannot spread. I'll never complain about having a cold nose again.)
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Posted: May 14th, 2009, 10:02am EDT
When we smile genuinely, there are two major muscles that move. A Duchenne smile or Zygomatic smile involves contraction of both the zygomatic major muscle (which turns the corner of the lips up to meet the eyes) and the orbicularis oculi muscle (which raises the cheeks and forms crow's feet around the eyes). A non-Duchenne smile involves only the zygomatic major muscle and looks fake.
(Many researchers believe that Duchenne smiles indicate genuine spontaneous emotions since most people cannot voluntarily contract the outer portion of the orbicularis oculi muscle. As for the crow's feet, I prefer the term "laughter lines".)
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Posted: May 13th, 2009, 5:10am EDT
The UK government has admitted that nearly 370 farms in Britain are still restricted in the way they use land and rear sheep because of radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear power station accident 23 years ago.
(Dawn Primarolo, the minister for health, revealed 369 farms and 190,000 sheep were affected.
In 1986, approximately 9,700 farms and 4,225,000 sheep were under restriction across the United Kingdom. So much for a cleaner, greener future.)
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Posted: May 6th, 2009, 6:01pm EDT
According to a study by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), the French devote nearly twice the time to meals than do Americans, Britons or Mexicans.
(Of course the French take eating very seriously, and whatever you do, don't try to talk about work during lunch. That said, the credit crunch is having an effect. According to the Guardian newspaper, over 3,000 traditional French restaurants, cafes and bars went bust in the first three months of 2008.)
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Posted: May 6th, 2009, 4:24am EDT
According to a study by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), the French spend more time sleeping than their counterparts in economically developed countries.
(On average, the French get 8.8 hours of sleep each night, enjoying more rest than Americans and Spaniards and a full hour more than South Koreans who rank last on the list with a mere 7.8 hours of sleep. Personally if I don't get 8 hours of sleep I'm like a bear with a sore head for the rest of the day.)
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Posted: May 1st, 2009, 6:01pm EDT
There is a pothole every 120 yards on Britain's roads.
(English councils filled 5,252 holes each on average last year but because of an £8.5bn funding shortfall it will take nearly 13 years at the present rate of maintenance to get them all patched up. It costs around £65 to fill one pothole, and it would cost £47m per local authority to clear the problem. The British government raises £46bn each year from the road tax, but the problem is only 20 per cent of is put back into roads. We all know what happens to the rest of the money, it's all those second homes.)
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Posted: April 29th, 2009, 5:57am EDT
According to the CDC (Centre for Disease Control), around 36,000 people in the USA die from influenza-related complications each year.
(Actually records are confusing and not that well kept, so it could be more, or less.)
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Posted: April 29th, 2009, 5:39am EDT
The deepest that humans have ever drilled into the Earth is 12,261 metres (40,230 ft) .
(The drilling took place on the Kola Peninsula in Russia. Some interesting things were discovered within the earth's crust, as the drill made its way approximately halfway through the earth's crust it exposed rocks that were 2.7 billion years old, and along the way they found a fractured area of rock 3 to 6 miles beneath the surface that had been thoroughly saturated with water. Temperatures eventually reached 180 °C (360 °F), making deeper drilling prohibitively expensive.)
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Posted: April 27th, 2009, 7:07am EDT
To date the most expensive domain names are:-
10. VIP.com
Sold for: $1.4 million in September 2005
Bought by: Leisure and Gaming
9. CreditCards.com
Sold for: $2.75 million in July 2004
Bought by: Austin
8. Wine.com
Sold for: $2.9 million in September 1999
7. Shop.com
Sold for: $3.5 million
6. AsSeenOnTv.com
Sold for: $5.1 million in January 2000
5. Beer.com
Sold for $7 million
4. Diamonds.com
Sold for: $7.5 million
3. Business.com
Sold For: $7.5 million in 1999 (This was the Guinness World Record holder).
2. Porn.com
Sold for $9.5 million in 2007.
1. Sex.com
Sold for: $11 - $14 million (depending on who you listen to) in January 19th 2006
Bought by: Escom LLC
(No surprises in the top 3 then. Power and sex sells.)
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Posted: April 24th, 2009, 4:24am EDT
According to research from France's National Institute of Demographic studies, France has the highest proportion of clinically underweight women in Europe.
(France is the one country in which both sexes are solidly in the "normal" weight bracket, and the only one in which more than five percent of women are officially "underweight". The problem is only half of them think they are too thin.)
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Posted: April 17th, 2009, 6:01pm EDT
According to a survey, suicide rates go up in the spring.
(They also go up during an economic downturn, and there are a couple of other known risk factors - being a man, a doctor and a smoker. So as it's spring, and being that we're in a recession, if you're a male, smoking doctor, please try to think positive. The survey was conducted by Keith Hawton of Oxford University and Kees van Heeringen of University Hospital, Gent, and published in the British medical journal The Lancet.)
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Posted: April 17th, 2009, 6:10am EDT
According to research by climate consultants ICF International and anti-virus firm McAfee, email spam uses more than 33bn kilowatt-hours of energy every year.
(This is enough to power more than 2.4m homes, and amounts to emissions of more than 17 million tons of CO2. Not just that, but searching for legitimate e-mails and deleting spam uses 80% of the energy, so of the 131kg of CO2 created by the average business user 22% of it is related to spam. According to the same report spam filtering would reduce unwanted spam by 75%, the equivalent to taking 2.3 million cars off the road. I've never heard of wanted spam.)
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Posted: April 17th, 2009, 6:05am EDT
According to a report by climate consultants ICF International and anti-virus firm McAfee 62 trillion spam emails are sent globally, every year.
(I know I get more than my fair share. Maybe there should be an 11th commandment, Though shalt not Spam.)
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Posted: April 17th, 2009, 5:56am EDT
A team of researchers in the US has discovered the earliest sample of human-made medicine.
(They found traces of wine compounds and plant-derived ingredients from a jar, basically a medicinal alcoholic drink. The bottles are more than 5,000 years old and were found in the tomb of one of the first pharaohs of Egypt, Scorpion I. So the next time I have a tipple, it will be purely medicinal.)
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Posted: April 17th, 2009, 5:52am EDT
Scientists in Dubai say they have cloned a camel.
(Injaz, a female one-humped camel, was born on 8 April, after more than five years of work. She joins the world's first mammal to be cloned, Dolly the Sheep, along with several cloned mice, cows, pigs and dogs. Personally I can't see the point. Cloning is extremely complicated and expensive, and sex is much more enjoyable.)
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Posted: April 13th, 2009, 11:08am EDT
The most famous decorated Easter eggs made by goldsmith, Peter Carl Faberge.
(In 1883, the Czar of Russia, Alexander, commissioned Faberge to make a special Easter gift for his wife, the Empress Marie. The first Faberge egg was an egg within an egg. It had an outside shell of platinum and enamelled white which opened to reveal a smaller gold egg inside. The smaller egg, opened to display a golden chicken and a jewelled replica of the Imperial crown.
Me? I make do with a chocolate one.)
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Posted: April 10th, 2009, 9:10am EDT
According to research by Debenhams, the size of men's feet in the UK has gone up a size in the past five years.
(Half a decade ago, the average was a UK size 8. Now it is 9 and, to underline the trend, demand for size 12s has soared, retailers say. Requests for size 14 and above have also leapt in the past few years as men's feet appear to becoming broader and longer. Medical experts believe that Britain's obesity epidemic is fuelling the increase in shoe size. Seemingly eating processed foods during puberty can stimulate the growth hormone not only making your waist larger, but also other parts of the body. They mention hands and feet, but it makes you wonder....)
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Posted: April 6th, 2009, 11:42am EDT
According to the Independent, the FSA (Financial Services Authority) has brought just one criminal case of insider dealing since its inception in 2001.
(Insider dealing (aka insider trading) is the use of confidential information to profit from mergers and acquisitions. It has nothing to do with the illegal trade in spare parts for organ transplants.)
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Posted: March 30th, 2009, 11:52am EDT
The worst song of all time (as voted for by a panel of music writers) is going to be re-released, 25 years after it appropriately hit number 2.
(It's called Agadoo, and it's by Black Lace. Just to remind people how awful it is, here are the lyrics and the song:-
Ag-a-doo-doo-doo, push pineapple, shake the tree,
Aga-doo-doo-doo, push pineapple, grind coffee,
To the left, to the right, jump up and down and to the knees,
Come and dance every night, sing with a hula melody.
I met a hula mistress somewhere in Waikiki,
Well she was sellin' pineapple, playin' ukulele,
And when I went to the girl, come on and teach me to sway,
She laughed and whispered to me, yes come tonight to the bay.
The lovely beach, in the sky the moon of Kauai,
Around calypso sarong we'll all be singin' this song.
Ag-a-doo-doo-doo, push pineapple, shake the tree,
Aga-doo-doo-doo, push pineapple, grind coffee,
To the left, to the right, jump up and down and to the knees,
Come and dance every night, sing with a hula melody.
Aga-doo-doo-doo, push pineapple, shake the tree,
Aga-doo-doo-doo, push pineapple, grind coffee,
To the left, to the right, jump up and down and to the knees,
Come and dance every night, sing with a hula melody.
And down on the shore, they gather romance,
She showed me much more, not only to dance...
Aga-doo-doo-doo, push pineapple, shake the tree,
Aga-doo-doo-doo, push pineapple, grind coffee,
To the left, to the right, jump up and down and to the knees,
Come and dance every night, sing with a hula melody.
Aga-doo-doo-doo, push pineapple, shake the tree,
Aga-doo-doo-doo, push pineapple, grind coffee,
To the left, to the right, jump up and down and to the knees,
Come and dance every night, sing with a hula melody.
The lovely beach, in the sky the moon of Kauai
Around calypso sarong we'll all be singin' this song:-
Ag-a-doo-doo-doo, push pineapple, shake the tree,
Aga-doo-doo-doo, push pineapple, grind coffee,
To the left, to the right, jump up and down and to the knees,
Come and dance every night, sing with a hula melody.
Ag-a-doo-doo-doo, push pineapple, shake the tree,
Aga-doo-doo-doo, push pineapple, grind coffee,
To the left, to the right, jump up and down and to the knees,
Come and dance every night, sing with a hula melody.
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Posted: March 28th, 2009, 8:20am EDT
According to statistics from French media ratings agency, 2008 was the year of the one-minute hike in the couch potato syndrome. They found that in 80 territories worldwide people spent more time than ever glued to the goggle box.
(Not surprisingly sport, particularly football, remained the firm TV favourite, followed by fiction. Perhaps we should try living more, and spectating less.)
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Posted: March 24th, 2009, 5:07am EDT
According to a report by Amnesty International a total of 2,390 people were put to death in 25 countries in 2008.
(Five states: China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States -- accounted for 93 percent of the executions.
China: 1,718 people
Iran: 346 people
Saudi Arabia: at least 102 people
United States: 37 people - Texas accounted for roughly half.
Pakistan: at least 36 people.
Belarus is the last country in Europe and the former Soviet Union that is still carrying out executions.)
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Posted: March 23rd, 2009, 5:21am EDT
Under the current rules, British MPs can claim an Additional Costs Allowance of up to £24,000 a year.
(It goes to MPs from outside inner London to cover the cost of staying away from their main home when carrying out parliamentary duties. It's crazy, many people earn a lot less than this and work thousands of miles away from home.)
!Note - They've offered to give up this allowance, in exchange for a £40,000 pay rise! These guys are so out of touch!
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Posted: March 21st, 2009, 7:01pm EDT
According to the AFP (Agence France-Presse) Welsh is spoken by 600,000 people.
(Not 600,001 or 599,999 - 600,000. They counted.)
Source Here
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Posted: March 19th, 2009, 1:56pm EDT
According to a report in The Times, an estimated 100 million books are stolen from bookshops in the UK every year.
(This means there's a black market in books worth about £750 million.)
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Posted: March 16th, 2009, 6:19am EDT
According to a report in the Daily Mail, old age begins at 27.
(Scientists at the University of Virginia found that our mental abilities peak at the age of 22 and start to decline from the age of 27. Perhaps they tested readers of the Daily Mail, once you start reading that paper, your cognitive abilities have already started to deteriorate.)
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Posted: March 15th, 2009, 10:57am EDT
$2trn (That's two trillion dollars) of the combined worth of planet Earth's billionaires has disappeared over the past year.
(Across the globe, the number of those who can boast a fortune of over a thousand million US dollars has shrivelled from 1,125 to 793. The 10 biggest dollar-losers between them have this year lost more than the annual GDP (gross domestic product) of Ireland. Of course for those of us who are struggling to hold onto our jobs, or our houses, this is barely on our radar.)
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Posted: March 13th, 2009, 4:29am EDT
In the last five years, fire crews in England have received over 1,700 calls to help move obese patients.
(Essex had the most calls at 390. It's not easy to move any human being, believe me, so they even have a 22 stone dummy to practise on. What a crazy world we live in.)
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Posted: March 10th, 2009, 7:06am EDT
The tongue of the chief coffee taster for a worldwide chain of coffee shops has been insured for £10m ($13.95m).
(I knew you could insure most things, but this is a bit tasteless.)
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Posted: March 2nd, 2009, 9:32am EST
Aberystwyth, is going to screen the classic Monty Python movie "Life of Brian".
(I can hear all the Annoying Mouses out there going "Well that's not interesting". But it is, because 30 years ago this Welsh town banned the film. No one thought to revoke the ban because few people realised it still stood, and now there'll be a one-off screening for charity at Aberystwyth Arts Centre. It should be a good night as Michael Palin and Terry Jones are expected to attend.)
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Posted: March 1st, 2009, 10:07am EST
A Keep Britain Tidy (KBT) survey found that 25% of English streets are littered with fast food rubbish.
(This is up from 16% in 2002. The worst culprits were Britain's biggest fast food chain MacDonald's who accounted for 29% of the rubbish, with unbranded wrappings from local fish and chip or kebab shops in second place at 21%. Greggs the bakery accounted for 18%, KFC 8% and
Subway/Coffee shops 5%. KBT wants retailers to make it easier to dispose of litter responsibly, but I think it's more of a reflection of the kind of people who eat the stuff, if they don't care what they put in their stomaches, they certainly don't care about where they put their rubbish, they just don't give a ....)
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Posted: March 1st, 2009, 9:57am EST
According to the the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), popular cough and cold medicines which have been used for years to treat children probably don't work.
(Not only don't they work but they can also cause side effects like hallucinations! I knew there was a reason I never liked taking my medicine.)
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Posted: February 25th, 2009, 3:13am EST
According to the Daily Telegraph, it costs an average of £667 to keep a prisoner overnight in a London cell.
(It only costs £395 a night to stay at the Dorchester. Maybe the best way to cut crime is to present the prisoner with a bill at the end of his / her stay.)
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Posted: February 25th, 2009, 3:00am EST
According to the Financial Times, in 2008 the number of MBA graduates rose to 500,000 worldwide.
(In 1908 33 people were the first to graduate from Harvard University. It makes you wonder if it hasn't devalued the qualification, and if you look at the state of business and finance in the world today, you have to wonder what all these bright young things have been taught.)
You can view
business school rankings here.
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Posted: February 23rd, 2009, 4:56am EST
The shire of Northampton has more speed cameras than any other part of the UK.
(But don't worry, you can check on the Northampton police web site to see where they are!
http://www.northants.police.uk/default.asp?action=article&ID=2123
Is it just me, or is this daft?)
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Posted: February 20th, 2009, 4:32am EST
Around two million tonnes of clothing ends up in landfill in the UK every year.
(The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) says the clothing and textiles sector in the UK produces around 3.1m tonnes of carbon dioxide, 2m tonnes of waste and 70m tonnes of waste water per year. In 2007 the Environment Select Committee found that the proportion of textile waste at council tips in the UK had risen from 7 per cent to 30 per cent in five years. It's called throw away or disposable fashion, driven by companies like Primark, in fact it's called the Primark effect. There is hope though, people like Helen Storey who began the Wonderland project, and who along with Professor Tony Ryan has invented the Disappearing Dress, which disintegrates in the wash. My only worry is that it rains a lot in the UK.)
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Posted: February 20th, 2009, 3:01am EST
According to Robert Penn, co-author of The Wrong Kind of Snow. In 1673 Dover and Calais were joined by ice.
(Between 1350 and 1850 in the UK, there was a Little Ice Age. Freezing winters were a fact of life and the freezing of the River Thames in London in 1684 led to that year's Great Frost Fair, which was held on the River itself. But there's no way the health and safety fun police would allow it now.)
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Posted: February 20th, 2009, 2:54am EST
Well not the whole of the UK, or at least not yet. But in Warrington Bank Quay railway station, passengers have been told "No Kissing".
(They are only allowed to kiss in the car park. I'm not sure how they'll enforce this rule though. Maybe lip clamping services will spring up all over.)
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According to FA chairman Lord Triesman, English football has total debts of more than three billion pounds (3.9 billion euros).
(Unsurprisingly, he says that the four big clubs, Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool, probably account for about a third of that amount. They obviously subscribe to the Lily Allen school of Economics: "But it doesn’t matter cause I'm packing plastic, and that’s what makes my life so FA fantastic."
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Google has adapted its free email service so that users can adjust their email settings to activate a feature that makes you solve a few simple math problems after you click "send" to verify you're in the right state of mind.
(It's to prevent anyone from letting loose after a few too many, just to make sure you really want to tell your boss what you think of him / her. Not recommended for anyone who is mathematically challenged though.)
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A study by global market information group TNS has shown that the Chinese spend the largest fraction of their leisure time online, an average of 40%, and under 25s a whopping 50%.
(However, in the UK, housewives spend even more time than that. Stuff the ironing! Let's hear it for the British housewife!)
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Posted: January 22nd, 2009, 10:40am EST
A poster campaign proclaiming "There's probably no God" does not breach British advertising rules.
(More than 300 people complained about the the atheist campaign where the slogan "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life," was stuck on around 800 buses. Now that's free speech.)
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Posted: January 21st, 2009, 6:57am EST
At the inauguration of Barack Obama around two million people packed into the Washington National Mall to see the ceremony.
(I watched it on TV along with two billion other people.)
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Posted: January 18th, 2009, 7:13am EST
The Moon's distance from the Earth can vary by about 30,000km.
(The Moon's orbit is eliptic, it does not follow a circular but rather an oval path. This means that its distance from the Earth is not constant.)
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Posted: January 10th, 2009, 6:01pm EST
80 years since the last one, a new Winnie-the-Pooh story is to be published.
("Return to the Hundred Acre Wood", written by David Benedictus, is to be released in Britain and the United States on October 5. Well, I've heard of milking the cow, but never of milking the bear.)
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Posted: January 10th, 2009, 3:15pm EST
According to a paper, published by the British Medical Journal, children who badly misbehave in school are likelier to end up with a dud job, have poor mental health, end up in a teen pregnancy or get divorced.
(Forty years after monitoring Britons born in 1946, a clear link was found between misbehaviour at school and difficulties in adult life. I'm going to look at some of my old school reports and see where I went wrong.)
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Posted: January 8th, 2009, 1:14pm EST
Only 2% of gas in the UK comes from Russia.
(Britain still uses its North Sea reserves for most of its gas supply, supplementing it with imports from Norway. However, that hasn't stopped the wholesale price of gas from rocketing 26% in the last three days whilst the continuing gas wrangle between Russia and Ukraine has reduced supply to Europe. I guess it was just too good an opportunity to miss.)
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Posted: January 6th, 2009, 6:01pm EST
According to a three-year study, carried out at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, on the links between personality and music taste, classical music fans have high self-esteem while heavy rock fans lack self-belief. Indie music listeners lack self-esteem and lovers of pop music are uncreative, while country and western fans are hard-working and rap fans have an outgoing personality.
(I wonder what they'd make of me. I like most genres. Maybe that makes me a full of self esteem whilst lacking self belief, uncreative, creative, hard-working, outgoing schizophrenic.)
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Posted: January 6th, 2009, 4:24am EST
According to a three year study published by a university in Edinburgh, heavy metal fans and lovers of classical music have more in common than they may like to think.
(Although fans of heavy metal bands like Metallica are traditionally portrayed as work-shy, long-haired students, and lovers of Mozart are seen as sober and hard-working, researchers found that both music types attract creative people who are at ease with themselves but can be introverted. I must say I've never seen anyone head banging to Mozart though.)
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Posted: January 6th, 2009, 4:10am EST
According to a report in the British Journal of Psychology, the number of suicides in England and Wales fell by about 40 percent after the July 2005 London bombings.
(This echoes a trend recorded after the attacks on September 11, 2001, in New York, where suicide rates also dropped by about the same percentage. Psychologists believe traumatic national events such as these help potentially suicidal people to feel less alone and more a part of society. Or maybe they just realise how sacred life is.)
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Posted: December 30th, 2008, 6:01pm EST
When you're drinking your bubbly to see in the New Year the following notes might help to choose and then describe the taste and bouquet (smell).
(Brut Zero & Brut Sauvage, are sugar free and extremely dry. These are also the best option for diabetics.
Brut is dry.
`Extra Dry' is actually slightly sweeter than Brut.
Demi sec translates as 'half dry', which is a good choice for those who prefer medium wines.
Doux and Rich are very sweet.
Biscuity - a biscuit smell to the bouquet that denotes maturity and integrated flavours.
Creamy - obvious tastes of vanilla or cream.
Fresh - Champagne has a higher acidity compared to other white wines and usually features traces of lemon and green apple for a refreshing taste.
Nutty - this flavour usually derives from age and points to maturity of the Champagne.
Toasty - a bready smell to the bouquet that denotes maturity and integrated flavours.
Yeasty - Champagne is made using a secondary fermentation process to create the fizz and it is the extent of the enzymatic breakdown of the yeast cells that create this particular flavour.
Complexity - the very best wines have greater maturity and integration of flavours which last longer in the mouth and have a more defined bouquet. This range of qualities in Champagne is termed complexity, in contrast to more one dimensional varieties.
Length/persistence - refer to how long the flavour of the Champagne remains after swallowing. Most great wines have good length of flavour.
Happy New Year)
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Posted: December 29th, 2008, 6:01pm EST
According to the Economist, the world's largest exporter is Germany.
(Yes, Germany, not China and not the US. Although China was predicted to overtake both the US and Germany by 2010, the global recession might put paid to that.)
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Posted: December 24th, 2008, 6:01pm EST
According to research, commissioned by Grove Fresh Organic, 8pm is the UK's official Christmas Day 'Sour Hour'.
(More than 3 million Brits admit to being at their worst at this time on Christmas Day. So, have a Happy Christmas everyone, and remember lights out at 8!)
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Posted: December 22nd, 2008, 6:01pm EST
In 2007 Gordon Brown did not send a Christmas card to Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel or Russia's outgoing president, Vladimir Putin.
(Did I mention he's Scottish?)
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Posted: December 19th, 2008, 6:01pm EST
According to research from the University of Rochester in the US, men prefer women in red.
(Seemingly this doesn't just apply to clothing - even women in photographs with a red frame were rated as more attractive. The conclusion was that men are driven by primal instincts. No surprises there then.)
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You really can smell fear.
(According to a study at Rice University in Houston there are chemical warning signals produced by fear. Now they just have to discover the sweet smell of success.
There's an
a-z list of phobias and fears on the forum.)
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According to a report by the National Audit Office, the chief executive of CDC Group, Richard Laing, is paid £970,000 a year.
(What's amusing / annoying is that the CDC is the Commonwealth Development Corporation, a government-owned body which helps to tackle poverty in developing countries. I think giving some of his wages to poverty stricken countries might be helpful.)
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A single sneeze propels 100,000 germ laden droplets into the air at 90mph.
(According to cold and flu expert Dr Roger Henderson, just one sneeze on a crowded train can give 150 passengers a cold in just five minutes. This means that 10 per cent of commuters will come into contact with an area infected by just one sneeze, and researchers for cold and flu remedy Lemsip found that 99 per cent of commuters suffered at least one cold last winter. As my mother used to say "Coughs and sneezes spread diseases,catch them in your handkerchief!" And with the availability of paper tissues, there is no excuse not to do this.)
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According to a six-year study from the University of Michigan, we may all be getting older, but seniors feel about 13 years younger than their actual age.
(516 men and women aged 70 and over, said that they felt on average 13 years younger than their chronological age. But women thought they were closer to their actual age than men. I'll bet you women lie more about their age though.)
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According to the Guinness Book of Records The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is the "Most Translated Document" in the world.
(It consists of 30 articles which outline the view of the General Assembly on the human rights guaranteed to all people.)
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The computer mouse was first demonstrated by Douglas Engelbart on 9th December 1968. It was made of wood and had one button.
You can watch a video of the demonstration here.(The world's first trackball was invented by Tom Cranston, Fred Longstaff and Kenyon Taylor. It was as part of a project in 1952, and it used of all things, a standard Canadian five-pin bowling ball, but it was not patented, as it was a secret military project.
Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute invented the mouse in 1964 after extensive usability testing, but he never received any royalties for it, as his patent ran out before it became widely used in personal computers.
The first known publication of the term "mouse" as a pointing device is in Bill English's 1965 publication "Computer-Aided Display Control".
The first marketed integrated mouse, which was shipped as a part of a computer, and intended for personal computer navigation, came with the Xerox 8010 Star Information System in 1981.)
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The first known examples of writing date back 5500 years.
(Markings were found on fragments of pottery at a site called Harappa in Pakistan. Unfortunately it's a bit like my handwriting, nobody can understand what it says.)
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A pay slip allegedly bearing the signature of the woman who inspired the Beatles' Eleanor Rigby was sold recently for £115,000.
(I have a pay slip allegedly bearing the signature of the woman who set up an interesting facts blog, if anyone is interested.)
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Nissan has developed a car which rotates 360 degrees.
(This means no more reverse parking! I know what I'm writing on my pressie list to Santa this year.)
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Over the last 3 years, the Smurfs have sold more than 10 million albums.
(Who said the music industry was in trouble?)
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It is not possible to cool any substance to absolute zero (Davies, Jeremy Dunning - 1996).
(0° K, is a thermodynamic (absolute) temperature scale. It measures –273.15 °C on the Celsius scale. Which is very, very, very cold.)
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According to the Office of National Statistics, centre staff take the most sick leave in the UK.
(A couple of years ago a similar Australia-first study of absenteeism in call centres found sick leave rose in 38 per cent of call centres. Staff took on average 75 per cent of their allowed sick leave. Whilst I was at university I worked in a call centre, and I can tell you, it's a sickening job.)
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The average human head has roughly 100,000 hair follicles.
(I really don't recommend that you attempt to test this particular fact.)
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Ragweed is the leading cause of late-summer hay fever in North America.
(The problem is it's spreading to Europe and extending the havfever season to October! In Germany, ragweed is called 'ambrosia,' which is from the plant's botanical name, Ambrosia artemisiifolia. A nice name for a nasty menace.)
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According to recent figures, gas and electricity prices in Britain have climbed twice as fast as the European Union average.
(According to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) there's been a 29.7 percent rise in utility prices in the past year in the UK, compared to a 15 percent increase in the EU. We don't call it "rip of Britain" for nothing.)
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According to France's Chocolate-Makers Union, the Swiss are the world's top consumers of chocolate, chomping through 12.3 kilogrammes per person per year.
(No surprise that the Swiss are top, but Germans mop up 11.2 kgs per person, Britons 10.3 and Belgians 9.3. Seemingly the Japanese love dark chocolate, but the Chinese hate it! But I always say, if you don't like dark chocolate, you don't really like chocolate.)
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Interesting Halloween Fact # 5 - Candles
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Bill Gates spent his last day at Microsoft.
(Maybe he'll stop sending me updates now.)
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According to an EU-commissioned study, the annual cost of the lost of forest is more than the amount being lost in the current banking crisis.
(Seemingly if you add the value of the various services that forests perform, such as providing clean water and absorbing carbon dioxide, the annual cost of deforestation comes in at between $2 trillion and $5 trillion.)
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According to a survey on Religion and Public Life in America, conducted by the Pew Forum, more Americans believe in heaven than in hell.
(In addition, around three-quarters of Americans believe in miracles, and nearly six in 10 pray every day. Of those who pray regularly, around a third -- 31 percent -- say God answers their prayers at least once a month, and one in five Americans said they receive direct answers to prayer requests at least once a week.)
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The UK's Department for Transport has rewritten the guidelines on the acceptable number of people standing in a train carriage.
(Before, it was considered acceptable to have ten people standing for every 100 seats but under new guidelines it is all right to have 30 standing passengers per 100 seats. So you might be squashed on like a sardine with no seat and no chance of finding a seat, but you can be happy in the knowledge that you're not actually overcrowded.)
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Professor Steve Jones from the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London, believes that the mechanisms of evolution are winding down in the human race.
(So, according to him this is as good as it gets.)
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A group of aliens calling themselves the Galactic Federation of Light are coming to earth today.
(How do I know? Well it's on YouTube, so it must be true. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOF7IIQYmlI)
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Two New Testament books were left out of the modern Bible.
(The Codex, written around the time of the first Christian Emperor Constantine, is probably the oldest Bible in existence and it contains books which are missing from the authorised version of the Bible that most Christians are familiar with today.)
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According to an EU study, if you listen to music at high volume for more than one hour a day over five years risk permanent harm to your hearing.
(Seemingly one in 10 people with a personal MP3 or CD player could suffer permanent hearing loss because they play their music too loud.)
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Nine £1m banknotes were printed after World War II.
(Seemingly there are two still in existence. Although they are no longer legal tender one treasury note recently fetched £78,300 at an auction in London.)
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Henry V created the UK's earliest passports.
(According to the Home Office's website they were first issued in 1414 and they were called ‘Safe Conducts’. But even earlier than that a reference to what appears to be a passport is found in the Hebrew version of the Bible. In Nehemiah 2, which is attributed to the time of the Persian Empire (about 450 BC), Nehemiah, an official serving King Artaxerxes I of Persia, asked leave to travel to Judea, and the king granted it and gave him a letter "To the governors beyond the river" requesting safe passage for him as he traveled through their lands, which could also be the first recorded instance of "To whom it may concern.")
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The annual rate of house price deflation in the UK is 4.6%.
(Deflation is the opposite of inflation. The problem for a lot of people is most of their money is tied up in their house.)
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Local historians in the UK have confirmed evidence that baseball was played in Surrey more than 20 years before American independence.
(The reference is from a diary from 1755 that documents a game being played in Guildford. A later historical reference to the game being played in England appears in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, written between 1797 and 1798. Maybe I should add it to the Sports section then.)
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According to the Times the great British cup of tea is making a comeback.
(Tearooms around the UK and especially in London are enjoying a resurgence as people discover that sharing a pot of tea is cheaper than a round of cappuccinos.)
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Almost a third of BT payphones have been removed in the past six years.
(In 2002, there were about 95,000 BT payphones across the UK, but 31,000 have been removed since then. The blame lies with the increased use of mobile phones.)
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According to University of Cambridge computer scientist; Dr Richard Clayton, e-mail addresses beginning with with "A", "M" or "S" get more spam than those starting with "Q" or "Z".
(Spammers seemed to like the letters, "A", "M", "S", "R" and "P". About 40% of all the messages arriving in the e-mail inboxes of accounts with addresses that had one of those characters as their first letter were junk. Much less popular were "Q", "Z" and "Y". For these cases, spam was about 20% or less.)
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The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol," which refers to the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros.
(Having found its way increasingly into everyday language, usually through "I Googled it", the verb, "to google," was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning, "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."
They formally incorporated their company, Google Inc., on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California.)
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DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid) from 3,000-year-old skeletons can be matched to living descendants.
(I'm not sure if I'd want relatives that old turning up on my doorstep.)
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According to the Office of National Statistics, over 60s in the UK outnumber children for the first time.
(This problem can be easily addressed, so come on guys - get on with it.)
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Fewer than a half of the world’s maritime boundaries have been agreed.
(Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, all countries have rights to resources up to 200 nautical miles from their shoreline. This recently resulted in Russia planting a flag on the seabed of the North Pole. Personally I think that if someone can walk there, without the aid of any machinery, they are quite entitled to plant a flag, of course they didn't so they aren't.)
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Lake Baikal in Russia holds about a fifth of the world's fresh water.
(At 1,637 meters (5,371 ft), it is also the deepest lake in the world. It was declared a Unesco World Heritage site in 1996, so let's hope that preserves its future.)
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The official motto of the Olympic Games and the Olympic Movement is “citius, altius, fortius”.
(It's Latin for "faster, higher, stronger." Perhaps some of the athletes got a bit confused with the Latin, it's not "faster with drugs, higher on drugs, stronger drugs!")
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David Beckham will take part in the Olympic flag ceremony at the closing ceremony in Beijing.
(He will appear alongside Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, London-born singer Leona Lewis, dancers from the Royal Opera House and (drum roll) Boris Johnson - the newly elected Mayor of London. Luckily sportsmen and women from previous Olympic Games will also appear, which to me is much more meaningful.)
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Germany's Christian Ahlmann has been suspended from the Olympic Games in Beijing after his horse tested positive for a banned substance.
(Drugging yourself is bad enough. Drugging a horse! Scumbags, they should make whoever did it do the course without a horse.)
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The plane bringing Britain's Olympic team home next week is going to be painted gold in honour of the record gold medal haul for Team GB in Beijing.
(British Airways are going to paint the nose-cone of the Boeing 747, which is normally dark-blue. A golden nose job.)
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Britain has had its best Olympics for a century, taking its 17th gold today and staying in third place in the overall medals table, behind China and the United States.
(Not bad for a little island, but personally I think we've always had good athletes, our drugs just weren't good enough.)
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According to the China Daily, Peking roast duck is the popular choice of athletes at the Beijing Olympics.
(The crispy duck dish now tops the medal table at the athletes' village. Funnily enough the company running the catering is an American one and they've had to hire specialist chefs to cook it.)
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Some spruikers in Beijing are wearing counterfeit versions of the blue and white Olympic volunteer shirts.
(A spruiker is someone who vigourously tries to persuade customers to purchase their wares. In this case rip off designer clothing, watches etc. Personally I think there's only one thing sadder than wearing branded goods, and that's wearing fake branded goods.)
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According to the International Olympic Committee, the Beijing Games are set to become the most widely broadcast event in Olympic history.
(Timo Lumme, the IOC's director of TV and marketing said that by the end of the Beijing Games, three times more TV and online material would have been broadcast than at the Athens Games in 2004. "The figure for total viewing in the world could be around 1.2 billion people," he said.
In China alone, a total of 842 million people tuned in to at least some of the opening ceremony and more than 1 billion Chinese people have watched at least one Olympic event. Whilst in the United States, more than 40 million viewers watched swimmer Michael Phelps win his eighth gold medal - the biggest Saturday night audience since 1990.)
Source BBC News.
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The Beijing Games are the last time table tennis players will be allowed to use speed glue to re-fix the rubber surfaces to the racket or paddle.
(So called speed glues contain volatile organic compounds, and expose the players to potentially harmful chemicals. However, not everyone is happy about the ban, seemingly gas produced by the chemicals seeps into the bat's rubber covering and stretches the rubber giving it a tension that in turn makes the ball behave like an object meeting a trampoline, hence the term speed glue. Critics charge that the glue ban is a veiled attempt to slow the rapid-fire sport. The ban was supposed to take place as of 1 September 2007, but the date was moved back to 1 September, 2008. From September the International Table Tennis Federation will introduce a doping test for bats - a device that can detect whether the illegal glue is present in the rubber covering.)
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The official Olympic flag was first flown during the 1920 Olympic Games.
(It was created by Pierre de Coubertin in 1914. The flag consists of five interconnected rings on a white background. Each ring symbolizes the five significant continents, Africa, America, Asia, Australia and Europe. Each ring is interconnected to symbolize friendship. The rings, from left to right, are blue, yellow, black, green, and red. These colours were chosen because at least one of them appeared on the flag of every country in the world.)
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In the opening ceremony organisers claimed that the 56 children who carried the national flag were from each official ethnic group in China, but they were actually all Han Chinese.
(Seemingly the deputy director of the Galaxy Children's Art Troupe, Yuan Zhifeng, to which the children belonged, let the cat out of the bag to the Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal.)
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The pretty little girl who sang at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games was only miming.
(The real singer was Yang Peiyi. She was not allowed to appear because she was not considered as "flawless" as nine-year-old Lin Miaoke. The excuse given by officials was that they had decided to "put our country's interest first." In the words of François de la Rochefoucauld, “The world more often rewards the appearance of merit than merit itself”.)
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Togo won its first ever Olympic medal when Benjamin Boukpeti took bronze in the men's single kayak slalom at the 2008 Beijing Games.
(He got a bigger cheer than the gold medal winner.)
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Parts of the spectacular Beijing Olympics opening ceremony on Friday were faked because of fears over live filming.
(The bit where a series of giant firework footprints appeared above the city, were CGI. They did set off the fireworks, but figured they wouldn't be able to film them adequately.)
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A 97-year-old grandmother, Xiao Xincui, has travelled 2,400 kilometres (1,491 miles) by tricyle to watch the Chinese badminton team in action at the Beijing Olympics.
(Actually she sat in the back and supervised her grandson, Liu Xianghui, who provided the pedal power. I hope she didn't weigh much.)
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The 29th Olympic Games began in Beijing. Building a Peaceful and Better World Through Sport and the Olympic Ideal.
(Oh and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who attended the ceremony, said "war has started" in the breakaway region of South Ossetia while Georgia accused Russia of "a well-planned invasion" and appealed to world leaders for help.)
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According to research published in the British Journal of Ophthalmolog, men should think twice about how tight they wear a necktie because it could increase their chances of developing glaucoma.
(Seemingly a tight necktie can raise the blood pressure in the eye, which is a leading risk factor in the illness that can lead to damage to the optic nerve and loss of vision. I have a better suggestion - don't wear ties.)
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A miniature model space craft from the original Star Wars film has sold for £177,789 ($350,000) in an auction of iconic film memorabilia.
(I've got an Airfix model of the model if anyone is interested.)
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According to a study by Birkbeck College, University of London, yawning is known to be contagious in humans but now scientists have shown that pet dogs can catch a yawn, too.
(Seemingly this copying suggests that pooches are capable of empathising with people. say the researchers who recorded dogs' behaviour in lab tests. All I can say is it's currently 50 50 in my house. After yawning for about two minutes only my dog Laika yawned back, Sam just looked at me as if I'd lost my marbles.)
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According to a survey by the Yorkshire Building Society, the average Brit's savings would only last 52 days if they found themselves out of work.
(36% of people surveyed had savings of less than £500. The concept of saving for a rainy day seems to have disappeared.)
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In the American numbering system, a million has six zeros, a billion has nine zeros, a trillion has 12 zeros and after that?
Quadrillion: 15 zeros
Quintillion: 18 zeros
Sextillion: 21 zeros
Septillion: 24 zeros
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If you have fat friends you are more likely to become obese.
(A study carried out at the University of Warwick, Dartmouth College, and the University of Leuven, suggests that choices about appearance, on which decisions such as job offers or being deemed attractive are based, are determined by the choices others around you make. So when I next chomp into a cream puff I'll blame my friends.)
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If you reach the quarter-finals at Wimbledon, you get free tea at the tournament for life.
(Basically you join the ranks of Wimbledon's Last Eight Club, which was formed in 1986 as part of the 100th Championship celebrations. The club is open only to those who have contested a singles quarter-final or doubles semi-final at Wimbledon.)
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According to Recoup, about 35% of the 13.1 billion plastic bottles used by UK households annually are recycled.
(This is up from 3% in 2001. So, things are improving.)
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According to Thinkbroadband.com, London has the fastest broadband in the UK.
(And the slowest traffic.)
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A 44 year old Briton living in Australia has sold his life on eBay for £192,000.
(Ian Usher put his "entire life" up for sale - house, car, job and even his friends. How much would you sell yours for?)
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A female driver is three times more likely than a man to suffer whiplash injuries if her car is hit from behind.
(Female passengers suffer from whiplash injuries when their car is hit from the front too. Believe me, I know.)
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If you wear a T-shirt featuring rude words, bombs or cartoon guns you can be prevented from boarding a plane in UK airports.
(Brad Jayakody, was wearing a Transformers T-shirt, which showed a cartoon character holding a gun. He was stopped from boarding a flight by the security at Heathrow's Terminal 5. Better not wear a T-shirt with a frying pan either, Tom and Jerry reek havoc with them.)
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According to the BBC, in the UK, a child of three is expected to know about 300 words.
(According to US guidelines, by the age of three a child should be able to say around 500 to 900 words. Maybe that is what's wrong with our education system.)
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According to the World Gold Council, the officially reported gold reserves of each country in 2007 were:-
1 United States of America - 8,133.5 (tonnes)
2 Germany - 3,417.4 (tonnes)
3 International Monetary Fund - 3,217.3 (tonnes)
4 France - 2,622.3 (tonnes)
5 Italy - 2,451.8 (tonnes)
6 Switzerland - 1,166.3 (tonnes)
7 Japan - 765.2 (tonnes)
8 Turkey - 700.1 (tonnes)
9 Netherlands - 624.5 (tonnes)
10 People's Republic of China - 600.0 (tonnes)
11 Russia 438.2 (tonnes)
12 Taiwan - 423.3 (tonnes)
13 Portugal - 382.6 (tonnes)
14 India - 357.7 (tonnes)
15 Venezuela - 356.8 (tonnes)
16 United Kingdom - 310.3 (tonnes)
17 Lebanon - 286.8 (tonnes)
18 Spain - 281.6 (tonnes)
19 Austria - 280.0 (tonnes)
20 Belgium - 227.7 (tonnes)
(I have to point out that although the United States has the largest reserves of any individual country, in total the Eurozone gold holdings are greater; 11,065 tonnes as of December 2007.)
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According to the World Gold Council, in 2001, all the gold ever mined totalled around 145,000 tonnes.
(I own less than 1 oz of it.)
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The penalty shootout was thought up by Israeli, Yosef Dagan.
(It was a dark day for English football. Before that a draw was decided by drawing lots. At least back then we had a chance.)
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The penalty kick was first introduced in 1891.
(The invention of the penalty kick is credited to goalkeeper and businessman William McCrum in 1890 in Milford, County Armagh, Northern Ireland. The Irish Football Association presented the idea to the International Football Association Board and finally after much debate, the board approved the idea on 2 June 1891. It was introduced in the 1891-92 season. The first ever penalty kick was awarded to Wolverhampton Wanderers in their game against Accrington at Molineux Stadium on 14 September 1891. The penalty was taken (and scored) by John Heath as Wolves went on to win the game 5-0.)
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England's first defeat abroad was in Spain in 1929.
(We've had plenty of practice since then.)
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Around 30 million women and girls around the world play football.
(I used to play football, but in my day it really wasn't encouraged. Now? I'm like Beckham - too old.)
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Nearly all hand-made footballs come from Sialkot in the Punjab, Pakistan.
(Around 40 million balls are made in Pakistan each year: that’s enough to fill nearly 220 football pitches. The main problem with this is that manufacturers ensure that they aren't made by forced child labour.)
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There are two components in a football, the external part, also called "rexine", which is made of synthetic materials, and the internal part, which is made of natural rubber.
(The one thing you can't do is inflate one without a pump. Believe me I tried, and I nearly ruptured my lungs.)
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A football is made out of 32 patches, sewn together.
(For professional matches, they're usually sewn together by hand. Just as well it's not my job, they'd fall apart at the first kick.)
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Travelodge have come up with a new concept in camping. No more tents, and midnight trips to the loo, they have created a prefabricated mobile hotel room.
(It has all the facilities of their standard room, including a luxury double bed, bedside lights, duvet, pillows, fully carpeted floor, window blinds, dressing table & light, mirror, chair, flat screen TV, DVD player with a collection of DVD's, air conditioning, heater, bedside lights and a illuminated headboard, tea / coffee making facilities, washroom with bio-degradable toilet and washbasin with running water. The cost? A mere £26 a night. But it's no good asking them to deliver it to the top of Mount Everest, it will only be available at main events like music festivals and sporting competitions.)
Source: Daily Mail
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According to figures from accident and emergency departments in England, injuries to children from tree falls are down. In 2006-7, only 1,067 children went to casualty due to tree falls.
(That sounds like good news, but the bad news is that children are more likely to injure themselves in a tumble out of bed - 2,531.)
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The most valuable tree in the UK is a plane tree in central London.
(It has been valued at £750,000, but as it is six-foot-wide and stands in Berkeley Square, Mayfair, that's not so surprising.)
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25 places in the UK claim to have the most pubs.
(The claimants include Glasgow, Glastonbury, Bewdley, Bollington, Weymouth, Witney, Saffron Walden and St Albans. If any of these places wish to hire me to resolve this dispute, I'd be more than willing.)
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According to Mark Hastings, of the British Beer and Pub Association, more than 15 million people visit a pub each week.
(What a great job Mark Hastings has. Counting the number of people in pubs, I'd do that for nothing.)
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According to Mark Hastings, of the British Beer and Pub Association, there are 57,500 pubs in the UK.
(Somehow that doesn't seem enough for a population of nearly 61 million.)
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In the UK the most popular name for a pub is the Red Lion.
(There are 756 "Red Lions" in the UK. So if you arrange to meet anyone at the pub, make sure you know which pub you're talking about.)
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For years BMW has been refining its dual-fuel (hydrogen/gasoline) technology. They have now developed the mono-fuel Hydrogen 7, which runs solely on hydrogen.
(According to Argonne National Laboratory it is "one of the lowest emitting combustion engine vehicles that have been manufactured." This is great news! Until you read the Spiegel that is, which says that the hydrogen dispensed at filling stations is generated primarily from petroleum and natural gas. So, the shiny new car puts about as much strain on the environment as a heavy truck with a diesel engine.)
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According to figures presented at the 61st International Water Conference, between 1940 and 1990, world water usage increased four-fold.
(This isn't sustainable. Even within the United States, water is being withdrawn faster from underground aquifers than it can be replenished. One aquifer near El Paso, Texas, which serves both the U.S. and Mexico, is expected to run dry by 2020.)
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According to the Peace Corp's website, of all the water on earth, 97.5 percent is salt water. Of the remaining 2.5 percent of fresh water, some 70 percent is frozen in the polar ice caps. The other 30 percent is mostly present as soil moisture or lies in underground aquifers.
(This means that less than 1 percent of the world's fresh water (or only about 0.007 percent of all the water on Earth) is readily accessible for direct human use.)
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In 2007 a rare first edition, from 1847, of Emily Bronte's novel Wuthering Heights sold at auction for £114,000.
(It had been expected to fetch between £30,000 and £50,000. So a nice surprise for the owner.)
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According to Visa Europe, 41% of personal expenditure in Britain is carried out using a credit card.
(This compares with just 8% in Germany. You can imagine how many times I had to put my credit card away and scrabble around for cash when I first came here.)
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According to the European Central Bank six out of seven payments in Europe are made with cash.
(So much for a plastic society. Show me the money!)
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Abdominal fat is the most dangerous.
(It is known to increase the risk of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and some cancers. So start doing those sit ups now.)
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The Olympic torch is designed to stay alight in rain up to 50mm an hour.
(They probably tested this theory in Wales.)
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According to a study by the Max Planck Institute, the brain makes some decisions 10 seconds before they become conscious thought.
(Hence the saying, "Look before you leap.")
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May 1st was declared a workers holiday by the International Working Men's Association (First International) in Paris in 1889.
(It was to commemorate the Haymarket Martyrs of 1886: 8 anarchists who were wrongly accused of throwing a bomb at police. 4 of them; Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolf Fischer and George Engel were hanged, Louis Lingg committed suicide in prison and in 1893, John Peter Altgeld, pardoned the three surviving men; Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe and Michael Schwab. A bit too late though.)
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According to The Reform Scotland report, there is more crime in Glasgow than New York.
(Seemingly for every 100,000 people there were around 731 incidents in Glasgow compared to 631 in New York. You can keep an eye on
Glasgow's crime statistics here.)
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According to the Guinness World Records Organisation, the largest chocolate bar in the world was made by Elah Dufour - Novi in Alessandria, Liguria, Italy on 11 September 2007.
(It weighed 3,580 kg (7,892.5 lb), but it probably weighs nothing now.)
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The Olympic torch is designed to withstand winds of up to 65 kms per hour.
(I just hope the sprinters who carry it know this.)
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According to traffic researcher Frank Schmid, there are 160,000 traffic jams in Germany every year.
(This means that 288 million litres of petrol are wasted and 714,000 tons of C02 created. I'm afraid that on my last two holidays I was a contributer, for some reason every time I drive a long way in Germany, someone decides to demolish a bridge on the motorway I'm on.)
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Testosterone could be partly responsible for crises in city trading.
(Cambridge University researchers discovered that testosterone levels were linked to the profit that male City of London traders made. The downside is that they can then become over-confident, and take bigger and bigger risks leading to huge losses. They recommend recruiting more women, but I would have thought that wouldn't help the testosterone levels of the remaining men at all. Just remember though, when a City trader makes a big profit or loss, they were just feeling a bit hormonal.)
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