datalink7
Lifer
- Jan 23, 2001
- 16,765
- 6
- 81
Random facts:
Butterflies taste with their feet.
On average, 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens every year.
Ninety percent of New York City cabbies are recently arrived immigrants.
Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal
ads for dating are already married.
Elephants are the only animals that can't jump.
Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.
It's possible to lead a cow upstairs...but not downstairs.
Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch
every year because when it was built, engineers failed to
take into account the weight of all the
books that would occupy the building.
A snail can sleep for three years.
No word in the English language rhymes with "MONTH".
Average life span of a major league baseball: 7 pitches.
Our eyes are always the same size from birth,
The electric chair was invented by a dentist.
All polar bears are left handed.
In ancient Egypt, priests plucked EVERY hair from their bodies,
including their eyebrows and eyelashes.
An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the
letters only on one row of the keyboard.
"Go." is the shortest complete sentence in the English
language.
If Barbie were life-size, her measurements would be 39-23-33.
She would stand seven feet, two inches tall.
A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.
The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.
Americans on average eat 18 acres of pizza every day.
The average human eats 5 spiders while sleeping during their life. When you sleep your mouth opens and spiders are attracted to the heat and moisture coming out of your mouth when you breathe.
It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.
A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.
----
The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4
feet 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in
England, and English expatriates built the US railroads.
Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail
lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad
tramways, and that's the gauge they used.
Why did 'they' use that gauge then? Because the people who built the
tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building
wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would
break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because
that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So who built those old rutted roads? The first long distance roads
in Europe (and England) were built by Imperial Rome for their
legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts? Roman
war chariots first made the initial ruts, which everyone else had to
match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels and wagons. Since
the chariots were made for, or by Imperial Rome, they were all alike
in the matter of wheel spacing.
Thus, we have the answer to the original question. The United States
standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the
original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
Specifications and bureaucracies live forever. So, the next time you
are handed a specification and wonder which horse's rear came up
with it, you may be exactly right. Because the Imperial Roman war
chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of
two war-horses.
And now, the twist to the story...
There's an interesting extension to the story about railroad gauges
and horses' behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on its
launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides
of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs.
Thiokol makes the SRBs at their factory at Utah. The engineers who
designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter,
but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the
launch site. The railroad line from the factory had to run through a
tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel.
The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the
railroad track is about as wide as two horses behinds.
So, the major design feature of what is arguably the world's most
advanced transportation system was determined by the width of a
Horse's ass!
----
No piece of paper can be folded in half more than 7 times.
Apples, not caffeine, are more efficient at waking you up in the morning.
The word "samba" means "to rub navels together." (damn that modern latin america paper)
A 'Jiffy' is actually a unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
"Go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog" is a palindrome.
The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from an old English law that stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.
Months that begin on a Sunday will always have a "Friday the 13th."
Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.
A kiss stimulates 29 muscles and chemicals causing relaxation. Women seem to like it light and frequent, men like it more strenuous.
--
At the end of last year, according to the company's most recent filing, its cash (and short term investments that can be converted to cash in less than a year) totaled a whopping $38.2 BILLION dollars. The Microsoft juggernaut continues to generate another $1 BILLION a month, putting the total cash today worth well above $40 BILLION dollars.
This mind-bogglingly large pile of dough. No other nonfinancial firm has more liquid money at its disposal, and only a handful of banks do. It's more cash then Ford, Exxon Mobil and Wal-Mart have COMBINED, and nearly two times as much as Intel, the tech company with the next largest cash balance.
It is enough to buy the entire airline industry-----twice. Or all the gold in Fort Knox----4 times over. It is enough to buy 23 space shuttles or every major professional baseball, basketball football and hockey team in the America.
For comparison, Top 10 nonfinancial companies cash and short term investments in Billions
Microsoft.......................$38.2
Ford...............................$18.2
Intel................................$10.3
Pfizer..............................$9.5
General Motors............$9.2
Exxon Mobil....................$9.0
Johnson & Johnson.... $8.0
Cisco..............................$7.5
Hewlett-Packard...........$7.1
IBM..................................$6.4
-------------------
Reader Lynn Decker sends along this note, which purports to answer the question "Is it better to be a jock or a nerd?"
Consider Michael Jordan, having "retired," with $40 million in endorsements, he makes $178,100 a day, working or not. If he sleeps 7 hours a night, he makes $52,000 every night while visions of sugarplums dance in his head. If he goes to see a movie, it'll cost him $7.00, but he'll make $18,550 while he's there. If he decides to have a 5 minute egg, he'll make $618 while boiling it. He makes $7,415/hour more than minimum wage. He'll make $3,710 while watching each episode of Friends. If he wanted to save up for a new Acura NSX ($90,000) it would take him a whole 12 hours. If someone were to hand him his salary and endorsement money, they would have to do it at the rate of $2.00 every second.
He'll probably pay around $200 for a nice round of golf, but will be reimbursed $33,390 for that round. Assuming he puts the federal maximum of 15% of his income into a tax deferred account (401k), his contributions will hit the federal cap of $10,500 at 845am on January 1st. If you were given a penny for every 10 dollars he made, you'd be living comfortably at $65,000 a year.
He'll make about $19.60 while watching the 100 meter dash in the Olympics, and about $15,600 during the Boston Marathon. While the common person is spending about $20 for a meal in his trendy Chicago restaurant, he'll pull in about $5600. This year, he'll make more than twice as much as all U.S. past presidents for all of their terms combined. Amazing isn't it?
However... If Jordan saves 100% of his income for the next 500 years, he'll still have less than Bill Gates has at this very moment.
Game over. Nerd wins.
Butterflies taste with their feet.
On average, 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens every year.
Ninety percent of New York City cabbies are recently arrived immigrants.
Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal
ads for dating are already married.
Elephants are the only animals that can't jump.
Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.
It's possible to lead a cow upstairs...but not downstairs.
Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch
every year because when it was built, engineers failed to
take into account the weight of all the
books that would occupy the building.
A snail can sleep for three years.
No word in the English language rhymes with "MONTH".
Average life span of a major league baseball: 7 pitches.
Our eyes are always the same size from birth,
The electric chair was invented by a dentist.
All polar bears are left handed.
In ancient Egypt, priests plucked EVERY hair from their bodies,
including their eyebrows and eyelashes.
An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the
letters only on one row of the keyboard.
"Go." is the shortest complete sentence in the English
language.
If Barbie were life-size, her measurements would be 39-23-33.
She would stand seven feet, two inches tall.
A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.
The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.
Americans on average eat 18 acres of pizza every day.
The average human eats 5 spiders while sleeping during their life. When you sleep your mouth opens and spiders are attracted to the heat and moisture coming out of your mouth when you breathe.
It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.
A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.
----
The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4
feet 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in
England, and English expatriates built the US railroads.
Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail
lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad
tramways, and that's the gauge they used.
Why did 'they' use that gauge then? Because the people who built the
tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building
wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would
break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because
that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So who built those old rutted roads? The first long distance roads
in Europe (and England) were built by Imperial Rome for their
legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts? Roman
war chariots first made the initial ruts, which everyone else had to
match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels and wagons. Since
the chariots were made for, or by Imperial Rome, they were all alike
in the matter of wheel spacing.
Thus, we have the answer to the original question. The United States
standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the
original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
Specifications and bureaucracies live forever. So, the next time you
are handed a specification and wonder which horse's rear came up
with it, you may be exactly right. Because the Imperial Roman war
chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of
two war-horses.
And now, the twist to the story...
There's an interesting extension to the story about railroad gauges
and horses' behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on its
launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides
of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs.
Thiokol makes the SRBs at their factory at Utah. The engineers who
designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter,
but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the
launch site. The railroad line from the factory had to run through a
tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel.
The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the
railroad track is about as wide as two horses behinds.
So, the major design feature of what is arguably the world's most
advanced transportation system was determined by the width of a
Horse's ass!
----
No piece of paper can be folded in half more than 7 times.
Apples, not caffeine, are more efficient at waking you up in the morning.
The word "samba" means "to rub navels together." (damn that modern latin america paper)
A 'Jiffy' is actually a unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
"Go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog" is a palindrome.
The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from an old English law that stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.
Months that begin on a Sunday will always have a "Friday the 13th."
Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.
A kiss stimulates 29 muscles and chemicals causing relaxation. Women seem to like it light and frequent, men like it more strenuous.
--
At the end of last year, according to the company's most recent filing, its cash (and short term investments that can be converted to cash in less than a year) totaled a whopping $38.2 BILLION dollars. The Microsoft juggernaut continues to generate another $1 BILLION a month, putting the total cash today worth well above $40 BILLION dollars.
This mind-bogglingly large pile of dough. No other nonfinancial firm has more liquid money at its disposal, and only a handful of banks do. It's more cash then Ford, Exxon Mobil and Wal-Mart have COMBINED, and nearly two times as much as Intel, the tech company with the next largest cash balance.
It is enough to buy the entire airline industry-----twice. Or all the gold in Fort Knox----4 times over. It is enough to buy 23 space shuttles or every major professional baseball, basketball football and hockey team in the America.
For comparison, Top 10 nonfinancial companies cash and short term investments in Billions
Microsoft.......................$38.2
Ford...............................$18.2
Intel................................$10.3
Pfizer..............................$9.5
General Motors............$9.2
Exxon Mobil....................$9.0
Johnson & Johnson.... $8.0
Cisco..............................$7.5
Hewlett-Packard...........$7.1
IBM..................................$6.4
-------------------
Reader Lynn Decker sends along this note, which purports to answer the question "Is it better to be a jock or a nerd?"
Consider Michael Jordan, having "retired," with $40 million in endorsements, he makes $178,100 a day, working or not. If he sleeps 7 hours a night, he makes $52,000 every night while visions of sugarplums dance in his head. If he goes to see a movie, it'll cost him $7.00, but he'll make $18,550 while he's there. If he decides to have a 5 minute egg, he'll make $618 while boiling it. He makes $7,415/hour more than minimum wage. He'll make $3,710 while watching each episode of Friends. If he wanted to save up for a new Acura NSX ($90,000) it would take him a whole 12 hours. If someone were to hand him his salary and endorsement money, they would have to do it at the rate of $2.00 every second.
He'll probably pay around $200 for a nice round of golf, but will be reimbursed $33,390 for that round. Assuming he puts the federal maximum of 15% of his income into a tax deferred account (401k), his contributions will hit the federal cap of $10,500 at 845am on January 1st. If you were given a penny for every 10 dollars he made, you'd be living comfortably at $65,000 a year.
He'll make about $19.60 while watching the 100 meter dash in the Olympics, and about $15,600 during the Boston Marathon. While the common person is spending about $20 for a meal in his trendy Chicago restaurant, he'll pull in about $5600. This year, he'll make more than twice as much as all U.S. past presidents for all of their terms combined. Amazing isn't it?
However... If Jordan saves 100% of his income for the next 500 years, he'll still have less than Bill Gates has at this very moment.
Game over. Nerd wins.
glad to see its relevant to the thread about sharks and dolphins and whatnot....
but nonetheless its pretty interesting ...!
but nonetheless its pretty interesting ...!
Actually, that was one of the techniques taught to servicemen who might find themselves lost in the ocean. Kicking the nose was also a popular recommendation. They also suggested that when in the water you should beat the surface making noise so as to scare away any sharks. Of course, we now know that sound mimics the sounds of lunch.
wow thats harsh :Q :Q
i mean sharks had it coming cuz theyre evil and stuff and are predators but seals are just furry lil animals that do nothing but mind their own business...
damned orcas! :| :|
wouldn't we all!!
pics/vids anyone?
i have one of a whale exploding...
but i dont think its relevant...
pics/vids anyone?
i have one of a whale exploding...
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