As the number of phones in the United States grew throughout the 1990s, phone companies and the North American Numbering Plan Administration (NANPA) had to come up with new area codes to handle them all. In a rare instance of bureaucratic humor, the NANPA announced that the new area code for Brevard County, Florida, the home of Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center, would be 321, as in 3 2 1 Liftoff!"
Brevard County resident Robert Osband appeared before the Florida Public Service Commission to request this fitting and creative area code. Although the area code 321 had already been assigned to a suburb of Chicago, a little lobbying by the Florida PSC got the assignment changed. The Space Coasts new area code became official on 1 November 1999.
Contrary to popular belief, the Sahara Desert of northern Africa does not consist entirely of towering sand dunes. In fact, only about 15 percent of the desert is covered in sand dunes. Instead, most of the desert is full of scrubby vegetation. The Sahara also contains many plateaus of bare rock, along with areas of gravel. The Sahara Desert stretches across parts of Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Morocco, Tunisia, and Sudan.
People have lived in the areas surrounding the Sahara for millennia. There is evidence of groups living in Nubia during the Neolithic Era, beginning around 10,000 BC. Throughout recorded history, the area has contained trade routes and it was the center of the slave trade in the fourth and fifth centuries AD.
More about the Sahara Desert:
- The surface area of the Sahara -- about 3.6 million square miles (9.4 million square km) is comparable to the land mass of China or the United States.
- The Nile and Niger Rivers are the only two permanent rivers in the Sahara. Both are fed by rainfall outside the deserts boundaries.
- The Sahara Desert usually sees about 8,200 hours of sunshine every year.
Trade winds carry sand from the Sahara and deposit it on the Amazon rainforest....Only about 15% of the Sahara is covered in sand dunes.
http://www.wisegeek.com/is-there-anywhere-in-the-sahara-desert-without-sand.htm
The most shoplifted food item is . . . Survey says . . .
Cheese. Yes, we are all rodents at heart.
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-food-do-people-most-often-steal-from-grocery-stores.htm
But Kraft Singles don't denote the same level of moral turpitude as squeeze cheese. People who steal squeeze cheese are lower than the butt hairs on Satan's ass.It's probably because people that eat a lot of cheap dairy products are subhuman pigs by definition, impulsive apes bathing in the shit while they veg out on tv all day. If you like Kraft Singles, you are an inferior being. If you are an inferior being, you are also more prone to being a shoplifting piece of shit. These people probably steal other things too, but they ALWAYS go by the dairy isle.
I wonder how they measure this, as it doesn't sound right: the theoretical max for any given point on Earth is <5000.Only about 15% of the Sahara is covered in sand dunes.
The Sahara Desert usually sees about 8,200 hours of sunshine every year.
It looks like it covers 3 time zones.I wonder how they measure this, as it doesn't sound right: the theoretical max for any given point on Earth is <5000.
Is it perhaps how much time at least some part of Sahara is seeing Sun? This may be plausible, although even that seems like a stretch - 8,200 hours is ~342 full days a year, or 22h 30m per day on average. It's not like Sahara is ten timezones wide...
I can't get it to work either. I guess it could be a typo. I assume that they get their information from someplace and don't just make it up. But like Snapple cap factoids, if they don't double check their source, they're going to end up looking foolish from time to time.
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-kinds-of-property-does-the-queen-of-england-own.htmIn the United Kingdom, the royal financial portfolio includes a retail park near Windsor Castle, a property that features a McDonald's restaurant. Queen Elizabeth II can even keep an eye on the investment, since the Bath Road Retail Park in Slough is visible from the Queen's quarters in Windsor Castle. The purchase, made by the Crown Estate in 2008, had a price tag of £92 million.
The Crown Estate is a semi-independent public entity that manages a large portfolio worth billions of pounds. It is one of the United Kingdom's largest property owners. However, Crown Estate property is not the private property of the reigning monarch, nor is it administered on her behalf.
McDonald's around the world:
- McDonald's is the world's largest hamburger fast food chain, with more than 35,000 restaurants in 119 countries.
- Ray Kroc bought the original burger joint from brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald in 1955. Kroc's first McDonald's restaurant was in Des Plaines, Illinois.
- Unusual McDonald's locations include a military-only restaurant at Guantanamo Bay, a kosher McDonald's in the middle of Israel's Negev Desert, and a spaceship-shaped restaurant in Roswell, New Mexico.
lol.
you don't say.
The look of the Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C. sets the tone -- serious business is done here, as reflected in the neoclassical design, with Roman columns guarding the entrance. But up on the fifth floor there is a spot where a Supreme Court justice can shed the iconic robe and slip into some sweats and sneakers. Known as the highest court in the land, the top floor of the Supreme Court Building, a National Historic Landmark, houses a small basketball gym.
The basketball court is one of the perks for justices, law clerks and anyone with game who might know somebody who knows somebody. Pick-up games are common at lunchtime, mostly among the many young law hopefuls who clerk at the Supreme Court.
Three points about the SCOTUS gym:
- The late Justice Byron Whizzer White, a college football star at the University of Colorado, shot hoops in the high court into his 70's, sometimes going one-on-one with Justice Clarence Thomas.
- Justice Thomas tore his Achilles tendon during a game in the gym; the injury ended his playing days.
- A new floor was installed in 1984 and wooden backboards were replaced with Plexiglas in 1997. There aren't any benches, and the court is smaller than regulation size.
If any wild animal is universally adored, it has to be the penguin. People seem to love their portly, torpedo-shaped bodies, striking black and white plumage, and their unintentionally hilarious waddling when on land. However, the penguin is uniquely designed for a life lived largely at sea. Since a penguin's diet consists primarily of seafood caught while swimming, it is inevitable that the birds will ingest seawater. To handle this, many marine birds have a gland near their eyes that efficiently filters out salt from the bloodstream. The salt is then excreted from the bird's body through the bill, making the bird appear to have a runny nose. Penguins frequently shake their heads to get the salt off their beaks, or they sneeze out the excess.
In general, however, penguins don't drink seawater to hydrate themselves. They usually drink from fresh water sources such as pools and snowmelt, or they eat fresh snow, in order to get an adequate amount of water. Penguins in captivity are usually kept in fresh water, and this doesn't seem to bother them. In fact, they seem to prefer fresh water when given the choice of where to swim.
More about the popular penguin:
http://www.wisegeek.com/can-a-penguin-drink-salt-water.htm
- In the summer, penguins eat about 2 pounds (.9 kg) of food each day. In the winter, they will consume about a third of that amount.
- Unlike other birds, when penguins molt (lose their feathers), they lose them all at once, instead of gradually. The birds cannot swim or fish during this time, so they prepare by eating extra food to stock up on fat while they're grounded.
- The penguin's black and white plumage provides excellent camouflage from any angle. When seen from above, their black backs blend in with the water, while their white bellies match the white sky when seen from below.
Finding Neandertal ancestors in the human family tree was shocking enough when researchers announced it in 2010. Now the implications for modern-day people carrying surviving Neandertal DNA may prove just as stunning.
Today, Europeans and Asians carry, on average, between 1.5 percent and 4 percent Neandertal DNA. A flurry of new studies suggests that the genetic hand-me-downs may once have helped human newcomers adjust to their new homes. But these genetic bits and pieces may no longer be helpful, and may even raise the risk of depression, heart disease, some skin conditions, allergies and other maladies.
There was, and still is, a lingering cost of having this admixture, says John Capra, an evolutionary geneticist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Makes sense now why you're not known as CheeseburgerBoy.It's probably because people that eat a lot of cheap dairy products are subhuman pigs by definition, impulsive apes bathing in the shit while they veg out on tv all day. If you like Kraft Singles, you are an inferior being. If you are an inferior being, you are also more prone to being a shoplifting piece of shit. These people probably steal other things too, but they ALWAYS go by the dairy isle.
that the US is about 15,278,854,359,859,200 sq.inches in area. and each sq. inch has app. 14.7 pounds of air pressure upon it. So the weight of the air above the us is app.
224,599,159,089,930,240 lbs. or 112,299,579,544,965.12 tons....I think
Total area all 50 states. I guess that includes water. Probably pretty close yeah!Is that the continental US? Or all 50 states? Or all 50 states, plus DC and territories? And since you've reported it to the nearest 100 square inches, can we assume that the margin of error is within 2 or 3 square feet?