During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a Japanese air attack. They covered it with camouflage netting and to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air.
Before Camouflage :
After Camouflage :
During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a Japanese air attack. They covered it with camouflage netting and to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air.
The Falkirk Wheel, named after the nearby town of Falkirk in central Scotland, is a rotating boat lift connecting the Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal. The difference in the levels of the two canals at the wheel is 24 metres (79 ft), roughly equivalent to the height of an eight storey building. The structure is located near the Rough Castle Fort and the closest village is Tamfourhill. On 24 May 2002, Queen Elizabeth II opened the Falkirk Wheel as part of her Golden Jubilee celebrations. The opening had been delayed by a month due to flooding caused by vandals who forced open the Wheel's gates.
The Falkirk Wheel cost £17.5 million, and the restoration project as a whole cost £84.5 million (of which £32 million came from National Lottery funds).
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- There are more than 2,700 major languages spoken throughout the world.
- There are over 583 different languages and dialects spoken in Indonesia alone, including
English and Dutch. More Info: The official language of Indonesia is Bahasa. Other languages include Minahasa, Tetu, Ambonese, Buginese, Dayak, Halmahera, Javanese, Acehnese, Batak, Toraja, Sundanese, Ceramese, and Sasak. - More than 2,000 languages are spoken in the entire continent of Africa.
- The language spoken by the people most is Mandarin, a type of Chinese. Second is English.
- The most difficult language to speak is Basque. It is not related to any language in the world. It is spoken in north-western Spain and south-western France.
- The Berbers of Northern Africa have no written form of their language.
- Somalia is the only country in the world where every citizen speaks one language, Somali.
- The only country where Latin is the official language is Vatican City.
- The Cambodian alphabet is the world’s largest alphabet, with 74 letters.
- The world’s shortest alphabet, used in the Solomon Islands, has only 11.
- English, the second most spoken language in the world, has more words than any other language. But English speakers generally use only about 1% of the language.
- About one third of the more than one million English words are technical terms.
- The language of Taki, spoken in parts of French Guinea, consists of only 340 words.
- The Irish language has three dialects, the Connact Irish, Munster Irish, and Ulster Irish.
- The language Malayalam, spoken in parts of India, is the only language whose name is a palindrome.
- Tigrinya, spoken by half of Eritrea’s population, is a Semitic language based on Ge’ez, the ancient liturgical (and now extinct vernacular) language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
- Modern Japanese employs four writing systems: kanji (adapted from the Chinese hanji), hiragana, katakana, and romaji.
- Today, 58 countries in the world and the United Nations include English as an official language, followed by French with 32 countries and the United Nations, and Arabic at 25 countries and the United Nations.
- There are more than 7,000 dialects in the world.
- Sign language for the deaf was first systematized in France during the 18th century by Abbot Charles-Michel l’Ep?e.
- French Sign Language (FSL) was brought to the United States in 1816 by Thomas Gallaudet, founder of the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, whom developed American Sign Language (ASL).
- By the time a child is 5 years old, he/she will on average have spent 9,100 hours learning its native language.
- What is known as standard Italian today dates back to last century, when the great Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873) gave Italy a national language by resolving that it should be Tuscan Italian.
- German is commonly divided into two forms, Low German (Plattdeutsch) and High German (Hochdeutsch).
- There are 33 letters in the Cyrillic alphabet.
- The country Nigeria itself has more than 250 different languages, making the production of newspapers and television shows a challenge. Major languages include, French, Arabic, Hausa, Djerma, and Songhai.
- Many linguists estimate that of the 6,800 languages currently spoken, only about 3,000 will remain viable by the end of the century.
- Some 95% of the world’s population living today learn one of about 100 languages as a first language, leaving the remaining 6,700 languages spoken by 5% of the population.
- Two areas of the world have the largest number of languages (some 300 to 400 total) that are currently becoming extinct: Australia and North America (Aboriginals and Native American languages).
- About 140 languages are thought to be dead and dying in Australia and some 80 to 90 in North America.
- Votic, a Finno-Ugric tongue of the Uralic language family in the Kingisepp district on the Leningrad region of Russia, has less than a hundred remaining speakers.
- According to the 2000 Census, of the nearly 47 million Americans at least 5 years old who spoke a language other than English, about 60% of them spoke Spanish.
- Esperanto is an artifical language devised by a Polish eye doctor, L. L. Zamenhof, introduced in 1887. The name comes from his pen name, Dr. Esperanto, which in the language means one who hopes.” Based on Indo-European roots with a simple grammar, it was intended to be an international second language that people from different countries could learn easily and use to communicate. Thousands of books have been published in Esperanto, and there are 100,000 or more Esperanto speakers in the world according to some estimates.
- Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language. It uses 4 different tones to convey different meanings: flat, rising, falling then rising, or falling.
- The language with the largest number of consonantal sounds was that of the Ubykns in the Caucasus, with 82. The last fully competent speaker, Tevtik Esenc, died in Istanbul in October 1992.
- The language with the most vowels is Sedang, a central Vietnamese language, with 55 distinguishable vowel sounds. via
You might hear the NERD bells go off in your head when you saw this article, but I still thought it was extremely interesting. Here are parts of your body that you actually don’t need. Check out point 13. LOL.
1. VOMERONASAL ORGAN (VNO), or Jacobson’s organ: a tiny hole on each side of the nasal bridge that is considered to be connected to nonfunctional chemical receptors. Could be all that is left from our once great ability to detect pheromones.
2. EXTRINSIC EAR MUSCLES: These three muscles most likely made it possible for our ancestors to move their ears independently of their heads, as rabbits and dogs do. We still have them, which is why most people can learn to wiggle their ears.
3. WISDOM TEETH: Early humans had to chew a lot of plants to get enough calories to survive, making another row of molars helpful, but unless you chew a lot of branches, these will eventually come out in a painful procedure. Only about 5 percent of the population has a healthy set of these third molars.
4. NECK RIB: A set of cervical ribs—possibly leftovers from the age of reptiles, still appear in less than 1 percent of the population. They often cause nerve and artery problems.
5. THIRD EYELID: A common ancestor of birds and mammals may have had a membrane for protecting the eye and sweeping out debris. Humans retain only a tiny fold in the inner corner of the eye, exactly there where you always catch a spec of dust or debris.
6. DARWIN’S POINT: A small folded point of skin toward the top of each ear is occasionally found in modern humans. It may be a remnant of a larger shape that helped focus distant sounds.
7. SUBCLAVIUS MUSCLE: This small muscle stretching under the shoulder from the first rib to the collarbone would be useful if humans still walked on all fours. Some people have one, some have none, and a few have two.
8. PALMARIS MUSCLE: This long, narrow muscle runs from the elbow to the wrist and is missing in 11 percent of modern humans. It may once have been important for hanging and climbing. Surgeons harvest it for reconstructive surgery.
9. MALE NIPPLES: Lactiferous ducts form well before testosterone causes sex differentiation in a fetus. Men have mammary tissue that can be stimulated to produce milk. This just makes me angry; I’ve been spending a fortune on milk all these years! I’ll have to test this tomorrow with my Special K.
10. ERECTOR PILI: Bundles of smooth muscle fibers allow animals to puff up their fur for insulation or to intimidate others. Humans retain this ability (goose bumps are the indicator) but have obviously lost most of the fur.
11. APPENDIX: This narrow, muscular tube attached to the large intestine served as a special area to digest cellulose when the human diet consisted more of plant matter than animal protein. It also produces some white blood cells. Annually, more than 300,000 Americans have an appendectomy.
12. BODY HAIR: Brows help keep sweat from the eyes, and male facial hair may play a role in sexual selection, but apparently most of the hair left on the human body serves no function.
13. THIRTEENTH RIB: Our closest cousins, chimpanzees and gorillas, have an extra set of ribs. Most of us have 12, but 8 percent of adults have the extras.
14. PLANTARIS MUSCLE: Often mistaken for a nerve by freshman medical students, the muscle was useful to other primates for grasping with their feet. It has disappeared altogether in 9 percent of the population.
15. MALE UTERUS: A remnant of an undeveloped female reproductive organ hangs off the male prostate gland.
16. FIFTH TOE: Lesser apes use all their toes for grasping or clinging to branches. Humans need mainly the big toe for balance while walking upright, the other four are for holding when you slam them on a coffee table at night!
17. FEMALE VAS DEFERENS: What might become sperm ducts in males become the epoophoron in females, a cluster of useless dead-end tubules near the ovaries.
18. PYRAMIDALIS MUSCLE: More than 20 percent of us lack this tiny, triangular pouch-like muscle that attaches to the pubic bone. It may be a relic from pouched marsupials.
19. COCCYX: These fused vertebrae are all that’s left of the tail that most mammals still use for balance and communication. Our hominid ancestors lost the need for a tail before they began walking upright. All they’re good for now is give us painful falls on the butt.
20. PARANASAL SINUSES: The nasal sinuses of our early ancestors may have been lined with odor receptors that gave a heightened sense of smell, which aided survival. No one knows why we retain these perhaps troublesome mucus-lined cavities, except to make the head lighter and to warm and moisten the air we breathe.
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Following are some amazing people facts:
- A Greek monk Mihallo Toltos never saw a women in his life. When he was born, his mother died and the baby was taken the following day to a monastry atop the Mount Athos. He spent his life among the monks-isolated from women. Even female animals were not allowed to enter the monastry.
- Mrs. Laurel Nisbel of USA survived for 37 years and 58 days on lungs made of metal.
- Richard the Lion-Hearted King of England spent more than 95% of his reign away from his kingdom and visited England only twice.
- Italian flag was designed by Napoleon Bonaparte.
- In India, the Chenchu tribe believe that sex at night produces blind children.
- 20,000 men laboured for nearly 20 years to bring the Taj Mahal at Agra, to its final shining glory of perfection beside the Yamuna river. The building, a mausoleum of pure white marble, was built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan to house the body of his beloved second wife, Mumtaz Mahal.
- The oldest man-made structures built in 3250 BC still standing are stone henge-like temples. The megalithic buildings are at Magarr and Skorba on Motta and a Ggantija on the nearby island of Gozo.
- Two irrigation dams built by Roman Engineers in the 2nd century AD in Merida, Spain, are still in use. The only major maintenance work they have needed in the past 1800 years has been the renewal of their stone facings, carried out in the 1930's.
- The American Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, made his first car in the garden shed at his home in Michigan in 1896
- The longest lived man was Shirali Nislimov who died on sept. 8, 1978 at the age of 168 years.
- More than half of the world's people are rice eaters.
- Rafael Molina known as Lagartijo, the famous 19th century bullfighter, killed some 4867 bulls.
- Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, inventor, lute player, sculptor, military engineer, scientific observer, anatomist, architect, town planner as well as a committed designer.
Do you know this about earth :
- In 1783 an Icelandic eruption threw up enough dust to temporarily block out the sun over Europe.
- About 20 to 30 volcanoes erupt each year, mostly under the sea.
- A huge underground river runs underneath the Nile, with six times more water than the river above.
- Lake Bosumtwi in Ghana formed in a hollow made by a meteorite.
- Beaver Lake, in Yellowstone Park, USA, was artificially created by beaver damming.
- Off the coast of Florida there is an underwater hotel. Guests have to dive to the entrance.
- Venice in Italy is built on 118 sea islets joined by 400 bridges. It is gradually sinking into the water.
- The Ancient Egyptians worshipped a sky goddess called Nut.
- The world’s windiest place is Commonwealth Bay, Antartica.
- In 1934, a gust of wind reached 371 km/h on Mount Washington in New Hampshire, USA.
- American Roy Sullivan has been struck by lighting a record seven times.
- The desert baobab tree can store up to 1000 litres of water in its trunk.
- The oldest living tree is a California bristlecone pine name ‘Methuselah’. It is about 4600 years old. The largest tree in the world is a giant sequoia growing in California. It is 84 meters tall and measures 29 meters round the trunk. The fastest growing tree is the eucalyptus. It can grow 10 meters a year.
- The Antartic notothenia fish has a protein in its blood that acts like antifreeze and stops the fish freezing in icy sea.
- The USA uses 29% of the world’s petrol and 33% of the world’s electricity.
- The industrial complex of Cubatao in Brazil is known as the Valley of Death because its pollution has destroyed the trees and rivers nearby.
- Tibet is the highest country in the world. Its average height above sea level is 4500 meters.
- Some of the oldest mountains in the world are the Highlands in Scotland. They are estimated to be about 400 million years old.
- Fresh water from the River Amazon can be found up to 180 km out to sea.
- The White Sea, in Russia, has the lowest temperature, only -2 degrees centigrade. The Persian Gulf is the warmest sea. In the summer its temperature reaches 35.6 degrees centigrade.
- There is no land at all at the North Pole, only ice on top of sea. The Arctic Ocean has about 12 million sq km of floating ice and has the coldest winter temperature of -34 degrees centigrade.
- The Antarctic ice sheet is 3-4 km thick, covers 13 million sq km and has temperatures as low as -70 degrees centigrade.
- Over 4 million cars in Brazil are now running on gasohol instead of petrol. Gasohol is a fuel made from sugar cane.
From the University of Georgia: Bar Room Economics
Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
So, that’s what they decided to do.
The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. ‘Since you are all such good customers,’ he said, ‘I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20.’ Drinks for the ten now cost just $80. The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free.
But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’ They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each ; end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.
And so:
The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).
Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.
‘I only got a dollar out of the $20,’declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,’ but he got $10!’ ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ exclaimed the fifth man.
‘I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got ten times more than I!’ ‘That’s true!!’ shouted the seventh man. ‘Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the
breaks!’ ‘Wait a minute,’ yelled the first four men in unison. ‘We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!’
The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.
The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!
And that, ladies and gentlemen, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction . Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they
might start drinking by them selves where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.
I hopped in a taxi and we took off for the airport.
We were driving in the right lane when suddenly a black car jumped out of a parking space right in front of us.My taxi driver slammed on his breaks, skidded, and missed the other car by just inches!
The driver of the other car whipped his head around and started yelling at us.
My taxi driver just smiled and waved at the guy.
And I mean, he was really friendly.So I asked, ‘Why did you just do that? This guy almost ruined your car and sent us to the hospital!’
This is when my taxi driver taught me what I now call, ‘The Law of the Garbage Truck.’
He explained that many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment.
As their garbage piles up, they need a place to dump it and sometimes they’ll dump it on you. Don’t take it personally. Just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on. Don’t take their garbage and spread it to other people at work, at home, or on the streets.
The bottom line is that successful people do not let garbage trucks take over their day. Life’s too short to wake up in the morning with regrets, so..... ‘Love the people who treat you right. Pray for the ones who don‘t.’
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