Unknown Facts

1. Shakespeare invented the word 'assassination' and 'bump'.
2. Stewardesses is the longest word typed with only the left hand.
3. The ant always falls over on its right side when intoxicated.
4. The electric chair was invented by a dentist.
5. The human heart creates enough pressure when it pumps out to the body to Squirt blood 30 feet.
6. Wearing headphones for just an hour will increase the bacteria in your ear By 700 times.
7. Ants don't sleep .
8. Owls have eyeballs that are tubular in shape, because of this, they cannot move their eyes.
9. A bird requires more food in proportion to its size than a baby or a cat.
10. The mouse is the most common mammal in the US.
11. A newborn kangaroo is about 1 inch in length.
12. A cow gives nearly 200,000 glasses of milk in her lifetime.
13. The Canary Islands were not named for a bird called a canary. They were named after a breed of large dogs. The Latin name was Canariae insulae - "Island of Dogs."
14. There are 701 types of pure breed dogs.
15. A polecat is not a cat. It is a nocturnal European weasel.
16. The animal responsible for the most human deaths world-wide is the mosquito.
17. The biggest pig in recorded history was Big Boy of Black Mountain, North Carolina, who was weighed at 1,904 pounds in 1939.
18. Cats respond most readily to names that end in an "ee" sound.
19. A cat cannot see directly under its nose. This is why the cat cannot seem to find tidbits on the floor.
20. Pigs, walruses and light-colored horses can be sunburned.
21. Snakes are immune to their own poison.
22. An iguana can stay under water for 28 minutes.
23. Cats have more than one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have about ten.
24. The biggest member of the cat family is the male lion, which weighs 528 pounds (240 kilograms).
25. Most lipstick contains fish scales.
26. Rats multiply so quickly that in 18 months, two rats could have over a million descendants.
27. Each day in the US, animal shelters are forced to destroy 30,000 dogs and cats.
28. A shrimp's heart is in their head.
29. A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.
30. A cockroach will live nine days without its head, before it starves to death.
31. The cat lover is an ailurophile, while a cat hater is an ailurophobe.
32. A woodpecker can peck twenty times a second.
33. It may take longer than two days for a chick to break out of its shell.
34. Dragonflies are one of the fastest insects, flying 50 to 60 mph.
35. Despite man's fear and hatred of the wolf, it has not ever been proved that a non-rabid wolf ever attacked a human.
36. There are more than 100 million dogs and cats in the United States.
37. Americans spend more than 5.4 billion dollars on their pets each year.
38. cat's urine glows under a black light .
39. The largest cockroach on record is one measured at 3.81 inches in length.
40. It is estimated that a single toad may catch and eat as many as 10,000 insects in the course of a summer.
41. Amphibians eyes come in a variety shapes and sizes. Some even have square or heart-shaped pupils.
42. It would require an average of 18 hummingbirds to weigh in at 1 ounce.
43. Dogs that do not tolerate small children well are the St. Bernard, the Old English sheep dog, the Alaskan the bull terrier, and the toy poodle.
44. Moles are able to tunnel through 300 feet of earth in a day.
45. Howler monkeys are the noisiest land animals. Their calls can be heard over 2 miles away.
46. A quarter of the horses in the US died of a vast virus epidemic in 1872.
47. The fastest bird is the Spine-tailed swift, clocked at speeds of up to 220 miles per hour.
48. There is no single cat called the panther. The name is commonly applied to the leopard, but it is also used to refer to the puma and the jaguar.
49. A black panther is really a black leopard.
50. A capon is a castrated rooster.
51. The world's largest rodent is the Capybara. An Amazon water hog that looks like a guinea pig, it can weigh more than 100 pounds.
52. The poison-arrow frog has enough poison to kill about 2,200 people.
53. The hummingbird, the loon, the swift, the kingfisher, and the grebe are all birds that cannot walk.
54. The poisonous copperhead snake smells like fresh cut cucumbers.
55. A chameleon's tongue is twice the length of its body.
56. Worker ants may live seven years and the queen may live as long as 15 years.
57. The blood of mammals is red, the blood of insects is yellow, and the blood of lobsters is blue.
58. Cheetahs make a chirping sound that is much like a bird's chirp or a dog's yelp. The sound is so an intense, it can be heard a mile away.
59. The underside of a horse's hoof is called a frog.
60. The frog peels off several times a year with new growth.
61. The bloodhound is the only animal whose evidence is admissible in an American court.
62. 98% of brown bears in the United States are in Alaska.
63. Before air conditioning was invented, white cotton slipcovers were put on furniture to keep the air cool.
64. The Barbie doll has more than 80 careers.
65. To make one pound of whole milk cheese, 10 pounds of whole milk is needed.
66. 99% of pumpkins that are sold for decoration.
67. Every 30 seconds a house fire doubles in size.
68. The month of December is the most popular month for weddings in the Philippines.
69. A one ounce milk chocolate bar has 6 mg of caffeine.
70. Carbon monoxide can kill a person in less than 15 minutes.
71. The largest ever hailstone weighed over 1kg and fell in Bangladesh in 1986.
72. Ants can live up to 16 years.
73. In Belgium, there is a museum that is just for strawberries.
74. The sense of smell of an ant is just as good as a dog's.
75. Popped popcorn should be stored in the freezer or refrigerator as this way it can stay crunchy for up to three weeks
76. Coca-Cola was originally green.
77. The most common name in the world is Mohammed.
78. The name of all the continents end with the same letter that they start with.
79. The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue.
80. TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row ! of the keyboard.
81. Women blink nearly twice as much as men!!
82. You can't kill yourself by holding your breath.
83. It is impossible to lick your elbow.
84. People say "Bless you " when you sneeze because when you sneeze, your heart stops for a millisecond.
85. It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky.
86. The "sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick" is said to be the toughest tongue twister in the English language.
87. If you sneeze too hard, you can fracture a rib. If you try to suppress a sneeze, you can rupture a blood vessel in your head or neck and die.
88. Each king in a deck of playing cards represents great king from history.
    Spades - King David
    Clubs - Alexander the Great,
    Hearts - Charlemagne
    Diamonds - Julius Caesar.
89. 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987, 654,321
90. If a statue of a person in the park on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.
91. A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.
92. A snail can sleep for three years.
93. All polar bears are left handed.
94. American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first-class.
95. Butterflies taste with their feet.
96. Elephants are the only animals that can't jump.
97. In the last 4000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
98. On average, people fear spiders more than they do death.
99. The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.
100. Most lipstick contains fish scales.
101. Like fingerprints, everyone's tongue print is different.
102. Tapeworms range in size from about 0.04 inch to more than 50 feet in length.
103. A baby bat is called a pup.
104. German Shepherds bite humans more than any other breed of dog.
105. A female mackerel lays about 500,000 eggs at one time.
106. It takes 35 to 65 minks to produce the average mink coat. The numbers for other types of fur coats are: beaver - 15; fox - 15 to 25; ermine - 150; chinchilla - 60 to 100 .

Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman: [Courtesy: Business week]
King of As a pioneer of standards-based design, he helped put an end to the browser wars and made Web sites available to all
by Jessie Scanlon

It's hard to remember what the Web was like in 1995, when Jeffrey Zeldman designed his first site. But suffice it to say that in those days "WWW" might as well have stood for the Wild West Web—there were no rules and no best practices. In a way, it was a time of great experimentation. But Zeldman soon came to see the flip side: The chaos was leading to user frustration and spiraling development and maintenance costs that threatened healthy development of the Web.

At the time, Zeldman was working as an art director at an advertising agency, and a client wanted a Web site. That project launched a new career that now includes the 11-person New York design consultancy Happy Cog; the Webzine A List Apart; the traveling conference An Event Apart; and a new book imprint—all dedicated to Web design. Perhaps most important, Zeldman helped to pioneer the movement known as standards-based design—a yawn-inducing term that basically ensures that a Web site can be used by someone using any browser and any Web-enabled device.

This concept may seem obvious today, but during the Browser Wars of the 1990s, Microsoft (MSFT) and Netscape each claimed close to 50% of the market, and their browsers were almost entirely incompatible. It wasn't uncommon to type in a URL and find that the site didn't work. Companies eager to open their virtual doors had to invest in multiple versions of their sites. In short, it was a bad situation for businesses and consumers alike. Yet the browser makers were behaving as many software companies do—by trying to out-feature the competition with the introduction of new proprietary technologies.

Chaos and Lawlessness
"There could be no filmmaking without industrywide agreement on frame rates, lenses, and audio recording equipment," argued Zeldman, and the flourishing Web was no different. In fact, the Web already had standards or nonproprietary technologies recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The industry organization was founded by WWW inventor Tim Berners-Lee along with the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and the Swiss particle physics lab CERN to create guidelines and ensure that Web technologies work well together.

Some standards defined the basic structural languages of the Web—the piece of code that defines something as a headline, for instance—while others established the language used for the presentation of content. The problem was that although the standards existed, they were widely flouted.

"The Web standards movement was a bottom-up thing in response to the top-down communities that weren't being responsive," says Jeffrey Veen, manager of user experience for Google's (GOOG) Web applications, who served as executive director of interface design for Wired Digital back in the Wild West days. "Both Microsoft and Netscape came to HotWired [as it was then called] to show us early builds of their version 4.0. We told them you're not using this, you're not using that, you're building things in the wrong direction, and we're not going to support your browser." "This and that" included inconsistent support for standards such as CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), for instance, and incompatible versions of DHTML or "Dynamic HTML."

Getting Organized
In 1998, Zeldman co-founded the Web Standards Project (WaSP), a coalition of designers and developers with a message for the industry. As the organization's official history page puts it: "If Netscape and Microsoft persisted in building ever more incompatible browsers, the cost of development would continue to skyrocket, tens of millions of people would find themselves locked out, and the Web would fragment into a digital tower of Babel."

Many thought it was a fool's errand—that the browser companies were never going to listen to us," recalls Zeldman. "Others argued that 'users don't care if you use Web standards.' Well, of course they don't. They just know that your site works better."
Take the example of CSS, a tool designers use to articulate how the information contained in a Web site's pages should be displayed on different devices or in different browsers. Before CSS, code controlling the appearance of content was written into the basic source code of a page. That meant Web site developers who wanted their sites to be universally accessible had to create multiple versions of a page (one for each browser or device).

Speaking the Same Language
CSS allowed developers to separate content from appearance; style sheets are like little notes that say to the Web server, "If you're sending a page to a PC, make it look like this." There might be separate sheets for PCs, for a "printer-friendly" layout, for a PDA, and so on. For designers, CSS means that the page will appear as it was intended, no matter what the device. For developers, CSS means they only have to build the page once. And for users, CSS means, as Zeldman says, that the site works.
For companies with a Web presence—needless to say, most companies—CSS means "You can control you branding, your image, and still deliver content to users in the most appropriate style," Zeldman says. It also means that a site redesign wouldn't require every page to be recoded—an expensive and time-consuming proposition.
And it's not just with redesigns that standards save a company money. In 1998, WaSP estimated that the need to write four or more incompatible versions—common practice in pre-standards days—added at least 25% to the cost of designing and developing any Web site. Designing with standards can also reduce maintenance costs. If a site reduces its mark-up weight (basically its amount of

code) by 35%, it reduces bandwidth costs by the same amount, according to Zeldman.

Designer Compliance
Google's Veen argues that standards also reduce risk. When Wired Digital built pages to be viewed with browsers using nonstandard technologies, he says, "We had no way of knowing whether our content would work when the next browser version came out." Once the browser companies committed to supporting standards, Web developers could be more confident that the next version of a browser would not suddenly introduce a new version of, say, HTML, that wouldn't work with older Web sites.

While the advantages seem obvious now, Web standards were a hard sell to Microsoft and Netscape back in those days. The lobbying efforts were helped by the fact that many engineers at those companies recognized the value of standards and pressed the cause internally. So by 2000, Zeldman was ready to declare victory and get back to designing. But then he realized that while the browser makers were recognizing standards, many designers still weren't using them. "Some of the designers I expected to embrace standards said, 'Do you know how much money I make by knowing how to encode a Web site for six browsers?'" says Zeldman. Other designers worried that standards would limit their creativity.

"Nobody cared about, or understood, the benefits [of Web standards]," says Dan Cederholm, founder of the Salem (Mass.) design firm Simplebits and author of several books, including Bulletproof Web Design. "It wasn't until Zeldman published To Hell With Bad Browsers that people really started taking notice of using CSS for Web layouts."

A Writer's Flourish
The articles Zeldman was publishing at A List Apart, the Webzine he co-founded in 1998, were convincing some in the design community. And to reach a broader audience of designers and Web site owners, Zeldman channeled his evangelism into a book, Design with Web Standards, first published in 2003. The book, like his articles, reflects his former lives as a reporter for The Washington Post and an advertising copywriter; he's a talented writer, adept at making technical arguments in language that non-techies can easily understand.
When he writes, for instance, "Yahoo's front page is served millions of times a day. Each byte that is wasted on outdated HTML hacks is multiplied by an astronomical number of page views, resulting in gigabytes of traffic that tax Yahoo's servers and add Pentagon-like costs to its overhead," it's easy to grasp. And although Zeldman was only one of many designers and developers behind the standards movement, he is widely recognized as one of its most important voices, in part because of his ability to talk about the dry and, let's face it, dull subject of standards in a way that made everyone see their importance.

Today, most sites are standards-compliant. WaSP lives on, and continues to work with Web software developers to ensure compatibility with W3C standards. Zeldman, though, is no longer actively involved with the Web Standards Project, leaving him more time to work with Happy Cog clients such as Advertising Age magazine, Warner Bros. Entertainment , and Amnesty International. It also leaves him time to be, in his words, "an ambassador for the profession," and in that role, his influence has only grown. As Khoi Vinh, the design director for NYTimes.com, says of Zeldman: "He's a lion in the field."

Zeno’s Paradoxes - Proof that motion unexists

Zeno’s Paradoxes -

Proof that motion unexists

Do you ever have one of those days when you just can’t seem to get yourself moving? Or maybe, no matter how hard you try to get caught up, you always seem to lag behind? I have those kinds of days all the time—and so, apparently, did ancient Greek philosophers. One of them, Zeno of Elea, devised an ingenious set of philosophical statements that amount to “proof” that motion is impossible, despite all evidence to the contrary. These statements are known as Zeno’s Paradoxes (or sometimes, collectively, as Zeno’s Paradox), and they continue to vex philosophers to this day.

I first became aware of Zeno and his ideas while working on my undergraduate degree in philosophy. I was reading Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, in which philosophical issues are frequently presented in hypothetical dialogs between Achilles, the Greek warrior legendary for his swiftness, and a Tortoise. Lewis Carroll had used the same pair of characters, but it was Zeno who first put them together—in the fifth century B.C. In Hofstadter’s retelling of the story, Zeno himself makes a guest appearance in order to explain to Achilles and the Tortoise that motion is not merely impossible, it “unexists.” The story is based on one of Zeno’s eight so-called paradoxes, of which only three or four are usually mentioned. Allow me to give you a very brief taste.

Achilles and the Tortoise:

Imagine that Achilles meets a Tortoise, who challenges him to a foot race. Achilles is amused when the Tortoise asks merely for a modest head start. But then the Tortoise explains that by agreeing to this demand, Achilles has already lost! The logic, says the Tortoise, is that if he starts ahead of Achilles at point A, Achilles will have to run to point A before he can overtake the Tortoise (which is, of course, obvious enough). Meanwhile, the Tortoise will have moved ahead slightly to point B. Again, Achilles must advance to point B before he can push ahead, by which time the Tortoise will have traveled farther (if only by inches), to point C. And so on. Although with each successive point in the race the Tortoise moves smaller and smaller distances, Achilles never quite catches up, always remaining one segment behind. And thus, says Zeno, the faster can never overtake the slower.

The Dichotomy:

Another variation on the same theme is called the “dichotomy paradox” (or sometimes the “bisection paradox” or “race course paradox”). Suppose you want to cross a room. In order to get to the other side, you must first get to the halfway point, which will take you some finite amount of time. And before you can get halfway, you have to cross half of that distance, at which point you’d be a quarter of the way across. And before that, you’d have to cross half of a quarter, and so on infinitely. Each of these steps must take a finite amount of time. And yet, you have to cross an infinite number of distances to walk across the room—or indeed any distance at all. And since one cannot travel an infinite number of distances in a finite period of time, motion itself is impossible.

The Arrow:

Just when you think motion is completely done for, Zeno makes matters even worse. Think of an arrow in motion, he says. At any particular instant during its flight, the arrow occupies just one position in space, which is how we define an object that’s at rest. So the arrow must, at that point, be at rest. At the next instant, whatever position the arrow is in, it’s also in just one spot, and thus, still at rest. Therefore, by definition, anything in motion is actually at rest!

Now, I know what you’re thinking: this is all very silly. A logical “proof” does not mean that motion is impossible, and whatever Zeno may have conjectured about such things at the office, he still certainly walked home at the end of the day. That is true. And yet, at some level, you have to admit that he does have a point, of sorts. Trying to tease apart Zeno’s logic from common sense has occupied a great many philosophers and mathematicians over the centuries. And if you’re willing to wrap your head around a bit of calculus, you can find some rather definitive mathematical explanations for why we can move after all. But that, say some people, is missing the whole point.

In the first place, there are philosophers who deny that these little stories are truly paradoxes. For example, it’s true that one can, in principle, divide a finite distance into an infinite number of points, but so what? They still add up to a finite distance. Meanwhile, the same is true of time: you can subdivide hours, minutes, seconds, and so on as much as you want, but that doesn’t make time grind to a halt. Both motion and time are, in reality, continuous. So if you don’t believe in the fiction that motion must occur in discrete steps of both distance and time, there’s no paradox at all. That, say critics, takes care of at least the first two statements; as for the arrow…you can define motion as a state that exists over successive points in time, which would mean Zeno’s idea of “rest” is fundamentally mistaken.

However, it may be that all the effort to debunk the paradoxes is misguided; by themselves, they’re nothing more than intellectual exercises that Zeno himself may not even have believed. Zeno, who lived from roughly 490 B.C. to 430 B.C., was a student of Parmenides, founder of a group of thinkers known as the Eleatics. Parmenides believed that the universe is fundamentally unchanging. Since everything is ultimately one, any motion or change must be merely an illusion. Although Zeno’s statements can be taken as defending Parmenides at face value, their intention was to do so in a more subtle way, using a logical technique known as reductio ad absurdum—reduction to the absurd—also known as proof by contradiction. In other words, if a logical argument yields an absurd conclusion, one of its premises must be wrong. So it’s not that Zeno believed motion in the everyday sense was impossible; he was trying to demonstrate, by way of these absurd stories, that time and distance are in fact not divisible—and in that way, support the claim that the universe is an unchanging whole.

Ultimately, though, no one will ever know for sure exactly what Zeno was getting at, because none of his writings survived. We know about Zeno only because later philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, mentioned his writings in their own works—and not, I should point out, in a very complimentary way. Although some philosophers still aren’t convinced that the paradoxes are resolved, most people believe now, as in Aristotle’s time, that Zeno was too clever for his own good. And personally, I just don’t find his stories moving