maandag 27 april 2009

An average CD has a capacity of 74 minutes, the duration of beethoven's 9th symphony

The partners aimed at a playing time of 60 minutes with a disc diameter of 100 mm (Sony) or 115 mm (Philips).[16] Von Karajan suggested extending the capacity to 74 minutes to accommodate Wilhelm Furtwängler's recording of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony from the 1951 Bayreuth Festival.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cd

The cloth of a billiard table is green because it envolved from a lawn game

Billiard cloth (sometimes erroneously called felt) is a specific type of cloth that covers the top of the table's "playing area". Both the rails and slate beds are covered with 21-24 ounce billiard cloth (although some less expensive 19oz cloths are available) which is most often green in color (representing the grass of the original lawn games that billiards evolved from), and consists of either a woven wool or wool/nylon blend called baize.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billiard_table

by @lentebriesje

The bikini is named after bikini atoll in pacific where america tested an atomic bomb 4 days earlier


Réard named his swimsuit the “bikini,” taking the name from the Bikini Atoll, one of a series of islands in the South Pacific where testing on the new atomic bomb was occurring that summer. Historians assume Reard termed his swimsuit the “bikini” because he believed its revealing style would create reactions among people similar to those created by America’s atomic bomb in Japan just one summer earlier.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini#History

US has less than 5% of world population but it has almost 25% of the world's prisoners

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.
Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.
The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/us/23prison.html

A pack of Wrigley's gum was the first product scanned with a barcode










In June 1974, one of the first UPC scanner, made by NCR Corp. (which was then called National Cash Register Co), was installed at Marsh's supermarket in Troy, Ohio. On June 26, 1974, the first product with a bar code was scanned at a check-out counter. It was a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum. The pack of gum wasn't specially designated to be the first scanned product. It just happened to be the first item lifted from the cart by a shopper whose name is long since lost to history. Today, the pack of gum is on display at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.


http://www.adams1.com/history.html

Marie Stuart became queen when she was 6 days old

Mary I (popularly known in the English-speaking world as Mary, Queen of Scots and, in France, as Marie Stuart) (8 December 1542 – 8 February 1587) was Queen of Scots from 14 December 1542 to 24 July 1567.

She was the only surviving legitimate child of King James V. She was six days old when her father died and made her Queen of Scots. Her mother, Mary of Guise, assumed regency and her daughter was crowned nine months later.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_I_of_Scotland

The first written record of a contraceptive is crocodile dung

















The first written record of spermicide use is found in the Kahun Papyrus, an Egyptian document dating to 1850 BCE. It described a pessary of crocodile dung and fermented dough


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spermicide