USELESS (but intresting) FACTS
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Ten percent of the Russian government's income comes from the sale of vodka.
The name Jeep came from the abbreviation used in the army for the "General Purpose" vehicle, G.P.
The Eisenhower interstate system requires that one mile in every five must be straight. These straight sections are usable as airstrips in times of war or other emergencies.
Worldwide more capital cities begin with B than any other letter: Berlin, Berne, Bonn, Bucharest, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Baghdad, Bratislava, Brussels, Belgrade, Bogato and Belfast, to mention a few.
According to the federal Trade Commission. there are 20,000 television commercials made each year that are aimed exclusively at children. Of these, 7,000 are for sugared breakfast cereals.
The Pentagon building in Arlington, Virginia, has nearly 68,000 miles of telephone lines.
The six official languages of the United Nations are: English, French, Arabic, Chinese, Russian and Spanish.
The airplane Buddy Holly died in was the "American Pie." (Thus the name of the Don McLean song.)
A bubble is round because the air within it presses equally against all its parts, thus causing all surfaces to be equidistant from its center.
A day on the planet Mercury is twice as long as its year. Mercury rotates very slowly but revolves around the sun in slightly less than 88 days.
A teaspoon of neutron star material weighs about 110 million tons.
A cosmic year is the amount of time it takes the sun to revolve around the center of the Milky Way, about 225 million years.
Crystals grow by reproducing themselves. They come the nearest to being "alive" of all members of the mineral kingdom.
A perfectly clean fire produces almost no smoke. Smoke simply means that a fire is not burning properly and that bits of unburned material are escaping.
The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," uses every letter in the alphabet. (Developed by Western Union to Test telex/two communications)
The number 4 is the only number, in the English language, that has the same number of letters in its name as its meaning.
Facetious, abstemious, abstentious, arsenious and arteriosus are the only five words in the English language that contain the vowels a, e, i, o, and u in their proper order.
"Stewardesses" is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand. Unless of course, you use the hunt-and-peck method.
"Almost" is the longest word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order.
There are only four words in the English language which end in "dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, hazardous.
The only 15-letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is "uncopyrightable."
Debra Winger was the voice of E.T.
The mask used by Michael Myers in the original "Halloween" was actually a Captain Kirk mask painted white.
All of the clocks in the movie "Pulp Fiction" are stuck on 4:20.
Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger bought the first Hummer manufactured for civilian use in 1992. The vehicle weighed in at 6,300 lbs and was 7 feet wide.
The man, who plays Lt. Commander Montgomery Scott on Star Trek, is missing the entire middle finger of his right hand.
It takes 3,000 cows to supply the NFL with enough leather for a year's supply of footballs.
Average life span of a major league baseball: 7 pitches.
The only two days of the year in which there are no professional sports games (MLB, NBA, NHL, or NFL) are the day before and the day after the Major League All-Star Game.
Amount that American Airlines saved in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served First-Class: $40,000.
The reason firehouses have circular stairways is from the days of yore when the engines were pulled by horses. The horses were stabled on the ground floor and figured out how to walk up straight staircases.
Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them used to burn their houses so-hence the expression "to get fired".
If a statue in the park of a person 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.
a ( insert bug name here ) lifespan is 24 hours
It's possible to lead a cow upstairs...but not downstairs.
A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why.
Snails can sleep for 3 years without eating.
The fingerprints of koala bears are virtually indistinguishable from those of humans, so much so that they could be confused at a crime scene.
Termites eat wood twice as fast when listening to Heavy Metal music.
A flea is capable of jumping 13 inches in a single leap. In human terms, this would be equivalent to a person leaping 700 feet in one bound.
A dragonfly flaps its wings 20 to 40 times a second, bees and houseflies 200 times, some mosquitoes 600 times, and a tiny gnat 1,000 times.
A grasshopper can leap over obstacles 500 times its own height. In relation to its size, it has the greatest jumping ability of all animals.
Hair grows at a rate of .00000001 miles per hour. (That's .000000022 kilometers per hour.)
Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.
Humans are the only primates that don't have pigment in the palms of their hands.
Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.
The word "grease monkey" comes from the person (usually a young boy) that would crawl up in the rafters to grease all of the pulleys and belts that ran all of the equipment in a blacksmith shop or machine shop.
"To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer." --Paul Ehrlich, American Scientist