Carrot Facts

The Average person will eat 10,866 carrots in their lifetime.
Carrots were the first vegetable to be canned commercially
The Longest Carrot recorded in 1996 was 5.14 metres (16 feet 10 ½ inches)
Carrots produce more distilled spirit than potatoes
In early Celtic literature, the carrot is referred to as the "Honey Underground"!
Carrots are one of the rare vegetables which are more nutritious cooked than raw
Carrots were first grown as a medicine not a food
It's a myth that Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, was allergic to carrots - he simply did not like them.

For more carrot facts visit The Carrot Museum

Picture from michael.newman

There is a seven letter word in the English language that contains ten words without rearranging any of its letters, "therein": the, there, he, in, rein, her, here, here, ere, therein, herein.

Vodka Uses

To remove a bandage without pain saturate the bandage with vodka. Vodka disolves adhesive.

To clean your eyeglasses, simply wipe the lenses with a soft, clean cloth dampened with vodka. The alcohol in the vodka cleans the glass and kills germs.

Prolong the life of razors by filling a cup with vodka and letting your safety razor blade soak in the alcohol after shaving. The vodka disinfects the blade and prevents rusting.

Using a cotton ball, apply vodka to your face as an astringent to cleanse the skin and tighten pores.

Fill a sixteen-ounce trigger-spray bottle with vodka and spray bees or wasps to kill them.

Vodka will disinfect and alleviate a jellyfish sting.

Swish a shot of vodka over an aching tooth. Allow your gums to absorb some of the alcohol to numb the pain.

Happy Pi Day

Today is apparently Pi Day a celebration of the mathematical ratio that man has been trying to unlock for millennia.

3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971

Pi represents the number you get when you divide the distance around a circle (its circumference) by the distance across (the diameter). While there are many infinitely long numbers in maths, pi is the only one in which an infinitely simple idea - the circle - unfolds into an infinitely complex value. This paradox drives many people to distraction.

The most recent attempt, by a Japanese computer scientist in 2002, found 1.24 trillion digits of pi.

Coincidentally, Pi Day is also the birthday of Albert Einstein, who no doubt knew more than a little about pi.

To see more go to the BBC

Leap Years

The leap year was introduced by Julius Caesar in 46BC, to make the calendar tidier. The extra day every fourth year made the average year 365.25 days long.

This was still about 12 minutes longer than the solar year, which you can get away with on the short term, but in 1267 a monk called Roger Bacon noticed that the calendar had slipped nine days in the 13 intervening centuries.

It then took the church until 1582 to accept that it was celebrating Easter on the wrong week. That year Pope Gregory XIII adjusted the calendar, introducing the system we go by today: every fourth year is a leap year, unless it is divisible by 100 and not by 400. This makes the year 365.2425 days, which is still a little under 26 seconds too long, but nothing to fret about.


More from Wikipedia

Dog Facts

Happy Hound
Originally uploaded by Elfleda.

All 400 breeds of domestic dog belong to the same species: Canis familiaris. The vast diversity is down to humans carefully selecting valuable inherited traits but often encouraging unusual ones - such as dwarfism or lack of a tail - that, in the wild, might prevent a dog surviving long enough to reproduce.

A dog's nose has 220 million olfactory cells, a human's just five million. A dog's sense of smell is not only hundreds of times better than ours: it's four times better than the best odour-detecting machines. They can even smell cancer.

Doctors in California have found that both Labradors and Portuguese water dogs can detect lung and breast cancer with greater accuracy than mammograms or CT scans. The dogs correctly identified 99 per cent of lung cancer sufferers and 88 per cent of breast cancer patients simply by smelling their breath.

Smell

When the Roman Emperor Vespasian (AD 9-79) was challenged over his policy of taxing public lavatories, he declared: "Money has no smell." In 2006, scientists at the University of Leipzig found out that he was right. The metallic smell we experience after handling coins is actually a type of body odour. When we touch the metal, sweat from the skin gains electrons, then reacts with body oils and causes them to decompose, creating the familiar smell.

RIP Sir Edmund Hillary

Sir Edmund Hillary, who has died today at the age of 88, made it to the summit of Everest in 1953, and became the first man on the planet to reach its highest point.

There had been seven legal failed attempts to reach the top before he was sucessful.


Photo by apurdam

Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.

The origin and true meaning of this phrase is actually totally unrelated to any form of animal or its testicles. Back in time to the period of the Napoleonic War, the great gunships of this time carried many cannons on various gun decks. As an efficient method of storage and delivery of cannon balls to the cannon for firing, a "Monkey" (this term is used to define a table and/ or a rail) made of brass was used to hold the balls. In very cold temperatures the brass would contract or even break thus allowing the cannon balls to roll off the Monkey onto the gun deck. Hence the sailors would say "it is cold enough to freeze the balls off a Brass Monkey".

Picture by Anne Bourne