 |  |
According to Badastronomy the universe generates (or is that consumes?) half a trillion dollars of power per cubic light year per hour, not a quarter of a trillion as was thought until yesterday.
I wonder if anyone pointed out to the people who named USS Ponce, that in the UK it means ‘flamboyantly gay’.
Trivia - Pandoras ‘box’ was a mistranslation.
Pandora - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The mistranslation of pithos as “box” is usually attributed to the sixteenth century humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam when he translated Hesiod’s tale of Pandora. Hesiod uses the word “pithos” which refers to a jar used to store grain. It is possible that Erasmus confused “pithos” with “pyxis” which means box. The scholar M.L. West has written that Erasmus may have mixed up the story of Pandora with the story found elsewhere of a box which was opened by Psyche
Trains Planes and Ruby on Rails - Is speed the most important thing for a successful startup?
Twenty years ago, I was reading a Graham Greene novel on a painfully slow train ride in Italy. In the book, he pointed out that your mood as a train traveller was directly proportional to speed.
Evan posts today about how the mood a Twitter HQ is directly proportional to the speed of the site.
I’ve noticed that many people running startups seem to have moods that are directly proportional to their Alexa rank.
I’d argue that fast response time is the unwritten golden rule of successful web apps. A site that is slow is like wading through mud. Before Youtube I could watch video on the web, but before Youtube, my expectation was that it would splutter and stall.
I suspect that focusing on speed is much healthier than traffic or, dare I say it, features. If you built a product with one great feature and make it fast, your traffic will come, people will understand what its about and the extra features can be added later.
Google had less accurate search than Altavista for a long time after they became hip (you couldn’t do exact phrase matching because ’stop’ words like ‘the, of, and or’ etc. weren’t indexed), but Google was always blindingly fast and they kept focused on one things even as CMGI made Altavista pour portal crap around their nice search page.
And anyway, Graham Greene said nothing about Alexa.
According to a British Coffee Association spokesperson (with a vested interest), its 4.5 cups a day:
“a wealth of scientific evidence suggests that moderate coffee consumption of four to five cups per day is perfectly safe for the general population and does have a beneficial effect on alertness and performance even in regular coffee drinkers”
A holiday tradition, for me and my dad:
Following Jason’s My Year in Cities, 2006 (kottke.org).
Here’s lists of cities visited this year:
(The reason I’m doing this is I’m collecting lists for some new Wists features, which I’ll be able to show shortly).
New York, NY
Philadelpia, PA
Austin, TX
San Francisco, CA
Seattle, WA
London, England
Geneva, Switzerland
Paris, France
Barcelona, Spain
and bonnie Selkirk!
Study finds that wearing a cycling helmet increases your chance of being hit by a car.
Wearing a long flowing wig provides the greatest protection.
BBC NEWS | UK | England | Somerset | Wearing helmets ‘more dangerous’
What is both rare and everywhere?
- Uranium is rare, but everywhere.
One ton of an ordinary rock, such as granite, contains 16g of Thorium and Uranium.
A kilogram of Uranium is equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT, which is approx. the same as the energy potential of 20,000 tons of gasoline.
One ton of common-or-garden rock contains the equivalent fuel of 320 tons of gasoline. It could take a lot less than that to extract it.
Until recently, what did environmentalists and Car/Oil companies have in common?
- A reason to hate nuclear power.
It used to be very easy to make a case against nuclear energy, and if you are either a treehugger or a oil exec. you would be historically allied.
You are currently browsing the archives for the trivia category.
(rss)