Trivia and Fun Facts
- The Hoover Dam is made of enough concrete to make a two lane highway from New York to San Francisco, that’s around 4000 miles (2500 kilometres).
- The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, also known as Rodeo Houston or HLSR, is the world's largest world's largest live entertainment and livestock exhibition.
- Already world famous for his paintings, and with his notorious Blue, Rose and Cubism periods behind him, Picasso started to learn the art of clay sculpting in 1948 (at age 67). He went on to create more than 3,500 clay sculptures, featuring the distinctive Picasso subjects - women, bull-fights, birds and fish, often Meditteranean-inspired.
- The MS 150 is a two-day, 180-mile fund raising cycling ride organized by the National Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Society: Lone Star chapter. This ride is the largest event of its kind in North America taking in about 13,000 riders each year with a goal of raising $18 million towards finding a cure for MS.
- The first webcam watched a coffee pot. It allowed researchers at Cambridge to monitor the coffee situation without leaving their desks.
- The domestic cat can run faster than Usain Bolt (the Jamaican sprinter known as the fastest man ever).
- The MS 150 is a two-day, 180-mile fund raising cycling ride organized by the National Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Society: Lone Star chapter. This ride is the largest event of its kind in North America taking in about 13,000 riders each year with a goal of raising $18 million towards finding a cure for MS. This year's 30th Anniversary ride is scheduled 12-13 April 2014.
- In a short period of ten years Van Gogh made approximately 900 paintings.
- Douglas Englebart, the inventor of the mouse, has never seen a dime from the patent. That’s because his patent expired just before the device became widely used with almost every computer. But he’s not cursing his luck – Englebart has had a hand in a multitude of other inventions, including hypertext.
- Louisiana is the first state to have an Official Crustacean and it is the crawfish.
- During the initial compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the largest contributor of more than ten thousand words was Dr. W.C. Minor, an American Civil War veteran who was an inmate in an asylum for the criminally insane.
- There is no definitive history about how the word “barbecue” originated – or why it’s sometimes used as a noun, verb, or adjective. Some say the Spaniards get the credit for the word, derived from their “barbacoa” which is an American-Indian word for the framework of green wood on which foods were placed for cooking over hot coals. Others think the French were responsible, offering the explanation that when the Caribbean pirates arrived on our Southern shores, they cooked animals on a spit-like devise that ran from “whiskers to tail” or “de barbe a` queue.”
Quotes
- “What we now want is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth, and the elimination of egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife... Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment...” ~ Nikola Tesla
- "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new." ~ Albert Einstein
- "A computer will do what you tell it to do, but that may be much different from what you had in mind." ~ Joseph Weizenbaum
- "The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents." ~ Nathaniel Borenstein
- "Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head." ~ Jasper Fforde
- “Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something” ~ Plato
- "If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living." ~ Henri Poincare
- "The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. " ~ Warren G. Bennis
- "In all large corporations, there is a pervasive fear that someone, somewhere is having fun with a computer on company time. Networks help alleviate that fear." ~ John C. Dvorak
- “If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “The original question, 'Can machines think?' I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.” ~ Alan Turing, Mechanical Intelligence: Collected Works of A.M. Turing
- “The difference between e-mail and regular mail is that computers handle e-mail, and computers never decide to come to work one day and shoot all the other computers.” ~ Jamais Cascio
- "If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world." ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
- "You are the sum total of everything you've ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot - it's all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive." ~ Maya Angelou, Interview from the April 2011 edition of O, the Oprah Magazine (2011)
- "Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after." ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh
- "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." ~ Albert Einstein
- “We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.” ~ Steve Jobs
- "When you realize you've made a mistake, make amends immediately. It's easier to eat crow while it's still warm." ~ Dan Heist
- "It's said that All Hallows' Eve is one of the nights when the veil between the worlds is thin - and whether you believe in such things or not, those roaming spirits probably believe in you, or at least acknowledge your existence, considering that it used to be their own. Even the air feels different on Halloween, autumn-crisp and bright." ~ Erin Morgenstern
- "While only one day of the year is dedicated solely to honoring our veterans, Americans must never forget the sacrifices that many of our fellow countrymen have made to defend our country and protect our freedoms." ~Randy Neugebauer
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