by
Leah Baltus and Jeremy Topping
- The Global Positioning System (GPS), which computes position, velocity and time, was designed for and is operated by the U.S. military. For anywhere from $200 to $1,300, civilians can use basic GPS, too—not just in their cars, but with their PDAs using Bluetooth.
- Florentine architect and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi was the first to develop (and publish) a mathematical theory of perspective, leading the way for Renaissance POV masters Durer and da Vinci. Unlike them, however, some Renaissance artists used perspective not for accuracy but to make a statement: In paintings of the Virgin Mary, the vanishing point is often her womb to suggest her significance as the mother of Christ.
- More heart attacks occur on Monday than on any other day. Forty percent of American sick days are taken on Monday.
- A Seattle architect named John Graham built the first revolving restaurant, La Ronde, atop an office building in Honolulu in 1961 and another at the top of Seattle’s Space Needle a year later. By the mid-1990s, even Saddam had one, installing it in Baghdad’s Saddam Tower during the tower’s reconstruction after a 1991 British bombing. (In the reconstruction, Saddam doubled the tower’s original height, making it roughly 10 meters taller than the Tower of London.)
- In the 2004 season, only four of roughly 150 major league starting pitchers are black, and blacks make up about 10.5 percent of all major league baseball starters—down from about 20 percent in the mid-1970s. The NBA, on the other hand, is about 80 percent black today.
- Geometrician Erno Rubik’s original Magic Cubes (or Buvuos Kocka in his native Hungarian) were so stiff they often caused injuries and conditions—Rubik’s wrist— to occur in cubists. Following a loosening redesign, however, an estimated 100,000,000 Rubik’s Cubes were sold around the world from 1980 to 1983.
- Thanks to technology, thumbs are the new fingers. According to Britain’s The Observer, a study done in nine cities around the world showed that GameBoys, cell phones and other hand-helds have caused thumbs to take over fingers as the hand’s most dexterous and muscled digit for folks under the age of 25.
- In 1920, 57 percent of Hollywood movies billed the leading lady above the leading man. In 1990, only 18 percent gave the lady top billing. Today Guinness World Records lists Cameron Diaz as the world’s highest-paid actress and Adam Sandler the highest-paid actor.
- Chinese is not a single language but a group of related Sinitic languages, e.g., Mandarin, Cantonese and Gan, all of which can further subdivide into as many as 1,500 dialects. The Chinese writing system contains nearly 40,000 characters.
- Fully nocturnal owls, such as the barn owl, often have asymmetrical ears, which evolved to help owls accurately determine the distance and direction of their prey. In Roman mythology, an owl foretold bad fortune, including the deaths of Caesar and Augustus.
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