http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT0qQqnP6rs
I dont feel like putting in the lyrics, so check it out yourself, if you really care.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Back!
Woot! Amira, Amira~ I'm out of that hell!
*huggles a thousand times* x3 I miss you so much Am, when are you visiting me..?
I heard about your Saturday. *claps* Congrats, you've find peace. Even if for a while, I'm proud of you. You're like the insane, emo-wannabe sister I never had. No offense. ^-^;;;;;;
I hope you've been fine, and no one has been hurting your feelings. If they have, they shall suffer forever. =0 ..I'm so glad you've put my name in this wicked thing.
...Dont worry about her, I know she still trusts you. You've gone through a lot, with shuk and all..
I wish I could push it all away for ya, but like they always say, You gotta put up with the rain if you want to see the rainbow. The rainbow is there, look up ahead.
Someday.. all your sufferings would end.. I'll pray for you.
Oh yeah, you said you want to apply for boarding school. That's.. lovely, but.. will you be able to take care of yourself?.. I'm worried you know. Dont even ask what I've been through in my coma.
Well until then, farewell Amira. Have lotsa fun this Eid, I really hope you do.
Bye! Au Revoir!
*huggles a thousand times* x3 I miss you so much Am, when are you visiting me..?
I heard about your Saturday. *claps* Congrats, you've find peace. Even if for a while, I'm proud of you. You're like the insane, emo-wannabe sister I never had. No offense. ^-^;;;;;;
I hope you've been fine, and no one has been hurting your feelings. If they have, they shall suffer forever. =0 ..I'm so glad you've put my name in this wicked thing.
...Dont worry about her, I know she still trusts you. You've gone through a lot, with shuk and all..
I wish I could push it all away for ya, but like they always say, You gotta put up with the rain if you want to see the rainbow. The rainbow is there, look up ahead.
Someday.. all your sufferings would end.. I'll pray for you.
Oh yeah, you said you want to apply for boarding school. That's.. lovely, but.. will you be able to take care of yourself?.. I'm worried you know. Dont even ask what I've been through in my coma.
Well until then, farewell Amira. Have lotsa fun this Eid, I really hope you do.
Bye! Au Revoir!
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Crush - David Archuleta
I hang up the phone tonight
Something happened for the first time
Deep inside
It was a rush, what a rush
Cause the possibility
that you would ever feel the same way
About me
It's just too much, just too much
Why do I keep running from the truth
All I ever think about is you
You got me hypnotized, so mesmerized
And I just got to know
Do you ever think
When you're all alone
All that we can be
Where this thing can go
Am I crazy or falling in love
Is it really just another crush
Do you catch a breath
When I look at you
Are you holding back
Like the way I do
Cause I'm tryin, tryin to walk away
But I know this crush aint goin away, goin away
Has it ever cross you mind
When were hangin, spending time girl,
Are we just friends
Is there more, is there more
See it's a chance we've gotta take
Cause I believe that we can make this into
Something that will last, last forever, forever
Do you ever think
When you're all alone
All that we can be
Where this thing can go
Am I crazy or falling in love
Is it really just another crush
Do you catch a breath
When I look at you
Are you holding back
Like the way I do
Cause I'm tryin, tryin to walk away
But I know this crush aint goin away, goin away
Why do I keep running from the truth
All I ever think about is you
You got me hypnotized, so mesmerized
And I just got to know
Do you ever think
When you're all alone
All that we can be
Where this thing can go
Am I crazy or falling in love
Is it really just another crush
Do you catch a breath
When I look at you
Are you holding back
Like the way I do
Cause I'm tryin, tryin to walk away
But I know this crush aint goin away, goin away
Hmmm..~ Lovely and beautiful song Ira, cant wait till you get out of the hospital..
Something happened for the first time
Deep inside
It was a rush, what a rush
Cause the possibility
that you would ever feel the same way
About me
It's just too much, just too much
Why do I keep running from the truth
All I ever think about is you
You got me hypnotized, so mesmerized
And I just got to know
Do you ever think
When you're all alone
All that we can be
Where this thing can go
Am I crazy or falling in love
Is it really just another crush
Do you catch a breath
When I look at you
Are you holding back
Like the way I do
Cause I'm tryin, tryin to walk away
But I know this crush aint goin away, goin away
Has it ever cross you mind
When were hangin, spending time girl,
Are we just friends
Is there more, is there more
See it's a chance we've gotta take
Cause I believe that we can make this into
Something that will last, last forever, forever
Do you ever think
When you're all alone
All that we can be
Where this thing can go
Am I crazy or falling in love
Is it really just another crush
Do you catch a breath
When I look at you
Are you holding back
Like the way I do
Cause I'm tryin, tryin to walk away
But I know this crush aint goin away, goin away
Why do I keep running from the truth
All I ever think about is you
You got me hypnotized, so mesmerized
And I just got to know
Do you ever think
When you're all alone
All that we can be
Where this thing can go
Am I crazy or falling in love
Is it really just another crush
Do you catch a breath
When I look at you
Are you holding back
Like the way I do
Cause I'm tryin, tryin to walk away
But I know this crush aint goin away, goin away
Hmmm..~ Lovely and beautiful song Ira, cant wait till you get out of the hospital..
I'm singing in the rain...~
Our bodies
- Each square inch of human skin consists of 19 million cells, sixty hairs, ninety oil glands, nineteen feel of blood vessels, 625 sweat glands, and 19,000 sensory cells.
- The pupils of your eyes can give clues to your emotions if the other person can se them. If you are trying to bargain for something you want very much, wear dark glasses, for your pupils may dilate when you show interest and you may end up paying a higher price for the merchandise. [I’d love to try this sometime.]
- Human reproduction follows lunar time rather than sidereal, or solar, time: Gestation is about 266 days – nine lunar months – and the menstrual period is one lunar month.
- Man has tiny bones once meant for a tail and unworkable muscles once meant to move his ears. [Doggy! xD]
- To keep your feet warm, put on a hat. Eighty percent of all body heat escapes through the head.
- The scientist Paul Weiss has estimated that each of us had in his brain about as many cells as there have been seconds in time since our part of the cosmos began to assume its present form – about 1 quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000). Further, he estimates that each cell has about 10,000 macromolecules and receives about 10,000 connections from other brain cells as the macromolecules of each develop linkages. Dr. Weiss computes that the brain loses 1,000 brain cells per day, irretrievably, seemingly at random, which mean a loss of 100 billion cross-linkages daily. Yet, amazingly, basic patterns and memories are maintained. [No wonder the second I try to think about what I dreamt, I forget all about it except for the most horror parts. ~___~]
- The brain is surrounded by a membrane containing veins and arteries. This membrane is filled with nerves of feeling. However, the brain itself has no feelings; if it cut into, the person feels no pain. (Just… wow.)
- The heart beats faster during a brisk walk or heated argument than during sexual intercourse. [*coughs hysterically* No comment on that. .-.;;;;;]
- We think we cannot see at night, But given enough time to adjust, the human eye can, for a time, see almost as well as an owl’s. Ultimately, as the amount of light decreases, an owl detects shapes after a human no longer can.
Pampered Pets
- Napoleon suffered from ailurophobia, the fear of cats. [I think my friend Fatin, do also. .-. Our last extra Maths class in the … form 5 (?), there was this kawaii cat. =3 For me at least, but Fatin, along with Helmiati, were scared of it. I took it out, upon their request but the cat kept coming back. xD After a while, the cat decided to leave the class.]
- A cat fell from the twentieth floor of a building in Montreal, in 1973, and suffered only from a pelvic fracture.
Salty Facts
- There is a salt mine in the Polish town of Wieliczka, near Cracow, that has been in operation for nearly 1,000 years. [I’ve been in this salt mine; my mother twice. It’s just… amazing. No other words can describe the feeling when you are exactly down in the mine.]
Sharps and Flats
- There were at least fifty two musicians in the family of Johann Sebastian Bach. [I love his music.]
- Bach’s Six Concertos for Orchestra – the Brandenburg Concertos – were written for the margrave of Brandenburg, a prince who loved music, concertos in particular. When the margrave died, the Brandenburg Concertos were said to be worth twenty four groschen. Eight groschen were worth $1.50 in those days (1721), so the value for six of the most distinguished pieces in all of music was only $4.50.
- Johann Sebastian Bach must have liked to walk. He walked the 230 miles from Arnstadlt to Lubeck, Germany, in order to hear the organist Buxtehude. On another occasion, he walked 25 miles to Halle in the hope of meeting Handel, arriving just after Handel had left the town by coach.
Solar System
- Want to reach the outermost planet of the solar system in twenty five years instead of the forty seven years that a direct flight would take? If yes, be sure to be launched first toward Jupiter. Passing through the giant’s planet gravitational field, your spaceship would receive an added boost on its way to that most distant planet, Pluto.
Sports
- Between 1882 and 1887, Hugh L. Daly played second base and shortstop and pitched for several major league baseball teams. As a pitcher, he won seventy four games, including a no hitter, and he registered a long standing record of striking out nineteen batters in a game. Not bad for a man with only one arm.
Strange Rules, Laws, and Customs
- It was proposed in the Rhode Island legislature in the 1970s that there be enacted a $2 tax on ever act of sexual intercourse. [o-o I wonder how much… .-.;;;;]
That’s Entertainment
- Everyone has heard of Hollywood’s voice dubbing. In the movie musical Singin’ in the Rain, the lesser art of foot-dubbing was applied: After Gene Kelly completed his famous tap dance in the rain, the director still needed the sound of sloshy tapping feet. Instead of having Mr. Kelly dance again for the sound track, two young ladies put on their tap shoes and, tapping in bucketsful of water, produced the required sounds to match the tapping seen on the screen. One of these tappers was the late Carol Haney, assistant to Mr. Kelly, and the other was Gwen Verdon, choreographer Jack Cole’s assistant. Both of these foot-dubbers later became Broadway dancing stars.
What’s in a Name
- The most common name in the world is neither Ching nor John. It’s Muhammad. [I think someone told me this, I just can’t remember who and when…]
- Some of the names by which Bangkok is known are Great City of Angels, the Supreme Warehouse of Divine Jewels, the Great Land Unconquerable, the Grand and Prominent World, the Royal and Delightful City Full of Ninefold Gems, the Highest Royal Dwelling and Grand Palace, the Divine Shelter and Living Place of the Reincarnated One…
Words
- One of the greatest orators of all time – Demosthenes (384?-322 B.C.) – was once a stutterer who stubbornly trained himself out of it, reportedly by putting pebbles in his mouth and practicing speaking aloud.
- The Polish actress Helena Modjeska (1844 - 1909) was popular with audiences for her realistic and emotional style of acting. She once gave a dramatic reading in her native tongue at a dinner party of people who didn’t know Polish [Oh boy…], and her listeners were in tears when she finished. It turned out she had merely recited the Polish alphabets. [I never got around to ACTUALLY learning the whole alphabets, neither Miss Monika nor that crazed Polish teacher taught any of her students the alphabets in Polish. .-.; But that must have been so dramatic to have her audience in tears. xD]
- Among the thousands of languages spoken around the world, about 175 languages are spoken natively by at least a million people. The ten largest languages each have over 100 million native speakers. They are, in descending order, Chinese, English, Russian, Spanish, Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, Portugese, German and Japanese.
- A forty five letter word connoting a lung disease, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis, is the longest word in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. The longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary means the act of estimating as worthless – floccinaucinihilipilification.
- One legal term for having sexual intercourse with someone else’s spouse – i.e., adultery – is “criminal conversation.”
- Each square inch of human skin consists of 19 million cells, sixty hairs, ninety oil glands, nineteen feel of blood vessels, 625 sweat glands, and 19,000 sensory cells.
- The pupils of your eyes can give clues to your emotions if the other person can se them. If you are trying to bargain for something you want very much, wear dark glasses, for your pupils may dilate when you show interest and you may end up paying a higher price for the merchandise. [I’d love to try this sometime.]
- Human reproduction follows lunar time rather than sidereal, or solar, time: Gestation is about 266 days – nine lunar months – and the menstrual period is one lunar month.
- Man has tiny bones once meant for a tail and unworkable muscles once meant to move his ears. [Doggy! xD]
- To keep your feet warm, put on a hat. Eighty percent of all body heat escapes through the head.
- The scientist Paul Weiss has estimated that each of us had in his brain about as many cells as there have been seconds in time since our part of the cosmos began to assume its present form – about 1 quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000). Further, he estimates that each cell has about 10,000 macromolecules and receives about 10,000 connections from other brain cells as the macromolecules of each develop linkages. Dr. Weiss computes that the brain loses 1,000 brain cells per day, irretrievably, seemingly at random, which mean a loss of 100 billion cross-linkages daily. Yet, amazingly, basic patterns and memories are maintained. [No wonder the second I try to think about what I dreamt, I forget all about it except for the most horror parts. ~___~]
- The brain is surrounded by a membrane containing veins and arteries. This membrane is filled with nerves of feeling. However, the brain itself has no feelings; if it cut into, the person feels no pain. (Just… wow.)
- The heart beats faster during a brisk walk or heated argument than during sexual intercourse. [*coughs hysterically* No comment on that. .-.;;;;;]
- We think we cannot see at night, But given enough time to adjust, the human eye can, for a time, see almost as well as an owl’s. Ultimately, as the amount of light decreases, an owl detects shapes after a human no longer can.
Pampered Pets
- Napoleon suffered from ailurophobia, the fear of cats. [I think my friend Fatin, do also. .-. Our last extra Maths class in the … form 5 (?), there was this kawaii cat. =3 For me at least, but Fatin, along with Helmiati, were scared of it. I took it out, upon their request but the cat kept coming back. xD After a while, the cat decided to leave the class.]
- A cat fell from the twentieth floor of a building in Montreal, in 1973, and suffered only from a pelvic fracture.
Salty Facts
- There is a salt mine in the Polish town of Wieliczka, near Cracow, that has been in operation for nearly 1,000 years. [I’ve been in this salt mine; my mother twice. It’s just… amazing. No other words can describe the feeling when you are exactly down in the mine.]
Sharps and Flats
- There were at least fifty two musicians in the family of Johann Sebastian Bach. [I love his music.]
- Bach’s Six Concertos for Orchestra – the Brandenburg Concertos – were written for the margrave of Brandenburg, a prince who loved music, concertos in particular. When the margrave died, the Brandenburg Concertos were said to be worth twenty four groschen. Eight groschen were worth $1.50 in those days (1721), so the value for six of the most distinguished pieces in all of music was only $4.50.
- Johann Sebastian Bach must have liked to walk. He walked the 230 miles from Arnstadlt to Lubeck, Germany, in order to hear the organist Buxtehude. On another occasion, he walked 25 miles to Halle in the hope of meeting Handel, arriving just after Handel had left the town by coach.
Solar System
- Want to reach the outermost planet of the solar system in twenty five years instead of the forty seven years that a direct flight would take? If yes, be sure to be launched first toward Jupiter. Passing through the giant’s planet gravitational field, your spaceship would receive an added boost on its way to that most distant planet, Pluto.
Sports
- Between 1882 and 1887, Hugh L. Daly played second base and shortstop and pitched for several major league baseball teams. As a pitcher, he won seventy four games, including a no hitter, and he registered a long standing record of striking out nineteen batters in a game. Not bad for a man with only one arm.
Strange Rules, Laws, and Customs
- It was proposed in the Rhode Island legislature in the 1970s that there be enacted a $2 tax on ever act of sexual intercourse. [o-o I wonder how much… .-.;;;;]
That’s Entertainment
- Everyone has heard of Hollywood’s voice dubbing. In the movie musical Singin’ in the Rain, the lesser art of foot-dubbing was applied: After Gene Kelly completed his famous tap dance in the rain, the director still needed the sound of sloshy tapping feet. Instead of having Mr. Kelly dance again for the sound track, two young ladies put on their tap shoes and, tapping in bucketsful of water, produced the required sounds to match the tapping seen on the screen. One of these tappers was the late Carol Haney, assistant to Mr. Kelly, and the other was Gwen Verdon, choreographer Jack Cole’s assistant. Both of these foot-dubbers later became Broadway dancing stars.
What’s in a Name
- The most common name in the world is neither Ching nor John. It’s Muhammad. [I think someone told me this, I just can’t remember who and when…]
- Some of the names by which Bangkok is known are Great City of Angels, the Supreme Warehouse of Divine Jewels, the Great Land Unconquerable, the Grand and Prominent World, the Royal and Delightful City Full of Ninefold Gems, the Highest Royal Dwelling and Grand Palace, the Divine Shelter and Living Place of the Reincarnated One…
Words
- One of the greatest orators of all time – Demosthenes (384?-322 B.C.) – was once a stutterer who stubbornly trained himself out of it, reportedly by putting pebbles in his mouth and practicing speaking aloud.
- The Polish actress Helena Modjeska (1844 - 1909) was popular with audiences for her realistic and emotional style of acting. She once gave a dramatic reading in her native tongue at a dinner party of people who didn’t know Polish [Oh boy…], and her listeners were in tears when she finished. It turned out she had merely recited the Polish alphabets. [I never got around to ACTUALLY learning the whole alphabets, neither Miss Monika nor that crazed Polish teacher taught any of her students the alphabets in Polish. .-.; But that must have been so dramatic to have her audience in tears. xD]
- Among the thousands of languages spoken around the world, about 175 languages are spoken natively by at least a million people. The ten largest languages each have over 100 million native speakers. They are, in descending order, Chinese, English, Russian, Spanish, Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, Portugese, German and Japanese.
- A forty five letter word connoting a lung disease, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis, is the longest word in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. The longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary means the act of estimating as worthless – floccinaucinihilipilification.
- One legal term for having sexual intercourse with someone else’s spouse – i.e., adultery – is “criminal conversation.”
Genius
- Louis Pasteur, whose work on wine, vinegar, and beer led to pasteurization, had an obsessive fear of dirt and infection. He refused to shake hands, and he carefully wiped plate and glass before dining. (I remember him... art class or something.)
- Albeit Einstein’s last words will never be known. He spoke them in German, and the attending nurse did not understand German. (Oh phooey!)
Literary Life
- After spending fruitless years looking for a story that would match his “strong sense of man’s double being,” Robert Louis Stevenson dreamt the plot of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Medicine
- David – (his last name has never been publicly revealed) has lived all his life in a sterile environment, He suffers the rare disease known as severe combined immune deficiency, and his body is unable to fight off even the most common germs. (By living in a germfree life-support system, which is enclosed in a see-through plastic bubble, he has never experienced a sick day, except for his disease, for which doctors say there is still no treatment.) On his seventh birthday, in 1978, he wasn’t able to blow out the candles on his cake – they weren’t allowed in the bubble, so he was only able to see them. About a hundred people are born with this blood disorder, and David is the oldest of five survivors. David lives with his family in Houston, and walks out of doors wearing an astronaut’s suit with a plastic-bubble helmet.
- Electrical stimulation of certain areas of the brain can revive long-lost memories.
- A study of the common cold, made b two epidemiologists at the University of Michigan, disclosed that the incidence of colds was greater among the better-educated. (Even if this is true, I only get fevers. Just my high temperature got me into medication – for weeks now. I haven’t recovered ever since I took two bottles of medicine once. )
Misconceptions
- The pilgrims did not build log cabins, nor did they wear black hats with a conical crown and a hatband with a silver buckle. (xP I remember this assembly about thanksgiving by Year… 4 if I’m not mistaken. Radzi – if I can recall correctly, was in it.)
Numbers and Statistics
- In their encyclopedia, Elements and Mathematics, a group of French mathematician working under the collective pseudonym of Nichols Bourbaki spent 200 pages just introducing matters relating to the number 1.
- The number of possible ways of playing just the first four moves on each side in a game of chess is 318, 979, 564,000. (Fuck, that’s a lot! O-o Besides, immature as I am in chess, I was one step away from beating Mr. Hughes, the chess teacher/ my Humanity teacher, head of the Humanity department. He wrote in my end of 2007 year report that I am the darling of the humanities department. xD)
- A prime number is any number that can be divided only by itself and 1. There are an infinite number of primes. Any one of those primes (except for 2 and 3) will become evenly divisible by 6 if you either subtract 1 from it or add 1 to it. For example, the number 17, if 1 is added to it, it is evenly divisible by 6; or the number 19, if 1 is subtracted from it, it is evenly divisible by 6. (I made myself a list of all the prime numbers from 1 to 100. The primes are yellow/orange in colour while the others are dark pink. 26, however, is blue. I thought it’d be nice if the number was different from other. One in a million…~)
- Take fifteen copies of Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts and number them “1” to “15.” If you tried to line them up in all possible arrangements, and if you made a change a minute, it would take you 2,487,996 years to do it.
- Before the computer was used in determining prime numbers, the largest known prime was 2 to the power of 127 – 1. To test suck a number on a standard calculator requires many months, and similar amounts of time are needed to check the result. In 1971, the American Mathematical Society received the highest known prime number, 2 to the power of 19937 – 1, a number of 6,002 digits. It was calculated on an IBM computer in 39 minutes, 26.4 seconds. (297th page, I’m so exhausted!!)
- There are fifty-two cards in an ordinary deck. The number of ways in which they can be arranged is just about 80,660,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000! If you had that many decks of cards, each arranged a different way, and if each deck weighed only as much as a single hydrogen atom(the lightest atom), all the decks together would weigh a billion times as much as the sun.
- In 1872, the English Mathematician William Shanks calculated the value of the mathematical expression pi to 707 places. It took him fifteen years to do so. In 1949, the first electronic computers calculated it to 2,035 places in three days – and found that Shanks had made a mistake in the last hundred or so figures in his calculation were wrong. (Damn!)
- The number 2520 can be divided by 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 and 6 and 7 and 8 and 9 and 10 (as well as 12, 14, 15, 18, 20, 21, 24…)without having a fractional leftover.
- The number 37, which cannot be wholly divided by any number (except by 1 and itself [which means it’s a prime?]), has the property that it will wholly divide the following numbers: 111, 222, 333, 444, 555, 666, 777, 888, 999. [111 divide by 37 is 3; 222 divide by 37 is 6…]
- The number 10 is used as a convenient base to count with, but the Gauls of ancient France, the Mays of Central America and other peoples used 20 as a base. The Sumerians, the Babylonians, and others after used a base of 60 – convenient because 60 can be evenly divided by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30. This 60 survives in the divisions of hours into minutes and minutes into seconds, and in the division of the circle into 360 degrees.
- One of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics is “Fermat’s last theorem,” named for the French mathematician Pierre Fermat (1106-65). He wrote that he had found that a certain equation, x to the power of n + y to the power of n = z to the power of n, had no solution in whole numbers, except where n = 2. Thus, 3 squared + 4 squared = 5 squared [One of the famous Pythagoras theorem question in our PMR examination, one of the important exams that I am going to take this October 13 – 17.] Fermat went on to say that he didn’t have the space in his notation for the simple proof. Mathematicians have been searching for the proof for three-centuries, in vain. Modern computers have shown that the equation has no solutions for all values of n up to 2,000, but this is not the general proof we are still looking for.
- 1234567654321 is the product of 11,111,111 multiplied by itself.
- During the next minute, 100 people will die and 240 will be born. The world’s population problem increases by 140 people per minute.
- In 1978, the Center for Population Research estimated that a million teenage girls in the U.S., or one in ten between the age of fifteen and nineteen, become pregnant each year. About 600,000 actually bear children.
Of Wives and Mistresses
- Peter the Great had his wife’s lover executed and his head put into a jar of alcohol. She had to keep it in her bedroom.
- When the Elector of Hanover became George I of England in 1714, his wife did not become Queen because she had committed adultery. He placed her under house arrest in Ahlden Castle, where she stayed of thirty-two years. Those who knew of her fate called her the “Prisoner of Ahlden,” and so she remains in history. Ironically, George had arrived in England with his two mistresses. Adultery was a crime only for wives. (So sexist man…)
- The Babylonians auctioned off marriageable girls every year. Men had to bid high for the most attractive girls, and their money provided dowries so that the ugly girls, for whom no one would bid, could find husbands. Herodotus considered this the wisest of Babylonian customs.
- “An utter stranger takes the liberty of addressing you,” began a note from Shelley’s sister in law, Claire Godwin, to George Bron, whom she had not met. “It may seem a strange assertion, but it is no less true that I place my happiness in your hands… I know that you have the reputation of being mad, bad and dangerous, but nevertheless you hold my destiny…” Byron yielded to the request for assignation. He met Miss Godwin, despised her, loved her – and shucked her.
- Though popularly thought to have been an Egyptian, a Macedonian, and the daughter of Ptolemy XI. She married two of her brothers and was the mistress of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. [Which bring back memories of this play… by Shakespeare if I can recall correctly, about Mark Antony and Cleopatra]
- The forth Mogul Emperor, Jahagir, who ruled from 1605 to 1627, had a harem of 300 royal wives, 5,000 more women, and 1,000 young men for alternate pleasures. [*coughs maniacally* o-o;;;] Outside the palace, he stabled other kinds of pets: 12,000 elephants, 10,000 oxen, 2,000 camels, 3,000 deer, 4,000 dogs, 100 tame lions, 500 buffalo, and 10,000 carrier pigeons. [NOW this is not a mini zoo, but a HUGE one. ._.;;]
- After his love affair of two years with Catherine with Great, Gregory Aleksandrovich Potemkin continued to be an important adviser to Catherine. He even helped to choose her subsequent lovers.
- The Thracians were a warrior of people who lived in what is today Bulgaria, from about 1300 to 500 B.C., when they were reduced to vassals by the Persians. They practiced polygamy. When a man died, his wives argued among themselves as to which one had been his favourite. The wife who finally decided upon as the favourite won the privilege of being killed and placed next to her husband in his tomb. [Just like I’d say, “Sehidup, semati” which if translated into English, meaning “Live together, die together.” xD But really, I’d RATHER not be the favourite one. .___.;]
- In ancient Greece, women counted their age from the date on which they were married, not from the day they were born, signifying that the wedding marked the start of a woman’s life. [Then I am unborn. xP But then again, what would divorce do? O-o Be the end of their life?]
On Books
- Clement Clarke Moore (1779- 1863) – a biblical scholar, professor of Oriental and Greek Literature, and compiler of a Greek and Hebrew lexicon – wrote the exquisitely simple and easily remembered “Visit from St. Nicholas”: “T’was the night before Christmas and all through the house…” [Ooh! I remember one of the journals I had to do like a few days before Christmas. Mr. Glenn wrote this as a starter and we had to continue it and make a story. =3 I love morning journals!]
- Pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, was computer-calculated to a million decimal places in 1973 by the French Mathematician and Martine Bouyer. The value was published as a 400- page book – very important, and yet surely one of the most boring books in the world. [Anyone would be crazy enough to read a 400-page book full of numbers. ~_~ I can read a 400-page book on even science fiction but NOT numbers.]
The Orient
- The astrologers in China, during Marco Polo’s visit (1271-95), would tell relatives how the dead person must be taken from the house to ward off bad luck. It wasn’t always through the door. The family sometimes would have to break through a wall.
- Because the Japanese word for “four” sounds exactly like the word “death” and because the word “nine” sounds exactly like the word “suffering,” there are no rooms numbered 4 or 9 in many hospitals and hotels in Japan. [What fun.]
- Louis Pasteur, whose work on wine, vinegar, and beer led to pasteurization, had an obsessive fear of dirt and infection. He refused to shake hands, and he carefully wiped plate and glass before dining. (I remember him... art class or something.)
- Albeit Einstein’s last words will never be known. He spoke them in German, and the attending nurse did not understand German. (Oh phooey!)
Literary Life
- After spending fruitless years looking for a story that would match his “strong sense of man’s double being,” Robert Louis Stevenson dreamt the plot of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Medicine
- David – (his last name has never been publicly revealed) has lived all his life in a sterile environment, He suffers the rare disease known as severe combined immune deficiency, and his body is unable to fight off even the most common germs. (By living in a germfree life-support system, which is enclosed in a see-through plastic bubble, he has never experienced a sick day, except for his disease, for which doctors say there is still no treatment.) On his seventh birthday, in 1978, he wasn’t able to blow out the candles on his cake – they weren’t allowed in the bubble, so he was only able to see them. About a hundred people are born with this blood disorder, and David is the oldest of five survivors. David lives with his family in Houston, and walks out of doors wearing an astronaut’s suit with a plastic-bubble helmet.
- Electrical stimulation of certain areas of the brain can revive long-lost memories.
- A study of the common cold, made b two epidemiologists at the University of Michigan, disclosed that the incidence of colds was greater among the better-educated. (Even if this is true, I only get fevers. Just my high temperature got me into medication – for weeks now. I haven’t recovered ever since I took two bottles of medicine once. )
Misconceptions
- The pilgrims did not build log cabins, nor did they wear black hats with a conical crown and a hatband with a silver buckle. (xP I remember this assembly about thanksgiving by Year… 4 if I’m not mistaken. Radzi – if I can recall correctly, was in it.)
Numbers and Statistics
- In their encyclopedia, Elements and Mathematics, a group of French mathematician working under the collective pseudonym of Nichols Bourbaki spent 200 pages just introducing matters relating to the number 1.
- The number of possible ways of playing just the first four moves on each side in a game of chess is 318, 979, 564,000. (Fuck, that’s a lot! O-o Besides, immature as I am in chess, I was one step away from beating Mr. Hughes, the chess teacher/ my Humanity teacher, head of the Humanity department. He wrote in my end of 2007 year report that I am the darling of the humanities department. xD)
- A prime number is any number that can be divided only by itself and 1. There are an infinite number of primes. Any one of those primes (except for 2 and 3) will become evenly divisible by 6 if you either subtract 1 from it or add 1 to it. For example, the number 17, if 1 is added to it, it is evenly divisible by 6; or the number 19, if 1 is subtracted from it, it is evenly divisible by 6. (I made myself a list of all the prime numbers from 1 to 100. The primes are yellow/orange in colour while the others are dark pink. 26, however, is blue. I thought it’d be nice if the number was different from other. One in a million…~)
- Take fifteen copies of Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts and number them “1” to “15.” If you tried to line them up in all possible arrangements, and if you made a change a minute, it would take you 2,487,996 years to do it.
- Before the computer was used in determining prime numbers, the largest known prime was 2 to the power of 127 – 1. To test suck a number on a standard calculator requires many months, and similar amounts of time are needed to check the result. In 1971, the American Mathematical Society received the highest known prime number, 2 to the power of 19937 – 1, a number of 6,002 digits. It was calculated on an IBM computer in 39 minutes, 26.4 seconds. (297th page, I’m so exhausted!!)
- There are fifty-two cards in an ordinary deck. The number of ways in which they can be arranged is just about 80,660,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000! If you had that many decks of cards, each arranged a different way, and if each deck weighed only as much as a single hydrogen atom(the lightest atom), all the decks together would weigh a billion times as much as the sun.
- In 1872, the English Mathematician William Shanks calculated the value of the mathematical expression pi to 707 places. It took him fifteen years to do so. In 1949, the first electronic computers calculated it to 2,035 places in three days – and found that Shanks had made a mistake in the last hundred or so figures in his calculation were wrong. (Damn!)
- The number 2520 can be divided by 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 and 6 and 7 and 8 and 9 and 10 (as well as 12, 14, 15, 18, 20, 21, 24…)without having a fractional leftover.
- The number 37, which cannot be wholly divided by any number (except by 1 and itself [which means it’s a prime?]), has the property that it will wholly divide the following numbers: 111, 222, 333, 444, 555, 666, 777, 888, 999. [111 divide by 37 is 3; 222 divide by 37 is 6…]
- The number 10 is used as a convenient base to count with, but the Gauls of ancient France, the Mays of Central America and other peoples used 20 as a base. The Sumerians, the Babylonians, and others after used a base of 60 – convenient because 60 can be evenly divided by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30. This 60 survives in the divisions of hours into minutes and minutes into seconds, and in the division of the circle into 360 degrees.
- One of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics is “Fermat’s last theorem,” named for the French mathematician Pierre Fermat (1106-65). He wrote that he had found that a certain equation, x to the power of n + y to the power of n = z to the power of n, had no solution in whole numbers, except where n = 2. Thus, 3 squared + 4 squared = 5 squared [One of the famous Pythagoras theorem question in our PMR examination, one of the important exams that I am going to take this October 13 – 17.] Fermat went on to say that he didn’t have the space in his notation for the simple proof. Mathematicians have been searching for the proof for three-centuries, in vain. Modern computers have shown that the equation has no solutions for all values of n up to 2,000, but this is not the general proof we are still looking for.
- 1234567654321 is the product of 11,111,111 multiplied by itself.
- During the next minute, 100 people will die and 240 will be born. The world’s population problem increases by 140 people per minute.
- In 1978, the Center for Population Research estimated that a million teenage girls in the U.S., or one in ten between the age of fifteen and nineteen, become pregnant each year. About 600,000 actually bear children.
Of Wives and Mistresses
- Peter the Great had his wife’s lover executed and his head put into a jar of alcohol. She had to keep it in her bedroom.
- When the Elector of Hanover became George I of England in 1714, his wife did not become Queen because she had committed adultery. He placed her under house arrest in Ahlden Castle, where she stayed of thirty-two years. Those who knew of her fate called her the “Prisoner of Ahlden,” and so she remains in history. Ironically, George had arrived in England with his two mistresses. Adultery was a crime only for wives. (So sexist man…)
- The Babylonians auctioned off marriageable girls every year. Men had to bid high for the most attractive girls, and their money provided dowries so that the ugly girls, for whom no one would bid, could find husbands. Herodotus considered this the wisest of Babylonian customs.
- “An utter stranger takes the liberty of addressing you,” began a note from Shelley’s sister in law, Claire Godwin, to George Bron, whom she had not met. “It may seem a strange assertion, but it is no less true that I place my happiness in your hands… I know that you have the reputation of being mad, bad and dangerous, but nevertheless you hold my destiny…” Byron yielded to the request for assignation. He met Miss Godwin, despised her, loved her – and shucked her.
- Though popularly thought to have been an Egyptian, a Macedonian, and the daughter of Ptolemy XI. She married two of her brothers and was the mistress of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. [Which bring back memories of this play… by Shakespeare if I can recall correctly, about Mark Antony and Cleopatra]
- The forth Mogul Emperor, Jahagir, who ruled from 1605 to 1627, had a harem of 300 royal wives, 5,000 more women, and 1,000 young men for alternate pleasures. [*coughs maniacally* o-o;;;] Outside the palace, he stabled other kinds of pets: 12,000 elephants, 10,000 oxen, 2,000 camels, 3,000 deer, 4,000 dogs, 100 tame lions, 500 buffalo, and 10,000 carrier pigeons. [NOW this is not a mini zoo, but a HUGE one. ._.;;]
- After his love affair of two years with Catherine with Great, Gregory Aleksandrovich Potemkin continued to be an important adviser to Catherine. He even helped to choose her subsequent lovers.
- The Thracians were a warrior of people who lived in what is today Bulgaria, from about 1300 to 500 B.C., when they were reduced to vassals by the Persians. They practiced polygamy. When a man died, his wives argued among themselves as to which one had been his favourite. The wife who finally decided upon as the favourite won the privilege of being killed and placed next to her husband in his tomb. [Just like I’d say, “Sehidup, semati” which if translated into English, meaning “Live together, die together.” xD But really, I’d RATHER not be the favourite one. .___.;]
- In ancient Greece, women counted their age from the date on which they were married, not from the day they were born, signifying that the wedding marked the start of a woman’s life. [Then I am unborn. xP But then again, what would divorce do? O-o Be the end of their life?]
On Books
- Clement Clarke Moore (1779- 1863) – a biblical scholar, professor of Oriental and Greek Literature, and compiler of a Greek and Hebrew lexicon – wrote the exquisitely simple and easily remembered “Visit from St. Nicholas”: “T’was the night before Christmas and all through the house…” [Ooh! I remember one of the journals I had to do like a few days before Christmas. Mr. Glenn wrote this as a starter and we had to continue it and make a story. =3 I love morning journals!]
- Pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, was computer-calculated to a million decimal places in 1973 by the French Mathematician and Martine Bouyer. The value was published as a 400- page book – very important, and yet surely one of the most boring books in the world. [Anyone would be crazy enough to read a 400-page book full of numbers. ~_~ I can read a 400-page book on even science fiction but NOT numbers.]
The Orient
- The astrologers in China, during Marco Polo’s visit (1271-95), would tell relatives how the dead person must be taken from the house to ward off bad luck. It wasn’t always through the door. The family sometimes would have to break through a wall.
- Because the Japanese word for “four” sounds exactly like the word “death” and because the word “nine” sounds exactly like the word “suffering,” there are no rooms numbered 4 or 9 in many hospitals and hotels in Japan. [What fun.]
Another
Children
- In 1852, police estimated that 10,000 abandoned, orphaned, and runaway children were roaming the streets of New York City.
- Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales were greeted by bad reviews: “… quite unsuitable for children… positively harmful for the mind…” (I AGREE!! =0)
- So that their children might acquire proper manners and learn proper French, French trappers and rivermen exploring North America set up a “little Paris” in St. Genevieve, Missousi, in the 1760s. At the school for social manners, it was hoped the children seeking good breeding would acquire at least “the two elements of true politeness – grace and self-denial.”
Cold facts
- A catastrophic temperature drop is not needed to get an ice age under way. The drop need only be enough to allow a little more snow to fall during a slightly colder winter then can be melted by a succeeding, cooler summer.
- An iceberg contains more heat than a match. The total heat energy of the iceberg (i.e., the total kinetic energy of all its molecules) is greater than the heat energy of the match. It’s the temperature of the match that is greater.
- It is not surprising that nice-tenths of an iceberg is under water. The surprising thing is that one-tenth of the iceberg is above water. Ice floats because water expands when it freezes – and there are very few other substances that expand when they freeze. Contraction on freezing is almost universal.
- Water freezes faster if it is cooled rapidly from a relatively war, temperature than if it is cooled at the same rate from a lower temperature.
Communications
- The Leyland liner Californian, bound in April 1912 from London to Boston, with room for forty seven passengers but carrying none at the time, was close enough to receive wireless messages from the foundering Titanic and to help in a rescue. But the Californian’s radio operator was not on duty. He had had no relief, and had to sleep sometime.
- It took five months to get word back to Queen Isabella about the voyage of Columbus, two weeks for Europe to hear about Lincoln’s assassination, and only 1.3 seconds to get the word from Neil Armstrong that man can walk on the moon.
- During the “blackout” of July 13-14, 1977, when electric power to New York City failed during the early evening and was not restored until the next afternoon, a record eighty million telephone calls were made. On an average business day, thirty six million calls are made in the city. (Amazing…)
Creepy Crawly
- The president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in New York, which specializes in cancer treatment, has observed that “ants are so much like being human beings as to be an embarrassment.” Writes Dr. Lewis Thomas: Ants “farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemicals sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves. The families of weaver ants engage in child labor, holding their larvae like shuttles to spin out the thread that sews the leaves together for their fungus gardens. They exchange information ceaselessly. The do everything but watch television.”
De Gustibus
- When we sit down to dinner each evening, our menu includes a great deal more water than the glassful we consume as a beverage. Many foods contain a surprising percentage of water by weight, e.g., cucumber, 96%; watermelon, 92%; apple, 84%; potato, 78%; steak, 74%; cheese, 40%; bread, 35%.
- When tea was first introduced in the American colonies, many housewives, in their ignorance, served the tea leaves with sugar or syrup after throwing away the water in which they had been boiled.
- Nearly 28,000 different ways to lose weight have been tried, according to U.S. data. The oldest is fasting, “the ultimate diet.”
Energy
- There’s enough energy in ten minutes of one hurricane to match the nuclear stockpiles of the world.
- A single lightning bolt may give off 3,750 million kilowatts of electrical energy. About 75% of this energy is dissipated as heat, raising the temperature of the surrounding air to around 27,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and causing rapid air expansion which leads to sound waves – thunder – that can be heard up to eighteen miles away.
- A lighting bolt generates temperatures five times hotter than the 6000 degrees Celsius found at the surface of the Sun.
Explorations
- Caption James Cook’s public orders in 1768 were to observe from Tahiti the transit of Venus. Once he reached Tahiti, though, he opened sealed instructions, which told him: “Whereas there is reason to imagine that a Continent or Land of great extent, may be found to… the Southward of the Track of any former Navigators… you are to proceed to the southward in order to make discovery of the Continent above mentioned.” He found it: Australia.
Fine Feathered Friends
- A little more than a century ago, there was an account of a flock of passenger pigeons in a column 500 yards wide that took three hours to pass over the observer: about a billion birds in all. Today, the passenger bird is extinct.
Finny Facts
- The oyster is usually bisexual. It begins life as a male, then becomes a female, then changes back to being a male, then back to being a female; it may go back and forth many times.
Fossils
- Tyrannosaurus rex was the largest carnivorous reptile of the dinosaur period. But it was not the largest of all dinosaurs; this distinction belonged to the herbivorous sauropods, of which the largest, Brachiosaurus, weighed as much as fifty tons. (My favourite dinosaur is infact, the Brachio.)
- Dinosaurs were mostly vegetarians, despite their enormous size and decidedly carnivorous appearance. One exception was the mammoth Tyrannosaurus rex, which apparently ate other dinosaurs. The food making up a single bite for a tyrannosaur, it was speculated, would feed a human family of four for an entire month.
- In 1852, police estimated that 10,000 abandoned, orphaned, and runaway children were roaming the streets of New York City.
- Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales were greeted by bad reviews: “… quite unsuitable for children… positively harmful for the mind…” (I AGREE!! =0)
- So that their children might acquire proper manners and learn proper French, French trappers and rivermen exploring North America set up a “little Paris” in St. Genevieve, Missousi, in the 1760s. At the school for social manners, it was hoped the children seeking good breeding would acquire at least “the two elements of true politeness – grace and self-denial.”
Cold facts
- A catastrophic temperature drop is not needed to get an ice age under way. The drop need only be enough to allow a little more snow to fall during a slightly colder winter then can be melted by a succeeding, cooler summer.
- An iceberg contains more heat than a match. The total heat energy of the iceberg (i.e., the total kinetic energy of all its molecules) is greater than the heat energy of the match. It’s the temperature of the match that is greater.
- It is not surprising that nice-tenths of an iceberg is under water. The surprising thing is that one-tenth of the iceberg is above water. Ice floats because water expands when it freezes – and there are very few other substances that expand when they freeze. Contraction on freezing is almost universal.
- Water freezes faster if it is cooled rapidly from a relatively war, temperature than if it is cooled at the same rate from a lower temperature.
Communications
- The Leyland liner Californian, bound in April 1912 from London to Boston, with room for forty seven passengers but carrying none at the time, was close enough to receive wireless messages from the foundering Titanic and to help in a rescue. But the Californian’s radio operator was not on duty. He had had no relief, and had to sleep sometime.
- It took five months to get word back to Queen Isabella about the voyage of Columbus, two weeks for Europe to hear about Lincoln’s assassination, and only 1.3 seconds to get the word from Neil Armstrong that man can walk on the moon.
- During the “blackout” of July 13-14, 1977, when electric power to New York City failed during the early evening and was not restored until the next afternoon, a record eighty million telephone calls were made. On an average business day, thirty six million calls are made in the city. (Amazing…)
Creepy Crawly
- The president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in New York, which specializes in cancer treatment, has observed that “ants are so much like being human beings as to be an embarrassment.” Writes Dr. Lewis Thomas: Ants “farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemicals sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves. The families of weaver ants engage in child labor, holding their larvae like shuttles to spin out the thread that sews the leaves together for their fungus gardens. They exchange information ceaselessly. The do everything but watch television.”
De Gustibus
- When we sit down to dinner each evening, our menu includes a great deal more water than the glassful we consume as a beverage. Many foods contain a surprising percentage of water by weight, e.g., cucumber, 96%; watermelon, 92%; apple, 84%; potato, 78%; steak, 74%; cheese, 40%; bread, 35%.
- When tea was first introduced in the American colonies, many housewives, in their ignorance, served the tea leaves with sugar or syrup after throwing away the water in which they had been boiled.
- Nearly 28,000 different ways to lose weight have been tried, according to U.S. data. The oldest is fasting, “the ultimate diet.”
Energy
- There’s enough energy in ten minutes of one hurricane to match the nuclear stockpiles of the world.
- A single lightning bolt may give off 3,750 million kilowatts of electrical energy. About 75% of this energy is dissipated as heat, raising the temperature of the surrounding air to around 27,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and causing rapid air expansion which leads to sound waves – thunder – that can be heard up to eighteen miles away.
- A lighting bolt generates temperatures five times hotter than the 6000 degrees Celsius found at the surface of the Sun.
Explorations
- Caption James Cook’s public orders in 1768 were to observe from Tahiti the transit of Venus. Once he reached Tahiti, though, he opened sealed instructions, which told him: “Whereas there is reason to imagine that a Continent or Land of great extent, may be found to… the Southward of the Track of any former Navigators… you are to proceed to the southward in order to make discovery of the Continent above mentioned.” He found it: Australia.
Fine Feathered Friends
- A little more than a century ago, there was an account of a flock of passenger pigeons in a column 500 yards wide that took three hours to pass over the observer: about a billion birds in all. Today, the passenger bird is extinct.
Finny Facts
- The oyster is usually bisexual. It begins life as a male, then becomes a female, then changes back to being a male, then back to being a female; it may go back and forth many times.
Fossils
- Tyrannosaurus rex was the largest carnivorous reptile of the dinosaur period. But it was not the largest of all dinosaurs; this distinction belonged to the herbivorous sauropods, of which the largest, Brachiosaurus, weighed as much as fifty tons. (My favourite dinosaur is infact, the Brachio.)
- Dinosaurs were mostly vegetarians, despite their enormous size and decidedly carnivorous appearance. One exception was the mammoth Tyrannosaurus rex, which apparently ate other dinosaurs. The food making up a single bite for a tyrannosaur, it was speculated, would feed a human family of four for an entire month.
Randomness ~
About queens
- A female pharaoh was unknown in Egypt before Hatshepsut, who began her reign in 1502 B.C. In order not to shock convention, she had herself portrayed in male costume, with a beard, and without breasts.
- When Elizabeth I of Russia died in 1762, 15,000 dresses were found in her closets. She used to change what she was wearing two and even three times in an evening.
- English was not the mother tongue of Queen Victoria. Her mother, the daughter of a German duke spoke German in the home, and Victoria - though she ruled England for sixty-four years – was never able to speak English fluently.
Ancient Peoples
- February originally had twenty nine days every year. In 8 B.C., the Roman Emperor Augustus renamed the thirty day month of Sextillis, giving it the name of August to honour himself. He took a day from February so that his month would have as many days as July, which had been named for Julius Caesar.
- The greatest soldier of ancient times, Alexander (356-323 B.C) was tutored by the greatest thinker, Aristotle.
- The best known story about Archimedes is that when he discovered the principle of buoyancy in the bathtub, he ran naked through the streets of Syracuse, shouting “Eureka! Eureka!” (“I have it! I have it!”) This was not a very astonishing thing for him to have done. The Greeks habitually exercised in the nude, and the sight of a naked male figure meant little to them.
- One of the Seven Wonders of the World, the elaborate Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, was destroyed in October 356 B.C. – A case of deliberate arson. When the culprit was caught and asked why he had done the deed, he replied he did it so that his name might live in history. The man was executed, and it was ordered that his name be erased from all records and never be spoken. But he did succeed after all; we know his name: Herodotus.
Animal World
- The vampire bat is not as vicious as its image. It does not puncture the skin of its victim’s neck, but instead, scrapes exposed patches of skin with its teeth until it draws blood. So gentle is the scraping that the sleeping prey does not wake up while the bat is at work.
- “The wolf at the door” was once a sad reality. Wolf packs could be found in all forest of Europe, and in 1420 and 1438 wolves roamed the streets of Paris. O-o
- It is the female lion who does more than 90 percent of the hunting while the male is afraid to risk his life, or simply prefers to rest.
- Despite man’s fear and hatred of the wolf, it has not been proved that a nonrabid wolf ever attacked a human, Fir years there has been a reward offered by the Sault Ste. Maris, Ontario, Star to anyone who could document an attack by a wolf. The reward has never been claimed.
- The ancestors of a horse were only about a foot tall 60 million years ago. o___o
Art
- A nearly fatal misjudgment marked Pablo Picasso’s birth. The midwife, thinking him stillborn, had abandoned him on a table; but his uncle, a cigar-smoking physician revived him with a blast of needed (albeit smoke-filled) air into his lungs.
- Artists consider the basic colours to be red, yellow and blue, but scientists say they are red, green, and blue. No pigment combination of red, green and blue will produce yellow. Yet, if a beam of red light and green light overlap, the result is yellow. The answer to this riddle lies primarily in the totally different ways colours are achieved with light and with pigments.
- In the grassy fields above the cliffs at Etretat, Claude Monet would work on five or six paintings at a time. As the weather changed, he would switch from one canvas to another. (I remember Miss Kasia’s art class, we were observing his drawings.)
- As though he didn’t have everything else going for him, Leonardo da Vinci was described by people who knew him as “the most beautiful man who ever lived.”
- Vincent van Gogh was known to have sold only one painting.
- Picasso, when he died in 1973, left in four repositories in the south of France the following: 1,876 paintings, 1,355 sculptured, 2,880 ceramics, more than 11,000 drawings and sketches, and some estate was worth – at the official appraisal – 1,251,673,200 French francs, or approximately $250 million. (WOW!)
- Students were given a month to complete the competitive art examination at the estimable Barcelona Academy of Fine Arts. Picasso, at the age of fifteen, completed the all the examination in one day and furthermore, won first place over all adult competition.
- In his early days, Picasso kept warm by burning some of his drawings.
Better to give
- Ernest Hemingway gave to the Shrine of the Virgin in eastern Cuba, where he lived, Nobel Prize money he had won for the novel The Old Man and the Sea. “You don’t,” he said, “ever have a thing until you give it away.”
Catastrophe
- So far in the twentieth century, two objects have struck the earth with enough force to destroy a whole city. Each object, one in 1908 and one in 1947, struck isolated regions of Siberia. Not one human being was hurt at the time. Pure luck.
- The first hydrogen bomb, tested in 1952, was as powerful as the total of all bombs dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II, including the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
- The sinking in 1912 of the Titanic with a loss of 1,513 lives is not, as most people seem to believe, the greatest sea disaster of all time. Far from it! It was dwarfed by the sinking thirty three years later of the German vessel Wilhelm Gustloff, torpedoed in the Baltic Sea by the Russian submarine S-13. Close to 8,000 people drowned, most of them women and children – more than five times the number of victims that went down with the Titanic.
- A female pharaoh was unknown in Egypt before Hatshepsut, who began her reign in 1502 B.C. In order not to shock convention, she had herself portrayed in male costume, with a beard, and without breasts.
- When Elizabeth I of Russia died in 1762, 15,000 dresses were found in her closets. She used to change what she was wearing two and even three times in an evening.
- English was not the mother tongue of Queen Victoria. Her mother, the daughter of a German duke spoke German in the home, and Victoria - though she ruled England for sixty-four years – was never able to speak English fluently.
Ancient Peoples
- February originally had twenty nine days every year. In 8 B.C., the Roman Emperor Augustus renamed the thirty day month of Sextillis, giving it the name of August to honour himself. He took a day from February so that his month would have as many days as July, which had been named for Julius Caesar.
- The greatest soldier of ancient times, Alexander (356-323 B.C) was tutored by the greatest thinker, Aristotle.
- The best known story about Archimedes is that when he discovered the principle of buoyancy in the bathtub, he ran naked through the streets of Syracuse, shouting “Eureka! Eureka!” (“I have it! I have it!”) This was not a very astonishing thing for him to have done. The Greeks habitually exercised in the nude, and the sight of a naked male figure meant little to them.
- One of the Seven Wonders of the World, the elaborate Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, was destroyed in October 356 B.C. – A case of deliberate arson. When the culprit was caught and asked why he had done the deed, he replied he did it so that his name might live in history. The man was executed, and it was ordered that his name be erased from all records and never be spoken. But he did succeed after all; we know his name: Herodotus.
Animal World
- The vampire bat is not as vicious as its image. It does not puncture the skin of its victim’s neck, but instead, scrapes exposed patches of skin with its teeth until it draws blood. So gentle is the scraping that the sleeping prey does not wake up while the bat is at work.
- “The wolf at the door” was once a sad reality. Wolf packs could be found in all forest of Europe, and in 1420 and 1438 wolves roamed the streets of Paris. O-o
- It is the female lion who does more than 90 percent of the hunting while the male is afraid to risk his life, or simply prefers to rest.
- Despite man’s fear and hatred of the wolf, it has not been proved that a nonrabid wolf ever attacked a human, Fir years there has been a reward offered by the Sault Ste. Maris, Ontario, Star to anyone who could document an attack by a wolf. The reward has never been claimed.
- The ancestors of a horse were only about a foot tall 60 million years ago. o___o
Art
- A nearly fatal misjudgment marked Pablo Picasso’s birth. The midwife, thinking him stillborn, had abandoned him on a table; but his uncle, a cigar-smoking physician revived him with a blast of needed (albeit smoke-filled) air into his lungs.
- Artists consider the basic colours to be red, yellow and blue, but scientists say they are red, green, and blue. No pigment combination of red, green and blue will produce yellow. Yet, if a beam of red light and green light overlap, the result is yellow. The answer to this riddle lies primarily in the totally different ways colours are achieved with light and with pigments.
- In the grassy fields above the cliffs at Etretat, Claude Monet would work on five or six paintings at a time. As the weather changed, he would switch from one canvas to another. (I remember Miss Kasia’s art class, we were observing his drawings.)
- As though he didn’t have everything else going for him, Leonardo da Vinci was described by people who knew him as “the most beautiful man who ever lived.”
- Vincent van Gogh was known to have sold only one painting.
- Picasso, when he died in 1973, left in four repositories in the south of France the following: 1,876 paintings, 1,355 sculptured, 2,880 ceramics, more than 11,000 drawings and sketches, and some estate was worth – at the official appraisal – 1,251,673,200 French francs, or approximately $250 million. (WOW!)
- Students were given a month to complete the competitive art examination at the estimable Barcelona Academy of Fine Arts. Picasso, at the age of fifteen, completed the all the examination in one day and furthermore, won first place over all adult competition.
- In his early days, Picasso kept warm by burning some of his drawings.
Better to give
- Ernest Hemingway gave to the Shrine of the Virgin in eastern Cuba, where he lived, Nobel Prize money he had won for the novel The Old Man and the Sea. “You don’t,” he said, “ever have a thing until you give it away.”
Catastrophe
- So far in the twentieth century, two objects have struck the earth with enough force to destroy a whole city. Each object, one in 1908 and one in 1947, struck isolated regions of Siberia. Not one human being was hurt at the time. Pure luck.
- The first hydrogen bomb, tested in 1952, was as powerful as the total of all bombs dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II, including the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
- The sinking in 1912 of the Titanic with a loss of 1,513 lives is not, as most people seem to believe, the greatest sea disaster of all time. Far from it! It was dwarfed by the sinking thirty three years later of the German vessel Wilhelm Gustloff, torpedoed in the Baltic Sea by the Russian submarine S-13. Close to 8,000 people drowned, most of them women and children – more than five times the number of victims that went down with the Titanic.
Friday, September 5, 2008
Fall for you - Secondhand Serenade
The best thing about tonight's that we're not fighting
Could it be that we have been this way before
I know you don't think that I am trying
I know you're wearing thin down to the core
But hold your breathe
Because tonight will be the night that I will fall for you
Over again
Don't make me change my mind
Or I wont live to see another day
I swear it's true
Because a girl like you is impossible to find
Your impossible to find
This is not what I intended
I always swore to you i'd never fall apart
You always thought that I was stronger
I may of failed
But I have loved you from the start
Ohhhh
But hold your breathe
Because tonight will be the night that I will fall for you
Over again
Don't make me change my mind
Or I wont live to see another day
I swear it's true
Because a girl like you is impossible to find
It's impossible
So breathe in so deep
Breathe me in
I'm yours to keep
And hold onto your words
Cuz talk is cheap
And remember me tonight
When your asleep
Because tonight will be the night that I will fall for you
Over again
Don't make me change my mind
Or I wont live to see another day
I swear it's true
Because a girl like you is impossible to find
Tonight will be the night that I will fall for you
Over again
Don't make me change my mind
Or I wont live to see another day
I swear it's true
Because a girl like you is impossible to find
Your impossible to find
Hmm, this song is just beautiful Ira.. wake up soon, I'd give up everything..
Could it be that we have been this way before
I know you don't think that I am trying
I know you're wearing thin down to the core
But hold your breathe
Because tonight will be the night that I will fall for you
Over again
Don't make me change my mind
Or I wont live to see another day
I swear it's true
Because a girl like you is impossible to find
Your impossible to find
This is not what I intended
I always swore to you i'd never fall apart
You always thought that I was stronger
I may of failed
But I have loved you from the start
Ohhhh
But hold your breathe
Because tonight will be the night that I will fall for you
Over again
Don't make me change my mind
Or I wont live to see another day
I swear it's true
Because a girl like you is impossible to find
It's impossible
So breathe in so deep
Breathe me in
I'm yours to keep
And hold onto your words
Cuz talk is cheap
And remember me tonight
When your asleep
Because tonight will be the night that I will fall for you
Over again
Don't make me change my mind
Or I wont live to see another day
I swear it's true
Because a girl like you is impossible to find
Tonight will be the night that I will fall for you
Over again
Don't make me change my mind
Or I wont live to see another day
I swear it's true
Because a girl like you is impossible to find
Your impossible to find
Hmm, this song is just beautiful Ira.. wake up soon, I'd give up everything..
Facts and Trivia, this is awesome I tell ya
Upon the request of my ..beloved cousin, I will report all my doings for today, 3rd September/ Ramadhan. ^-^v
Well first off, morning started off.. just okay. No wait.. heh, just leave it there. .-.;
I onl got 50 bucks, not even enough to pay for my tuition fees =0 but what the heck, I'll get some more tomorrow morn. Hopefully. ~__~ Hmm.. and yeah, Akmar will pay back the 40 buck she took from me. ._____.; THAT also, in hope.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. On Thursday, Mrs (? xD) Sharifah (or Syarifah or watever .-.;) wanted to see me. She, respectively, the teacher on duty and the editor of the school's upcoming 'Mercu', what I call the school magazine.. It was about my essay. Which one? Well, for some odd reason, for our holiday essay, I wrote about Paris. And you also know Doll-chan, Ira, that I only spent like a day there and of course, absent-minded as I am, I couldnt remember a thing. (With an exception of the fact that the queue was long and I was at a high altitude; do the math.) And guess what? I forgot that I once wanted to study there; Paris that is. .__.; Stupid yes, I do, infact dream big. But heck, I wanted to study arts. But now, my ..destination-to-be is to reach Canada.
It's even in my wallet; dont ask. xD
Anyways, yeah, she edited my essay. Effectively enough, I'm satistfied with it. The change that is.
"Mira!"
.. long silence.
"Mira.."
I just continued walking.
"Amira..?"
I thought I heard something.
"Amirah..!"
I blinked.
"Nur Amirah binti Abdul Razak!"
I turned around and faced him.
"WHAT?!" I said coldly.
"You didnt answer me.." he shrugged.
"I thought I was hearing things, honest." .-.;
"Yeah well, just wanted to say, the library opens till 5 today." He winked.
I blushed slightly and turned around to go to the assembly hall. I waved and he nodded.
..See how names have an inpact on how I respond to people?? .-.;;;
I didnt hear him until he said Amira. My brain totally ignored 'Mira', upon my 'own' request. This happened on Thursday morning, and his nick is Kev. xP Aka, the famous school librarian who guarded my fav book for a whole week! How nice is that! o-o
Hmm, oh yeah, I tripped on a rock, stared in disbelief. The motor cyclist almost crashed into me; the car behind too. xD What a day Friday was!
Well, I'm like super tired and exhausted now, gotta go in a few anyways.
Well first off, morning started off.. just okay. No wait.. heh, just leave it there. .-.;
I onl got 50 bucks, not even enough to pay for my tuition fees =0 but what the heck, I'll get some more tomorrow morn. Hopefully. ~__~ Hmm.. and yeah, Akmar will pay back the 40 buck she took from me. ._____.; THAT also, in hope.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. On Thursday, Mrs (? xD) Sharifah (or Syarifah or watever .-.;) wanted to see me. She, respectively, the teacher on duty and the editor of the school's upcoming 'Mercu', what I call the school magazine.. It was about my essay. Which one? Well, for some odd reason, for our holiday essay, I wrote about Paris. And you also know Doll-chan, Ira, that I only spent like a day there and of course, absent-minded as I am, I couldnt remember a thing. (With an exception of the fact that the queue was long and I was at a high altitude; do the math.) And guess what? I forgot that I once wanted to study there; Paris that is. .__.; Stupid yes, I do, infact dream big. But heck, I wanted to study arts. But now, my ..destination-to-be is to reach Canada.
It's even in my wallet; dont ask. xD
Anyways, yeah, she edited my essay. Effectively enough, I'm satistfied with it. The change that is.
"Mira!"
.. long silence.
"Mira.."
I just continued walking.
"Amira..?"
I thought I heard something.
"Amirah..!"
I blinked.
"Nur Amirah binti Abdul Razak!"
I turned around and faced him.
"WHAT?!" I said coldly.
"You didnt answer me.." he shrugged.
"I thought I was hearing things, honest." .-.;
"Yeah well, just wanted to say, the library opens till 5 today." He winked.
I blushed slightly and turned around to go to the assembly hall. I waved and he nodded.
..See how names have an inpact on how I respond to people?? .-.;;;
I didnt hear him until he said Amira. My brain totally ignored 'Mira', upon my 'own' request. This happened on Thursday morning, and his nick is Kev. xP Aka, the famous school librarian who guarded my fav book for a whole week! How nice is that! o-o
Hmm, oh yeah, I tripped on a rock, stared in disbelief. The motor cyclist almost crashed into me; the car behind too. xD What a day Friday was!
Well, I'm like super tired and exhausted now, gotta go in a few anyways.
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