How much is inside ____________?

'Discovered' this gem of a website quite some time ago and it's really cool. check this out:

Aluminum Foil

How much aluminum foil is in a roll? Well, 200 square feet, it says so right on the box. But what if you are trying to wrap a large amount of food? How many rolls should you buy? We were not sure, so on Saturday, we cracked open a new roll, and tried to cover my entire car.
We couldn't exploit foil's unique wrap-around adhesion properties, so we were forced to use tape to get started on the hood. Everyone helped, Marc, Kara, Chuck, Mike, James and Ambur.Actually, Kara didn't help at all, she just stood around, and Leif asserts that he WOULD have helped, but that he had to go to work.

We carefully covered the top and sides of the car, followed by the bumpers and wheels. Mark paid special attention to the antenna and wiper-blades. It took a long time, with everyone pulling aluminum off of the same roll. This episode of "How Much is Inside" took place outside in the open, exposing my delicate research to public scrutiny. I took the opportunity to promote cockeyed.com. I may need to develop some promotional materials if this exposure continues.
Suddenly it became obvious why the Delorean sports car was such a sensation: The car looked awesome! I busied myself with stretching the end of the aluminum while my co-horts devised plans to get the car up to 88 miles per hour at the precise moment we applied the 300 Gigawatts of power to the flux capacitor. We had just enough aluminum to cover the body of the car, and 3 of the tires. About 5 square feet short of covering the last wheel, we were out of foil. We didn't have any foil left to build the rear mounted "anti-spoiler". We should have tried a smaller car. A nice '74 bug perhaps would have been nicely covered in foil, safe from bird droppings and freezer burn.
Anyway, we came pretty close, and you now know how much is inside. I am going to leave the car wrapped for one year, filled with rare foodstuffs and survival equipment for the millenium crisis. I will use this car to travel the barren irradiated plains in search of the precious juice, fighting roving bands of brigands with my crossbow. I'll be OK...as long as my camera works.

Epilogue

Ah, Crap!

There's more of these where this article came from! Click here! hah. I wanna do crazy stuff like them too! So fun! Any ideas anyone? =)

The origin of the Qwerty Keyboard

How the QWERTY keyboard came about:

Did you ever feel that the QWERTY keyboard was just absolutely awkward, inefficient and time-consuming to use? Afterall, why place the keys on the keyboard the way it is today? It's not as if the most commonly used letters are placed together...

If you have no idea what I'm talking abt, look down at your keyboard right now... notice that the first few alphabets on the keyboard says QWERTY? Yap. You are looking at the QWERTY keyboard.

So who's the guy behind the QWERTY keyboard?

Sholes, a U.S mechanical engineer, invented the first practical modern typewriter, patented in 1868.

However, there was a problem with the typewriter as it jams up easily (think of the ancient four tiered typewriter whose keys tend to fly up and stick together)

To reduce the possibility of it jamming up, James Densmore,a Business associate, suggested splitting up keys for letters commonly used together to slow down typing.

The salemen for the typewriter then decided to use the QWERTY system because if you look carefully, notice that you can type the word 'typewriter' without ur fingers ever leaving the top row? Heh. Legend has it that the salemen arranged the words this way to impress the buyers on how they can type the word 'typewriter' without ever needing to lift their fingers off the first row. (cue: woah~ so smart~~)

As the typewriter slowly evolved to the keyboard, the QWERTY system held its place and is now the most well used system.

This is despite the fact that there is a better system called the Dvorak keyboard. What's so good abt the Dvorak keyboard?

With the Dvorak keyboard, a typist can type about 400 of the English language's most common words without ever leaving the home row (middle row). The comparable figure on QWERTY is 100. The home row letters on Dvorak do a total of 70% of the work. On QWERTY they do only 32%.

you: WOAH~ If it is that good then why dun we all switch to the Dvorak system??

Well, cos it is just too troublesome to relearn a new keyboard. and besides if you are already a very good typist, the keyboard layout wouldnt do much difference... You'll probably be faster, but the time needed to relearn the keyboard and master the keyboard is probably not worth it. =p

Aiyah. it just means we are all lazy bums that's y we din change the keyboard layout lar. =p

p.s. this is a mere reproduction of my older post of trivia on the other blog. Anyway, realised that there's very few comments. sob sob. hehe. tell me whether u all found the trivias useful/silly/entertaining or wat lar. or suggest some new topics lar. =p

btw, most information is taken from my previous module: Simplicity as well as several websites off google cos i dun remember the dates and figures.

Currently on who's who: Who is Dubya!

Before I continue...

Raise your hands those who knows who Dubya refers to!

Hah. Not too many. Let me enlighten you pple.

What: Dubya
Pronounciation: 'duhb-yah'
Function: Noun
Etymology: Old Texan variation of the English letter 'W'
Refers to: A certain US president

Can anyone make a guess now?

*drumrolls*

Yesh. it is none other than George W. Bush!

Actually Dubya is a rather common nickname given to Bush by his supporters and non-supporters alike. And it is so given because Texans tend to pronounce the letter 'W' as, you-guess-it, "dubya". However, the nickname usually has a slightly derogatory connotation to it as it makes fun of his not-so-perfect English.

Here's some of the Dubya websites for ur surfing delights!

Dubya speak

Dubya Comics

Dubya News

Let's talk about *private* matters!

Have you ever wondered why *certain* parts of ur body has curly curly hair despite ur own head of hair being straight?

Yes... I'm toking abt *ahem* pubic hair.

Hey, it's perfectly normal to be curious you know. =p Besides, the inspiration for this particular post is from a family-oriented tv show on channel 8 in SG. Heh.

So, why is pubic hair curly???

Let's talk about hair.

Hair is made of a protein called keratin, the stuff of horse hooves, antlers and fingernails. There are two types of hair: vellus, which is our fine body hair; and terminal, which is the coarser hair on our scalps, eyebrows, pubic areas, and men's faces, chests and limbs.

Terminal hairs grow faster than vellus hairs. Terminal hairs are sometimes curly because they can sprout from an oval-shaped follicle, rather than a round one.

Hair type and shape is determined by the shape of the follicle - the flatter the follicle, the curlier the hair. During adolescence, the androgens (male sex hormones) floating around your body instruct all the follicles in your pubic area to grow flat, thus becoming curly-hair follicles.

The follicles on your head aren’t usually sensitive to androgens, so curly head-hair is the result of genetic predisposition.

Enlightenment!

Da Ultimate Survivor

Today's trivia will be on the world's best survivor. An evolutionary champion.

Da amazing.

Da gross.

Da one whose charms attracts everything from worn-out slippers to rolled up newspapers.

Gather ur slippers and newspapers pple as we 'welcome' today's guest.

......

Da Cockroach!


What's so special about da gross creepy crawlie cockroach? Well, we already know that it has really amazing survivor skills that could actually allow it to survive extreme temperatures and nuclear warfare.

BUT

Did you know that it's so gd at surviving that even if you chop off its head in frustration, it can still live?

A cockroach could live for a long time, perhaps a month without its head.

You might ask how's that possible? Nobody should be able to survive without a head! Right?

Well, the only reason we need our head for basic survival is:

(1) We breath through our mouth or nose and the breathing rhythm is controlled in our brain. Cutting off our head would interfere with breathing although that could be maintained with a respirator.

(2) Cutting off our head could lead to blood loss and a drop in blood pressure which would result in death due to lack of blood transport of oxygen and nutrition to our tissues.

(3) Cutting off our head would prevent us from eating and we would die of starvation pretty quickly.

All of these reasons for dying are not present in cockroaches and many insects in general:

(1) Cockroaches breath through spiracles which are in each body segment and the blood does not carry oxygen to the tissues. The spiracles deliver air to each cell of the body through a set of tubes called tracheae. The brain does not control the breathing through the spiracles.

(2) The cockroach does not have blood pressure the way a mammal does and so cutting off the head does not lead to uncontrolled bleeding.

(3) The cockroach is a poikilotherm or cold blooded animal. They need much less food and a one day meal would be enough to last them a whole month as long as they were not extremely active. Without a head the cockroach would just sit around without doing anything much.

All this along with a cool temperature could allow the cockroach to last about a month without need for their head, as long as they did not get infected with a mold, bacterium or virus, which could kill them prematurely.

[ref]

OMG. So they wun even die after we cut off their heads?!

Then HOW CAN WE KILL THOSE PESKY LITTLE CREEPY CRAWLIES?

Tough luck folks. These things have been around since the age of the dinos. Smack all you want, spray all you can, there will still be more of those around. However, if you really wanna try, here's a lethal suggestion from Straight Dope!

The Origin Of Trivia!

Having noticed how much I love sharing my stash of useless information, I have decided to start a new blog specially dedicated to 'educating' the masses! So nice rite? hehehe.

For the first post, I thought it would be really meaningful to reveal to all the origin of trivia!

Everyone uses the word 'trivia' but who really knows how it came about?

Curious?

Read on!

The word trivia is actually a back formation from trivial, a word which English borrowed from Latin in the early 15th century, but which didn't take on its current meaning until the late 16th century.

English took it from trivialis the possessive form of the Latin trivium "crossroad" (literally "three roads"). It has often been suggested that, the meeting place of three roads being equivalent to today's street corner, common folk would pass by having common (hence trivial) conversations.

The sense of "commonplace" evolved into "trifling" or "unimportant", and that is where today's sense of the word comes from. The noun trivia arose at the end of the 19th century. Although the "crossroad" theory has had wide currency it may not be the truth.

The earliest English use of trivial (1432) says nothing about crossroads or gossip. It is the adjectival form of an entirely different trivium... Now, the Greek word for "four" is tetra, so the claim about the meeting place of three roads was a little wide of the mark.

There was, however, something in Medieval English known as the quadrivium, a term taken from Latin and referring to the upper four liberal arts: Arithmetic, Astronomy, Geometry, and Music. The lower three were the trivium: Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. These were the "three ways" of knowledge.

By the way, the Indo-European root from which the tri- part of these words come is *trei- "three", which gave most Indo-European languages words related to "three". The -via portion is descended from the root *wegh- "to go, transport in a vehicle" the subject of last week's Spotlight.

Woo hoo. So now you know!

Today's trivia has been brought possible by: Take Our Word For It