Strange But True: Einstein Gravity
By Lucie Winborne
On July 4, 1776, King George III wrote in his diary entry, "Nothing important happened today."
A 5-month-old fetus has 200,000,000,000 brain cells, but by birth half of them have been lost.
Superstitious folks understandably took note in Santa Clara, California, on Oct. 22, 1931, when the Gamma Eta Gamma legal fraternity was partially destroyed by fire: The house was located at 1313 Franklin Street, its phone number was Santa Clara 13, and the postman wore badge number 13! The damage sustained to the house was even estimated at $13,000.
An AK-47 is depicted on the flag of Mozambique.
Einstein's ideas on relative acceleration were partly inspired by a guy who fell off a roof in Berlin. Surviving without injury, he told the physicist that he had not felt the effects of gravity.
Until the 17th century, the word "upset" meant to set up (i.e., erect) something.
The oldest recorded death sentence is found in the Amherst papyri, a list of state trials of ancient Egypt dating to 1,500 B.C. A teenage boy, convicted of "magic," was ordered to kill himself by either poison or stabbing.
Apart from humans, the Asian elephant is the only mammal that can stand on its head.
In 2002, the Nevada state legislature authorized a license plate depicting a mushroom cloud from an exploding nuclear bomb to commemorate nuclear weapons tests conducted in the state's desert between 1945 and 1992. The Department of Motor Vehicles, however, rejected it.
Soviet craftsman Nikolai Syadristy carved a set of chess figures that were so small they could only be distinguished when magnified 2,000 times with a microscope.
Thought for the Day: "In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or step back into safety." -- Abraham Maslow
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