March 2011
1 post
1 tag
800
Roughly the speed of a jetliner, in kilometers per hour, at which a tsunami traveled and swept away homes, farms and other property in North-east Japan, destroying everything in its path. Should anyone have seen the tsunami coming in plain sight and attempted an escape, the tsunami would still have caught up and killed him. The tsunami was triggered by an 8.9 magnitude earthquake, the...
May 2009
1 post
1 tag
15
Number of popes named Benedict. Joseph Ratzinger (pictured) chose his pontifical name in honor of Pope Benedict XV, who reigned during the First World War. In the long colorful history of the papacy, Benedict XVI is considered only the 15th official pope to anoint himself Benedict. There are such things as ‘antipopes’, or popes who claim to be popes but lacked recognition from the...
October 2008
1 post
1 tag
1 and 2
Count every child in the world by one’s and two’s. Every second child is poor. 33% of children in the developing world are homeless. 25% have no access to safe drinking water. 15% have no access to health services.
121 million kids worldwide don’t go to school because their families cannot afford it and their governments aren’t building enough schools. 1.4 million...
August 2008
14 posts
1 tag
1986
The year the International Olympic Committee (IOC) allowed professional sports federations to permit their athletes to compete in Olympic games. In 1988, professionals in tennis, soccer, and equestrian sports were permitted to compete in the 1988 games in Los Angeles. 1988 also marked the year when the International Basketball Federation (IBF) allowed professional basketball players to join...
1 tag
525,600
Number of minutes in a regular year, as proclaimed in a song of the Broadway hit “Rent”. But there are actually 525,949.2 minutes or 365.2425 days in a Gregorian year. The excess minutes about equal one day after every 4 years, hence the leap year.
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4
Daily wage, in US dollars, of Ghazala Khamis’s husband, now the father of a total of 10 children after Ghazala gave birth to a healthy set of septuplets last August 17, 2008. The family hails from Egypt.
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2
Number of times registered mobile phone users in Montenegro outnumber the country’s population.
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9
Number of Olympic gold medals Michael Phelps has won, matching the all-time record gold medal hauls of swimmer Mark Spitz and track star Carl Lewis. Phelps hopes to beat that record by winning his next race at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 200m Butterfly. Should Phelps win all his 8 races, he shall have set another record for most gold medals won in a single Olympics.
1 tag
50%
Percentage of South Ossetia, Georgia’s 70,000 residents holding Russian passports. Russia justified its attacks on Georgian territory “to protect its citizens”, but the whole world including the USA had condemned their “disproportionate” military actions. {link}
1 tag
1,300,000
Estimated value, in US dollars, of the Menlo Park, CA property where Larry Page and Sergey Brin originally built their company, Google Inc., at the time it was eventually sold to them in September 8, 2006. Back in 1998, Page and Brin paid $1,700 a month to use the garage of an acquaintance named Susan Wojcicki, who needed extra cash to pay her mortgage. Wojcicki is now Google’s Vice...
1 tag
302
Number of gold medals to be won at the 2008 Summer Olympics taking place in Beijing, China. The first gold was won by Czech shooter Katerina Emmons. {source}
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1,000
Number of years, says Mars Society’s Robert Zubrin, it would take to terraform Mars into a habitable planet. Zubrin lays out his six-step plan here.
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21%
Percentage of all oil imports that the United States gets from the Middle East. Americans need not look very far to know where most of their oil comes from — Canada, which accounted for 26% of their oil purchases.
1 tag
14,000,000
Amount, in US dollars, that People Magazine and Hello Magazine paid Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt to gain rights to publish photos of their newborn twin babies Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline. {link}
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72
Number of hours a 30 year-old Chinese man spent playing video games nonstop before collapsing and eventually die from overexhaustion. {link}
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33
Number of days to register property in Davao City, Philippines, according to a World Bank report. Similarly, the report revealed that it took an average of 47 days for entrepreneurs to start their businesses in the city. {link}
1 tag
100,000,000,000
Denomination of Zimbabwe’s newly circulated currency, roughly equivalent to one US dollar. Zimbabwe’s annual inflation is the highest in the world, at 2,200,000%, forcing the government to issue billion dollar bank notes that are worth next to nothing.