• Debra Winger was the voice of E.T.
• Pearls melt in vinegar.
• It takes 3,000 cows to supply the NFL with enough leather for a year's supply of footballs.
• Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.
• The 3 most valuable brand names on earth: Marlboro, Coca-Cola, and Budweiser, in that order.
• It's possible to lead a cow upstairs...but not downstairs.
• Humans are the only primates that don't have pigment in the palms of their hands.
• Ten percent of the Russian government's income comes from the sale of vodka.
• The sentence, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." uses every letter in the alphabet. (Developed by Western Union to Test telex/two communications)
• Average life span of a major league baseball: 7 pitches.
• A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why.
• The reason firehouses have circular stairways is from the days of yore when the engines were pulled by horses. The horses were stabled on the ground floor and figured out how to walk up straight staircases.
• The airplane Buddy Holly died in was the "American Pie." (Thus the name of the Don McLean song.)
• Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history. Spades-King David; Clubs-Alexander the Great; Hearts-Charlemagne; and Diamonds-Julius Caesar.
• 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
• Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them used to burn their houses down - hence the expression, "to get fired."
• Hershey's Kisses are called that because the machine that makes them looks like it's kissing the conveyor belt.
• The name Jeep came from the abbreviation used in the army for the "General Purpose" vehicle, G.P.
• The highest point in Pennsylvania is lower than the lowest point in Colorado.
• The only two days of the year in which there are no professional sports games (MLB, NBA,NHL, or NFL), are the day before and the day after the Major League All-Star Game.
• Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.
• The mask used by Michael Myers in the original "Halloween" was actually a Captain Kirk mask painted white.
• If you put a raisin in a glass of champagne, it will keep floating to the top and sinking to the bottom.
• Snails can sleep for 3 years without eating.
• Actor Tommy Lee Jones and vice-president Al Gore were freshman roommates at Harvard.
• The fingerprints of Koala bears are virtually indistinguishable from those of humans, so much so that they could be confused at a crime scene.
• All of the clocks in the movie "Pulp Fiction" are stuck on 4:20.
• James Doohan, who plays Lt. Commander Montgomery Scott on Star Trek, is missing the entire middle finger of his right hand.
• The Eisenhower interstate system requires that one mile in every five must be straight. These straight sections are usable as airstrips in times of war or other emergencies.
• There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.
• Months that begin on a Sunday will always have a "Friday the 13th."

1. A zebra is white with black stripes.

2. All the planets in our solar system rotate anticlockwise, except Venus. It is the only planet that rotates clockwise.

3. Hummingbirds are the only animal that can also fly backwards.

4. Insects do not make noises with their voices. The noise of bees, mosquitoes and other buzzing insects is caused by rapidly moving their wings.

5. The cockroach is the fastest animal on 6 legs covering a meter a second.

6. The word "listen" contains the same letters as the word "silent".

7. The only 2 animals that can see behind itself without turning it's head are the rabbit and the parrot.

8. A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.

9. India invented the Number System. Zero was invented by Aryabhatta.

10. The whip makes a cracking sound because its tip moves faster than the speed of sound.

11. A hippopotamus can run faster than a man.

12. India never invaded any country in her last 10000 years of history.

13. 'Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia' is the fear of long words.

14. Didaskaleinophobia is the fear of going to school.

15. A snail can sleep for 3 years.

16. The names of the continents all end with the same letter with which they start.

17. In 1883 the explosion of the volcano Krakatau put so much dust into the earth's atmosphere that sunsets appeared green and the moon appeared blue around the world for almost two years.

18. "Almost" is the longest word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order.

19. Twenty-Four-Karat Gold is not pure gold since there is a small amount of copper in it. Absolutely pure gold is so soft that it can be molded with the hands.

20. Electricity doesn't move through a wire but through a field around the wire.

Tea, a beverage that is consumed in almost every culture and is enjoyed by millions. Whether you brew it naturally hot or cold, many benefits can be obtained by drinking several cups a day. Almost everyone at some point has had a cup of tea.

Below are ten interesting facts about tea providing folks a helpful insight and fun read about the beverage enjoyed by many. Make your favorite cup and enjoy!

1) Tea is the second most consumed beverage in the world! It is only beaten by water. Out of all the sports drinks, sodas, and even coffee, tea still holds (and probably will always hold) second place!

2) All tea, white, green, oolong (aka. wu long or brown tea), and black tea come from the same plant. Camellia sinensis is the mother of tea and gives us the leaves that can become those four main types. It is the processing the leaves go through that determines their classification or "color".

3) Tea is grown in many countries, but it is India that produces most of the world's exported tea! China produces the second, mostly green and white teas, and Sri Lanka comes in third for total world production. Japan produces a lot of green tea as well, but only around two percent is exported since Japan is a huge green tea drinking nation.

4) Even though there are only four main types of tea, literally thousands of varieties can be made from each! Many factors such as culture, climate, growing conditions, processing, and even time of day of harvesting all make that possible.

5) Tea is not graded by taste or color, but by leaf size and texture. There are eight main grading categories, with "Finest Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe" (FTGFOP) as one of the highest to "Pekoe" (P) which is the lowest loose leaf grading. The common term "Orange Pekoe" is believed by many folks as being a variety of tea when in fact is just a grading of tea. The "orange" in orange pekoe has nothing to do with oranges or extracts from them either.

6) In America, over 90 percent of folks brew their tea by tea bag. The majority of the tea is black tea; green and white teas have only started to become popular, but continue to increase in sales every year.

7) There are many health benefits that can be obtained from drinking tea daily. Common benefits are help with certain tumor and cancer prevention, lowered cholesterol, and a healthier heart. But did you know that the properties in tea can also help your skin look younger by destroying free radicals which cause dark spots and wrinkles? Tea has shown to even fight cavities!

8) Black tea is the most common, most exported, and most consumed type of tea in the world, while white tea is the least. Black tea is also the most oxidized of all types, while white tea is the least.

9) Tea contains less caffeine than coffee. A cup of black tea has half the amount of caffeine compared to a cup of coffee, and green tea has less than half the amount of caffeine compared to a cup of black tea.

10) The most important yet basic of tea facts is that brewing tea loose leaf style over tea bags is the best way to obtain true tea flavor and benefits! There are also many more varieties of loose leaf tea which can provide folks a lifetime of drinking enjoyment.

Learn More Interesting Facts About Tea

David Carloni is the creator and webmaster of The Color Of Tea.com

Unless you are staying in an underground cave for more than a year without an internet connection, there's a healthy chance that you have at least watched, if not downloaded, an online video on Youtube or Google Videos.

The online video sharing space has exploded in the recent months with the entry of new players like Metacafe, Blip.tv, Revver, Yahoo Videos and so on. Millions of video clips, technology shows, music albums, movie trailers are available on these video sites for online viewing or they can also be downloaded to your hard drive for offline viewing.

The downloaded video files are generally in FLV format (Flash Video) which is an Adobe standard for video compression. It has fast becoming the web standard for delivering online video (replacing Apple QuickTime, AVI, Windows Media and Real rm formats) because Flash Video can be viewed inside Macromedia Flash Players which is shipped by default with most web browsers. [Flash Video Editing Guide]

A lot of us know how to download Google Videos or Youtube videos from the internet but what do we do next ? Can we make the FLV video files searchable ? How do you edit FLV files ? All your questions and concerns are answered here:

How do I download videos from Youtube or Google Videos or Metacafe ?

It's strange that none of the video sharing sites provide a simple one-click button to download videos. So we will have to take the help of easy workarounds to download the videos. Here are three different ways to download any video from the internet though internally, they employ the same hack (Right-click -> "Save Target As" OR copy the link into your download manager. but change the file extension to .flv)

Approach 1: The easiest way is to copy your video URL and paste it on KeepVid Lite. When you click submit, you will be provided with a link to save the video as an FLV file.

Approach 2: Bookmark this Link or drag it your browser links toolbar. When you want to download a certain video, open the link in your browser and click the KeepVid button.

Approach 3: For Firefox Users - Install the VideoDownloader Extension from Mozilla Addons website - It downloads all embedded objects on a webpage including the video clips.

What naming convention do I adopt for saving video files on my hard disk ?

With time, as the collection of FLV files on your computer grows in size, it may get impossible to keep a track of the video files. The drawback of flv files is that they are neither searchable nor indexed by media gallery software like Picasa or Apple iTunes. Hence, an intelligent approach would be save the files in such a manner that it becomes obvious even for a layman to understand what the video is all about.

Try to include a short context and duration of the video in the name. For instance, the Google Factory Tour video is 5hours, 39minutes and 41seconds long. You can save it as Google_Factory_Tour_053941.flv or GoogleFactoryTour_053941.flv.

Such files are easy to find later using desktop search programs. Alternatively, if you have the time and energy, the FLV Meta Data Injector can insert additional meta data into FLV files. It's a free command line utility. [Watch Video Tutorial]

How can I play FLV files on my computer - They don't open with Windows Media Player or Winamp or iTunes ?

You can download free FLV players to watch FLV files locally. My favorite FLV player has a simple and easy-to-remember name - FLV Player. Another nice alternative is the Riva FLV player.

I download a large 30 minute video from Youtube but I am only interested in the last 10 minutes of the clip. How do I split a large FLV file into smaller playable video clips?

This is the most common question among video enthusiasts - they want to split a large FLV video file into smaller chunks for editing or resharing only the interesting tidbits on the internet. To break an FLV file, get the free FLV Parser - a tiny command-line tool to split FLVs into pieces. Its intended use is to convert a large FLV into a series of shorter FLVs based on a series of millisecond-based timecodes. Using the -s switch will split the audio and video of the outputted files; the audio track will be extracted as a series of MP3 files, and the short FLVs produced will have no audio track at all.

How do I convert FLV videos to Flash SWF or Windows AVI or Apple Quicktime mov formats ?

The free Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer software from Super can convert FLV files to practically any other video format including MP4, MOV H.264, AVI, ASF or Flash SWF animations. Download here.

How do I convert my AVI MPEG MOV 3GP movie clips back to FLV format ?

Say you complete editing your movie in Windows Movie Maker or Avid and now left with an MOV file that you want to convert to FLV. Just get the free Riva FLV encoder and relax. The Riva encoder even lets you select parts of the video that you want to convert to FLV and crop the rest.

I have three small video clips that I download from Google Videos and now want to join them into one single video - How do I merge FLV files ?

I am not aware of any free software that let you join FLV files other than the expensive Macromedia Flash Professional. However, here's a simple workaround to join several flv video file - convert individual flv files to avi using Super [as mentioned above], then join the multiple Avi files into a single avi file using free VirtualDub and finally convert this avi back to FLV using Riya FLV encoder.

How do I watch Youtube Video on my iPod, PSP or Television ?

Again we'll make use of the Super Video Encoder mentioned above. Just convert the FLV file into a corresponding format (like Apple iPod or Sony PSP or MPG) and transfer it to your gadget.

I want to add my own music and photos to a Youtube video clip but don't have the budget to buy Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro or Macromedia Flash. Can I still create my custom video for free ?

Chances are that your computer already has a full fledged video editing application installed by default - it's called Windows Movie Maker and should satisfy the needs of most hobbyist film makers. You can add titles, transitions and even certain video effects.

Here's how to edit a Youtube video inside Windows Movie Maker - First convert the FLV to AVI format using Super Encoding software, then add your own pictures, music or video clips and finally export the completed file into any video format of your choice. It's that simple.

I don't like the FLV Video Player provided by Google Video. Can I create my custom skin for embedding the video clip ?

The problem with official video players, like the ones provided by YouTube or Metacafe, is that they cannot be customized and the embedded video content is completely contolled by the video hosting site. You cannot personalize the layout of the FLV players like the color settings, logos, etc.

Hence the best solution is to get your creative juices flowing and design the skin of the FLV player yourself. Instructions are available at Adobe Website. You may have to have to download trial version of Macromedia Dreamweaver and Flash Professional software for this trick to work.

Google Videos are not available in my country yet - Can I set download them or view them online ?

Absolutely, you can still watch and download Google Video - read workaround.

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Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/07/10-interesting-things-you-can-do-with.html

Will Brinton, the founder of Woods End Laboratories, a bioenergy consultancy, predicts a future without landfills. Instead we’ll use table scraps and sewage to power our homes. Just dump the waste into a household digester, and bacteria will break it down and release the natural gas methane. Farms could sell their copious poop-based energy supplies back to the grid. But how much energy do animals yield? We ran the numbers and found that you might want to consider a pet elephant.

MANURE MAKER	DAILY OUTPUT	METHANE YIELD	POOP POWER
Elephant	200 pounds	230 feet3/day	39 kilowatts*
Cow	120	95	16
Llama	16	18	3
Pig	2.5	3	0.5
Dog	0.75	1	0.2
Chicken	0.2	0.3	0.05

^*The average U.S. household consumes 30 kilowatts a day.

i Found this on:

http://www.popsci.com/corey-binns/article/2008-09/stinkiest-fuel-earth

If you live in the United States it can be difficult to understand the role mobile phone technology plays across the globe. Here, you may use your phone for calls and messaging, perhaps for some computing lite, but likely little more. In Senegal, however, farmers are using phones to track crop prices, in Japan, writers are SMSing whole novels, and in Sweden, they're texting to apply for instant loans. An app that lets you kill time on the subway, this is not.

Within a year and a half, half the world will use cellphones, predict analysts, and with the bulk of new users emerging from developing nations, the question of what phones can do for their owners has never before had such potentially world-changing answers.

Enter Nokia and Dean Kamen.

Yesterday, a new partnership formed by the company (of largest cellphone maker fame) and the man (yep, the guy who invented the Segway) announced "Calling All Innovators." For the next three months developers can enter mobile apps with real-world value for a chance at a $25,000 purse (also, you know, the glory of helping to save the world). There are three categories the apps can fall into: ECO-Challenge calls for programs that help users make "sustainable choices," Emerging Markets is a catchall to encompass anything from microfinance to health care, and Technology Showcase lets developers strut their stuff. The apps will run on Nokia phones with the S60 platform.

Kamen has recently completed a field test of two inventions that he hopes will change the world. Both are based on Stirling engine technology: one is a water purifier, the other an electrical generator. "Cancer, diabetes, all those diseases, that's 50 percent," says Kamen. "The other 50 percent of all disease is caused by bad water. Getting clean water to people would knock out 50 percent of all disease."

Each purifier and generator provides enough power and water for a village; but, with one million villages in India alone, deployment is a challenge. In the past, Kamen has worked with multinational companies to launch his inventions, but the top-down approach of a big company doesn't mesh well with the million-village scale of this project.

The developing world has a high number of cell phones per capita -- the counterpoint to having very little in the way of landlines -- and the idea is that software running on Nokia's platform could be used to network and control a village's small-scale power and water supply.

Hence the contest. Kamen is hoping to tap the expertise of mobile software developers -- for instance, the three million of them enrolled in Nokia's "Forum Nokia" community -- to provide the infrastructural glue that will help get his inventions to the people who need them. Like Tim O'Reilly, Kamen hopes that developers, properly motivated, will pour some of their efforts into projects that help the world instead of endless widget toys and games.

It's an inspiring idea

i found this on:

http://www.popsci.com/gear-%2526-gadgets/article/2008-09/will-cellphones-save-world

It’s not necessarily laziness that makes people hit the “snooze” button in the morning. Most likely, your body clock is mismatched with the demands of your life.
Your clock is controlled by the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a part of the brain that controls the body’s biological rhythms. But, says Jean Matheson, a sleep-disorders specialist at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, these preset natural rhythms often don’t align with daily realities—work or school start times cannot be adjusted to fit a person’s sleep schedule. People who have trouble crawling out of bed probably have an inner clock set to late wake-up and sleep times, a condition known as phase delay.
It is possible to adjust your phase-delayed body clock, Matheson says, but at a price: No sleeping in on the weekends. “When people sleep late on weekends, they revert to their natural phase-delayed rhythm,” she explains. This makes it harder to wake up early on weekdays. You can train yourself to wake up earlier, Matheson says, by setting your alarm 15 minutes earlier each day (and heeding its call).
Exposure to artificial light in the evening can also cause phase delay. The brain is very sensitive to light, and too much of it just before bed—from computer screens, televisions or bright reading lights—can trick the brain into thinking it’s daytime.
If you find it difficult to adjust your sleep habits, there’s some good news. Scientists at the University of California at Irvine recently discovered that a single amino acid regulates your internal clock. One day, says pharmacology professor Paolo Sassone-Corsi, this research could translate into a drug that controls the brain’s sleep cycle.