Kuroshio Sea @ Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium,
originally uploaded by anzyAprico.
The Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium, located in Okinawa, Japan, is the world’s second largest aquarium. The aquarium is a part of the Ocean Expo Commemorative National Government Park located in Motobu, Okinawa. The main tank called the ‘Kuroshio Sea’ holds 7,500-cubic meters (1,981,290 gallons) of water and features [...]
Built in only 16 months between 1941 and 1942, the Pentagon is only 71 feet tall, yet it has 5 floors, 17.5 miles of corridors, 150 stairways, 280 restrooms, 685 drinking fountains, 7,748 windows and workers replace more than 250 light bulbs each day.
A “clue” originally meant a ball of thread. This is why one is said to “unravel” the clues of a mystery.
The 1997 blockbuster movie Titanic lasts 3 hours and 14 minutes. The actual ship took 2 hours and 40 minutes to sink after hitting an iceberg.
Officially, the space shuttle program of NASA is known as the Space Transportation System (STS). The first shuttle was actually the Space Shuttle Orbiter Enterprise, named after the famous star ship in the Star Trek television series. It was a drop-test vehicle released from a Boeing 747 in midflight. Enterprise made five successful free-flight tests [...]
Joseph Weill, who inspired the movie “The Sting” release in 1973, rented abandoned banks and convinced businessmen that he had set up a genuine bank. He waited for them to deposit large sums of money before shutting down and moving on to the next town. This, plus some of his other scams, earned him over [...]
In Scotland, New Year’s Eve is called hogmanay, and is an occasion when young people go about singing and seeking gifts.
The word caddy (or caddie, as its sometimes spelled) comes from France, via Scotland, and is a corruption of “cadet.”
In France a cadet was a rich man’s younger son. Since the eldest son inherited the whole estate, any males born after him often joined the army, which gives us the military sense of cadet.
Eventually cadet [...]
Antarctica is 98% ice, 2% barren rock.
The average thickness of the ice sheet is 7,200 feet; this amounts to 90% of all the ice and 70% of all the fresh water in the world. If the ice cap were to melt, the sea level would rise by an average of 230 feet.
There is a house in Rockport Massachusetts, built entirely of newspapers. The Paper House at Pigeon Cove, as it is called, is made of 215 thicknesses of newspapers.
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