bitful » 7 things http://www.bitful.com UK-based weblog on technology, queerness, language and fitness Tue, 07 Feb 2012 23:46:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 7 things I did not know last week http://www.bitful.com/2009/08/30/7-things-i-did-not-know-last-week-85/ http://www.bitful.com/2009/08/30/7-things-i-did-not-know-last-week-85/#comments Sun, 30 Aug 2009 09:57:36 +0000 Luca http://www.bitful.com/?p=4231
  • You can use an electric toothbrush to pollinate tomatoes.
  • Red Bull is produced and sold by an Austrian company, and it is based on a Thai energy drink.
  • You cannot delete more than 4000 messages in Microsoft Outlook 2003 in a single operation.
  • The skin growths that appeared on poisoned Ukranian president Yushchenko helped save his life by isolating the dioxin away from his internal organs.
  • In Gmail, z undoes anything (even sending a message if you are quick) when keyboard shortcuts are enabled.
  • Fasting for 16 hours before your breakfast in a new time zone can override the body's sleep clock. This can also work with other irregular sleep patterns.
  • Left-hand traffic and left-hand drive are not the same thing. The former is when cars occupy the left side of the road, the latter means that the driver sits on the left in a vehicle. So vehicles in countries with right-hand traffic have left-hand drive, and viceversa.
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  • James Bond's creator Ian Fleming wrote 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car. Via a friend's friend who left a comment on my friend's Facebook.
  • If you extract numbers from a text string in Excel they are still stored as text (and therefore uncountable). To turn them into numbers you need to multiply the formula you used to extract numbers from a text string by 1.
  • Simon Le Bon's firstborn is a model like her mother.
  • Will Powers' 'Kissing With Confidence' (that I know via the original 'That's What I Call Music' CD) was part of a whole concept album 'Adventures In Success', a 'parody of the self-help/get rich quick gurus'. Via Joe.My.God.
  • Carly Simon provided (uncredited) the vocals for 'Kissing With Confidence'.
  • We love rounded corners so much because 'A rectangle with sharp edges takes indeed a little bit more cognitive visible effort'.
  • You get only one Gold Card (the paper counterpart to the annual Oyster London transport electronic ticket) per year. You lose it, you stop getting discounts on rail travel (because most of the British Rail ticket offices do not accept the printed receipt as proof of validity, even if TfL claims they should. I fear my Gold Card is likely to be in a recycling bin in Italy.
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  • There are more than 35 ways to do pushups.
  • You can go to Gmail in Firefox by typing the letter g in the address bar and hitting Enter.
  • 'Members of the public and the media do not need a permit to film or photograph in public places and police have no power to stop them filming or photographing incidents or police personnel.' Via Mike).
  • MacArthur Park (one of Donna Summer's hits) was originally recorded by the late Richard Harris (Albus Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films).
  • Microbial cells outnumber your own by a factor of 10. Via Richard Dawkins.
  • The keyboard shortcut Ctrl-L focuses on the browser's address bar and select the whole URL. Works in Chrome and Firefox, would expect in others too but haven't tried.
  • And something I had a hunch about, and I'm not the only one: swapping the position of batteries in a device makes them last longer. Still scientifically unconfirmed though.
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  • Twitter only lets its users retrieve the last 3,200 updates they’ve entered into the system.
  • Venice residents get free city-wide wi-fi. Tourists need to pay about $7 a day.
  • The word oxymoron means 'sharply dull' in Greek.
  • There are 100,000 people buried under Washington Square Park in NYC.
  • Animal welfare legislation generally applies only to vertebrates.
  • Excessive amounts of alcohol interferes with REM sleep.
  • A trip to the dentist before brain surgery could prevent pneumonia.
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  • Putting butter, mayonnaise, or ice on a burn is a myth.
  • You can smelt iron ore in a microwave.
  • In the first half of 2009 I covered 2% of the distance to the Moon.
  • Actor Greg Grunberg (Heros' Matt Parkman) is also a social media entrepreneur.
  • If you click on a link with your mouse's scroll wheel, it will open in a new tab. You can then close a tab by clicking anywhere on it with the scroll wheel. Works in Chrome, Firefox, IE (haven't tried other browsers. Requires a scroll wheel that you can click, of course.
  • You can put a Twitter feed on your blog with Google Docs. Create spreadsheet, pull Twitter RSS feed into it, embed spreadsheet in blog. This also mean that you can use Google Docs to read RSS feeds.
  • The method I sometimes use to shorten long cables is called a chain sinnet (or monkey braid). This means I can finally stop calling it 'crochet' (because that's what it is and how I learnt it).
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  • You can use Gmail drafts to mail yourself unallowed files.
  • The song Everytime We Touch by Cascada borrows its chorus from 1992 track Everytime We Touch by 'Moonlight Shadow' singer Maggie Reilly.
  • The dessert I had last night is not called 'eaten mess' but 'Eton mess' (which makes sense since I ate it at a friend's in Windsor).
  • Justin Henry (Oscar-nominated child actor in Kramer vs. Kramer) is now a Regional Director of Sales at online video service Veoh.
  • British film director Duncan Jones (sci-fi thriller Moon) is David Bowie's son.
  • Shoe company Bata used to set up villages ('Batavilles') around its factories for its workers to live.
  • Phoebe Cates has been married to Kevin Kline for the last twenty years.
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  • Dominic Purcell is Australian.
  • The word 'avocado' comes from the Aztec 'ahuacatl' meaning tescicle.
  • Tina Fey wrote and co-starred in Mean Girls.
  • You can cure a stomach ache if you lie on your left side for 5 minutes. The stomach is on the left side, the oesophagus enters it on the right and therefore gas bubbles can rise and allow you to burp. Reciting the alphabet is optional.
  • Mary Portas bats for my team. Well, in the female division I suppose, since she left her husband of 13 years and moved in with her partner Melanie Rickey.
  • Labradors are the most popular breed (by registration) in the world.
  • The Japan edition of Lily Allen's 'Alright Still' has a song entitled 'Cheryl Tweedy'.
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  • Marc de Champagne is brandy made with discarded seeds and skins from Champagne grapes.
  • Turkey grows 70% to 75% of the world's hazelnuts.
  • Kennington Park was the site of public executions until the 1800s, and the speakers’ corner of south London.
  • Parkour derives from parcours du combattant, the classic obstacle course method of military training. Via Joe.My.God.
  • Melrose Place is being rebooted. With Ashlee Simpson-Wentz. Heather Locklear will not join the cast as 'there wasn't a way to bring Amanda back that made sense'. Yeah, as if that ever stopped scriptwriters before.
  • There is such a thing as a professional nagger. I may have to apply.
  • Japanese manholes are works of art.
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  • Jodrell Bank is not a bank.
  • Belarus is the only European country to carry out executions.
  • The vocals on Michael Gray's The Weekend and De Souza's Guilty are both from the same woman (Shena)
  • It is possible (but unadvisable) to lose 30 pounds in 24 hours (as in weight, not money).
  • You can be 'debaptised' from the Catholic Church, but not from the Church of England because it does not regard baptism as a sign of membership.
  • The number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships is commonly approximated to 150 (Dunbar's number).
  • The iPhone is not big in Japan.
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  • Gordon Brown lost the sight in one eye after an accident as a teenager.
  • The salt used to prevent roads from icing does not come from the sea.
  • The Union Flag is not symmetrical.
  • Status Quo covered Men Without Hats' Safety Dance in their 1996 album 'Don't Stop'
  • The original F*** My Life is the French site Vie de merde. Both are 'shadenfreude' websites with short everyday anecdotes of unfortunate moments that ruin someone's day
  • Wasabi has anti-bacterial properties. Via Tim Ferriss.
  • Branston pickle was originally made in the Branston suburb of Barton upon Trent, 5 miles from where my boyfriend's parents live.
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