Chapter 55 - Random Facts 8

The circ.u.mference of the Earth at the equator is 25,000 miles. The Earth rotates in about 24 hours. Therefore, if you were to hang above the surface of the Earth at the equator without moving, you would see 25,000 miles pass by in 24 hours, at a speed of 25000/24 or just over 1000 miles per hour.

The PT Cruiser was designed by Bryan Nesbitt, who later also styled the Chevrolet HHR. The name "PT Cruiser" includes the initialism PT, standing for "Personal Transport" and designating the car's platform as well as production code.

As a candle burns the wax melts and is drawn up the wick like when you dip a paper towel into a cup of water. The melted wax in the wick gets evaporated due to the heat from the flame, this dries the wick out which allows it to draw up more melted wax at a constant rate.

It was named for it color. Actually, use of the word 'orange' to describe a cross between red and yellow wasn't recorded until three hundred years after the fruit appeared in Europe. It's thought that oranges get their name from the Sanskrit word for fragrant – naranja.

A deck of English Uno cards from 1994. This particular deck uses the older card design, where letters appear on the action cards instead of symbols. The deck consists of 108 cards, of which there are twenty-five of each color (red, green, blue, and yellow), each color having two of each rank except zero.

Hence, Earth circ.u.mference is 2*Pi*r is about 40,030 km. Now is up to you to decide the amount of running per day. If you run a marathon 42.2 km per day, you'll be done in around 2.5 years.

(Located in Canada)Calgary's elevation is approximately 1,048 m (3,438 ft) above sea level downtown, and 1,084 m (3,557 ft) at the airport. The city proper covers a land area of 726.5 km2 (280.5 sq mi) (as of 2006) and as such exceeds the land area of the City of Toronto.

Wisdom teeth are called wisdom teeth because they erupt (emerge) into the mouth when people are in their late teens or early twenties, affectionately termed the "Age of Wisdom." Wisdom teeth are technically referred to as third molars, and they're just like all the other teeth in your mouth.

Despite its name, the game is not a variation of checkers, nor did it originate in China or any part of Asia (on the other hand, the game known as "Chinese chess", or xiangqi, is from China). The game was invented in Germany in 1892 under the name "Stern-Halma" as a variation of the older American game Halma.

Texas is the second largest U.S. state, behind Alaska, with an area of 268,820 square miles (696,200 km2).

The really clever thing about hippos is that they produce their own sunscreen, in the form of a sticky reddish sweat. It has told Nature magazine the oily secretion is made up of two unstable pigments - one red, the other orange.

The Lego Group began in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen (born 7 April 1891), a carpenter from Billund, Denmark, who began making wooden toys in 1932. In 1934, his company came to be called "Lego", from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means "play well".

The source of the Upper Mississippi branch is traditionally accepted as Lake Itasca, 1,475 feet (450 m) above sea level in Itasca State Park in Clearwater County, Minnesota.

In 1901, New York became the first state to register automobiles; by 1918 all states required license plates. States were slower to require licenses for drivers. Only 39 states issued them by 1935 and few required a test, despite widespread concern about incompetent drivers.

Wild bananas, prior to domestication, do have seeds. But like seedless gr.a.p.es, humans have found and cultivated seedless mutations. So now all banana trees come from cuttings and there are no seeds in the fruit. The little brown specs in a banana are the vestiges of seeds that did not develop because of the mutation.

The standard plural in English of octopus is octopuses. However, the word octopus comes from Greek, and the Greek plural form octopodes is still occasionally used. The plural form octopi is mistakenly formed according to rules for Latin plurals, and is therefore incorrect.

By the time he was five years old, Mozart had complete mastery of keyboards and violin, and had written his first five compositions. At six, he toured Europe as a child prodigy; by 16, he'd already written three operas and 25 symphonies.

Apollo 8, the second human spaceflight mission in the United States Apollo space program, was launched on December 21, 1968, and became the first manned spacecraft to leave Earth orbit, reach the Earth's Moon, orbit it and return safely to Earth.