Fact O' The Day

[Colorado700R]

Yes and Yes....us skinny fuggers gotta have goals too!

[Hefe]

as long as you have SOME goal

[Krandall]

'The Federal U.S. tax code now exceeds 71,000 pages. '

Prior to World War II, the federal tax code was a modest 500 or so pages long, but by the end of the war it had grown to over 8,000 pages. Since that time, the code has grown at a fairly consistent rate of a little more than 3% every year, reaching over 71,000 pages in 2010. And despite complaints that not a single person in the country fully understands it, the code's growth shows no signs of slowing down.

[Hefe]

especially now!

[Krandall]

'Scrabble was invented by an unemployed architect in 1938. '


Today owned by Mattel, Scrabble got its start in the 1930s when Poughkeepsie, New York, resident and unemployed architect Alfred Butts created a letter/word game called LEXIKO. He used the front page of The New York Times to determine values per letter, basing them on frequency analysis. Butts failed to interest game makers until he met entrepreneur James Brunot and together they made Scrabble -- a word, by the way, which means "to grope frantically." Today, the game has sold more than 100 million sets in 29 languages and spawned a host of copycats.

[Krandall]

'The Impac is the world's most lucrative literary award. '

The Impac literary award (officially the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award) pays the winner 100,000 Euros for a single work of fiction in English, making it the most lucrative singular literary award in existence. Novels are submitted by libraries around the world, and it was first awarded in 1996. Previous winners include Herta Muller, 2009's Nobel laureate in Literature.

[Krandall]

'The average length of an adulterous affair is two years.'


According to the infidelity statistics compiled at infidelityfacts.com, affairs last two years, slightly more than half of all American marriages end in divorce, and a surprising 17% of people polled admitted to some form of infidelity (physical or emotional) with a brother(peelz/shawn....) or sister-in-law.

[Krandall]

'The most money paid for a cell phone number is $2.75 million.'

According to the 2009 Guinness Book of World Records, a charity auction held in the Arab Emirate of Qatar in 2006 sold off the Qatari cell phone number 666-6666 to an anonymous bidder for a record 10 million QAR ($2.75 million USD).

[Krandall]

'Practicing yoga can get you out of prison early in some places. '

Specifically in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh: According to Sanjay Mane, that state's Inspector General of Prisons, yoga is reducing sentences for those willing to practice it. The logic behind the move is that yoga is not only good for fitness but it also has a way of reducing stress and allowing the prisoner to learn how to better control his behavior.

[Krandall]

'In current English libel law, the burden of proof is on the accused, not the accuser. '


Unlike libel laws in most of the world, English libel law gets it backward, placing the burden of proof on the accused. Cases on average cost over $2 million and can drag on for years. As a result, English courts have become a popular destination for international plaintiffs, who merely need to show that they have a reputation in England and that the libelous statement could have been heard or read by the English public.

[Krandall]

'The makers of the Q-Ray bracelet were convicted of fraud.'

The Q-Ray ionized bracelet had a decent run, allegedly selling well among professional athletes (notably golfers) around the year 2000. But when its maker, QT Incorporated, claimed actual therapeutic effects, the Mayo Clinic stepped in and proved conclusively that the bracelet was a piece of junk and no more beneficial than any other bracelet. The company was required to pay at least $16 million in refunds. Nonetheless, they still sell the bracelet online.

[Spartan]

Fact of the day....Krandall's slacking today

[Krandall]

'Only two pieces of interrupted mail from the Pony Express are known to exist.'


By "interrupted mail," researchers mean mail that began the journey in a rider's pouch but failed to reach its destination. At least one rider was killed by Indians, and not every pouch reached its destination because the terrain was hostile, but of all the mail that disappeared, only two pieces are extant, including one envelope that has a stamp from "The Central Overland California & Pikes Peak Express Company," which ran the Pony Express and ultimately went under in 1861 because it lost a federal government contract to the stagecoach.

[Krandall]

'Only the data from about one-fifth of all clinical trial research actually reaches publication. '


By cross-checking trials listed at ClinicalTrials.gov against findings published at PubMed, researchers determined that less than one in five clinical trial studies reach publication, not because they've been rejected, but because they have never been submitted. Often, whether or not data is published has more to do with who conducted the trial than anything else: The lowest publication rate belongs to industry (drug companies, etc.), which publishes less than 6% of its trial data, while studies performed by clinical-trial networks reached publication almost 60% of the time.

[Krandall]

'The world's first national park was established in 1872. '


President Grant's signature created Yellowstone National Park in March of 1872, making it the first such park in the world. Features include Old Faithful Geyser and the Yellowstone Caldera, the largest supervolcano in North America. While Yellowstone might have been first, it covers just 3,472 square miles -- a fraction of the size of the massive Northeast Greenland National Park in Greenland, which covers over 375,000 square miles.