Did you know…. A fun, and very simple game.

[uk666]

Did you know.....

"Go!" is the shortest sentence in English

The word 'Go' is the shortest grammatically correct sentence in the English language. 

Here's how:

A complete sentence needs to have a subject and a verb. Here, 'you' is the implied subject, meaning that it is understood without mentioning that 'go' is being told to 'you'. 

And of course, 'go' is the verb, thus making it a complete sentence in itself.

[uk666]

Did you know.....

The name Jeep comes from a US army phrase

Though the Jeep’s contributions to WWII are clear, the origin of its name remains mysterious. A strong theory is the name comes from the letters "GP", the military abbreviation for "General Purpose".

That’s when Willys officials demonstrated the new scout car’s impressive off-road capabilities to Congress by driving a presentation model right up the steps of the Capitol building. 

In an article covering the spectacle, journalist Katharine Hillyer reported that GIs who had already worked with the new experimental machine had christened it “the jeep.” The name stuck.

IF HISTORIANS COULD pick a single piece of military hardware to symbolize the whole of the Second World War, they’d be hard pressed to come up with a better choice than the beloved Jeep.

U.S. factories produced nearly 650,000 of the ubiquitous utility vehicles between 1941 and 1945 – that’s nearly 500 a day for the duration of America’s participation in the conflict. Each one cost Uncle Sam about $650. At that price, Jeeps were a real bargain, particularly when considering that a single Thompson sub-machine gun went for $200.

The 2,000-pound, four-wheel-drive runabout was the embodiment of the word workhorse. Jeeps performed a seemingly endless array of jobs everywhere Allied soldiers fought. From medevac duties in Pacific jungles and armed reconnaissance in North Africa to towing artillery on the Russian Front, jeeps literally did it all and more.

In fact, the legendary machines have carved out such an indelible niche in the public’s consciousness, few today even stop to think about the vehicle’s peculiar-sounding name and where it came from. 

Yet interestingly enough, the origin of the word “jeep” is still mired in controversy, more than 80 years after the first models rolled off assembly lines.

[uk666]

Did you know.....

No two people can ever see the same rainbow 

Regardless of how substantial a rainbow looks; it’s only an optical illusion. And like other optical illusions, people don’t always see it the same way. With rainbows, however, it’s scientifically impossible for two people to see exactly the same thing.

As National Geographic reports, a rainbow occurs when light waves encounter water droplets at an angle, often when sunlight shines through raindrops. 

The combination of the light waves’ angled paths and the fact that they’re passing into a new substance causes them to change speed and appear bent, a process called refraction. 

When they encounter the other side of the droplet, they ricochet off it (reflection) and then exit the droplet, refracting again as they move back from water to air. Since the colours don’t all refract at the same angle, we see them as separate layers.

And because no two people can view that resulting rainbow from exactly the same angle, it’s going to look slightly different for each of us, there’s essentially a line running from the sun to the very centre of the rainbow’s full circle (called the antisolar point), which passes straight through your vantage point along the way. 

If you stood on your toes, crouched down, or moved two feet to your left, that line would change and so would the rainbow, though it might not be very noticeable.

[uk666]

Did you know.....

A man called Ray sent the first ever email in 1971

Up until the early 70s you could only send ‘mail’ to users on the same machine. So, it was that in 1971 a 25-year-old software engineer called Ray Tomlinson implemented a system that allowed messages to be sent between different users on different computers. 

The email was sent from one computer to another computer sitting right beside it in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but it travelled via ARPANET, a network of computers that was the precursor to the Internet.

It was called e-mail (note the hyphen) and Ray used the (until then barely used) ‘@’ symbol to indicate that the recipient was at a different location than where the message came from. 

In that way the e-mails used a person’s name, then @, followed by the computer they were sitting at. In that one moves he plucked the lowly @ symbol from obscurity and thrust it into the mainstream.

[uk666]

Did you know.....

Ghosts make an appearance in five Shakespearean plays

William Shakespeare loved adding ghosts into his stories and probably scared the people who attended his plays. 

Keep your eye out for some ghastly apparitions in Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Richard III and Cymbeline. Wooh!

[uk666]

Did you know.....

Egypt doesn't have the most pyramids

Thanks to the movies, when most of us form a mental image of a pyramid, we transport ourselves to Egypt where those massive, triangular tombs are pretty much synonymous with the country itself.

There's one problem - despite what many of us might have assumed, Egypt isn't the pyramid capital of the world, or even northern Africa. That honour belongs to Egypt's southern neighbour: Sudan.

Yup, the country with the most pyramids in the world is Sudan. Sudan has between 200 to 255 known pyramids, compared to Egypt's 138, and no, they weren't created by ancient Egyptians who might have wandered further south.

Instead, the pyramids in Sudan were built by members of the Kingdom of Kush, an ancient civilisation that ruled areas along the Nile River from 1070 BC to 350 AD.

While the Kushites started building pyramids about 500 years after the Egyptians were over them, both cultures used them to entomb their dead.

One of the biggest concentrations of Kushite pyramids is the ancient city of Meroë, which lies near the middle of modern-day Sudan. This city alone contains roughly 200 out the country's 255 pyramids, suggesting that at some point, it was a thriving metropolis.

[uk666]

Did you know.....

The bowler hat was designed for protection

The distinctive dome of the Coke (pronounced “cook”), otherwise known as the Bowler hat, was first made in 1849 for nobleman Edward Coke, younger brother of the 2nd Earl of Leicester. 

He ordered it from Lock & Co. as a type of hard, protective hat, to be close-fitting and with a low, rounded crown. This was to protect the heads of Coke’s gamekeepers at Holkham Hall, Norfolk so when they rode the horses and carts, their heads were shielded from the branches of any low-hanging or thorny trees.

Before Coke’s, gamekeepers and estate groundsmen wore top hats that have high, square crowns and would often get knocked off and damaged when they hit the ground. The Bowler hat was designed to solve these problems. A prototype was swiftly made by Lock & Co.'s chief hat maker, Thomas Bowler, hence why it is more commonly known as the Bowler hat.

From Charlie Chaplin’s slap sticking on the silent screen, the outlaws and lawmen riding the Wild West, and to its iconic presence in the city of London, the Bowler hat's unmistakable silhouette has made it as recognisable as any of its famous wearers.

[uk666]

Did you know.....

Rain can freefall at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour

While rain usually falls at a speed of 15 miles per hour, in storms, they can exceed that by around 10 miles! That's why it's good to carry an umbrella, especially in Britain (at any time of year).

[uk666]

Did you know.....

Caesar Salad was invented in Mexico

Yes, the Caesar salad was indeed invented in Tijuana, Mexico. It was created by Italian immigrant Caesar Cardini at his restaurant, Caesar's, on July 4, 1924.

The restaurant was overwhelmed with customers on that day, and Cardini, short on ingredients, improvised the salad using what was available. 

The original recipe included romaine lettuce, olive oil, raw egg, croutons, Parmesan cheese, and Worcestershire sauce.

[uk666]

Did you know.....

Crows hold grudges against individual humans, for up to 17 years

Crows are more than just black-feathered figures cawing from treetops; they are masters of memory and grudges, with cognitive abilities that defy our expectations.

crows can hold a grudge against a human for up to 17 years. That’s nearly two decades of memory of remembering a face, a voice, or a feeling. Imagining a bird glaring at someone from a telephone wire year after year.

Crows, it turns out, are not just ordinary birds. They belong to the corvid family, which includes ravens and magpies’ birds that are known for their intelligence. Scientists have studied them for years and discovered that crows can recognize human faces, use tools, solve problems, and communicate danger to other crows.

In one study, researchers wore masks while capturing and tagging crows for observation. Years later, crows still remembered those faces and would scold or mob anyone wearing the same mask even if that person wasn’t involved in the original incident.

That means these birds don’t just remember they associate, they learn, then they warn others. The grudge becomes collective. It’s passed down like a warning call echoing…

[uk666]

Did you know.....

Honey can last for thousands of years

Honey can last for thousands of years in sealed pots; it’s even been discovered in Ancient Egyptian tombs. The secret to its long life lies in the bees’ honey-making process.

Forager bees collect sugary nectar from flowers and transport it back to the hive. Here, the bees transfer the nectar to other worker bees, which repeatedly drink and regurgitate the liquid, reducing its water content. 

During this process, an enzyme in the bees’ stomachs breaks down the nectar’s glucose into gluconic acid – which helps to make honey acidic (pH of around 4) and hydrogen peroxide.

Once the nectar is deposited in the honeycomb, the bees fan it furiously with their wings to speed up the water’s evaporation. The honey’s low water content and high acidity are the two main reasons it doesn’t spoil the bacteria that cause food to go off can’t thrive in these conditions. 

The hydrogen peroxide also has antibacterial properties. So, the honey stays fresh for the bees during the cold winter months and for much longer inside our jars.