1. Henry VIII had 2 official marriages out of the general 6 he’s meant to have had
2. The human body has 4 nostrils (2 are hidden)
3. Antarctica is the driest, wettest and windiest place in the world
4. The largest living thing is a giant mushroom in Oregon
5. A blue whale’s throat is the diameter of a grapefruit
6. A chicken in 1945 lived for 2 years after having it’s head chopped off
7. A goldfish does not have a 2 second memory – according to research it is more like 2 months
8. Mosquitos have killed 45 billion people over the years from the 100+ fatal diseases they carry
9. The Bobak Marmott of Mongolia is largely responsible for all plagues (which have killed approx 1 billion people over the years)
10. Chameleons change colour based on emotion not the background
11. Polar bears are not left handed
12. Marco Polo was born Marko Pilíc in Korcula in modern day Croatia and he did not introduce Ice Cream and Spaghetti to Italy
13. Walter Raleigh did not introduce Potatoes or Tobacco to England/Ireland
14. Champagne was invented by the English – they shipped in flat wine from Champagne and added the “fizz” and started fermenting it by adding sugar
15. Seven prisoners were freed by the storming of the Bastille on 14th July 1789. They were 4 forgers, a sexual offender and 2 lunatics (one was english and thought he was Julius Caesar)
16. The Swiss eat their pet cats and dogs after they die – apparently as part of the recycling process. Some is turned into lard & cough medicine
17. The Nursery Rhyme Ring a Ring a rosie has nothing to do with the great plague. It dates from a 1790 Massachusetts rhyme about a girl name Josie.
18. There are at least 15 different states of matter
19. Glass is not a liquid – it is a solid, and the reason why church windows are thicker at the bottom is because medieval glaziers didn’t always cast a uniform sheet of glass and put the thicker end at the bottom
20. Silver is the best metal at conducting electricity and heat
21. The moon smells like gunpowder and the moondust feels like snow
22. The moon goes round the earth, but the earth also goes round the moon
23. There are an additional 6 satellites that could be considered moons of the earth
24. The average distance between asteroids in an asteroid belt is approx 1.25 million miles, so the chance of hitting one when flying through one is very small
25. Light travels at 300,000 km/s in a vacuum but when travelling through diamond it only travels at 130,000 km/s. The slowest speed it has been recorded at is 60 km/h when travelling through a block of sodium frozen at -272ªC
26. A centipede with 100 legs has never been found
27. A two-toed sloth has 3 toes on each foot, it is so named because it has 2 fingers on each hand. Two toed sloths are not related to three toed sloths
28. A European earwig has 2 penises
29. There are more tigers in captivity in the USA than in the wild combined – there are thought to be 12,000 owned by private owners. It is only illegal to own tigers in 19 US states.
30. The Shaftesbury memorial in Picadilly Circus is of Anteros, Eros’s younger brother (not of Eros as it is commonly signposted and referred to as)
31. Only 5 people were officially killed in the Great Fire of London
32. The Romans gave the thumbs up symbol at the end of a gladiator fight to signify the loser should be killed. They buried their thumb in their fist to indicate he should be saved
33. Most accused of witchcraft were acquitted or hanged – very few were burnt at the stake. Most were men.
34. The number of the beast is 616 – it was mistranslated from the original Book of Revelations until it was redone in 2005
35. The Universe is beige
36. Water is actually a faint shade of blue despite appearing colourless in small quantities
37. There is no word for blue in ancient greek
38. The Coriolis force is not the main influence on which way (clockwise or anticlockwise) water goes down the plughole – in fact it is going to be negligible
39. Camels carry fat in their humps and originally come from North America
40. Technically there are only 46 US states:
Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts are officially commonwealths.
In addition there are 2 commonwealths: Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands. They drew up their own constitutions declaring themselves commonwealths of the United States. Neither are US states, and are officially unincorported territories so not included in the 50 “US States”
41. George Washington’s false teeth were mostly made of hippopotamus ivory
42. Baseball was invented in England
43. Thomas Crapper as not the first to invent the flushing toilet however he was involved in the sewerage industry and holds 3 patents for water closet improvements.
44. Mozart’s middle name was not Amadeus. His full name was Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart.
45. The largest capital city is technically Honolulu, the capital of Hawaii. This is because the boundary of the city of Honoloulou is the county of Honolulu which consists of the entire stretch of the North Western Hawaiian islands which are 1500 miles long or 2127 square miles
46. The Largest man made structure is a rubbish dump on Staten Island called Fresh Kills. At 4.6 square miles in area, receiving 650 tons of rubbish a day until it was closed in 2001. It reached a height of 25m taller than the statue of liberty
47. We are still in an ice age – an ice age is defined as any period in earth history when there are polar ice caps
48. The inventor of the biro was called László Biró and from Hungary. However the first person to patent the ball point pen was John J. Loud, but he never exploited it
49. Chalk isn’t used to make blackboard chalk – it’s made of Gypsum (Calcium Sulphate as opposed to Calcium Carbonate)
50. Cockroaches are not the most likely creatures to survive a nuclear war. They may be able to live for a week without a head, but a fruit fly can sustain over 3 times the radiation and a parasitic wasp can take 9 times. The creature most likely to survive though is the bacterium Deinococcus Radiodurans
51. Violin strings have never been made of cat gut – they sometimes used sheep gut at least until the 1750′s (and maybe even today)
52. The greater the number of floor you climb before you throw a cat out the window, the more likely it is to survive. According to a US study that showed cats that fell out of buildings up to 7 stories were more likely to sustain injuries than those falling from higher floors.
53. Ostriches don’t bury their heads in the sand
54. Your fingernails and hair don’t continue to grow after you die – it’s because your body dehydrates tightening the skin that creates this illusion
55. Alcohol doesn’t kill brain cells, it just makes new cells grow less quickly due to the dehydration
56. James Bond’s favourite drink was not a Vodka Martini – it was bourbon which he consumes 58 glasses of in all the books whereas he only drinks 19 Vodka Martinis.
57. Jaffa Cakes are cakes (not biscuits) – a landmark legal case was involved, as under British law biscuits and cakes are not subject to VAT, but chocolate covered biscuits are (luxury item). The evidence to prove they were cakes was that Jaffa cakes go hard (like cakes) when they go stale. In contrast, biscuits go soft.
58. It doesn’t matter how close you sit to the tv you won’t damage your eyes
59. The more hours sleep you have at night the more likely you are to shorten your life. However, not sleeping enough will reduce your IQ, memory and reasoning ability
60. Half an hour of exercise 3-5 days a week is likely to be just as good a treatment for depression as the medication your doctor prescribes you as it reduces symptoms by 50% according to surveys
61. Hitler was not a Vegetarian though he probably should’ve been as he suffered from chronic flatulence – not eating meat would’ve helped this
62. The Spanish invented the concentration camp in cuba in 1895 several years before the British used them in the Boer Wars
63. The Hurricane aeroplane was more successful than the Spitfire in the battle of britain essentially winning the battle
64. 1 dog year is not equivalent to 7 human years. It’s a sliding scale that starts quickly and slows down in time. It also depends on the size and breed of dog.
65. There is no such animal as a panther – technically all large cats are panthers, but what is usually being referred to are black leopards/jaguars.
In the US they often mean a black puma – however none has ever been found
66. The banana plant is a herb and the banana is a berry
67. Botanically,Strawberries, Raspberries and Peaches are not berries – they are drupes – raspberries and strawberries are aggregated drupes.
68. Almonds are drupes, Peanuts are Peas (legumes), and Brazil nuts are seeds – none are nuts
69. Captain cook did not give his men limes to cure scurvy – he gave them sauerkraut. Lemons were given to sailors from 1795. By the 1850′s to save money limes were given to save money. Limes contain very little vitamin C, so scurvy came back with a vengeance.
70. Captain Cook did not discover Australia and he wasn’t the captain of the ship, he was a Lieutenant. British explorer William Dampier explored Australia in the 17th Century. Another contender is the 14th Century Chinese Admiral Zheng He
71. The Australian slang for an English man, POM (or pommy), is short for pomegranate because it rhymes with immigrant when said in an aussie accent
72. There were between 2 and 20 wise men or magi and at least one of them may have been a woman. This is according to the English church’s 2004 revision of the description of the Magi
73. Panama hats come from Ecuador. They were named so because they were given as standard issue to men digging the Panama Canal
74. St Patrick may be the patron saint of ireland but he is not irish – he was from somewhere around Pembrokeshire

Enough with the preamble
1. The first one that got me thinking was computer Voice Recognition

It sounds like a great idea to alleviate RSI and by telling the computer what you want to do as opposed to typing it or using a mouse seems much more userfriendly. Apple Computer developed a technology in the early 90′s as an extension to System 7 called plaintalk. It is now part of the system preferences of OSX and simply called Speech Recognition. It enables you to use a hotkey to talk into a microphone with certain key phrases and it will follow your instructions. I had mixed results when trying it, mainly due to the fact that it assumes you speak with an American accent. My impressions aren’t very good and it doesn’t like British English too much. IBM developed a program called ViaVoice which was supposed to be very good but expensive. I think the big reason why the whole thing never worked was it looks like you’re mad talking to yourself and doesn’t work well in an office environment. Just my 2 english pence!
Having said that you still get glimpses of it used in telephones for speed dials and I always think of the Odeon cinema hotline that asks you to say the name of the Odeon that you want to book tickets for.

2. Next up we have the paperless office!

Having worked for the UK health service for 3 years I can categorically say this is nowhere near to even being a possibility, in fact the opposite has happened thanks to email allowing people the ability to forward pdfs and other attachments eg. this article. The internet now has more information out there than ever before and expectations are high on how much of that information we have at our finger tips. Net result, my desk looks like a pig sty and i never get to the bottom of any of my piles. So much for fax software and handheld scanners for electronically storing any letter or other piece of paper received by non electronic means. I am yet to meet anyone who seriously uses fax software, you can’t buy handheld scanners, those paper port scanners never scan things in straight and if you decide to use OCR you can get some unexpected results sometimes.

3. Removable storage (Data, Music and Video) – what on earth happened with this! I originally had them all separate but they’re kind of related.

Let me list a few:
Floppy Disk replacements such as the SuperDisk (LS120) and Zip disk
Sony’s “SACD – Super Audio CD
Laserdisc
Mini Disc
Just to name a few! I’ll start with the floppy disk replacements because i was so close to yelling at my co-workers when he burnt two files to cd which totalled 1mb onto a CD-R when the computer was a wintel box and had a floppy drive. But i restrained myself and said nothing. My point is that since Apple released the iMac Rev A which was the first commercial computer not to have a floppy disk drive (and others have followed suit though in more limited numbers often having an interchangeable floppy & CD drive) people are more confident that a computer will have a CD drive than a floppy drive. It is ridiculous to waste 99.9% of a CD’s capacity, and there are now more variations than is needed. Iomega came close with the zip drive until they hit a snag with the click of death problem, and Imation tried to market the LS-120 but it was horribly slow. I tend to email/ftp files these days and tend to bank on being able to get an internet connection as everywhere there’s a computer there seems to be broadband internet! Occasionally i’ll burn a CD or for larger files i’ve got my Firewire/USB external drive that i should use for backup but don’t as I haven’t had the time to use any backup software (whoops!)

SACD – what the heck is that you are probably asking. Basically it was meant to be higher quality than a CD and instead of an album taking up 500-700mb it would be 4.7Gb – so a DVD. Thought up in 1999 by Sony & Phillips. I have never seen one in the shops and doubt I ever will – it was a complete disaster as it came out just before a program called napster appeared. There’s also a format rivalry with DVD-Audio and like all Sony Products it uses some copy protection which I wouldn’t want to touch with a bargepole – oh, and i’d hazard a guess that i wouldn’t be able to notice any difference since i can’t tell the difference between a 192kbps mp3 and the original CD!

Laserdisc – this was originally patented in 1958 but didn’t appear till the 1970′s but you could still buy them when I was young. I don’t know anyone who owns any or even the player. The nearest I’ve got is a DVD that was made by being copied off a Laserdisc of Star Wars Episode IV with Chinese subtitles. Haven’t seen anything laserdisc related for about 20 years.

Another audio format the minidisc – you still see them around for recording purposes but record companies did try and sell albums on mini disc. It must’ve lasted about 2 years at most, and I haven’t seen them since. I like to record gigs from time to time but record on tape as that’s all i’ve got. I thought about minidisc but they’re expensive and it’s still a pain to transfer to mp3 because sony never made it easy to do so as they are incompatible with Magneto Optical drives and vice versa which use the same technology

4. My final one comes from one i saw on the google search above… Virtual Reality

William Gibson predicted it in his book Neuromancer in 1984 though the credit on wikipedia seems to go to Damien Broderick for his 1982 book The Judas Mandala. Pure and simple – what happened to it? It died a death somewhere in the mid-90s and hasn’t been heard of since

I know it’s something that’s been around for ages, but a company now looks to be properly distributing it called Zinio
They offer a broad range of magazines which you can buy either as back issues or subscribe to
About the same price as buying off the shelf, and it’s pretty convenient if you want a specific issue and don’t want to go down to the shops. Plus since you pay in US Dollars, the exchange rate works to my advantage eg. MacUser UK is £3.95 per issue over here, but only $3.50 from Zinio
An annual subscription works out at £62.46 by direct debit for a real copy
From Zinio it is only $49.95
When you consider that there’s $1.85 to the pound, it works out pretty cheap

On the downside, the digital version comes in Zinio’s own format, (.zno) and has to be viewed using their viewer. The viewer is available for windows & OSX, though isn’t universal binary yet (but has been confirmed as in development)
It uses some form of DRM called contentguard

A reader program is required to access the magazines, which utilize a combination of technology licensed from Adobe and Contentguard

and if you print anything it puts a pale grey watermark on the page

They offer a free sample section, so i took the opportunity to try it out. The freebies are a little lacking though oddly you can get MacWorld Sweden as well as the US version
You can only view one magazine at a time, as the viewer doesn’t seem to support multiple viewing of documents, and while it is based on Acrobat reader, it lacks a lot of the features you’d expect to have such as scrolling
I suspect you wouldn’t get anything to replace the free CD/DVDs you would normally get though they may have a way of having online links to the content.

The downloads magazines in OSX are stored in your users folder/Zinio Library/
The site itself is a little confusing, as there is an international section, but MacUser UK appears in the US section but not the UK, and there are some publications that they sell which don’t appear on the main site as they are acting as agents for the distributors.

Finally, they offer a US textbooks section for students. It’s a little lacking on variety, and since it’s US textbooks they won’t have scientific books that use metric units like Peter Atkin’s Physical Chemistry the defacto standard text for most university chemistry courses.

They say there are plans for adding interactive features into the digital versions of magazines and books to make them more attractive

Overall i kinda like it, but can’t see myself buying through it – and they do need to add some scrollbars to the viewer.

Still in Borders book shop, I had a call from my agency to do some work at my old workplace – a different department, and pretty good pay. It’s only 3 days a week, but it should get me by until I can sort out a full time permanent job. I started there yesterday, and it’s a real mess, but I think I can handle it. It’s in the Psychology department, but with a bit of luck my interview next week should go well.

So I left Borders, and thought now was as good a time as any to get a new graphics card which I’ve been putting off for ages. Following the Stevenote on tuesday 10th January (the day before), I thought that I would be trading in my Frankenstein Mac for something newer, and the Graphics card will more than likely be the only thing I upgrade before I do so.

The previous week I’d gone into the Apple Store in Regent Street for the first time and asked around to see if anyone there could make any recommendations without much joy. They suggested Micro Anvika – a computer store that has a few branches in the area. They’re an apple dealer, but also sell PCs. They sell a lot of accessories, and I’ve bought stuff from them in the past.
Armed with a bit of info on what I was looking for – an AGP card that supports Core Image on OSX 10.4, and a preference for ATI, I thought that a Radeon 9600 would be a good card and fit the job.

Micro Anvika have two shops opposite each other, the first one I went to said they do the card but didn’t have one in stock, however, the other branch did. The assistant in the 2nd shop was very knowledgeable, and asked the right questions. He helpfully told me they had one on returns, and would get me a discount because it had been opened, but was still brand new. The customer who bought it before didn’t realise his PowerMac G5 had PCI express, so it hadn’t even been fitted to a computer. Everything looked good, £150, a good spec Radeon card, AGP, supports Core Image. I was excited, and soon I would get some better video playback performance in quicktime, take the load off my ageing processor. I got home, shut my mac down, pulled the old card out, and straight away I saw a problem… the new card would not go into the slot as it did not have an extra notch in it, even though they were both AGP. I looked at the manual, which was helpfully for the old version, the 9600 Pro Mac Edition. The one I had bought was the Radeon 9600 Pro PC & Mac Edition. Unbeknown to me, and due to lack of adequate research, ATI had seriously messed around with the specs inbetween. This card was a 4x AGP only card, unlike the previous version which was 4x/2x AGP. My AGP slot is 2x – and after much exhaustive searching, it seems that the higher spec card, the Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Edition is 4x/2x AGP, but Micro Anvika do not sell this one. It’s probably also more expensive.

Irritated, and having put my old graphics card back in, a GeForce 2mx with 32mb VRAM, I booted my mac up. While i was looking at the innards of my mac, I’d pulled out my extra USB ports PCI card and forgotten to put it back in, so shut the mac down again to put it in. Everything back together. Pressed the power button – nothing – PANIC!!! What had I done. I changed the mains cable – again nothing – more PANIC!!! Those who have read about how I built my mac up will know what a mess it is inside with custom wiring – anything could’ve happened. I realised pretty quickly that the power supply was not at fault as when i plugged and unplugged the power cable i was still getting a little spark which was good news, as I do not have a spare. My immediate suspect was the dodgy wiring, and that in setting everything back up i’d dislodged something. Straight away, I pulled out the dodgiest part – the logic board power extension cable which I had used initially to allow the use of an ATX power supply. Once again I tried to power my mac up, with no joy. In a moment of inspiration, I remembered that when I came back from holiday the clock had reset itself to the default January 1 1972 or whatever it is – and that in some mac models, if the clock battery fails, it will sometimes refuse to allow you to boot up. I pulled the battery out, and for no real reason put it back in, pushed the power button and it started up. A sigh of relief! I was back to where I had started, but will probably need to buy a new clock battery sometime this week.

But, I still had the problem that I had spent £150 on a graphics card that wouldn’t work. I couldn’t get back to the shop that day, and decided that I would go back on Friday (today) after starting work on Thursday. So, this morning before I went back I did all my research, and even though the shop assistants were knowledgeable, I hoped that they would give me a refund. I spoke to the assistant who had sold me the card, and he seemed baffled as to why it didn’t work. I explained the problem referring to the manual which did show a card that would fit, especially after I explained several times that my mac had an AGP slot, and was a G4 as the system requirements said – it fitted everything on the box.

Here’s a site on AGP compatibility which shows the importance of the AGP key.
The important diagram is this one:

AGP 1x/2x runs at 3.3V or 1.5V and requires cards with both notches, while AGP 4x runs at 1.5V or 0.8V and only needs the one notch (the 0.8V uses the 1.5V part). AGP 8x runs at 0.8V, again requiring just the 1.5V notch
Wikipedia summarises it quite well on thei Section on AGP Compatibility
I think I am now an expert on AGP formats!

He then got his boss who initially appeared very knowledgeable wearing an Ixus t-shirt he was clearly showing off all the skills he was trained in. He was nearly onto the right track, but was convinced, like I initially believed, that AGP 2x and 4x were the same type of slot, and suggested that it was only AGP 1x that was really different. The only other Mac AGP card they did was the Radeon X800 which was much more expensive and very definitely only AGP 8x. I could tell now I was gonna get my refund as I started mentioning cards like the Nvidia FX5200 and they said they didn’t do them for macs. The assistant who I originally bought it from now blamed Apple for putting some strange connector on my motherboards that wasn’t a proper industry standard and gave me a full refund. Success! Great relief. I’m not sure if I’d just walked in and said I bought this card and it didn’t work because my board is 2x and the card only supports 4x that I would’ve got my refund.

So, my next challenge is should I look further into whether there is still a graphics card that I can buy which will fill the purpose, or concentrate on what my next computer should be, as that will come with a top spec motherboard, graphics card and everything I want. I still can’t decide what that computer should be