Fact of the day

Fact of the day

Information is the most powerful weapon.

Fact N° 2008
Teddy Roosevelt once gave a speech immediately after having been shot.
In 1912, while campaigning for a third term (and as a third-party candidate), Roosevelt was shot in the chest in front of a Milwaukee hotel. The bullet passed through a glasses case and a folded speech in Roosevelt's pocket before lodging itself in his chest. The former president gave his speech anyway, speaking for almost an hour before finally going to the hospital.
Fact N° 2009
The Great Wall of China is not especially visible from space.
Though urban legend often asserts that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made object visible from space, the Wall itself is difficult to discern in low-earth orbit. Some parts of the structure are arguably visible, but its texture and color are too similar to the terrain to be markedly obvious. NASA's chief scientist for Earth observation, Kamlesh Lulla, suggested that cities at night are the most noticeable man-made structures (also visible: roads, bridges, reservoirs, and the Giza pyramids).
Fact N° 2010
Early military Harley-Davidsons were equipped with machine guns and, in one case, a pigeon loft.
Harley-Davidson motorcycles were employed by the U.S. Army in General Pershing's pursuit of Pancho Villa in 1916 -- not especially surprising, given that the bikes were already popular with police and the military (half of all early Harley-Davidson production went to the U.S. Army). Also tested, though, were Harleys with a machine-gun-equipped sidecar and one with a sidecar pigeon loft, as carrier pigeons were still being used for communication at the time.
Fact N° 2011
Eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano could result in a death toll in the millions.
Yellowstone is home to three overlapping calderas and has seen over a hundred eruptions over the last 117 million years. Though an eruption anytime soon is highly unlikely, it has the potential to be cataclysmic. Two million years ago, Yellowstone produced an eruption that rated an 8 (out of 8) on the Volcanic Explosivity Index; that would be an eruption 10 times the size of a VEI 7, and the last VEI 7 (74,000 years ago in Indonesia) may have threatened humanity with extinction.
Fact N° 2012
The length of a meter is technically defined by the speed of light.
The meter has been defined by a few different things throughout its 350-year history, including the swing of a pendulum and the length of the meridian that passes through Paris. in 1983, for a whole host of reasons -- one of which was to have a consistent, unvarying speed of light -- the meter was redefined as "the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458th of a second."
Fact N° 2013
Japan plans on building a moon base within the next 10 years.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) intends to begin surveying the moon with humanoid robots by 2015, and to use those robots to begin construction of an unmanned base. Japan, which launched an orbiting lunar spacecraft back in 2007, estimates development costs in the $10-million range for the prototype humanoid robot (Maido-kun), and will ultimately spend $2 billion for the entire project.
Fact N° 2014
The sculptor of Mount Rushmore was originally working on a smaller Confederate version.
Gutzon Borglum, a well-known American artist, began construction of a monument to Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis at Stone Mountain, Georgia, in 1923. The project was partially financed by the recently reformed KKK, with whom Borglum was originally on friendly terms. However, within two years he and his financiers were so irreconcilable that Borglum destroyed his working models and left Georgia. A replacement artist finished Stone Mountain, and Borglum began working on Mount Rushmore two years later.

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