Fact of the day

Fact of the day

Information is the most powerful weapon.

Fact N° 1261
Archie Moore holds the professional boxing record for most career knockouts with 130.
According to records gathered from The Ring Record Book and the Boxing Encyclopedia, and published in the Sports Illustrated Almanac, in a career that spanned 30 years, Archie Moore was credited with an astonishing 130 knockouts. Moore held the light heavyweight boxing championship for an amazing stretch, from 1952 to 1959, retaining the belt through numerous bouts. In that weight class, Moore almost exclusively dominated, but he fared substantially worse when he fought as a heavyweight, as seen in his losses to Rocky Marciano and Cassius Clay.
Fact N° 1262
The U.S. Navy's Nimitz-class aircraft carriers are almost as long as the Empire State Building is tall.
In the U.S. Navy, the nine nuclear-powered Nimitz-class aircraft carriers (a 10th is currently under construction) constitute the longest warships in the world. According to the general characteristics of the line, they weigh over 78,000 tons each and reach an astounding 1,115 feet (340 meters). By way of comparison, the famed Empire State Building in New York City, finished in 1931 and at one time the tallest building in the world, reaches 1,250 feet to its roof.
Fact N° 1263
The 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded for explaining why it's impossible to buy a good used car.
The prize was officially awarded to researchers George Akerlof, Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz for their "analyses of markets with asymmetric information." Their work, most notably stemming from George Akerlof's 1970 essay, "The Market for Lemons," pointed out what happens in any market when the seller has more information about a product and its quality than the buyer. As such, no matter what the quality, buyers who don't know the actual quality assume it's average, which means that a high-quality used car can't be sold for its real value without people assuming it's an average used car and therefore overpriced. Consequently, owners of those high-quality used cars don't put them on the market, leaving room on that market only for average and low-quality used cars.
Fact N° 1264
According to one survey, Qatar Airways offers the best first-class services in the world.
Skytrax, part of UK-based Inflight Research Services, annually ranks the best in first-class services using over 20 different criteria, and most recently ranked Qatar Airways at the top of the list. First-class passengers who fly out of the capital of Qatar, Doha, have their own $90 million terminal with a waterfall and marble floors. They and their luggage are checked in by an attendant and they can relax in a lounge with a number of fine-dining restaurants, access to a medical center, along with spas, saunas and a Jacuzzi. In flight, they're treated to caviar, plush pillows and mattresses, and a toiletry kit courtesy of luxury manufacturer Bulgari.
Fact N° 1265
No one has had more NBA playoff appearances than John Stockton and Karl Malone.
John Stockton and Karl Malone share the top of the record books for each having had 19 playoff appearances in their career, the huge majority of them while playing together as one of the most effective point guard/forward pairs in NBA history for the Utah Jazz during the 1980s and 1990s. The unfortunate irony is that, despite the numerous individual all-time records they hold along with the shared record of playoff appearances, the two times they took the Jazz to the NBA finals, they lost to Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls.
Fact N° 1266
The first known reference to "technical virginity" appears in the 1920s.
"Technical virginity," or the status of being a virgin because a person has "done everything except" vaginal sex, first appeared in the 1920s, according to professor Laura Carpenter, who in 2005 published a book entitled Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences. The concept of virginity then became cluttered with this kind of subversive thinking, eventually leading to the popular idea of the late 1990s of "revirginization" -- women reclaiming their virginity, either spiritually or through surgical procedures.
Fact N° 1267
In some regions, the toothpick fish is more feared than a piranha.
The toothpick fish, also known as the candiru, is a small eel-shaped parasitic freshwater fish that mainly feeds by sliding in through the gills of other fish and feeding off of it. The candiru is well-known in popular culture for its alleged ability to swim up the urine stream of human males and lodge itself in the urethra. However, no studies have been found to substantiate this behavior, although one study purports that the fish can jump up the stream if a man is standing thigh-deep in the water (yet even that study could not confirm that the fish in question was actually a candiru).

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