From didYouKnow.org:
Worldwide, 20,000 brands of beer are brewed brewed in 180 styles, from ales, lagers, pilsner and stouts to bitters, cream ales and iced beers.
Beer has been a popular beverage for a long time. Babylonian clay tablets show detailed recipes of beer making in 4300 BC. Beer was also brewed by the ancient Chinese, Assyrians […]
Friedrich Bayer was born in 1825, the only son in a family of six children. His father was a weaver and dyer, and Bayer followed in his footsteps. In 1848, he opened his own dye business, which became very successful. In the past, all dyes had come from organic materials, but in 1856 coal tar […]
How much caffeine?
- A cup of drip brewed coffee has about 115 mg
- An espresso (and percolated coffee) about 80mg
- Instant coffee has about 65mg
- Decaffeinated coffee has about 3mg
- Coca-Cola has 23mg
- Pepsi Cola 25mg
- Mountain Dew 37mg
- TAB 31mg
- Tea has about 40mg
- An ounce of chocolate contains about 20mg
With more than 25 […]
The first national celebration of Thanksgiving was declared in 1777 by the Continental Congress. However, this was not an annual event. Today, our Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday of November. This was set by Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 (approved by Congress in 1941), who changed it from Abraham Lincoln’s designation as the last […]
In September 1752 the Julian calendar was replaced with the Gregorian calendar in Great Britain and its American colonies. The Julian calendar was 11 days behind the Gregorian calendar, so 14 September got to follow 2 September on the day of the change. The result was that between 3 and 13 September, absolutely nothing happened!
The […]
On 5 October 1960 an early-warning system warned the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) of a massive Soviet nuclear missile strike approaching the United States. What happened is that a fault in a computer system had removed two zeros from the radar’s ranging components, detecting the missile attack at 4 000km (2,500 miles) […]
Just some random statistics about volcanoes and how destructive they can be.
When Mount St Helens blew up in 1980, it exploded with the force of 500 Hiroshima sized atomic bombs. The top 1300 feet of the mountain were blasted away, and when the side of the mountain collapsed, the dirt and rock traveled down the […]
…that most techies know the primary colors are Red, Green, and Blue, but artists know the primary colors are Red, Yellow, and Blue? The reason why comes down to the differences of chemistry versus physiology.
The human eye has three types of receptor cones, each one being sensitive to a different band of light. The […]
…that there are 420,000 lines of code in the program that runs the space shuttle? This software never crashes, it never needs rebooting, and it is the closest thing to bug-free that humans could ever imagine.
The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have […]
…that one person holds the distinction for being the most destructive engineer of all time? He was not a weapons engineer, or a military man, but an engineer with a penchant for chemistry.
There are a host of bad chemicals that we pump into our atmosphere and some, like lead, will never really leave us. […]