h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Everyone is familiar with the famous quote by Henry Ford regarding the color options for his Model T, "Any customer can have a car painted in any colour he wants so long as it is black".

However, not many people know the color of his original Model Ts were green with a red stripe. He went to the black only option after one of his engineers pointed out that black was cheaper and it dried quicker speeding up production.

The prettiest colour available on the later Model A
was Thorn Brown which is still available and is a
very distinguished, semi-formal gloss finish that
has a hint of blue in a mid brown that is anything
but 'plain as mud'.

http://www.volocars.com/galleria_images/2027/2027_main_f.jpg

http://www.lionsgatemodelaclub.com/Classified_Images/dbower/30coupe.JPG


~jwf~

Mount Everest was once surveyed to be exactly 29,000 feet high (the current accepted height is 29,035 feet (8,850 meters)). The surveyors added two more feet because they didn't think anyone would believe them with such a nice, round number.

So it's growing then. Everyone who climbs it has to go further than their predecessors.

It *is* growing, the Himalayas are tectonically active.

It's also moving North.

So the mountain is going from Mohammed?

For really extraordinary mountain building, keep a close eye on the Diomedes, where the Canadian plate and the Eurasian plate are colliding.

The mountains coming up there will one day make the Himalayas look small.

Charles Darwin reported an increase in coastal elevation in Chile during the voyage of the Beagle, due to an immense earthquake that had hit the area.

Presumably, some of that would be represented in Andean elevation change, besides exceptionally large tsunami waves sweeping the Pacific rim.

Also, I've mentioned this before, the highest point on Earth as measured from its center is Mt. Chimborazo (a volcano) in Ecuador. Its peak is 2.168 km farther from the Earth's center than Everest yet it isn't even the highest peak in the Andes by altitude above sea level.

"Oh look the earth's gone all pear shaped."



~jwf~

..."Oh look, the earth's gone all pear shaped."...

Measured in terms of deflection of satellite orbits, it has, with an equatorial bulge at the latitude of Mt. Chimborazo and around the equator, extending over the southern hemisphere to ~ the antarctic circle, a dimple over the south pole and anarctic, an inverse 'bulge' of negative curvature, like the neck of the pear, over the north temperate zone and a peak near the north pole, which makes the north pole, in terms of deflection of satellite orbits, the highest point on earth.

If the prophet mohammed hadn't said he had dreamt about Jerusalem then there would have been one less world issue to deal with.

In base 3, the number of primes of 7 digits that have a prime number of each of the digits 0, 1 and 2 is 42 (A prime other than 2 in an odd base must have an odd number of odd digits, so 7 is the shortest relevant length here). The number having fewer than 19 digits, also, happens to have the pretty prime factorization (3^5)*(97^2)---erm...that is, (10^12)*(10121^2).

At the start of the US Civil War, Union General Ulysses S. Grant was a slave owner, and Confederate General Robert E. Lee was not.

The great-nephew of Emperor Napoleon, Charles Joseph Bonaparte, while serving as Attorney General under US President Theodore Roosevelt created the Bureau of Investigation, now known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

WARNING: Possibly Useful


Until the 70's, typewriters did not have a dedicated exclamation point key. To make one, typists would type an apostrophe, backspace, then type a period.

The equestrian events of the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 were held in Stockholm

More short-lived than useless, there are 8998 posts in this thread.

I REMEMBER those typewriters.