Many hotels and hospitals in China don't label the fourth floor .. why?

Why? The pronunciation of "four" is close to that of "death" in Chinese.

If you use the number four on happy occasions such as wedding, especially in the southern part of China or in the countryside, you are likely to be criticized behind your back for failing to understand basic manners. Hospital and hotels normally have no fourth floor, and the numbers in the elevator just skip from three right to five. And in some cases the price of an apartment on the fourth floor is usually lower.

Source: http://www.chinaonyourmind.com/chinese%20culture/chinese%20customs.htm

An elephant was executed by hanging in 1916.

Charlie Sparks, the owner of a small-time circus called Sparks World Famous Shows, was touring the southern United States. Along for the trip was Mary, a 30-year-old pachyderm that Sparks claimed was the largest animal on Earth, could play the horn, had a .400 batting average, and could kill a man. It turns out only one of those was true.

The many witnesses of the following events offer various accounts of what happened on September 12, 1916, that fateful day when Sparks World Famous Shows came to Kingsport, Tennessee. For whatever reason, whether by mistake or malicious intent, Mary the elephant killed novice elephant handler, Red Eldridge. For her crimes, “Murderous Mary” was sentenced to be executed the next day.

After deciding that there was no way to produce enough electricity to electrocute Mary, Sparks decided instead to execute her with a public hanging. 2,500 people showed up to watch the elephant be hanged at the Clinchfield Railyards. She was so heavy that the chain around her neck snapped shortly after she died. They then buried her in a grave dug by a steam shovel.

Source: http://www.blueridgecountry.com/archive/mary-the-elephant.html

The Tonle Sap River in Cambodia flows North for almost half the year and then South for the rest of the year.

Monsoon rains fill the neighboring Mekong River with so much water that the Tonle Sap river is forced to flow backwards into the Tonle Sap Lake. The lake swells to 5 times its normal size, providing Cambodians with giant Mekong catfish for food.

Overfishing, and damming of the Mekong river may disrupt this important seasonal occurrence. Fishermen have been catching fewer and smaller fish in recent years, and Mekong catfish is now endangered.

Google was once named "BackRub".

Creators Larry Page and Sergey Brin met while at Stanford University and collaborated on a web search engine called "BackRub." Over time, the engine became too large for the university's servers and the pair decided it was time for a name change. They eventually came up with the name "Google," which was based on the word "googol" - a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros! They believed this word encapsulated their goal of organizing the limitless amounts of information stored across the World Wide Web.

Spicy food can make your nose run because of a chemical compound that irritates your mucus membranes.

This chemical compound is called capsaicin, and it is found in such foods as hot peppers. It is a strong irritant that can irritate both the mucus membranes of the nose and the tear ducts of a person's eyes. This is why oftentimes your nose can run and your eyes water while enjoying a spicy meal. Capsaicin can also dilate blood vessels, which is why people also tend to turn red in the face!

Angel Falls in Venezuela is so high that the water often evaporates before it can land.

At over 3200 feet, it's the tallest waterfall in the world! That's roughly 20 times taller than the Niagara Falls. The height of the longest uninterrupted fall for water in Angel Falls is over 2600 feet. In the dry season the water will evaporate before hitting the bottom of the falls!

The initials of Homer Simpson's creator are hidden in his ear and hair.

If you look closely, you can see that Homer's little squiggle of hair and right ear resemble an 'M' and a 'G.' Those letters stand for the name of his creator, Matt Groening! Groening originally designed the features to resemble the letters much more closely, but he thought the ear was too distracting. He still draws the ear as a 'G' when he draws pictures of Homer for fans though!

The Lincoln Memorial has a typo on it that is still partially visible.

Two of Abraham Lincoln's most important speeches are carved on the inner walls of the Memorial: the Gettysburg Address on the north wall, and his Second Inaugural Address on the south wall. While carving the Second Inaugural Address, the engraver accidentally chiseled an 'E' instead of an 'F' in the word "future!"

The mistake was easily corrected by filling in the extra line, but the mistake is still quite visible if you look closely. By the way, Abraham Lincoln's body is not buried in the Lincoln Memorial. It's actually in Springfield, Illinois. And the position of the statue's hands are not sign language.

The average person has between 1,460 and 2,190 dreams a year.

Most people over the age of 10 have 4 to 6 dreams every night. Those numbers times 365 days in one year makes for between 1,460 and 2,190 dreams every year. We dream during REM periods (which is when we have Rapid Eye Movement in our sleep) which can range anywhere from 5 minutes to half an hour long. In the course of one night this happens multiple times.

"Wait a minute!" you might be thinking, "I don't remember having 4 different dreams in one night, and I certainly don't remember having over 1,000 dreams this year." The fact of the matter is, you forget between 95% to 99% of all the dreams you have. That may seem kind of high, but most of your dreams don't really interest you enough to make you want to remember them.

Dreams are commonplace and don't require enough concentration to force you to remember them. In that sense, they are similar to other routine actions you do throughout the day like driving or tying your shoes. You don't remember most of the time you do those things either.

Source: http://psych.ucsc.edu/dreams/FAQ/index.html

BMW used to manufacture airplanes.

The company we now know as BMW actually started as Rapp-Motorenwerke, a company that manufactured low-quality aircraft engines in a converted bicycle factory near Munich back in 1913. That company later merged with another more successful engine company called Gustav Flugmaschinefabrik, to form Bayerische Flugzeug-Werke (Bavarian Aircraft Works) aka BFW. After securing a contract with the German military they again changed names in 1916 to Bayerische Motore Werke or BMW for short. They then produced the war planes that the Germans used in the first World War.

As part of the Versailles Treaty at the conclusion of WWI, Germany was no longer allowed to produce military aircraft (though, they still did). BMW still secretly produced airplane engines but with the decreased demand for military aircraft engines and a weak post-war German economy, business was struggling. They had to branch out and produce engines for trucks, boats, farming equipment, motorcycles, and finally in 1928, automobiles.

During World War II, BMW found itself producing military vehicles and even rockets for Nazi Germany's military. Though their Munich plant was destroyed during the Allied invasion of Germany, the company survived the war, and was allowed to repair vehicles for the Allied troops during the postwar reconstruction. In the decades after the War, BMW gained international renown for its cars. However, if you look at their logo, it's actually a picture of a propeller, in reference to the company's past.

Source: http://www.bmwdrives.com/bmw-history.php

Facebook paid $8.5 million to acquire the domain name 'fb.com'.

How much money did Facebook fork over when it acquired Fb.com last year? A cool $8.5 million, more than 42 times the amount the company originally paid for Facebook.com.

In case you were wondering, the previous holder of the domain wasn't an incredibly shrewd domain squatter. It was actually held for a long time by the American Farm Bureau Federation, who owned fb.com to redirect to their actual website, fb.org. Facebook acquired the domain sometime last year from the American Farm Bureau Federation. At its annual meeting in Atlanta, the non-profit revealed that it earned $8.5 million on the sale of fb.com, according to Reuters.

The last high-profile domain purchase by Facebook was for Facebook.com, all the way back when it was known as TheFacebook. The company paid $200,000 in August 2005 to acquire the domain, 42.5 times less than what Facebook spent to acquire fb.com. While the Facebook.com purchase was expensive for the company back then, it’s an investment that has clearly paid off. The company is obviously hoping that fb.com will also pay off.

If you leave Tokyo by plane at 7 am, you will arrive in Honolulu at approximately 7:45 pm the previous day.

Due to a massive gap in time zones, Honolulu is 19 hours behind Tokyo. Subtracting the 7 hour and 45 minute flight time between these two cities gives us a trip difference of 11 hours and 15 min. Therefore, you would actually land in Hawaii more than 11 hours before you left Japan!

First ever video on YouTube - uploaded on 23rd April 2005 at 8:27PM

There are NO natural lakes in Maryland.

Despite the fact that some of its bodies of water have been named "lakes" (Lake Habeeb, Deep Creek Lake) ALL of Maryland's lakes are man made! They have all been created by damming up preexisting rivers. Technically, that makes them reservoirs. Most of them are actually called reservoirs as well (e.g. Loch Raven Reservoir).

The reason that some of these artificial lakes are called lakes and some are called reservoirs is based on their use. The ones that were created for recreational http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifpurposes are called lakes. If the body of water was created for hydroelectricity, flood control, or as a water supply, it's a reservoir.

Most lakes in North America were formed by glaciers, but there were no glaciers in Maryland during the last Great Ice Age. Other ways natural lakes can be made are through landslide blocking a river, or volcanic activity.

To learn more about Maryland's artificial lakes click here.

In WWII, Allied troops used FAKE inflatable 'TANKS' to trick German soldiers!

The use of “dummy tanks” made of inflatable rubber served many purposes in war time. It is effective in convincing enemy soldiers that you have more tanks than you actually do. It could also be useful as a decoy, so that you move your real tanks without being noticed. When the British and the Americans were preparing for the D-Day invasion, they used the inflatable dummies to replace their real tanks, concealing the fact of their tank movements. The Germans were fooled into thinking that the invasion was taking place from Pas-de-Calais instead of Normandy.

Inflatable tanks are still used today. The Russian military still produces blow-up tanks and anti-aircraft weapons. These inflatable tanks are much more sophisticated because they now have to trick both the human eye and thermal imaging. An inflatable T-80 tank costs $6000.

To learn more about inflatable tanks in World War II, click here. Check out this story to learn more about a Russian company that produces inflatable weapons.

Mexico has 60 languages!

However, only 6% of the population can speak any of these indigenous languages. The Spanish colonizers forced the Spanish language to be the official language of Mexico. It wasn’t until the 1990s that Mexico accept the indigenous languages as official languages for the country. Mexican legal documents can now be written in any of the 60 languages!

Read more about Mexican languages here.

Scientists used to think that Stegosaurus had a brain in its butt.

This was because it was hard to believe that the 24 foot long animal could have survived with a brain roughly the size of a walnut. This led to suspicion that the stegosaurus was so large it needed two brains to maintain its bodily functions. Part of this confusion stemmed from the fact that the stegosaurus’ spinal cord features a suspicious bulge near its rear end. This enlargement of the spinal cord in the hip area was actually its sacral plexus, an intersection of various nerves that serves the animal’s pelvis, back legs, buttocks, and genitals. None of this conspicuous nerve bulge was made up of brain matter.

Naturally, despite the fact that scientists later disproved the “second brain in its rear end” theory, it was too good for the press to let go. The theory was featured in a popular column in the Chicago Tribune in 1912, and nearly 100 years later, it hasn’t escaped the collective consciousness.

Read more about the 2-brain theory at the Straight Dope. And you can get all of your stegosaurus facts at How Stuff Works.

Gravity is weaker in North America than it is in Europe, East Asia, Australia, and North Africa.

This is because Earth is not a perfect sphere, and its interior mass is not evenly distributed. There are slight variations of gravitational pull depending on where on Earth’s surface you are.

In fact, you can now check to see which points on the Earth’s surface have the strongest and weakest gravitational pulls with a “gravity map”, available at BBC.com. The map is a 3-dimensional model of the earth that represents the amount of gravitational pull on a specific point on the Earth as its altitude. It uses data compiled from the Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE).

GOCE is a satellite that orbits at a low altitude (the lowest ever for a satellite, at 254.9 km or 158 miles) that uses a gradiometer to detect the gravitational pull at different parts of the Earth. Because of this, the data collected from GOCE is the most accurate data on the Earth’s gravity that we have ever been able to compile. It has even been able to collect data from hard-to-reach areas like Antarctica, the Himalayas, the Andes, and Southeast Asia.