oh gd...
i have a reputation among my friends for knowing what they affectionately refer to as "dustbin knowledge" : useless for exams but interesting and [sometimes] useful to know. here's some of my favourites:
1.the gravitational pull of the doctor that delivered you is more than 6 times that of jupiter
2.tmesis (teh-mee-sis) is that practise of inserting one word into another (ie: absof*ckinglutely)
3.if all your DNA was streched out it would reach to the moon and back six thousand times
4. Antarctica is the only continent without snakes
5. Tobacco is the only legal product that, even when used correctly, harms your health
6. 99% of an atom is empty space
7. Picasso was an astrophysicist who tried to paint as we would see things in four dimensions
8. "Alice in Wonderland" and its sequel "Alice Through the Looking-Glass" were written by Charles Dodgson who was a mathematics professor at Cambrige Uni, again to do with astro-physics theories.
9. "Nylon" is called so because it was discovered in London and New York at the same time
10. Einstein dropped out of school at the age of 16
11. to make 1 kg of honey, a bee would need to visit 4 million flowers
12. Vatican City in Rome is the worlds smallest independant state with a population of 1000
13. 10% of the worlds population live on islands
14. a blue whales pork-soldier is roughly 6 feet long
15. the housefly only lives for fourteen days
16. you are 23.4 times more likely to get struck by lightning than win the lottery
17. a "jiffy" is a real unit of time: it is 1/100th of a second
18. peanuts are used to make dynamite
19. more people are killed each year by coconuts than sharks
20. only 8% of the worlds money is in circulation
apologies for length...no jokes though
(asme, Fri 18 Mar 2005, 13:14, Reply)