Ancient

For a proficient typist, there is nothing more frustrating than watching a hunt-and-peck typist at the keyboard. No such worries with these people.

The world record for typing on a PC QWERTY keyword is held by Natalie Lantos, who in 1998 typed at a rate of 192 wpm. This is, on average, 15 keystrokes per second.

The world record for SMSing (is that a word?) is currently held by Kimberly Yeo who 'typed' 26 words in 43.24 seconds into her cell phone in June 2004. The message she typed ("The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.") was 161 characters long, giving an average of 4 characters per second!

The world fastest internet connection belongs to Sigbritt Löthberg, a 75-year old in central Sweden. She has a 40 Gigabits per second connection to the internet. At that speed, an entire DVD could be copied to her computer in less than 1 second.

Her son who works for Cisco, arranged the connection to prove that fast internet connections were possible in the home.

A pulsar is a rapidly rotating neutron star (see other factoid). The strong magnetic fields around a neutron star accelerate decaying neutrons from the stars surface to near the speed of light. The resulting radiation is focused through the magnetic poles and sprayed into the galaxy. As the star spins, the direction of the stream of radiation changes too (much like holding a torch and spinning in a circle).

The fastest rotating pulsar is the Millisecond Pulsar (discovered in 1982). It has a rotational period of 1.55 milliseconds, that is, it does 645 complete revolutions every second. If you were standing on the surface of the star, your rotational speed would be (very briefly) over 40,000km/s -- before you were crushed into less than the width of a atom and torn to shreds by the massive magnetic field.

After a supernova explosion, the remaining core can collapse into a superdense ball of matter. Typically, the mass of two suns is condensed into a ball 20km in diameter. In this ball of matter, the gravitational forces are so strong that the atoms themselves are crushed, the electrons melding with the protons in the nucleus, producing neutrons -- hence the name, "neutron star."

These neutron stars have some very strange properties:

• One cubic centimetre of a neutron star has a mass of 100 million tonnes.
• The neutron "soup" is 100,000 million million times stronger than steel.
• Gravitional acceleration is about 150,000km/s per second (in comparison with earth's 9.8metres/s per second). This means that something falling toward the star for only 1 second would have velocity of 150,000km/s when it hit the star (without a making a splat, since the sound waves could not escape the gravitation)
• The magentic field around a neutron star is 1,000,000 million times stronger than earth's magentic field. This strong magnetic field leads to pulsars (see other factoid).

The player to hit the longest hole in one is Bret Melson, who sunk a hole-in-one on a 448yd Par 4 at the Ko’olau Golf Club, Hawaii in February 2007. This gave him an very rare "albatross" (3 under par).

However, this claim seems to be contradicted by About.Com golf who give the honour of the longest hole-in-one to Mike Crean, who at the 9th hole at Green Valley Ranch Golf Club in Denver in 2002, holed a 471m (515yard) tee shot. This gave him an even rarer "condor" (4 under par).

A five under par is impossible in professional golf, since there are no par 6 holes.

The longest drive ever recorded in competitive golf was by Mike Austin, who hit a 472m (515 yard) drive at the 1974 National Seniors Open in Las Vegas, Nev.

Officially, the longest drive ever was by Kelly Murray, who on September 25, 1990, set a Guinness World Record by hitting a golf ball 626.2 m (684.8 yards). The catch was that he was standing on the 30m wide airstrip at Fairmont Hot Springs, British Columbia when he hit the ball -- which hardly seems sporting, old chap.

And if you really want to be technical, the longest golf shot ever was hit by Mikhail Tyurin on 22 November 2006. It reached a speed of 6km per second and travelled more than 1 billion kilometers before it landed -- or more precisely, burned up re-entering the earth's atmosphere. Mikhail Tyurin was (of course) standing on the porch of the International Space Station when he hit the ball.

The world's longest opera is Richard Wagner's The Ring Cycle, clocking in at over 14 hours. If you include intermissions, allow 18 hours before the fat lady sings. The Ring Cycle took Richard Wagner 27 years to compose! It consists of 4 parts: Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Götterdamerung.

The Ring Cycle is loosely based on a Norse legend of the Nibelungenlied from the 1200s. It has many similarities to The Lord Of The Rings.

The greatest recorded number of curtain calls were received by Luciano Pavarotti. On February 24, 1988, he received 165 curtain calls and was applauded for 1 hour 7 minutes after singing in Gaetano Donizetti's L'Elisir D'Amore at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, Germany.

The greatest recorded number of curtain calls ever received at a ballet is 89 by Margot Fonteyn de Arias and Rudolf Nureyev after a performance of Swan Lake in Austria, in October 1964.

In February 1582, Pope Gregory XIII decreed that 10 days should be dropped from October 1582 so that 15 October should follow immediately after 4 October. This marked the change from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. This was observed in Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Spain. Other Catholic countries followed shortly after.

Sweden, however, decided to make a gradual change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. By dropping every leap year from 1700 through 1740 the eleven superfluous days would be omitted and from 1 Mar 1740 they would be in sync with the Gregorian calendar. (But in the meantime they would be in sync with nobody!)

So 1700 (which should have been a leap year in the Julian calendar) was not a leap year in Sweden. However, by mistake 1704 and 1708 were treated as leap years. This left Sweden out of synchronisation with both the Julian and the Gregorian world, so they decided to go *back* to the Julian calendar. In order to do this, they inserted an extra day in 1712, making that year a double leap year! So in 1712, February had 30 days in Sweden.

Later, in 1753, Sweden changed to the Gregorian calendar by dropping 11 days like everyone else.

The fastest people ever (i.e. travelling the highest speed relative to earth) were the crew of Apollo 10 (Thomas Stafford, John W. Young and Gene Cernan). They attained at speed of 39,896 km/h (11.1 km/s, 24,790 mph).

This is approx 0.000037 times the speed of light. To reach Alpha Centuri (4.3 light years), they would have to travel for 116,000 years!

The people who have travelled farthest from Earth are the Apollo 13 crew; James Lovell, Fred Haise, John Swigert. On April 15, 1970, while passing over the far side of the moon at an altitude of 254 km from the lunar surface, were 400,171 km from earth.

The Great Wall of China cannot be seen from the moon. No man made structure can be.

Even the lesser claim that the Great Wall can be from "space" (where "space" is a low orbit of 350km) is not true. The Pyramids and the Hoover Dam can be seen from "space."

In his last Test innings, at The Oval in 1948, Sir Donald Bradman needs to score only 4 runs to gain an average of 100 runs per Test innings. He was bowled for a duck.

The Apollo 13 commander, Jim Lovell, did not say, "Houston, we have a problem." What he actually said was "Houston, we've had a problem here".

On 10 January 1984, Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming, received a message that one of its Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles was about to launch from its silo due to a computer malfunction. To prevent the possible launch, an armoured car was parked on top of the silo.

The term "the whole 9 yards" is popularly believed to come from WWII fighter pilots in the South Pacific. When arming their airplanes on the ground, the .50 caliber machine gun ammo belts measured exactly 27 feet, before being loaded into the fuselage. If the pilots fired all their ammo at a target, it got "the whole 9 yards."

One problem with this explanation is that there is almost no reference to "the whole nine yards" before 1961, and many references afterwards, which would be odd for a phrase that was coined 15 years beforehand.

The word 'pixel' is a contraction of either 'picture cell' or 'picture element.'

The Abrams M1A1 main battle tank has a fuel efficiency of 4 litres per kilometre. A company of 11 tanks travelling 100km requires 4400 litres of diesel.

The Chinese ideogram for 'trouble' symbolizes 'two women living under one roof'.

Walt Disney's autograph bears no resemblance to the famous Disney logo.

The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Arabic (not the Persian!) phrase "Shah Mat", which means "the king is dead".

In movie making, the "second unit" films shots that do not require the presence of actors.

The largest man-made non-nuclear explosion occured on Thursday, December 6, 1917, in the City of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, when the French cargo ship Mont-Blanc exploded. The ship was a war transport carrying 2,653 tonnes of military explosives. 2000 people were killed and over 9000 people injured.

There are 92 known cases of nuclear bombs lost at sea.

The length of a single human DNA molecule, when extended, is 1.7 metres.

A group of unicorns is called a blessing.
A group of frogs is called an army.
A group of rhinos is called a crash.
A group of kangaroos is called a mob.
A group of whales is called a pod.
A group of geese is called a gaggle.
A group of ravens is called a murder.
A group of officers is called a mess.
A group of larks is called an exaltation.
A group of owls is called a parliament.
Twelve or more cows are known as a "flink."

[This is a very often quoted collection, but I cannot confirm several of the nouns]

"Video Killed the Radio Star" was the very first video ever played on MTV.

Armored knights raised their visors to identify themselves when they rode past their king. This custom has become the modern military salute. See this link for an alternative opinion

Charlie Chaplin once failed to reach the finals in a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest.

The first inter-racial kiss on American TV was in an original Star Trek episode entitled "Plato's Stepchildren," which aired on November 22, 1968. The kiss was between Nichelle Nichols (Lt Uhura) and William Shatner. The producer, fearing audience backlash, filmed two versions of the scene: one where the kiss could be seen; the other where the actors turned away from the camera and the kiss was not visible.

On 15 April 1912 the SS Titanic sunk on her maiden voyage to New York and over 1,500 people died.
Fourteen years earlier the novel "Futility" was published by Morgan Robertson. The book described how a ship called "Titan" crashes into an iceberg on its maiden voyage to New York on a misty April night.

Ben-Hur, Titanic and Lord of the Rings won 11 Oscars each. The Color Purple was nominated for 11 awards but did not win any.

In the 50 or so stories that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about Sherlock Holmes, not once does Holmes ever say, "Elementary, my dear Watson."

In no episode of Star Trek did James T. Kirk ever said, "Beam me up, Scotty." The closest he came was in the movie Star Trek IV, when he said, "Scotty, beam me up."

"Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."

This probably the single most misquoted statement in the English language. The original author, Lord Acton, actually wrote: "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."

The WiMedia protocol (a wireless form of USB) works by dividing every second into about 4000 slots, each slot being 256 microseconds long, and sharing those slots between nearby devices. For this to work, all devices need to share a common clock accurate to 0.5 microseconds.

Maria de Lurdes Mutola, who won gold in the womens 800m in Sydney 2000, was the first Mozambican to ever win a gold medal.

The largest mountain in the solar system is Olympus Mons, found on Mars. It is 27 km tall and 625 km across. Commerical passenger jets cruise at about one third of that height. If it was on Earth, its peak would be in the ozone layer.