Here are some more interesting facts that have come to my notice over the years and that I thought were worth making a note of.
On 26th April 2006 I read that the average standard of living in Britain was three times as high as it was fifty years before. It seems to me that this is one of the most important things that have happened in my lifetime, and yet I have only read it once, when many less important facts have been repeated hundreds or thousands of times as often as is necessary to bring them to everybody’s attention.
On 22nd June, 2011 I read in a book by John Gribbin that in 2010 it was discovered that life on earth will be exterminated in one and a half million years’ time when a star passes through the Oort Cloud. I have not seen this mentioned since.
Half of the languages of the world can’t be written down.
Solepcism is the idea that nothing exists except oneself.
In From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne, published in 1865, 3 Americans set off from Florida in a spacecraft called ‘Columbiad’.
The commonest surnames in Britain are Smith, Jones, Williams, Brown, Taylor, Davis, Wilson, Evans and Thomas in that order.
In 1951 there were 270 centenarians in Britain; in 2001 there were 8560.
The current version of the Queen’s head has appeared on 200,000 million postage stamps.
The differences between British and American spelling is due to the differences in Johnson’s dictionary of 1755 and Webster’s of 1828. Not all of Webster’s spellings became established.
In court, courtsey, courier, courage and flour the letters ‘our’ are pronounced in five different ways.
The average person has a vocabulary of 60,000 words.
The Golden Treasury of Video
September has been and gone, and there is no sign that my favourite scenes from television have been reinstated as I was promised. Because there were so many sequences the videos cost £3240 to upload, which is more than the rest of my website added together. I thought that it was worth it because of the pleasure that I could bring to people who like the same things that I do, but I expected the collection to survive for more than a year.