Life facts life

Mattresses

Mattresses can have up to 900% markup (a $3000 mattress can cost as little as $300 to make).

Stanley Kubrick

During the space race, Stanley Kubrick was so worried that humans would soon make the first contact with aliens that he tried to buy an insurance policy for 2001: A Space Odyssey in case audiences found his depiction of aliens ridiculous.

According to Guinness World Records, "set" has the largest number of meanings of any word in the English language, with 430 different senses listed in the 1989 edition of Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The word "sets" the record with an entry running 60,000 words, or 326,000 characters, and no other English word has come close since.

Despite what you may have seen on other lists of random trivia, your fingernails and hair do not, in fact, continue to grow after you die. To grow, these must have a steady supply of glucose, which is cut off after the heart stops beating, preventing any further growth. In fact, the skin around the hair follicles and nails dehydrates after death and partly retracts, which can make them appear longer.

Eddie Van Halen

Eddie Van Halen actually started out playing the drums. He bought a drum set and his brother bought a guitar. When his brother got better at the drums than him, Eddie said: "OK, fu*k you, I'll play your guitar."

Try writing out a few sentences—anything at all. Now take a minute to look at how frequently each letter in the alphabet appears. Chances are you'll see a lot of the letter "e." That's because the commonly used vowel appears in around 11 percent of all words in the English language, according to Oxford Dictionaries. The next most popular letter was "a," which appears in around 8.5 percent of all words. The least common letter is "q," which appears in just 0.2 percent of words.

Entomologists have estimated that there are at least one million trillion insects and only one percent of that number is ants, according to the BBC. And if you took all those ants (about ten thousand trillion) and put them on one side of a giant scale, you could almost put all of the people in the world onto the other and balance things out. Unfortunately, as humans have become heavier, this probably wouldn't hold up today—but it once did. Francis Ratnieks, professor of Apiculture at the University of Sussex, told the BBC this might have held true around 2,000 years ago.

КОШАЧИЙ АНГЕЛ
От автора: Посвящаю всем кошачьим «Ангелам».

Я не знал, что в мире есть кошачий Ангел.
Как-то в детстве, где-то в сказках слышал это.
Но когда казалось мне, что умираю,
Она просто подошла ко мне из света...

Протянула ко мне руки. Не боялась
Ни проплешин, ничего — держалась стойко.
Ни того, что моя шерсть давно свалялась,
Ни того, что я — обычный кот с помойки.

Я уткнулся своим носом в руки эти
И почувствовал как капает... солёно.
Я подумал: «Значит, Ангел есть на свете!».
А потом она несла меня до дома.

И баюкала. И пичкала лекарством.
Тормошила и щекою прижималась.
И когда в ее руках я просыпался,
Она ангельски-прекрасной мне казалась.

И беда уже, как страшный сон, забылась.
Вновь здоров, всегда накормлен я и счастлив.
Засыпая, говорю я ей: «Спасибо,
Мой кошачий Ангел, солнечно-прекрасный».

Автор: Арина Каретникова-Белобородова