1. all of the letters carried by the u.s. postal service is the equivalent of 5 pb (petabytes). (1 petabyte = 1000 terabytes) (1 terabyte = 1000 gigabytes)

2. google processes about 5 petabytes of data every 5 hours

3. until the introduction of the world wide web to the world, the number of people that read was in the decline due to television. since 1980, however, this number has tripled.

4. roughly 20% of surgical instruments are made in northern pakistan, where child labour is not uncommon. link

1. there are at least seven things that still confuse scientists. link

2. denmark overfishes 10 times the allowed quota in canadian waters. link

3. abbey road is for sale (the studio, not the actual road… and not the album… well… of course the album is for sale… oh, never mind…) link

4. lights make you honest and oranges make you generous. link

5. swiss banks holding jewish accounts created before ww2 made it exceedingly difficult for the remaining family members to get their money back after the war. link

6. swiss gold coins have been found in the past to have a high mercury content. this is very unusual for refined gold. one explanation is that the coins were made from gold taken from the teeth of nazi prisoners during ww2.

7. the swiss constitution states that it is illegal to confine either a pig or a budgie bird alone. taking 10 minutes to land a fish is considered animal torture, and the country is voting on creating ‘animal lawyers’ to deal with such issues. link

8. tuscans love cats. tuscans love cat. link

9. madeleine albright was born marie jana korbelová in czechoslovakia.

1. in texas, you can go to jail for trying to save people’s lives (by accusing the sheriff’s favourite doctor or being stupid). link

2. murmansk, russia, was changed from a small fishing port to a major industrial centre during the second world war due to the fact that the gulf stream keeps its water warm enough to not freeze during the winter.

3. there is water on saturn’s moon, enceladus. link

4. walter frederick morrison, the originator of one of my favourite religious beliefs, died this week. link and link

5. love stinks. link

6. elephants can walk while they’re running – or is that run while they’re walking? link

7. the rate of kids dropping out of school in denmark is double that of canada.

8. the pope approves of michael jackson. link

9. olivia newton-john’s “physical” is the sexiest song – ever, however, marvin gaye’s “sexual healing” is only the 34th mosy sexy song. link and link

10. in an effort to cut budget, the city of colorado springs is selling its police helicopters. buy them here

1. the catholic church actively disputes human equality. link

2. paris is boring. link

3. in south america, there are places where fireflies do not blink randomly – they blink in unison. tens of thousands of them blink together at the same rate, lighting up the trees, then leaving them in blackness, over and over.

4. the scientist who discovered the importance of pheromones to ants, back when he was first spreading the word of his discovery, would do demonstrations be dragging an ant’s pheromone-producing organ across a surface, and show other ants following the trail. it was not unusual for him to write his name with the organ, which resulted in him spelling his name in ant.

5. science, generally speaking, has had a great deal of success over the past couple of hundred years with reductionism. in order to understand a system, the philosophy of science has been to break it down to its smallest constituent parts. however, there is a relatively new branch of science called “emergence” that goes the other way – it moves upwards to the whole instead of the component. this is the better way to understand things like ant colonies. ants, individually, are stupid. ants in colonies are incredibly smart.

6. there are ants who, just ahead of the monsoon season, build a small ridge around the opening to their colony. this raises the entrance above the surrounding ground. as a result, the colony doesn’t flood when the rain comes.

7. the ipad is not the first device to be poorly named… (okay, i already knew this, but there are some funny ones out there…) link and link and link and link and link and link and link and link and link and… never mind…

8. you can’t get rich on feng shui. link

9. when you’re surfing the internet for porn at work, you should always check first to make sure that there is nobody behind you, getting interviewed on national television… link

10. stealing from the girl guides will not go unpunished. link

11. relative to the size of the economy, british banks are 10 times larger than they were in 1970. link

12. 33.8% of americans are obese – a rate that is 10 times higher than japan’s. 68% of americans are obese or overweight. estimates based on current trends indicate that 100% of america will be overweight by 2048. link

13. power makes some people loonie. link

14. people who own cats are smarter than people who own dogs. link

15. having heard the jonas brothers perform live on television twice, i can say that they are completely unencumbered by talent.