Huge Animals

The giant animals — Strange project of a Chinese artist. More images after the break...

Facts about India

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The official Sanskrit name for India is Bharat.  INDIA has been called Bharat even in Satya yuga ( Golden Age ) More INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT India : - 

• The name `India’ is derived from the River Indus, the valleys around which were the home of the early settlers. The Aryan worshippers referred to the river Indus as the Sindhu.
• The Persian invaders converted it into Hindu. The name `Hindustan’ combines Sindhu and Hindu and thus refers to the land of the Hindus.
• The number system was invented by India. Aryabhatta was the scientist who invented the digit zero. More facts after the break...

• Sanskrit is considered as the mother of all higher languages. This is because it is the most precise, and therefore suitable language for computer software. ( a report in Forbes magazine, July 1987 ).
• Chess was invented in India.
• Algebra, Trigonometry and Calculus are studies which originated in India.
• The' place value system' and the 'decimal system' were developed in 100 BC in India.
• The first six Mogul Emperor's of India ruled in an unbroken succession from father to son for two hundred years, from 1526 to 1707.
• The World's First Granite Temple is the Brihadeswara temple at Tanjavur in Tamil Nadu. The shikhara is made from a single ' 80-tonne ' piece of granite. Also, this magnificient temple was built in just five years, (between 1004 AD and 1009 AD) during the reign of Rajaraja Chola.
• India is.......the Largest democracy in the world, the 6th largest country in the world AND one of the most ancient and living civilizations (at least 10, 000 years old).
• The game of snakes & ladders was created by the 13th century poet saint Gyandev. It was originally called 'Mokshapat.' The ladders in the game represented virtues and the snakes indicated vices. The game was played with cowrie shells and dices. Later through time, the game underwent several modifications but the meaning is the same i.e good deeds take us to heaven and evil to a cycle of re-births.
• The world's highest cricket ground is in Chail, Himachal Pradesh. Built in 1893 after levelling a hilltop, this cricket pitch is 2444 meters above sea level.
• India has the most post offices in the world !
• The largest employer in the world is the Indian railway system, employing over a million people !.
• The World's first university was established in Takshila in 700 BC. More than 10,500 students from all over the world studied more than 60 subjects. The University of Nalanda built in the 4th century was one of the greatest achievements of ancient India in the field of education.
• Ayurveda is the earliest school of medicine known to mankind. The father of medicine, Charaka, consolidated Ayurveda 2500 years ago.
• Although modern images & descriptions of India often show poverty, India was one of the richest countries till the time of British in the early 17th Century. Christopher Columbus was attracted by India's wealth and was looking for route to India when he discovered America by mistake.
• The art of Navigation & Navigating was born in the river Sindh 6000 over years ago. The very word 'Navigation' is derived from the Sanskrit word NAVGATIH. The word navy is also derived from the Sanskrit word 'Nou'.
• Bhaskaracharya rightly calculated the time taken by the earth to orbit the sun hundreds of years before the astronomer Smart. His calculations was - Time taken by earth to orbit the sun: ( 5th century ) 365.258756484 days.
• The value of "pi" was first calculated by the Indian Mathematician Budhayana, and he explained the concept of what is known as the Pythagorean Theorem. He discovered this in the 6th century, which was long before the European mathematicians.
• Algebra, trigonometry and calculus also orignated from India. Quadratic equations were used by Sridharacharya in the 11th century. The largest numbers the Greeks and the Romans used were 106 whereas Hindus used numbers as big as 10*53 ( i.e 10 to the power of 53 ) with specific names as early as 5000 B.C. during the Vedic period. Even today, the largest used number is Tera: 10*12( 10 to the power of 12 ).
• Until 1896, India was the only source for diamonds to the world. ( Source . Gemological Institute of America )
• The Baily Bridge is the highest bridge in the world. It is located in the Ladakh valley between the Dras and Suru rivers in the Himalayan mountains. It was built by the Indian Army in August 1982.
• Sushruta is regarded as the father of surgery. Over 2600 years ago Sushrata & his team conducted complicated surgeries like cataract, artificial limbs, cesareans, fractures, urinary stones and also plastic surgery and brain surgeries.
• Usage of anesthesia was well known in ancient India medicine. Detailed knowledge of anatomy, embryology, digestion, metabolism, physiology, etiology, genetics and immunity is also found in many

Money Facts

• The word millionaire was first used by Benjamin Disraeli in his 1826 novel Vivian Grey.
• If you stack one million US$1 bills, it would be 110m (361 ft) high and weight exactly 1 ton.
• A million dollars' worth of $100 bills weighs only 10 kg (22 lb).
• One million dollars' worth of once-cent coins (100 million coins) weigh 246 tons.
• TIP is the acronym for "To Insure Promptness."
• The term "Blue Chip" comes from the colour of the poker chip with the highest value, blue.
• Nessie, the Loch Ness monster is protected by the 1912 Protection of Animals Acts of Scotland. With good reason - Nessie is worth $40 million annually to Scottish tourism.
• Of the more than $50 billion worth of diet products sold every year, almost $20 billion are spent on imitation fats and sugar substitutes.
• Annual global spending on education is $80 billion.
• US and European expenditure on pet food is $17 billion per year.
• The global expenditure on healthcare and nutrition is $13 billion.
• Money notes are not made from paper, it is made mostly from a special blend of cotton and linen.
• In 1932, when a shortage of cash occurred in Tenino, Washington, USA, notes were made out of wood for a brief period. The wood notes came in $1, $5 and $10 values.
• The world's largest coins, in size and standard value, were copper plates used in Alaska around 1850. They were about a metre (3 ft) long, half-a-metre (about 2 ft) wide, weighed 40 kg (90 lb), and were worth $2,500.
• The first credit card was issued by American Express in 1951.
• About 30% of consumers use their credit card as their main means of buying Christmas goodies, 70% do not save to buy Christmas gifts and 86% of consumers do their Christmas shopping during December.
• Excessive use of credit is cited as a major cause of non-business b@nkruptcy, second only to unemployment.
• Statistics show that people with high, medium and low income groups spend about the same amount on Christmas gifts.
• In the 1400s, global income rose only 0,1% per year; today it often tops 5%.
• The average age of Forbes's 400 wealthiest individuals is 63.
• In 1955 the richest woman in the world was Mrs Hetty Green Wilks, who left an estate of $95 million in a will that was found in a tin box with four pieces of soap.
• In 2001 the richest woman was Liliane Bettencourt, the daughter of L'Oreal's founder. She has a net worth of $14 billion (depending on how the stock market did today).
• In 2000, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands is the second wealthiest woman, with $5,2 billion.
• Queen Elizabeth II is one of the 10th wealthiest women in the world.
• The $ sign was designed in 1788 by Oliver Pollock.
• The term "smart money" refers to g@mblers who have inside information or have arranged a fix, the g@mbling term for insuring the outcome of an event by illegal methods.
• Small-time g@mblers who place small bet in order to prolong the excitement of a game are called "dead fish" by game operators because the longer the playing time, the greater the chances of losing.
• In g@mbling language, for a g@mbling house a "sure-thing" is a wager that a player has little chance of winning; "easy money" is their profit from an inexperienced bettor, an unlucky player is called a "stiff."
• Australians are the heaviest g@mblers in the world; an estimated 82% of Australians bet. That is twice as much per capita as Europeans or Americans. Yet, Australia, with less than 1% of the world population, has 20% of the world's poker machines.
• There are more than 7 million millionaires in the world.
• 80% of millionaires drive second-hand cars.
• In 1900, the price of gold was less than $40 per ounce. It reached $600 in 1930, now struggling to reach $400 per ounce.
• If Los Angeles County was a country, it would be the 19th largest economy in the world.
• If California was a country, it would be the 5th largest economy in the world.
• Tobacc0 is a $200 billion industry, producing six trillion cig@rettes a year - about 1,000 cig@rettes for each person on earth.

• In 1965, CEOs earned on average 44 times more than factory workers. In 1998, CEOs earned on average 326 times more than factory workers and in 1999, they earned 419 times more than factory workers.
• The income gap between the richest fifth of the world's people and the poorest measured by average national income per head increased from 30 to one in 1960, to 74 to one in 1998.
• A third of the world's people live on less than $2 a day, with 1,2 billion people living on less than $1 a day.
• In the 17th century, wool fabrics accounted for about two-thirds of England's foreign trade. Today, the leading wool producers are Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and China.
• The NASDAQ stock exchange was totally disabled in on day in December 1987 when a squirrel burrowed through a telephone line.
• In 1990, the word "recession" appeared in 1,583 articles in The Wall Street Journal.
• Global sales of pre-recorded music total more than $40 billion.
• Tourism is the world's biggest industry, affecting 240 million jobs.
• In 1865, Frederik Idestam founded a wood-pulp mill in southern Finland, naming it Nokia. It rapidly gained worldwide recognition, attracting a large number of workforce and the town Nokia was born. In 1898, the Finnish Rubber Works company opened in Nokia, taking on the town name in the 1920s. After WWII, the rubber company took a majority shareholding in the Finnish Cable Work. In 1967, the companies consolidated to become the Nokia Group. The recession of the 1990s led the group to focus on the mobile phone market.

Man of the Year by Time magazine was Mark Zuckerberg

Time / AP 

26-year-old founder of social online network Facebook and its executive director - the youngest billionaire in the world. December 15, 2010 Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, is depicted on the cover of Time magazine edition of "Man of the Year 2010". At 26, Zuckerberg - The youngest deserved this title after the aviator Charles Lindenberg, whom the status of "Man of the Year" was awarded in 1927, when he was 25 years old. More after the break...

2. December 14, 2010  Zuckerberg is the California Hall of Fame. He gained fame not only as the youngest billionaire in the world, but also as an outstanding newcomer in the world of philanthropy. This year, he vowed to donate $ 100 million on the development of public schools in Newark, New Jersey.

Pool / Reuters

3. October 5, 2010 In the main administration Facebook in Palo Alto, California. Zuckerberg commented on his page on Facebook: «The title of" Man of the Year "- it's a real honor and recognition of how our team is not numerous creates what hundreds of millions of people trying to use to make the world more open and more united. I am happy that I am a part of it. "

Paul Sakuma / AP

4. October 5, 2010 Zuckerberg launched the first version of Facebook from his dorm room at Harvard. Senior students have filed suit, claiming he stole their idea - a charge which was the main idea of the movie "Social Networks", published in 2010.

Paul Sakuma / AP

5. September 25, 2010 At a press conference on the donation of $ 100 million to develop public schools of Newark, to Zuckerberg joined Newark Mayor Cory A. Brooker (left) and Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie.

Gary He / AP

6. August 8, 2010 During a press conference in Palo Alto, Calif., Zuckerberg is watching as a software developer Ben Facebook Gertsfild beat the gong to mark start «Places» - a new social networking features based on location.

Tony Avelar / AP

7. April 21, 2010 Facebook, which began as a small network, available only for college students, has grown to the scale of the site, costing billions of dollars, and claims the attendance of 500 million regular users.

Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP

8. July 23, 2008 During a conference in San Francisco in 2008 to develop a Facebook f8, Zuckerberg shows option Facebook Connect. This technology allows Facebook users to start using any site on the Internet without additional registration.

Eric Risberg / AP

9. July 23, 2008 Editor of Time magazine, Richard Stengel called Zuckerberg a central figure in world development, which has caused "erosion of faith in authority, decentralization of power and at the same time, possibly growing faith in each other."

Eric Risberg / AP

10. November 6, 2007 "Man of the Year" according to "Time" - a person or event who are most influenced the development of culture and media in a given year, for better or for worse.

Craig Ruttle / AP

11. February 5, 2007 In the Personal Information page Zuckerberg on Facebook you can read the following words: "I try to make the world more open."

Paul Sakuma / AP