Interesting Facts

How many Heathrow workers does it take to change a light-bulb? (The answer is - none, because since opening in 2008, not a single bulb has been replaced in terminal 5's departure lounge at Heathrow. In some areas up to 60 per cent of the lights have blown, but they haven't been replaced because there is no safe way to reach them. The people who designed the terminal, which cost £4.5billion, appear to have overlooked basic maintenance, light-bulbs need to be changed, and some of them are positioned 120ft above the ground. I would have thought pulleys and lifts would have been on the specs, but seemingly not. They have tried cherry-pickers and hydraulic boom lifts to replace the downlighters, but none were deemed to be practical or safe enough, and now, a team of specialist wire walkers has been given the job of stopping the lights from going out completely. It will take four months and cost millions of pounds. I wonder if they will play circus music whilst they ...

According to research carried out by the Ultra Parallel Visible Light Communications project, a joint venture between the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, St Andrews and Strathclyde, and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council wireless transmission reaching speeds of 10Gbit/s – more than 250 times faster than ‘superfast’ broadband is possible using converted LED lightbulbs. (The technology, cleverly called Li-Fi by Edinburgh University's Prof Harald Haas, would enable existing LED light bulbs to be converted to transmit Li-Fi signals with a single microchip.  The bulbs would have to be kept on to transmit data, but they could be dimmed to the point that they were not visible to humans, and would be more secure than Wi-Fi, as hackers would be unable to access unsecured internet connections from out of sight of the transmitter.) Source    

Reflected light cast by a building in London is allegedly so intense that it has melted parked cars. (According to City AM newspaper, the 37-storey tower known as the Walkie Talkie in the financial district, casts a beam of light at certain times of day that has melted parts of cars. It was designed by Uruguayan architect Rafael Vinoly, Mr Vinoly probably thought the sun never shines in the UK.)

In France, from July 1, a new law will require shops and offices in France to turn off their lights one hour after the last worker leaves a building.   ( Shop windows may only be lit from 7 a.m. or an hour before opening time, and  shop window displays must be turned off at 1 a.m.   Exceptions will be made during Christmas and other significant events, as well as in some tourist and cultural areas. I wonder what they will do with the Eiffel tower.) Source

Scientists have been measuring the speed of light for three centuries, and they have it down to an accuracy of half a foot per second. The speed of light is 186, 282.3959 miles per second. Which reminds me of the Monty Python song:- Whenever life gets you down Mrs Brown, And things seem hard or tough. And people are stupid, obnoxious, or daft, And you feel that you've had quite enough... Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour, That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned, A sun that is the source of all our power. The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see Are moving at a million miles a day. In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour, Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'. Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars. It's a hundred thousand light years side to side. It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light ye...