Interesting Facts

According to research carried out by website uSwitch.com , 9 out of 10 landline-users in the UK are bombarded by cold calls – despite half of them being ex-directory. (8 out of 10 mobile phone users suffer too, and two-thirds also blitzed by spam text messages. One call centre in the UK has been sending out 6 million unsolicited calls a day, even British Gas made 7,000 cold calls to 900 homes over the course of 2012, about 8 calls to each household. I got one last night from a company conducting "surveys". I just said, politely, but firmly, "No thank you." Hung up, and then blocked that number.)

According to the Guardian newspaper, there are only 987 independent bookshops in the UK. (The number of independent bookshops in the UK fell below 1,000 in 2013, with 67 closing, leaving just 987 across the UK. It's really sad, and Amazon needs to take some of the blame.) Source

According to Cisco, mobile devices will outnumber humans by the end of 2012. (By 2016 it predicts that there will be 10 billion mobile connected devices around the world. Today your pocket - tomorrow the world!)

Today is the first Friday the 13th of the year, and it's got the inter web thingy in a spin, but not everyone thinks the number 13 is unlucky. Triskaidekaphobia, is the phobia of the number 13, and there are a number of theories behind the cause of this association between thirteen and bad luck, but none of them have been accepted as universally true. (13 Lucky or Unlucky? Unlucky 13 The number 13 is considered to be an unlucky number in some countries. The end of the Mayan calendar's 13th Baktun is superstitiously feared as a harbinger of the apocalyptic 2012 phenomenon. Fear of the number 13 has a specifically recognized phobia, Triskaidekaphobia, a word which was coined in 1911. The superstitious sufferers of triskaidekaphobia try to avoid bad luck by keeping away from anything numbered or labelled thirteen. As a result, companies and manufacturers use another way of numbering or labeling to avoid the number, with hotels and tall buildings being conspicuous examp...

According to the Foundation for Endangered Languages half a million people in the United Kingdom speak Welsh. (There are a number of other languages, apart from English, in the UK. A few thousand Scots are fluent in Gaelic, about 400 people speak Cornish, while the number of Manx speakers - the language of the Isle of Man - is perhaps as small as 100.)

The Fibonacci numbers are 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... (By definition, the first two Fibonacci numbers are 0 and 1, and each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two. For example:.- 0 + 1 = 1 / 1 + 1 = 2 / 2 + 1 = 3 / 3 + 2 = 5 / 3 + 5 = 8 / 5 + 8 = 13 / 8 + 13 = 21 ... Fibonacci sequences appear in nature, such as branching in trees, arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruitlets of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern and the arrangement of a pine cone.)

The number sign ( # ) is called an an octothorpe, octothorp, octathorp, or even octatherp. (In the United States, the symbol is usually called the pound sign, and the key bearing this symbol on touch-tone phones is called the pound key. But in the UK it is never called the pound sign since the term "pound sign" is understood to mean the currency symbol, £, and it is never used to refer to pounds as a unit of weight either, instead lb is used. The symbol is most often called the hash. Basically it's a confusing little sign.)