Interesting Facts

According to the Publishers Association, revenue from digital downloads hit £92million in 2011. (This is a 366 per cent increase on 2010. Around 1 in 40 UK adults received a Kindle for Christmas, and retailer John Lewis said that at one point during the festive season they were selling a Kindle every 30 seconds. Experts say the success of e-books is being driven by top authors releasing eBook-only short stories and novels,. If they would just reduce the price of an e-book these figures would sky-rocket.)

According to its creators Rovio, Angry Birds Space has been downloaded 50 million times in just 35 days. (This makes it the fastest growing mobile game ever, Breaking the records set by - yes - previous Angry Birds releases. Other popular games have reached the 50 million download milestone too, these include Draw Something and Temple Run - but it took them a bit longer than 35 days. Source :

Before they are born, sand tiger sharks eat their siblings until only one survives in each uterus.  (There is even a term for this, rather disgusting, phenomena:    in utero cannibalization.   Actually t he female sand tiger shark has two uteri, so two pups can be born at one time. Sometimes nature is just downright icky!)

The UK press (apart from the obvious ones) have all jumped on the fact that Rupert Murdoch called the British Prime Minister's disabled son 'RETARDED' whilst giving testimony at the Levenson enquiry. (Retarded comes from the French word 'retarder', and when used in the context of childhood development it  has been around for centuries, it was used as an official medical adjective to describe a mentally disabled person, but for the last few decades retarded is now deemed offensive. Why is it offensive?  Well that happens to words the moment they start to be used as an insult.  I guess around 1970 kids started to say to other kids in the playground, 'you are such a retard' or 'you are so retarded'. In 2006 the medical term 'mental retardation' was dropped by the American Association on Mental Retardation and the organisation was renamed American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. And in 2008, a poll by the BBC conclu...

If you're looking for a good ROI (Return On Investment), here's a way of making 30% in just 5 days. (No, this isn't a con, this is genuine. Send me all your money (joke). No - go to a UK post office and buy some first and second class stamps. By Monday they will be worth around 30% more. On 30th April a first-class stamp in the UK will rise in price from 46p to 60p and a second-class stamp will go up from 36p to 50p.  As the stamps don't show their monetary value, just their status (First / Second Class), you will be making an excellent investment.)

No, this isn't an oxymoron .  A town in Britain called Dull has been twinned with a town in the USA called Boring. (Boring and Dull!  They must have Boring and Dull schools, and Boring and Dull streets. In Scotland the sign will probably read "Dull  - Twinned with Boring", the sign in America might read: "Welcome to Boring, sister community of Dull".  It's so tempting to make some more silly jokes using these names as adjectives (click on the source link to read some). We will discuss this in today's Skype session, bring your puns.) Source

Gideon Sundback, a Swedish-American electrical engineer, is credited with the invention of the zipper. (He was born on April 24th 1880 in Sweden, but the development work on the zip was carried out in the US as head designer at Universal Fastener. Sundback made several advances in the development of the zipper between 1906 and 1914, while working for companies that later evolved into Talon, Inc. He built upon the previous work of other engineers such as Elias Howe, Max Wolff, and Whitcomb Judson. He was responsible for improving the "Judson C-curity Fastener". At that time the company's product was still based on hooks and eyes. Sundback developed an improved version of the C-curity, called the "Plako", but it too had a strong tendency to pull apart, and wasn't any more successful than the previous versions. Sundback finally solved the pulling-apart problem in 1913, with his invention of the first version not based on the hook-and-eye principle, the ...