Did you know that Leonardo DaVinci, Albert Einstein, Bill
Gates, Whoopi Goldberg, Tom Cruise, J. F. Kennedy, Pablo Picasso and many
others were dyslexic?
Churchill had difficulty in learning how to read. Agatha
Christie dictated her books because she mixed up the order of the letters in
writing. I think that it is much harder to learn how to read in English or
French because the same letters have different sounds, while in Italian every
letter corresponds to one sound. This explains why the number of dyslexics in
Italy is very low.
Did you know that Mussolini,
in order to encourage population growth, imposed a Bachelor’s Tax in the late 1920’s ?The reason why we use lb. for pound is due to the fact that in
ancient Rome the value of a sack of coins was determined by weight which was
measured in librae (pl. of libra).
When Michelangelo
overheard that the statue of La Pietà was being attributed to
another sculptor he signed it by carving his name diagonally across Mary’s
chest.
.Leonardo DiCaprio
was named after Leonardo Da Vinci because
his pregnant mother felt DiCaprio first kick while she was admiring Leonardo’s painting at Galleria Degli Uffizi.in Florence.
History of
Spaghetti
Contrary to popular belief it wasn’t Marco Polo the first
to bring pasta from China , instead were the Arabs during the conquest of
Sicily.
History of e-mail
Ray Tomlinson, a
US programmer, is the inventor of internet based e-mail. In 1971 he was
inspired by colleagues who didn’t answer their phones. He chose the symbol @ which he placed between the user log
in name and the host computer.Gondolas
in Venice
There are about 400 gondolas in Venice and all are
obliged to be painted black, unless it belongs to a high official . All gondoliers
mush wear black pants. When one gondolier dies the license passes to his widow.
Movement used to
say no with your head varies from culture to culture
To say “no” we turn our head to the right and left. For
the Indians this movement is the opposite ( it means “yes”.).
Arabs, to show disagreement, move their head up. Turks
and Iranians, to indicate “yes” move their head from side to side. In Greece,
to indicate ”yes”, they move their head backwards.
Dolbear’s Law
In 1897 Amos
Dolbear, an American scientist, published an article “The Cricket as a Thermometer”in which he describes how
the rate of crickets chirp, that male crickets use to attract females,
increases with the higher temperature. The
formulas below are fairly accurate. To calculate the temperature in Fahrenheit
count the number of chirps in 15 seconds (N15)
then add 40, TF=40+N15.
To calculate the temperature in Celsius there is a
shortcut method: “count the number of chirps in 8 seconds then add 5, TC=5+N8
