Monday, January 20, 2014

Little know facts about well Known personalities


 
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