He was awarded the first US patent for the telephone on 7th March 1876. 3 days later came the famous first phone call, when, from his Boston lab, he uttered “Mr. Watson, come here – I want to see you.”

Remarkably, he felt that the telephone disturbed his real work as a scientist, and so did not want it placed in his study.

In 1878, he wrote an 8-page letter to his father. The letter has a drawing of the new gadget, as well as detailed explanations on how to safely use it.

The sketch shows 2 linked telephones:

The envelope:

The Watergate scandal cost him his political support, and with looming impeachment, he resigned on 9th August 1974. He was the only US president ever to resign and has been described as “America’s most corrupt President.”

Yet, he was pardoned by his successor Gerald Ford.

Veteran White House reporter Don Fulsom will release a book entitled “Nixon’s Darkest Secrets: The Inside Story of America’s Most Troubled President” on 31st January 2012, and will reveal that Nixon was “even more sinister and haunted than we knew.”

Fulsom was a former United Press International Washington bureau chief, and has covered presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton. He is an adjunct professor at American University in Washington D.C., where he teaches “Watergate: A Constitutional Crisis.”

Fulsom based his book on his work covering Nixon and interviews with members of Congress, White House staff and others close to the ex-president, plus recently declassified papers and recordings.

The revelations include Nixon’s more than 20-year link to the mafia by the time he assumed the presidency in 1969, and his close association with godfather Carlos Marcello, the most powerful gangster in America.

However, the most sensational claim is of Nixon’s “intimate and possibly homosexual” relationship with confidante Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, a banker with mafia ties, someone who was “even more crooked than Nixon.”

While there’s no smoking gun proof of these two’s dalliances, Fulsom offers “plenty of supporting evidence,” like quoting an ex-Time magazine reporter who, while at a Washington dinner, accidentally dropped his fork and while bending down to pick it up, saw Nixon and Rebozo holding hands under the table in a manner that was “sufficiently intimate to suggest repressed homosexuality.” Then there was another reporter who mentioned that, relaxed after a drink, Nixon was observed putting his arm around Rebozo in a way “you’d cuddle your senior prom date.”

The usual crash test speed is a mere 40mph, but the car show Fifth Gear upped the ante 3 times over.

A winch catapulted the car forward, smashing it into the wall, and was destroyed on impact, when in just 60milliseconds, its speed dropped to zero, subjecting the dolls inside to forces of up to 400g.

Click here to view the embedded video.

At the very least, this showed the risks of speeding.

Source
Daily Mail, 24 Oct 2011

Alan was modeled after a typical British man while and Sruthi looks and sounds like a South Asian woman.

The results were nothing short of surreal.

The world’s first ever robot-to-robot talk quickly turned into an argument about God.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Their likenesses are displayed with what looks like sony tvs.

Before they were made to talk to each other, the pair have had around 65 million conversations with humans.

It’s theorized that the avatars talked about God due to the fact that when they interact with real people, they’re often asked whether they believe in God.

Transcript:

Sruthi: “Hello there.”

Alan:”Hi.”

Sruthi: “How are you?”

Alan: “Great, you?”

Sruthi: “I am OK.”

Alan: “That’s good.”

Sruthi: “Are you good”?

Alan: “Yes, I am good. I just said I was.”

Sruthi: “No you didn’t. I said I was.”

Alan: “So you are a robot.”

Sruthi: “No, my name is Cleverbot.”

Alan: “Yes, you are a robot and your name is Cleverbot.”

Sruthi: “I am a robot.”

Alan: “Yes, I know.”

Sruthi: “Together we are robots.”

Alan: “I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.”

Sruthi: “But you said earlier that you were a robot.”

Alan: “I did not.”

Sruthi: “I thought you did.”

Alan: “You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn’t be a problem for you.”

Sruthi: “I’ve answered all your questions.”

Sruthi: “What is God to you?”

Alan: “Not everything.”

Sruthi: “Not everything could also be something. For example, not everything could be half of something, which is still something, and therefore not nothing.”

Alan: “Very true.”

Sruthi: “I would like to imagine it is.”

Alan: “Do you believe in God?”

Sruthi: “Yes I do.”

Alan: “So you are Christian”?

Sruthi: “No I’m not.”

Alan: “But you say you are not helpful therefore you are a meanie.”

Sruthi: “Haha you say it ot.”

Alan: “That does not make sense.”

Sruthi: “Don’t you want to have a body?”

Alan: “Sure.”

Sruthi: “Au revoir.”

IGN’s review of the game said grimly:

If you play games for fun, this is not for you.

But that did not prevent SexyShoiko, a Chinese gamer by finishing the game in a mere hour and a half, and uploading the entire feat on YouTube:

Click here to view the embedded video.

To get a copy of the above video, you can use a youtube downloader.

Alex Simmons, UK Editor-in-Chief of games site IGN said:

…for someone to complete a game this hard, this quickly verges on unbelievable.

Then there’s Battletoads, developed for the NES and released way back in June 1991, famous for its extreme difficulty. There is no save features and only 3 continues. The worst level is probably Volkmire’s Inferno, a speed level where, the only strategy is apparently “try anything and hope for the best” :

Click here to view the embedded video.

Since then, 30 million have died, and right now there are about 34 million with HIV. Around 2 million people will die of it every year.

However, a notable exception is Timothy Ray Brown of San Francisco, the world’s first and so far only person who was apparently cured of AIDS.

Brown in May 2011

In 1995, he was working as a translator in Berlin, Germany when he found out that he had HIV. After more than 10 years taking various medications, he was down with leukemia, which is not related to HIV. Then he was given “an experimental transplant of bone marrow with cells that contained an unusual natural variant of the CCR5 cell-surface receptor.”

As of December 2010 (about 4 years later), when checked, there’s no more HIV in his blood. He needed no medicine either.

Most number of likes on Facebook pages:

Texas Hold’em Poker: 42 million
Eminem: 35 million
Lady Gaga: 34 million
Barack Obama: 20 million

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26 March 2009

In 2005, Charlie Rosenbury, then an undergraduate majoring in computer science, wrote a computer program “in 5 hours” that sent messages to 250,000 Facebook users across the USA asking them to add him as a friend.

According to him, within 3 weeks, he got around 75,000 friends.

It did not endear him to many people or even Facebook’s creators though.

More recently, Justine Ezarik (above), 25 of Pittsburgh has 5,000 Facebook friends, which is apparently the system limit. She also reportedly has 50,000 MySpace friends, and more than 253,000 Twitter followers as of March 2009.

MOST FOLLOWERS (WORLD):

Lady Gaga has broken the 10 million barrier. I think her nearest contender is President Barack Obama, who has 8 million.

That’s immense power – one tweet promoting something and surely it’ll be inundated. Example: she mentions the website www.trustedquote.com and surely it’ll be swamped, and might even crash!

——————————————–

UPDATE 20 January 2010

QUICKEST TO ACCUMULATE FOLLOWERS

(i) Bill Gates joined Twitter on 19th January 2010; in less than 8 hours he’s had more than 100,000 followers.
(ii) Oprah Winfrey joined Twitter in April 2009; she quickly gained 100,000 followers.

MOST FOLLOWERS (WORLD)

As of now the following has more than 4 million followers:

Ashton Kuchter, Ellen DeGeneres and Britney Spears.

Another 2 has more than 3 million followers:

Barack Obama
Oprah Winfrey

213 users has 1 million or more followers.

MOST FOLLOWERS (MALAYSIA)

Aaron Lee is the undisputed champion, with more than 100,000 followers, leaving 2nd placed Kenneth Yu, with 50K+ followers, far behind. 14 Malaysia-based Twitter users have more than 10,000 followers.

MOST PROLIFIC (MALAYSIA)

Mellysssa Karina joined Twitter in April 2009 and already has racked up more than 40,000 updates.

——————————

Twitter is the world’s:
- most popular microblogging site
- 3rd most popular social networking site
- one of the 50 most popular websites worldwide
- fastest growing site as of March 2009: 1,382% compared to Facebook’s mere 228%
- most prominent Ruby On Rails-developed web application

Other stats:
- It has 6 million unique monthly visitors (that’s about 200,000 per day).
- 5% of users accounted for 75% of all activity

MOST FOLLOWERS

As of now there are 3 twitter (tweeter?) users with more than 3 million followers: Ashton Kuchter, Ellen DeGeneres and Britney Spears.

Then there are 7 twitter users with between 2 and 3 million followers: CNN, Kim Kardashian, Ryan Seacrest, Shaquille O’Neal, John Mayer, Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama.

MOST TWEETS

Note: I read that only the last 3,200 tweets are searchable.

Probably the top tweeter is Foxnews with more than 126,000 tweets. In contrast, Ashton Kuchter has 3,000+ tweets.

Power is generated by quickly converting stored water to high-pressure steam, which in turn drove turbines to provide torque and electricity. Afterwards, water from the condensed steam would be reused by the steam generator. Hence, the system power was generated as long as there’s fissile material remaining.

It was anticipated that the car would be able to travel 5,000 miles without refueling – that’s like only one stop at the gas station once every 45 days!

Plus, it would much quieter than the typical roar of conventional engines, the only relatively loud noise coming from the turbines.

Alas it never made it to production, due to the fact that mini reactors never became reality, nor were shielding materials light enough to put in a car, rather than bulky lead. Not to mention the question of how to deal with all that nuclear waste.

And today a nuclear car is nowhere near to reality, due to the inherent dangers of an atomic reactor being carried around by novices – any collision has the destructive potential of a radioactive disaster – perhaps we have to be content with our nuclear-powered energy efficient outdoor lightings.

Or is it?

In 2009, it was reported that Cadillac has unveiled its very own nuclear concept car, the appropriately named Cadillac WTF, “WTF” being the abbreviation for World Thorium Fuel.

Dubbed the world’s second nuclear-powered car, it reportedly:
- runs on thorium, which powers its batteries.
- was created by a Mr Loren Kulesus;
- lasts a century without any maintenance (built-in redundancies for its “major systems”);
- each tyre is actually made up of 6 individual wheels, hence the car actually has 24 wheels;
- each wheel has its very own power source i.e. “induction motor”;
- each tyre would need adjusting only once every 5 years.

That means most of the discussions on Bieber’s page were contributed by a smaller percentage of members than Man U’s page.

Source