Plato's Beard » Trivia

Untiring wonder toy!

ravi — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 21:20:34 +0000

The little guy at home would probably rank his “ogo” bricks as among the top 5 of his toys — not surprisingly, it was named Toy of the Century by Fortune and the British Toy Retailers association. A BusinessWeek article “The Making of…a LEGO” traces the history and details of the company and the product. One little known factoid? LEGO is the #1 tyre manufacturer in the world! ;-)

The bricks are so meticulously made that the company claims that out of every 1 million elements made, just 18 will be declared defective and removed from the set. Impressive numbers, considering that the LEGO Group is producing 15 billion components a year—that’s 1.7 million items an hour, or 28,500 a minute. Tire production accounts for some of that number; the factory also produces 306 million tiny rubber tires a year. In fact, going by that number, LEGO is the world’s No. 1 tire manufacturer.

[ Link ]

Old and bloated!

ravi — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 05:03:39 +0000

Slashdot has a post today on the Web turning 16, which links to W3C’s history of the web page. Back in 1994 or 1995, shortly after my site was listed in a top 100 list (I think PC Computing Magazine?) some guy contacted me with a bit of interesting info: according to his records, my CERN HTTPD server was among the first 250 sites (I forget how he calculated that — perhaps based on the old Yahoo index?). Reading through the W3C history page I see:

1993

January: Around 50 known HTTP servers.
October: Over 200 known HTTP servers.

I started up my server in early February 1993 and shortly after sent information about it to the WWW mailing lists of the time. Depending on what is meant by “known” above, It seems quite possible that the guy was right about my making the first 250… maybe…

Maopost: Vintage Chinese Posters

ravi — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 15:29:30 +0000

Maopost.com has some (as you may have guessed) vintage Chinese propaganda posters. Check it out. If you really like themther eis even a Dashboard Widget to display the poster of the day on your desktop.

Trivia from Divia, Part 1

ravi — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 17:39:38 +0000

Yeah, bad pun on that title…

Some fun bits (at least if you are as much of a geek as I am) from Divya (I am not sure what her sources are, so no attribution):

Animals can digest only molecules with one orientation (in an Organic Chemistry sense) though both exist in nature.
Mitochondria, now part of our cellular makeup, were once free living bacteria. Did you know that they are passed down only the maternal genetic line? (Findings of an underappreciated female biologist: Lynn Margulis)
Cockroaches can live for 2 weeks without their heads since they have their brains in their legs, but they will eventually die of starvation.