Stan Bowes, from Diggle, has uncovered some more interesting and entertaining strange but true facts for us – you just couldn’t make them up.
SIMPLE MATHEMATICS can soon reveal startling – and almost unbelievable – results. Suppose you had a collection of twelve books. You can arrange these in a number of different ways – by author, subject, title, etc.
If you arrange them totally randomly there are many different combinations. How long would it take to try every possible arrangement? Amazingly, assuming you could try one combination every minute, without ever stopping, it would take over 900 years! (I ran out of fingers trying to calculate how long it would take for my 4,500+ books!)
ST BERNARD have been used for avalanche rescue for about 900 years and everyone knows they carry a small cask of brandy around their necks to keep people warm. Wrong.
Famous for his animal paintings, English artist Sir Edwin Landseer painted one of the dogs, and chose to show such a cask, and the legend was born. But they never did carry them.
Improve your vocabulary
Mugwumps: A delightful sounding word, derived from the Algonquian Indian dialect of North America, meaning ‘a war leader’. Borrowed into English as a humorous term for the boss of any organisation, it now tends to suggest any petty official who thinks themselves to be important. Oddly, it was also a term for a politician who changes sides.
Grufeling: To lie in bed closely wrapped and looking comfortable. A Scottish word, usually used in a mocking manner.
Apophthegms
Genius is one of the many forms of insanity
