Tuesday Trivia

This first group of factoids is really interesting, I think. It's about the . . . .

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

• Some 460 languages are represented in the collections.
• The oldest written material in the Library is a cuneiform tablet dating from 2040 B.C.
• On August 24, 1814, the Library's core collection of 3,000 volumes was destroyed when the British burned the Capitol, where the Library was housed.
• The smallest book in the Library of Congress is Old King Cole. It is 1/25" x 1/25", or about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. The pages can only be turned with the use of a needle.
• The Library of Congress occupies three buildings on Capitol Hill. The Thomas Jefferson Building (1897) is the original separate Library of Congress building. The John Adams Building was built in 1938 and the James Madison Memorial Building was completed in 1981.
• The Library is directed by the Librarian of Congress, who is appointed by the president of the United States and confirmed by a vote of the Senate. Since the Library's founding in 1800, there have been 13 Librarians of Congress.

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• The word millionaire was first used by Benjamin Disraeli in his 1826 novel Vivian Grey.
• If you stack one million US $1 bills, it would be 110m (361 ft) high and weight exactly 1 ton. (Exactly one ton? Cool!)
• TIP is the acronym for "To Insure Promptness." (Ohhhh. I didn't know that! And I've met some servers who obviously didn't either!)
• The world's largest coins, in size and standard value, were copper plates used in Alaska around 1850. They were about a metre (3 ft) long, half-a-metre (about 2 ft) wide, weighed 40 kg (90 lb), and were worth $2,500. (Think how hard it would be to keep your pants at the waist or your purse on your shoulder with that little booger!!)
• Nokia: a phone and a town In 1865, Frederik Idestam founded a wood-pulp mill in southern Finland, naming it Nokia. It rapidly gained worldwide recognition, attracting a large number of workforce and the town Nokia was born. In 1898, the Finnish Rubber Works company opened in Nokia, taking on the town name in the 1920s. After WWII, the rubber company took a majority shareholding in the Finnish Cable Work. In 1967, the companies consolidated to become the Nokia Group. The recession of the 1990s led the group to focus on the mobile phone market.
• Seven out of 10 men get six or fewer hours of sleep on week nights.
• A 10 percent loss of bodyweight can relieve knee arthritis pain by up to 50 percent. (I can attest to that!)
• Forty-nine percent of managers believe their jobs to be high-stress positions, versus 32 percent of self-employed workers.
• Thirty-three percent of men say that they spend less than five hours with their children during a typical five-day workweek. (That's not good.)
• Junior-level employees who have access to middle managers tend to be more productive than employees supervised by senior-level managers.
• Toothbrushes before 1938 were made using the hair of horses, hogs and beavers. (Eeuuuuwwww!)
• The driest inhabited place in the world is Aswan, Egypt where the annual average rainfall is .02 inches.
• The air at the summit of Mount Everest, 29,029 feet is only a third as thick as the air at sea level.
• On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried the entire US telephone system was shut down for 1 minute in tribute. (Awwwww.)
  And a couple Halloween-ish bits:
  
• The name Dracula means Son of the Devil in Romanian.
• Most spiders have 8 eyes.

I hope you all have a terrific day! I'm gonna be busier than a one legged man in a butt kickin' contest. Later!!