Monthly Archives: January 2012
2011 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,600 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 60 trips to carry that many people.
Interesting Fact #18326 – Busted!!!
Their brain power is at best shallow. Or so we thought. But scientists believe fish may have hidden depths. The creatures said to have a mere three-second memory span can actually recall information for up to three months.
Scientists found that fish trained to respond to certain sounds in captivity still reacted months later when they heard them in the wild.
The finding challenges the stereotype of fish being forgetful sorts, an idea reinforced by films such as Finding Nemo, whose characters include an absent-minded fish called Dory.
According to research at Plymouth University, goldfish have a memory span of up to three months – and can even tell the time.
The fish were trained to nudge a lever to get food. When the lever was adjusted so it would only work during one hour each day, the goldfish adapted, learning only to press the lever around the right time.
They even clustered around the lever as feeding hour approached, apparently remembering it was nearly lunchtime – or was it just because they were hungry???
Pause for thought …
“Every New Year people make resolutions to change aspects of themselves they believe are negative. A majority of people revert back to how they were before and feel like failures.
This year I challenge you to a new resolution. I challenge you to just be yourself. ”
– Aisha Elderwynv
Interesting Fact #18326
Everyone knows a few things about Goldfish. They’re gold and they don’t live very long. Well how much do you think your goldfish knows about You?
Not very much because their memory span is only 3 seconds!
Out with a bang – or was it a whimper?
Social network Twitter ground to a halt yesterday as it was overloaded with New Year messages. In Britain the site crashed at about 3pm and was out of action for more than an hour.
It coincided with midnight celebrations in Japan when revellers were sending a record 16,197 tweets per second.
The overload meant no one could post new messages or read existing ones. Instead, frustrated users were greeted with the error message: ‘Twitter is over capacity.’
The site returned to working order but then stopped on several other occasions, prompting speculation that it was being hit by the arrival of New Year in different parts of the world.
One user tweeted: ‘It’s amazing how three words can ruin my day! Twitter over capacity.’
Another joked: ‘Twitter’s New Year resolution needs to be I will never go over capacity.’
Conversely however, I was actually able to send texts at midnight last night that were going through straight away and responded to immediately – an unheard of event in years gone by … perhaps technology hasn’t moved quite as far ahead as it would have us believe?
Tessa's Blog 