BOMBING SHIP

What is "Fortnight"

What is "Fortnight"

"Fortnight" is a contraction of "fourteen nights." In the US "two weeks" is more commonly used. I always thought fortnight was a night spent inside a fort, possibly in a cellar.


A smaller unit of time is a 'jiffy' which is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second. So when people tell you they will be 'back in a jiffy', you just know they are lying because that's just not physically possible.


Speaking of time, if the sun stopped shining suddenly, it would take eight minutes for people on earth to be aware of the fact. Of course, when it does stop shinning, it will be followed by a really bright flare that will wipe us off the face off the earth. In fact, the face of the earth itself will be wiped off. Bet that's one situation that even cockroaches won't survive.


On a related note, light travels at the rate of 186,200 miles a second. Now someone please invent a car made of light.


While we are on the subject of time, space, continuum and more importantly dates, any month that starts on a Sunday will have a Friday the 13th in it. Now isn't that an amazingly useless piece of information. Unless of course, that's the day the sun suddenly stops shining. That would make it a very important day.


And if you've got any more time left, a bathometer is an instrument for indicating the depth of the sea beneath a moving vessel. And you thought it was supposed to measure how long it takes to take a bath? You use a watch for that.

Chickens From Another Space

Chickens From Another Space

One small step for eggs and one giant leap for chickens.

The Beijing Daily reported the three chickens hatched from a batch of eggs, which orbited the Earth 108 times aboard China's third unmanned spaceship "Shenzhou III."

According to state media, China plans to have manned space flights by 2005.

If successful, they will join the United States and former Soviet Union as the only countries to put a person into space.