Life in a barrel and the bankers

The belief that to attain wisdom and virtue one must give up all the pleasures of life originated from the Cynics, an ancient sect. The Greek philosopher, Diogenes (c412-323BC), adopted the philosophy, discarded all his possessions except a cloak, purse and wooden bowl, and made his home in a barrel, living in it on the outskirts of Corinth, Greece. When he saw a boy drinking from his hands, he threw out the bowl as well.

It is told that Alexander the Great once met Diogenes, then a very old man. The powerful young conqueror, having heard much about the old philosopher, asked if there was anything he could do for him. Diogenes replied, "Stand out of my sunshine." Alexander replied, "If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes."

Ironically, Diogenes's father Hicesias was a banker, the profession which now is considered socially useless. Diogenes would have agreed; he "despised pretensions to knowledge that served no purpose."

For the record, over the year American charities received about $5 billion, banker bonuses totaled some $100 billion - about twice as much as the US government spend on education - while bank bailouts could cost more than $20 trillion.

The most watched program on TV

What is the world's most popular sports? Football, baseball, motor racing? Nope. Angling (fishing) is the most popular sports in the world with more active participants than any other sports. But you'll hardly see it on TV. The most watched sports worldwide accumulatively (all the televised games in all the countries) on TV is soccer but the most watched televised single series of sports throughout the year is F1, pipped to the post in viewership only occasionally by Idol, Eurovision, national election results and suchlike broadcasts. The most watched televised event on any given single occasion is the marvelous Summer Olympics.

Now, let's talk about the weather. After all, the weather is the most watched program on TV anywhere anytime. Yep, not only is talking about the weather an easy way to break the ice it also grabs more eyeballs than any sitcoms, soapie, sports event or aspiring singer.

But of course, the weather often is more interesting than news or politics... even without having to start the debate about global warming; strange, since our lovely little planet is actually now going through one of it's cold spells. Talking of which, Oymyakon, Siberia is the coldest inhabited community on earth. The 500 or so inhabitants brave winter temperatures that fall to -67° C (- 89° F). The highest temperature ever recorded was 58 degrees centigrade (136 degrees F) at Al'Aziziyah in Libya, on September 13, 1922. The longest lasting rainbow occurred on August 14, 1979 on the coast of Gwynedd, North Wales - it lasted for 3 hours. What was weather like there by you today?

Hair transplants and famous bald people

Transplanting hair is a grafting procedure that takes 4 to 5 hours, with the patient under local anaesthesia. A strip of scalp is removed from the back of the head, then cut up into grafts of hair. Hundreds of tiny slits are made in bald areas, and the hair is transplanted one or two follicles at a time. More than one procedure is usually necessary, and some patients have temporary swelling in the forehead or numbness in the scalp. It takes about 3 months for the transplanted hair to start growing again. Each procedure costs several thousand dollars.

There is an alternative to grafting. In a transplant procedure called “the flap” a flap of skin with hair is lifted from the scalp and rotated into the place of the bald spot and then stitched at the hairline. The flap is done in 4 or 5 surgical procedures over a period of a few weeks. Because it is never completely severed from the scalp, as is the case in grafting, the flap doesn't lose its blood supply. As a result, the patient heals faster and the hair never stops growing.

However, even though the option of having hair is there, many famous persons never bother with transplants. Famous bald people include: Patrick Stewart, Ben Kingsley, Phil Collins, Andre Agassi, Marvin Hagler, Graham Gooch, Michael Jordan, Montel Williams, Bruce Willis, Vin Diesel, and many others - and not forgetting Homer Simpson. If the list seems long it's because male pattern baldness - resulting in partial or complete baldness - affects some 40% of western men.

"There's one thing about baldness, it's neat," said American humorist Don Herold. After all, "God only made so many perfect heads; the rest He covered in hair."

The computer rat vs the computer mouse

Douglas Engelbart invented a large foot-operated control called a rat for the computer in the late 1950s but it never caught on. What did catch on 20 years after he invented it was the computer mouse.

Inspired by Vannevar Bush's call to make knowledge widely and freely available, Engelbart drew on his experience as a radar technician during World War II where he saw computer pointing devices that roughly resembled the mouse and designed the X-Y position indicator for a display system, for which he earned U.S. patent number #3,541,541 in 1970. He nicknamed it the mouse because of the tail that came out of at the end. (In the picture, Engelbart holds the first computer mouse, demonstrated on December 9, 1968.) The Xerox Star was the first home computer (in the 1970s) to feature a mouse but it was only with the launch of the Apple Lisa in 1983 when the computer mouse started catching on.

Douglas Engelbart invented or contributed to a number of products, including email, windows and video conferencing. He never received a royalty for his computer mouse invention but did receive something money can't buy and a computer can't calculate: international respect and honor.

All the gold ever mined still exists today

Gold is virtually indestructible; almost all the gold ever mined still exists today... all 165,000 tonnes of it, only enough gold to fill two Olympic-sized swimming pools. All it would neatly fit under the Eiffel Tower. That is not a lot. That is because you'll have to drill through 250 tonnes of rock, then pulverize it, then chemically treat it to get enough gold for only a single wedding ring. Gold also simply is beautiful to look at. These are the qualities that has always made gold one of the most sought-after precious metals with the price of an ounce trading for $1000 and more (see the history of gold prices).

Gold is extremely malleable and pliable. A one-ounce piece of gold can be beaten down to 5 micrometers thick - that is 1/10 the diameter of a human hair - and laid out into 50 miles of wire. It can also be made so thin that it becomes a translucent sheet; in fact, astronaut's visors are covered in a thin gold film to protect their eyes from glare. Gold also has anti-inflammatory and other medicinal properties.

Ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia (modern-day Iran and Iraq) were the first, at around 5,000 BC (some sources indicate 4,000 BC), to use gold for ornaments. The Egyptians would soon fall in love with the precious metal too. But gold was mostly use for personal adornment; the first gold coins were issued by Egyptian pharaohs only at around 2,700 BC. Large scale gold coinage for the monetary purpose was introduced in by King Croesus during his reign (560 - 546 BC) of Lydia (modern-day western Turkey). Croesus became one of the wealthiest persons ever.