I did not know that yesterday!

The distinction belongs to Yonge Street, which is listed as a whopping 1,178 miles (1,896 km) in length -- roughly the distance from San Diego, California, to Seattle, Washington. It starts on the Toronto lakeshore and winds its way northwesterly along Highway 11 to Rainy River, Ontario, at the Minnesota border.
Long before it was paved, Yonge began as a trail used by the Huron Indians and early explorers like Samuel de Champlain. John Graves Simcoe, the provincial governor of Upper Canada and founder of Toronto, ordered the paved portion of the thoroughfare built to provide military access to the Great Lakes in case of an American invasion. He named the street after Sir George Yonge, the British secretary of war at the time.

Over the course of many years and administrations, the road grew. It snaked its way through bustling cities, tree-lined forests, and around picturesque lakes. In 1927, an important addition linked Yonge to the northern Trans-Canada Highway. "The official end of the line" came in 1965 when construction on the road was stopped. Today most of Yonge Street exists as Highway 11. The old highway lives on as dead-end side roads or overgrown wooded trails, leading some to refute Yonge's claim to the title of longest street.

The street is known as a good place to find food, folks, and fun. It's renowned for the flashy "Yonge Street Strip" section, people watching at Eaton Centre, performing arts theaters, and, most notably, the Hockey Hall of Fame. Near the street's southernmost point, you'll find the floating restaurant Captain John's. The former cruiseship is a fitting reminder of Yonge Street's maritime origins.

For those of you unfamiliar with the party scene, "beer goggles" refers to how people often appear more attractive to you after you've had a few drinks. For a long time, it was just a convenient excuse a person used to explain "regrettable amorous encounters." However, according to a study at the Universities of Glasgow and St. Andrews, beer goggles (or "brew gogs" as they're known in certain fraternal circles) are very real. It's no secret that excessive drinking leads to poor judgment behind
the wheel. Well, it can also lead to poor judgment at your local pub. According to the aforementioned study, what constitutes "attractive" changes drastically after a few drinks. In other words, while you may think you're hitting on a 10, there's a chance you're actually picking up someone in the lower-single digits.

The reasons behind this phenomenon have to do with alcohol stimulating the nucleus accumbens, aka "the part of the brain which is used to determine facial attractiveness." In the 2002 study, male and female students were shown pictures of members of the opposite sex and asked to rate them on a scale of 1-7 (sounds cruel, I know). The more students drank, the higher they rated the photographs.

We hope this sobering study helps encourage more responsible drinking. Remember -- if you're looking for love and don't want to wake up disappointed, you're better off at an ice-cream social than a keg-stand contest.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin (January 1, 1863-September 2, 1937), born as Pierre de Frédy, was a French pedagogue and historian, but is best known as the founder of the modern Olympic Games.

Born in Paris into an aristocratic family, De Coubertin was inspired by his visits to British and American colleges and universities, and set out to improve education. He thought part of this improvement should be sports education, which he considered an important part of the personal development of young people.

He conceived of an international competition to promote athletics. A growing international interest in the ancient Olympics, fed by recent archaeological finds at Olympia, De Coubertin devised a plan to revive the Olympic Games.

To publicize these plans, he organised an international congress on June 23, 1894 at the Sorbonne in Paris. There he proposed to reinstate the ancient Olympic Games. The congress led to the establishing of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), of which De Coubertin became the general secretary. It was also decided that the first modern Olympics would take place in Athens, Greece and that they would be held every four years. These Games proved a success, and De Coubertin took over the IOC presidency when Demetrius Vikelas stepped down after the Olympics in his own country.

Despite the initial success, the Olympic Movement faced hard times, as the 1900 (in De Coubertin's own Paris) and 1904 Games were both swallowed by international fairs, and received little attention.

This changed for the better after the 1906 Summer Olympics, and the Olympic Games grew to become the most important sports event. De Coubertin stepped down from his IOC presidency after the 1924 Olympics in Paris, which proved much more successful than the first attempt in that city in 1900. He was succeeded as president by Belgian Henri de Baillet-Latour.

De Coubertin remained Honorary President of the IOC until he died in 1937 in Geneva, Switzerland. He was buried in Lausanne (the seat of the IOC), although his heart was buried separately in a monument near the ruins of ancient Olympia.

Pierre de Coubertin Awards
The Awards are an initiative of the Australian Olympic Committee and formed an integral component of the NSW Olympic Schools Strategy in the lead up to the Sydney Olympic Games. The Awards recognise Australian senior secondary students who demonstrate attributes consistent with the fundamental aims of the Olympic Movement through participation in physical and athletic activities.

All secondary schools are invited to nominate one recipient for the Pierre de Coubertin award each year. Past recipients of the award include a number of former and current Olympians: 1996 recipients Jade Winter attended the 1996 Atlanta Olympics in Swimming and Ashley Callus participated in Sydney 2000 Swimming; 1998 winner Angie Skirving represented in Hockey at Sydney, while 2000 recipient Damian
Istria (St Josephs College) represented Gymnastics at Sydney in the same year.

So today we are celebrating my 100th post, and i would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you that came here so far...but enough of that and let's find out some facts about the number 100. (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

In mathematics
One hundred is the square of 10 (in scientific notation it is written as 102). The standard SI prefix for a hundred is "hecto-".

It is the sum of the first nine prime numbers, as well as the sum of two prime numbers (47 + 53), and the sum of the cubes of the first four integers.

But perhaps this number is most important as the basis of percentages (literally "per hundred"), with 100% being a full amount.

One hundred is also an 18-gonal number. It is divisible by the number of primes below it, 25 in this case. But it can not be expressed as the difference between any integer and the total of coprimes below it, making it a noncototient.

100 is a Harshad number in base 10, and also in base 4, and in that base it is a self-descriptive number.

In astronomy
The Messier object M100, a magnitude 10.5 spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices.

The New General Catalogue object NGC 100, a magnitude 13.3 spiral galaxy in the constellation Pisces.


In other fields One hundred is also:
The atomic number of fermium, an actinide.
In degrees Celsius, the boiling temperature of water at sea level.
The number of years in a century.
The number of pounds in an American short hundredweight.
The number of subunits into which many of the world's currencies are divided; for example, one euro is one hundred cents and one Pound Sterling is one hundred pence.
The number of verses in the pop song 99 Bottles of Beer
The denomination of the U.S. hundred-dollar bill with Benjamin Franklin's portrait.
The denomination of American savings bonds with Thomas Jefferson's portrait.
The denomination of American treasury bonds with Andrew Jackson's portrait.
The number of tiles in a standard Scrabble set.
The number of entries in many "all time" lists voted for by the public, e.g. The 100 Best Films, The 100 Worst Pop Songs
In India and Israel, 100 is the police telephone number.
In United Kingdom, 100 is the operator telephone number
The year AD 100 or 100 BC.
Hundred Days, aka the Waterloo Campaign
The number of the first folder of photos in the DCIM folder created by a brand-new digital camera (or after a change of memory card if the camera is set to auto-reset numbering).
The number of poems in the Japanese poetry anthology Hyakunin Isshu.

The alphabet has often been described as an arbitrary collection of symbols representing an arbitrary collection of sounds. Its order is equally random. The origins of the earliest alphabets, which were probably created around 4,000 years ago, are quite murky. The earliest form of the alphabet was invented by the Semitic peoples living in Egypt. This original alphabet eventually gave rise to written Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and the modern Roman languages.

The alphabet developed much out of laziness. Early pictograms required readers and writers to memorize hundreds of specific images representing words and ideas. The alphabet, on the other hand, was a kind of phonetic shorthand in which thirty basic sounds could be strung together to form words.

Egyptian hieroglyphics used both pictograms and phonemes (symbols that represent sounds). The first phonemes were based on pictograms -- for example, the symbol representing house, or "beth" in spoken Semitic, eventually became the letter "B."

So, while we can't give you an exact reason for the order, we can give you one fun (if rather obvious) fact you may not have realized -- the word "alphabet" comes from "alpha" and "beta," the first two words in the Greek alphabet.

I sniffed around the Web, taking little bites of information from various sites. Eventually, I came up with what we hope is a satisfactory answer, although there are some Indian scientists out there who might argue with my conclusion.
Chile peppers are measured in Scoville Heat Units, named after pharmacist Wilbur Scoville who invented a scale to measure the heat of peppers. Each unit is actually a measure of capsaicin (the chemical responsible for a pepper's heat).

I found several sources that claimed a 1994 red savina habañero from GNS Spices was the hottest pepper ever tested, measuring in at an amazing 577,000 Scoville Units! However, scientists in India claim they grew the hottest chile in the world in the northeastern hills of Assam, a variety called Naga Jolokia. This pepper was tested and found to have 855,000 Scoville Units, though the methods used have been called into question.

I went to the home page of Fiery-Foods.com and found my way to a heat scale. The scale was compiled by Dave DeWitt, the site's creator, with the help of Dr. Ben Villalon of the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station and Dr. Paul W. Bosland of New Mexico State University's Department of Agronomy and Horticulture. They claim it's the most up-to-date chart around.

Many factors affect the Scoville Unit measurement of a pepper, including the genetic background of the plant, the soil it's grown in, the temperature, the fertilizer used, and the watering practices. The various charts and scales should not be considered definitive heat levels for particular varieties. It's quite possible to pick up a few jalapeños at the local market and have one be mild and another be
rip-roaring hot.

We hear a lot about it lately, with the bird flu crisis, but what exactly is a Pandemic?

A pandemic, or global epidemic, is an outbreak of an infectious disease that affects people over an extensive geographical area (from Greek pan all + demos people).

Common killers and pandemics
According to the World Health Organization, a pandemic can start when three conditions have been met:

the emergence of a disease new to the population
the agent infects humans, causing serious illness
the agent spreads easily and sustainably among humans.

A disease or condition is not a pandemic specifically because it kills a large number of people. For example, the class of diseases known as cancer is responsible for a large number of deaths. But the deaths and disabilities due to cancer are not considered a pandemic because the condition is not infectious (although certain infectious agents are known to increase cancer risk).


Pandemics through history
There have been a number of significant pandemics in human history, generally zoonoses that came about with domestication of animals - such as influenza and tuberculosis. There have been a number of particularly significant epidemics that deserve mention above the 'mere' destruction of cities.


Concerns about possible future pandemics
Diseases that may possibly attain pandemic proportions include Lassa fever, Rift Valley fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus and Bolivian hemorrhagic fever. As of 2004, however, emergences of these diseases into the human population in recent years has shown their virulence is so high they have burned out in geographically confined areas. Thus their effect on humans is currently limited.

HIV - the virus that causes AIDS - can be considered a global pandemic but it is currently most extensive in southern and eastern Africa. It is restricted to a small proportion of the population in other countries, and is only spreading slowly in those countries. If there were to be a true destruction-of-life pandemic it would be likely to be similar to HIV, i.e. a constantly evolving disease.

Antibiotic-resistant superbugs may also revive diseases previously regarded as 'conquered'.

In 2003, there were concerns that SARS, a new highly contagious form of pneumonia, might become pandemic.

There is also a historical record of Influenza pandemics of varying severity at 20-40 year intervals. In February 2004, avian influenza virus was detected in pigs in Vietnam, increasing fears of the emergence of new variant strains. It is feared that if the avian influenza virus combines with a human influenza virus (in a pig or a
human), the new subtype created could be both highly contagious and highly lethal in humans. Such a subtype could cause a global influenza pandemic, similar to the Spanish Flu, or the lower mortality pandemics the Asian Flu and the Hong Kong Flu.

In November 2004 the director for the western region of the World Health Organization said that an influenza pandemic was inevitable and called for urgent plans to combat the virus.

In May 2005, scientists urgently call nations to prepare for a global influenza pandemic that could strike as much as 20% of the world's population.

In October 2005, cases of the Avian flu (the deadly strain H5N1) were identified in Turkey. EU Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou said: "We have received now confirmation that the virus found in Turkey is an avian flu H5N1 virus. There is a direct relationship with viruses found in Russia, Mongolia and China." Cases of bird flu were also identified shortly thereafter in bordering Romania, and then Greece.
Possible cases of the virus have also been found in Croatia, Bulgaria and in the United Kingdom. However, by the end of October only 67 people had died as a result of H5N1 which was atypical of previous influenza pandemics.

Fax (short for facsimile - from Latin "fac simile", "make similar",
i.e. "make a copy" - or telefacsimile) is a telecommunications technology used to transfer copies of documents, especially using affordable devices operating over the telephone network. The words telecopy and telefax are also used as synonyms.

Overview
A fax machine is essentially an image scanner, a modem, and a computer printer combined into a highly specialized package. The scanner converts the content of a physical document into a digital image, the modem sends the image data over a phone line, and the printer at the other end makes a duplicate of the original document.

Obviously, a very high-quality fax machine with some additional electronics can connect to a computer, and can be used to scan documents into a computer, to print documents from the computer, and to make photocopies. Such high-end devices are called multifunction printers and cost more than fax machines.

Modern fax technology became feasible only in the mid-1970s as the sophistication and cost of the three underlying technologies improved to a reasonable level. Fax machines first became popular in Japan, where they had an clear advantage over competing technologies like telex; it is faster to write Japanese ideographs than to type them. Over time, they gradually became affordable and were very popular around the world by the mid-1980s.

However, although most businesses still maintain some kind of fax capability, the technology appears increasingly dated in the world of the Internet.

The most basic fax mode transfers black and white only. The original page is scanned in a resolution of 1728 pixels/line and 1145 lines/page (A4). The resulting raw data is compressed using a modified Huffman code optimized for written text, achieving average compression factors of around 20. Typically a page needs 10 s for transmission, instead of about 3 minutes for the same uncompressed raw data of
1728×1145 bits at a speed of 9600 bit/s. The compression method uses a Huffman codebook for run lengths of black and white runs in a single scanned line, and it also uses the fact that two adjacent scanlines are usually quite similar, saving bandwidth by encoding only the differences.


History
Scottish inventor Alexander Bain is often credited with the first fax patent in 1843. He used his knowledge of electric clock pendulums to produce a back-and-forth line-by-line scanning mechanism.

In 1861 the first fax machine, Pantelegraph, was sold by Giovanni Casselli - before even the invention of workable telephones.

As a designer for the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), in 1924, Richard H. Ranger invented the wireless photoradiogram, or transoceanic radio facsimile, the forerunner of today's "Fax" machines. A photograph of President Calvin Coolidge sent from New York to London in November 1924 became the first photo picture reproduced
by transoceanic radio facsimile. Commercial use of Ranger's product began two years later. Radio fax is still in common use today for transmitting weather charts and information.

An early method for facsimile transmission, the Hellschreiber, was invented in 1929 by Rudolf Hell, a pioneer in mechanical image scanning and transmission.

In 1985 Dr Hank Magnuski, founder of GammaLink, produced the first computer fax board, called GammaFax.

In the old days, building bridges required the sinking of many large rocks. Not the most elegant construction technique, maybe, but certainly quite effective. The Romans built bridges this way over 2,000 years ago that are still in use today, but most modern foundations for large bridges begin their lives as huge floating tanks.

During the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, laborers worked in pneumatic caissons, or huge airtight cylinders full of compressed air. Conditions inside the caissons were notoriously miserable; twenty men died from fires, explosions, and something called "Caisson Disease," which we now know as the bends. No-one knew much about the effect of air pressure on the human body back then, and the designer, Washington Roebling, was paralyzed for life.

In the 1930s, workers on the San Francisco Bay Bridge used giant submersible caissons as actual bridge foundations. Initially buoyant, these huge steel contraptions were towed out to the bay, then gradually filled with concrete and water, and sunk. By that time diving technology had improved, so individual divers, or "sand hogs," assisted in the process.

The same method is used today -- huge metal caissons weighing up to 30,000 tons are floated out to a designated spot and then sunk. For example, the foundations for the Tacoma Narrows Bridge were pumped with 12,000 tons of sea water.

According to the CIA World Factbook, as of July, 2005, there were approximately 6,446,131,400 people on the planet, and the death rate was approximately 8.78 deaths per 1,000 people a year. According to our nifty desktop calculator, that works out to roughly 56,597,034 people leaving us every year. That's about a 155,000 a day.Still, more people are being born than dying. The population growth rate is hovering around 1.14%, which doesn't seem like much, but last year that was (back to the calculator!) 73,485,898 more mouths to feed. As the Factbook succinctly puts it: "For the 21st century, the continued exponential growth in science and technology raises both hopes (e.g., advances in medicine) and fears (e.g., development of even more lethal weapons of war)."

The legal information resource ItsMyLife.com offers some interesting mortality statistics for the United States. Of the 2,400,000-plus Americans who die each year, over 45,000 are killed in transport accidents. The number of homicides, poisonings, and drunk driving fatalities are roughly the same, at around 17,000 each. Perhaps more surprisingly, a stunning 178,000 Americans die from medical or hospital error every year.

For more details, the National Center for Health Statistics offers a free report. The United Nations also offers a 2005 World Health Report. One of its key findings: this year almost 11 million children under the age of five will die from a preventable disease.

A Regulus cruise missile was used for one attempt to deliver mail.Rocket mail is the delivery of mail by rocket or missile. The rocket would land by deploying an internal parachute upon arrival. It has been attempted by various organisations in many different countries, with varying levels of success. It has never been seen as being a viable option for delivering mail, due to the cost of the schemes and numerous failures.

The collection of postage stamps used for (and depicting) rocket mail is a specialist branch of aerophilately.


Gerhard Zucker
In the 1930s, German Gerhard Zucker experimented with powder rockets similar to fireworks. Between 1931 and 1933, he travelled throughout Germany displaying his rocket and claiming that it could be used to deliver mail.

After moving to the United Kingdom, Zucker attempted to convince the General Post Office that postal delivery by rocket was viable. On 31 July 1934 a rocket was launched over a 1600-metre flight path between the Hebridean islands of Harris and Scarp in Scotland. Around 1.07 m long with a diameter of 18 cm, the fuselage was packed with 1,200 envelopes. Unfortunately for Zucker, the rocket exploded and destroyed most of its cargo.

Stephen Smith
Stephen Smith, a Secretary of the Indian Airmail Society, combined his work with his interest in rocketry. His first launch was on 30 September 1934, and he experimented with 270 more by 4 December 1944. 80 of these contained mail, and his achievements include the first successful rocket mail sent over a river and the first rocket to carry a parcel.

The Oriental Fireworks Company supplied Smith with 16 rockets between 23 March 1935 and 29 June 1935. Between them, these "Silver Jubilee" flights carried over a thousand covers.

In 1992 the Indian government issued a stamp to celebrate the centenary of Smith's birth, calling him "the originator of rocket mail in India".


United States Postal Service
The first successful delivery of mail by a rocket in the United States was made on 23 February 1936, when two rockets that were launched from the New Jersey shore of Greenwood Lake landed on the New York shore, some 300 metres away.

In 1959 the U.S. Navy submarine USS Barbero assisted the United States Postal Service (USPS) in its search for faster, more efficient forms of mail transportation with the first and only delivery of "Missile Mail". Shortly before noon on 8 June 1959, Barbero fired a Regulus cruise missile — its nuclear warhead having earlier been replaced by two official USPS mail containers — at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station in Mayport, Florida. Twenty-two minutes later, the missile struck its
target.


USS Barbero first day commemorative cover. The return address is the Postmaster General.The USPS had officially established a branch post office on Barbero and delivered some 3000 pieces of mail to it before Barbero left Norfolk, Virginia. The mail consisted entirely of commemorative postal covers addressed to President of the United States Dwight Eisenhower, other government officials, the Postmasters General of all members of the Universal Postal Union, and so on. They contained letters from United States Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield. Their postage (four cents domestic, eight cents international) had been cancelled "USS Barbero Jun 8 9.30am 1959" before the boat put to sea. In Mayport, the Regulus was opened and the
mail forwarded to the post office in Jacksonville, Florida, for further sorting and routing.

Upon witnessing the missile's landing, Summerfield stated, "This peacetime employment of a guided missile for the important and practical purpose of carrying mail, is the first known official use of missiles by any Post Office Department of any nation." Summerfield proclaimed the event to be "of historic significance to the peoples of the entire world", and predicted that "before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail."


Russian submarine launches
Since the end of the Cold War, Russia has made a few experimental rocket mail launches from nuclear submarines in the Sea of Okhotsk toward western Russia, using now-surplus missiles.


Reusable launch vehicles
Some think that rocket mail, or at least ultra-elite business package delivery, may become commercially viable with the developmemt of fully reusable launch systems, particularly single-stage to orbit vehicles. Such systems would allow package delivery anywhere in the world in 30-45 minutes. This idea has been forwarded by aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin of Mars Society fame, and was the original business plan behind Pioneer Rocketplane (now Rocketplane Limited, Inc.), which he co-founded. Zubrin has since left the company, which is now focused on pursuing a somewhat more conventional space tourism strategy. The potential of package delivery with reusable launch vehicles is discussed in Zubrin's book Entering Space.


References
^ http://www.wikipedia.org
^ Wade, Mark. (28 March 2005) "Zucker Rocket" at Encyclopedia
Astronautica. Accessed 4 September 2005.
^ "Stephen Smith" at King George V Silver Jubilee. Accessed 5 September 2005.
^ "Indian Rocket Mail Detail" at King George V Silver Jubilee.
Accessed 5 September 2005.
^ "100 Years of Sustained Power Flight History" at Federal Aviation
Administration site. Accessed 5 September 2005.
^ "ARS Chronology" at Encyclopedia Astronautica. Accessed 5 September 2005.

How does the nozzle on the fuel pump know when to shut off to avoid
overfilling the vehicle?

As How Things Work from the University of Virginia explains, gasoline nozzles have a small hole at the end that becomes blocked when gasoline rises to the top of the tank. Once this happens, the pressure drops inside a valve system built into the pump. This cuts off the gas flow. If you want the nitty-gritty details, check out The Straight Dope. And if you don't believe me, check the end of the gas pump the next time you're at the station. You should be able to see the valve system hole.

I also found a suggestion from Dr. Ezra of Cornell University. He states the valve system is sensitive to air pressure within the tank, which increases as the tank fills with gas. Dr. Ezra, I respect your diploma, but this is simply not true.

And as to the rumors that cell phones can start gas station fires, Engadget tells us that it just ain't so. Sadly, this hasn't stopped a Connecticut state senator from trying to introduce a bill requiring drivers to hang up their cell phones before filling their tank. Yeesh.

Despite the repeated warnings of your mother, sitting too close to the TV will not damage your eyes. Prior to 1968 or so some sets emitted excessive X-rays, but that problem has now been eliminated. So no damaging rays are actually given off from the set that can hurt you. However, sitting too close to the TV could strain your eyes. Some eye doctors recommend that you sit no closer than five feet from the TV screen, but this precaution is merely to prevent eye fatigue. There are some people who believe that eyestrain can lead to myopia, or nearsightedness, and a few animal studies seem to support this theory, but there is little conclusive evidence.

Several other sources confirmed that sitting smack dab in front of the TV does not damage your eyes. According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, kids, the usual culprits, can focus up close better than adults, so they often develop the habit of sitting right in front of the television. However, sitting too close to the TV may indicate that your child needs glasses.

While TV may not ruin your eyes, the jury is still out as to its effects on your brain.

The standard eye chart is called the Snellen Chart, after the Dutch ophthalmologist Herman Snellen (1834-1908). Snellen developed the chart in 1862; it measures visual acuity, or the ability to see from a fixed distance.

Why the big "E?" That's how Snellen designed the original, and having a standard letter on top helps to determine the chart's size and the distance it should be from the patient. However, we found several variations of the Snellen chart: the letter "A" on top, "K V D" on top, as well as the letter "F."

The size of the letters relative to each other is very important. Snellen letters, also known as optotypes, grow progressively smaller according to a constant ratio. The eighth row of letters is usually the 20/20 line. Someone with 20/20 vision has "normal" vision (though 61% of Americans wear corrective lenses), while someone with 20/40 vision can only see at twenty feet what a normal person can see from
forty feet.

Some charts use a series of "Es" facing different directions; the objective is to identify the directions of the letters. This is a popular test for children or people who can't read.

It's true -- female honeybees die after they sting. Their stingers are actually ovipositors, tubular structures extending from the abdomen that sometimes contain eggs. When the barbed stinger is left inside the victim, the honeybee mortally tears her abdomen in the process. Alas, she dies.

Note, however, that only female honeybees die after stinging. Fortunately, honeybees are relatively docile, and only commit suicidal acts when provoked. And they only die if they sting a mammal, because of the thickness of our skin. They can sting other insects with impunity.

The mechanics of bee-stinging are fascinating. As Dr. Universe notes, a valve-and-piston motion causes the stinger to both sink itself into your skin, as well as pump venom through the tiny lancets. Also, an "alarm pheromone" secreted at the base of the stinger causes other bees in the vicinity to get riled up.

Fortunately, only about one out of a hundred people are allergic to bee stings, but allergic reactions can be very serious. Yahoo! Health suggests that if you are bit, don't squeeze the bite -- you'll just pump more venom into your system. Try gently scraping off the stinger with a butter knife or a credit card. Of course, if it really hurts, seek medical help.

Who was the mysterious matron of the green apple? Cathy's Apple Page states Granny Smith was an Australian woman who stumbled on her famous variety after throwing out a bunch of apples in the mid-19th century. As the story goes, from this pile of bad apples a young tree sprung, bearing a light green fruit that was tart but not excessively sour. The new strain of apple could also withstand lengthy bouts of storage and shipping.

The story is true, mostly. The city of Ryde in New South Wales, Australia, hosts her official biography. Born in 1799 in Sussex, England, Maria Ann Sherwood emigrated with her husband Thomas Smith to Australia in 1838 to plant orchards in the new Australian colony.

Granny Smith developed her famous fruit late in life. Her distinctive green apple came from a seedling tree that had grown from the remains of "some French crab apples grown in Tasmania." She never lived to see its success. In 1870, just two years before folks began cultivating her new seedling tree, she passed away. Granny Smith apples won first prize in a local agricultural fair in 1891, and five years later they were being shipped around the world.

That sweet red blotch inside a tart green olive has always been a puzzler.
To answer part one of the question, I headed straight for Epicurious.com, where I found the following definition:


pimiento; pimento A large, red, heart-shaped sweet pepper that measures 3 to 4 inches long and 2 to 3 inches wide. The flesh of the pimiento (the Spanish word for "pepper") is sweet, succulent and more aromatic than that of the red bell pepper... Pimientos are the familiar red stuffing found in green olives. Armed with a new appreciation for sweet peppers, I entered "olive + pimento" and "olive history" in the Google search box, hoping to answer the second part of the question. I couldn't find a specific reason as to where or why the practice of stuffing olives with pimentos started, but I did find some interesting facts about olives that may hint at a reason.

First, Spain leads the world in olive production, followed by Italy and Portugal. Since "pimento" is a Spanish word, I'm guessing maybe they started the pimento practice. That answers the where, now for the why.

All freshly picked olives, no matter how ripe, have a vile, intensely bitter taste. In order to make them palatable, they must be pickled. Since pimentos are sweet and indigenous to the Mediterranean, it's easy to imagine an innovative farmer or chef way back when thinking they would make the perfect neutralizer to the olive's natural
acidity. After all, aren't the best dishes created with ingredients most readily available?

While this is all speculation, if you visited a Spanish tapas bar and sampled a variety of olive offerings, you'd see my point. So pour yourself a martini and puzzle no more.