I did not know that yesterday!

Cops love asking motorists if they know how fast they were going. We're not sure why. Thanks to their radar guns, cops already know the answer.

Despite all the rhetorical questions it's spawned, the radar gun remains one of the more interesting developments in traffic enforcement. To learn how it works, we consulted the folks at HowStuffWorks.

They explain that speed guns measure "the round-trip time for light to reach a car and reflect back" after a cop shoots a beam at a speeding car. "If the gun takes 1,000 samples per second," it's able to compare the change in distance between the samples. Armed with that information, it can then calculate the car's speed.

Because the radar gun takes so many samples per second, the results are usually very accurate. We suppose that's a good thing, but it does make appealing a ticket much more difficult.

Source: ask.yahoo.com

It seems like everyone has a different answer for this one, mainly because some hold the definition of "novel" to one intact book and not a series of books with a continuing story.

The "Guinness Book of World Records" says that Marcel Proust's "� la recherche du temps perdu" ("Remembrance of Things Past" or "In Search of Lost Time") holds the world record for the longest novel, at approximately 9,609,000 characters. But the novel is presented in multiple volumes, so sticklers don't always agree with Guinness.

"A Suitable Boy" by Vikram Seth has 1,349 pages and approximately 3,374,000 characters. It's claimed to be the "longest single volume novel ever published" in English. Before Seth's novel, others turned to Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa" as the longest novel with over a million words (and about 5,500,000 characters). This is where all the character, word, and volume counts blur and we begin to get a headache
-- because sometimes "Clarissa" is published as one intact book, and sometimes it's in volumes.

For simplicity's sake, we'll go with Proust.

Source: ask.yahoo.com

Bios from allmusic and Wikipedia tell the ludicrious but tragic tale of Milli Vanilli. In the late '80s, German music producer Frank Farian saw gold in the "exotic looks" of two "aspiring models and former breakdancers," Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan. He hired them to front an album of Euro dance/rap songs on which they didn't sing, but lip-synced in live appearances. The public was kept in the dark. The
album, "Girl You Know It's True," featured three number-one hits, "despite near-universal critical distaste."

Even as rumors of the truth emerged, Milli Vanilli won a 1990 Grammy for Best New Artist. Pilatus and Morvan lobbied to sing on the next production, but producer Farian came clean before that could happen. An uproar ensued, the duo's Grammy was rescinded, and a class-action suit was filed against Arista Records, which fired the group and dropped the album from its catalog.

Pilatus took the reversal of fortune hard, slashing his wrist and threatening suicide. The duo re-formed and recorded as Rob and Fab in 1993, but the album sold a paltry 2,000 copies. In 1996, Pilatus was sentenced to several months in jail for various offenses, including assault. In 1998, he was found in a Frankfurt hotel room, dead from mixing pills and alcohol. Morvan fared better, becoming a studio
musician, Los Angeles DJ, and solo artist. A different take on the Milli Vanilli saga can be found on his web site. A film about Milli Vanilli is in the works.

Source: ask.yahoo.com