Apple sold 5.3 million iPods in the first quarter of 2005. They've also sold more than 500 million songs via their iTunes store as of today.

Apples are a distant second at 16.7 pounds/person/year.

The German sauna competition uses the same rules: participants sit in 110-degree heat, with water poured on the stove every 30 seconds to create more steam. Kramp's time falls short of the almost 12 minutes set by Finn Leo Pusa to win last year's international championship in Heinola, Finland.

Major League Baseball at one point was restricted to only white players. After much progress there were 7 Latin American players in the All Star game. That number has skyrocketed and this year there are 24 (from Cuba, Curacao, Dominican Republic, Panama, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela).

Still just the Great "American" Pastime?

The current BMW logo, introduced in 1920, was based on the circular design of a white aircraft propeller on a blue background.

It turns out that you can only tell which direction a sound is coming from because it arrives at your two ears at slightly different times. In general, our ears can hear from about 20Hz-20,000Hz (cycles/second) -- lower the Hertz, the lower the pitch. The formula w = f / v gives you the wavelength of a sound (where f is the frequency, w is the wavelength, and v is the velocity of sound [approx 1100 ft/sec]).

By plugging in a wavelength of about a foot (the distance between your ears) you arrive at a lower limit wavelength of 1,100 Hz. So if a sound is lower than 1,100 Hz, you can't really tell where it's coming from.

This brings up the twin hazards of wife carrying: (1) Run too hard and you risk throwing out your back and (2) Finish too slowly and you risk implying your wife is fat.

Here are some of the The Top 10 Things Overheard at the World Wife Carrying Championship:
7. "No, you can't have second helpings."
2. "No spurs! No spurs!"
See the rest

There is no fixed air temperature for frosty breath. Exhaled air has relatively high amounts of moisture from our lungs. When this warm, moist air is chilled, the moisture condenses. The exhaled air is chilled below its saturation temperature, or dew point. For big dramatic clouds of frosty breath, it helps to have humid air. Why? This stops the condensation cloud from evaporating too quickly. The water droplets will last longer in moist air, because the air is already fairly saturated.

Barnes and Noble will sell about 50,000 copies in the first 24 hours -- more than 99% of books sell in their lifetime. The book's publisher, Scholastic, has announced a first printing of 10.8 million copies -- 7 times the first run of Bill Clinton's "My Life".

In 1984, when "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" was released, the MPAA didn't think the film deserved an "R" rating, but parents were shocked at the violence and disturbing images in the film. So they created a rating between "PG" and "R" -- "PG-13"!

In the 1920s, radio was booming, and broadcasters wanted to include advertisers to increase their station's profits. Soon, all the networks had serials aimed at women, and companies selling cleaners and food products rushed to sponsor the shows. For example, Proctor & Gamble's Oxydol soap powder sponsored a popular serial drama in 1933. By 1939 the press started calling the shows "soap operas" because so many were sponsored by soap manufacturers.

The nearly 9-foot-long Mekong giant catfish was landed May 1 by villagers in Chiang Khong, a remote district in northern Thailand, and weighed by Thai fisheries department officials, said Zeb Hogan, who leads an international project to locate and study the world's largest freshwater fish species.