"Wi-Fi" doesn't actually stand for anything

 

People usually say Wi-Fi is a wireless fidelity, but that is wrong. The term "Wi-Fi" mean nothing, it was made up to sound catchy.

 

Wi-Fi Alliance founding member Phil Belanger shared the history of the term with Boing Boing back in 2005. Phil said, the reason that everyone hears about ‘Wireless Fidelity’ is some of my colleagues in the team were afraid. They did not understand branding or marketing. They could not imagine using the name ‘Wi-Fi’ without having some sort of literal explanation. So, we compromised and agreed to include the tag line ‘The Standard for Wireless Fidelity’ along with the name. This was a mistake and only served to confuse people and dilute the brand.

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Listen To 230 ft organ in Croatia that uses the sea to beautiful music

In the coastal city of Zadar, Croatia, a series of large marble steps descend into the Adriatic Sea. Pedestrians can stroll across the 230-foot sea-organ harnesses the energy of the winds and waters of the sea to create random but soothing and harmonized notes. The sea-organ, or “morske orgulje” as it’s know in Croatian, was designed by Croatian architect Nikola Basic and opened to the public in 2005.

Water and wind enter through holes at the bottom of the steps, where they are channeled into resonating chambers. The sounds from these chambers exit through holes along the highest steps. Each of the pipes is tuned to different musical chords. The sea and the wind blow air through the pipes, which comes out through whistle openings on the sidewalk.

Producing sounds a lot like those of a whale, the sea organ has become a popular lunch spot for locals and tourists since it was built in 2005, a calming place at which to appreciate the majesty of nature. The organ is a significant improvement to the Zadar coastline in Croatia, which was previously a long line of concrete having been bombed during World War II.

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Why Hurricanes and Cyclones Spin Counter clockwise in the Northern hemisphere and Clockwise in the Southern hemisphere

The direction of that spin depends on what hemisphere of the world the hurricane is brewing in. A hurricane's spin and the spin's direction are determined by a super-powerful phenomenon called the "Coriolis effect."

The particles heading away from the equator are traveling at higher speeds than the ones closer to the poles. Because the globe is spinning, air and water therefore don't follow a straight path north or south. Instead, anything traveling northward in the northern hemisphere gets pushed toward the right.

Particles traveling from the equator to the south experience a similar curve in the opposite direction. It effects things like wind, ocean currents, airplanes, missiles, but doesn’t effect toilets or sinks.”  (In case you were wondering, that would be better referred to as “ambient swishing.”)

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Why do jeans have that tiny pocket?

Ever wonder why there’s a teeny-tiny pocket above the regular ones in the front of your jeans. It’s a watch pocket, originally for men who wore pocket watches and needed a protective place to store them. Though, as Levi’s points out, the pocket has also served many other purposes over time, from condom storage to coin hoarding.

Levi Strauss, the man who invented jeans back in 1873 for the invention of that extra pocket. A blog post on Levi's website confirms this, saying that, early on, Strauss’s jeans were given a small pocket which was designed as “protection for pocket watches.” These are designed for cow boys.

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Why is “C” the default drive letter assigned to your computer hard disk instead of A or B?

Why is the default drive in MS-Windows computers the C drive? The drives beyond that one are labelled D, E, and so on. If you plug in USB drives, they get F and G. So yeah, what about A and B?

Early PCs didn’t usually come with internal mass-storage devices due to the expense. Instead, they generally had “floppy” disk reader which used to read 5 1/4″ floppy disks, initially labeled as “A” in MS-DOS and certain other operating systems. Some systems came with two such floppy disk drives necessitating the need for a “B”.

When hard disk drives became standard in most PCs in the later 1980s, since the first two letters were already commonly used for these floppy drives, they logically labeled the third storage device “C”. Times changed and eventually, floppy disk drives were entirely removed from computers, but somehow the label ‘C’ stuck with hard disk drives. In fact, most Windows computers come with the first partition labelled as ‘Local Disk C:’ for that same reason.

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Why is there bumps on the F and J keyboard keys?

The raised bumps on the ‘F’ and ‘J’ keys are placed there for proper position of fingers while typing. For ease of use of the keyboard, these keys have ridges on them so that if you are speed-typing without looking at the keyboard a lot, then the ridges will help you position your fingers if in case you fly off the handle.

For the correct typing position, the ridges are placed on those two keys so that you place your index fingers on them.

Positioning your left index finger on the ‘F’ key and your right index finger on the ‘J’ key leaves the other three fingers of your left hand to rest on the ‘D,’ ‘S,’ and ‘A’ keys while the remaining fingers of your right hand rest on the ‘K,’ ‘L,’ and ‘:/;’ (colon) keys. The thumbs of both hands should ideally rest on the space bar.

These improvements came to keyboards as a result of a patent filed by June E. Botich in 2002 and all keyboards manufactured after that contain the ridges.

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Rainbows do occur at night - Moonbow

Moonbows are similar to rainbows, but they are created by moonlight instead of direct sunlight.

Moonbows or lunar rainbows are rare natural atmospheric phenomena that occur when the Moon’s light is reflected and refracted off water droplets in the air.

Moonbows are rarer than rainbows because a variety of weather and astronomical conditions have to be just right for them to be created.

Water droplets must be present in the air in the opposite direction of the moon. Moonbows occur on the opposite side of the Moon and tend to look white to the human eye. This is because their colors are not bright enough to be perceived by the receptors in the human eye. It is possible, however, to view the colors in a moonbow using long exposure photography. The Moon has to be very low in the sky – no more than 42 degrees from the horizon. The Moon phase has to be a Full Moon or nearly full. The sky must be very dark for a moonbow to be observed – any bright light can obscure it.

Moonbows are more frequent in some locations around the world. Most of these locations tend to have waterfalls, which create layers of mist in the air. Some of these locations are the Yosemite National Park in California and Cumberland Falls State Resort Park in Kentucky, U.S.; Victoria Falls on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe; and Waimea in Hawaii, U.S.

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All Gmail users have two E-mail addresses

When you create a Gmail account, you actually get two email addresses – one is the regular @gmail.com address while the second email address has @googlemail.com in the domain.

                                       

That means if your email address in Gmail is something like abc@gmail.com, all email messages that are sent to abc@googlemail.com will also be delivered to your own Gmail account.

So whenever you will get any email to abc@googlemail.com it will get delivered to same account. So you can use abc@googlemail.com as a personal address like giving to your friends, relatives, using on personal visiting card, etc and abc@gmail.com you can use it for public places like your blog, website, etc.

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The dots on dominoes and dice are called "pips"

Pips are small but easily countable items. "Pip" has been used not only to denote the dots on dominoes, but also the dots on dice, as well as the marks on playing cards and sometimes as a synonym for "dot" in morse code.

The small, hard seeds of some fruit, such as those in an apple, orange, or lemon are also called "pips".

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Chocolate was once used as currency

Ancient Mesoamerican civilizations used to give the cacao tree an important place in society. The Mayans and the Aztecs used to use cocoa beans as currency. Crushed cocoa beans were used to make a bitter liquid called xocoatl. Only royalty and the best military warriors could gain access to the drink.

Chocolate, namely cocoa beans have been used for thousands of years. As early as 250 A.D., ancient civilizations of Mexico and South America used the cocoa bean. It was used as currency.

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