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  313 Woodside Place, Okotoks AB, Canada.   Phone: 403-471-6951  

Soft skills training (and more)

for Canadian business

"Useless triva" often isn't useless at all.

Sometimes it can help to focus our minds on life-lessons that are all around us if we look for them.  We have organised the trivia below into categories to help with that focus.

DISCLAIMER.  While we have not checked the accuracy of all this trivia, we have not included items that we suspect may not be true.  If you identify an item that is inaccurate or misleading, please feel free to tell us.  Email us here.

Language trivia

One of the goals of our soft skills training is to promote effective communication.  Attaining a high level of proficiency in the English language would be an excellent place to start!

• Winston Churchill  was born in a ladies' room during a dance.
  

• Abraham Lincoln was the only US president to be granted a patent.  He invented an hydraulic device to lift ships over shoals.
  

• Oprah Winfrey's first name is "Orpah" after a character in the Old Testament Book of Ruth.  Family and friends mispronounced it "Oprah", and it stuck.
  

• Albert's father suffered numerous business failures, and Albert himself seemed destined for failure.  A school teacher told him he "would never amount to anything", and he dropped out of school.  He became a draft dodger.  He tried to enter a technical college, but failed the entrance exam.  Albert's last name?  Einstein.
  

• As a child, William's favourite book (he was a voracious reader) was the encyclopedia.  In high school his computer lab privileges were suspended after he took advantage of software glitches to obtain free computer time from the computer service provider.  He was reinstated in return for fixing the software.  William's last name?  Gates.
  

• Calvin Coolidge refused to use the telephone while he was President. A man of few words, he once said, "If you don't say anything, you won't be called on to repeat it."
  

• Alfred Nobel's fortune, with which the Nobel Peace prize is funded, was made through Nobel's businesses manufacturing armaments, nitroglycerin and dynamite, which he invented.
  

• No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.
  

• "Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt"
  

• The words 'racecar", 'kayak' and "level" are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left. (They are palindromes).
  

• There are only four words in the English language which end in "dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
  

• There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: "abstemious" and "facetious."
  

The amazing world around us

The natural world is full of surprises.  The more we understand about its diversity, complexity and synergy, the more awe-struck we become.

Whether you hold the view (as I do) that this is evidence of a Supreme Creator, or that it all came together by random chance, we can both agree that this is ideed a wonderful world.

• Almonds are a member of the peach family.
  

• A snail can sleep for three years.
  

• An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
  

• In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
  

• It takes over 1,250,000 orchid seeds to weigh one gram.
  

• One ragweed plant can release over  
  1 billion grains of pollen.
  

Human beings

Inventions

• A quarter of all your bones are in your feet.
  

• Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
  

• Babies are born without kneecaps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.
  

• A 3 month old fetus has fingerprints
  

• On average we have about 100,000 hairs on our head.  We lose between 40 and 100 of them every day.
  

• Our blood makes a complete circuit of our body about once every 60 seconds
  

• There are more chickens than people in the world.
  

• Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
  

• If the population of China walked past you, 8 abreast, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.
  

• Every square inch of our body is home to about 32 million bacteria.
  

• Most adults have between 14 and18 square feet of skin.  That's up to 82,944,000,000 bacteria..........
  

• If you could pick off 100 bacteria a second 24 hours a day, it would take over 1,500 years to become bacteria-free.  Except, of course that they breed like rabbits (figuratively, not biologically!)
  

• 1,200,000 mosquito bites would completely drain your body of blood.  (Got DEET?)
  

• The largest cell in the human body is the ovum.  The smallest? The sperm.  One ovum cell weighs as much as 175,000 sperm cells.  (OK men, do you still think size matters?)
  

We are wonderfully made, from a brain that is infinitely more complex and functional than the world's best computers, down to the marvels of engineering we call our feet.

But did you know ..................

Is there no end to the ingenuity and inventiveness of the human mind?  Some inventions came about by long, tedious research and persistence in the face of failure.  And others were just happy accidents.  Either way, technology keeps marching onward.

• Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors
  

• The cruise liner, QE 2  moved only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burned.  (That's 0.00094697 mpg)
  

• The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.
  

• Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.
  

• The "WD" in WD40 stands for "water displacement".  The company tried 39 formulas for the product, none of which worked.  Then came the 40th formula ..........
  

The Environment

• The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.
  

• The largest hailstone ever recorded was 17.5 inches in diameter.
  

• The world's population has increased every year except in the years following 1347 - the start of the plague in Europe. 10% of all people ever born are alive today.
  

• Energy saved from one recycled aluminum can will operate a TV set for 3 hours, and is equivalent to half a can of gasoline
  

• Canada has 0.5% of the world's population, but 7% of its renewable water supply
  

• Greenhouse Gas Emmissions from  the energy sector by country:  Australia 1%; Canada (including oil sands) 2%; India 4%; Japan 4%; Eurasia 9%; Europe 17%; China 20%; USA 22%; Rest of the world 21%.  (US Energy Information Administration, 2005)
  

• Canada's Greenhouse Gas Emmissions by sector: Oil sands 5%; Other oil & gas 18%; Solvents & waste 4%; Buildings 10%; Agriculture 9%; Transportation 25%; Other industry 14%; Electricity & heat generation 16%.   (Environment Canada)
  

Can the actions of man affect the earth's climate?  There are different views on that issue, but one thing is certain.  We should treat the environment with respect and care .  We need to do all we can to preserve it for succeeding generations.

Computers

No invention has ever changed the world as dramatically and suddenly as the computer.  In 50 years or less it has changed, and arguably enriched the lives of families the world.over.

• "Typewriter" is the longest word that can be made using the letters on only one row of the keyboard
  

• "Stewardesses" is the longest word typed with only the left hand , and "lollipop" is the longest word typed with your right hand.
  

• The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing.
  

• The Commodore 64, one of the first home computers was named for it's then ground-breaking 64KB of memory.  Between 12.5 and 17 million units were sold, and 10,000 software titles were developed for it.
  

• In 1945 a computer at Harvard malfunctioned and scientist Grace Hopper traced the cause to a moth in one of the circuits. Ever since, when something goes wrong with a computer it is said to have a bug in it.
  

Astronomy and Time

• Sunlight takes 8 minutes 20 seconds to reach Earth.  Light from the  most distant star that we know about takes over 1 billion years.
  

• A light year is the distance light travels in 1 year, or 9,454,254,955,488 kilometres or 5,874,601,673,407 miles.  The distance from the sun to the earth is 0.0000158124 light years
  

• February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.
  

• The International Space Station weighs 500 tons and is the size of a football field.
  

• In the northern hemisphere we can see about 5,000 stars without a telescope.
  

• In our Milky Way galaxy there are between 100 and 300 billion stars.  How many galaxies are there?  Astronomers don't know, but they estimate the number at hundreds of billions. 
  

Famous People

The purpose of language is to comunicate information , ideas, feelings and much more.  Without a knowledge of spelling, grammar and style, our communication will lack clarity.

• "Abstemious" means moderate in the consumption of food or alcohol.  (So yes, it is a word.)
  

• The word "set" has the highest number of separate definitions in the English Language (192 definitions according to the Oxford English Dictionary.)
  

• The sentence: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter of the alphabet.
  

• "Ough" can be pronounced in eight different ways. The following sentence contains them all: "A rough-coated, dough-faced ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough, coughing and hiccoughing thoughtfully.
  

• All the ants in Africa weigh more than all the elephants.
  

• A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
  

• A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.
  

• A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
  

• A notch in a tree will remain the same distance from the ground as the tree grows.
  

Time and space are linked.  Astronomy is the basis for our year, month and day.  In space, even distance is measured in light years.

Generally we know about famous people because of the things that made them famous.  But often it is the "other side of the story" that we find intriguing.

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