[flitton]

The sharp eyed among you will see that I have edited this. This was because some of it was of British interest only and some was just dull statistics. I hope I've weeded out the more interesting titbits, though some of it will be well known to a US audience.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

UK scientists have developed a clock which ticks 1,000,000 billion times a second. Technically that's a quadrillion.

In the UK one billion = 1,000,000,000,000, (10^12) in the US, 1,000,000,000 (10^9). In the US, one trillion = 10^12 in the UK, 10^18. In the US one quadrillion = 10^15, in the UK 10^24.

There seems to be an inconsistency here. In the US, incrementing the prefix part of -llion seems to mean three orders of magnitude, in the UK six. Therefore is, a trillion(US) = 10^3 x billion(US), while a trillion(UK) = 10^6 x billion(UK). And so forth for quadrillion, quintillion, etc. Therefore, 1,000,000 billion(UK) would be either be a trillion(UK) or 1,000,000 billion(US) would be a quadrillion(US).

I need to know, I might want to buy one of those clocks, since I'm often late and if I had a clock with one 10^-15 second resolution I might be OK, I really need one with 10^-24 second resolution.

[Polybius]

Farmers plant their crops up to three weeks earlier than 15 years ago. In the 1960s, temperatures from January to March averaged 4.2C; it rose to 5.6C in the 1990s.

End world hunger. Support global warming.

[Swordmaker]

94. A cruise ship can put more than 130,000 litres of sewage into the sea each day.

Who could have believed that two totally unrelated FreeRepublic Threads could actually be related! This explains a new California law.

[Oztrich Boy]

101. John Kerry served in Vietnam