Sorry about the Silence, how about some tea?

Sorry about the silence these past few days, I hope my followers/followees can forgive me, came down with a mystery illness that's knocked me cold the past 3 days. But on with show, I'm back, here with my cup of tea. Well, with the news front being strangely un-interesting, let's look into Britain's favourite hot beverage:

Tea

1/. The British population drink 165 million cups daily or 60.2 billion per year.
Taking the average tea bag to be 3.5g (warning: dodgy science inbound, I weighed a tetley tea bag pre-dunk just for this), that equates to 557.5kg of tea wrapped in thin paper bags a day. That's about err... Half a small car? A baby elephant's worth? Okay, that's not as impressive as I'd hoped to be. But it's still a shit load of tea.
NB: That's >99% black tea by the way.


2/. We (the Brits) care about tea so much, we started a war about it.
Okay, so I'm not really proud about this one, and it's a tenuous link anyway, but I'm referring to the Opium Wars. (warning: dodgy history inbound) In a nut shell, the East India Trading Company (the British trading force at the time) were buying Silk, Porcelain and Tea from the Chinese. To fund this spending spree the British imported Opium, and sold it to smugglers. The Chinese weren't too happy about this, and so restricted trading and forced the Opium traders to turn over their stock. As a result, the British decided to take control of all the ports and forcefully negotiate. So there. Don't mess with our tea imports.
PS: This is all summed up in the highly addictive game High Tea (flash game, free to play, probably not historically accurate).


3/. Spiders freak out on caffeine.
See the comparison picture of a spiders web:

Sorry again about the silence, I'll be catching up with all my fellow bloggers in the next day or two, and there'll be another blog post on Saturday at latest.

Amazing Human Feats (Physical)

I was reading about the London Marathon on the BBC News website, and there was an article discussing whether the 2-hour marathon time will ever be broken. This got me thinking... What other amazing physical feats have humans accomplished?

1/. Bruce Lee could snatch a dime off a person's open palm before they could close it, and leave a penny behind.
Bruce Lee was one of the first people I thought of, and someone who's always fascinated me. This is quite simply an amazing thing to think about. Lee was known for his phenomenal combination of speed and strength. Hell, when filming him they had to use 32fps instead of the usual 24 because he was too damn fast.

2/. Usain Bolt holds the current World Record for the fastest 100m sprint: 9.58s.
This is ridiculous. His average speed is 23.35mph. Average. From rest. I just can't bend my head around the statistics of this. Just look around you, find something about 5m away (a door is 2m, use that as a guide). In under half a second, he can run that distance. O_O

3/. Martin Strel has swam 313.5 miles (or 504.5km) of the Danube in 84 hours and 10 minutes.
That's continuous swimming, no stopping for anything. That's 3.5 days. I get a tired if I have to run to the shop 500m down the road, or if I stay up till the early hours finishing some work.

4/. Wu Zuyou holds the fastest time for blowing up a balloon with the eye.
Okay, that last one's no so much of an amazing feat, but it's damn impressive. The Guinness World Records doesn't have the actual time, but it goes on to explain the balloon was inflated by "blowing" air through the tear ducts, and the balloon was 16.1cm in diameter. I've been looking for a video for hours of this... Must See D:


Inspiring or depressing? Do you know of any other impressive feats of mankind? Can you do anything special yourself?

Grand National: Racing, Jockeys and... Robots?

So, today's the day of the Grand National here in the UK: a "world-famous National Hunt horse race which is held annually at Aintree Racecourse near Liverpool, England". the perilous course, leads to some quite unexpected results, and within the British public there is a culture of many people placing bets on a wide variety of horses.

- In 1928, only 2 horses finished the race, the fewest ever recorded

- 5 horses have won with odds of 100/1: Tipperary Tim (1928), Gregalach (1929), Caughoo (1947), Foinavon (1967) & Mon Mome (2009)

- It is the most valuable National Hunt event in Britain, offering a total prize fund of £950,000 in 2011

- The word jockey is by origin a diminutive of "jock", the Northern Englishor Scots colloquial equivalent of the first name "John," which is also used generically for "boy, or fellow"

- Jockey insurance premiums are one of the highest of all professional sports, not surprising as between 1993 and 1996, 6,545 injuries occurred during official races for an injury rate of 606 per 1,000 jockey years.

- In Australia race riding is regarded as being the second most deadly job, after offshore fishing

- Robot jockeys are replacing human jockeys in camel racing. In Saudi Arabia, Bahrain,United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, small children were often used. However, to combat this and the human rights abuses they often suffer, child jockeys are slowly being banned in favour of robot equivalents:

Just me or do they look like cordless drills?

Did you place a bet on the Grand National? Would you be a jockey given the right physical attributes? Would you let your camel be ridden by a cordless drill?