This Is The Way a Bikini Explodes

A bikini is usually a women's abbreviated two-piece swimsuit with a bra top for the chest and panties cut below the navel.

photo credit pixabay.com 

Where does the name come from?

The name for the bikini design was coined in 1946 by Parisian engineer Louis Réard, the designer of the bikini. He named the swimsuit after Bikini Atoll, where testing on the atomic bomb was taking place.

Various explanations for the swimsuit name have been suggested, none convincing enough. Perhaps, the best explanation is the analogy of the explosive force of the bomb and the impact that women wearing this world's smallest bathing suit make on men.

Dig In

On 1 July 1946, the United States conducted the first post-war test of an atomic weapon at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Bikini was the site for numerous nuclear weapons tests through 1958. Four days after this first test, fashion designer Jacques Heim exhibited a two-piece swimsuit which he dubbed the bikini in an attempt to ride the publicity wave created by the well-publicized detonation. Months earlier, Heim had marketed another two-piece swimsuit that he named the Atome, because it was so small. Heim did not invent the style of suit, however; skimpy two-piece bathing suits had been in existence since at least the 1930s.

[source: wordorigins & wikipedia]

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Fried Eggs: Help Yourself!

Can You Fry an Egg on the Sidewalk If It’s Very Warm Outside?

photo credit Jen

Sort of. But you’d need a little help from something besides the sun. To cook an egg, you need pretty high heat. The white of an egg turns solid between 62 and 65°C. The yolk needs a little higher temperature: between 65 and 70°C.

On a very hot day, the outside temperature might reach 43°C. But even then, a sidewalk wouldn’t get hot enough to cook an egg. Concrete - the material usually used to make sidewalks - gets hot in the sun. But it doesn’t get that hot. 

Still, there are some tricks you can use to cook an egg on a sidewalk. Materials such as metal and glass conduct heat. That means heat moves through them—and they get hotter. You could hold a piece of glass or metal over your egg. Try a magnifying glass or a mirror. If you hold the glass at the right angle, you can catch some of the sun’s heat and conduct it over your egg.

The question is - considering how dirty a sidewalk can be, would you eat it?

Did You Know?

Oatman, Arizona, hosts a sidewalk egg-frying contest every Fourth of July. The only rule is that you can’t use any heat other than that of the sun to fry your egg. People fry plenty of eggs that day. But they get help from mirrors, magnifying glasses, and even solar-powered (sun-powered) ovens.

[source: Does It Really Take Seven Years to Digest Swallowed Gum?: And Other Questions You've Always Wanted to Ask (Is That a Fact?)]

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A Little Knowledge is A Dangerous Thing...indeed

Under Chairman Mao, every Chinese family was obliged to kill a sparrow a week to stop them eating all the rice. The project was ineffective because sparrows don’t eat rice.

The Great Sparrow Campaign also known as the Kill a Sparrow Campaign , and officially, the Four Pests Campaign was one of the first actions taken in the Great Leap Forward (an economic and social campaign by the Communist Party of China (CPC) from 1958 to 1961. The campaign was led by Mao Zedong and aimed to rapidly transform the country from an agrarian economy into a socialist society through rapid industrialization and collectivization.) from 1958 to 1962. The four pests to be eliminated were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. The extermination of the last upset the ecological balance, and enabled crop-eating insects to proliferate.

By April 1960, Chinese leaders realized that sparrows ate a large amount of insects, as well as grains. Rather than being increased, rice yields after the campaign were substantially decreased. Mao ordered the end of the campaign against sparrows, replacing them with bed bugs in the ongoing campaign against the Four Pests. By this time, however, it was too late. With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the ecological problems already caused by the Great Leap Forward, including widespread deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides.

[source: qi.com]

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Swimming and Peeing

Olympic swimmers routinely pee in the pool!

Nearly 100 per cent of elite competitive swimmers pee in the pool. Regularly. Some deny it, some proudly embrace it, but everyone does it.

The more interesting question is, when does said peeing happen? 

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Christmas Facts: Last Minute Shopping

Every Christmas Day, 400,000 Britons go out to a shop to buy batteries.

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The Changing Universe

When Star Wars came out in 1977, France was still using the guillotine.

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