posted
Hence the irony of that fact. Strangely, you and I are probably thinking that we are more skilled than other motorists and are IN FACT above average drivers, though.
*37 Helen's agree that you cannot spend too much money on a good pair of shoes. Geez, I miss Kids In The HallPosts: 1870 | Registered: Mar 2003
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The Sears Tower is 1,454 feet high (that's about a quarter of a mile), and you can add another 253 feet for the twin antenna towers.
1,600 feet per minute Sears Tower elevators operate as fast as 1,600 feet per minute.
106 Cabs Two domed entrances, one with skylights, were added to the Sears Tower in 1984 and 1985. A 106-cab elevator system (including 16 double decker elevators) divides the Tower into three separate zones, with skylobbies in between.
114 Piles The Sear Tower's heavy weight - more than 440 million pounds - is also supported by 114 piles sunk deep into the earth so that they stand firmly on hard, solid bedrock.
2 City Blocks The Sears Tower covers two city blocks and has 101 acres of office and commerical space.
222,500 Tons The combined weight of the building is 222,500 tons.
25,000 Entries More than 25,000 people enter the Sears Tower every day.
Architects The Sears Tower was designed by the architects "Skidmore, Owings & Merrill," the same firm that designed the John Hancock Center.
Exercise? There are 2,232 steps from ground level to the roof. Unfortunately for those interested in a little legwork, people aren't normally allowed to use the stairwells.
Floor Space 4.5 million gross square feet of floor space.
HOW much?!? The cost of building Sears Tower was in excess of $150 million.
Its Own City The Sears Tower is a city unto itself, containing 43,000 miles of telephone cable, 2,000 miles of electrical wire, 25,000 miles of plumbing, and enough concrete to build an eight-lane highway five miles long. It even has its own zip code.
Lots of Windows The Tower's framework consists of 76,000 tons of steel, has more than 16,000 bronze-tinted windows, and has 28 acres of black duranodic aluminum skin.
Nice View On clear day, visibility from the Skydeck is more than 50 miles and four states: Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
Phone Wire The Sears Tower contains enough phone wire to wrap around the earth 1.75 times, and enough electrical wiring to run a power line from Chicago to Los Angeles.
Sears Tower Skydeck More than 1.5 million tourists visit the Sears Tower Skydeck each year.
Tallest in the World? The Sears Tower ranked as the world's tallest building from its completion in 1973 until 1997, when twin towers in Malaysia beat it out by a few feet, WITH THE INCORPORATION OF SPIRES. The Sears Tower still boasts the highest top floor of any building in the world.
The Lobby and Calder The famous sculpture Alexander Calder has several pieces of art in the lobby of the Sears Tower. He is well-known for his extremely large mobiles and red iron statues, one of the latter of which adorns the Federal Building Plaza.
The Tower is Tubes! The Sears Tower is an example of the revolutionary bundled-tube structural design. Tube buildings gain most of their structural support from a rigid network of beams and columns in their outer walls. The rigid outer walls act like the walls of a hollow tube. The Sears Tower is actually a bundle of nine tubes, and is considered one of the most efficient structures designed to withstand wind. This is a great design for a skyscraper in Chicago, the "Windy City," where the average wind speed is 16 miles per hour. As the building climbs upward, the tubes begin to drop off, reducing the wind forces on the building.
Posts: 1870 | Registered: Mar 2003
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quote:The only way to be above average is to obey every traffic law to the letter. No one is an above average driver.
This would only be true if a) following every traffic law to the letter made one a better driver and b) the average driver followed every traffic law to the letter in every situation except one. Otherwise someone could be above-average by following all the traffic laws to the letter in every situation except one.
posted
Most importantly, being above average is just that, above the mathematical average. To obey all traffic laws and be an excellent driver in a manner of skill would make a driver near perfect. In terms of a bell curve model, I believe the humor of the above factoid makes much more sense.
Ergo: You do not need to be a perfect driver to be "above average", you just need to be better than 50% of the drivers out there.
Vis-a-vis: Since 70% of drivers believe themselves to be "above average", this becomes mathematically impossible since we might arbitrarily establish that the top 25% or 30% of drivers on a bell curve to be considered above average.
Posts: 1870 | Registered: Mar 2003
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quote: *A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds *A duck's quack does not echo
Both of these were on the show Mythbusters and shown to be false. Goldfish were trained to go through a maze. And the sound waves in a duck's quack were shown to resemble the echo a lot, but the echo was definitely there.
Posts: 1658 | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
Mythbusters also disproved that Hotel Keyguards are corrupted by magnets adn credit cards. I personally have proven this to BE true. therefore, mythbusters sucks.
Posts: 1572 | Registered: Jan 2004
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quote: Most importantly, being above average is just that, above the mathematical average. To obey all traffic laws and be an excellent driver in a manner of skill would make a driver near perfect. In terms of a bell curve model, I believe the humor of the above factoid makes much more sense.
Ergo: You do not need to be a perfect driver to be "above average", you just need to be better than 50% of the drivers out there.
Vis-a-vis: Since 70% of drivers believe themselves to be "above average", this becomes mathematically impossible since we might arbitrarily establish that the top 25% or 30% of drivers on a bell curve to be considered above average.
70% of drivers can be above average, let me show you how:
you don't need to be better than 50% to be above average, that would be above the median. You would just have to be above the average skill amount. For example lets say there are only 4 people, and their driving skills are rated on a 1 to 10 scale. Their skill levels are: 1, 8, 9, and 10. Makeing an average of 7, which 75% of the people are above. and keeping into account the people under the age of legel driving, and over the age of experianced driving, and people who do not know how to drive(including people from other countries), making it highly possible that the people who consider themselves above average drivers really are above average.
Posts: 2489 | Registered: Jan 2002
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posted
Quick refresher for those who have forgotten their statistics, please: What is the mode?
I know mean is the sum of the values divided by the number of value (used for GPAs, it's what most people think of as the average).
Median is simply the value for which there are an equal number of higher and lower values in a set of values (or the average of the two middle values when needed). I'm not sure of all the details for special situations, such as when what would be the median value is present multiple times but not evenly spread about the middle.
I have no idea what mode is, however. I used to know, but apparantly I've never had to make use of it before in a non-academic setting.
On a side note, the idea of an average driver may be impossible on it's face, since there are so many factors contrubiting to what makes someone a good driver. Any attempt to reduce it to a single value is doomed to failure.
posted
Here's a fun fact that I learned the other day.
You know how there are some American Beer companies that have been around for over 100 years? I always wondered how they survived the prohibition. But now I know!
Coors, for example, survived by selling malted milk to Mars candy. Malted milk is pretty much just malt (pre-fermented beer) mixed with cream. Mars' first candy bar was the Milky Way, named for the Coors malted milk.
So it seems that the prohibition is responsible for a lot of the malted milk products that we eat now. When you eat Whoppers, you are eating creamy pre-beer.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
The mode is the value that occurs the most times. There was no mode in the data set example that MEC provided above, but if we expand his set to 1,2,2,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 there is one -- and still 70% of the sample is above it.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
I know. Today, the first thing the corporate suits would do would be to lay off half of their employees, and *then* try to figure out how to stay in buisness.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
Hey man I don't know, but the toungue works by itself, where as other muscles depend on one another, and your bones in order to work at all. Besides, isn't the toungue your most exersized muscle? You use it every day to eat, talk, kiss, etc.
posted
- There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.
- You can't kill yourself by holding your breath.
- Americans on the average eat 18 acres of pizza every day.
- The flea can jump 350 times its body length. That is like a human jumping the length of a football field.
- A cockroach will live nine days without its head before it starves to death.
- Every time you lick a stamp you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.
- You are more likely to be killed by a champagne cork than by a poisonous spider.
- Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people do.
- In ancient Egypt, Priests plucked EVERY hair from their bodies, including their eyebrows and eyelashes.
- A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.
- The ant can lift 50 times its own weight, can pull 30 times its own weight and always falls over on its right side when intoxicated.
- The lifespan of a tastebud is ten days.
- On average, 100 people choke to death on ball-point pens every year.
- Non-dairy creamer is flammable.
- On average people fear spiders more than they do death.
- If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days, you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee.
- If you fart consistently for 6 years and 9 months, enough gas is produced to create the energy of an atomic bomb.
Posts: 165 | Registered: Apr 2004
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Like the fact that its still legal to shoot someone with a bow and arrow if caught climbing over Chester (England) city walls between midnight and six in the morning.
Posts: 394 | Registered: Feb 2004
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posted
Alaska law says that you can't look at a moose from an airplane
In Miami, it is forbidden to imitate an animal
In Illinois, the law is that a car must be driven with the steering wheel
In Memphis, Tennessee, a woman is not to drive a car unless a man warns approaching motorists or pedestrians by walking in front of the car that is being driven
In Tennessee, it is against the law to drive a car while sleeping
In Utah, birds have the right of way on any public highway.
In Virginia, the Code of 1930 has a statute which prohibits corrupt practices or bribery by any person other than political candidates
In Washington State, you can't carry a concealed weapon that is over 6 feet in length.
The law states that more than 3000 sheep cannot be herded down Hollywood Blvd. at any one time.
Posts: 394 | Registered: Feb 2004
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posted
Dagonee, The mode is the most frequently used number, basically. Sometimes, there is no mode.
Posts: 10890 | Registered: May 2003
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posted
My favorite fact in the world--has anyone said this yet?
Myoclonic twitch = when you're sort of half asleep and dreaming, and in the dream you step down or move your hand, and you try to do it in real life too, and it jerks you back all the way awake
posted
I learned the other day, that if you're forced, somehow, to sneeze with your eyes ope, your eyes pop out of their sockets. My chemistry teacher said that it was true.
Posts: 3389 | Registered: Apr 2004
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