Truth is stranger than (science) fiction

Greetings boys and girls, another week is upon us, and I figured it wouldn't hurt to cram a bit more knowledge into our skulls while it's still 2013. Not that it means anything that it's 2013, it's really just a convenient excuse to share these wonderful facts with you.

For example, did you know that the University of Oxford was established earlier than The Aztec Empire? It's true, but it seems so incredibly unlikely, right?

And speaking of the olden times, consider that more time has passed between when the Egyptians started working on The Great Pyramids of Giza and the birth of Julius Caesar, than old Julius and us.

It's easy to forget how much happened in the relatively short period of time known as the 20th century, but Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr were born in the same year, yet we still tend to view them as belonging to completely different eras, even thought they were contemporaries.

Let's jump off planet for a moment and look at Venus, the planet closest to Earth in size. The pressure on the surface is 93 times higher than on earth, which would crush you in seconds. That's equivalent of one kilometer under the sea.

But the really weird fact is that Venus rotates on its axis only once every 243 Earth days but orbits the sun once every 224.65 Earth days. This means that on Venus, a day is longer than a year! Talk about having a looong day at work.

And finally, do you know your star sign? I bet you do, we all do. But whether you believe in astrology or not, your star sign is not your star sign at all!

You see, the Earth kind of wobbles a bit, which means that in the ca. 2000 years since the Babylonians invented the zodiac, we've shifted around enough to bump our star signs one step forward. So if you thought your sign is Virgo, you are actually a Libra. In other words, you don't know your sign at all...

That's all I wrote. It's a short post I know, but I've had a long day today, though not not Venusian long.

Take it easy, and have a great week!