Topic: NEWS english - on March 15, 2005 at 9:24:00 AM CET
Pi Day
March 14, written 3/14 in the USA date format, is the official day for Pi Day derived from the common three-digit approximation for the number π: 3.14. It is usually celebrated at 1:59 PM (in recognition of the six-digit approximation: 3.14159). Some, using a twenty-four-hour clock rather than a twelve hour clock, say that 1:59 PM is actually 13:59 and celebrate it at 1:59 AM or 3:09 PM instead. Parties have been held by mathematics departments of various schools around the world.
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Topic: NEWS english - on March 15, 2005 at 9:10:00 AM CET
Mussolini's Granddaughter on Hunger Strike
The granddaughter of Italian wartime dictator Benito Mussolini went on hunger strike on Monday after being barred from next month's regional elections over signature forgeries.
Alessandra Mussolini, founder of the far-right Social Alternative movement, is appealing the ban in a Rome court.
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Topic: NEWS english - on March 14, 2005 at 8:48:00 PM CET
Searching for the Welsh-Hindi link
A BBC journalist is urging helpful linguists to come forward to help solve a mystery - why the Hindi accent has so much in common with Welsh.
Sonia Mathur, a native Hindi speaker, had her interest sparked when she moved from India to work for the BBC in Wales - and found that two accents from countries 5,000 miles apart seemed to have something in common.
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Topic: NEWS english - on March 13, 2005 at 1:34:00 PM CET
Poor show by Einstein look-alikes
A New York university planned to mark the 127th birthday of genius physicist Albert Einstein by bringing dozens of his look-alikes together in a room.
But when the City University of New York placed an advert in an actors' newspaper, only one person turned up - a man originally from Afghanistan.
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Topic: NEWS english - on March 13, 2005 at 9:25:00 AM CET
Escher Web Sketch
Escher Web Sketch allows you to draw repeating patterns. You can select the symmetry of the patterns by clicking on one of the icons in the bar above the drawing area. The drawing tools are selected from the icon bar under the drawing area. You can also change the pattern size and placement with the Modify cell button. The right hand side of the drawing area is reserved for each drawing tool's usage. Typically it changes the pen size and color.
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Topic: NEWS english - on March 13, 2005 at 9:07:00 AM CET
Homes of the Billionaires
How does the other half live? Well, it depends. Try more like how does the other 0.00001% live?
According to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), the median American house size is slightly more than 2,000 square feet. Compare that with the domicile of the world's richest man: As might be expected from one with that sobriquet, Microsoft founder Bill Gates' house is more than 30 times the average size.
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Topic: NEWS english - on March 12, 2005 at 9:29:00 AM CET
Look Who's Talking at the Drive-Through
McDonald's Corp. wants to outsource your neighborhood drive-through. The world's largest fast-food chain said on Thursday it is looking into using remote call centers to take customer orders in an effort to improve service at its drive-throughs.
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Topic: NEWS english - on March 11, 2005 at 11:09:00 AM CET
The world's richest individuals
Indian-born businessman Mittal now third-wealthiest in world INDIAN-born steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal boosted his fortune faster than anyone in the world over the past year to become the third richest person in the world, Forbes Magazine said today. London-based Mittal, who built one of the world's biggest steel empires, has a net worth of $US25 billion ($A31.61 billion), trailing only Microsoft chief Bill Gates $US46.5 billion ($A58.79 billion) and US investment guru Warren Buffett $US44 billion ($A55.63 billion).
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Topic: NEWS english - on March 4, 2005 at 9:26:00 AM CET
Noisy planes to "train" birds to stay away from new Thai airport
Small and noisy planes will soon begin flying over Thailand's new international airport to "train" birds to avoid the area when it opens next year, an Airports of Thailand (AOT) official said. The official said that planes will begin flights next week over the new 3.7-billion-dollar Suvarnabhumi Airport to scare away the birds, which can cause planes to crash if they are sucked into jet engines.
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Topic: NEWS english - on March 2, 2005 at 8:54:00 AM CET
Giant figures unearthed in Peru
Archeologists have discovered a group of figures scraped into the hills of Peru's southern coastal desert that are believed to predate the country's famous Nazca lines.
About 50 giant figures were etched into the earth over an area of roughly 90 square miles (145 square kilometers) near the city of Palpa, El Comercio newspaper reported.
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Topic: NEWS english - on March 1, 2005 at 3:10:00 PM CET
U.N. reports Afghan opium production is up again.
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Afghanistan is the #1 producer of opium in the world - responsible for 87% of all illicit opium production - according to reports from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and its opium production has accelerated since the coalition invasion in 2001.
The November 2004 annual reports put out by UNODC show that Afghanistan opium production has been increasing each year since the coalition invasion. The UNODC report for 2004 shows a 64% increase over the previous year in opium production hectares, and a 22% increase in export value for the year US$2.8 billion.
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Topic: NEWS english - on March 1, 2005 at 11:55:00 AM CET
Largest machines on Earth will be described at AAAS today by their central planner
Two of the largest machines ever conceived by scientists will be described today by one of the world's leading experts on particle colliders, the massive and expensive machines used to explore inner space by smashing particles together at super-fast speeds.
Cornell University physicist Maury Tigner, director of Cornell's Laboratory for Elementary Particle Physics (LEPP) in Ithaca, N.Y., is playing a major role in two of these machines: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), being built at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, for which he serves as chairman of the machine advisory committee, and the International Linear Collider (ILC), being planned by an international team, for which he is chairman of the steering committee.
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