Tuesday, September 2, 2008

From Olympics to Countries

Today, with no major work to be done and no pending work, I decide to do some research to gain some general knowledge. I will take you through my transition from IE8 to Olympics to Countries as I mention the facts I learnt.

As Internet explorer 8 was fresh in my mind I decided to start off with it. After a few "googling" I came across a selection based search result application called "Kallout" - sounds cool right! This application claims to be the first in market to help browser experience easier and faster by providing similar services of accelerator in IE8 i had talked about.
I checked out the website http://kallout.com/ and found the feature pretty interesting. I was thrilled when I saw that this can be intergrated with other application in your computer like excel, powerpoint, outlook and guess what you can have the same feature of accelerator in IE8. Pretty cool stuff right. Fed up with the IE8 beta, which requires me to press the compatibility button ever time I need to use internal page links in Wikipedia, I decide to uninstall it.
Control Panel->select IE8->Remove->Restart.
With IE8 out of my computer I downloaded the Kallout but din't want to install in my company computer for security reason, I started checking out the Microsoft's Live Map. I was seeing United states and as I zoomed out I saw the US label disappear and North and South America Label appear. I was shocked. Slowly I came to know that it displays the diffenrent continents as you zoom out unlike google maps.
Thus I happened to see the different continents in Wikipedia (though I had known it before). I discovered that there are different types of continent classification in the world. Most claim 7 continents and others 6,5,4 all by clubbing one or the other continent. As I read through I found this sentence
The six-continent combined-America model is taught in Latin America, Iran and some parts of Europe including Iberian Peninsula and Greece. This model may be taught to include only the five inhabited continents (excluding Antarctica)[20][21] — as depicted in the Olympic logo.
Whats this... did it say Olympic Logo? Cool, So

FACT 1: The five olympic logo represent 5 continents viz. America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia.
So there I started to research on Olympics. As I read through I discovered the founder's name, where and how the Olympic torch is lit, and wats special about Sydney Olympics

FACT 2: Pierre de Coubertine is the founder of Olympics

FACT 3: The olympic torch is lit with the Sun's ray and parabolic mirror beforw it is taken around the world.

FACT 4: In Olympics 2000 (Sydney) Torch was taken underwater

Having read the different continents I got reminded of a country which is surrounded in all four sides with another country - Yes, a country inside a country.
Most might have guessed one such country - Vatican City inside Italy, but I knew another country

FACT 5: Lesotho is a country inside South Africa.

Thus I started searching about such countries and I found out that such countries are called enclave. If country A lies inside country B, then A is B's enclave.

FACT 6: The only countries which are landlocked and enclave of another country are
Vatican City - Italy's enclave, Lesotho - South Africa's enclave and San Marino - Italy's enclave.

FACT 7: That means Italy has two countries inside it. A really good information right

I got to know about these countries through wikipedia and you might want to do the same.
Did you know Vatican City is the smallest country with area of .44 km2

No comments: