So I am doing a little news segment on Asian Affairs for our weekly Asian Cultural Society meeting. Of course, there was no way I am going to use the common current affairs material, because, like Canada, who cares. So I dug around trying to find some interesting stories from the past, present, and the foreseeable future of Asia, and I found the following stories on the BBC website of QI (Quite Interesting).
The first story is about Cats in Boxes, continuing my cat theme from previous posts:
Between 1959 and 1961, a British/WHO project accidentally killed lots of cats when treating malaria with DDT in the Sarawak area of Borneo. The DDT also killed cockroaches, which were eaten by cats, which also died and the area became thus infested with rats. Now Sarawak is quite a dense forest region and fighting rats the conventional way was problematic, so the British/WHO team decided to parachute in cats in boxes into the region to fight off the infestation. The boxes had little springs attached to them which would open the box when it hit the ground. Forget about whether it worked or not, the whole concept boggles the mind!
Second story, Adding 2 Feet to the Everest:
Radhanath Sikdar a Bengali mathematician, was the first to measure the peak as 29,000ft, but because he thought people would think he just rounded up to 29,000 feet, he "added" 2 feet to make it 29,002 feet to make it seem legitimate. This was the accepted height of Everest up until 1955, when it became 29,028ft. Incidentaly, Mt. Everest is named after George Everest, the Surveyor General of India at the time, and he pronounced his name as "EVE-rest".
On a side note, apparently the most dangerous sport in the world, purely in number of related accidents and deaths, is kite-flying! Apparently the "manja" string causes many people to lose fingers, and in a few cases, arems and heads! Falling kites have also known to fall in front of motorists causing road accidents and such...
I have a few more, but if any of you have heard anything interesting of late, let me know...
The cat-in-the-box story is funny....but wouldn't the cats have been going nuts inside the boxes?
ReplyDeletePeople's falling off the roof/terrace and running in the streets with their eyes at a falling kite are the two primary ways by which deaths occur in the sport.
ReplyDeleteThat is strange, my name is Harry Meadows and my birthday is 26th november
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