Oh! My God

What do you think ‘knur and spell’ is?

It’s a game that has been played for the last 300 years in the Pennine area of Northern England! A ‘knur’ is a small baked clay ball and a ‘spell’ is a wooden structure from which the knur hangs. The players must hit the knur with a sycamore cane, and the player whose knur travels the farthest wins!

 

What is glass made of?

Glass in initial stage is soft and syrupy. It is a mixture of sand, soda and lime melted together at high temperatures. In this state it can be shaped into the glass objects we see around us. Various minerals can be added to make different colored glass. Then, the “syrup” is cooled, heated and cooled again in a process that makes it hard.

 

What is the difference between an insect and a spider?

See the legs, first – spiders have eight, insects have six. Insects have antennae and spiders do not. Let us now consider the number of body parts – insects have three and spiders have two. In addition, if the animal is hanging by a thread, it is a spider. Spiders make silk insects do not.

 

What is your favorite Christmas dish?

In the middle ages Great Pie was popular with royal families-so long as the table was strong enough. Beneath the inch thick pastry was a whole turkey, stuffed with a chicken, stuffed with a partridge, stuffed with a pigeon. Anyone for seconds?

 

Where Chess invented?

Chess was invented in India.

 

Who invented matchsticks?

Matchsticks were invented accidentally by John Walker, a chemist in 1827. He was trying to produce a burnable material for shotguns. His first match was a stick he was using to stir a mixture of chemicals. It burnt into flames when he scraped it against a stone floor to clean off the head.

 

Who invented money?

The first piece of metal to be considered a coin was invented in Lydia, Turkey, in 670 B.C. However, the idea of money took place long time ago. People traded a basket of berries with six ears of corn, a cow in exchange of ten chickens. However, what if the person with berries wanted wheat instead of corn? Eventually, it made sense to have something that always had the same value and was easy to carry. In addition, this gave result to what we use now – money.

 

Who invented roller skates?

Joseph Merlin of Huy, Belgium invented the roller skates. To introduce his invention he entered the ballroom-playing violin in 1759. Unfortunately he did not know how to stop and crashed into a full-length mirror, breaking his violin.

 

Who needs sight when you have vision?

Kishor Bhattacharya of Guwahatti, a postgraduate in History, set up an NGO called Dristidan for the welfare of the blind to bridge the gulf between visually challenged and those with sight. As a first step he has opened an extensive Braille library to provide easy access to books and journals. “My simple aim is to give the blind the confidence to survive in this world,” says Kishor, who is visually handicapped himself. Next step? A shelter for homeless blind in the North-east.

 

Why is infrared radiation used as signals during war?

Ordinary visible light is scattered by haze but infrared (IR) radiation can penetrate through the haze without being scattered. Therefore, these can be used as signals on distant objects obscured by atmospheric haze. Also, IR radiation enables sharpshooters to see their targets in total darkness. These devices essentially consist of an IR lamp which sends a beam of IR radiation (called black light) and a telescope receiver which picks up returned radiation from the object and converts it to a visible image.