Number Gossip: get the low down on your favourite numbers.

Saying hello first to someone you are speaking to on the phone may help them better understand what you ask for next, as it allows them time to comprehend your vocal range, something that is usually more instantaneous in face to face situations.
Vowel sounds are made by using the mouth as a resonating cavity, [...]

Despite there being a few obvious omissions, the “semi-serious” list of the ten best rock albums of all time, as published by the Vatican’s official newspaper, “L’ Osservatore Romano”, is not actually half bad:

The Beatles, “Revolver”
Pink Floyd, “The Dark Side of The Moon”
Oasis, “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?”
Michael Jackson, “Thriller”
U2, “Achtung Baby”
Fleetwood Mac, “Rumours”
Donald Fagen, [...]

Distractivity. A link blog that points to the distracting items you find so enjoyable may be a part of the answer.
Distractivity is what you’re doing when you get distracted from what you should be doing. It’s generally what you want to do, often what you need to do, and arguably, what you’ll do best.

Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov talks about his matches with supercomputer Deep Blue, and some of the game’s impressive numbers.
The number of legal chess positions is 1040, the number of different possible games, 10120. Authors have attempted various ways to convey this immensity, usually based on one of the few fields to regularly employ [...]

At Kottke yesterday:
If Back to the Future were made today, Marty would have travelled back in time to 1980.

Strictly speaking yes, that is correct, as Back to the Future sees Marty McFly travel back in time 30 years, which would make his year of arrival 1980.
Would there any point in setting the movie in [...]

From eight colours in 1903 to 120 this year, at this rate there will be 330 differently coloured crayons in a Crayola box by 2050.
Ever industrious, Velo also calculated the average growth rate: 2.56 per-cent annually. For maximum understandability, he reformulated it as “Crayola’s Law,” which states: The number of colors doubles every [...]

From the BBC, 100 things we didn’t know last year.
Using both hands to read Braille achieves an average speed of 115 words a minute, compared with 250 words a minute for sighted reading.

If you thought December was a Blue Moon month because there are two full Moons, you’re going to be disappointed. A Blue Moon is actually the name for a slightly different lunar occurrence:
The article that told me I was wrong about what “blue moon” means (and hilariously refers to that definition as “trendy”) explains [...]

The scent you sometimes smell as rain begins to fall on very dry earth has a name: petrichor.
The term was coined in 1964 by two Australian researchers, Bear and Thomas, for an article in the journal Nature. In the article, the authors describe how the smell derives from an oil exuded by certain plants [...]