125 - Years of Coca Cola

 

Q - What's the difference between Diet Coke and Coke Zero ? Read on ...

Have you seen the Coke 125 ad on TV? Hard to miss really.

• Yes, Coca Cola is celebrating it's 125th anniversary having its first sales on May 8th 1886, in Jacobs Pharmacy, Atlanta, Georgia - costing 5c a glass.
• It was developed by Dr. John Pemberton, a pharmacist, who actually died 2 years after his Coca Cola drink went on sale.
• Pre 1886 the drink was developed as a 'wine' with alcohol but with the enforcement of prohibition in the USA Pemberton looked at the possibilities for a non-alcoholic version of the drink
• In its early days it sold about 9 drinks per day but 125 years later it sells 1.7 billion drinks each day
• The drink, also in the early days, contained cocaine (from the coca leaf) and had claims of medicinal properties and cures for certain ailments (with cocaine, maybe it did !!!). Today the concentrate does not have any cocaine but does have extract from cocaine-free coca leaf.
• The flavouring and 'caffeine' source for Coca-Cola is Kola nuts
• Coca-Cola claim to have introduced the modern day image of Santa Claus, in a1931 campaign. It's a debatable claim !

11 - Memories of Sesame Street

Q - Remember Sesame Street ? Who was Berts pal?  Read on ...
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In the year of 2011 it seems appropriate to have a look at where the number 11 features and it pops up in a wonderful variety of places.

• Do you follow soccer, hockey or American football? Well they all have 11 players. Rugby on the other hand is 15 players but did you know a standard size 5 rugby ball is 11" long?

• The first spacecraft to land on the moon in 1969 was Apollo 11 and the command module is still on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C.

• 11-11-11 : World War 1 ended at 11 a.m on the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918.

• We all know that Everest is the highest point on earth but few can name the deepest part in our oceans. It is called Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, in the Pacific ocean near Japan. It is 11km deep (Everest is 8.85km high by comparison)
• Speaking of oceans what about the movie Oceans 11? Oceans being the name of the character played by George Clooney by the way and nothing to to do with the high seas.

• Speaking of movies
  

The Internet - 20 years young carries 294 Billion emails per day

Q - Which Pop star is the most followed person on Twitter and how many followers ( to the nearest million will do)? Have a guess before reading on.

We take the internet so much for granted now that it seems like it's been around for ever but it's just 20 years old. The commonly accepted view is that the internet was born in August 1991 and is accredited to one Tim Berners Lee. A heck of a lot has happened since then.

20 is likely to be the only small number you will come across when seeking out data about the internet as every other statistic is in millions or billions.

Have a look at this for 2010 ... (it may already be out of date)

There are a variety of data sources quoting web and internet usage statistics. They don't always tally and difficult to be sure who is quoting the most accurate figures but from a combination of different sources in circulation for 2010 the following are some of the big numbers being bandied around (and who are we to argue) ....

255 Million = the number of websites online at Dec 2010

294 Billion = yes 'billion' - the staggering number of emails sent across the internet and networks every day

262 Billion = the outrageous number of those daily emails that were spam (89%)

21 Million = Number of new websites in 2010

1.97 Billion = number of interent users worldwide (June 2010) - likely to be well over 2bn now as users are

                      growing at about 14% per anuum