This is the July 2023 edition of the fascinating facts Newsletter, which includes a broad range of interesting topics. This includes information about the month of July, the inventor of the internet and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The July 2023 edition also includes weird, crazy inventions and a quiz..

Fascinating Facts July 2023 Contents

You can download the full newsletter to read HERE, however some snippets are listed below.

About The Month Of July

They named July after the famous Roman General Julius Caesar, as it was the month of his birth. The month was previously called Quintilis (Latin for fifth) the fifth month of the 10-month-long ancient Roman calendar.

As the second month of Summer, July is, on average, the warmest month of the year in the northern hemisphere. While in the southern hemisphere it is on average, the coldest month of the year. Read More…

A Number That Cannot Be Counted

Numbers are a human construct. Therefore, there are no such things in nature as numbers. Numbers are only what society accepts as the description of an amount! This was borne out in 1938 when mathematician Edward Kasner wanted to help people comprehend very large numbers. He asked his 9-year-old nephew Milton Sirotta for a name for a figure one followed by 100 zeros, and Sirotta suggested “googol”. Two years later, Kasner published Mathematics and the Imagination, which introduced the
world to the googol and its big brother the googolplex. The googol quickly became a well-known large number, gaining much cultural impact. Read More…

The Leaning Tower of Pisa

While the picture of the Leaning Tower of Pisa makes one wonder why it has not collapsed, walking round it reinforces that opinion. Designed as a freestanding bell tower of Pisa Cathedral, it has a nearly four-degree lean, the result of an unstable foundation. The 186 ft tower, with 8 floors and about 296 steps, is one of three structures in the Pisa’s Cathedral Square, which includes the cathedral and Pisa Baptistry. A research study in 2001 indicated that Diotisalvi was the original architect, by comparison with his other works, notably the bell tower of San Nicola and the Baptistery, in Pisa. Read More…

Do You See The Same Colour As Me?

No one can be totally sure that we all see the same colours. What colours we see depends not just on how things are in the world around us, but also on what happens in our eyes and our brains. For instance, two people look at the leaves of a tree, they might both say that the leaves are green. But could it be, that you see them as green, while I see them as a colour closer to your brown, or maybe even your purple?

Our eyes sense light, and we think of light as being made up of many waves of different lengths with the shortest wavelengths we can see creating the colour violet, while the longest wavelengths create red. Added to that, there are also lots of wavelengths we can’t see, which create colours we can’t even imagine. Read More…

Philippides & The Marathon

When, in 490 BC, Philippides, the Greek messenger who was taking part in the Battle of Marathon, witnessed a Persian vessel changing its course towards Athens as the battle was near a victorious end for the Greek army, and decided to run 25 miles to Athens without stopping, discarding his weapons and clothes to lose as much weight as possible. He burst into the assembly, exclaiming, “we have won!”. He never thought that, hundreds of years later, while his run would be remembered by an annual race in a number of cities virtually now its origin and even less remember his name! Read More…

Are These The Oldest Professions?

No one can say which is the oldest but there a number which it is obvious are some of the first. It has often been said that the world’s oldest profession is prostitution, and the second is spying, as they are mentioned in the Bible! The first must all relate to those based on the human needs, but it is impossible to decide which. So here are a few suggestions. For this list, one needs to cover professions that would have emerged as a result of first human creations, such as tools, art, language, and agriculture. All of these jobs still exist in some form and probably always will because they deal with some of the most basic human needs. Read More…