Things I learned lately 12 Feb

• Between 1964 and 1968, touch tone phones didn't have # or * keys yet.
• The discoverer of the neutron (James Chadwick) was a student of the discoverer of the proton (E. Rutherford) who in turn was a student of the discoverer of the electron (J.J. Thomson).
  
  
  
• 700,000 years ago, the entire central valley of California was submerged in the giant Lake Corcoran.
• You can orbit a black hole just as you can orbit the sun. You just wouldn't want your orbit to unrecoverably decay is all.
• The English word cowboy was derived from vaquero, a Spanish word for an individual who managed cattle while mounted on horseback.
• Washington and Delaware are the only two US states that don't have a county with a declining population.
• Hawaii and Alaska both share a highest recorded temperature of 100 degrees F (37.8C). The highest recorded temperature in the US is in California, 134F (56.7C).
• It's hard to imagine how small a nanometer is (nanotech falls in the range of 1-100 nanometers). A human hair is about 75,000 nm wide. Or, put a different way, if a marble was 1 nm wide, the earth would be 1 meter in diameter.
• What do the albums Abba - Voulez Vous; Genesis - Duke; and Led Zeppelin - In through the out door have in common? They were all recorded at Polar Studios, formed by Abba musicians Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson. 
• It's almost 4,000 km or a 41 hour drive from Sydney to Perth Australia. That's like driving from Los Angeles to New York (driving time).