Question:Are you Web-wise enough to know about "typosquatters"? Doubtless you've had occasion to visit their handiwork, however inadvertent.
Answer: Typosquatting means registering Web addresses that differ from popular sites by just single-letter errors or transpositions — "typos" in editors' jargon, says New Scientist magazine.
One example is www.goole.com, obviously designed to snare surfers misspelling www.google.com. The popular search engine even anticipated this blunder and tried to buy up the address but was too late, though they did get gooogle.com, gooooogle.com, and goooooooooooogle.com. "But in a veritable domain-name bunfight, typosquatters somehow got the four, nine and 20 — 'o' versions. Where does it all end?"
Certainly not at the White House, because if you type in www.whitehouse.org, you won't get the official site — it's at www.whitehouse.gov — but rather a political spoofing instead.
So, why bother? Dough-re-mi naturally, since many sites pay a small fee to sites that send surfers their way. "Click on one of those ads and you're putting money in the typosquatter's pocket."
Question:The biggest example anywhere stands at about 65 feet, though the average is comfortably household-size, with some 20 billion made annually, over half in China. Use one of these hand-held "tools" and it'll still be doing its thing 35 miles or 45,000 words later. It can perform in zero gravity and has been called upon to do so. Many Civil War soldiers made its acquaintance, as do millions of schoolkids today who often as not use one for poking, prodding, even pricking instead of for its preferred pontifical purpose. Can you pinpoint this p-word object?
Answer: It's a pencil, as detailed by Dean Christopher in Discover magazine.
The 65-footer is on display near Kuala Lampur, made of Malaysian wood and polymer. Pencil lead actually contains no lead but rather a mixture of clay and graphite, so a prick won't cause lead poisoning though the person could become infected. On the other end, erasers are a fixture in the United States but usually not in Europe.
Question:Here's a tricky ONE: Which is bigger, the whole number 1.0 or the repeating decimal fraction 0.9999 ...? The 1 in the first number is certainly bigger than the 0 in the second number, but what about all those 9's, indeed an endless number of them as signified by the ...?
Answer: The magic of this infinite series is that as you add 9's to .99, then .999, then .9999 etc, the value obviously gets closer and closer to the number 1.0 until finally it EQUALS 1.0! To prove this to yourself, suggest Edward Burger and Michael Starbird in "The Heart of Mathematics," note that 1/3 = 0.3333 ... and that 2/3 = 0.6666 ..., which when added together yield 0.9999 ... And since 1/3 + 2/3 = 1, then 0.9999 ... must also equal 1.
Send STRANGE questions to brothers Bill and Rich at strangetrue@compuserve.com, coauthors of "Can a Guy Get Pregnant? Scientific Answers to Everyday (and Not-So- Everyday) Questions," from Pi Press.