News of the Weird

A nightspot manager has solved the problem of queues in the ladies room by putting two toilets in the same cubicle. Doug Wilkinson, licensee of the Spareroom Cafe in Dudley, West Midlands, installed a second toilet in one of the cubicles after female customers complained about long waits. He says the idea has been a hit with customers since he added the third toilet at the bar in Wolverhampton Street a fortnight ago. Mr Wilkinson said: "We weren't able to split the partition to create a third cubicle, so we put two toilets into one. We haven't had any bad responses. We did a survey beforehand and found out that a lot of the time, women go to the loo in pairs anyway."

Q: How much water is there on the Earth?

A: There's a whole lot of water on Earth! Something like 326,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons (326 million trillion gallons) of the stuff (roughly 1,260,000,000,000,000,000,000 liters) can be found on our planet. This water is in a constant cycle where it evaporates from the ocean, travels through the air, rains down on the land and then flows back to the ocean.

The reason there is so much water is because the oceans are huge. About 70% of the planet is covered in ocean, and the average depth of the ocean is several thousand feet (about 1,000 meters). 98% of the water on the planet is in the oceans of the world, and therefore is unusable for drinking because of the salt. About 2% of the planet's water is fresh, but 1.6% of the planet's water is locked up in the polar ice caps and glaciers. Another 0.36% is found underground in aquifers and wells. Only about 0.036% of the planet's total water supply is found in lakes and rivers! That's still thousands of trillions of gallons, but it's a very small amount compared to all the water available.

Nice

I'm going out for coffee with a friend in about 25min. It'll be nice to catch up a bit. We were never that close, but we have a mutual friend who we are both very close to so it'll be fun. It'll also be nice to just get out of here for a bit to see someone that is not family.