If you are interested to sign your works using a Chinese seal, you can go here, enter your desired Chinese text （which should be less than 6 characters）and have your seal generated. Below you can see the seal I generated for myself :

• The first declaration of human rights was written by Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire?
• The first rocket was invented by the Chinese in the 13th century?
• The first "Suez" Canal was completed some 2300 years ago by Darius I of Persia, who conquered Egypt?
• A day on Mars is about half an hour longer than a day on Earth?
• Nerve cells can travel as fast as 120 meters per second?
• The word pound is abbreviated "lb" after the constellation "Libra" because it means pound in Latin?
• The dollar symbol ($) is a U combined with an S?
• The expression "Tying the Knot" comes from an old Roman custom where the brides clothes were tied up all in knots and the groom was supposed to untie the knots?
• Lachanophobia is the fear of vegetables?
• The way to distinguish between an ape and a monkey is that apes do not have tails?
• The reason why golf balls have "dimples" on them is because it helps in the ball to move a farther distance by reducing drag?
  

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Here's a very cute site named Sheep World where you can send some pretty cute sheepy ecards (here) along with downloading sheepie wallpapers, playing sheepy games, shopping for cute sheepy items (if you know German though), etc. etc. Anyway, it's a nice site with lots of nice drawings of the cute sheep ^.^

The below emoticons are taken from this Chinese site, it has a huge collection of interesting smileys and emoticons to keep you busy during your summer holiday ~_^

I was searching for some cool USB flash memories that came across this site. These Mimobots are sooo cool ^.^

Wow! This Mobile Gardening is really cool ^^ Here's another Natural cell phone strap (seen here) where a living plant is kept in a capsule again BUT unlike the previously mentioned, this one does need some sort of caring such as watering (once or twice a month) and replanting it by the time your plant grows too big to fit in its tiny capsule anymore ~_^

Wow! this is interesting to have a living plant strapped to your cellphone though I guess one should be super careful not to break its glass capsule, somehow. Another interesting fact is that it doesn't even need your care to survive and takes care of itself; sooo lovely and cool (I found this natural mobile phone strap here) ^.^

and later destroyed :-(

"Persepolis Recreated" or "شکوه تخت جمشيد" in Persian is a great documentary where the ashes and ruins of Persepolis come to life once more with the help of computer technology as one of the magnificent and glorious cities and capitals of the ancient civilizations. Built by the order of Darius the great and completed by Xerxes the Great (not the strange looking guy you see in the ridiculous movie 300), Persepolis , the richest city under the sun, was very regretfully burnt to the ground in the rages of a Macedonian known to the world as Alexander.

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I love Hello Kitty themed stuff and these cellphone straps are really cute ^.^ You can find more of them in this cutie mobile phone shop ^^

Go to this site and have either your name or whatever message you like engraved on a bar of soap =)

Technorati Profile

Free Rice is a charity website where you can play a vocabulary game to help fight the world hunger. According to their site, for each correct word you chose during the vocabulary play, they donate 20 grains of rice through the UN World Food Program to help end the hunger.

Although I'm not for the UN as I'm not satisfied with their actions, I like this helping via playing while educating idea of "Free Rice" (besides they have a beautiful site design :-) , so I too took part and managed to donate 1220 grains of rice! Ironically I am playing to help the so-called hungry people while my own country has suddenly gone out of its rice supplies due to the dryness resulting from the lack of rain!!

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Bentō (弁当 or べんとう, Bentō) is a single-portion takeout or home-packed meal common in Japanese cuisine. A traditional bento consists of rice, fish or meat, and one or more pickled or cookedvegetables as a side dish though it can be very elaborately arranged. Contests are often held where homemakers can compete for the most aesthetically pleasing arrangements. The food is often decorated to look like people, animals, or characters and items such as flowers and plants. This style of elaborate bento is called Kyaraben. [wikipedia].

I wonder how can one eat these masterpieces as they are not mere food, but real works of art :-o

• The most expensive spice in the world is Saffron
• The trunk of an elephant can hold up to two gallons of water
• Birds do not sweat as they do not have sweat glands
• The dot that appears above the letter "i" is called a tittle
  
• One tree can filter up to 60 pounds of pollution from the air each year
• A human head remains conscious for about 15 to 20 seconds after it is been decapitated
  
• Early Romans used to use porcupine quills as toothpicks
• According to Scandinavian traditions, if a boy and a girl eat from the same loaf of bread, they are bound to fall in love
  
• Owls swallow their prey whole as they have no teeth. After approximately 12 hours they cough up the feathers, bones and furs in a shape of a football pellet.
  
• Canada is the only country not to win a gold medal in the Summer Olympic Games while hosting the event
  

This cute little gadget is a Cooling Fan which is both battery and USB operated. According to its specifications [here] it is 26cm tall and weighs about 160gr. I've asked a relative living in the US to order this along with a piggy fan for me and can't wait to get my hands on them (due to the imposed sanctions, we neither can have international credit cards nor are we able to shop from most of the online shops as they do not post to Iran, add to these the local restrictions too x_x)

اين يه فن نازه که هم با اتصال به پورت يو اس بى کار مى‌کنه و هم با باترى قلمى. آيا از اينا تو ايران هم ميشه پيدا کرد؟‌

This is really a cool song written by Dwight Latham and Moe Jaffe in 1947 and is performed by Lonzo and Oscar the very same year. This novelty song is about a man who, through an unlikely combination of marriages, becomes stepfather to his own stepmother and becomes his own grandpa!!!


I'm My Own Grandpa

Many, many years ago when I was twenty-three
I was married to a widow who was pretty as could be.
This widow had a grown-up daughter who had hair of red.
My father fell in love with her and soon they, too, were wed.


This made my dad my son-in-law and changed my very life
For my daughter was my mother, 'cause she was my father's wife.
To complicate the matter, even though it brought me joy
I soon became the father of a bouncing baby boy.


My little baby then became a brother-in-law to dad
And so became my uncle, though it made me very sad
For if he was my uncle, then that also made him brother
To the widow's grown-up daughter, who, of course, was my step-mother.


My father's wife then had a son who kept them on the run
And he became my grand-child, 'cause he was my daughter's son.
My wife is now my mother's mother, and it makes me blue
Because, although she is my wife, she's my grandmother too.


If my wife is my grandmother, then I am her grandchild
And every time I think of it, it nearly drives me wild
For now I have become the strangest case you ever saw
(This has got to be the strangest thing I ever saw)
As husband of my grandmother, I am my own grandpa.


Chorus
I'm my own grandpa
I'm my own grandpa
It sounds funny I know
but it really is so
Oh, I'm my own grandpa.

Today, May 17 (28 Ordibehesht) is Khayyam Commemoration Day in Iran.

Who is Hakim Omar-e-Khayyam

Ghiyās od-Dīn Abol-Fath Omār ibn Ebrāhīm Khayyām Neyshābūri (Persian: غیاث الدین ابو الفتح عمر بن ابراهیم خیام نیشابوری) or Hakim Omar Khayyám (Neyshābūr, Persia, May 18, 1048 – December 4, 1131) was a Persian poet, mathematician, philosopher and astronomer who lived in Persia.

He is best known for his poetry, and outside Iran, for the quatrains (Rubaiyats) in Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, popularized through Edward Fitzgerald's re-created translation. His substantial mathematical contributions include his Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra, which gives a geometric method for solving cubic equations by intersecting a hyperbola with a circle.

Persian Calendar

Like most mathematicians of the period, Omar Khayyám was also famous as an astronomer. In 1073, the Seljuk dynasty Sultan, Sultan Jalal al-Din Malekshah Saljuqi (Malik-Shah I, 1072-92), invited Khayyám to build an observatory, along with various other distinguished scientists. Eventually, Khayyám and his colleagues measured the length of the solar year as 365.24219858156 days and introduced several reforms to the Persian calendar, largely based on ideas from the Hindu calendar.

On March 15, 1079, Sultan Malik Shah Saljuqi accepted this corrected calendar as the official Persian calendar. This calendar was known as Jalali calendar after the Sultan, and was in force across Greater Iran from the 11th to the 20th centuries. It is the basis of the Iranian calendar which is followed today in Iran and Afghanistan. While the Jalali calendar is more accurate than the Gregorian, it is based on actual solar transit, and requires an Ephemeris for calculating dates. The lengths of the months can vary between 29 and 32 days depending on the moment when the sun crossed into a new zodiacal area . This meant however, that seasonal errors were lower than in the Gregorian calendar (This calendric measurement has only an 1 hour error every 5,500 years, whereas the Gregorian Calendar, adopted in Europe four centuries later, has a 1 day error in every 3,330 years, but is easier to calculate).

The modern day Iranian calendar standardizes the month lengths based on a reform on March 31, 1925, under the early Pahlavi dynasty. The law said that the first day of the year should be the first day of spring in "the true solar year", "as it has been" and fixed the number of days in each month thus the first six months (Farvardin–Shahrivar) have 31 days, the next five (Mehr–Bahman) have 30 days, and the last month (Esfand) has 29 days or 30 days in leap years.

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Omar Khayyám's poetic work has eclipsed his fame as a mathematician and scientist. He is believed to have written about a thousand four-line verses or quatrains (rubaai's). In the English-speaking world, he was introduced through the The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám translated into English by Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883).

Interesting to Know

• A lunar crater Omar Khayyam was named after him in 1970.
• A planetoid Omarkhayyam discovered by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Zhuravlyova in 1980 is named after him.
• Omar's life is dramatized in the 1957 film Omar Khayyam starring Cornel Wilde, Debra Paget, Raymond Massey, Michael Rennie, and John Derek.
• Khayyám is quoted in Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech, Why I oppose the war in Vietnam. "It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home. Come home America. Omar Khayyám is right 'The moving finger writes and having writ, moves on.'"
• There are several references to Khayyam and his Rubaiyat in works of famous Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges
• A sparkling wine made in India, sometimes referred to as Indian Champagne is called Omar Khayyam.
• In Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry refers to Omar Khayyam as the king of hedonism.