6 Things You May Not Know (but now you do)

In the spirit of an old blog post by one of my favorite tech folks: Don Hite, I decided to add my 1.2 cents onto it.

1. The US imports more oil from Canada than from any other nation on Earth.  Middle East countries come in at 4th on the list for quantity of oil imported.  (source: US. EIA)

2. The Apple iPhone is NOT the dominant Smartphone.  As of Q2, CY 2009, RIM (Blackberry) owns 50 percent of the US smartphone market, while Nokia owns 44 percent of the worldwide smartphone market.  The Apple iPhone owns 23 percent of the US market, and 13 percent of the worldwide market. (source: InformationWeek)

3. The world’s fastest computer is not a Mac or a PC - it runs Linux. The IBM Sequoia supercomputer is the world’s fastest computer as of Feb 2009, logging some 20 petaflops per second of processing power.  (source: IBM press release)

4. Officially, viruses are not yet known to be living or non-living.  A virus is technically somewhere in between.  Some scientists consider them “alive” while others do not.  (source: MIT / Whitehead Institute)

5. On average, more than 50,000 people die from Influenza in the U.S. annually.  Influenza is listed as the 8th leading cause of death in the United States.  Based on 2006 data (the latest available), the official death count was 56,326.  Heart disease is the number 1 cause of U.S. deaths at 631,636, followed by Cancer, Stroke, chronic lower respiratory disease, Accidents, Diabetes and Alzheimer’s.  So H1N1 is really not that significant at this point. (source: CDC)

6. For every fatal suicide, there are 12 to 25 failed attempts.  Think you’re going to make that jump?  You’re more likely to survive it, maimed and crippled, than to succeed.  Sorry dude.  (source: NIMH / NIH government statistics)