The world will never be normal. Too many nuts, quacks, and ghosts.

"What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen sparrow?"

(Feeling very Python-esque tonight. And they never answered it well in the movie anyway.)

It all depends on whether the sparrow is alive or dead and whether or not it has some object stuck through it or out of it (depending on how you wish to look at it).

However, I have noticed that velocity can increase if one uses assistance. Like a canon or catapult. Just make sure not to over load either object or feathers will fly.

As to how fast a sparrow flies on it's own...I'll say they're fast little buggars when the predator is determined to get them for...various means and reasons.

hummingbirds!! how fast do their wings beat?

now those little fellows can really move!!

Why is the alphabet in that order?

JB Snape wrote:hummingbirds!! how fast do their wings beat?

now those little fellows can really move!!

50 times per second. They're really cool when you get them to land on your finger and sit there looking at you.

ProfessorMalachi wrote:Why is the alphabet in that order?

To make it easier for kids to memorize. *cackles* Some history...

A Greek borrowed the 22 Phoenician letters around 800 BC — I say "a Greek" because idiosyncratic errors suggest one absentminded genius botched the job. Among other mistakes, he got several sibilant letters mixed up, and by the time things calmed down S and Z were the wrong shape and S was out of order. The same joker, or one who followed closely, gave exclusively vowel sounds to four letters theretofore primarily consonantal: ancestors of A, E, I, and O. Later Greeks added letters to the end, two of which interest us: chi, ancestral X, which over time acquired our modern "ks" sound; and upsilon, ancestral U, which was probably a vowel variant of the semivowel wau, since dropped from the Greek alphabet but ancestral to F.

The Etruscans borrowed the Greek alphabet about 700 BC. They retained the letter order but dispensed with the Semitic-derived letter names, which is why we say "ay, bee," not "alpha, beta." (British zed, from zeta, is a holdout.)

Latin borrowed the Etruscan alphabet about 600 BC. The Etruscans had no G sound and thus no corresponding letter, so eventually Latin G evolved from C — fittingly, because Etruscan C (pronounced "k") had come from the Greek gamma (pronounced "g" as in, well, gamma). Rather than sitting next to its sib, G took slot seven, replacing underutilized Z. Centuries later Z came back to transliterate Greek zeta and Y was introduced to represent upsilon. As newbies, Y and Z had to sit in the back.

The modern English alphabet is the 23-letter Latin assortment with three additions hastened by the invention of movable type. W starts showing up in English letter lists in the 16th century, replacing the previous literal double U (or V) that denoted our current W sound. Naturally it was placed next to the then-undifferentiated U/V. The I/J and U/V cleavages came later — though the different shapes had existed for centuries, they weren't considered distinct letters in English until around 1700.

omg, im too tired to read all of this...

answer me this, peeves, why do we get so tired?

Because your body can't keep up with your mind.

that's for sure!!


but why does it feel like my body can't keep up with my mind? hehe

nvm, both are tired

Because your mind is exasporated that your body can't keep up.