A straight line drawn between two places on a world map looks like the shortest distance between them. But this usually isn’t so, because most maps are distorted. Take a look at a globe. If you stretch a piece of string over the globe, joining Japan and Denmark, you will see that the shortest route runs over the North Pole, …

From about A.D. 800 the Norse sailors raided the coasts of northwest Europe, and the craft they used were the broad and shallow ‘longships’. The Vikings, as the Norsemen are commonly called today, set out from their creeks or fiords in Scandinavia and Denmark in early spring and late summer, and sailed away on long, bold searches for plunder. These …

Janus Friis was born 26 June 1976 in Copenhagen. He is a Danish entrepreneur best known for co-founding the file-sharing application KaZaA, and the peer-to-peer telephony application Skype. In September 2005, he and his partner Niklas Zennström sold Skype to eBay for $2.6B. They also developed Joost – an interactive software application for distributing TV shows and other forms of …

Giovanni Van Bronckhorst — “This World Cup is my ultimate dream,” the Oranje captain told FIFA.com in April 2009. Handed the armband when Bert van Marwijk took over the Netherlands reins in the summer of 2008, the evergreen Feyenoord full-back will be bringing an end to a 14-year love affair with the national team in South Africa. Unsurprisingly, he hopes …

Caroline Wozniacki was born on July 11, 1990 in Odense, Denmark. She is a professional tennis player. She is a nineteen years old tennis player who turned professional in 2005. She has Polish origins because her parents were born there. As a junior player she won in 2005 the Orange Bowl tennis championship and lost the final at Australian Open …

Bertolt Brecht, born on Feb. 10, 1898, died on Aug. 14, 1956, one of the great German poets and playwrights, had a key influence on modern drama. As an innovator he advanced such ideas as the “alienation effect,” an attempt to divorce the audience from emotional identification with the play’s characters, presumably preventing them from experiencing catharsis, pity or fear …

Bayberry — Myrica is a genus of about 35-50 species of small trees and shrubs in the family Myricaceae, order Fagales. The genus has a wide distribution, including Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America, and missing only from Australasia. Some botanists split the genus into two genera on the basis of the catkin and fruit structure, restricting Myrica …

Loons — The loons (North America) or divers (UK/Ireland) are a group of aquatic birds found in many parts of North America and northern Eurasia (Europe, Asia and debatably Africa). All living species of loons are members of the genus (Gavia), family (Gaviidae) and order (Gaviiformes). A loon is the size of a large duck or small goose, which it …

Alphabetical Listing of Uncategorized Acronyms 2.5G — Second-and-a-half-generation Mobile Telephone System 2D — Two 2G — Second 3D — Three 3G — Third 3I — Investors In Industry (venture Capitalists) 3M — Minnesota Mining And Manufacturing Company 4D — Four-dimensional (usually Three Spatial Plus One Temporal Dimension 4G — Fourth-generation Mobile Telephone System 4GL — Fourth-generation Programming Language 4WD — …