10 Things You Should Know - Episode VI

• ‘The Wicked Bible’ of 1631 is so called because it dropped a ‘not’ from one of the prohibitions of the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt commit adultery (instead of ‘thou shalt not commit adultery’).

• During the Second World War, Russian strongman Stalin was code-named GLYPTIC, meaning ‘an image carved out of stone’. The name Stalin means ‘man of steel’.

• The Vatican City has no armed force of its own, the (Pontifical) Swiss Guard being a corps responsible for the security of the Pope. The Pontifical Swiss Guard was founded by Pope Julius II in 1506 as the personal bodyguard of the Pope and continues to fulfill that function. All recruits must be Catholic, unmarried males with Swiss citizenship who have completed their basic training with the Swiss Army with certificates of good conduct, be between the ages of 19 and 30, and be at least 175 cm (68.90 in) in height. Members are armed with small arms and the traditional halberd (a kind of pole weapon) and trained in bodyguarding tactics.

• In a speech broadcast by the Azad Hind Radio from Singapore in July 1944, Subhash Chandra Bose addressed Mahatma Gandhi as the ‘Father of the Nation’ and asked for his blessings and good wishes for the war he was fighting. This was the first time that Mahatma Gandhi was referred to by this title.

• Goldman Sachs was founded by Marcus Goldman in New York in 1869. Thirteen years later, his son-in-law Samuel Sachs joined him. In 1885, the firm adopted the name, Goldman Sachs & Co.

• The population of Uttar Pradesh is a little over 20 crore (Census 2011). This means that if UP were a separate country, it would have been the fifth most populous nation in the world. To put this in perspective, UP’s population would put it ahead of Brazil, which with its area of over 85 lakh sq km, is 35 times larger than UP in area.

• The Aztecs used to describe gold as ‘the excrement of the gods’.

• The word cyberspace is a portmanteau of cybernetics and space. It was coined by William Gibson, the Canadian science fiction writer, in 1982 in his novelette ‘Burning Chrome’ in Omni magazine and was subsequently popularized in his novel Neuromancer. Cyberspace relates to virtual reality.

• ‘Meatspace’ is the opposite of ‘cyberspace’. In other words, meatspace relates to anything that is physical in nature.

• We all know that Rahul Dravid is nicknamed ‘The Wall’. There is another nickname he has got: Jammy. That is what his school teammates called him, because Rahul’s father worked for Kissan jams (a Unilever brand). 

Check out 10 Things - Episode I, Episode II, Episode III, Episode IV, and Episode V.