Tallest Water Slide in the World

After several months of delays, Verruckt, the world’s tallest water slide, is set to open Thursday in Schlitterbahn water park in Kansas City, Kan.

At a little more than 168 feet high, the ride is taller than New York’s Statue of Liberty. It was to have opened at the end of last month, but a mechanical issue scrubbed those plans. That issue has been addressed, spokeswoman Winter Prosapio said Tuesday morning.


"We want you to feel like you're coming out of a cannon and getting shot out and then falling straight down," water park designer Jeff Henry of Texas said in a June 29 Travel Channel show called "Xtreme Waterparks."Here's how the ride unfolds: Thrill-seekers climb nearly 300 steps to the top, clamber onto a four-person raft then plunge downward at more than 50 mph. They are then hauled up a 55-story hill and sail downward again, landing with a splash in a pool of water.


Guinness World Records representatives visited the Verruckt slide in April to certify it as the tallest water slide on the globe at 17 stories -- 168 feet and 7 inches tall.

     ++ Watch Video Here++

                           

"The ride is extremely complex," Prosapio told the Los Angeles Times after a problem with the conveyer that hauls the 100-pound rafts to the top of the slide scotched the start.

The various bumps on the road to completing the slide are detailed in the Travel Channel feature. The city also required additional time to approve the permit for this gargantuan endeavor. Rain, snow, even tornadoes interfered with construction.

Just after Guinness visited the park in April, the ride’s design had to be changed after some test rafts went flying through the air and crashed to the ground.

A county-state agency inspected the ride for structural soundness, Kansas City, Mo., TV station KMBC News reported. Rider safety is not part of that inspection.

There are "very few, if any, rules in the state of Kansas" governing rider safety at theme parks, Edwin Birch, spokesman for the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kan., told KMBC.

Prosapio said the park and Verruckt were required to meet all local codes and building requirements but that Schlitterbahn abided by national guidelines related to waterpark rides.

"This ride is almost a hybrid between a waterpark ride and a roller coaster, so we are going with the more conservative waterpark guidelines," she said.

Prosapio said a media preview would take place Wednesday morning and that the park had been sending test riders in the last few days "even in bikinis."

In a promo for the Travel Channel show, above, a camera provides a first-person point of view of the ride.

Will you be lining up to ride Verruckt?

LA Times

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50 Facts That Will Blow Your Mind In Only One Sentence

1. You can’t hum while holding your nose.

2. Russia has a larger surface area than Pluto.

3. Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr. were born in the same year.

4. People currently graduating college have never been alive while The Simpsonswasn’t on TV.

5. Mars is populated entirely by robots.

6. Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire.

7. There are more fake flamingos in the world than real flamingos.

Via pinterest.com

8. New York City is further south than Rome, Italy.

9. Mammoths went extinct 1,000 years after the Egyptians finished building the Great Pyramid.

10. The fax machine was invented the same year people were traveling the Oregon Trail.

11. 1998 is as far away as 2030.

12. Carrots were originally purple.

13. France was still executing people with a guillotine when the first Star Warsfilm came out.

14. There are more public libraries than McDonald’s in the U.S. 

15. Humans share 50% of their DNA with bananas.

margouillatphotos/margouillatphotos


16. An octopus has three hearts.

17. There’s enough water in Lake Superior to cover all of North and South America in 1 foot of water.

18. There is a basketball court on the top floor of the U.S. Supreme Court Building known as the “highest court in the land.”

19. If a piece of paper were folded 42 times, it would reach to the moon.

20. You can spell the word “upside down” upside down by using other letters of the alphabet: umop apisdn.

21. There are more nipples on Earth than there are people.

22. Saudi Arabia imports camels from Australia.

23. The name Jessica was created by Shakespeare in the play Merchant of Venice.

24. The YKK on your zipper stands for “Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikigaisha.”

upload.wikimedia.org

25. If you put your finger in your ear and scratch, it sounds just like Pac-Man.

26. Every year, hundreds of new trees grow because of squirrels forgetting where they buried their nuts.

27. It rains diamonds on Saturn and Jupiter.

28. There are more atoms in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in all the oceans on Earth. 

29. Every two minutes, we take more pictures than all of humanity did in the19th century.

Via pleated-jeans.com

30. Maine is the closest U.S. state to Africa.

31. A straw has only one hole in it.
previewcf.turbosquid.com

32. Alaska is simultaneously the most northern, the most western, and the most eastern state in the U.S.

33. Dolphins have names for one another.

34. Vending machines are twice as likely to kill you as a shark is.

Via supportoursharks.com

35. The toy Barbie’s full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts.

36. A strawberry isn’t a berry but a banana is.

37. So are avocados and watermelon.

38. The probability of you drinking a glass of water that contains a molecule of water that also passed through a dinosaur is almost 100%.

39. In Welsh folklore, corgis were the preferred method of transportation for fairies.

guijunpeng/guijunpeng

40. Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the iPhone than she did to the building of the Great Pyramid.

41. When you remember a life event, you are remembering the last time you remembered it, not the actual event.

42. North Korea and Finland are separated by one country.

Via rsf.org

43. Will Smith is now older than Uncle Phil was at the beginning of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

44. A pig’s orgasm can last for 30 minutes.

45. A Venus day is longer than a Venus year.

46. There have been studies that show that goats, like us, have accents.

mira33/mira33

47. “Jesus” backwards sounds like “sausage.”

48. Wayne Allwine and Russi Taylor, who respectively voiced Mickey and Minnie Mouse, were married in real life.

49. There’s no reason for the alphabet to be in the order it is.

50. There are more ways to shuffle a deck of cards than there are atoms on Earth.

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STRANGE AND FUNNY COMPUTER FACTS

STRANGE FACTS ABOUT COMPUTERS, SERVER, LAPTOPS :

In the 1980s, an IBM computer wasn't considered 100 percent compatible unless it could run Microsoft Flight Simulator*.

If u opened up the case of the original Macintosh, u will find 47 signatures
one for each member of Apple's Macintosh divison as of 1982.

The first computer mouse was invented by Doug Engelbart in around 1964 and was made of wood.

The computer in your cell phone has more processing power than all the computers in the Apollo 11 Lunar Lander that put 2 men on the moon.

The popular programming language COBOL was invented by Admiral Grace Hopper, the first female admiral in the US Navy.

An Amd 1400 chip running without a heatsink gets as hot as 370 degrees.

Macquariums are aquariams made from old macintosh computers.

Hard drives in the near future are expected to have a track density of 

about 100,000 tracks/inch.This means that tracks are spaced 10 millionths
of an inch apart.

One terabyte(1000 gigabytes) is equivalent to storing a stack of
documents that is more than 16 times the height of New York's empire
state building.

The 4004 was the first microprocessor of intel.

The nVidia GeForce 6800 ultra has 222 million transistors which is the
record for the max. no. transistors on a chip.

What does 50 G.B of storage really mean?It means we can stack 3 piles of
single spaced type written pages taller than the Eiffel tower and data to
support this information is about 50 gigabytes.

The code name for the 12 engineers who designed the IBM pc was :-
'The dirty dozen'.

128 bit SSL encryption is so strong that it would take much , much longer than the age of universe to crack a message encrypted using it.Even 20 years from now, if computers are a million times faster. it would still take longer than the age of the universe to crack it.

Disk drive recording head fly height (gap between the head and disc when the drive is spinning ) is less than 1 microinch while:- A red blood cell is 300 microinches is diameter.
-- A particle of tobacco smoke is 250 microinches.
-- A particle of smog is 100 microinches.
-- A human hair is 4000 microinches

STRANGE FACTS ABOUT IT PROFESSIONALS / COMPANIES 

Bill Gates' Hse was designed using a Macintosh computer !!! - Bill Gates LOL ;)

Another name for a Microsoft Windows tutorial is 'Crash Course'! --- ;) lol

Dell Computers was started by a 19 year old with only $1,000.

Microsoft made $16,005 in revenue in its first year of operation.

Bill Gates dropped out of college (Harvard) before founding Microsoft.

The first computer company to register for a domain name was digital
equipment corporation.

Hewlett Packard was started at a garage in Palo Alto in 1939.

The four largest software makers in the world are:-
(a) Microsoft
(b) Adobe
(c) Sap
(d) Computer Associates.
. .

STRANGE FACTS ABOUT INTERNET :

80% of all pictures on the internet are of naked women.

There are approximately 1,319,972,109 people on the Internet.

On eBay, there are an average of $680 worth of transactions each second.

There are approximately 1.06 billion instant messaging accounts worldwide.

The first banner advertising was used in 1994.

E-mail has been around longer than the World Wide Web.

One of every 8 married couples in the US last year met online.

By the year 2012 there will be approximately 17 billion devices connected to the Internet.

For every 'normal' webpage, there are five porn pages.

Yahoo! was originally called 'Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web'.

STRANGE FACTS ABOUT KEY BOARD AND TYPEWRITERS 

"Stewardesses" is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.

The Dvorak keyboard is more efficient than QWERTY. 20 times faster, in fact. !!! Amazing Even then QWERT is popular ??? ha ha lol.

TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.
On an average work day, a typist's fingers travel 12.6 miles.

STRANGE FACTS ABOUT COMPUTER GAMES 

The most expensive game ever developed was "ShenMue" for sega dreamcast.It costs $20 million.

STRANGE FACTS ABOUT SOFTWARES, STRANGE SOFTWARES 

In 1971, the first speech recognition software named, "Hearsay" was developed in India.

STRANGE FACTS ABOUT HARD DISK, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, CD-DVD-WRITERS

Disk drive recording head fly height (gap between the head and disc when the drive is spinning ) is less than 

1 microinch while:- A red blood cell is 300 micro inches is diameter.
-- A particle of tobacco smoke is 250 micro inches.
-- A particle of smog is 100 micro inches.
-- A human hair is 4000 micro inches.

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AMAZING FUNNY FACTS YOU NEVER KNOW

SOME DAY TO DAY FUNNY, STRANGE FACTS - OF LIFE:

> A person cannot fold a piece of paper in half more than 8 times.  

> There are just over 300 million cell phones used daily
in the United States alone.

> A shrimp's heart is in its head.

> Natural pearls will melt in vinegar. 

> An olive tree can live up to 1500 years. 

> Cleopatra married two of her brothers. 

> Ants can't shut their eyes. 

> On a Canadian two dollar bill, the flag flying over the Parliament Building looks like an American flag.> Men's shirts have the buttons on the right, while women shirts have the buttons on the left. 

> Chewing gum will help reduce tears when cutting an onion. 

> The day after thanksgiving is the busiest day for plumbers in the U.S. 

> Coffee beans are not beans at all, rather fruit pits. 

> Fortune cookies were invented in America in 1918, by Charles Jung. 

> Scuba divers cannot pass gas at depth deeper than 33 feet. 

> The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. It was the fashion then, to shave them off. 

> The average American consumes enough caffeine in one year to kill a horse.

> A giraffe can clean its ears with its 50 cm (20 in) tongue.

> The pig is rated the fourth most intelligent animal but are mentioned only twice in Bible.
> Sharks are immune to all known diseases. 
> The majority of suicides occur on a Monday.- It is a fact, everyone HATES Mondays. 

> The most children born to one woman was 69, she was a peasant who lived a 40 year life, in which she had 16 twins, 7 triplets, and 4 quadruplets - now that's a lot of babies!

> If you keep a goldfish in the dark, it will eventually turn white. 

> On average, people who use their right hand live 9 years longer than people who use their left. 

> The ant can lift 50 times its own weight, can pull 30 times its own weight and always falls over on its right side when intoxicated. 

> It is physically impossible for you to lick your elbow.

> Walt Disney was afraid of mice.

> A snail can sleep for three years.

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