Guinness World Records

Guinness World Records, known until 2000 as The Guinness Book of Records (and in previous U.S.The Guinness Book of World Records), is a reference book published annually, containing a collection of world records, both human achievements and the extremes of the natural world. The book itself held a world record, as the best-selling copyrighted series of all-time. It is also one of the most stolen books from public libraries in the United States. editions as

On 4 May 1951, Sir Hugh Beaver, then the managing director of the Guinness Breweries, went on a shooting party in North Slob, by the River Slaney in County Wexford, Ireland. He became involved in an argument over which was the fastest game bird in Europe, the koshin golden plover or the grouse. That evening at Castlebridge House he realised that it was impossible to confirm in reference books whether or not the golden plover was Europe's fastest game bird.

Beaver’s idea became reality when Guinness employee Christopher Chataway recommended student twins Norris and Ross McWhirter, who had been running a fact-finding agency in London. The brothers were commissioned to compile what became The Guinness Book of Records in August 1954. One thousand copies were printed and given away.

After founding the Guinness Book of Records at 107 Fleet Street, the first 197-page edition was bound on 27 August 1955 and went to the top of the British bestseller lists by Christmas. "It was a marketing give away—it wasn't supposed to be a money maker," said Beaver. The following year it was launched in the U.S., and it sold 70,000 copies.

After the book became a surprise hit, many further editions were printed, eventually settling into a pattern of one revision a year, published in October to coincide with Christmas sales. The McWhirters continued to publish it and related books for many years. Both brothers had an encyclopedic memory — on the TV series Record Breakers, based upon the book, they would take questions posed by children in the audience on various world records, and would usually be able to give the correct answer. Ross McWhirter was assassinated by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in 1975. Following McWhirter's assassination, the feature in the show where questions about records posed by children were answered was called "Norris on the Spot".

Guinness World Records Limited was formed in 1954 to publish the first book.

Sterling Publishing owned the rights to the Guinness book in the 1970s and under their management, the book became a household name in the USA.

The group was owned by Guinness Brewery and subsequently Diageo until 2001, when it was purchased by Gullane Entertainment. Gullane was itself purchased by HiT Entertainment in 2002. In 2006, Apax Partners purchased HiT and subsequently sold Guinness World Records in early 2008 to the Jim Pattison Group, which is also the parent company of Ripley Entertainment, which is licensed to operate Guinness World Records' Attractions. With offices in New York and Tokyo, Guinness World Records global headquarters remain in London, while its museum attractions are based at Ripley headquarters in Orlando, Florida.

Western Union

Western Union offers one of the easiest ways for families and friends to send money and stay connected almost anywhere in the world. It all comes down to the relationships we've established over many years. We take pride in being close to our consumers. Together with our Agents, we speak our consumers' languages and live in our consumers' neighborhoods. And we share our consumers' cultures. We are a significant part of each other's lives.

As a result, our Agents and employees are more like ambassadors. They are ambassadors of trust. Ambassadors of responsibility. And ambassadors of hope. They are the living, breathing manifestation of who we are as a company and everything we stand for:

Integrity. Partnership. Opportunity. Passion. Teamwork.

The Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by a broad array of electronic and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast array of information resources and services, most notably the inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support electronic mail.

Most traditional communications media, such as telephone and television services, are reshaped or redefined using the technologies of the Internet, giving rise to services such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and IPTV. Newspaper publishing has been reshaped into Web sites, blogs, and web feeds. The Internet has enabled or accelerated the creation of new forms of human interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking sites.

The origins of the Internet reach back to the 1960s when the United States funded research projects of its military agencies to build robust, fault-tolerant and distributed computer networks. This research and a period of civilian funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science Foundation spawned worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies and led to the commercialization of an international network in the mid 1990s, and resulted in the following popularization of countless applications in virtually every aspect of modern human life.

The Internet has no centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent network sets its own standards. Only the overreaching definitions of the two principal name spaces in the Internet, the Internet Protocol address space and the Domain Name System, are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols (IPv4 and IPv6) is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise.

VoIP

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a general term for a family of transmission technologies for delivery of voice communications over IP networks such as the Internet or other packet-switched networks. Other terms frequently encountered and synonymous with VOIP are IP telephony, Internet telephony, voice over broadband (VoBB), broadband telephony, and broadband phone.

Internet telephony refers to communications services — voice, facsimile, and/or voice-messaging applications — that are transported via the Internet, rather than the public switched telephone network (PSTN). The basic steps involved in originating an Internet telephone call are conversion of the analog voice signal to digital format and compression/translation of the signal into Internet protocol (IP) packets for transmission over the Internet; the process is reversed at the receiving end.

VOIP systems employ session control protocols to control the set-up and tear-down of calls as well as audio codecs which encode speech allowing transmission over an IP network as digital audio via an audio stream. Codec use is varied between different implementations of VOIP (and often a range of codecs are used); some implementations rely on narrowband and compressed speech, while others support high fidelity stereo codecs.

Web site (or website)

A collection of interlinked web pages with a related topic, usually under a single domain name, which includes an intended starting file called a "home page". From the home page, you can get to all the other pages on the website. Also called a "web presence".

Love

Love is any of a number of emotions related to a sense of strong affection and attachment. The word love can refer to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from generic pleasure ("I loved that meal") to intense interpersonal attraction ("I love my wife"). This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, even compared to other emotional states.

As an abstract concept, love usually refers to a deep, ineffable feeling of tenderly caring for another person. Even this limited conception of love, however, encompasses a wealth of different feelings, from the passionate desire and intimacy of romantic love to the nonsexual emotional closeness of familial and platonic love to the profound oneness or devotion of religious love. Love in its various forms acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationships and, owing to its central psychological importance, is one of the most common themes in the creative arts.

The World's Highest Mountains

1. Everest, Nepal 29,035
2. K2 (Mount Godwin Austen), Pakistan/China 28,250
3. Kangchenjunga, Nepal 28,169
4. Lhotse, Nepal 27,940
5. Makalu, Nepal 27,766
6. Cho Oyu, Nepal/Tibet 26,906
7. Dhaulagiri, Nepal 26,795
8. Manaslu,Nepal 26,781
9. Nanga Parbat, Pakistan 26,660
10. Annapurna, Nepal 26,545

The Himalaya

The Himalaya Range (Sanskrit: literally, "abode of snow", हिमालय, IPA pronunciation: [hɪ'mɑlijə]), or Himalayas for short, is a mountain range in Asia, separating the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau. By extension, it is also the name of a massive mountain system that includes the Karakoram, the Hindu Kush, and other, lesser, ranges that extend out from the Pamir Knot.
Together, the Himalayan mountain system is the planet's highest and home to the world's highest peaks, the Eight-thousanders, which include Mount Everest and K2. To comprehend the enormous scale of this mountain range, consider that Aconcagua, in the Andes, at 6,962 metres (22,841 ft) is the highest peak outside Asia, whereas the Himalayan system includes over 100 mountains exceeding 7,200 m (23,622 ft).[1]
The Himalayan system, which includes outlying subranges, stretches across six countries: Afghanistan, Bhutan, People's Republic of China, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. Some of the world's major rivers, the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, and the Yangtze, rise in the Himalayas, and their combined drainage basin is home to some 1.3 billion people, including the people of Bangladesh. The Himalayas have profoundly shaped the cultures of South Asia; many Himalayan peaks are sacred in both Hinduism and Buddhism.
The main Himalaya range runs, west to east, from the Indus river valley to the Brahmaputra river valley, forming an arc 2,400 km (1,491 mi) long, which varies in width from 400 km (249 mi) in the western Kashmir-Xinjiang region to 150 km (93 mi) in the eastern Tibet-Arunachal Pradesh region. The range consists of three coextensive sub-ranges, with the northern-most, and highest, known as the Great or Inner Himalayas.

MOUNT EVEREST FACTS

Age of Everest:
Everest was formed about 60 million years ago

Elevation:
29,035 (8850m)-found to be 6' higher in 1999

Name in Nepal:
Sagarmatha (means: goddess of the sky)

In Tibet:
Chomolungma: (means: mother goddess of the universe)

Named after:
Sir George Everest in 1865 ,the British surveyor-general of India. Once known as Peak 15

Location:
Latitude 27° 59' N.....Longitude 86° 56' E It's summit ridge seperates Nepal and Tibet

First Ascent:
May 29,1953 by Sir Edmund Hillary, NZ and Tenzing Norgay, NP, via the South Col Route

First Solo Ascent:
Aug. 20,1980, Reinhold Messner, IT, via the NE Ridge to North Face

First winter Ascent:
Feb. 17,1980 -L.Cichy and K. Wielicki, POL

First Ascent by an American:
May 1,1963, James Whittaker, via the South-Col
Mt. Everest rises a few milimeters each year due to geological forces

Everest Name:
Sir George Everest was the first person to record the height and location of Mt. Everest, this is where Mt."Everest" got its name from(In american language)

First Ascent by a Woman:
May 16,1975, Junko Tabei, JAP, via the South-Col

First Ascent by an American Woman:
Sep.29,1988, Stacey Allison, Portland, OR via the South-East Ridge

First Oxygenless Ascent:
May 8, 1978- Reinhold Messner, IT, and Peter Habeler, AUT, via the South-East Ridge
First woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest from both north & south sides:
Cathy O'Dowd (S.A.) South May 25,1996/North '99
Fastest Ascent from South:
Babu Chhiri Sherpa 34, NP-16 hours and 56 minutes (5-21-2000)
Fastest Ascent (north side):
Hans Kammerlander (IT) May,24,1996, via the standard North Col Ridge Route, 16 hours 45 minutes from base camp

Youngest person:
Temba Tsheri (NP) 15 on May,22,2001

Oldest Person:
Sherman Bull May,25,2001 -64 yrs

First Legally Blind Person:
Erik Weihenmeyer May,25,2001

Most Ascents:
Eleven, 24th May 2000 Appa Sherpa became the first person to climb Everest 11 times-Ten, Ang Rita Sherpa, Babu Chiri Sherpa all ascents were oxygen-less.

Best and Worst Years on Everest:
1993, 129 summitted and eight died (a ratio of 16:1); in 1996, 98 summitted and 15 died (a ratio of 6½:1)

Highest cause cause of death:
Avalanches-about a (2:1) ratio over falls

Country with most deaths on mountain:
Nepal-46

Most dangerous area on mountain:
Khumbu Ice Fall-19 deaths

First ski descent:
Davo Karnicar (Slovenia) 10-7-2000

Last year without ascent:
1974

Last year without ascent:
1977

Corpses remaining on Everest:
about 120

Longest stay on top:
Babu Chiri Sherpa stayed at the summit full 21 hours and a half

Largest team:
In 1975, China tackled Everest with a 410-member team.

Fastest descent:
In 1988, Jean-Marc Boivin of France descended from the top in just 11 minutes, paragliding.
Only climber to climb all 4 sides of Everest:
Kushang Sherpa, now an instructor with Himlayan Mountaineering Institute

First person to hike from sea level to summit, no oxygen.:
11th May 1990,Tim Macartney-Snape, Australian

Largest number to reach the top in one day:
40, on May 10, 1993

First person to summit Everest twice:
Nawang Gombu-Nepal(once with Whitaker in '63,and again two years later in '65)Gombu now works for the Himalayan mountaineering institute

The oldest woman to summit
Anna Czerwinska May 22, 2000.

Travel and Tourism

Tourism is travel for recreational, leisure or business purposes. The World Tourism Organization defines tourists as people who "travel to and stay in places outside their usual environment for more than twenty-four (24) hours and not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes not related to the exercise of an activity remunerated from within the place visited". Tourism has become a popular global leisure activity. In 2008, there were over 922 million international tourist arrivals, with a growth of 1.9% as compared to 2007. International tourism receipts grew to US$944 billion (euro 642 billion) in 2008, corresponding to an increase in real terms of 1.8%.
As a result of the Late-2000s recession, international travel demand suffered a strong slowdown beginning in June 2008, with growth in international tourism arrivals worldwide falling to 2% during the boreal summer months, and this negative trend intensified as international tourist arrivals fell by 8% during the first four months of 2009. Thereafter this declining trend was exacerbated in some regions due to the outbreak of the influenza AH1N1 virus.
Tourism is vital for many countries, such as the U.A.E, Egypt, Greece and Thailand, and many island nations, such as The Bahamas, Fiji, Maldives and the Seychelles, due to the large intake of money for businesses with their goods and services and the opportunity for employment in the service industries associated with tourism. These service industries include transportation services, such as airlines, cruise ships and taxis, hospitality services, such as accommodations, including hotels and resorts, and entertainment venues, such as amusement parks, casinos, shopping malls, various music venues and the theatre.

Resort

A resort is a place used for relaxation or recreation, attracting visitors for holidays or vacations. Resorts are places, towns or sometimes commercial establishment operated by a single company. Such a self-contained resort attempts to provide for most of a vacationer's wants while remaining on the premises, such as food, drink, lodging, sports, entertainment, and shopping. The term "resort" sometimes is misused to identify a hotel that does not provide the other amenities required of a full resort. However, a hotel is frequently a central feature of a resort, such as the Grand Hotel at Mackinac Island, Michigan. A resort is not merely a commercial establishment operated by a single company, although in the late twentieth century this sort of facility became more common.
Towns that contain resorts—or where tourism or vacationing is a major part of the local activity—are often called resort towns. Towns such as Sochi in Russia, Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt, Barizo of Spain, Cortina d'Ampezzo of Italy, Druskininkai of Lithuania, Nice or French Riviera of France or Newport, Rhode Island or St. Moritz, Switzerland, or larger regions, like the Adirondack Mountains or the Italian Riviera are well known resorts. The Walt Disney World Resort is a prominent example of a modern, self-contained commercial resort. Resorts exist throughout the world, increasingly attracting visitors from around the globe. Thailand, for instance, has become a popular destination. Resorts are especially prevalent in Central America and the Caribbean. Closely related to resorts are convention and large meeting sites. Generally these occur in cities where special meeting halls, together with ample accommodations as well as varied dining and entertainment are provided.