Mark Zuckerberg: Little-Known Facts

Most of us know Mark Zuckerberg as the CEO of Facebook, but there are a lot of interesting facts about this young billionaire that you all must know.

Born : May 14, 1984

Age : 28

1. Type @[4:0] in a Facebook comment, and Mark Zuckerberg’s name will appear.

2. As a teenager Mark was an aethist.

3. Mark’s father Edward Zuckerberg enrolled Mark in a graduate computer course at a nearby college. When his father accompanied Mark to the college at the first class, the instructor looked at Edward and said, pointing to Mark, “You can’t bring him to the classroom with you.” Edward informed the instructor that his son Mark was the student.

4. Mark and his sisters loved to play pranks. Once, Mark and his sister Randi pulled a prank on New Year’s Eve of 1999 that was memorable for Mark Zuckerberg. During that time, everyone was upset about Y2K, which was the theory that a bug in a computer data programming would ruin many of the computerised systems of the world when the year turned to 2000. Mark knew that his parents were apprehensive about Y2K, so he, with his sister, waited until exactly midnight and then shut down the power in their house so as to make his parents think the fears about Y2K had actually come true.

5. Mark, along with his classmate, at Phillips Exeter Academy wrote a music program called Synapse. The program used artificial intelligence to analyse a user’s music listenting habits and used that information to recommend other music.

6. The program got a lot of favourable reviews that both AOL and Microsoft showed interest in buying it for around $1 million. Also, they wanted to hire Mark to develop it, but he would have to drop out of school, so he refused.

7. He joined a Jewish fraternity, Alpha Epsilon Pi. At a party one Friday night, Mark met Priscilla Chan, a Chinese American from Boston. They would later begin dating. Priscilla Chan later expressed her first impressions of Zuckerberg : “He was this nerdy guy who was just a little bit out there.”

8. To be able to communicate with his girlfriend Priscilla Chan’s family members, Zuckerberg started to learn Chinese in 2010.

9. At the beginning of the sophomore year, Mark developed Course Match, the program that enabled students/users to decide what college courses they wanted to opt for based on what other students at their school were choosing.

10. He also invented Facemash, a program that was created with the purpose of finding out who was the most attractive person on campus. However, this was more like the pranks he used to play as a child.

11. The domain name Facemash.com, the predecessor to Facebook that Zuckerberg built in 2003, was sold in 2010 for $30201.

12. In 2009 Mark Zuckerberg wore a tie for the entire year as a symbol of how serious and important the year was following the recession that began in 2008.

13. In 2011, Zuckerberg turned vegetarian and said he would only eat meat of animals that he killed himself.

14. Zuckerberg’s first car was a Subaru Forester SUV.

15. Mark Zuckerberg is also on Twitter as @finkd where he has over 150,000 followers but has posted only 19 tweets in the last three and a half years.

16. Blue is Mark Zuckerberg’s favourite colour, as evident from Facebook’s design.

17. By the time he turned 13, he had already created a basic computer network for his family dubbed “Zucknet,” which allowed the computers in the family and his father’s dental offfice to send messages to each other by pinging.

18. Zuckerberg has also created a few computer games. Once, he developed a computer version of the game Monopoly based on his middle school and a version of the game Risk based on the Roman empire.

19. Zuckerberg’s pet dog Beast is a Puli, a type of Hungarian Sheepdog.

20. Zuckerberg placed a big whiteboard in the hallway of his dormitory suite. Mark would use it to brainstorm with symbols and codes for software. In the words of one of his roommates, Dustin Moskovitz: “He really loved that whiteboard. He awlays wanted to draw out his ideas, even when that didn’t necessarily make them clearer.”

21. Mark Zuckerberg’s interest in programming developed when his parents gifted him the book C++ for Dummies.

22. Mark Zuckerberg has about 50 patents in his name. The first of which was issued in November 2004 for the technology behind the Synapse Media Player.

23. The number of people on who have Mark Zuckerberg on their Google+ circles is roughly half of the number of users who have subscribed to his status updates on Facebook.

24. His favorite musicians include Daft Punk, Lady Gaga, Shakira and Rihanna

Real Meanings Behind Typical Reasons For Break Ups

I’m just bad at relationships.”

Breaking up hurts, and, knowing this, people often come up with some typical ‘nice’ excuses to soften the blow when announcing the news. But what do these white lies truly mean?

“I’m just bad at relationships.”

If you stick to this one quite often, you might really believe it is true. If you don’t like someone “enough”, or if you don’t like them the way they liked you, you naturally conclude it is a flaw in yourself. You accept as an undisputed truth that you fail at relationships. Then, someone comes along who you actually want to make an effort toward and suddenly your ‘ingrained personality traits’ change. The person breaking up with you using this trope really believes they are telling you the truth, but honestly, they just didn’t feel strongly about you. They’ll suddenly be great at relationships when someone comes around who makes them want to be great. That person’s not you, and that’s okay. You can’t “fix” them. This one’s actually doing you a favor. Just move on from this mess. It’s something they need to come to terms with, and they’ll see the difference when they actually fall in love.

“It’s not you, it’s me.”

This is another one where the person might really believe they’re telling the truth. It’s a red herring. What they mean is, it’s both of you. They’re trying to protect your feelings by using a tired cliche, which is a nice try, but ultimately this leaves the dumped with more questions than answers. What someone really means when they say this is, “I don’t like you as much as I think probably someone should like you. You’re great but not for me.”

“I just need to focus on myself and my career right now.”

Don’t begrudge anyone their dream… but, in any case, this excuse is a lie. If you really like someone, you will make time for them. You would show up at their house after work and hobbies and meetings and other obligations at like 3 in the morning and you’ll be down to hang out. If you want to put your career first right now, totally, yes, you should do that. However, if you really think someone is worth it, you will make time for them. Busy people can have significant others. Consider that maybe you were more emotionally expressive and needy, which is not a judgment, and they are a bit more closed off and felt too much obligation. Being needy is not a bad thing, and for your own mental health, you want someone who wants to be around you just as much as you want to be around them, right? And this does unfortunately mean that the person didn’t really care about you enough.

“You’re too good for me.”

This one’s a red flag. All it means is, “I have very low self-esteem and like to sabotage things that are good for me”. If you’re in it to win it, stick this one out, but this person is probably trying to drop you because they hate themselves. Now, do you want to fight the good fight and try to be the one who makes them experience real love? Not really possible, sorry. Or do you know that the job of a significant other is not mold and fix their partner? Because when someone breaks up with you this way, you’ve got to decide if it’s your job to convince them otherwise. (Hint: it’s probably not.)

“I just think we’re better as friends.”

This one is actually true. This means the person really enjoys you but doesn’t have passionate romantic feelings for you. Sometimes friend love and boyfriend/girlfriend love can get confusing. The flip side to this is that they experimented at the expense of your feelings. They might be feeling super guilty about this fact and want to believe they are a “good person” who “wouldn’t do something like that.” They ask you to remain friends so they can feel better about hurting you. It’s selfish. If you’re not ready to just hop back on the buddy train, don’t pretend to be cool for their sake. Someone who uses this to break up is only thinking of themselves and how they perceive themselves as “nice.” If you don’t buy it, don’t coddle them. You’ll just end up crying in a bathroom after seeing them at a party with their new, hotter significant other

5 Mind-Bending Facts About Dreams

Why do some people have nightmares while others really spend their nights in bliss?​

Why do some people have nightmares while others really spend their nights in bliss?​

When your head hits the pillow, for many it’s lights out for the conscious part of you.

But the cells firing in your brain are very much awake, sparking enough energy to produce the sometimes vivid and sometimes downright haunted dreams that take place during the rapid-eye-movement stage of your sleep.

Like sleep, dreams are mysterious phenomena. But as scientists are able to probe deeper into our minds, they are finding some of those answers. Here’s some of what we know about what goes on in dreamland.

1. Violent dreams can be a warning sign

As if nightmares weren’t bad enough, a rare sleep disorder – called REM sleep behaviour disorder – causes people to act out their dreams, sometimes with violent trashes, kicks and screams.

Such violent dreams may be an early sign of brain disorders down the line, including Parkinson’s disease and dementia, according to research published online July 28, 2010, in the journal Neurology.

The results suggest the incipient stages of these neurodegenerative disorders might begin decades before a person, or doctor, knows it.

2. Night owls have more nightmares

Staying up late has its perks, but whimsical dreaming is not one of them.

Research published in 2011 in the journal Sleep and Biological Rhythms, revealed that night owls are more likely than their early-bird counterparts to experience nightmares.

In the study 264 university students rated how often they experienced nightmares on a scale from 0 to 4, never to always, respectively.

The stay-up-late types scored, on average, a 2.10, compared with the morning types who averaged a 1.23.

The researchers said the difference was a significant one, however, they aren’t sure what’s causing a link between sleep habits and nightmares.

Among their ideas is the stress hormone cortisol, which peaks in the morning right before we wake up, a time when people are more prone to be in REM, or dream, sleep.

If you’re still sleeping at that time, the cortisol rise could trigger vivid dreams or nightmares, the researchers speculate.

3. Men dream about sex

As in their wake hours, men also dream about sex more than women do.

And comparing notes in the morning may not be a turn-on for either guys or gals, as women are more likely to have experienced nightmares, suggests doctoral research by psychologist Jennie Parker of the University of the West of England.

She found women’s dreams/nightmares could be grouped into three categories: fearful dreams (being chased or having their life threatened); dreams involving the loss of a loved one or confused dreams.

4. You can control your dreams

If you’re interested in lucid dreaming, you may want to take up video gaming.

The link? Both represent alternate realities, said Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada.

“If you’re spending hours a day in a virtual reality, if nothing else it’s practice.

Gamers are used to controlling their game environments, so that can translate into dreams.”

Her past research has shown that people who frequently play video games are more likely than non-gamers to have lucid dreams where they view themselves from outside their bodies.

They were also better able to influence their dream worlds, as if controlling a video-game character.

That level of control may also help gamers turn a bloodcurdling nightmare into a carefree dream, she found in a 2008 study.

This ability could help war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Gackenbach reasoned.

5. Why we dream

Scientists have long wondered why we dream, with answers ranging from Sigmund Freud’s idea that dreams fulfill our wishes to the speculation that these wistful journeys are just a side effect of rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep.

Turns out, at least part of the reason may be critical thinking, suggests Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett who presented her theory at the Association for Psychological Science meeting in Boston.

Her research revealed that our slumbering hours may help us solve puzzles that have plagued us during daylight hours.

The visual and often illogical aspects of dreams make them perfect for the out-of-the-box thinking that is necessary to solve some problems, she speculates.

So while dreams may have originally evolved for another purpose, they have likely been refined over time for multiple tasks, including helping the brain reboot and helping us solve problems, she said.