Lots of travel this past week limited my blogging. But sitting on airplanes reading newspapers and magazines did yield these five fascinating factoids:

— “Today there are some 3 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide, and that will grow to 5 billion by 2015, when two-thirds of the people on earth will have phones, predicts Finnish handset maker Nokia.” (Source: Business Week)

— “The 134 million citizens of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, had just 500,000 telephone lines in 2001 when the government began encouraging competition in telecommunications. Now Nigeria has more than 30 million cellular subscribers. ” (Source: Business Week)

— “[G]asoline remains the cheapest liquid on sale at most American filling stations, costing less per gallon than milk, coffee, or mouthwash.” (Source: Financial Times)

— “[T]he diplomatic security section of the U.S. State Department employs 34,000 people world-wide, far more than the 12,000 foreign-service officers working in diplomatic posts abroad.” (Source: Wall Street Journall)

— Only three countries in the world haven’t adopted the metric system: Liberia, Mynamar, and the United States. (Source: Good magazine)

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