Voodoo Time Dot Com

The most frequently spoken word on the entire planet is… “OK”

Along with the entire scientific community, I learned (as Einstein suspected) that the speed of gravity is the same as the speed of light (i.e., 186,000 miles per second or 299,792,458 meters per second).

So, if the Sun suddenly disappeared, Earth would shoot off into space at precisely the same time the lights went out (about 8.3 minutes after the Sun went kablooey).

Author L. Frank Baum (author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) chose the name “Oz” for his fictitious land after glancing at the second drawer of his filing cabinet.

A-N
O-Z

In honor of Christmas:

The Bible does not ever mention how many wise men travelled to visit Jesus. It is merely assumed there were three since they came bearing three gifts (Furby, Playstation 2, and Tickle-Me Elmo).

It is unknown whether Joseph and Mary were married at the time of Jesus’s birth. Matthew’s account says they were. Luke’s says they were merely engaged (espoused).

Oh, and for all of you who consider the word “X-mas” to be sacrilege, get over it. The Greek letter “X” (chi) was the symbol for “Christ”.

In school, we always learned there were 4 major oceans on Earth (Arctic, Atlantic, Indian, Pacific). However, in 2000, the International Hydrographic Organization pulled a fifth ocean from the southern bits of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans. They called it, appropriately enough, the Southern Ocean.

These are the words to the Spongebob Squarepants theme en español…

¿Están listos chicos?
¡Sí, Capitan, estamos listos!
¡No los escucho!
¡Sí, Capitan, estamos listos!
Uuuuuuuuuuuuu….
Vive en una piña debajo del mar
¡BOB ESPONJA!
Su cuerpo absorbe y sin estallar
¡BOB ESPONJA!
El mejor amigo que podrías desear
¡BOB ESPONJA!
Y como aun pez le es fácil flotar
¡BOB ESPONJA!
¡Todos!
¡BOB ESPONJA!
¡BOB ESPONJA!
¡BOB ESPONJA!
El es Bob….¡Esponja!

A sound wave at 165 Decibels (dB) causes frictional heating (due to the extreme compression and expansion of air) sufficient to catch a person’s hair on fire.

A sound at 160 dB will instantly perforate a person’s eardrum.

In comparison, the level where sound becomes painful to humans lies somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 dB to 130 dB.

One in seventeen (1/17) people worldwide will die of a mosquito-bourne illness - especially malaria.

The Dingo Fence in Australia is the longest continuous man-made barrier in the world, spanning some 9600 kilometers between New South Wales and Queensland. It was erected to keep dingos (the native wild dogs of Australia) out of sheep-herding areas of southeastern Australia while still preserving their habitat. China’s Great Wall is longer overall, but it’s longest continuous lengths fall far short of the dingo fence.

The jury seems to be out on what is actually the longest man-made structure on Earth. Depending on who you ask, the winner is the Dingo Fence, the Great Wall, or the Trans-Siberian Railroad. But it appears that the longest man-made structure on Earth is probably an underwater cable system. One of these, connecting the UK and Japan spans approximately 28,000 kilometers.

Today I learned that owls have extremely large eyes relative to the size of their brains. An owl’s eye is roughly the same size as a human eye, though their facial feathers make them look slightly smaller.

If humans had the same eye-size/brain-size ratio, our eyes would be the size of grapefruits and weigh about five pounds each!