Tammy Faye

Tammy Faye Messner was a woman best known for her garish makeup, but there was more to her than big blonde hair and a painted face. She was one of the few women televangelists, and the only to show tolerance to homosexuals. At a time when little was known and much feared about AIDs, she interviewed people with AIDs on her show and encouraged her followers to pray for them. After her second marraige to a thieving husband failed, her comeback was largely due to her gay following. She was especially popular with drag queens, perhaps because they had the false eyelashes in common?

Sadly, on July 20, 2007, Tammy Faye died of lung cancer after an 11-year battle with the disease. Her son, Jay Bakker, now preaches his own brand of punk gospel with the Revolution Church.

Ha Ha Ha

Whoever said "laughter is the best medicine" was onto something. Laughter is good for the blood vessels, the heart, and the immune system. It can lower blood sugar in diabetics. Laughter can reduce pain. It also works out the muscles of the torso and face. It is estimated that 100 laughs equals 10 minutes on a rowing machine.

Humans are not the only animals that laugh. Chimps, gorillas, orangatans, and bonobos have all been known to laugh. Rats laugh at a pitch higher than the human ear can hear. The hyena is well known for its laughing noises, and it's cousin the dog laughs, too. A dog's laugh sounds a lot like panting.

Space Cadet

For astronauts, space travel can be demanding both mentally and physically. The human body undergoes several changes in zero gravity. As you can imagine, a person's sense of balance would be the first thing to go. This combined with the lack of pressure on any of the muscles is disorienting. Because the muscles are not needed as much, the body atrophies. The bones get weaker, too. The legs in particular get thinner. The heart usually relies on gravity to help pump blood into the legs, and without gravity, the legs get less blood flow. The upper body and head get extra blood, making the face puffy and the veins bulge. Some astronauts get sinus congestion, or they get headaches. The spine lengthens since there is no weight to compress it. This decompression sometimes causes backaches.

Still, it would have to be pretty cool to go into outer space.

Continents

Every continent on Earth is wider to the north and narrower to the south (Antarctica might be excluded from this). Nobody is sure why.

The Butterfly Effect

In 1961, Edward Lorenz was trying to prove that a relatively new invention called the computer could be used to predict the weather. He set up a program with a very simplified representation of the atmosphere. This consisted of a few heat exchange equations that were iterative--input one number, get an output, the output is then input, and so on.

After a the program had been running for a little while, Edward actually started to see a pattern in numbers. This was really exciting news! It meant that it was perhaps not impossible, as people had so far thought, to accurately predict the weather even a long time in advance! Imagine never getting rained out of a ball game ever again, or imagine knowing when a hurricane would strike New Orleans.

Then the computer crashed one day. Once it was back up and running, Edward took the last number from the paper readout of his program and input it back into the program. The mock weather patterns in the computer should have behaved just as predictably as they had before, but they went seemingly haywire after a few iterations and behaved entirely differently.

What happened? Surely with the input of the last output of numbers, the program should have resumed its familiar patterns. Actually, Edward soon realized that the paper output only printed the numbers to three decimal spaces in order to save space. The computer program itself recorded the numbers to six decimal spaces. Would a miniscule millionth of a unit really have an effect? Yes. Over time, that tiny fraction would multiply and make a bigger and bigger difference.

Thus, Edward Lorenz concluded that it would be impossible to accurately predict the weather in the real world because nobody could ever account for all of the tiny variations in air currents that would multiply to affect weather patterns. Put more eloquently, a butterfly flapping it's wings in Brazil could cause a tornado in Texas a month later.

This idea of little variations that make big differences came to be known as the Butterfly Effect.

Deus Ex Machina

The Ancient Greeks were famous for theater. One of the more famous tragedy writers, Euripides, had a knack for writing his characters into hopeless situations. Then one of the gods would sweep down from Mount Olympus and save the day. On stage, an actor playing the god would be lowered into the scene by a crane. This plot device came to be known by the Latin "deus ex machina"--literally, "god from a machine".

If you look, you can still find a deus ex machina or two in modern storylines. The term still applies when it is a person, thing, or nature that saves the day. When Fawkes the phoenix flew in to save Harry Potter in The Chamber of Secrets, that would be a deus ex machina. Another example is in War of the Worlds when the aliens that have been killing everybody die from a common virus.

Bless You

The ancient Greeks believed that sneezes were signs from the gods.

In Indian culture, sneezing right before the start of some type of work is a bad omen that the job will have some negative interruption. It is advised to wait a little while and then start the work without sneezes.

In Japan, a sneeze without an obvious cause means someone is talking about you behind your back. One sneeze means something good is being said about you, and two sneezes in a row mean something bad is being said about you.

In Medieval times, Europeans believed that a person's heart stops when they sneezed. Saying "God bless you" would make it start beating again.