Wordology

The word gymnasium comes from the Greek gymnazein, which means 'to exercise naked'.

How Not to Spill Coffee

Rouslan Krechetnikov is a mechanical engineer at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and he spends most of his time working on fluid dynamics, the flow of air on a plane’s wings, the stability of a rocket, and other weighty problems. None of that has brought him as much attention as his newest paper in the journal Physical Review E: “Walking with coffee: Why does it spill?”

Krechetnikov and a graduate student, Hans Mayer, decided to divert from weightier subjects last year after a scientific conference, where they had watched fellow researchers stumble to their tables, trying not to get coffee all over themselves and the floor.

“The project was certainly fun. We just wanted to satisfy our curiosity and, given the results, to share what we learned with the scientific community through peer-reviewed literature,” Krechetnikov wrote.

They set up a simple experiment, watching a person walk in a straight line, mug in hand. They had their test subject look at the coffee cup. They had their test subject look at the floor ahead. They shot video of it all, recording how the coffee oscillated and how long it took to spill.

The results. Don’t rush. You may think the coffee will spill less if you get it to the table more quickly, but the opposite is true. Slow down and the sloshing will too. Watch the cup, not the floor. You will spill less.

The abstract concludes: “The studied problem represents an example of the interplay between the complex motion of a cup, due to the biomechanics of a walking individual, and the low-viscosity-liquid dynamics in it.” Isn't science wonderful?

Happy Friday

The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.

I always forgive, and never forget to have a Happy Friday!

French Fry Calorie Fact

A single McDonald's french fry has 5 calories A single Pringle has twice as many calories, 10.

What's in a Name, Tanqueray

When he was a young boy, Charles Tanqueray’s path through life seemed pretty clear. He was the product of three straight generations of Bedfordshire clergymen, so it was assumed he would take up the cloth himself.

He decided to do something different and began distilling gin in 1830 in a little plant in London’s Bloomsbury district. By 1847, he was shipping his gin to colonies around the British Empire, where many plantation owners and troops had developed a taste for Tanqueray and tonic.

Ten Interesting Names

Did you know the Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons has a name? It’s Jeff Albertson. Creator Matt Groening says, “I was out of the room when [the writers] named him. In my mind, ‘Louis Lane’ was his name, and he was obsessed and tormented by Lois Lane.”

2. Barbie’s full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts. (Ken’s last name is Carson.)

3. Cap’n Crunch’s full name is Captain Horatio Magellan Crunch

4. Snuffleupagus has a first name - Aloysius.

5. In the Peanuts comic strip, Peppermint Patty’s real name is Patricia Reichardt.

6. The Wizard of Oz' full name is, Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkel Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs. Frank Baum’s Dorothy And the Wizard in Oz relates,
“It was a dreadfully long name to weigh down a poor innocent child, and one of the hardest lessons I ever learned was to remember my own name. When I grew up I just called myself O.Z., because the other initials were P-I-N-H-E-A-D; and that spelled ‘pinhead,’ which was a reflection on my intelligence.”

7. Mr. Clean's first name is ”Veritably.” The name came from a “Give Mr. Clean a First Name” promotion in 1962.

8. In a deleted scene in the 2006 Curious George movie, The Man With the Yellow Hat’s name was revealed as Ted Shackleford. The original scene was deleted.

9. The real name of Monopoly mascot Rich Uncle Pennybags is Milburn Pennybags.

10. The policeman in Monopoly is Officer Edgar Mallory.

Numbers and Letters

If you spell out numbers individually, (one, two, three, etc.) you will need to reach a thousand before you find the letter A.

Madame Curie Facts

Marie Curie (1867-1934) was an expert in physics, chemistry and radioactivity. She was also the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and then was awarded a second.

Marie Salomea Sklodowska was born in Warsaw Poland. Her father was a math and physics teacher and atheist. Her mother was a teacher, operated a boarding school, and was Catholic. Four-year-old Marie taught herself how to read Russian and French and was known to help her four brothers and sisters with their math homework. It was also at age four that she began demonstrate her incredible memory.

As a teenager, Marie was anxious to attend college, but her family couldn’t afford it so she spent five grueling years earning money as a governess. In 1891 she headed for the Sorbonne in Paris. There, she met future husband Pierre Curie. While there, she discovered the radioactive elements radium and polonium (She named it after her native Poland). Later, she became the first woman professor at the Sorbonne.

In her thirties, Marie worked closely with her husband, and together they devised the science of radioactivity (she named the term radioactivity), for which they were awarded a Nobel Prize in physics. They had two children Irene and Eve. After Pierre’s death in 1906, Marie continued her work, winning her second Nobel, in chemistry at age 44.

It has been determined that Marie contracted aplastic anemia from all of her time spent with radiation which, at that point, had no dangers associated with it. She died from it in 1934.

Bacon Fat

Almost half of bacon fat is monounsaturated, just like what is found in olive oil. It can actually lower your bad cholesterol.

Seven Uses for Lemons

Summertime always means refreshing lemonade to quench your thirst. Here are some other uses for those yellow goodies.

Realtors say a nice bowl of lemons makes a colorful and inexpensive arrangement for the table or counter top.

Finger nails looking dull and yellowed after a long period covered in dark polish? Just squeeze a lemon into a small dish, clean your nails and soak them in the lemon juice for a minute or two. Some women claim that this treatment will also make nails stronger, particularly when adding a tablespoon or so of olive oil to the dish.

Keep cut fruit and vegetables like apples, pears, avocados and potatoes from turning brown by squeezing on a little bit of lemon juice.

You can perk up droopy lettuce by soaking it for an hour in a bowl of cold water and the juice of one lemon.

Simmer lemon peel in water on the stove-top as a natural air freshener

A few drops of lemon juice added to simmering rice will keep it from sticking to the pot and make clean-up a lot easier.

Blond vs. Blonde

You see the words used interchangeably, but there actually is a difference. The difference is gender. When referring to a woman with yellow hair, you should use the feminine spelling 'blonde'. When referring to a male with yellow hair, you should use the spelling 'blond'.

Coca Cola Facts

It was originally used for medicinal purposes and sold at Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta, GA. Coca leaves do indeed contain traces of cocaine, which was then believed to help control one’s dependence on opiates.

John Pemberton received a medical degree at 19 and worked as a druggist in Columbus, Georgia, before joining the Confederate army during the Civil War. He rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel with the Third Georgia Cavalry and was severely wounded in battle.
To control the pain resulting from those wounds, he became addicted to morphine.

After the war, he settled in Atlanta, where he began work on a beverage combining coca leaves and cola nuts. His objective was to create a pain reliever but when his lab assistant accidentally mixed the concoction with carbonated water on May 8, 1886, the two men tasted it, liked it, and decided it might make a profitable alternative to ginger ale and root beer. Vernor's Ginger Ale, created in 1866 by a Detroit pharmacist, preceded Coke and was originally available only in Detroit.

Three years later, Dr. Pemberton he sold out for $2,300. He had no idea what the still very classified, secret formula would be worth. It is now used in a product that sells about 350 million cans and bottles a day in nearly 200 countries. He died a few years after his accidental invention and only a few months after the Coca Cola Corporation was incorporated.

The original medicine was sold to make people feel better. Some say it still does, minus the cocaine. Vernor's, especially with Captain Morgan, still makes me feel better than Coke.

Happy Friday

Books are a guide in youth, an entertainment for age, and put our disappointments to sleep.

You can make book on the fact that young and old are never disappointed when they have a Happy Friday!

Kindergarten Facts

Friedrich Froebel, German, invented kindergarten. He was a teacher, author and toy maker. His experience as an educator led him to the conclusion that playtime can be very instructive; an essential part of a child’s education. He founded the first kindergarten for this purpose in 1837 in Blankenburg, Germany.

Froebel also invented of a series of toys designed to stimulate learning. He called them gifts. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright's mother gave her son some of these gifts in the form of maple wood blocks. Wright often spoke of the value the gifts had brought him throughout his life.

The first public kindergarten in the U.S. was started by Conrad Poppenhusen in College Point, Queens, New York in 1870.