During his inauguration, President Bush did the "Hook 'em, 'horns" salute to greet the Longhorn marching band.
It turns out this got lost in translation in Norway, where shocked people interpreted his hand gesture (popular among heavy metal groups and their fans in Scandinavia) as a salute to Satan.
The "windchill" is supposed to indicate how cold it feels.
A windchill temperature is, rather, a calculation of how cold it would have to be to cause the same rate of heat loss from your skin if there were no wind blowing. Wind chill approximates how cold it feels because the rate of heat loss corresponds with skin temperature, and skin temperature is what our nerves sense.
But they use the unusually high skin resistance of the 95th percentile of people to measure wind chill and therefore overestimate how cold it feels.
We're landing a probe (Huygens) on Titan, one of Saturn's moons, for the first time on January 14, 2005. It's riding aboard the Cassini spacecraft - check out the view.
The word Armageddon is derived from Megiddo, since the prefix har means "hill" in Hebrew; hence, Armageddon means "Hill of Megiddo".
The plains of Megiddo are perhaps one of the bloodiest places on earth having battles fought there by, among many others, Egypt, Persia, Assyria, the British Empire, and Napoleon. In fact, the earliest known recorded battle took place at Megiddo.
On December 31, 2004, the Taipei 101 became the world's tallest building at 508 meters tall (1,600+ ft.) and 101 floors. The previous record holder, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, is only 452 meters and the World Trade Center towers were 415 meters. The Taipei 101 has the world's fastest elevators with speeds of almost 40mph.
A 900 ton tuned mass damper is suspended from the 90th floor down to the 87th floor (pic). When the building sways (in the breeze or in an earthquake), the ball naturally sways the opposite way because of inertia and serves to dampen the vibration.
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| Source: "Intro to Matter" textbook via Madeleine DeBlois
January 3, 2005
| Society
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About 62% of all working women are the contributors of half or more of their household income.
I believe this means that most working women are contributing as much or more than their husbands in terms of household income.
At the same time, although women account for about half of managerial and professional positions, they account for only 8% of executive vice presidents and above at Fortune 500 companies.
It's more fuel efficient to drive with air conditioning than with the windows down (if you're on a highway).
The Mythbusters tested a 2004 Ford Explorer going 55mph and got 11.7mpg with windows up and AC on. The mileage dropped to 11.3mpg with windows down and AC off.
Manhattan Island of New York City was purchased for $24 in beads and other trinkets from the Algonquian native inhabitants of the area around 1624. "Manhattan" is Algonquian for "hilly island".
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