Around 1998 along came Despair Inc, who started making spoofs of these motivational posters.  In the beginning, these tended to be near exactly the same as the motivational counterparts which tended to feature some artsy photograph and be “office friendly”.  The original demotivators then used similar artsy photos, but would just change the text to be something depressing instead of uplifting.

The demotivators from Despair Inc were eventually popularized by none other than the meme generating machine that is 4chan.  From here, people started making their own demotivators, now including often racy content and twisted humor.  And the rest is history.

Just for fun, here’s a bunch of funny demotivators:

Sources:

• Successories: A Brief History
• Know Your Meme: Demotivators
• Motivational Poster

Japanese Body Remover

Today I found out the first known robot was created around 400-350 BC by the mathematician Archytas and was a steam powered pigeon.

Archytas, who coincidently is known as the “father of mechanical engineering”, constructed his bird out of wood and used steam to power the movements of the robot.  This bird was then suspended from a pivot bar and at one point the bird managed to fly as much as 200 meters before it ran out of steam.  This is not only the first known robot, but was also one of the first recorded scientifically done studies of how birds fly.

Archytas was a very famous philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, commander, statesman, and strategist in his day.  Among his many accomplishments include being the founder of mathematical mechanics or more what we know as mechanical engineering.  He was also an elected General for seven years in a row, which violated the law at the time.  But seeing how he never lost a single battle in his time as “strategos”, the people decided to continue to elect him as the ruler of their city-state anyway.

His mathematical works also were heavily borrowed by Plato and Euclid, among others.  Among those mathematical accomplishments were, in geometry, he solved the problem of “doubling the cube” as proposed by Hippocrates of Chios.  He also made great advancements in musical theory, using mathematics to define intervals of pitch in the enharmonic scale in addition to those already known in the chromatic and diatonic scales.  In addition to this, he showed that pitch on a stringed instrument is related to vibrating air.

Archytas’s virtue was also such that it is thought that Plato, a close friend of Archytas, used Archytas as his model for the “Philosopher King” and he seems to have strongly influenced Plato’s political philosophy as shown in “The Republic” and other works.  For example, “How does a society obtain good rulers like Archytas, instead of bad ones like Dionysus II?”

Archytas eventually died by drowning in a shipwreck, with his body later washing up on shore.

Bonus Factoids:

• Artisans in China developed an elaborate functional mechanical orchestra around 200 BC.
• Leonardo Divinci designed and built the first known humanoid robot around 1495.  This robot was an armored knight that could sit up, wave its arms, and move its head while opening and closing its jaw; presumably meant to scare children who were misbehaving.
• Cybernetics professor Kevin Warwick recently became the world’s first cyborg, putting computer chips in his left arm that he uses to remotely control doors, an artificial hand, and his electronic wheelchair among other things.  Among his more famous experiments: in 2002, using a connection to his nervous system, he connected through the internet and controlled a robotic arm including being able to feel what the arm/hand felt through sensors in the hand.  Another extrasensory preceptor he has wired up to his nervous system is an ultrasonic sensor attached to a hat.  His wife has also been similarly equipped, though with a simpler device, connected to her nervous system so that they can communicate with their nervous systems to one another through the internet; more or less transmitting “feelings” to one another.
• The first known human killed by a robot was in 1981, when a robotic arm, no doubt in a diabolical plot to try to take over the world, crushed a Japanese Kawasaki factory worker.
• The “Archytas” crater on the moon is named in Archytas’ honor.
• The word “android” was coined by German philosopher Albertus Magnus who attempted to create an artificial being which he named “Android” using the “angels from the netherworld” and the powers of the philosopher’s stone that he created from the “metals and material unknown to this world…”  When he completed this project, after 30 years, his student, St. Thomas, supposedly destroyed the “diabolic being” and denounced it as a “tool of Satan and blasphemy to God”.

Sources:

• Automatons of the Ancient World
• Archytas of Tarentum
• Archytas
• Robotics
• 10 Weird and Amazing Robot Facts
• Albertus Magnus
• Kevin Warwick

A diode is a special type of semiconductor that has many uses.  One of the principle uses though is to control the direction of the flow of electricity.  The most common type of diode does this by using something called “p-n junctions”.  This is just a fancy way of saying “magic”.

Really though, in simple terms, think of a Dr. Pepper can divided in the middle.  On one half you have made a semiconductive material that you’ve added impurities to so that it contains negatively charged carriers; basically an abundance of electrons. We then call this side an “n-type semiconductor”.  On the other half you’ve done the same thing, except you’ve introduced impurities that contain positively charged carriers; basically think of it like a bunch of holes that need filled by electrons.  We call this side a “p-type semiconductor”.

So we have on one side an n-type semiconductor and on the other side a p-type semiconductor.  The boundary between these two is called the “p-n junction”.  This is where all the magic happens.  It turns out that conventional current will travel from one side to the other, but doesn’t like to go in the opposite direction.  So you can use this to make sure electricity only flows in the direction you want it to in your circuit (among a lot of other things; seriously diodes are crazy useful in a variety of ways and various specialized diodes can do some other interesting things, which I won’t go into in this article, but will probably revisit at some point.  Generally speaking, these p-n junctions are at the heart of almost all semiconductor electronic devices).

So how are these diodes modified to produce light?  Well it turns out they don’t really need to be modified at all to produce a form of light radiation.  However, standard diodes tend to be made of materials that absorb most of the light radiation given off and more importantly tend not to give off the light in human-visible form anyways.

What’s going on here is, as the electricity jumps across the p-n junction,  the electrons from the “n-type” side “fill holes” in the “p-type” side.  During this process, the electrons end up changing their state. During this state change, a photon is emitted.   More specifically what is going on is, as electrons move around orbiting a nucleus of an atom, electrons with different orbits have different amounts of energy.  Electrons with orbits farther away from the nucleus have greater energy and ones closer have less energy.

So in order for an electron to change its orbit, it needs to either lose energy or gain energy.  What we are interested in with LEDs are the electrons going from a higher orbit to a lower orbit, thus losing energy in the form of a photon of light.  When the electrons from the n-type side “fill the holes” in the p-type side, they then lose energy in the form of these light photons.  The greater the energy release, the higher the frequency the light photon given off, thus changing the color.

If the frequency ends up being in the human visible spectrum (the range your eyes can see), then you’ll see the light being given off by the LED.  If not, such as when given off in the infrared spectrum, then you won’t see it. But it can still be useful, such as in allowing you to change the channel on your TV (infrared LEDs are typically used in your TV remote control among many other places).  When you press a button on your remote, you don’t see the light, but the receiver on your TV can see it and can interpret what it’s seeing from the infrared LED.

In LEDs, the light that ends up being created depends then on the material being used and the current that is run through it.  The light in a standard diode has the atoms arranged so that the electron drop in energy is very short and thus the frequency of light given off isn’t visible to our eyes, rather is in the infrared.  So simply put, LEDs where you can see the light are made of semiconductor materials that create a bigger drop in the electron’s orbit so that the frequency of the photon packet comes out in the human visual spectrum.  They can even be designed so that the amount of electricity flowing through them will actually change the drop and so you can have a multi-color LED.

Bonus Factoids:

• Diodes were the first semiconductor electronic devices.
• The discovery of the p-n junction is attributed to American physicist Russell Ohl of Bell Laboratories.
• These “p-n junctions” aren’t just the core of diodes, but are also  the building blocks of almost all semiconductor electronic devices, such as transistors, solar cells, integrated circuits, etc.
• The process of adding impurities to a semiconductor is called “doping”.
• LEDs are much more efficient than “regular” incandescent light bulbs due to the fact that they give off almost no heat; so a much higher percentage of the electricity used goes towards making light, rather than in incandescent bulbs where a good percentage of it ends up just making heat.
• This phenomenon of light being given off as a result of current run through a device is called “electroluminescence”.  This is distinct from such things as light emissions due to heat, which is called incandescence; or light through some chemical reaction, which is called chemiluminescence; among others.
• Electroluminescence was discovered by British born H.J. Round of Marconi Labs in 1907.

Sources:

• Light Emitting Diode
• How LEDs Work
• How Diodes Work
• How Do LED Lights Work
• Diode
• P-N Junction
• Electroluminescence
• Images Courtesy of Wikipedia and The Lighting Industry Federation

The human gut is basically sterile until you are born.  For the first year of your life, the cultures of bacteria and other microbes in your gut fluctuate wildly and begin settling down around the time you start weaning.

Recently, a study was conducted, published in the journal, Nature, with scientists from Germany, Brussells, Beijing, Denmark, Spain, France and the UK all combined in a massive cataloging of microbes in the human gut, most of which are bacteria.  The research, led by Professor Jun Wang from Beijing Genomics Institute-Shenzhen, also found that there are about 160 unique species of microbes in the average person’s gut, also most of which are bacteria.

In this study, these scientists for the first time managed to decode all the microbial genes found in the human gut.  Given that we are so incredibly dependent on these bacteria for a variety of health reasons, this research could very quickly lead to significant advancements in various medical fields, including how we treat and recognize a variety of ailments.  Currently, next to nothing is known about the majority of these bacteria living in a symbiotic relationship with us and yet they clearly have a huge effect on our health and well being.

As Dr Jerome Raes, a researcher who was part of the study said, “We have no clue as to how the gut works because this is a very complex ecosystem.  We really don’t know how that ecosystem works even though it is crucial for our well being.  We don’t know how food is digested and which species do what.”

“We’ve basically sequenced all of their (the subjects) genomes at once. It was a huge effort because it’s basically the biggest sequencing exercise anyone has done so far – it’s about 200 times the sequencing effort of the human genome project,” he said.

These bacteria help us digest food, provide vitamins, and protect us from invading pathogens.  When something happens to these cultures, it is known that it can lead to such problems as Crohn’s disease, Ulcerative colitis, and even has been linked to obesity.  With Crohn’s and Ulcerative colitis scientists have now already been able to tell which people have these medical problems based on what cultures of bacteria are in their gut.

In this study the team analyzed fecal matter from 124 Europeans.  Surprisingly, and going against less detailed research in the past, using new methods to catalog the entire spectrum of bacteria in our gut, the researchers discovered that despite the diversity of subjects, they shared more or less the same types of bacteria in their guts.  They also found an amazing number of previously unknown microbes.

“A lot of things we found were new… whenever you go fishing for microbial diversity you find thousands of novel species because the microbial world is vastly uncharted,” Dr Raes said.

“In the future, we should be able to modify the (microbial) flora to optimize health and well being,” he said.

“This also opens up the possibility of prevention through diet, and treatments tailored a person’s genetic and microbial profile.”

Bonus Factoids:

• Of all the genes in our gut, it turns out over 99% of them are bacterial.
• Over 1000 prevalent species were discovered with each person having about 160 species present in their guts and the vast majority of them being unknown in terms of what they do or what effects they have on us.  Of these 1,000 species, they found over 3.3 million distinct genes spread across those species.
• Bacterial densities in a human’s colon are the highest recorded for any known ecosystem.

Sources:

• The 160 Species in our Gut
• Census of Microbes in the Human Gut
• Human Gut Microbes Hold ‘Second Genome’

Exhibit A: Anatoli Petrovich Bugorski, a Russian scientist who has the distinction of being the only person to ever stick their head in a running particle accelerator.  Shockingly, he also managed to survive the ordeal and all things considered, come out without too much damage.

Bugorski was a researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino.  Specifically he worked with the Soviet particle accelerator the synchrotron U-70.  On July 13, 1978, Bugorski was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment.  As he was leaning over the piece of equipment he stuck his head through the part of the accelerator that the proton beam was running through.  Supposedly, he saw a flash that was “brighter than a thousand suns” at this point.  Interestingly, he did not feel any pain when this happened.

The beam itself measured 2000 gray as it entered Bugorski’s skull and about 3000 gray when it exited on the other side.  A “gray” is an SI unit of energy absorbed from ionizing radiation.  One gray is equal to the absorption of one joule of radiation energy by one kilogram of matter.  An example where this is commonly used is in X-rays.  For reference, absorption of over 5 grays at any time usually leads to death within 14 days.  However, no one before has ever experienced radiation in the form of a proton beam moving at about the speed of sound.

As you can see from the picture, the beam entered the back of Bugorski’s head and came out around his nose.  Shortly after this happened, Bugorski’s left half of his face swelled up beyond recognition.  He was taken to the hospital and studied as this was something that had never been seen before and so they closely monitored him thereafter, fully expecting him to die within a few days at most.

Although the skin on the part of his face and back of his head where the beam hit eventually peeled off over the next few days, Bugorski did not die as they thought he would.  The beam also burned through his skull and brain tissue along with the afore mentioned skin.  However, ultimately he came through it all surprisingly well.

Despite the beam going through his brain, his intellectual capacity remained the same as before.  The few negative health drawbacks he did experience were not life threatening either.  He lost the hearing in his left ear and experienced a constant unpleasant noise in that ear from then on.  The left half of his face slowly became paralyzed over the course of the next two years.  He also gets significantly more fatigued with mental work, though he did go on to get his PhD after this incident.  The remaining side effects were occasional absence seizures and later tonic-clonic seizures, though these didn’t show up right away.

Interestingly, looking at Bugorski now, you’d see the right half of his face looks like a normal wrinkled old man, but the left half of his face looks as if it was frozen in time 19 years ago.  Apparently Botox’s got nothing on a particle accelerator’s proton beam for stopping wrinkles.

Bonus Factoids:

• During absence seizures, the person will often appear to be just staring off into space.  There is no typical jerking or twitching as is associated with many other types of seizures.  Absence seizure victims will often move from one location to another without purpose or thought behind it.  What is happening here is, under normal circumstances, thalamacortical oscillations maintain normal consciousness of an individual;  during absence seizures these are disrupted.
• A synchrotron is a cyclic particle accelerator where a magnetic field and an electric field are carefully synchronized with a traveling particle beam.  The magnetic field turns the particles so they circulate; the electric field accelerates the particles.
• Tonic-Clonic seizures are more typically what most people think of when we think of seizures.  During the “tonic” phase the person will lose consciousness and their muscles will suddenly tense.  This typically only lasts a few seconds.  During the “clonic” phase the muscles will start to contract and relax rapidly, causing the person to convulse sometimes severely.
• Bugorski went on to get his PhD after this incident and worked as a scientist for many years.  In 1996 he applied for disabled status to receive his epilepsy medication free, but was turned down.  He also tried to make himself available to Western researchers but was unable to afford to leave Protvino.
• Bugorski is married to Vera Nikolaevna and they together have one son named Peter.

Sources:

• The Man Who Stuck His Head Into a Particle Accelerator
• Anatoli Bugorski
• Synchrotron
• Absence Seizure
• Tonic-Clonic Seizure
• Gray (unit)

Today I found out that Tony’s Pizza is freaking delicious with ranch dressing. Now I know this isn’t like my normal posts that tend to be based in universal fact and not opinion.  However, because pizza and Dr. Pepper are pretty much the two biggest staples in my oh-so-computer nerdy diet and I was offered the chance to have my website here be sponsored with a ton of free pizza and some mullah if I made my pizza eating/loving ways known to fans of my website, I went ahead and bit at the chance. And for the record, I’m allowed to say positive or negative things about my sponsor and their product in this post and I get paid either way. I wouldn’t have taken the sponsorship else-wise, on principle. And don’t worry, there are some interesting factoids included in this post as well, also on principle and because that’s what you come here for and that’s what I enjoy about writing these articles.

I used to just love pizza for pizza’s sake and how great it went with Dr. Pepper, my personal drink of choice (note: not sponsored by Dr. Pepper.  But seriously if anyone from Dr. Pepper is reading this, any free soda you want to send my way would not be rejected and frankly, don’t you think you owe me for this unsponsored article?)

My personal favorite pizzas are Little Caesars, for their cheapness/good taste sake, and Tony’s, for the extreme cheapness/reasonably good taste.  Most of my life, I just ate it directly as it was served to me. However, along comes my brilliant wife who notices my love of ranch dressing, particularly heart attack causing buttermilk ranch, and she mentions to me that, even though she normally doesn’t like ranch dressing, it’s delicious on pizza, particularly frozen pizza, and WOW was she right. (Personally, I think that this may be a plot by her to get my life insurance early as I now tend to smother my pizza in ridiculously fattening buttermilk ranch.  Well played wife.  Well played)  Ranch particularly takes Tony’s pizza, which is reasonably tasting enough for the price, and makes it great tasting. I will say that this isn’t true of all pizza brands. I recently found out that it makes Pizza Hutt’s personal pan pizza’s, which normally also taste awesome and used to be one of my favorites despite the price, taste gross.

In any event, that’s my little tip-o-the day for those of you who’ve never tried it. Now for the factoids!

Bonus Factoids:

• The first known pizzeria was opened in Naples, Italy, in 1738 and was named “Antica Pizzeria”.
• The first pizzeria in the United States was opened by Gennaro Lombardi in 1895 in New York City.
• New York City currently has over 9000 pizzerias.
• More pizza is consumed during the week of the Super Bowl than any other time of the year.
• 93% of Americans eat pizza at least once a month.
• Approximately four billion pizzas are sold in the U.S. every year, three billion from pizzerias and one billion frozen style.
• About 36% of all pizzas contain pepperoni, making it the most popular topping in the United States.
• According to San Jose’s Mercury News (1/11/95), men who order pepperoni pizza’s are three times more likely to be wearing muscles shirts than when ordering any other kind of pizza.
• Two of the more popular toppings in Japan are squid and Mayo Jaga, which is mayonnaise, potato, and bacon… one out of three isn’t bad I guess…
• In India some favorite toppings are pickled ginger, minced mutton, and tofu.
• Brasilians prefer green peas as their topping of choice.
• Russians like pizza covered in mockba, which is a mix of sardines, tuna, mackeral, salmon, and onions…  seriously Russia?
• Practically every edible topping imaginable has been tried on pizza.  Some of the more unsuccessful lines that have been tried are pizza topped with: peanut butter and jelly, bacon and eggs (that actually could be tasty), and mashed potatoes.
• The Schwan Food Company, that owns Red Baron and Tony’s Pizza, along with a variety of other food related brands, was started in 1952 by Marvin Schwan who home delivered ice cream to rural Western Minnesota.  Schwans quickly expanding and today has over 18,000 employees worldwide.
• The record for the world’s largest circular pizza was set at Norwood Hypermarket in South Africa in 1990.  This pizza measured 122 feet and 8 inches across, weighing in at 26,883 pounds with an astounding 9,920 pounds of flower, 3,968 pounds of oh-so-delicious cheese, and 1,984 pounds of sauce.  No word on what ingredients made up the rest of this pie.
• In 2005 a Pizza restaurant owner, Bill Bahr, and a team of 200 helpers made the world’s largest rectangular pizza in Iowa Falls, Iowa (imagine that, Iowa Falls is in Iowa).  This pie was 129 feet by 98.6 feet and contained 4000 pounds of cheese and 700 pounds of sauce; again, no word on the rest of the ingredients.  This pie was then eaten by the town’s 5200 residents, each getting 10 slices.
• Children ages 3-11 prefer pizza over all other foods according to a recent Gallup Poll

Sources:

• Tony’s Pizza
• TLC Cooking: 12 Facts About Pizza
• Schwan Food Company
• Pizza Facts

This Calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius.  One Calorie is approximately 4.184 kilojoules or about a continuous 1.16 watts for an hour

TNT is yet another method for quantifying energy released, but this time the energy released during an explosion.  Unlike a Calorie though, TNT is also an actual thing, namely Trinitrotoluene.

Trinitoiojnsdfniodjfsdo, from now on just “TNT” because seriously, is a yellow colored substance that has some interesting properties for an explosive; these particular properties end up making it great for bombs and somewhat make up for its low yield explosive energy.  The biggest advantage to TNT is that it doesn’t explode easily.  You can drop it, scrape it, even melt it to a certain point (melts at 176 degrees F), which is far below the temperature it would detonate at.   This makes it handy for pouring into shells and other bomb casings.  It also neither absorbs nor dissolves water, so it works well even in wet environments and is easily mixed with a variety of other, often more powerful, explosive compounds.

So even though it has somewhat of a low explosive energy release potential, these afore mentioned benefits make it the explosive of choice for a variety of military applications.  Although, generally TNT ends up getting mixed with other explosive compounds creating various blends suited to a variety of purposes.  But TNT’s stability and versatility make it an ideal base of many bombs.

The explosive yield of TNT is considered the standard measure for strength of bombs and other explosives with 1 ton of TNT equaling 4.184 gigajoules. So 1 kg of TNT = 4.6 megajoules, thus a gram of TNT is equivalent in energy to 1 Calorie.

For further comparison, 1 kg of gunpowder will produce 3 megajoules of energy when exploding; 1 kg of dynamite contains 7.5 megajoules when exploding; 1 kg of gasoline produces 47.2 megajoules, though of course requires an oxidant.

Bonus Factoids:

• TNT and dynamite are not at all the same thing, contrary to what the Road Runner and Wiley coyote would have you believe.  Dynamite doesn’t actually contain TNT, but rather is an absorbent mixture soaked in nitroglycerin, which is extremely sensitive to shock unlike TNT; this is then wrapped in paper and vuala, dynamite.
• Calories are one of the few units of measurement that tend to be referred to as a concrete noun.  For instance you wouldn’t say “It’s 20 Fahrenheit’s” you would say “It’s 20 degrees Fahrenheit”.  But on the flip-side you would say “It’s 20 Calories”.
• TNT was originally created in 1863 and used as a yellow dye.  Because it was so difficult to detonate along with being a lot less powerful than many available alternatives, it wasn’t used as an explosive for many years.
• Because of the ease of melting and pouring TNT into shells, the German armed forces started filling their shells with TNT in 1902.  These shells were designed to pierce through armor, then explode.  This caused a lot more damage than British shells that just exploded on the surface.  By 1907 the British caught on to this and were now using TNT in the same fashion.
• TNT is poisonous and skin exposure will generally cause irritation and your skin will turn bright yellow or orange.
• During WWI, munitions workers who handled TNT were called “canary girls” or “canaries” because their skin that was exposed to the TNT turned yellow.  Not only did they have a girly nickname, but prolonged exposure to TNT causes liver, blood, spleen, and immune system problems among others.  Sort of kicking them while they are down.
• If you eat TNT, your pee will turn red and look like blood, though it is not.
• The Little Boy atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, exploded with approximately 15 kilotons of TNT.
• Most of the current nuclear bombs the U.S. has in its arsenal are only equivalent to .3-1.2 kilotons of TNT
• The biggest bomb the U.S. ever made had a theoretical yield of 25 megatons of TNT.  The Soviet Union however, developed one that was tested as large as 50 megatons of TNT with a maximum theoretical yield of 100 megatons.
• Amazingly, if we were actually able to convert matter perfectly to energy with 1 kg of matter being annihilated by 1 kg of antimatter, the energy produced from just that small amount of matter is about 42.95 mega tons of TNT.  So an adult male weighing in at around 200 pounds has somewhere in the vicinity of 4000 megatons of TNT potential in their matter if completely annihilated.
• To put how much power this is in perspective, 1 megaton of TNT, when converted to kilowatt hours, makes enough electricity to power an average American home for over 100,000 years.  It is also enough to power the entire United States for a little over 3 days.  So 1 kg of some matter being completely annihilated by 1 kg of  antimatter would be able to power the entire United States for about four months.
• On a completely baffling scale, a typical supernova explosion will give off about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 megatons of TNT.

Sources:

• Energy in a Ton of TNT
• Calorie
• TNT Equivalent
• Trinitrotoluene

Specifically, what is going on here is the Earth’s atmosphere scatters light in the blue and violet wavelength range, so the remaining wavelengths of light appear yellow.  This same effect is why the sky will also often appear yellow when the Sun is disappearing over the horizon, as well as why the sky/Sun can appear more red at times during this phase of the day.

As the sun is setting, more of the shorter wavelength blue is being scattered because of the decreased angle of the sun relative to you; thus the light has to pass through more atmosphere to get to you.  This increased diffusion results in less of the blue wavelength being visible to you and thus what remains appears yellow.  Similarly, if it is dusty or there are a lot of other larger particles in the air, this will filter out larger wavelengths, resulting in a red sky and red sun.

Bonus Factoids:

• Light travels from the Sun to the Earth in about 8 minutes and 19 seconds.
• While it only takes 8 minutes and 19 seconds for the light from the surface of the sun to reach us, it actually takes about 10,000-170,000 years for a photon to travel from the core of the sun to the surface.
• Once regarded by astronomers as a small and relatively insignificant star, the Sun is now known to be brighter than about 85% of the stars in the Milky Way.
• The Sun has an effective surface temperature of 5780 K, which is equivalent to just under 10,000 F and 5500 C.
• The core of the Sun has a density almost 150 times the density of water on Earth.  The temperature at the core is close to 14 million Kelvins and Celsius degrees, or 25 million degrees F.
• About 3/4 of the Sun’s mass consists of hydrogen, with most of the rest being helium (23.8%) and about 2% remaining consisting of other elements such as iron, oxygen, carbon, neon, and a variety of others.
• The Sun generates its energy from nuclear fusion at its core fusing the hydrogen nuclei into helium.  The nuclear fusion is self regulating; if the Sun’s diameter gets smaller while maintaining the same mass, the pressure at the core increases creating more nuclear fusion which in turn causes it to expand.  If it expands maintaining the same mass, the pressure lessens in the core causing less nuclear fusion.  So a natural equilibrium has resulted in this process with our Sun, though there are stars that can be observed going through this process of massive expansion and contraction at very steady rates.
• At the core of the Sun, nuclear fusion power produced is estimated at about 276.5 watts/m^3.  Interestingly this power production is more equivalent to a reptile’s metabolic energy production than what we would think like a nuclear bomb.
• This is in contrast to the amount of energy per (W/m^2) deposited on the surface of the Earth from the Sun, which is about 1368 W/m^2.
• Each second more than four million tons of matter are converted to energy within the Suns core.  At this rate, the Sun has so far converted 100 Earth masses of matter into energy.  This will give the sun an effective lifetime as a main sequence star of about 10 billion years with about 5 billion years to go.
• The Sun does not have enough mass to go supernova and explode.  However, in about 5 billion years it will enter a red giant phase steadily expanding until it consumes the Earth.  But fear not, the Earth will already be dead in about 1 billion years due to the fact that the sun becomes about 10% brighter every billion years; so in 1 billion years the Earth’s surface temperature will be such that no liquid water will be able to exist unprotected on the surface of the Earth.
• The Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way at a distance of approximately 24,000-26,000 light years.
• The Sun completes a clockwise orbit of the Milky Way center in about 225-250 million years.
• The Sun is about 150 million km or about 93 million miles from the Earth; this is by definition one astronomical unit (1 AU).
• The Sun is almost a perfect sphere; its diameter at its poles differs from the diameter at its equator by only 10 km or 6 miles.
• The area of the sun we call the “surface” is really just the outermost layer that radiates a significant amount of light.  There is actually quite a bit of the Sun above that layer.
• The Sun’s magnetic field is less than half of what it was just 22 years ago.  This has shrunken the Sun’s heliosphere which helps protect the earth from cosmic radiation.  Because of this, the Earth is now being struck with significantly more cosmic radiation than just a couple decades ago.

For you graphics and web developers out there, here are some more stars and their associated hex colors:

Sources:

• Science Made Simple
• What Colour is the Sun?
• Sun
• Star Color (image source)

Henry Chadwick was born on October the 5th, 1824 in Exeter, England.  As a boy, he was a huge fan of cricket and an avid player of “rounders”, which was the precursor to baseball.   In 1837, he and his family immigrated to the United States to Brooklyn, New York.  Chadwick initially didn’t like the game of baseball, preferring cricket, though he played baseball with his friends.  However, in 1856, after attending a particularly well played game between two of New York’s best teams, he became a fan and eventually a fanatic of the game.  From there he set out to make baseball “a national sport for Americans” as cricket was for the English.

The first thing he did was try to persuade the New York Times, who prominently reported cricket matches, to start covering baseball as well.  He even offered to report the games himself, so they wouldn’t have to hire anyone for the job.  Eventually, he got a job at the New York Clipper as a sportswriter in 1857.  From there, he set about trying to develop a system that would succinctly whittle down the important events of the game for scoring purposes and for the ability to evaluate a particular player’s contribution to a team and individual games.

In 1859, covering a match between the Brooklyn Excelsior and the Brooklyn Stars, Chadwick recorded the runs, hits, putouts, singles, and errors being the first instance of what we now know of as the box score.  Before this, others had tried to grapple with coming up with a way to systematically record the important events of the game, but none before this had been successfully.  He later refined this box score into pretty much what we typically use today, with a few tweaks that we have now, such as adding RBIs and things of this nature.

It’s interesting to note that walks were not ever included in Chadwick’s box scores.  This is because Chadwick felt that walks didn’t belong in the game, nor out of the park home runs.  He felt that the beauty of the game was in the action of the players.  Walks and out of the park home runs were a non-action, involving only the pitcher and hitter with everybody else just kind of standing around.  This fateful decision to discount walks is why the batting average has long been thought of as more important than on base percentage, even though statistically a walk is virtually as valuable as a single which obviously counts on the batting average (note: not quite as valuable, but the difference is extremely small).  With work done by people like Bill James and the myriad of other sabermetrics contributors and enthusiasts, this is starting to change however and a more accurate view of what is and what isn’t valuable on the field is beginning to emerge.  With less and less resistance to these new analysis on the game happening every year; though ironically the players themselves look like they are going to be the last hold outs; still clinging to antiquated methods of evaluating the game.  Ironical because, in effect, many don’t really have a great understand of what specific aspects of their game make them great or maximize their contributions to the team.  Though this too is ever so slowly starting to change with players like Brian Bannister and Zack Grienke, who are beginning to use these advanced statistics to get everything they can out of their talent.

It’s also interesting to note that Chadwick didn’t think the “error” was a very good evaluator of defensive ability and is on record as saying range was much more important than errors.  This flies in the face of traditional baseball analysts who often cite Chadwick’s box score insinuating that a baseball genius like Chadwick would have put something in about range if it was more important than errors.  In reality, Chadwick did not put this in as there was no way at the time to accurately judge how a player’s range affected a specific game/play vs. some other player.  Indeed, up until about 10 years ago or so, there wasn’t an accurate way to evaluate this.  Only with very recent technological advancements has this become possible.  It should be noted though, that before the 1960s, the box score contained a lot more defensive data, such as assists and things of this nature that could be accurately recorded.  The box score was shortened though at this time in the interest of space, now only including errors, if any.

Chadwick eventually died of pneumonia after attending the Giants’ opening game at the Polo Grounds in 1908, subsequently getting sick.  Upon his death, every major league park lowered their flags to half-mast.  Chadwick was later elected into the newly established Baseball Hall of Fame in 1938; the only writer to have gained that honor.  Chadwick is buried with his wife in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.  The tall marble pillar over their shared grave is topped with an enormous granite baseball and the grave itself is adorned with a bronze glove and bats.  His grave is marked with, among other things, “The Father of Baseball”.

Here is a sample baseball newspaper column written by Chadwick:

Bonus Factoids:

• Chadwick’s commentary on the game was so revered that when he attended games, it was not out of the ordinary for umpires to stop play to confer with him about some rule interpretation that pertained to the play at hand.
• Chadwick was the first to setup a demonstration proving that the rotation of a baseball could cause the ball to curve.  Before this, some pitchers had already observed and use this to their advantage (even though many of the day considered it cheating), but no one had yet proved that it was an actual effect and not just in the pitchers heads.  To prove it, he set up two stakes placed twenty feet apart in a line between the pitcher and batter’s box.  A pitcher, Fred Goldsmith, then threw a ball which ended up being to the right of the first stake, but then curved to end up to the left of the second stake.
• Chadwick was an outspoken supporter of changing the game at the time to allow extra innings instead of letting games end in a tie as was the rule at the time.  He also argued successfully that the game should be changed so that a hitter was not out unless an opposing player caught the ball in the air.  At the time, the batter was still out if the opposing player managed to catch the ball on the first bounce.  Due to the fact that baseball gloves were virtually non-existent / ineffective at the time, you can see why they’d have rather caught it on the first bounce.
• Henry Chadwick’s half-brother, Sir Edwin Chadwick, was knighted for his service as Sanitary Commissioner of London, where he promoted the idea that cholera and other disease were spread by stench, not by germs, and thus he advocated frequent bathing with soap and water as a means of disease control.  While not entirely correct in his thinking, this none the less was an effective way of cutting down on the many widespread diseases and sicknesses at the time.
• Chadwick chose the “K” to denote a strikeout because it was the last letter in “struck” as in “struck out”.  Chadwick often liked to use the last letter of words instead of the first, particularly when he felt they were more memorable.  In this particular case, Chadwick said “the letter K in struck is easier to remember in connection with the word, than S.”
• The 1861 Beadle guide, created by Chadwick, listed totals of games played, outs, runs, home runs, and strikeouts for hitters on prominent clubs.  This was the first baseball statistical database.  His goal in creating this database was to figure out a way to prove whether a particular player helped or hurt a team using statistical analysis.  This makes it particularly ironical that so many baseball traditionalists use his work as their excuse for not embracing sabermetrics.  Chadwick was the first sabermatrician and likely would have loved the new metrics that are being developed today using technologies he did not have available.
• When Chadwick developed the ERA (earned run average) statistic, his goal was not to evaluate a pitchers worth, but rather to differentiate between runs caused by batting skill and those caused by lack of fielding skill;  the pitcher’s skill was not factored in.  This makes sense considering pitchers of the day tended to just throw the ball right down the middle of the plate with any fanciness like curve-balls or any other deception by the pitcher often being considered by many to be cheating.  This is one of the reasons why baseball scores of the day often had teams scoring 30 or 40 runs per game.
• The first baseball box scores were closely related to cricket.  This is why the first box scores listed so prominently O as the number of put outs and R as the number of runs scored by a player.
• During his long career as a writer, Chadwick penned all his newspaper columns and books by hand, rather than use a typewriter.
• When not promoting baseball or covering games, Chadwick worked as a piano teacher and occasionally reviewed dramas.

Sources:

• Box Score: Baseball
• Henry Chadwick
• HowStuffWorks: Henry Chadwick
• Thank You, Henry Chadwick: Baseball’s Box Score Turns 150
• Henry Chadwick
• Tracking the Entire World: Henry Chadwick
• Why is the “K” used for the strikeout in baseball?

The word “gay” seems to have its origins around the 12th century in England, derived from the Old French word ‘gai’, which in turn was probably derived from a Germanic word, though that isn’t completely known.  The word’s original meaning meant something to the effect of “joyful”, “carefree”, “full of mirth”, or “bright and showy”.

However, around the early parts of the 17th century, the word began to be associated with immorality.  By the mid 17th century, according to an Oxford dictionary definition at the time, the meaning of the word had changed to mean  “addicted to pleasures and dissipations.  Often euphemistically: Of loose and immoral life”.  This is an extension of one of the original meanings of “carefree”, meaning more or less uninhibited.   Fast-forward to the 19th century and the word gay referred to a woman who was a prostitute and a gay man was someone who slept with a lot of women, often prostitutes.  Sort of ironical that today a gay man doesn’t sleep with women.   Also at this time, the phrase “gay it” meant to have sex.

With these new definitions, the original meanings of “carefree”, “joyful”, and “bright and showy” were still around; so the word was not exclusively used to refer to prostitutes or a promiscuous man.  Those were just accepted definitions, along with the other meanings of the word.

Around the 1920s and 1930s however, the word started to have a new meaning.  In terms of the sexual meaning of the word, a “gay man” no longer just meant a man who had sex with a lot of women, but now started to refer to men who had sex with other men.  There was also another word “gey cat” at this time which meant a homosexual boy.

By 1955 the word gay now officially acquired the new added definition of meaning homosexual males.  Gay men themselves seem to have been behind the driving thrust for this new definition as they felt (and most still do), that “homosexual” is much too clinical sounding and is often thought as offensive among gay people due to sounding like a disorder.  As such, it was common amongst themselves to refer to one another as gay decades before this was a commonly known definition (reportedly homosexual men were calling one another gay as early as the 1920s).  At this time, homosexual women were referred to as lesbians, not gay.  Although women could still be called gay if they were prostitutes as that meaning had not yet 100% disappeared.

Since then, gay, meaning homosexual male, has steadily driven out all the other definitions that have floated about through time and of course also has gradually began supplementing the word ‘lesbian’ as referring to women who were homosexual.

Not satisfied with simply changing its definition once a century, as early as the 1980s a new definition for the word gay started popping up among American youth where now something gay could either mean a homosexual or something that is “lame” or “stupid” or the like.  This new definition was originally almost exclusively meant as an insulting term.

This has gradually spread to the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe.  Interestingly, today, according to a report done by the BBC, most children are still using the word to mean “lame”, but now with having nothing to do with sexuality of any sort and also not generally meant as an insulting term against people.  Now it is used more to the effect of just saying, for instance, “That movie was gay” as in stupid, but having nothing to do with homosexuality in their minds and not generally directed at people (thus not supposedly meant to be offensive to the gay community).  Whereas the origins of this new “lame” or “stupid” definition were most definitely meant to be insulting and were primarily directed at people.

Bonus Factoids and Interesting Stuff:

• The abstract noun ‘gaiety’ has somehow largely steered clear of having any sort of sexual connotation as with the word “gay”.  It still keeps its definition as meaning something to the effect of “festive”.
• Male homosexuality was illegal in Britain until the Sexual Offenses Act of 1967.  Because even mentioning someone was a homosexual was so offensive at the time in England, people who were thought to be gay were referred to as “sporty” with girls and “artistic” for boys.
• Bringing Up Baby in 1938 was the first film to use the word gay to mean homosexual.  Cary Grant, in one scene, ended up having to wear a lady’s feathery robe.  When another character asks about why he is wearing that, he responds an ad-libbed line “Because I just went gay”.  At the time, mainstream audiences didn’t get the reference so the line was thought popularly to have meant something to the effect of “I just decided to be carefree.”

Sources:

• Gay
• How Did ‘Gay’ Come to Mean ‘Homosexual’?
• How Gay Became Children’s Insult of Choice
• Online Etymology Dictionary: Gay
• Gaiety