The Slightly-less Leaning Tower of Pisa

I've long said that world records in the field of structures are slightly (ridiculously) specific. I mean, sure, there are legitimate technical differences between tall structures (which can be any old pile of materials) and tall buildings (which need to have occupiable space, and are therefore tougher to build really tall), for example. But there are some obscure ones out there.

Take the Confederation Bridge, for example. It's long. 12.9km long, to be precise. But it's not the world's longest bridge from land mass to land mass. Nor does it have the world's longest span length, a measure of the distance between two supports. Rather, it's the world's longest bridge over ice covered waters.

And now Reuters is reporting on a structure in the Netherlands that is gunning for another world record with world-class nit-pickyness. You see, they have a church that leans a bit.


Not qutie as much as the leaning tower of Pisa, you might say, and you'd be right. BUT! The guy in the following video would like you to consider that if you take the total lean of the church, and divide it by the structure's height, the resulting ratio is larger for the church than it is for the leaning tower! Said differently, if you could resize the two structures to be the same size but preserve their tilt angle, the church would have the bigger total tilt. This is all an incredibly complicated way of saying that the church has a greater angle of tilt. Congratulations, Netherlands, you are now the proud owners of the world record holder for "greatest height-to-lean ratio", or "greatest tilt in a hypothetical world where all structures can be resized to be the same size, but preserving tilt angles".

Canadian Media Priorities

I'm not sure the monstrous difference in scale between Canadian and American news and politics can be any better illustrated than through tonight's CTV news broadcast. Sure, they ran some footage of Obama's speech in front of what appeared to be most of the state of Colorado (side note: that part about ending foreign oil dependence in 10 years was both gutsy and kickass), but they ran it immediately AFTER a hard-hitting investigative piece on, uh... Toronto's new diagonal crosswalk at Yonge and Dundas.

In their defence, it is a pretty cool crosswalk.

Mark Zuckerberg Says "Too many new Facebook members"

I know spam chain letter things are nothing new, but I found this one waiting in my Facebook inbox today, and I think it's pretty entertaining:

Reply Attention all Facebook members.
Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,
There have been many members complaining that Facebook
is becoming very slow.Record shows that the reason is
that there are too many non-active Facebook members
And on the other side too many new Facebook members.
We will be sending this messages around to see if the
Members are active or not,If you're active please send
to 15 other users using Copy+Paste to show that you are active
Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks,
The user will be deleted without hesitation to create more space,
If Facebook is still overpopulated we kindly ask for donations but until then send this message to all your friends and make sure you send
this message to show me that your active and not deleted.

Founder of Facebook
Mark Zuckerber

Let's deconstruct this a little. First off, Mark Zuckerberg, the 24 year old prodigy who runs a company with an implied $15 billion market capitalization, doesn't understand the proper use of "your" versus "you're" (I really hope this is not the case, because I know the difference, and if he doesn't, it means that he is younger than me, and also has worse grammatical skills, and is still a billionaire).

Second, Mark (being the friendly guy that he is) has taken time out of his duties as CEO of Facebook to tell all his good friends that facebook is overpopulated. Too many people. He wants there to be fewer people using his company's product. Makes sense.

Finally, he wants to personally hear back from everyone on Facebook to make sure they're active! He must be planning to come in for a few hours on Saturday to go through all those responses.

If ever there were a compelling case for increasing our efforts at teaching critical thinking skills in school, the existence of this message in my inbox is it.

Deans to Students: Stop drinking illegally, start drinking legally

A bunch of college presidents in the US have put together a statement calling for lawmakers to lower the drinking age from 21 to 18. Their rationale is that if it's not illegal, students will feel less compelled to drink a ton of booze at once (i.e. the "predrink"), opting instead to drink a ton of booze spaced out over a whole night (i.e. the "Thursday").

A drinking age of 21 is pretty ridiculous when you look at it in the context of other global drinking ages. But hey, at least the United States has some powerful, influential allies in the "no alcohol until 21" club: Paraguay, Indonesia, Pakistan, India (but even then only in certain states), Oman, the UAE, the Ukraine, the Northern Marianas, Fiji and Kiribati.

Superfluism - A semi-annual review

I just took a look at my blogging output for the last few months, and I think some definite conclusions can be drawn concerning my procrastination habits.

You Oughta Know, Dave

I just heard this interesting tidbit last week and thought I'd pass it on. Alanis Morissette's 1995 hit "You Oughta Know", a pretty harsh appraisal of an old boyfriend of hers, is about none other than Dave Coulier, best known for co-starring with Arleen Sorkin (and later Tawny Kitaen) on the immortal classic "America's Funniest People" (also he was in Full House or something).

It's true! Maybe.

Bonus trivia! Tawny Kitaen was also the girl in Whitesnake's video for Here I Go Again, which is so awesome I have added it here for your daily fix of "girl-doing-cartwheels-on-expensive-cars-while-guys-with-perms-stare-intently-into-the-camera". You know you want it.

More on Georgia

This is almost too sad/hilarious to be true.

Almost.

The McDonald Offensive

Fun fact: the Russia-Georgia conflict is the first war ever started between two countries who both have McDonald's franchises.

Why does that matter, aside from being an interesting bit of trivia? In his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman observed that no two countries with McDonald's restaurants had ever entered into armed conflict (at the time of publication in 1999). He cited this as proof of the pacifying effect of globalization. His underlying reasoning was that countries with heavily interlinked economies will not go to war with each other for fear of disrupting mutually beneficial trade links. Unfortunately, Russia didn't get the memo, and no amount of McRibs was able to keep Russian tanks from rolling into South Ossetia.

Untriennium

Here's an interesting bit of obscure, theoretical atomic physics trivia for you: there's a cap on the number of possible elements that can ever exist, according to our current understanding of physics, and the highest element theoretically possible is element 139, untriennium.

It seems like scientists just keep smashing stuff together at higher and higher speeds, and discovering higher and higher numbered elements. Heck, we've already observed Ununoctium (that'd be element number 118), why not just keep going forever?

It turns out that the speed of an electron orbiting an atomic nucleus is proportional to the number of other electrons orbiting the nucleus (that's a gross simplification, but bear with me, I'm an engineer... it's what we do when reality is annoyingly complicated). It also turns out that as soon as you get more than, say, 137 electrons in orbit, things start to go wonky. Bohr's classical model of the atom says that the speed required of any atom after the 137th would have to be faster than the speed of light, which a lot of fairly smart physicists are convinced is impossible. If you refine the model a bit and take the effects of relativity into account, you can actually squeeze a 138th and 139th electron in there, but no elements beyond number 139 are allowed without breaking physics.

Neat!