In 1998, Carol Weihrer was undergoing eye surgery when she woke up. Desperate and in agony, she could feel everything that was happening to her, but the muscle relaxants kept her from moving or speaking.
This happens to 4,000 people each year, largely due to anesthesiologists’ errors, and the psychological trauma can lead to years of nightmares, flashbacks, insomnia, and alcoholism. It’s called “anesthesia awareness.”
If Earth were the size of a tennis ball, the sun would be 2,460 feet away.
And the nearest star would still be 125,000 miles away.
“The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order, symmetry, and limitation; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.” — Aristotle
111111111 x 111111111 = 12345678987654321
In old Konigsberg there were seven bridges:
Villagers used to wonder: Is it possible to leave your door, walk through the town, and return home having crossed each bridge exactly once?
Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler had to invent graph theory to answer the question rigorously, but there’s a fairly intuitive informal proof. Can you find it?
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is one continous cyclone that has lasted at least 340 years.
It’s more than twice the size of Earth.
Nashville’s Centennial Park contains a full-scale replica of the Parthenon.
Like the original in Athens, it’s “more perfect than perfect”: To counter optical effects, the columns swell slightly as they rise, and the platform on which they stand curves slightly upward. So the temple looks even more symmetrical than it actually is.
Opening excerpt from “Cadaeic Cadenza,” a short story written in 1996 by Mike Keith:
One
A Poem: A Raven
Midnights so dreary, tired and weary,
Silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore.
During my rather long nap — the weirdest tap!
An ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber’s antedoor.
“This,” I whispered quietly, “I ignore.” …
If you write out the number of letters in each word, they form the first 3,834 digits of pi.
What are these?
They’re snow crystals, magnified by a scanning electron microscope.
It’s only a happy accident that our moon “fits” over the sun’s disc during a solar eclipse. The sun is 400 times the diameter of the moon, but it’s nearly 400 times farther from Earth, so to us the two have almost exactly the same angular size.
