Month: June 2005

Southwest Airlines has unveiled its newest specialty plane, Maryland One, a 737-700 painted in the colors of Maryland’s state flag. Very nice…

William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology is “a 3,700-page compendium of 19th century classical scholarship. The Dictionary covers a dazzling array of historical characters, authors, gods and heroes in great detail and depth” and is now available online in its entirety. Very cool…

A recent article at Landover Baptist Church reveals that “new evidence suggests Noah’s sons rode flying dinosaurs.” The rest of the (obviously satirical) site is quite funny too…

Most discussions about earthquakes in the United States center around California and its San Andreas Fault, but a lesser-known area of seismic interest, the New Madrid Seismic Zone, could be at least as dangerous and is surprisingly located right in the middle of the country. In the wake of the recent earthquakes in southern California, CNN has a well-written article with historical background on previous quakes and the possible impact of another major quake there.

Three large quakes happened in the winter of 1811-1812, and strong rumbles hit several times until near the end of the 19th century.

These quakes were felt keenly over more than 2 million square miles – people in Boston, Massachusetts, felt one or more of the three main quakes, the first of which struck in three shocks on the morning of December 16, 1811.

Two more large shocks struck the area – on January 23, 1812, and the largest and most devastating of all hit February 7, 1812, destroying the town of New Madrid.

By contrast, the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, California, was felt over 60,000 square miles.

The BBC’s h2g2 has a very nice article on the Billy Joel song We Didn’t Start The Fire that offers year-by-year historical backgrounds on the lyrics.

Specimen Custom Guitars has more than satisfied an unusual request with its Pac-Man Electric Guitar.

WhatDoesThatMean is “a free lexicon of English idioms, words, and catch phrases from around the world. [It] is also a ‘user built’ site – in addition to searching for a definition, you can add your own.” The site is pretty fun and has a wide variety of slang phrases from many countries and dialects. However, what really got me hooked was yesterday’s featured entry, “Santorum.” (some NSFW language)

Update: It looks like WhatDoesThatMean has removed the “Santorum” entry, so you’ll have to refer to the Urban Dictionary link, which is better anyway.

According to salary.com, the salaries of TV dads have more than doubled since the early days of television:

Since the 1980s, when TV saw dads like Philip Drummond of “Diff’rent Strokes” and Cliff Huxtable of “The Cosby Show” start to earn higher incomes, TV dad salaries have been on the rise. Salary.com’s team of compensation experts studied a sampling of 60 TV fathers from the most popular television shows over the past six decades. Today’s TV dads have an average salary of $195,000 per year, which is more than twice the salary of their 1950’s counterparts, who were earning the equivalent of $75,000 (in 2005 dollars).
…
We ranked a sampling of 60 TV dad salaries from popular shows since the 1950s. Ten dads were used in each decade in order to compute the TV dad salary average. Based on jobs and salaries, Hollywood’s depiction of popular fathers has been moving up the corporate ladder at a rate of about 21 percent per decade.

Pretty interesting…

Check out The Onion 2056, a hilarious futuristic edition of The Onion.

Science@NASA reports that “The lowest-hanging full moon in 18 years is going to play tricks on you this week” due to the Summer Moon Illusion. It’s definitely a good time to try for some nice pictures of the rising moon this week…