Thursday, January 31, 2013

3120

The Bistro Shrimp Pasta at The Cheesecake Factory has 3120 calories.


source: Time magazine

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

27

A lot of celebrities have died at age 27:

  • Pope John XII; Patrician of Rome and Pope; 964; cause unknown
  • William Lane “Master Juba”; American dancer and entertainer; 1852; cause unknown
  • Joseph Merrick “The Elephant Man”; English sideshow performer and celebrity; 1890; dislocation of the spine
  • Alexandre Levy; composer, pianist and conductor; 1892; cause unknown
  • Louis Chauvin; ragtime musician; 1908; neurosyphilitic sclerosis
  • Rupert Brooke; English poet, known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War; 1915; sepsis from mosquito bite
  • Henry Moseley; English physicist; 1915; killed in action
  • Robert Johnson; blues singer and musician who recorded a very famous and influential set of 29 songs; 1938; cause unknown but probably strychnine poisoning
  • Ghazi of Iraq; king of Iraq; 1939; suspicious car accident
  • Nat Jaffe; swing jazz pianist; 1945; complications from high blood pressure
  • Jesse Belvin; R&B singer, pianist and songwriter; 1960; car accident
  • Rudy Lewis; vocalist of The Drifters; 1964; drug overdose
  • Malcolm Hale; original member and lead guitarist of Spanky and Our Gang; 1968; carbon monoxide poisoning 
  • Dickie Pride; rock and roll singer; 1969; overdose of sleeping pills
  • Brian Jones; Rolling Stones founder, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist; 1969; drowned
  • Alan "Blind Owl" Wilson; leader, singer and primary composer of Canned Heat; 1970; barbiturate overdose, possible suicide
  • Jimi Hendrix: pioneering electric guitarist, singer and songwriter for The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Band of Gypsys: 1970: drug overdose, although there are allegations of murder
  • Janis Joplin; lead vocalist and songwriter for Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Kozmic Blues Band and Full Tilt Boogie Band; 1970; probable heroin overdose
  • Arlester "Dyke" Christian; frontman, vocalist and bassist of Dyke & the Blazers; 1971; murdered
  • Jim Morrison; lead singer, lyricist and video director for The Doors, and poet; 1971; reported as heart failure
  • Linda Jones; soul singer; 1972; complications from diabetes
  • Leslie Harvey;  guitarist for Stone the Crows; 1972, electrocution
  • Ron "Pigpen" McKernan; Founding member, keyboardist and singer of the Grateful Dead; 1973, gastrointestinal hemorrhage associated with alcoholism
  • Roger Lee Durham; singer and percussionist of Bloodstone; 1973; fell off a horse and died from the injuries
  • Wallace Yohn; organ player of Chase; 1974; plane crash
  • Dave Alexander; bassist for the Stooges; 1975; pulmonary edema
  • Pete Ham;  keyboardist and guitarist, leader of Badfinger; 1975; suicide by hanging
  • Gary Thain; former bassist of Uriah Heep and The Keef Hartley Band; 1975; heroin overdose
  • Cecilia; singer; 1976; car accident
  • Helmut Köllen; bassist for 1970s prog rock band Triumvirat; 1977; carbon monoxide poisoning
  • Chris Bell; Singer-songwriter and guitarist of power pop band Big Star and solo; 1978; car accident
  • Jacob Miller; reggae artist and lead singer for Inner Circle; 1980; car accident
  • Bobby Sands;  Irish Republican Army volunteer, prison hunger striker and member of the UK parliament; 1981; starvation
  •  D. Boon; guitarist, lead singer of punk band the Minutemen; 1985; van accident
  • Alexander Bashlachev; poet, rock musician and songwriter; 1988; Fall from a height, probable suicide
  • Jean-Michel Basquiat; painter and graffiti artist; formed the band Gray; 1988; Speedball overdose
  • Pete de Freitas; drummer for Echo & the Bunnymen; 1989; motorcycle accident
  • Steve Olin; American baseball player; 1993; boating accident
  • Mia Zapata;  Lead singer of The Gits; 1993; murdered
  • Kurt Cobain; founding member, lead singer, guitarist and songwriter for Nirvana, 1994,  suicide by gunshot
  • Kristen Pfaff; Bass guitarist for Hole and Janitor Joe; 1994; heroin overdose
  • Andrés Escobar Saldarriaga; Colombian soccer player; 1994; murder
  • Richey Edwards; lyricist and guitarist for Manic Street Preachers; 1995; disappeared; officially presumed dead
  • Richey James Edwards; American spree killer; 1997; suicide
  • Fat Pat; rapper and member of Screwed Up Click; 1998; murdered
  • Freaky Tah;  rapper and member of the hip hop group Lost Boyz; 1999; murdered
  • Rodrigo Bueno;  cuarteto singer; 2000; car accident
  • Sean Patrick McCabe; lead singer of Ink & Dagger; 2000; Asphyxiation
  • Maria Serrano Serrano; background singer for Passion Fruit; 2001, plane crash
  • Jeremy Michael Ward; The Mars Volta and De Facto sound manipulator; 2003; heroin overdose
  • Jonathan Brandis; American actor, director, and screenwriter; 2003; from injuries he suffered after he hanged himself
  • Pat Tillman; American football player and soldier; 2004; gunshot from friendly fire
  • Lea De Mae; Czech athlete, model and pornographic actress; 2004; brain cancer
  • Bryan Ottoson; Guitarist for American Head Charge; 2005; prescription drug overdose
  • Valentín Elizalde; Mexican banda singer; 2006; murdered
  • Dash Snow; New York artist; 2009; drug overdose
  • Amy Winehouse, singer-songwriter; first British woman to win five Grammy Awards in single ceremony, 2011, alcohol poisoning
  • Richard Turner; Trumpet player, collaborator with Friendly Fires; 2011; cardiac arrest

Monday, January 28, 2013

74%

74% of people tilt their head to the right when they kiss.  (source: Tic-Tac commercial)

Sunday, January 27, 2013

5.859874

Pi goes on and on and on
And e is just as cursed.
I wonder which is larger when
Their digits are reversed.

-Martin Gardner


(I put it under this number since this is pi+e)

Friday, January 25, 2013

6

 A perfect number is a number that is equal to the sum of its proper factors.  The first perfect number is 6.  The proper factors of 6 are 1, 2, and 3.  1+2+3=6.  The next perfect number is 28.

Saint Augustine (354-430) wrote:- Six is a number perfect in itself, and not because G-d created all things in six days; rather, the converse is true. G-d created all things in six days because the number is perfect.

For more information on perfect numbers: Perfect_numbers

Thursday, January 24, 2013

6,400,000,000

A can of Silly String has about 400 feet of Silly String.  About 16,000,000 cans are produced each year.  This means 6.4 billion feet of Silly String are produced each year.

info on Silly String:  silly string

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

4.2 million

Original Batmobile from TV series auctioned for $4.2M


"Holy windfall, Batman!" The Batmobile just sold for $4.2 million.
 The original 19-foot-long black, bubble-topped car used in the 1960s "Batman" TV show sold at auction Saturday.


Monday, January 21, 2013

17

A sudoku puzzle must have at least 17 numbers to be filled in to be solvable.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

23

How many people do you need to choose at random if you want the probability that there will be two of them that have the same birthday to be over 50%? 

23

Saturday, January 19, 2013

One-Thousand

If you spell out the whole numbers, you would have to go to one-thousand to get your first "a".

Friday, January 18, 2013

21978

If you multiply the number 21978 by 4, it turns backwards

Thursday, January 17, 2013

91

Happy 91st birthday Betty White

1954
now





 For information on Betty White:    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_White

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

785,001,322,976,503.99

Go on Amazon and search for "Inside the giant Machine". They are selling a copy for 785 trillion dollars. Actually, $785,001,322,976,500.00 plus $3.99 shipping and handling.
 
 

Sunday, January 13, 2013

880

Exit 880 in I-10 in Orange, Texas, is the highest interstate exit number.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

one trillion - 1,000,000,000,000

Some people in the US government want to come put with a one trillion dollar coin.  Platnum, of course.  They think it will fix the economy.  I don't really understand what they plan to do with it.  I don't think they know either.  I doubt the local Wal-Mart would be able to make change if I used it to buy a Snicker's bar. But I've always learned that if a government starts printing a lot of money, the country gets ridiculous inflation.  And I doubt that it is so easy to fix a huge deficit.  But maybe it is a stroke of genius.  If so, maybe the government should make three and a half million of these coins, give one to everyone, and we'll all be rich!





Here are some links to some articles:

The Trillion Dollar Platinum Coin Just Might Work...


A Trillion-Dollar Coin Brings a Jackpot of Jests

What's up with the $1 trillion coin?

Friday, January 11, 2013

945

The sum of the proper factors of 945 is 975.  Any number whose proper factors add up to more than  the number itself is an abundant number.  945 is the lowest odd abundant number.  I don't know how many even abundant numbers there are below 945, but it looks like there are over 100.

Thursday, January 10, 2013

906-CALL-TURK

In "Scrubs", Turk got a telephone number:  906-CALL-TURK.  This is not the usual 555 phone exchange that everyone in TV Land has.  If you actually called it, you would really get Turk.  Well, at least you would get an answering machine saying he can't come to the phone, although occasionally the actor really did answer the phone.

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

512.73

512.73 is the Dewey Decimal system classification for analytical number theory.

What is the significance of 512.73?

According to "The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers":

First I subtract it from 666, the Number of the Beast in the Book of Revelation:
666 - 512.73 = 153.27
Behold!
The same digits appear, but rearranged, signifying the effect of removing evil from the world.

The whole number part is now 153, the number of fishes hauled from the river by Peter.
The decimal part is the sacred number 3, raised to its own power.

Divide the Number of the Beast by 3, and you obtain 222,
the Dewey Decimal system classification for the Old Testament.
Add 3 and you obtain 225, the classification for the New Testament.
Add 3 again, and you obtain 228, the classification of the Book of Revelation.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

19.25 million

The Big Bang Theory TV series on CBS has set two new records, which also sets a higher standard among adults 18-49 with 19.25 million viewers, bringing in a 6.1 rating, according to Nielsen.



for more information:  /entertainment/big-bang-theory-sets-record-110493.html

Monday, January 7, 2013

7

The Number 7 is considered a lucky number in many societies. This may have many different origins. There are religious origins as in the seventh day is considered the Sabbath. Among the ancients, seven represented the seventh son of a seventh son would be born with special powers. The seventh daughter of a seventh daughter would be born with the gift of healing.

Of course today, the number 7 represents luck in virtually every casino in the world. 7 is a winning roll in Craps when there is no number chosen. 777 also stands for a winning spin on many slot machines.

Sunday, January 6, 2013

7

On "Married with Children", Peg's cousin dropped off their son 7 for the Bundys to raise.  Peg adored him.  The reviewers didn't and he disappeared without any reason given.

Saturday, January 5, 2013

2

Chuck Norris can win a game of tic-tac-toe in 2 moves.

Friday, January 4, 2013

4

While the number 4 does not strike fear to many in the West, the Chinese and Japanese have a superstitious fear of the number 4. The reason is fairly simple: the word for death, shi, sounds just like the number for 4. In China and Japan, buildings do not have a 4th floor or any floor whose number contains the digit 4.  Cartoon characters that have only four fingers are considered bad luck. The superstition runs so deep in these cultures that cardiac deaths for Chinese and Japanese Americans are said to increase by 7 percent on the fourth of each month.

Thursday, January 3, 2013

103

Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, Nobel Winner, Dies at 103


Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, a Nobel Prize-winning neurologist who discovered critical chemical tools that the body uses to direct cell growth and build nerve networks, opening the way for the study of how those processes can go wrong in diseases like dementia and cancer, died on Sunday at her home in Rome. She was 103.

Born on 22 April 1909 at Turin to an Italian Jewish family, together with her twin sister Paola she was the youngest of four children. Her parents were Adamo Levi, an electrical engineer and mathematician, and Adele Montalcini, a painter.


In her teenage years, she considered becoming a writer and admired Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf. Adamo discouraged his children from attending college as he feared it would disrupt their lives as wives and mothers but he eventually supported Levi-Montalcini's aspirations to become a doctor anyway. Levi-Montalcini decided to attend University of Turin Medical School after seeing a close family friend die of stomach cancer. While attending, she was taught by neurohistologist Giuseppe Levi who introduced her to the developing nervous system. After graduating in 1936, she went to work as Giuseppe Levi's assistant, but her academic career was cut short by Benito Mussolini's 1938 Manifesto of Race and the subsequent introduction of laws barring Jews from academic and professional careers.

During World War II, Levi-Montalcini conducted experiments from a home laboratory, studying the growth of nerve fibers in chicken embryos, which laid the groundwork for much of her later research. Her first genetics laboratory was in her bedroom at her home. In 1943, her family fled south to Florence, and she set up a laboratory there also. Her family returned to Turin in 1945.

In September 1946, Levi-Montalcini accepted an invitation to Washington University in St. Louis, under the supervision of Professor Viktor Hamburger. Although the initial invitation was for one semester, she stayed for thirty years. It was there that she did her most important work: isolating the nerve growth factor (NGF) from observations of certain cancerous tissues that cause extremely rapid growth of nerve cells in 1952. She was made a Full Professor in 1958, and in 1962, established a research unit in Rome, dividing the rest of her time between there and St. Louis.


From 1961 to 1969 she directed the Research Center of Neurobiology of the CNR (Rome), and from 1969 to 1978 the Laboratory of Cellular Biology.  Rita Levi-Montalcini founded the European Brain Research Institute in 2002, and then served as its president. Her role in this institute was at the center of some criticism from some parts of the scientific community in 2010.

In the 1990s, she was one of the first scientists pointing out the importance of the mast cell in human pathology. In the same period (1993) she identified the endogenous compound palmitoylethanolamide as an important modulator of this cell. This line of research led to a new inroad in treating chronic pain and neuro-inflammation using this endogenous compound as an analgesic and anti-inflammatory drug.

Rita Levi-Montalcini died in her home in Rome 30 December 2012 at the age of 103.


   Wikipedia article:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Levi-Montalcini 

   NYT obituary:   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/science/dr-rita-levi-montalcini-a-revolutionary-in-the-study-of-the-brain-dies-at-103.html?_r=0


Wednesday, January 2, 2013

1987

This year, 2013, has all different digits.  The last time this happened was in 1987.

(post from Moish)

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

2013

some 2013 facts for the new year:

2013, 2014, and 2015 have the same number of divisors. Each is the product of three distinct primes.

The digital sums of 2013 in base 2 (11111011101), base 3 (2202120), and base 5 (31023) are equal.

The sum of 2013 and its prime factors equals the sum of 2014 and its prime factors: 2013 + 3 + 11 + 61 = 2014 + 2 + 19 + 53 = 2088.