Saturday Summary #3

Saturday Summary #3

This week's odds and ends of information that caught my attention:

The recent earthquake in Chile moved the city of Conception ten feet westward, shortened earth days by 1.26 seconds and shifted the planet's axis by nearly 3 inches.

Serving sizes in images of The Last Supper have grown two-thirds larger since da Vinci painted his version. [see above] [No one ordered the "super size" as far as we known]

Words describing supercomputer speed in an article about a Chinese computer named Dawning Neubulae: computes at 1.27 petaflops, the equivalent of 1,000 trillion mathematical operations per second.

Approximately one million people in the U.S. between ages of 45 and newborn were conceived with donated sperm; most will never know who their father was.

Beethoven's and Schubert's bones were exhumed [their graves were near to each other] a few years ago. Multiple tests on pieces of Beethovan's skull have shown that he did NOT die of lead poisoning which was a favorite theory so no one knows yet what caused his many complaints and death. [People don't seem to be paying much attention to Schubert who died at a younger age but was less dramatic if no less talented]

A survey of 340,000 people in the U.S. 18-85 years old showed that middle age is the difficult part. Of 18 year olds 50% felt good about their lives, in the middle years over 50% felt bad about their lives, and people in the oldest set felt better about their lives than even the 18 year olds.

Parrots and cockatoos can and do spontaneously dance to rock music and have been videoed proving it is not incidental. No other animal [except humans] has been shown to have a spontaneous sense of rhythm.

An ice cream shop in Falmouth, Massachusetts has been serving lobster ice cream for several years. It has actual chunks of lobster in a butter based ice cream that they make in their shop. [Yum?]