- Why do we christen boats with bottles of champagne?

According to maritime historians, the custom dates back more than a thousand years to the Vikings, who are thought to have practiced a gruesome ship-launching ritual called "roller reddening".

To propitiate the sea gods, boatwrights would strap a sacrificial maiden onto rollers used to maneuver ships into the water; the splattering blood ensured a safe voyage.

Then someone decided that the gods might enjoy red wine just as much, and maidens everywhere breathed a sigh of relief.

It wasn't until the late seventeenth century, when a Benedictine monk named Dom Pierre Perignon produced the liberation.

The tradition got a big boost in 1912 with the sinking of the Titanic, whose owners apparently tempted fate by neglecting to smash her with the ceremonial magnum — or, for that matter, blood or wine.

Bottoms up.

Why do people yell "Geronimo" wlien they jump off something? (Especially symbolic when jumping out of an Apaclie aircraft.)

Geronimo was a Chiricahua Apache war chief. There is a legend that Geronimo was being pursued by the U.S. Cavalry at Medicine Bluffs, Oklahoma. His path was cut off by a steep cliff bordering a river. The only chance he had of escaping was to jump off the cliff on horseback into the river below.

As he made the daring leap, he cried out his name in defiance of the troopers. Geronimo survived and escaped.

During World War II the name "Geronimo" was adopted as a battle cry of U.S. paratroopers as they jumped out of their planes.

The first paratrooper unit to use the cry was the 82d Airborne at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Geronimo was captured in 1885 but escaped with a small band of warriors. Over 5,000 soldiers and 500 Indian auxiliaries attempted to capture Geronimo's band. After traveling 1,645 miles for over five months, the soldiers finally found Geronimo's band, which had eluded them for so long. The band had only 35 warriors along with 8 children and 101 women.

Geronimo had been outnumbered by over 150 to 1, yet managed to hold the army at bay for almost half a year.Geronimo later escaped but was captured once again. Although President Grover Cleveland believed all the lurid newspaper stories about Geronimo's terrible acts of evil and wanted him hanged, more sensible men prevailed and Geronimo was sent to Fort Marion, Florida.

The Apaches had lived in high, dry country and could not tolerate the hot and humid climate of Florida. When Geronimo arrived in Florida, he found his comrades dying—over one hundred had died from consumption alone.

Finally, Geronimo's old enemies, the Kiowas and Comanches, offered him a part of their reservation at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

Geronimo went to Fort Sill in 1894 and remained there as prisoner of war until his death in 1909. Although he was buried in the Apache cemetery, legend says that shortly afterward his remains were secretly stolen and buried somewhere in the Southwest. No one has ever found Geronimo's bones.

What are the evolutionary reasons for, and possible benefits of, male-pattern baldness?
Male-pattern baldness involves a combination of genetics and testosterone.

To oversimplify slightly, if you're cursed with a certain gene, which perversely enough is passed down through your mother, then your balls will make your hair fall out.

The same set of chemical signals, conversely, puts hair on your chest and props up the multibillion-dollar razor-blade industry.

Why does nature bother with all of these elaborate hair realloca-tions?

The best guess is that balding evolved as a way for males to show
females that they were mature and hormon-ally sound.

"There tend to be a lot of things that signal age," says biological
anthropologist Jim Moore of the University of California, San Diego.
"They show that you've got good genes, because you've survived. And the testosterone connection shows you're ready to reproduce."

All the same, you might have noticed that the signal seems have gotten mixed up somewhere along the way; apparently tone-deaf to thousands of years of evolution, most women fail to respond to male baldness in the way they're "supposed" to.

That's not biology, that's just life. For a long time it was thought
that male-pattern baldness was unique to humans, but it's
not: the stump-tailed macaque, a monkey native to India, South
China, and the Malay Peninsula, seems to go bald for similar
genetic reasons, though no one has yet spotted middle-aged male
macaques swirling that proverbial last strand around and around.

What would happen if the Earth were to fall into a black hole?

A black hole is a wad of stuff with such incredibly strong gravity that even light cannot escape. Black holes usually result when giant stars run out of gas and collapse into tiny clumps of superheavy stuff. I say "usually" like it happens all the time, but the truth is nobody has ever actually seen a black hole—since no light can get out of them, they're invisible. But scientists are pretty sure they exist. The gravity of black holes is so strong that everything in the neighborhood, including planets, gets sucked in.

However, (1) since only very big stars can get to be black holes, and (2) since our wimpy sun is too small to qualify, death by black hole won't be our planet's fate. We'll just get torched when the sun goes into "red giant" stage, which happens to all old stars eventually. Luckily, this won't happen for another few billion years.

But suppose you were out walking the dog and a black hole
magically appeared. What would it be like?

It'd be no day at the beach, that's for sure. You'd have two
problems: intense radiation and tidal forces. The pull of gravity
at one end of you would be so much stronger than at your other
end that your body would be ripped apart.But suppose you were lucky and somehow survived. Then what?

Well, there's no way to know for sure, but some folks think you might
get spat out at a different place in space and time by way of
something called a "worm-hole." This is too complicated to explain now. But there's an outside chance that someday it may be possible to travel through time.

Galileo
There are many fallacies connected with this famous Italian astronomer and physicist:

1. Galileo did not invent the telescope; it was invented in 1608 in Holland. He did, however, make his own telescope in 1609 and pioneered its use as an astronomical instrument.

2. Although *tried* by the Inquisition he was never tortured.

3. He never uttered under his breath "E pur si mouve" ("Nevertheless it does move"). The story that after his "recantation" or
"abjuration" - and there does seem to be some question as to whether Galileo admitted he was wrong or simply agreed to keep quiet -Galileo rose from his knees and added this remark under his breath did not surface until 1761, some 130 years after the trial.

4. He never spent so much as a day in prison; his punishment was a kind of "house arrest," in the phrase of Montagu and Darling. He was never actually put into a prison cell.

5. He did not come to any theories about the pendulum as a result of observing a swinging lamp in the cathedral of Pisa, nor did he drop anything from the Leaning Tower to show that objects of different weights would fall to earth at the same velocity. Neither of these "facts" was mentioned by Galileo or his contemporaries; they were attributed to him years later.

6. Otherwise, what most people think they know about Galileo is quite correct, except that his name was Galileo only in the same sense that Lincoln's name was Abraham. His father was Vincenzio
Galilei, who named his son Galileo Galilei.

Did Napoleon lose the battle of Waterloo because of hemorrhoids?
(That's not where the English caused him pain.)

Although Napoleon was very sick when the battle of Waterloo began and there were signs his military ability had deteriorated, there is no record of his having had hemorrhoids. He did, however suffer from poor health for many years, including frequent bladder stone attacks.

A 1970 movie may have led to this myth. In the film, Napoleon is watching the battle when he becomes ill and has to retreat to his tent. His commanders then launch an attack on the British but send in foot soldiers without cavalry protection.

The foot soldiers are routed and the French forces never recover.
But there is no actual record of this happening. Napoleon's defeat was the result of a number of conditions, not the least of which was the fact that he was outnumbered. At Waterloo the French had about 70,000 men. Although the British had only 60,000 men, the Prussian army, which came to their aid, also had 70,000 men. This combined force was almost double that of Napoleon's army.

The commanders of the English and Prussian armies that defeated
Napoleon met at a village called La Belle Alliance. The Prussian
commander wanted to name the battle after the village. But
Wellington, the British commander, refused because he always
named his battles after the place he had stayed the night before
the battle. Thus, the battle became known as "the battle of
Waterloo."

Although Napoleon is usually portrayed as a power-hungry conqueror, his other achievements are often ignored. In the states that he created, he instituted constitutions, abolished slavery, introduced uniform laws for all people, created efficient governments, and fostered both science and the arts. Whatever Napoleon was, he was definitely not a small man.

Although most people think Napoleon was short, he was actually five feet six inches tall, an average height for a Frenchman in those days. He was often seen in the presence of taller men, which may have led to the myth that he was short.

Although Napoleon is usually portrayed as a power-hungry conqueror, his other achievements are often ignored. In the states that he created, he instituted constitutions, abolished slavery, introduced uniform laws for all people, created efficient governments, and fostered both science and the arts.Whatever Napoleon was, he was definitely not a "small man".

If somebody opened the emergency exit on an airplane, while it was in the air, would everybody on the plane be sucked out and killed?

I used to wonder about this, too. My feeling was, a seat next to the emergency exit was not something you wanted to sell to a guy with a twitch, if you know what I mean. But no need to worry. He couldn't get that door open even if he wanted to. The reason is that airplane doors don't open out, they open in. On the ground, which is where you're supposed to be when you use the emergency exit, that doesn't matter, because the air pressure is the same inside and out.But up in the sky it's a different story. The air gets thinner the higher you go. At 30,000 feet - the typical cruising altitude (height) for a jet plane - the outside air pressure is only about 3 pounds per square inch. To keep everybody from dying for lack of oxygen, the crew pressurizes the cabin (fills it with air) to about 11 pounds per square inch. So we've got 3 pounds pushing in, and 11 pounds pushing out. That gives us a net outward pressure of 8 pounds per square inch. If the emergency exit has a total surface of 650 square inches, opening the door would be like lifting a 2.5-ton weight. There's no way even Arnold Schwarzenegger could do it.

The same applies to the regular doors that you enter the plane through. True, they open out, but first they have to be yanked in a bit. So you wouldn't be able to get them open in flight either. Just as well. There are enough things to worry about on an airplane flight as it is.

- The origin of "Scuttlebutt":

If you want inside information, forget public relations releases and listen attentively to the scuttlebutt.

Much of it is meaningless or erroneous, but by mining this vein of talk you may come up with an occasional gem. Scuttlebutt is half rumor and half gossip, of course. That is because it was first heard when British sailors gathered around a large butt, or cask, of water. For no known reason, such a container was nearly always placed close to a vessel's scuttle, or hatch with a movable cover.Crew members who went for a drink of water liked to exchange the latest rumors with their mates, so talk under a scuttle that sheltered a butt became
"scuttlebutt".

Today's Useless fact - Why do dogs wag their tails? And what happens when they make eye contact?

Tail motion and eye contact are parts of a complicated inborn system of communication among doge. The signals let doge figure out who is top dog in a group or when meeting a stranger. They can also communicate emotional states. Tail wagging may simply indicate excitement. Position is important, too. The tail held high is a signal of dominance, which may be challenged or not, and a tucked tail shows a dog is kowtowing or accepts lower
status.

The social signals can best be observed in wolves. One of the things they do when they challenge each other is to monitor the autonomic signs, such as heart rate and blood pressure, that signal emotion.

Some of these signs are read indirectly, through changes in pupillary light. If the pupil becomes wider, it generally means fear or at least ambivalence. If wolves pupils narrow, on the other hand, based on other bodily postures and signs, it generally means they are angry, and you had better take them seriously.

Signals by domestic dogs are more ambiguous because owing to human intervention in their breeding, they are divorced from the original meanings and can signify anything from "come and play" to "watch out."

~source used: "The New York Times Book of Science Questions and Answers" by C. Claiborne Ray

Today's Useless Fact - What does the USPS do with mail it can't deliver or return because of lack of a return address?

If a piece of mail is improperly addressed and does not contain a
return address, it is sent to a dead letter office. Dead letter
offices are located in New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, San
Francisco, and St. Paul. There a USPS employee will open the
envelope. If no clues to the address of the sender or receiver
are found inside, and the enclosures are deemed to have "no
significant value," the letter is destroyed immediately.

Frank Brennan, of the USPS media relations division, explains that if the enclosures are deemed to be of some value, the parties involved will have a temporary reprieve:"This allows time for inquiries and claims to be filed. After 90 days, all items that have not been claimed are auctioned off to the public. Cash or items of monetary value that are found in the mail are placed into a general fund. If it is not claimed after one year, it is rolled over into a USPS account to be used as the USPS deems necessary."

And, of course, we can all count on the USPS making the best possible use of any windfalls that come their way.

~source used: "Do Penguins Have Knees?" by David Feldman

Does lightning ever strik twice in the same place?

This old saw is so often exposed as fallacious that probably not many educated people take much stock in it. But many are unaware that not only does lightning often strike twice in the same place; it is *more likely than not* to do so.

Lightning, like all electric currents or discharges, follows the path of least resistance. Air is a very poor conductor. Thus, almost anything else helping to bridge the gap between ground and cloud - a high tree, or a building, especially one with a metal skeleton; an elevation in the landscape itself - ill offer a more convenient path and thus "attract" the lightning.

To speak of a lightning "stroke" is not, incidentally, accurate. Lightning is really a succession of strokes, and often the most powerful move not from cloud to ground but the other way: the so-called return stroke.

- Do dolphins ever sleep?

Yes and No. Dolphins must be conscious to breathe. If they went
into a full deep sleep, they would suffocate. In addition, they
must be constantly alert to avoid danger. Yet virtually every
animal needs to sleep. The dolphins have solved this problem in a
unique way.

The dolphin brain has two hemispheres, just like ours. However, a dolphin's hemispheres each operate independently of the other. For eight hours, both hemispheres are awake; for the next eight hours,
only the left hemisphere sleeps; and for the next eight hours, only the right hemisphere sleeps. This way the entire brain gets eight full hours of sleep, although only half is sleeping at any given time. During the time half the brain is sleeping, the dolphin remains physically active but tends to move as little as necessary. When the dolphin is sleeping, circumstances and individual preferences determine how it continues to breathe. It may swim slowly and surface only now and then to take a breath. If in shallow water, the dolphin may rest on the bottom and occasionally rise to the surface. Or, it might simply rest at the surface and keep its blowhole exposed.

When a dolphin is underwater, it holds its breath. Just before reaching the surface, it opens the blowhole and begins to exhale.Once at the surface, it quickly takes in air and then closes the blowhole.

A dolphin typically surfaces to breathe about every two minutes.When we breathe, we exchange only about 17 percent of the air in ourlungs. The efficient dolphin exchanges about 80 percent of its lungs' air with each breath.

It is believed that dolphins can live as long as 50 years.A group of dolphins is called a "pod." Being social, they tend to congregate and spend their entire lives with fellow podmates. A pod can contain anywhere from 10 to 30,000 dolphins.

"Red sky by night, sailor's delight. Red sky by morning, sailor take warning." Is it true?

A Variations of this ancient saying turn up in Shakespeare and even in the Gospel of Matthew. Some meteorologists have estimated that the "night" part of the proverb can be as much as 70 percent accurate in forecasting rain—not bad, as folk wisdom goes, but not good enough to drive the Weather Channel off the air. There's no consensus on why it works as well as it does, but here's the basic concept:

Sunlight comes to us through more miles of the atmosphere at dawn and dusk than at other times of day. When the sky is clear, the atmosphere catters the light at the blue end of the spectrum, leaving mostly red. But if the light passes through larger particles, such as water droplets, you tend to get paler light. A ruddy sky at sunset, then, can indicate that there is little moisture in the upper atmosphere west of you, where tomorrow's weather generally comes from—and thus sunny skies are in the forecast. It might also be a
situation, say some meteorologists, in which the setting sun is simply reflecting off the underside of clouds on the eastern horizon, which suggests that rainy weather has already moved beyond you.

The second part of the proverb is the subject of endless speculation among professional meteorologists. More importantly, it isn't the least bit reliable. So when morning comes, sailor, don't even bother looking for red in the sky: you'd do just as well to flip a coin.

How come you can see through glass?

To understand this, you need to know another Weird Fact: Gloss is not "a solid". It's just a very thick liquid, like extra-hard Jell-O. Don't believe me? Go find a window, Now wait one billion years.

See what I mean? The glass has flowed out of the window frame and gotten all over the carpet.

Actually, a lot of times you don't even have to wait one billion years. You may notice that very old windows often are thicker on the bottom than the top. That's because the glass has oozed downhill over the years.

Basically, you can see through glass for the same reason you can see through any liquid, such as water. The molecules are so loosely spaced they don't block the light. What's more, there's very little in glass to *reflect* light, as in metals; to *bend* it, as in crystals; or to absorb it. So the light just zips right through.

P.S. To clarify, light does bend slightly when it passes from air to glass, and from glass back to air. That's what makes eyeglasses possible.

How did they keep beer cold in the saloons of the old west?

Beer in the Old West wasn't cold in the modern sense of the word —
but it was refreshingly cool. Evaporation kept it that way. Beer
in those days was packaged in wooden barrels, and the liquid
would seep through the porous wood to the outside of the barrel,
where it would evaporate. And basic physics explains the cooling
effect of evaporation.

Also, it should be noted that beer then was not artificially
carbonated. The slight natural carbonation required only that it
be cool to be refreshing and tasty. Modern beer, with its
artificial carbonation, needs to be very cold to hide the sharp
taste of the excess carbon dioxide.