Quotes
It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.
Work is much more fun than fun.
Noel Coward (1899-1973) English playwright

Transition of American FactFinder — The legacy version of American FactFinder will no longer be available as of Jan. 20. Nearly all of the data from the older version has now been uploaded to the new American FactFinder website, including previous years of American Community Survey estimates and data from the Economic Census and other business surveys. When the older version of FactFinder is discontinued, any deep links or bookmarks in the system will no longer work. A how-to guide for Building Deep Links in the new American FactFinder is available online, along with tutorials on searching, bookmarking and using the other features of the new site. http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/tip_sheets/tp11-25.html Thanks, Julie See also: http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml

Origin of the name "Google" from David Koller
From time to time I read or hear stories of the origin of the search engine and company name "Google" that are incorrect, which prompts me to write this brief account, based on my understanding of the genesis of the name. The source of my information is my friends and colleagues from Wing 3B of the Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford University, where Google was born. In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin called their initial search engine "BackRub," named for its analysis of the web's "back links." Larry's office was in room 360 of the Gates CS Building, which he shared with several other graduate students, including Sean Anderson, Tamara Munzner, and Lucas Pereira. In 1997, Larry and his officemates discussed a number of possible new names for the rapidly improving search technology. Sean recalls the final brainstorming session as occurring one day during September of that year. Sean and Larry were in their office, using the whiteboard, trying to think up a good name - something that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data. Sean verbally suggested the word "googolplex," and Larry responded verbally with the shortened form, "googol" (both words refer to specific large numbers). Sean was seated at his computer terminal, so he executed a search of the Internet domain name registry database to see if the newly suggested name was still available for registration and use. Sean is not an infallible speller, and he made the mistake of searching for the name spelled as "google.com," which he found to be available. Larry liked the name, and within hours he took the step of registering the name "google.com" for himself and Sergey (the domain name registration record dates from September 15, 1997). http://graphics.stanford.edu/~dk/google_name_origin.html

Even though an elephant’s leg looks like a solid column, it actually stands on tip-toe like a horse or a dog. Its heel rests on a large pad of fat that gives it a flat-footed appearance. The pad hides a sixth toe — a backward-pointing strut that evolved from one of their sesamoids, a set of small tendon-anchoring bones in the animal's ankle. Fossils suggest that the earliest ancestors of elephants had flat feet, with no sixth toes, and their ankles rested on the ground. As the animals evolved into giants, they adopted a tip-toe stance that straightened their legs and better supported their weight. During this change in their posture, one of their sesamoid bones was co-opted into a load-sharing strut. But Gerald Weissengruber at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna says that it is unclear if the sixth toe is a sesamoid bone at all, because it has no obvious muscles attached to it as do the panda’s thumb or a human sesamoid. Weissengruber also points out that John Hutchinson at the Royal Veterinary College in London mainly looked at captive elephants, which are known to suffer from foot and bone disorders. Disease could have turned cartilage in their foot into bone, and the ‘joint’ in the back toe might just be a fracture. A similar thing often happens to the cartilage in horse's hoofs. Hutchinson acknowledges the problem. “We don’t know how much of the ossification is normal and how much is pathological,” he says. “It would be nice to look at wild elephants.”
http://www.nature.com/news/how-the-elephant-got-its-sixth-toe-1.9712

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day
From: Mike Finestone Subject: Kosher
Def: 1. Conforming to the dietary laws of Judaism. 2. Proper; genuine; permissible.
The ultimate decision on whether a food is Kosher or not depends on the ruling of a rabbi. In the UK some time ago the London Rabinate deliberated on whether or not Mars bars were acceptable and decided against them. However in the North of the country no such question had been asked so in Manchester, for example, one could still enjoy them. At a meeting this anomaly was brought up and someone asked where the dividing line was between the North and the South. As quick as a flash the answer came from the audience -- Nuneaton (a town between the two).
From: Greta Dorfman Subject: kosher
"Kosher" is a word that is routinely egregiously misused by the non-Jewish public which has no understanding of the dietary laws. Oh well... but since it's actually a Hebrew word, I have to say that I'm a bit disappointed, that in the one week that you devote to Yiddish words, that you would use one that is so uninteresting in its true meaning. (I live in Israel, and I do everything possible to avoid buying kosher foods, particularly because kosherized meat is high in sodium.)

The Secret of the Fibonacci Sequence in Trees by Aidan Dwyer
"I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees for they have no tongues." —Dr. Seuss (The Lorax)
People see winter as a cold and gloomy time in nature. The days are short. Snow blankets the ground. Lakes and ponds freeze, and animals scurry to burrows to wait for spring. The rainbow of red, yellow and orange autumn leaves has been blown away by the wind turning trees into black skeletons that stretch bony fingers of branches into the sky. It seems like nature has disappeared. But when I went on a winter hiking trip in the Catskill Mountains in New York, I noticed something strange about the shape of the tree branches. I thought trees were a mess of tangled branches, but I saw a pattern in the way the tree branches grew. I took photos of the branches on different types of trees, and the pattern became clearer. The branches seemed to have a spiral pattern that reached up into the sky. I had a hunch that the trees had a secret to tell about this shape. Investigating this secret led me on an expedition from the Catskill Mountains to the ancient Sanskrit poetry of India; from the 13th-century streets of Pisa, Italy, and a mysterious mathematical formula called the "divine number" to an 18th-century naturalist who saw this mathematical formula in nature; and, finally, to experimenting with the trees in my own backyard. My investigation asked the question of whether there is a secret formula in tree design and whether the purpose of the spiral pattern is to collect sunlight better. After doing research, I put together test tools, experiments and design models to investigate how trees collect sunlight. At the end of my research project, I put the pieces of this natural puzzle together, and I discovered the answer. But the best part was that I discovered a new way to increase the efficiency of solar panels at collecting sunlight! Read much more and see images at: http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/2011/aidan.html
NORTHPORT, N.Y. The legitimacy of Aidan Dwyer's original idea remains unsettled, though scientists are skeptical. Aidan is now revamping his experiment as he maneuvers around homework, sleepovers and the odd curfew violation. But there is no disputing that he has become a star. Many in the scientific community are championing his intellectual curiosity and graceful ability to weather an Internet firestorm, making him a hot speaker at events around the world. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203550304577138511287470508.html