Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all! Thanks for all your support, engaging dialogue and ‘likes’.
Luckily the last cartoon for 2012 coincided with my annual holidays, giving me a chance to undergo repairs. But don’t worry, we’ll be back with fresh material mid January 2013.
And if you want to share a journey down memory lane of the year that was 2012, click the following for my top 3 favourite cartoons.
I introduced these two evil characters – Grumble and Grudge (with middle names of Hank and Chester) – because all good cartoons needs a touch of wickedness. If you want to see their mischief, click here for the story so far.
- Number 2: Merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream
Nothing better than a bit of toilet humour, so Doug holds a special place in my heart and had to make the top 3 for 2012. If you want to see more of Doug and his family of dung beetles, click here.
I don’t really know why I like this one, but it’s my favourite for the year. Maybe it’s the memories of my kids nagging from the back seat of the car. Maybe it’s the look of annoyance on rhino’s face.
…and this time, it’s the mathematical branch determining the formula to the calculate the most aesthetically pleasing Christmas tree.
A couple of students from the UK Sheffield University set upon the challenge of determining the ideal number of baubles, length of tinsel and lights necessary to decorate the picture perfect tree. The magical formulas are:
- Number of Baubles = ( √17 / 20 ) x h
- Tinsel length = { (13 x pi) / 8 } x h
- Length of lights = pi x h
- Height of star/angel = h / 10
Where: h is the height of your tree in cm.
If you don’t believe me, check out the Uni site for full details, including a cool on line calculator.
Taking on the challenges ordinary people wouldn’t dare, a team of scientists wanted to find out exactly what lives in your belly button?
Not surprisingly, a whole heap of bacteria. From a measly 60 volunteers, they managed to:
- collect 2,368 bacteria species
- of that, over 50% may not yet be known to science
- the average person had 67 species, the ‘cleanest’ had 29 and the ‘dirtiest’ 107
…and what about the cartoon? Well, one of the volunteers was found to have bacteria only found in the soils of Japan (they had never visited Japan before). Another volunteer had bacteria typically only found in ice caps (must have a cold innie).
Gosh, I love scientists….Must be why I ‘married’ one.
Planet WASP 12-b (named so, as it was discovered by the UK SuperWASP team – cool, I want to be in a team with a funky name like that too) is believed to be the closest orbiting planet to its star.
So close, it’s being devoured by it. A gas planet about 1.4 times the size of Jupiter, it has a mean surface temperature of 2,200°C and completes its orbit in just 1.1 days (just the thought make me dizzy). Due to its proximity, scientists believe that WASP 12-b is being boiled off and blown into space and creating a cloud of super heated gas around the planet. Estimates assume it will be ‘consumed’ in the next billion years.
