What I Learned This Week - 2/15/13

1.  A mathematician discovered the largest known prime number. It has 17 million digits. I just want to know how to pronounce it and how long it would take to pronounce it. One with 63 zeros is vigintillion – but 17 million? 
2. The annual father-daughter dance, the only place where you can say, "hey buddy, nice butterfly" and twelve straight men reply, "Thanks".
3. I need to get my bathroom mirror recalibrated - I swear it makes me look ten years older than I am.
4. Helicopters are the red shirts of the movies. If you see a helicopter in a movie, give it a minute then it will explode.
5. I watched a coworker - tired of people stealing his snacks - scrape all the filling out of a box of Oreos then replace the filling with plain toothpaste. He then set the plate of cookies in the employee breakroom.  I will never grab a cookie from the lunchroom again. Ever.
6. I finally remembered to leave a tip as “π” on a very small bill.
7. You’d think tofu icing would be bad, because it sounds bad, and the concept seems bad…..you’d be wrong.
8. This morning a fragment of an asteroid (possibly 2012 DA14) passed scary close to Earth. So close that it, produced a shock wave that actually caused damage and injured many people in Russia. There are mixed reports of actual impact. At 12:25 MDT the actual asteroid 2012 DA14 will pass within 17,000 miles of Earth - under the orbit of many critical communication satellites. You can watch it live here (http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2). Duck and cover just in case.
9. Arguably my favorite comedian of all time achieved a great milestone this week. At age 67, Steve Martin became a first-time father. Welcome to the club.
10. A geek in Croatia is working on an application to dynamically resize text on your computer. Basically it uses your webcam to track your face and see if you squint because the font is too small. It then enlarges the font until the squinting stops.  Apparently, using Ctrl+mouse-wheel is too difficult for a task him. Yes, there are many racial jokes you can insert here.
11. I’m becoming a food critic, and I’m not sure how I got this way.  I could not resist pointing out to a friend his Fuze iced tea contained the phrase, “Naturally flavored with other natural flavors”.
12. I agree that the internet is the modern form of Egypt – lots of writing on walls and worshipping cats.
13. Sadly, Lloyd Dobler references are lost on today’s youth. Forget any Peter Gabriel reference as well.
14. There is hope for the teenagers around me that have discovered Monty Python.
15. Stupid auto-correct makes me say thongs I didn’t Nintendo.
16. I hate it when I spell a word so incorrectly that even Google can’t figure out what I mean.
17. Age is turning me into Joey from Friends.  I learned a coworker gave up his TV, no cable, no dish, no nothing. Without hesitating, I asked him what his furniture was pointed to.
18. You know you’re getting older when your earlobes flap in the breeze of a bike ride.
19. Actor Matt Damon is boycotting toilets in an effort to bring clean drinking water to people around the globe.  I think I see why he may have clean water issues.