Some fascinating links

To those who care, sorry I haven't posted last week. Work got very complicated and involved in a classified way and home life has been engrossingly fun with birthday celebrations (more later) and planning two major trips. But anyway, here are a few fascinating links from today I couldn't pass up sharing:

1) Why does time fly in only one direction? (Answer: it might go the other way, but we would never be aware of it. And for answers like this, you can get tenure!)

2) Top 100 political donors of the last 20 years. (#1 ... AT&T, donating 50/50 to Reps and Dems; All but 2 of the top 12 give heavily to the Dems, but most of those are unions; Most partisan Rep donor: Amway.)

3) Some creative athiests will watch your pet if you are taken up in the Rapture and the pet isn't during the next 10 years.

4) Phrase of the day: hapax legomenon (plural: legomena). It's a word or phrase that only appears once in an author's writings. This makes translation very difficult (we have no idea what gopher wood is, Gen 6:14). Someday I may have to sit down and determine all the HL in 'Weird Al' Yankovic's works. I found it as part of a challenge I won.

(Hat tips: Newmark's Door: 1&2. Marginal Revolution: 3)