Because it’s always cocktail hour somewhere…

Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.
- Frank Sinatra

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.
- Hunter S. Thompson

Here’s to alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.
- Homer Simpson

Opportunity not knocking? Maybe it’s YOUR turn to knock…

Perseverance is a great element of success. If you knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

When you get people talking about God, you’ll usually end up in a rather enthusiastic conversation. Maybe even battle. Some quotes manage to irritate both sides of the argument a little:

If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.
- G. K. Chesterton

If God has created us in His image, we have more than returned the compliment.
- Voltaire

It’s funny how we eventually reach a point in life where some of the dumbest things our teachers said make sense. This little line often helps when I’m feeling stuck.

Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just sit there.
-Will Rogers

Aside from being a rather catchy song by the Doobie Brothers, what a fool believes could make for a really long list. We’ll try to keep it brief here. But I have to say that after reading the long-winded explanation of April Fools on Wikipedia, I can’t help but wonder if maybe the entry itself is a prank. Anyway, here are some scientific facts that a fool commonly believes:

A penny dropped from a very high building can kill a pedestrian below.
Not true. It might smart a bit though.

Friction with air heats objects as they enter the atmosphere.
Not true. It’s compression of the air in front of the object that causes all the heat.

There is no gravity in space.
Not true. Objects in “space” are simply in “free fall”.

If you kill a brain cell it is never replaced.
Not true. A long-lived myth debunked around 1998 by actual research.

There is a dark side of the moon.
Not true. We just never see one side. It receives sunlight regularly.

There are so many great drinking quotes that this may become a regular feature.

It is an odd but universally held opinion that anyone who doesn’t drink must be an alcoholic.
-P. J. O’Rourke

It takes only one drink to get me drunk. The trouble is, I can’t remember if it’s the thirteenth or the fourteenth.
-George F. Burns

Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.
-Frank Sinatra

Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
-Ernest Hemingway

Middle of the week and you’re not on top of things? Maybe that’s okay…

A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand. Is not the mountain far more awe-inspiring and more clearly visible to one passing through the valley than to those who inhabit the mountain?
-Khalil Gibran

If you want to get quoted, just keep reversing truisms until you find a decent antimetabole.  It’s an age-old trick of politicians.  A classic example:

Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.
-John F. Kennedy

Dorothy Parker carried this to new heights when she said (to explain missing a deadline:)

“Too f—ing busy, and vice versa.”

Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
-John Wooden

Since the Richter Scale goes from zero to ten, it can be hard to understand why the effects of a 5.1 earthquake can be so different from the effects of a 6.1 quake. It’s because the scale is based on a logarithmic function. Each whole number increase in magnitude represents a tenfold increase in measured amplitude, and in terms of energy, each whole number increase corresponds to an increase of about 31.6 times the amount of energy released. Each increase of 0.2 corresponds to a doubling of the energy released.

Here’s the formula:

where A is the maximum excursion of the Wood-Anderson seismograph, the empirical function A₀ depends only on the epicentral distance of the station, ?.

Okay. Enough math. Just the facts please:

The average rate of motion across the San Andreas Fault Zone is 2 inches a year, about the same rate at which your fingernails grow. Assuming this rate continues, Los Angeles and San Francisco will be adjacent to one another in about 15 million years.

There are about a half million detectable earthquakes in the world each year. 100,000 of those can be felt, and 100 of them cause damage.

From 1975 to 1995 there were only four states in the US that did not have any earthquakes: Florida, Iowa, North Dakota, and Wisconsin.

The world’s deadliest recorded earthquake occurred in 1556 in central China, killing an estimated 830,000 people. In 1976 another deadly earthquake struck in Tangshan, China, where more than 250,000 people were killed.

About 90% of the world’s earthquakes occur in the “Ring of Fire”. This is an earthquake-prone zone surrounding the Pacific Ocean.