Spring loaded contraptions of death

Apparently there is a mechanical engineering class at SNU where the final exam is to build something as dangerous as possible shoot a golf ball as far as possible. Its a mechanical engineering class so unfortunately no chemical energy source may be used ^^. The final exam was held near the amphitheater and ranges of 100 meter were common.  

Cheer up

The perfect item for research students, authors etc.:

What would The Church do?

I like the song 'What would Brian Boitano do', from the old south park movie. The song is a parody of the phrase 'What Would Jesus Do'. So i decided to see where people look actually for guidance. Not only comparing this parody with the original saying but if possible with the various ranks in the church.

Now when i looked into the ranks of the church i found it very difficult to simplify. Therefore i compare only to ranks within the catholic church and even there i have to simplify. Interesting is also the wikipedia article on the hierarchy of the catholic church.

Figure 1: Google hits for the phrase 'what would * do'. Sorted roughly by ascending level within the hierarchy of the catholic church (from left to right). Articles were included in the search query when necessary.

Well... the winner is obviously 'What Would Jesus Do'. Now the next question which comes to my mind is where are people interesting in WWJD? The answer was obtained from google via regional interest search for the phrase 'What Would Jesus Do'

Figure 2: Darker color indicates higher search volume for WWJD

Obviously the regional search is not statistically relevant. Mainly due to search volume measured in english. So please refrain from citing this figure for anything than fun purposes ^^.

What really surprises me is the high position of Jamaica. Anybody an idea what they scored high?

greek letters

While doing valuable research (which might one day grant me an income which doesnt make me cry), i saw that google has more hits for 'beta' than for 'alpha'. I wondered a bit and did a small survey which led to the following figure:

Figure1. Google hits for the indicated search phrase representing greek letters. If the top ranked search result was not the wikipedia article, a short description of the  top hit is given above. The queries were send 2011.3.23 14:00 (GMT+9)