Let's Learn About the Largest Cities of Japan (Populations)

Rank	City Name	Prefecture	Pop.
1	Tokyo	Tokyo	8,483,050
2	Yokohama	Kanagawa	3,579,133
3	Osaka	Osaka	2,628,776
4	Nagoya	Aichi	2,215,031
5	Sapporo	Hokkaidō	1,880,875
6	Kōbe	Hyōgo	1,525,389
7	Kyōto	Kyōto	1,474,764
8	Fukuoka	Fukuoka	1,400,621
9	Kawasaki	Kanagawa	1,327,009
10	Saitama	Saitama	1,176,269
11	Hiroshima	Hiroshima	1,154,595
12	Sendai	Miyagi	1,024,947
13	Kitakyūshū	Fukuoka	993,483
14	Chiba	Chiba	924,353
15	Setagaya	Tokyo	841,399
16	Sakai	Osaka	831,111
17	Niigata	Niigata	813,847
18	Hamamatsu	Shizuoka	804,067
19	Shizuoka	Shizuoka	713,716
20	Sagamihara	Kanagawa	701,568

Now you know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan

Two videos:
Japan earthquake: CCTV video of tsunami wave hitting Sendai airport

Dashboard camera catches tsunami as it hits the car

Let's Learn About Sick Bay

A sick bay is a compartment in a ship used for medical purposes — the ship's hospital.

The sick bay will contain the ship's medicine chest which may be divided into separate cabinets such as a refrigerator for medicines which require cold storage and a locked cabinet for controlled substances such as morphine. The sick bay and the medicine chest should be kept locked, with the keys only being available to the medical officer and the ship's master.

The term is also applied ashore by the United States Navy and Marine Corps to treatment clinics on naval stations and Marine bases.

Sick bays appear in popular science fiction franchises, such as Battlestar Galactica or the Star Trek series, as the medical facility on board a starship.

Now you know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_bay

Bear Feels Sick

Let's Learn About the Real St. Patrick

Saint Patrick (Latin: Patricius; Primitive Irish: *Qatrikias; Old Irish: Cothraige or Coithrige; Middle Irish: Pátraic; Irish: Pádraig; British: *Patrikios; Old Welsh: Patric; Middle Welsh: Padric; Welsh: Padrig; Old English: Patric; c. 387 – 17 March, 493) was a Romano-Briton and Christian missionary, who is the most generally recognized patron saint of Ireland, although Brigid of Kildare and Colmcille are also formally patron saints.

Two authentic letters from him survived, from which come the only universally accepted details of his life. When he was about 16, he was captured from Britain by Irish raiders and taken as a slave to Ireland, where he lived for six years before escaping and returning to his family. After entering the Church, he returned to Ireland as an ordained bishop in the north and west of the island, but little is known about the places where he worked. By the seventh century, he had come to be revered as the patron saint of Ireland.

Most available details of his life are from later hagiographies from the 7th century onwards, and these are now not accepted without detailed criticism. Uncritical acceptance of the Annals of Ulster would imply that he lived from 340 to 440, and ministered in what is modern day Northern Ireland from 428 onwards. The dates of Patrick's life cannot be fixed with certainty, but on a widespread interpretation he was active as a missionary in Ireland during the second half of the 5th century.

Saint Patrick's Day is observed on March 17, the date of Patrick's death. It is celebrated both in and outside of Ireland,(America) as both a liturgical and non-liturgical holiday. In the dioceses of Ireland it is both a solemnity and a holy day of obligation and outside of Ireland, it can be a celebration of Ireland itself.

Now you know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Patrick

The Confession of Saint Patrick and Letter to Coroticus

Patrick: Patron Saint of Ireland

Let's Learn About Tsunami Etymology

The term tsunami comes from the Japanese, meaning "harbor" (tsu, 津) and "wave" (nami, 波). (For the plural, one can either follow ordinary English practice and add an s, or use an invariable plural as in the Japanese.)

Tsunami are sometimes referred to as tidal waves. In recent years, this term has fallen out of favor, especially in the scientific community, because tsunami actually have nothing to do with tides. The once-popular term derives from their most common appearance, which is that of an extraordinarily high tidal bore. Tsunami and tides both produce waves of water that move inland, but in the case of tsunami the inland movement of water is much greater and lasts for a longer period, giving the impression of an incredibly high tide. Although the meanings of "tidal" include "resembling" or "having the form or character of" the tides, and the term tsunami is no more accurate because tsunami are not limited to harbours, use of the term tidal wave is discouraged by geologists and oceanographers.

There are only a few other languages that have a native word for this disastrous wave. In the Tamil language, the word is aazhi peralai. In the Acehnese language, it is ië beuna or alôn buluëk (Depending on the dialect. Note that in the fellow Austronesian language of Tagalog, a major language in the Philippines, alon means "wave".) On Simeulue island, off the western coast of Sumatra in Indonesia, in the Defayan language the word is smong, while in the Sigulai language it is emong.

As early as 426 B.C. the Greek historian Thucydides inquired in his book History of the Peloponnesian War about the causes of tsunami, and was the first to argue that ocean earthquakes must be the cause.

The cause, in my opinion, of this phenomenon must be sought in the earthquake. At the point where its shock has been the most violent the sea is driven back, and suddenly recoiling with redoubled force, causes the inundation. Without an earthquake I do not see how such an accident could happen.

The Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus (Res Gestae 26.10.15-19) described the typical sequence of a tsunami, including an incipient earthquake, the sudden retreat of the sea and a following gigantic wave, after the 365 A.D. tsunami devastated Alexandria.

Now you know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami
Tsunamis and Other Natural Disasters: A Nonfiction Companion to High Tide in Hawaii (Magic Tree House Research Guide #15)

Give to World Relief
http://wr.org/

Let's Learn About Charlie Sheen's Early Life

Sheen was born Carlos Irwin Estevez in New York City in 1965, the youngest son and third of four children of actor Martin Sheen and artist Janet Templeton. Sheen has two older brothers, Emilio Estevez and Ramon Estevez, and a younger sister, Renée Estevez, all actors. His parents moved to Malibu, California, after Martin Sheen's Broadway turn in The Subject Was Roses. His first movie appearance was at age nine in his father’s 1974 film The Execution of Private Slovik. Sheen attended Santa Monica High School in Santa Monica, California, where he was a star pitcher and shortstop for the baseball team.

During his days at Santa Monica High School he showed an early interest in acting, making amateur Super-8 films with his brother Emilio and school friends Rob Lowe and Sean Penn, at the time still using his birth name. A few weeks before graduation, Sheen was expelled from the school for poor grades and bad attendance. Deciding to become an actor, Charlie took the same stage name as his father, who had adopted it in honor of the Catholic archbishop and theologian Fulton J. Sheen.

Now you know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Sheen

Let's Learn About a Rorschach Test Controversy

Some skeptics consider the Rorschach inkblot test pseudoscience, as several studies suggested that conclusions reached by test administrators since the 1950s were akin to cold reading. In the 1959 edition of Mental Measurement Yearbook, Lee Cronbach (former President of the Psychometric Society and American Psychological Association) is quoted in a review: "The test has repeatedly failed as a prediction of practical criteria. There is nothing in the literature to encourage reliance on Rorschach interpretations." In addition, major reviewer Raymond J. McCall writes (p. 154): "Though tens of thousands of Rorschach tests have been administered by hundreds of trained professionals since that time (of a previous review), and while many relationships to personality dynamics and behavior have been hypothesized, the vast majority of these relationships have never been validated empirically [sic], despite the appearance of more than 2,000 publications about the test." A moratorium on its use was called for in 1999.

Now you know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test#Controversy

Let's Learn About Touché

In fencing, touché (French pronunciation: [tuʃe]), the French word for "touched", is used to acknowledge a hit, called out by the fencer who is hit. Conversely, if a fencer concedes a hit when no hit was actually made, the fencer's adversary would say, "'pas de touché'" (French pronunciation: [pɑ də tuʃe]; English: no touch) to indicate that the hit should not be counted.

Now you know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch%C3%A9