Robin's Random Facts

Amazing Tornadoes:
In 1896, a tornado in St. Louis, Missouri, proved that wind can be stronger than steel. After the tornado, people found a wooden board driven through a thick steel beam under a bridge. A tornado that hit Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, ripped a mile of barbed-wire fence out of the ground. Then the wind neatly rolled the fence up! And lastly... In 1937, a tornado lifted a train engine, turned it around, and set it back down on some nearby railroad tracks!
Numbers Big and Small:
Jiffy: 3.3357 times 10 raised to the -11 (3.3357x10^-11) seconds. It's named for the length of time it takes light to travel a centimeter in a vacuum.
Google: 10 to the 100th power: 10^100. This is 1 with 100 zeroes.
Googleplex: 10 to the googleth power: you could write it as 10^10^100 (and that's really big!). You can try to visualize it by imagining that the number represented by 1 with 100 zeroes is the number of zeroes following a 1 in a googleplex.

The tornado facts are courtesy of the National Wildlife Federation.