This weekend, while dealing with tendonitis in my left knee, I found myself on the couch watching Brainiac. I had never seen the show before, but it struck me as a lightweight version of Mythbusters. One of the assertions that the Brainiac cast validated was that paper can only be folded in half seven or eight times. I had heard this when I was younger, but always wondered what would happen with longer strips of really thin paper. Despite Brainiac’s confirmation that the upper limit was eight, I found that a high-school student, Britney Gallivan, had folded a paper in half 12 times in January 2002. And that wailing sound? A fact-checker losing his/her job.
