From Paul Krugman's most recent op-ed:
Unlike the dollar, the euro or the yen, whose values fluctuate freely, China’s currency is pegged by official policy at about 6.8 yuan to the dollar. At this exchange rate, Chinese manufacturing has a large cost advantage over its rivals, leading to huge trade surpluses.
Before the 1970s, college students got only a two week vacation for Christmas and the New Year, and took exams after the break. But in the 1970s when the economy was going into hell and most schools found themselves in a financial squeeze, the administrators realized they could save money by closing school down for a month in the winter. That way, they could cut costs on heating at a time when oil prices soared.
Car booting is where a company puts a wheel clamp on your car's tire when your payment at a parking meter has expired. Sometimes companies car boot even when the time hasn't yet run out, like how it's popular here in Dallas.
Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda is an old, fat Puerto Rican man who believes he's the second coming of Christ. He formed his own ministry in the 1980s named Creciendo en Gracia (Growing in Grace Ministry). According to Bill Maher's movie Religulous, Miranda has 100,000 idiots who are even dumber than him following him worldwide.
His message to people is to let loose:
- The devil, hell, and sin don't exist.
- Don't pray. It's useless.
- So are moral or ethical guidelines.
So as long as you give him money, life will be ok.
Make some time and read "Rediscovering Central Asia," an article from The Wilson Quarterly in which the author presents the fascinating period of Central Asia between 800 AD to 1100 AD. The region we now view as a mountainous void harboring religious extremism, was actually "the intellectual epicenter of the world." Here are a few quotes that help paint a picture of the scientific advances they made:
In astronomy, they estimated the earth’s diameter to a degree of precision unmatched until recent centuries and built several of the largest observatories before modern times, using them to prepare remarkably precise astronomical tables.
In chemistry, Central Asians were the first to reverse reactions, to use crystallization as a means of purification, and to measure specific gravity and use it to group elements in a manner anticipating Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table of 1871.
And in technology, they invented windmills and hydraulic machinery for lifting water that subsequently spread westward to the Middle East and Europe and eastward to China.
Are there other solar systems out among the stars, they asked, or are we alone in the universe? In Europe, this question was to remain open for another 500 years, but to these two men it seemed clear that we are not alone. They also asked if the earth had been created whole and complete, or if it had evolved over time. Time, they agreed, is a continuum with no beginning or end. In other words, they rejected creationism and anticipated evolutionary geology and even Darwinism by nearly a millennium. This was all as heretical to the Muslim faith they professed as it was to medieval Christianity.
The first, Nizam al-Mulk (1018–92), was a highly gifted administrator and also one of the best political scientists of the era. Al-Mulk’s teachers had introduced him to works by the best minds of the Central Asian renaissance. But by the time he was appointed vizier of the Seljuk Empire, the battle against Shiite dissidence was at full tilt. Fearing deviance on every side, al-Mulk proposed to establish a network of schools, or madrassas, that would instill orthodox Sunni Islam and turn young men into well-informed loyalists of the faith. Graduates would reject not only the Shiite schism but any other forms of thought that might be suspected of deviance from orthodoxy.
The second transformative figure, Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali (1058–1111), a philosopher and theologian, launched a frontal attack on the dangers posed by the unrestrained exercise of reason. The title of his most famous work tells it all: The Incoherence of the Philosophers (i.e., scientists). Like the Grand Inquisitor in Feodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, al-Ghazali intimately knew his enemy, in this case Aristotelian empiricism, which had attracted the best minds of the region. Attacking Aristotle, he attacked all contemporary rationalists, and to devastating effect.
Together, al-Mulk and al-Ghazali lowered the curtain on independent thought that had been raised in Central Asia for three centuries.
From this descent into obscurity it was an easy step to Dan Rather’s coverage of Afghanistan and the region in the immediate wake of 9/11. Donning a bush jacket and filming at dawn and dusk, he presented the region as inaccessible, backward, exotic, marginal, and threatening--in short, the end of the world. Ibn Sina, al-Biruni, and scores of other world-class geniuses from the region might just as well never have lived.
Even though the Central Asia of Rather’s depiction was and is an evocative image, it carries some bothersome implications. On the one hand, it conjures up a place where the best the United States and the world community can hope for is to limit the damage arising from it. This means destroying whatever threatens us and then getting out. The problem is that the thinking behind such an approach can then become self-fulfilling: A place we judged to be hopeless becomes truly so, and even more threatening than before. The fact that Central Asia and Afghanistan are situated between four--and possibly soon five--nuclear powers does not help matters.
This means focusing more of our support and theirs on reopening the great continental transport routes, instituting freer borders, lowering tariffs, and reducing meddling from the governments. Free trade must also extend to the world of ideas. This means creating the unfettered intellectual space that enabled Ibn Sina and al-Biruni to hypothesize on evolution rather than creationism and even to contemplate the existence of other worlds. Though they each lived under a different government, nobody intercepted their mail and nobody censured their heretical thoughts. In fact, rulers competed to become their patrons and to support their work.
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico -- which is about a ten minute drive from El Paso, TX -- currently has the world's highest murder rate, thanks to the drug cartel wars. It registers 130 murders per 100,000 residents. As of August 2009, that murder rate is more than three times higher than that of Baghdad.
Why does taking something with a grain of salt mean taking something with a degree of skepticism? Basically, if you can eat bitter food more easily with a small amount of salt, then lies or shady claims can be mitigated by a grain of salt.
In 77 AD Pliny the Elder, in his encyclopedia Naturalis Historia, translated the recipe for an antidote to poison by stating to "take two dried walnuts, two figs, and twenty leaves of rue; pound them all together, with the addition of a grain of salt; if a person takes this mixture fasting, he will be proof against all poisons for that day."
From David Attenborough's Life on Earth (p. 100):
Termites construct some of the greatest of all insect buildings. A termite fortress, walled, buttressed, and castellated, may contain ten tons of mud and stand three or four times as tall as a man. Several million inhabitants, busily running their errands within, can cause overheating and produce a foul oxygen-poor atmosphere so ventilation is of the greatest importance. Around the margins of the hill, the termites construct tall, thin-walled chimneys which stand out from the sides like ribs. No insects live inside these huge smooth-walled ducts. Their only function is ventilation. As the sun warms their walls, the air inside becomes hotter than that in the centre of the nest. It rises, drawing exhausted air from the central galleries and the deeper parts of the hill, creating a circulation. The thin, external walls of the chimneys are porous and so oxygen from the outside atmosphere diffuses in. The air, thus refreshed, rises to the top of the nest and then circulates back down other passageways. In very hot weather, the workers descend tunnels that go deep into the ground to the water table. Each returns carrying a crop full of water with which it wets the walls of the main part of the nest. The heat evaporates the water and this also lowers the temperature. By such devices, the worker termites manage to keep a very even temperature inside the nest.
Scientists believe that 80% of all volcanic eruptions on Earth happens in the oceans, and most volcanoes are located in the deep sea.
Yesterday I learned that the General Slocum disaster of 1904 was the second most deadly fire in U.S. history. The single most deadly one was the Peshtigo fire of October 8, 1871.
In fact, the Great Peshtigo Fire was the worst of its kind in North American history, but its story isn't as interesting as that of the General Slocum. The loggers at that time made it a common practice to start small fires in order to burn the dry forest debris. Massive wind that day fanned the flames and created a colossal fire out of the smaller ones that raged through 1 million acres in Wisconsin and upper Michigan, leaving 1,500 people dead.
As with the General Slocum, this disaster has been overshadowed by another fire incident. The Triangle Shirtwaist factory pushed the General Slocum catastrophe out of public consciousness, possibly because German-Americans died on the boat and Germans at the time were viewed in a different light. The Great Chicago Fire had actually happened on the same day as Peshtigo, but one reason Peshtigo got relegated is because people are still trying to figure out if Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked the lantern over.
The General Slocum disaster was the second most deadly fire in U.S. history. It killed 1,021 people in New York on June 15, 1904.
It happened in what was called Kleindeutchland, or Little Germany, on the Lower East Side. This enclave teemed with German immigrants who had been arriving there since the 1840s. St. Mark's Lutheran church, one of the churches in the area, held an annual event to celebrate the end of the Sunday school year. They usually rented a boat named General Slocum to take them to a nearby facility for a day of games and food. More than 1,300 people boarded the boat that fateful day.
A short while after the boat left the dock, smoke started coming out of a storage room. Crewmen tried putting the fire out, but because no one trained them to handle fire drills, they failed to extinguish the blaze and reported the emergency to Captain William Van Schaick ten minutes later. The captain basically panicked and, instead of docking the boat at a nearby spot, raced to North Brother Island a mile away. He did this because he feared the oil tanks situated at the nearby locations might have prompted an even greater disaster with the raging fire, even though onlookers shouted for him to dock it there.
The speed of the boat only fanned the flames, however, and passengers began jumping overboard or clinging onto parts of the boat not yet overtaken by the fire. And to make matters worse, nothing that could have halted the situation was able to work in the first place. The crew was inexperienced, the 3,000 life jackets were corked and disintegrated, the lifeboats were too firmly wired in place, and the hoses burst when the water was turned on. Plus, most of the kids who jumped off the boat could not swim, so many of them drowned. When the boat touched shore at North Brother Island, a team of onlookers and nearby nurses attempted to help the people still onboard. The rescue boats did all in their power but could only save the few who did not already drown.
In the aftermath Van Schaick and executives of the Knickerbocker Steamboat Co. were indicted, but the jury found Van Schaick the easy scapegoat. The judge sentenced him to 10 years of hard labor for criminal negligence and manslaughter. The Knickerbocker Steamboat Co. suffered only a minor fine, even though the trial revealed they falsified records on the true safety of the boat. But four months later a commission issued a damning report on the lack of common sense used on the construction of the General Slocum. People were fired and President Roosevelt instituted new regulations for all steamboats to have:
- fireproof metal bulkheads to contain fires
- steam pipes extended from the boiler into cargo areas (to act as a sprinkler)
- improved lifejackets (one for each passenger and crew member)
- fire hoses capable of handling 100 pounds of pressure per square inch
- accessible life boats
President Taft pardoned Captain William Van Schaick on this day in 1912.
Prialt is a new painkiller that is derived from the venom of cone snails. These animals spear their prey with rods that contain around 100 to 200 different poisons, which have been tested in clinical trials. Prialt, however, is the only one that is FDA approved. It is the most successful painkiller since morphine; in fact, it is 1,000 times more potent than morphine and doesn't lead to tolerance.
The snails can be found in the coral reefs, but climate change severely threatens this area. Plus, there exist some 500 species of cone snails, only one percent of which has been studied. So that's a whole lot of potentially useful neurotoxins.
Although the goatee is usually thought of as the chin hair connecting the mustache, a real goatee doesn't connect to the mustache.
In the Brazilian Amazon alone, loggers have illegally built about 107,000 miles of roads cutting through the forest. That's enough to encircle the earth four times over. The most notorious of these roads is the BR-319, which is 500 miles long and is even being paved.
Kinda like this one and this one.
39% of Americans can't name a fossil fuel. Even more can't name a renewable energy source. 56% thinks that nuclear energy contributes to global warming, while 31% thinks solar energy contributes to global warming.
Sigh...
Erwin Planck was a son of physicist Max Planck who was involved in the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler. He was arrested three days later and executed in Berlin the following January.
Today I watched all three parts of NOVA's "Becoming Human". I thought it was alright, but it did introduce me to some new things I hadn't heard about. One of them was that constant climate change of 2 million years ago might have actually increased our brain size.
From around 6 million to 2 million years ago, our line was becoming more bipedal but the size of our brain stayed relatively the same. Then the climate in Africa changed from wet to dry to wet in a span of about a thousand years. Only the most intelligent apes could have survived in this unstable environment, thus leading to what would become Homo habilis, nicknamed the "handy man" for his proficient use of stone tools. This was also the first species of the genus Homo.
So I guess Glenn Beck has one more excuse to casually dismiss today's climate change. Luckily, he probably won't be one of the humans to survive.
Liu Bolin is a 35 year-old Chinese artist who paints his body to camouflage himself with the surrounding areas.
This is my favorite pic. Can you find him?
The tongue-eating louse is a type of parasite that measures one to two inches long and lives inside fish by entering through their gills and eating their tongues. But it doesn't immediately kill the host; instead, the louse eats whatever scraps of food the fish is eating, thereby slowly killing it.
"Making pozole" is a term used by Mexican-American drug cartels that refers to dissolving their victims' bodies in chemicals. Pozole is a Mexican stew that takes a few hours to make.
In these rough economic times, instead of going out on the street and begging for money at the expense of your pride, you can do it online and no one will know who you are.
Websites like Begslist, CyberBeg, and DonateMoney2Me are places where you can tell your story to the whole world in hopes of getting some money or some other things you may need (or just want).
(NPR had a pathetic story this morning about parents using these sites to solicit Christmas gifts for their kids, as if Christmas gifts are the end-all, be-all for a child's happy life. But that's how I learned about this.)
Kenneth Biros, a condemned Ohio killer, today became the first person in the country to die by a single injection, instead of the usual three. The state changed the law after a September attempt to lethally inject a rapist failed because he had no usable veins.
This new method takes about the same amount of time as the old one and is supposedly less painful.
Ten-codes are the code words used by law enforcement officials and radio operators. They were introduced in 1937 by a man in the Illinois State Police, who got frustrated over the fact that radios at the time took about a tenth to a fourth of a second to "spin up." So adding the word ten would allow enough time for the radio to send the signal clearly.
The most famous ten-code is 10-4, which means "OK."
But the federal government recently suggested that the ten-codes should be phased out in favor of plain language, since different agencies have different meanings for a number of codes.
Art therapy is the same thing as psychoanlaysis but patients express themselves more by making art (painting, drawing, clay modeling, etc.) and reflecting on their work than by talking.
It's been proven to work relatively well on the elderly, suicidal adolescents, and people dealing with everyday stress, but not so well on those suffering from schizophrenia and PTSD.
Mississippi became the last state to ratify the 13th amendment, which in 1865 officially abolished slavery. They ratified it in 1995.
Kentucky had ratified the amendment in 1976. We already know they fail.
An urban heat island occurs when the infrastructure of a city uses up energy, thus making an "island" where it's warmer than the city's surrounding rural areas.
On a typical summer day, the sun can heat exposed surfaces in the city, like pavements and rooftops, to temperatures 50 to 90 degrees hotter than the air. Surfaces in rural areas, which are generally more shaded and moist, stay close to air temperatures. Surface urban heat islands are hottest during the day.
On the other hand, atmospheric urban heat islands, where the air is warmer than its surroundings, are strongest at night because of the time it takes the release of heat from the infrastructure to reach the atmosphere. In a city of 1 million people, the air can be 22 degrees higher than its surroundings.
A Hobson's choice is one where you have no real option - you either take what's given to you or leave it.
The term has its origins from around the end of the 17th century, when a man from Cambridge named Thomas Hobson (not to be confused with Thomas Hobbes) ran a successful horse and carrier rental business but only gave each of his customers one choice of horse. Hence, Hobson's choice.
Last year I learned a few reasons why women live longer than men. Today the BBC has given me one more reason.
Researchers in Japan experimenting on mice have found that if you eliminate the male genes from the offspring before its birth, the animal will live a third longer than one with normal genetic inheritance. The resulting mouse is lighter and smaller but also appears to have a better immune system.
The reason is a gene that is passed down by the fathers, which is inherited by both his male and female kids but only expressed in the males. It allows the males to grow big and strong, but at the expense of their life spans.
Not only do female humans live longer than their male counterparts, the same is true for many other mammals. And of course for humans, it might not be as simple as just one gene, but the general picture is still the same.
Atlanta hasn't had a white mayor since 1974. It looks like it might stay that way, as State Senator Kasim Reed beat his white opponent, Councilwoman Mary Norwood, by less than a percentage point in a runoff election today. The votes will most likely face a recount in the city with a 56% black population.
For thousands of years, elephants were used to crush captives by placing the victims' heads and/or bodies under the animal's foot. It was primarily done in South and Southeast Asia. European settlers in the 18th and 19th centuries eventually got rid of the practice.
I only marginally heard of Norman Rockwell and his paintings. He painted works that depicted everyday American lives. But what most people might not know, although he didn't keep it a secret, is that Rockwell had a cast of photographers who snapped pictures for him before each painting. Here's The Runaway:
Check out more of his work vis-a-vis the actual photos taken beforehand.
Nancy Witcher Astor was the first woman to serve as a Member of Parliament in Britain (although she wasn't the first woman to win a seat; that title belongs to someone who won an election but didn't serve), elected on this day in 1919. Here are a few interesting things about Astor:
- She was born in Danville, Virginia, where her father had been a slave owner.
- She moved to England at about the age of 26.
- She converted to Christian Science from Catholicism.
- She won her seat in a special election as a member of the Conservative Party pretty much by default. Most of her suffragette opponents were in jail, and she was known to have ridiculous political views (her fierce resistance against alcohol consumption) and say outlandish things.
- She had an unimpressive run as an MP but did have some influence outside of politics.
- She hated Jews and didn't mind the Nazis wiping them out.
- The Tories (Conservative Party members) felt she was becoming a liability to the party, and her husband strongly discouraged her from seeking re-election in the final years of WWII. So she quit.
- During her retirement from politics she went around the U.S. making speeches and spewing hatred toward black people and Jews. She suggested to a group of black students that they should grow up to be more like the servants she remembered in Virginia. To another group she said that they should be thankful for slavery because it's what allowed them to convert to Christianity.
- She had a gay son.
So at least in some respect, Nancy Astor was kinda like Sarah Palin before Palin was even born.
Cyber Monday is the Black Friday equivalent for online shoppers. It falls on the Monday after Black Friday. The name was coined in 2005, and although the day isn't the biggest for online shopping (that would be a week or two before Christmas), it's quickly becoming so.
In the first half of 2009, 99.3% of U.S. imports of live turkeys came from Canada, at a value of $9.2 million.
The Plot Against FDR in 1933 was a plan discussed among the business elite to overthrow the president using half a million war veterans. The businessmen wanted to institute the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the Great Depression. One of the notable businessmen was Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush. Major General Smedley Butler, the man being considered to head the coup, testified a year later in Congress and confirmed that people had met with him regarding their plan.
Listen to the BBC Radio 4 documentary on this.
We had just learned about Homo floresiensis in school and were supposed to write a two-page single-spaced paper formulating our own hypotheses on its possible origins. So how fortuitous it is that researchers have now confirmed that the ancient Hobbits of Indonesia are a separate species, and not diseased or deformed descendants of Homo sapiens.
Homo floresiensis lived in and around the area of Indonesia approximately 94,000 to 13,000 years ago. The species has confused scientists on where to put it on the evolutionary tree because of the members' diminutive size (three and a half feet tall) and the fact that they lived isolated from the rest of civilization.
This should help me on my paper.
Update 06.27.10; Watch the fairly recent NOVA episode "Alien from Earth" to learn more. It's damn good.
Lake Malawi gets its name "Calendar Lake" because it is 365 miles long and 52 miles wide at its widest point.
...with the help of ACORN.
Unbelievable. Only 27% of them think Obama actually won the election. That makes it 26% of the American people who think Obama enlisted the help of ACORN to steal 9.5 million votes.
I usually try to stay away from the political fray, but when I see polls like this I go berserk. Like I've said before, you can thank the TV media for inviting people representing both sides of the issues and not doing a damn thing to actually say which side is correct. And thanking Fox News is a gimme, of course.
I just watched the special dubbed "When Crocs Ate Dinosaurs" on the National Geographic Channel. Pretty amazing stuff. I can't possibly give you all the details but you can click the link and watch this three and a half minute synopsis.
The Yakuza are the Japanese mafia. Debut author Jake Adelstein has a new book out called Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, in which he describes his dealings with the Yakuza.
I had learned previously that chimpanzees were ambidextrous in their daily activities. Now that's been erased from my memory and replaced with this remarkable revelation.
A new study shows that chimps predominantly use their right hands when communicating, hinting to the strong possibility that they use the left half of their brains, as is true for humans. This is a breakthrough because it buttresses the hypothesis that speech evolved as our ancestors pointed to objects (see: Bouba/kiki effect).
The world's largest CPR class was held this morning at Cowboys Stadium. The city of Arlington's 4,526 eighth-grade students packed the new stadium as they learned how to do CPR, while an official with Guinness World Records stood alongside. The record demolished the previous one by nearly 1,000 people, set in Oslo, Norway.
Shisha, more commonly known here as the hookah, and one of the cultural staples of Egypt, was actually brought to there from the Ottoman Empire 200 years ago.
In Japan, the state requires men to have waistlines no bigger than 33.5 inches, and women can't have waistlines bigger than 35.4 inches. This law came into effect around April 2008, and it calls upon companies and local governments to annually measure the waistlines of people between the ages of 40 and 74.
Those in violation, if they don't lose the weight after three months, will be given dieting guides. After six more months the offenders will be "re-educated." This is all to decrease the overweight population by 10% over the next four years and 25% over the next seven years. The companies face financial penalties if their employees, the employees' families, and the companies' retirees are above the waistline limits.
I think we can all agree that 33.5 inches for guys is insane, but I don't care what anyone says, I love the overall idea of this plan. It would sure get the 30% of jackasses here who are obese to slim down, which would ultimately bring down the costs of health care anyway. It's called preventing shit before it happens (quite literally) so we won't have to throw money at our problems when we get diseases related to obesity.
Here's a quote from the NYT article:
“Nobody will want to be singled out as metabo [a word for overweight],” Kimiko Shigeno, a company nurse, said of the campaign. “It’ll have the same effect as non-smoking campaigns where smokers are now looked at disapprovingly.”
The Jersey Devil is the Bigfoot of New Jersey, flying around in the Pine Barrens.
Legend has it that in 1735, a mother who was just about to give birth put a curse on her coming child. She made a deal with the devil to trade her infant for her freedom from a loveless marriage. The baby is born, and within an hour grows into a gruesome creature that is as tall as two men, with huge wings and a tail. Then he flew up to the Pine Barrens to live all these years. Of course, stupid people have to believe stupid things, especially if they live close to an area with a centuries-old myth. There are people who claim they saw the Jersey Devil, blah blah blah.
The creature was the inspiration for the name of the state's NHL team, the New Jersey Devils.
The ten-year rule states that it takes about ten years of intense labor to master any field.
The coelacanth is a fish that was once thought to have gone extinct 65 million years ago. But a South African woman discovered it in 1938. The animal might be a link in the evolution from fish to land animals. The most interesting characteristic is its paired lobe fins that extend away from its body and move in an alternating pattern, representing what would later be the legs of the amphibians and reptiles.
Sesame Street has won 97 Emmy Awards. That’s the most Emmys won by any television show.
Verbal adhesion is the term used to describe a savant's ability to remember huge quantities of words' without comprehension. This phenomenon is not evident in Kim Peek, however, the world's most famous savant who was the inspiration for the 1988 movie Rain Man.
Physiognomy is the notion that a person's face reflects his or her character. The idea was put forth by Johann Caspar Lavater in the 1700s, who gathered together all the previous writings on physiognomy.
In 1831 a young Charles Darwin had the interview of his life with Captain Robert FitzRoy, concerning his post as naturalist on the H.M.S. Beagle. Darwin almost didn't make it because FitzRoy, as a physiognomist, thought Darwin's nose had a shape associated with lack of energy and determination. Which is why the theory of physiognomy should have died right there.
But apparently it's making some sort of comeback, while still getting disproved.
The Tower of Hanoi is a math game usually used in computer science. It involves three rods and a number of disks which can slide onto the rods. The disks vary in size -- the smallest is stacked on the top and the largest at the bottom, so it would look similar to a step pyramid. The purpose of the game is to move all the disks that are assembled on the left rod to the right rod. The middle one is used as a temporary place holder. But you have to follow these rules:
1. Only one disk can be moved at a time.
2. A disk can't be placed on top of a smaller disk.
3. All disks have to be slid on a peg while being moved.
The Tower of Hanoi got its name from a legend involving Vietnamese priests moving 64 golden disks in the same manner described above. That would have taken them 264 - 1 moves, or 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 turns, to finish.
The first words successfully stored on a hard drive were "This has been a day of solid achievement," on February 10, 1954.
NaNoWriMo, short for National Novel Writing Month, "is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30."
One of the subscribers to this blog, Penny Roberts, has gone insane and is participating in this marathon. So I'm ordering all 2 people who read this blog, including Penny, to wish her luck this month. Plus I want the book for free.
Here's her NaNoWriMo profile.
And I wrote this post because I didn't have enough time to learn something better today. I got tests to study for and I'm tired as hell. But at least the Phillies keep fighting.
I'm relatively new when it comes to ironing clothes. Today I decided to read those labels on my shirts and pants I never bother to read and found that the instructions said to iron them inside out. I had gotten done with most of my clothes doing it the usual way -- on the front -- so I only had about two garments left. And it turned out ironing inside out was actually better.
Here's how HowStuffWorks explains it:
To keep from giving your wash-and-wear garments a sheen when you do touch-up ironing, turn the clothing inside out and iron the wrong side.
A koi pond is another name for a water garden with lilies and fish and shit like that in it. The koi are a colorful variety of carp, developed in Japan.
Holland Codes are a series of letters that help suggest the type of career one should choose, which can be found out by taking a test. It was developed by American psychologist John L. Holland, who argued that "the choice of a vocation is an expression of personality." There are six letters in the test representing six different types. They are as follows:
Realistic (R) - practical, physical, hands-on, tool-oriented
Investigative (I) - analytical, intellectual, scientific, explorative
Artistic (A) - creative, original, independent, chaotic
Social (S) - cooperative, supporting, helping, healing/nurturing
Enterprising (E) - competitive environments, leadership, persuading
Conventional (C) - detail-oriented, organizing, clerical
These letters are then organized by the highest number you score on each one. So if you get I = 21, C = 11, S = 10, E = 6, A = 4, and R = 1 (as I did today in school), your Holland Codes would be ICSEAR. Since this is cumbersome and not too many people would care about your lowest scored letters, only the first three or so are used.
The types can also be represented on a hexagon. The shorter the distance between their corners, the more closely they're related. That's why it would be hard to find someone who's both artistic/creative (A) and conventional/organized (C).
You can take this version of the test now, although it's kind of a rough and ready sketch compared to the one I took at school.
Lester Pearson is considered the father of the modern concept of peacekeeping.
On this day in 1956, Britain, France, and Israel carried out a military attack on Egypt after President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, which was run by French and British interests. This was known as the Suez Crisis. The nationalization was a response to the two countries pulling out funds for the Aswan Dam. And that was a response to Egypt's recognition of the Communist People's Republic of China, among other things. The United States opposed the attack, and Nasser went to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev for help. Khrushchev threatened to nuke the West if the Brits and French didn't pull out. The world held its collective breath.
That left room for Pearson, a Canadian who went to the UN and proposed creating a United Nations Emergency Force to "keep the borders at peace while a political settlement is being worked out." This was a neutral force not involving the major alliances. Britain and France hated the idea but all 57 countries at the UN eventually signed the agreement.
Pearson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for his accomplishments and earned Canada an independent position on the world stage as far as peacekeeping. In 1963 he was elected as Canada's Prime Minister.
Lamarckism, proposed by French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, is a dismissed theory that states that the characteristics which an organism acquires during its lifetime will be passed on to its offspring. Later, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and Gregor Mendel's studies of plant genetics discredited this notion.
Two examples of Lamarckism would include:
Giraffes stretching their necks to reach leaves high in trees (especially Acacias), strengthen and gradually lengthen their necks. These giraffes have offspring with slightly longer necks.
A blacksmith, through his work, strengthens the muscles in his arms. His sons will have similar muscular development when they mature.
Feng shui is a complex body of knowledge that reveals how to balance the energies of any given space to assure the health and good fortune for people inhabiting it. It was developed in China about 3,000 years ago, and used today in the West for interior decorating.
I had known about the surrogate mother experiments, the experiments in which American psychologist Harry Harlow separated young rhesus monkeys from their mothers in order to demonstrate the importance of caregiving in cognitive development. But I didn't know the exact importance of his work.
Harlow took rhesus infants away from their mothers and replaced the mothers with two fake ones: one made of wire (hard) and the other made of terrycloth (soft). Anyone would reasonably assume that the monkeys would cling to the terrycloth mother because of their softness. So for balance, Harlow put food near the hard mother and didn't put anything near the soft mother. This way, one would really find out if the monkeys cared more about food or comfort. (He also switched the roles of the mothers in another experiment.)
The results weren't even close: the rhesus monkeys spent an overwhelming amount of time with the soft mother, regardless of whether she had food or not. And whenever there was a frightening sound nearby, the monkeys automatically clung to the soft mother.
So what does this prove (and disprove)? Up until that time, the behaviorist view was that feeding was the most important factor of the mother-child relationship. But as clearly shown, close body contact strengthened this bond. In addition, it was thought that holding a child too much would spoil him, which is also not true.
A country with an unwritten constitution is a country in which no formal constitution exists. Instead, the government and the courts cite the laws that have evolved over time. Examples of countries with unwritten constitutions are the UK, New Zealand, and Israel.
The Necker Cube is an optical illusion that most people would perceive as two objects. Look at this cube. You'll probably see it as facing one direction, most likely to your left. But if you stare at it for 30 seconds, the orientation of the cube will change, and will be facing to your right.
I almost jumped from my chair the first time the orientation changed.
The ankh was the the Egyptian hieroglyphic character that read "eternal life." Egyptian gods are often portrayed carrying it by its loop. Its origins still remain a mystery.
The Copts, the Christian sect in Egypt, preserved it to represent their Christian cross.
Finland will become the first country to make broadband a public right. In July everyone will have the legal right to at least a 1 MB per second Internet connection; the government is eyeing the prospects of upping it to 100 mbps in 2015. This is not compulsory on the Finnish people, however. Whoever wants a faster Internet connection can buy it at a fairly low price (a public option!).
I'm so glad the Finns have nothing better to do than to increase the speed of their Internet connections, while we here still have to struggle for decent health care.
The earthquake alarm is a device that can detect when an earthquake will occur 15 seconds beforehand. Among other things, it can potentially stop elevators so people on top floors can safely evacuate, and slow down public transit trains to decrease the chances of derailment. This machine is considered the Holy Grail of seismology. It will be tested in California's Bay area, but even so, the systems that will be used there lag behind ones already being used in Japan, Mexico, Turkey and Taipei.
Jeffrey Dahmer was a serial killer of the 1980s and early '90s, who at one point was murdering one person each week. His crimes involved homosexual rape, torture, dismemberment, necrophilia and cannibalism, and his victims were mostly black or Asian. In 1994 he was beaten to death in prison by a Jesus freak who ruptured his head with a bar from a weight machine.
Dahmer's story is really amazing. There's a much longer and more detailed story at the truTV website.
Most of the toothpick manufacturers are in Maine, who make them out of birch logs.
I thought I might have been the only person in the world who hears his own voice differently than what it actually is on tape. Today I got one less thing to worry about (kinda like this).
Inside your ears there is an organ called a cochlea, a special neurological structure that converts the vibrations of sounds in the air into electrical signals that the brain can understand. It gets stimulated by the pressure waves caused by sounds in the air, but at the same time can pick up the vibration of the bones in your skull. When you are listening to sounds in the environment, the chief source of those sounds is coming through the air, very little comes through the bone. When you’re speaking, however, your whole head resonates; it vibrates. This means that your cochlea gets stimulated by your skull vibrating, as well as the sound coming out of your mouth and going through the air to your ears.
The body does two things; it gets a different version of those vibrations (through the bone and the ear), but it also has a protective mechanism to cut down the amount of sound which is going into the cochlea. It reduces sensitivity of your ear a little when you’re speaking, so you get a slightly different rendition of what your voice sounds like.
That’s why, when you hear yourself recorded and played back, you sound totally different, because all you hear back from the tape recorder is sound coming through the air, minus the skull vibration and bone conduction.
Darwinopterus is the name of a new fossil that scientists have discovered in northeastern China. It's of a flying reptile that lived over 160 million years ago. This fossil is significant because it provides the first clear evidence of a "controversial" (I don't really see why it's controversial) type of evolution called modular evolution. This is "where natural selection forces a whole series of traits to change rapidly rather than just one."
Up until now, researchers knew there existed the more ancient, long-tailed pterosaurs and the newer, short-tailed ones, but those two species were separated by a wide gap in the fossil record. The discovery of this recent fossil and about 20 others like it, however, could prove to be the missing link. Darwinopterus had a head and neck like the advanced pterosaurs but a body like the more primitive types.
Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer and inventor. He's best known for his cartoons that depicted a quirky professor named Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, who created complex devices to accomplish simple tasks.
In 1931 Merriam-Webster dictionary added the adjective Rube Goldberg, defined as "accomplishing by complex means what seemingly could be done simply."
I think I might have seen this picture being played out in a Charlie Chaplin film.
Greenland is part of the North American continent. I always thought it belonged to the European continent, but it has been politically associated with Denmark for about three centuries.
That's one for us!
Of Pandas and People is the name of the textbook written in the late 1980s that creationists wanted to push down the throats of schoolchildren in biology class. It supported intelligent design.
Watch the two-hour long NOVA episode entitled "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial," which tells the story of the case in Dover, PA on the battle of whether to teach intelligent design in biology class.
About 3,500 years ago Native American tribes began permanently settling in what is now the area of Yosemite National Park. They called the valley Ahwahnhee, which means "valley that looks like a gaping mouth," and themselves Ahwahneechee, "dwellers in Ahwahnee." Now the Ahwahnee Hotel, a destination hotel in Yosemite, is named after the tribe and the original name they gave the park.
Parthenogenesis is a rare (in animals, but many plants exhibit this behavior), asexual form of reproduction in which the females of a species give birth without copulating with males. Instead, because the eggs are already diploid, only the physical actions of sex need to be employed for the female to give birth. This, however, is done by another female, one who is not ovulating. So the non-ovulating female dry humps the other female, and the offspring is an exact genetic copy of the mother.
Maybe the most popular example is a few species of the whiptail lizard. Unlike other parthenogenetic animal populations, these species are composed entirely of females.
Mechanism is the philosophical theory that all natural phenomena can be explained by laws of nature.
Vitalism states that the processes of life are not explicable by the laws of physics and chemistry alone and that life is in some part self-determining. This view employs "vital forces" to explain away things that haven't yet been explained by science.
The Bible is too liberal, is what some far-right nutbags are saying. And what's the solution? Edit it on a Wikipedia-style site! Those dumbasses at Conservapedia are editing the Bible on their site, deleting what they deem to be liberal passages. Here are their ten rules for a "conservative" Bible:
1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, "gender inclusive" language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level
4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop; defective translations use the word "comrade" three times as often as "volunteer"; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as "word", "peace", and "miracle"
5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as "gamble" rather than "cast lots"; using modern political terms, such as "register" rather than "enroll" for the census
6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story
9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities
Frogmarch means "to force (a person) to march with the arms pinioned firmly behind the back."
The teardrop is typically a prison tattoo that is placed underneath the eye. It means that the wearer has committed a murder -- the number of tears represents the number of people dead. It has evolved, though, to also mean that you lost a loved one. New York Knicks player Larry Hughes has two teardrops to signify the death of his brother.
Well, today brought the huge news about Ardi, the oldest human skeleton discovered. The journal Science (read their online post and watch their excellent video here) will release a special edition tomorrow that details Ardi in 11 papers.
As you can tell from the picture, Ardi had really divergent big toes. This is used for grasping, of course, but the animal walked bipedally on the ground when it wasn't living in the trees. So why would it choose to walk upright when its habitat was wooded forests?
Owen Lovejoy, an anatomist at Kent State, proposed the Sex for Food hypothesis. I now begin my (gross and perhaps criminal) oversimplification. Normally, a male ape has long canine teeth for fighting other males to get the ladies. But Ardipithecus, Ardi's genus, had smaller and stubbier teeth. Why? Lovejoy says that earlier males, especially the smaller ones who couldn't compete against their alpha counterparts, elected to bring food to their targeted females. The females, upon seeing this, would thank the males for the unexpected gift, then reward them with sex. (These males remind me of the high school nerds who beat out the jocks by helping out the hot chicks with their homework. If you're a hulking alpha male with so much testosterone you don't know what to do with it, you'd hate that little scrawny dweeb but you'd have to adjust because the girls are starting to like him.)
So how would the males bring the food to the females if they move around on all fours? Exactly, they would have to walk on their hind legs and use their arms to gather the food. This is how bipedalism began, under this hypothesis.
But couldn't the female just collect the food given by the nerd, while copulating with the jock, thereby getting the best of both worlds? Lovejoy states that his hypothesis depends on ovulation that is kept secret from not only the males, but more importantly to the female. (This is not found in the fossil record.) This is what started monogamous relationships, because females would prefer the hard-working and steady provider over the in-your-face guy who humps whatever girl he can get.
I just want this hypothesis to be true so all the scrawny and awkward people like me can finally win in something other than landing a good job.
The Flesch–Kincaid readability test, composed of the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level tests, are designed to indicate comprehension difficulty when reading something in English.
In Flesch Reading Ease, higher test scores mean that the material is easier to read, while lower scores signify a harder read. The equation for this test is:
Scores can be interpreted like this:
90.0–100.0 = easily understandable by an average 11-year-old student
60.0–70.0 = easily understandable by 13- to 15-year-old students
0.0–30.0 = best understood by university graduates
The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level test is the same thing but instead of using a scale of 0-100, it uses a number that corresponds to the grade level at which students should be able to understand the text. Obviously, this is used much more in the field of education.
The formula for this is:
There are several other readability tests, but Reading Ease is used by the U.S. Department of Defense for its documents and forms, and Microsoft Word. I stumbled upon the Flesch–Kincaid readability test today when I was fiddling with Google Docs.
Phototropism is a plant's direction of growth in response to sunlight. Heliotropism is when the plant tracks the sun's motion across the sky.
A Faustian bargain is a proverbial deal with the devil. The phrase comes from the classic German folklore that pits the protagonist, Faust, against the devil, Mephistopheles.
Woo Bum-kon was a Korean officer who carried out the largest known incident of spree killing in modern history.
After a heated argument with his girlfriend on April 26, 1982, he left the house in Gyeongsangnam-do, South Korea, and went to the police armory to stock up on a rifle and some grenades. He proceeded to rampage drunk through five villages in eight hours, walking from house to house and killing 58 people including himself, and injuring 35 others.
As a teenager, George Washington wrote his 110 Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation. These rules, which were mostly common sense things dealing with etiquette, were based on a 16th century Jesuit set of precepts made for young men.
I didn't read the whole list, but if #2 is any indication of how good/funny it is, then I probably should read all 110 Rules:
When in company, put not your hands to any part of the body not usually discovered.
Devils Tower is a volcanic neck located in the Black Hills of northeastern Wyoming. It rises 1,267 ft. above the surrounding terrain and the summit is 5,112 ft. above sea level. On this day in 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt dedicated it as the U.S.'s first national monument.
About 1% of the the 400,000 yearly visitors climb Devils Tower.
Benjamin Franklin, at age 81, was the oldest person to sign the Constitution. Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey, at 26, was the youngest.
Thomas Aikenhead was the last person to be hanged for blasphemy in Great Britain.
Aikenhead was an undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh who had read deist literature the university library held. He supposedly criticized Christianity among a group of friends, and soon after that one of his friends ratted on him. In the fall of 1696 Aikenhead was arrested for blasphemy.
During the trial, five student "friends" testified against him, claiming that during their private conversations, Aikenhead had strongly rebuked the Old and New Testaments and even preferred Muhammad to Jesus. Although the prisoner did have a defense counsel, the defense wasn't recorded. The verdict promptly came in that Aikenhead was to be hanged on January 8, 1697.
The law at the time stated that the third offense for blasphemy would result in death. Aikenhead petitioned the Privy Council on the grounds of his "deplorable circumstances and tender years," but forgot to mention that it was his first time to be tried for blasphemy. Two ministers and two Privy Councillors pleaded on his behalf, and on January 7, the Council ruled that the Church had to intervene in order for him to be granted a reprieve. The Church, however, urged "vigorous execution" to slow down "the abounding of impiety and profanity in this land." The next day Aikenhead was hanged.
This event is also considered by many to be partly responsible for the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment.
From Scientific American:
These images of the Leaning Tower are actually identical, but the tower on the right looks more lopsided because the human visual system treats the two images as one scene. Our brains have learned that two tall objects in our view will usually rise at the same angle but converge toward the top—think of standing at the base of neighboring skyscrapers. Because these towers are parallel, they do not converge, so the visual system thinks they must be rising at different angles...
The Door to Hell is outside of Derweze, Turkmenistan. In 1971 geologists stumbled upon an underground cavern while they were digging for gas deposits. They soon discovered that there was poisonous gas in there, so they decided to burn off the excess gas. Thirty-eight years later the hole is still burning with no end in sight.
The chest wig is a self-adhesive wig worn on the chests of men who want to look like Tom Jones. It was especially popular in the 1970s.
From Konrad Lorenz's King Solomon's Ring (pgs. 72-3):
But of all animals that suffer under the inefficient methods of many zoological gardens, by far the most unfortunate are those mentally alert creatures of whom we have spoken above. These, however, rarely awaken the pity of the zoo visitor, least of all when such an originally highly intelligent animal has deteriorated, under the influence of close confinement, into a crazy idiot, a very caricature of its former self. I have never heard an exclamation of sympathy from the onlookers in the parrot house. Sentimental old ladies, the fanatical sponsors of the Societies for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, have no compunction in keeping a grey parrot or cockatoo in a relatively small cage or even chained to a perch. Now these larger species of the parrot tribe are not only clever but mentally and bodily uncommonly vivacious; and, together with the large corvines, they are probably the only birds which can suffer from that state of mind, common to human prisoners, namely boredom. But nobody pities these pathetic creatures in their bell-shaped cages of martyrdom. Uncomprehendingly, the fond owner imagines that the bird is bowing, when it constantly repeats the bobbing head movements which, in reality, are the stereotyped remnants of its desperate attempts to escape from its cage. Free such an unhappy prisoner, and it will take weeks, even months, before it really dares to fly.
