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(This person is kinda upset that I dissed their favorite browser. I actually use Chrome and I like it, but for some reason the layout here is different than on Firefox. And of course, the iPad and IE just plain suck. You tool.)

Saturday, February 28, 2009

First people to be hit and killed by cars

The first person in the world to be run over and killed by a car was Mary Ward, an Irish scientist, in 1869. She fell off a steam-powered car and slid under the wheels.

The first pedestrian to be killed by a moving vehicle was Bridget Driscoll, in London, in 1896. She stepped off a curb and was run over by someone driving approximately 4 to 7 mph.

Straight Dope article.

Friday, February 27, 2009

Austrian School of Economics

The Austrian School of Economics is a cadre of right-wing economists who firmly hold laissez-faire views about government and the economy. It was founded in 1871 when a guy named Carl Menger took his first steps to fuck up the world by writing Principles of Economics. I guess his views have made some progress, but luckily Americans are too smart to fall for that...when their livelihoods are on the line.

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Pedantic

Pedantic means "marked by a narrow, often ostentatious concern for book learning and formal rules."

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Why do hardcover books change to paperback?

I know, it's a dumb question. But I was too lazy to think of why a perfectly good hardcover book has to be changed to paperback a year later.

Hardcover is more expensive to produce because, unlike paperback, it won't have bent corners, the paper is thicker, and there are no stitched bindings. Once the sale of a book decreases the company stops spending on the items necessary to make the book hardcover, so they start making paperback editions. The stuff that comprises the softer versions is much cheaper and the company saves money. Also, hardcover is usually reserved for those books which the company predicts will start selling big.

It's basic microeconomics, and I didn't understand it.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Minor marriages

From the book Consilience:

Minor marriages, formerly widespread in southern China, are those in which unrelated infant girls are adopted by families, raised with the biological sons in an ordinary brother-sister relationship, and later married to the sons. The motivation for the practice appears to be to insure partners for sons when an unbalanced sex ratio and economic prosperity combine to create a highly competitive marriage market.

Across four decades, from 1957 to 1995, [Arthur P. Wolf of Stanford University] studied the histories of 14,200 Taiwanese women contracted for minor marriage during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The statistics were supplemented by personal interviews with many of these "little daughters-in-law,"...as well as their friends and relatives.

....

When the future wife was adopted before thirty months of age, she usually resisted later marriage with her de facto brother. The parents often had to coerce the couple to consummate the marriage, in some cases by threat of physical punishment. The marriages ended in divorce three times more often than "major marriages" in the same communities. They produced nearly 40 percent fewer children, and a third of the women were reported to have committed adultery, as opposed to about 10 percent of wives in major marriages.

Monday, February 23, 2009

First college to go bookless

Northwest Missouri State is the first college to go completely textbook-free. Instead, each student is issued a laptop on the first day, which they can use to access their e-books for their classes. The e-books cost about half as much as the traditional textbooks and offer options such as putting Post-it notes on the corners of the pages, highlighting, and cutting and pasting pages. Students can even share their notes with other classmates in a kind of social network.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Legalizing marijuana more popular than Repubs

The idea of legalizing marijuana has been supported by the "loony left." Not so loony when you consider about 40% of the nation now supports legalization. And those so-called leaders of the Republican party? They're less popular than weed. Who's out of the mainstream, now?

Saturday, February 21, 2009

1860s baseball in Long Island

At the Hewlett Playing Grounds at the Old Bethpage Village Restoration in Long Island, NY, people enjoy the game of baseball as it was played in the 1860s.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Facts about black holes and the Large Hadron Collider

I should've probably known about these things earlier.

1. "First of all, Mother Nature can hurl cosmic rays of astronomically greater energy than anything the puny Large Hadron Collider can produce. In fact, the LHC is actually a pea shooter compared to what the universe has been hurling at the earth for billions of years. Yet the earth is still here."

2. "[T]hese mini black holes are subatomic in size, so tiny they are invisible, like an electron or proton. Their entire energy would not even light up a single light bulb. Black holes, like cats, come in all sizes, from ferocious tigers and lions to purring pussy cats."

3. "[T]hese mini black holes are unstable and decay much too quickly to do any damage. These subatomic black holes simply evaporate away (via something called Hawking radiation) faster than the blink of an eye."

And it's backed up by possibly the coolest scientist that ever lived, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, so I trust him the most.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Drake equation

The Drake equation is used in speculating how many planets in our galaxy have extraterrestrial life. It states that



where

R* is the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
fp is the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne is the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
f is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
fi is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life
fc is the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L is the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

Similar versions of the Drake equation can be used for lots of other things in life. Suppose we wanted to find sane (or at least not totally insane) Republicans in Washington. We could do something like this:

There are 535 members of the House and Senate.
219 of them are Republicans (178 in the House and 41 in the Senate).
0 House Repubs voted for the stimulus, so no sane ones there.
3 Senate Repubs voted for the bill.

So there is a total of 3 Repubs in our federal government who haven't totally lost their minds.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Voluntary Human Extinction Movement

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, or VHEMT, is a movement which advocates the voluntary self-extinction of the human race. Its members believe that Earth would be better off without humans and we should refuse to procreate.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Temporal lobe epilepsy

From the book Consilience:

Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy often develop hyperreligiosity, the tendency to charge all events, large and small, with cosmic significance. They are also prone to hypergraphia, a compulsion to express their visions in an undisciplined stream of poems, letters, or stories.

So I guess these people might also suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy:


Monday, February 16, 2009

Ariadne's thread

Ariadne's thread is a term used to describe the solving of a problem with multiple possible solutions.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Mo Hassan

Mo Hassan is the founder of BridgesTV, a satellite channel founded by him and his wife that portrays Muslims in a better light. This past Thursday he did just that by allegedly beheading his wife.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Further proof why we guys are idiots

In Schiphol International Airport in Amsterdam, images of a black house fly were etched onto the bowls of men's urinals to give guys something to aim at. Spillage thereafter decreased by 80%.



Friday, February 13, 2009

Ashkenazi Jews

Ashkenazi Jews, the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe whose descendants settled in the Rhineland, are said to have the world's highest IQs for a particular ethnic group. This may be due to the long history of persecution of the Ashkenazi Jews and a result of natural selection to breed with someone intelligent.

This theory was proposed by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending in their 2006 report (PDF). They have a new book out called The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Norm Coleman

Soon to be (hopefully, let's get this shit done, already) former Republican U.S. senator Norm Coleman celebrated his 20th birthday at Woodstock as a roadie for a band named Ten Years After. He is the only current senator to have attended Woodstock. He also smoked a lot of pot. And then this photo emerges. It's his high school yearbook pic. What a leftist.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Bobby Dunbar

Bobby Dunbar was a child who went missing in a Louisiana swamp in 1912. Here is the riveting story of him and his family on This American Life.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

What exactly is an assist?

Last week the NBA stripped LeBron James of his historic triple double at Madison Square Garden. The reason: a rebound that shouldn't have been. What if he would have gotten an assist taken away, instead? How does the NBA determine what an assist is?

In 1990 Hakeem Olajuwon racked up 29 points, 18 rebounds, 10 assists, and 11 blocks in a game against Golden State, earning himself with the extremely rare quadruple double. After the game, however, the league looked further into it and determined that Olajuwon had only 9 assists, which downgraded it to a triple double ("Dream" came back a few games later and got a quadruple double, anyway, just to rub it in Commissioner David Stern's face). Whereas a rebound call would be a little more objective (although the LeBron takeaway last Wednesday was crap), assists aren't as easy to judge.

If you go to the NBA rule book which is found online, you hardly read anything substantive on how assists are executed. Same goes for Wikpedia and WikiAnswers. So I went here and found the definition in the official NCAA 2007 stat's manual.

A player is credited with an assist when the player makes, in the judgment of the statistician, the principal pass contributing directly to a field goal (or an awarded score of two or three points)… Philosophy. An assist should be more than a routine pass that just happens to be followed by a field goal. It should be a conscious effort to find the open player or to help a player work free…

Still pretty subjective but at least they try to keep a standard throughout the league.

Monday, February 9, 2009

William Johnson

William Johnson was President Abraham Lincoln's black valet. He accompanied Lincoln from Illinois to D.C. and was perhaps the only person to read a draft of the Gettysburg Address before it was delivered. After the two headed back to the capital from Gettysburg they were both struck with smallpox; Lincoln survived, Johnson didn't. The president ordered that Johnson be buried at Arlington Cemetery and that the inscription on his tombstone be:

WILLIAM JOHNSON
CITIZEN

It was important because of the Dredd Scott decision in 1857 which ruled that no black person could be a citizen of the United States.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Volleyball

William C. Morgan, a YMCA teacher in Massachusetts, invented the game of Mintonette, which turned into volleyball. It was invented on February 9, 1895.

(Interestingly enough, James Naismith invented the game of basketball in December 1891 while he was a teacher at a YMCA in Massachusetts.)

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Ben Blank

Ben Blank worked for both CBS and ABC and is credited with the first news graphic and the first use of a logo displayed over a news anchor's shoulder.

He died on February 3.

Friday, February 6, 2009

How do you stop throwing up and having diarrhea?

I'm puking my guts out right now, it's a stomach bug. And I also have a bad case of diarrhea. How do I stop this? I did a quick Google search and found the clear liquid diet. I haven't tried it yet but I will soon.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Lincoln

There are about 14,000 books written about Abraham Lincoln. The only person who has gotten more attention in print is Jesus.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Why is there an extra 9/10 cents at the gas station?

It's all about marketing. When you see the big, bold digits $1.99 and 9/10 in the corner, does it register in your mind that gas is $1.99 or $2?

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Martin Delaney

Martin Delaney was an advocate for HIV/AIDS patients.

In the 1980s approximately 150,000 Americans tested positive for HIV every year and the mortality rate rose until 1995. The disease was the number one cause of death in the United States for people aged 25 to 44. Since then the age-adjusted mortality rate dropped by 70%.

What happened? In 1985 a man by the name of Martin Delaney spearheaded a group called Project Inform. The group sneaked in foreign medications and created their own clinical trials on the medicines which ailing patients eagerly tested, no matter what the authorities said or did. When the higher-ups did approve of the drugs, Project Inform pushed the case that HIV sufferers take part in the evaluations of the drugs' effectiveness. The activist group also hastened the pace for delivering medicine to the needy.

Not only did Project Inform save the lives of an innumerable amount of people, this episode helped foment transparency of medical institutions and made community activism important in the sense that elites no longer had a monopoly of knowledge in their field. You didn't have to get a degree from an ivy league school to know a little bit about what you care about to fight for it.

Martin Delaney died on January 23 of this year.

Monday, February 2, 2009

Coffee makes you poop

Coffee is a strong diuretic. That's all I care to learn.

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Flat Earth Society

The Flat Earth Society is a group of people who, whether it's the members' wacko religious beliefs or their innate affinity for conspiracy theories, still thinks the earth is flat. The group was founded in 1956 by an "intellectual" Englishman named Samuel Shelton. Later, a Californian named Charles Johnson ran it until his death in 2001. Since then, the group has been decentralized and weakened.

Get the Wikipedia info on them.