Could a cell phone really crash an airplane?

It can. Cell phones operate on approximately the same frequency as that of airplanes, so it could theoretically interfere with navigation. Actually, anything with an on-off switch should be turned off during takeoff and landings. At cruising altitude you can turn the device back on because any disruption would be too small to make a big deal out of and it wouldn't last too long.

Gunther Karsten

Gunther Karsten is considered the world's premier memory champion. He has won: the World Memory Championships in 2007, the Vice World Memory Champion several times, and the German Memory Championship 8 times. He is also the holder of several world records (like 1,949 digits memorized in 1 hour).

Timeshare

A timeshare is a form of ownership or right to the use of a property. Timeshare properties are typically resort condos, in which multiple parties hold rights to use the property, and each sharer is allotted a period of time in which they may use the property. Timeshares may be on a part-ownership or lease/"right to use" basis, in which the sharer holds no claim to ownership of the property.

This is how giraffes fight

Probably over a territory or a girl giraffe...or both.

Man who survived both A-bombs

Tsutomu Yamaguchi is a 93 year-old Japanese citizen who endured both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in August 1945. He had been on a business trip in Hiroshima on the 6th, the day the first bomb was dropped. Yamaguchi suffered severe burns and spent a night in the hospital before returning to his hometown of Nagasaki. He lived through the second bomb on the 9th.

I'm sure if there were third and fourth bombs he would have survived them too. Just about the only person to whom Harry couldn't give hell.

Seal hunting

Seal hunting -- an industry whose workers track down seals for their fur, meat, and oil -- is practiced in Canada (where most of the world's seal hunting occurs), Greenland, Namibia, Norway, and Russia. Seal populations went down dramatically when this business boomed and the harp seal went down to 1.5 million in the 1970s. Consequently, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea and the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans set the limit of caught seals to 270,000 per year. Hunters also can no longer kill the youngest baby seals. Thus, the number of seal deaths has been steadily decreasing.

Watch this year's graphic footage of the Canadian seal hunt.

Ways to cure the gay

From an article where 1 in 6 British psychiatrists has tried to "turn gays straight."

Aversion therapy
This was used in the 1950s and '60s. Doctors gave male patients a slide show that contained pictures of sexually attractive men and women, with a lever that let them change slides. If they spent too much time on the male pics, they received an electric shock. Instead of the electrical shock, a drug that induced the gay patient to vomit was also used. Aversion therapy lasted until the 1980s.

Covert sensitization
Doctors advised their patients to masturbate to a homosexual fantasy and then switch to a heterosexual one near orgasm. It required them to counter homosexual thoughts with shameful fantasies, like their parents discovering them.

Hypnotherapy and psychoanalysis
The obligatory psychiatric methods of hypnotherapy and psychoanalysis were also used.

Derek Munn, of the gay rights organization Stonewall, said that "so-called gay cure therapies are wholly discredited. The conclusions of this research are a welcome reminder that what gay and lesbian people need is equal treatment by society, not misguided treatment by a minority of health professionals."

So can we all put it to rest now, along with scientific findings in the brain? If you're gay, you're gay.

Sociological economic effects

Dr. Harvey Brenner, a sociologist and public health expert at Johns Hopkins University and the University of North Texas Health Science Center, calculated that for every 1% increase in the nation's unemployment rate, 47,000 deaths will occur. Of these, 26,000 deaths will have been a result of heart attacks, 1,200 from suicide, 831 will be murders, and 635 will be related to alcohol consumption.

Alice Waters

Chris Brown and Rihanna

I really didn't care about the whole Chris Brown/Rihanna debacle. I heard that he beat the shit out of her in a car, but that's it. I purposely chose to tune out everything that had to do with it. Until today. DoSomething.org made this vid about teenager abuse in relationships and re-enacted the Chris Brown and Rihanna fight. Everything I need to know about the situation can be explained by two white people doing a mediocre acting job and a monotonous guy in the background doing the play-by-play using big words.

The Transition

The Transition is a part-car part-airplane vehicle developed by the company Terrafugia. You'll be able to land it at an airport and fold it so you can drive home and park it in your garage. It's scheduled to be released in 2011 for a sticker price of $194,000.

Order yours today!

First-move advantage in chess

The first-move advantage in chess refers to the inherent advantage of the player who makes the first move. Stats compiled since 1851 show that the first move wins about 53 to 56 percent of the time. But the second move is better in rapid games and games between weaker players.

Western Kentucky...

...is a pretty good team. That game and the Michigan/Clemson one were the two that I got wrong today.

Way more informed

It is estimated that a week's worth of the New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.

St. Patrick's Day

I never bothered to know the origins of St. Patty's until I had a blog that forces me to learn something new each day.

From History.com.



Who was St. Patrick?
St. Patrick was born in Britain in 390 AD and died on March 17, 460. His family wasn't that particularly religious; his father most likely became a deacon because of tax incentives. When Patrick was 16 years old, Irishmen attacked his family's estate and took the teenager as a prisoner in Ireland, where he would spend the next six years in captivity. There he worked as a shepherd, ostracized and afraid. It's at this point that he turned to his religion for inner peace, which eventually led to his devoutness.

One day Patrick escaped - according to his writings God spoke to him in a dream and told him to leave Ireland. While back in his native Britain, an angel must have overridden God because the angel told him, in a dream, to return to Ireland as a missionary. For fifteen years afterwards Patrick delved into religious study, down the path to his ordination as a priest. To convert the Irish, Patrick incorporated Irish pagan beliefs into his lessons (kinda like how the pope did with Christmas). He used their bonfires to celebrate Easter and put an image of a sun onto the Christian cross. This is now called the Celtic cross.

How did the holiday begin?
The first St. Patty's parade was held in New York (surprisingly). Irish soldiers serving in the English military marched in the streets of the city on March 17, 1762, with the music and the rest of the festivities helping reconnect them to their Irish roots. Over the next 35 years the strong patriotism among immigrants aided in the creation of the "Irish Aid" societies, groups that would hold annual parades featuring bagpipes.

In 1848 a number of New York Irish aid societies merged to form one big NYC parade. That parade is now the world's oldest civilian parade and the largest in the country. It attracts over 150,000 participants.

Of course, as with all holidays, St. Patrick's Day evolved into the rowdiness that we celebrate each year.

Check out the meanings behind the symbols and traditions of St. Patrick's Day.

Marjoe Gortner

*** This has been put in the section 'Posts I wish I could take back.' Reason below. ***

Marjoe Gortner (whose name is a combination of Mary and Joeseph) was the youngest evangelical preacher when he was ordained at four years old. He traveled the country to "heal" people who were "sick." Then one day he decided to take a film crew with him and revealed in a documentary, which won the 1973 Academy Award for best documentary, how he duped people and how he really didn't believe in God at all.

Here's a clip from the documentary.



Update 05.18.10: I posted this a day or two before I had time to watch the documentary. I don't know if Gortner believed in God--I found a blog post that said he didn't. In the documentary, however, Gortner didn't mention whether or not he believed in God. He just said that religion was used to manipulate people.

Comma before "too"

Do you really have to add a comma before the word too at the end of the sentence? And if too is in the middle of the sentence - do you have to put the comma before and after it?

Technically, no. It's really up to you. If you want to emphasize your thought then adding the comma(s) creates a pause. Take, for instance, this sentence.

The Mavericks suck. The Cowboys suck, too.

Here I have added emphasis to how much the Cowboys can go to hell. But I can also state how much Dallas in general sucks by not adding a comma.

The Mavericks suck. The Cowboys suck too.

The same can be said for the commas in the middle of a sentence: put them there if you want to emphasize, don't otherwise. These rules can also be applied to also, in addition, however, and therefore.

Einstein's birthday...

...is today, strangely, the same day as Pi Day. What a coincidence.

Native Americans and black slaves

From 1750 until the start of the Civil War, there were two groups of Native Americans, particularly those in the southeast, when it came down to the views on black slaves: the ones who acted like abolitionists and the ones who wanted to assimilate to southern white culture. Some Indians helped slaves escape, but some tracked them down to return to their plantations. Some married free and enslaved blacks and some sold them to whites.

But still many Native Americans chose to actually be slaveholders. By 1824 the Cherokee held about 1,277 slaves; by 1860 the Choctaw and the Chickasaw had more than 5,000. When President Andrew Jackson forced the southeastern Indians to move to the Oklahoma Territory (Trail of Tears), as many as 15,000 black slaves marched with them. And with all this, no evidence exists that suggests that blacks ever owned Indian slaves.

Mormon cricket

The Mormon cricket is a wingless grasshopper native to the region of the U.S. that lies between Canada's southern border and northern Arizona. It is a serious agricultural pest and a pretty cannibalistic creature. They got their name when Mormons in Utah almost got their crops destroyed before seagulls miraculously flew in and saved the day.

About that cannibalism stuff...

Trenchant

Trenchant means "incisive; caustic."

Pete Stark

U.S. congressman Pete Stark of California (Bay area) is the only national politician who admits to being non-religious.

Rubber room

The rubber room is an off-campus location where hundreds of New York City schoolteachers get reassigned when they get in trouble with their higher-ups. They sit in a room and do nothing while still getting paid the same. They may stay there for a few weeks, but lots of teachers stay stuck in this room for months and some even for over a year. Basically, they wait there until the higher-ups determine their punishment. Then when the punishment is delivered, as in a firing, the teachers receive it without forewarning.

The rooms are pretty gang-like and territorial. Teachers form groups according to race and fight over chairs (pretty funny to think of your white teachers and black teachers going to blows for a chair). But when you assert yourself you can get along in that quasi-prison environment and play cards. It costs about $35 million a year to maintain these rubber rooms.

Great way to waste taxpayer money. But if you're a lazy teacher who has a good poker face then it's not so bad.

Rubber Room movie.

Earl Washington, Jr.

Earl Washington, Jr. is a man with an IQ of 69 living in Virginia. In 1982 he admitted to a crime he didn't commit. Read the Wiki article for more details.

He was also the subject of the book An Expendable Man: The Near-Execution of Earl Washington, Jr. by Margaret Edds.

Phonetic teleprompter

While the right derides and Politico "reports" that Obama can't make speeches without his teleprompter (no shit, every fucking politician has used the teleprompter to make speeches since its invention), I ran across this link in the comment section of a blog. I googled a bit to verify and it turned out to be true.

Apparently, George W. Bush didn't know how to pronounce the names of some countries (except Iraq) and political leaders (except Ahmadinejad, and that's a tough one), so he loaded the phonetic spellings of each word into the teleprompter. Examples include Sarkozy (sar-KO-zee), Mugabe (moo-GAH-bee), and Kyrgyzstan (KEYR-geez-stan).

But if it's a Republican then it's ok.

Dystonia

Dystonia is a neurological disorder in which sustained muscle contractions cause twisting and repetitive movements or abnormal postures. It may be inherited or caused by birth-related trauma, physical trauma, infection, or a number of other possibilities.

This disorder may range from mild (facial twitches or limb twitches) to severe (whole body). It can also be attributed to one's vocals, where the person won't be able to talk and will use a machine to communicate.

There is currently no treatment for patients suffering from dystonia.

This one is a pretty severe case.

Baader-Meinhof gang

This isn't the phenomenon that I learned about last summer. The Baader-Meinhof gang, or the Red Army Faction as it was later known, was comprised of middle-class young people in the 1960s and '70s who rebeled against West German capitalism.

Andreas Baader, dismayed at a 1967 police slaying of an activist, detonated homemade bombs in two Frankfurt department stores. After he was imprisoned, he escaped and teamed up with a left-wing journalist named Ulrike Meinhof (a woman). They spent the next two years robbing banks and bombing buildings.

In 1972 the duo was caught and arrested. The trial, which started in 1975, was the longest and most expensive in German history. A second wave of young militants vowed to release their heroes. The ensuing battles were among the most publicized and bloodiest in the country. During the course of the trial Meinhof was found in her cell hanging from a rope made of towels. The obligatory conspiracy theories followed. A year later Baader and two cohorts were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

1977 proved to be the most trying year. Among the killed were the chief public prosecutor and the head of the Dresdner bank. Hanns Martin Schleyer, head of the German Association of Employers and a former Nazi party member, was abducted in September. This kicked off a series of events knows as the German Autumn.

Schleyer's captors were negotiating with authorities for the release of Baader (and nine others) in exchange for Schleyer. Even as this was happening, on October 13, Arab sympathizers hijacked a plane full of German tourists on their way to Frankfurt from Majorca, Spain. The plane flew over parts of the Middle East and the Mediterrenean Sea before landing in Mogadishu, Somalia. The hijackers shot the captain dead but German elite commandos killed three of the criminals and freed the hostages.

As news of this broke, Baader and two of his friends committed suicide in prison. The next day Schleyer's kidnappers announced that he was dead. On April 20, 1998, upon seeing that no one gave a damn about them anymore, the Baader-Meinhof gang announced its dissolution.

So why is the completely unrelated phenomenon named after the group? A reader of a Minnesota newspaper coined the term when he first heard about the terrorist group and then heard it again a while later from a different source.

Why does Sylvester Stallone talk like that?

The idiot doctors who delivered him used forceps, which severed a nerve and paralyzed parts of his face. It slurred his speech and made his lip droop a bit.

Banks

In the 1970s most banks were privately owned. The partners who owned the bank allocated a portion of the profits to nonpartners while giving the rest to themselves. The nonpartners had to earn their money each year but the partners' percentage ownerships were reset every couple of years. So everyone's performance was always evaluated and judged because their own money was on the line. To put it simply, if you handled your biz, you got paid. If you didn't, you got penalized.

Nowadays, executives get huge bonuses either way. The more you play with people's money, the more money you make. And if you're not successful with your risk(s), hey, you're getting your bonus at the end of the year so no worries. And, oh yeah, screw the common man.

Yahoo!

Yahoo! is an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle. It was incorporated on this day in 1995.

Abu Mazen

President of the Palestinian National Authority Mahmoud Abbas is known as Abu Mazen in the Middle East.