Number of Chinese cigarette smokers can be the third biggest country

There are 350 million cigarette smokers in China. That's more than the total population of the U.S., and they can smoke their way to form one of the biggest countries in the world.

About 15% of our population smokes, compared to 26% of theirs.

A few facts about frog jumping

David Phillips

In 1999, UC-Davis civil engineer David Phillips was grocery shopping when he noticed something peculiar. Healthy Choice Foods was offering frequent-flyer miles to customers who bought its products. But a 25-cent pudding would bring 100 miles — the reward was worth more than the product itself.

And the rest is history. Read the Snopes article.

This reminds me of Michael Scott's Golden Ticket offer on The Office.

Dermatographic urticaria

Dermatographic urticaria, also known as dermatography or skin writing, is a skin disorder in which the affected area becomes inflamed when touched. The swelling typically disappears within 15 to 30 minutes, but may in extreme cases last for days. Lots of people with this condition like to write and draw stuff on their skin.

Last October, Koranic verses "appeared" on the leg of a Russian Muslim baby. The idiot doctors in the strongly Muslim region can't explain this naturally occurring phenomenon. It happens when the fundamentalist parents decide to write shit on their child's skin to propagandize the easily gullible--i.e., the general Muslim population. Naturally, Muslims all around the world are claiming this is a divine sign. At one point, up to 2,000 of them a day knocked on the family's door to see the "miracle baby."

And that, my friends, is what dermatographic urticaria is.

Baruch Goldstein

Baruch Goldstein was an American-born Jew who in 1994 opened fire at a mosque in the West Bank and killed 30, during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. He had belonged to an extremist group called the Jewish Defense League. Goldstein was later beaten to death with iron bars at the site.

Art Linkletter

Art Linkletter was a radio and TV host in the 1950s and '60s. He's perhaps most famous for the segment on his show House Party in which he asked kids random questions and they gave hilarious answers. That produced his best-selling book Kids Say the Darndest Things!

Art Linkletter died today at the age of 97.

Asperity

Asperity means "harshness or roughness."

How many coups d'etat have there been in Argentina?

Eleven.

1930
1943
1951 (failed)
1955
1962
1966
1976
1987 (failed)
two in 1988 (both failed)
1990 (failed)

And then they actually focused on governing. At least they're not as indecisive as Italy.

Uncle Sam Wilson

Samuel Wilson is the person whom Uncle Sam is modeled after. Wilson was a meat inspector in Troy, New York during the War of 1812. He branded the meat barrels as "U.S.," but people joked that it came from Uncle Sam.

Richard Nixon took us off the gold standard

A Republican did that. I knew he had some liberal leanings during his presidency, but, as Newsweek put it, the "Glenn Beck wing of the GOP" would have been furious.

Morton's fork

A Morton's fork is a choice between two bad outcomes. The term comes from John Morton, tax collector for King Henry VII. If he came across a wealthy person, then that subject had enough money to give the king. If the subject was living frugally, then he must have saved enough money to pay.

Bo-NO-bo

Scientists have recently discovered that bonobos shake their heads when disapproving of something. Although other reasons that these animals shake their heads might exist, researchers say it's the best explanation so far, and the findings were published in the journal Primates. If this is true, it would be pretty big because it may suggest a primitive link to our own head-shaking tendencies.

Kangaroo court

Kangaroo courts "are sham legal proceedings which are set-up in order to give the impression of a fair legal process." No one is quite sure of the origin of the term.

Kilkenny cat

The term Kilkenny cat, named after the Irish town Kilkenny, refers to anyone who is a tenacious fighter. No one knows the origin of the term.

The real Harry and Louise

Remember Harry and Louise from the early Clinton days? I don't, because I'm WAY too young. But it turns out that those two propagandist tools, who later joined Barack Obama in the fight for health care reform, weren't the only H&L running Washington. When FDR was president, Harry Hopkins, the Secretary of Commerce, married Louise Macy, the Paris editor of Harper's Bazaar, right inside the Oval Office. The president invited Harry and Louise to live at the White House, much to the dismay of the First Lady, who did not like Hopkins because he tended to drink one too many cocktails.

The most famous thing the couple was known for was a scandal in which a Canadian politician, who benefited from the Lend Lease Act, supposedly gave Macy an emerald as a wedding gift. The press attacked the new bride for accepting the gift, but everyone involved denied the charge. It was actually an antique diamond clip that had been in the Canadian's family for generations.

Source: FDR (pp. 645-6)

Barnum effect

The Barnum effect, also called the Forer effect, occurs when individuals say that a certain personality assessment accurately describes them, when in fact the assessment is general enough to apply to anyone. This can be applied to astrology, fortune telling, and some crappy personality tests.

In 1948, psychologist Bertram Forer handed out a personality test to some students and instructed them to rate how well the results were from a scale of 0 (very poor) to 5 (excellent). The results, he stated, were unique. Actually, Forer gave them all the same analysis, which he had culled from various horoscopes:

You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. Security is one of your major goals in life.

As you can see, this paragraph is broad enough to encompass lots of people's feelings about themselves. I could have probably rated this a 4, and that's what Forer's students also thought; on average, the score was 4.26.

The term Barnum effect comes from P.T. Barnum's alleged statement, "there's a sucker born every minute," which in this case refers to how gullible people can be led to believe lots of stupid things. Hence, astrology and reflexology.

Diego Marin Aguilera

Diego Marin Aguilera was an inventor who, after studying the flight and the anatomy of eagles, devised his own flying machine. On this day in 1793, he took off with his glider and reached a height of 5 to 6 meters (16 to 19 feet) and a distance of about 360 meters (1181 feet). Although that's pretty impressive, the glider had crash landed due to a faulty metal joint.

But Marin later destroyed his creation because of all the shit the townspeople gave him about him being crazy and a heretic. He left no documentation of his flapping wings and died at the age of 44. He actually had no formal education, just a passion for inventing.

Difference between dwarf and midget

A dwarf has disproportionate limbs. A midget's body is proportionate.

Battle of Palmito Ranch

The Battle of Palmito Ranch was the last major conflict of the Civil War, not the Battle of Appomattox Court House in which the Confederates surrendered. Palmito took place on May 12-13, 1865 about 12 miles east of Brownsville, Texas. The result was a Confederate victory, with 117 Union casualties (4 killed, 12 wounded, 101 captured) and only a handful of Confederate casualties (5 or 6 wounded, 3 captured). No one knows for sure why the fighting occurred a month after the war ended.

Origins and effects of tinfoil hats

David Cameron likes open source stuff

Apparently he's said nice things of free software, including Linux. I like the guy already.

If science operated like religion

Suppose scientists proposed things based on the accident of their geography, as people of various religions do. I've known that one's religion is an accident of geography and time, but I've never applied that reasoning to scientists.

For the full lecture by Richard Dawkins at UC Berkeley, click here.

7 fundamental problems we face

A well-written and nonpartisan post written on the problems we as a nation face:

* Collapsing infrastructure
* Loss of economic independence
* The lobbyist industry
* Obesity
* The revolving door
* Using personal funds for campaign purposes
* No term limits (for congressmen and and Supreme Court justices)

Avenue Q

Avenue Q is a musical whose characters resemble those on Sesame Street. The only difference is they cuss. It lasted on Broadway for six years before closing September 13, 2009, but they'll moving to an Off-Broadway venue.

Here is a bit called "The Internet is for Porn."

Deep web

The deep web is part of the Internet that's not indexed by search engines. It includes sites that are password-protected (such as your bank account and shopping carts) and pages which are not linked by other pages. It's believed that the deep web holds about 91,000 terabytes of information. On the other hand, the surface web, or the pages which Google can get to, contains only 167 terabytes. So deep web is 545 times bigger than surface web, or in other words, surface web is 0.18% the size of deep web.

Can you access the deep web? Read this post to find out.

To breed or not to breed?

I'm tired of this. Last semester I wrote a short essay based on the assumption that modern humans and Neanderthals probably didn't interbreed, as the interpretations of the DNA evidence had claimed at the time. Now scientists are saying otherwise, in a paper (PDF) published in Science.

Honestly, I guess it is rather difficult to believe that a few modern human men, having laid eyes upon some foxy Neanderthal ladies, never banged it out.

A few things:
* Every ethnic group except Africans carries a little bit of Neanderthal DNA.
* Those that do, have at least 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal DNA. That's a pretty huge shift from believing we rarely even mingled.
* We made love in the Middle East 60,000 years ago, right after Neanderthals left Africa and before modern humans started taking over the world.
* We share 99.7% of our DNA, as opposed to 98.8% for us and chimps.

More: John Hawks, the go-to guy for this kind of stuff, blogs it out here but it's hella long.

May the Fourth Be With You

May 4 is Star Wars Day because geeks thought it would be a cool pun to "May the force be with you."

And on the day of the anniversary of the Kent State shootings... *shakes head in disgust*

Balint's syndrome

Balint's syndrome is a condition in which the patient is unable to see more than one thing at a time. For example, he or she can see the numbers on a clock, but they can't see the clock as a whole object.

Laetrile

From Research Methods in Psychology (p. 317):

...[D]uring the early 1980s considerable controversy surrounded the supposed cancer-curing drug laetrile. Few respectable scientists or medical researchers considered this drug to be beneficial in the treatment of cancer. Advocates of laetrile, however, presented case studies reporting positive results. Largely because of public pressure, the government carried out systematic and expensive tests of the drug under controlled conditions. Researchers did not find beneficial effects of the drug in controlled experiments. As critics of laetrile have commented, many patients who used laetrile instead of traditional therapies may have postponed or interrupted valid courses of treatment and thus contributed to the spread of their cancer.

Why does OpenOffice have .79 inch margins?

I've always wondered that. It seems such a weird number. But that's because .79 inches equals 2 centimeters, which the rest of the world uses.

To fix that permanently:
1. Open up a new document.
2. Go to Format > Page, then click the Page tab.
3. Change the margins.
4. Go to File > Templates > Save. Write in the name you want to give the template, like "1 inch margins."
5. Then click File > Templates > Organize.
6. Open up the My Templates folder and you should find your personalized one there.
7. Right click on it and click Set as Default Template. There's no need to save the document.

And if you don't know what OpenOffice is, 1) shame on you, 2) get it.

CPU-Z

CPU-Z is an open source piece of software that gives accurate information about your system without having to open up the box.