Thirty-Three Things (v. 1)
1. Tallis’s Daily Hallucinating Delusional Syndrome
If I told you that I had a neurological disease which meant that for eight or more hours a day I lost control of my faculties, bade farewell to the outside world, and was subject to complex hallucinations and delusions – such as being chased by a grizzly bear at Stockport Railway Station – you would think I was in a pretty bad way. If I also claimed that the condition was infectious, you would wish me luck in coping with such a terrible disease, and bid me a hasty farewell.
Of course, sleep is not a disease at all, but the condition of daily (nightly) life for the vast majority of us. The fact that we accept without surprise the need for a prolonged black-out as part of our daily life highlights our tendency to take for granted anything about our condition that is universal. We don’t see how strange sleep is because (nearly) everyone sleeps. Indeed, the situation of those who do not suffer from Tallis’s Daily Hallucinating Delusional Syndrome is awful. They have something that truly deserves our sympathy: chronic insomnia.
2. Newbie Time Travelers Always Kill Hitler on Their First Trip
11/15/2104
At 14:52:28, FreedomFighter69 wrote:
Reporting my first temporal excursion since joining IATT: have just returned from 1936 Berlin, having taken the place of one of Leni Riefenstahl’s cameramen and assassinated Adolf Hitler during the opening of the Olympic Games. Let a free world rejoice!At 14:57:44, SilverFox316 wrote:
Back from 1936 Berlin; incapacitated FreedomFighter69 before he could pull his little stunt. Freedomfighter69, as you are a new member, please read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler before your next excursion. Failure to do so may result in your expulsion per Bylaw 223.At 18:06:59, BigChill wrote:
Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what’s the harm?
3. Human Anatomy Terms That Sound Like Things You Would Go See On A Vacation
Aortic Arch
Corpus Callosum
Islets of Langerhans
Bowman’s Capsule
Cranial Vault
Semicircular Canals
Medullary Pyramids
Brodmann Areas
Crypts of Lieberkühn
Prussack’s Space
Fissure of Rolando
McBurney’s Point
Anterior Horn
Alcock’s Canal
Hesselbach’s Triangle
Loop of Henle
Renal Columns of Bertin
4. Top 10 Best Presentations Ever
5. Most Citizens of the Star Wars Galaxy are Probably Totally Illiterate
Not once in any Star Wars movie does someone pick up a book or newspaper, magazine, literary journal, or chapbook handmade by an aspiring Jawa poet. If something is read by someone in Star Wars, it’s almost certainly off of a screen (and even then, maybe being translated by a droid), and it’s definitely not for entertainment purposes. As early as the 1990s-era expanded Star Wars books and comic books, we’re introduced to ancient Jedi “texts” called holocrons, which are basically talking holographic video recordings. Just how long has the Star Wars universe been reliant on fancy technology to transfer information as opposed to the written word? Is it possible that a good number of people in Star Wars are completely illiterate?
Faith according to our Lord’s teaching in [Matthew 6:30], is primarily thinking; and the whole trouble with a man of little faith is that he does not think. He allows circumstances to bludgeon him…
We must spend more time in studying our Lord’s lessons in observation and deduction. The Bible is full of logic, and we must never think of faith as something purely mystical. We do not just sit down in an armchair and expect marvelous things to happen to us. That is not Christian faith. Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them…
Faith, if you like, can be defined like this: It is a man insisting upon thinking when everything seems determined to bludgeon and knock him down in an intellectual sense. The trouble with the person of little faith is that, instead of controlling his own thought, his thought is being controlled by something else, and, as we put it, he goes round and round in circles. That is the essence of worry…
That is not thought; that is the absence of thought, a failure to think.
7. How War Increases Our Vocabulary
Almost every aspect of war spawns new words, and, over time, many of them slip into everyday use. Sometimes, they even become downright peaceful in the process. For instance, triumph used to mean a victory ceremony for Roman conquerors, and skedaddle signified retreat during the Civil War. And if you’re ever had a snafu ("Situation Normal: All F’d Up"), then you owe a debt to the WWI soldiers who invented the acronym to describe the trenches. With each passing conflict, the list of pacified war words gets longer and longer.
8. Amish: the most technologically sophisticated people:
The Amish are the most technologically sophisticated people on this continent, the best at picking and choosing among innovations, deciding which ones make sense and which ones don't.
The larger society at the moment has a primitive and superstitious belief that we must accept new technologies, that they are somehow more powerful than we are. Which makes the Amish in some ways the most modern American subculture—far more modern than some fellow with a cell phone who doesn't really like how it changes his life, but has one just because it seems "normal."
From Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003) by Bill McKibben
10. A compendium of excellent insults.
11. The lure of academic myths and their place in classic psychology:
You’ll be hard-pressed to find a psychology textbook that doesn’t tell the sad story of Kitty Genovese’s murder in the Kew Gardens neighbourhood of New York in 1964. Most will describe the shocking details of how there were 38 witnesses to the stabbing, all of them residents in the apartment block overlooking the scene of the crime, all of whom did nothing. Genovese’s tragedy inspired the psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley to formulate and test their theory that people’s sense of social responsibility is diluted when they are in a group – the bystander effect.
The bystander effect itself has since been supported by ample research, but a paper published last year in American Psychologist by Rachel Manning at the University of the West of England and colleagues uncovered fresh historical research showing how the story of Kitty Genovese, as it’s usually told, is actually something of a myth (see box). In short, probably only one person witnessed the final, fatal stabbing and several witnesses did do something to help.
You’ll be hard-pressed to find a psychology textbook that doesn’t tell the sad story of Kitty Genovese’s murder in the Kew Gardens neighbourhood of New York in 1964. Most will describe the shocking details of how there were 38 witnesses to the stabbing, all of them residents in the apartment block overlooking the scene of the crime, all of whom did nothing. Genovese’s tragedy inspired the psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley to formulate and test their theory that people’s sense of social responsibility is diluted when they are in a group – the bystander effect.
The bystander effect itself has since been supported by ample research, but a paper published last year in American Psychologist by Rachel Manning at the University of the West of England and colleagues uncovered fresh historical research showing how the story of Kitty Genovese, as it’s usually told, is actually something of a myth (see box). In short, probably only one person witnessed the final, fatal stabbing and several witnesses did do something to help.
12. Five ways to trigger a natural disaster
Dams are the most dangerous man-made structure likely to cause quake," says David Booth of the British Geological Survey. By artificially holding a large volume of water in one place, dams increase pressure on fractures beneath the surface of the earth. What's more, water has a lubricating effect, making it easier for the fractures—or faults—to slip.
13. Sermon Title of the Week: From John Leland, a Baptist evangelist from Massachusetts, in 1791 - “The Rights of Conscience Inalienable, and Therefore Religious Opinions Not Cognizable by Law; or, The High-Flying Church-Man, Stripped of His Legal Robe, Appears a Yaho.”
14. Quote of the Week: "Apologies are like monsters: They’re only real if you believe in them." – Justin Feinstein
[Philosopher A.J. Ayer] taught or lectured several times in the United States, including serving as a visiting professor at Bard College in the fall of 1987. At a party that same year held by fashion designer Fernando Sanchez, Ayer, then 77, confronted Mike Tyson harassing the (then little-known) model Naomi Campbell. When Ayer demanded that Tyson stop, the boxer said: "Do you know who the [expletive] I am? I'm the heavyweight champion of the world," to which Ayer replied: "And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men." Ayer and Tyson then began to talk, while Naomi Campbell slipped out.
16. 20 Things You Didn't Know About Death:
#3 No American has died of old age since 1951. That was the year the government eliminated that classification on death certificates.
#6 Within three days of death, the enzymes that once digested your dinner begin to eat you. Ruptured cells become food for living bacteria in the gut, which release enough noxious gas to bloat the body and force the eyes to bulge outward.
#20 It is estimated that 100 billion people have died since humans began.
17. Dogs are either optimists or pessimists, claim scientists
Scientists have confirmed what many pet owners have long suspected: some dogs have a more gloomy outlook on life than others.
The unusual insight into canine psychology emerged from a study by Bristol University researchers into how dogs behave when separated from their owners.
Dogs that were generally calm when left alone were also found to have a "dog bowl half full" attitude to life, while those that barked, relieved themselves and destroyed furniture appeared to be more pessimistic, the study concluded.
18. The Perfect Place to Commit a Crime is in Yellowstone National Park
Let's say you, heaven forbid, are charged with a crime. The Constitution itself (Article III, Section 2 for those who wish to look it up) requires that the "Trial shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed." Pretty straight forward. The 6th Amendment requires that the jury must be "of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed." Again, pretty clear. The only confusing part, unless you're a lawyer, is probably the term "district."
The U.S. Federal Courts are divided into zones called "districts" which correlate almost perfectly with states themselves. Connecticut has one district: the District of Connecticut. New York has four, using ordinal directions, e.g. "Southern District of New York" which includes Manhattan, the Bronx, and six counties in the state. Wyoming has one, as well, which includes the entire state -- and, in addition, the parts of Yellowstone National Park which are in Idaho and Montana. And that's where the perfect crime scene appears.
So that crime you're charged with? Imagine you committed it in the part of Yellowstone which is actually in Idaho. Where would your jury come from? It would have to be from the state (Idaho) and district (the District of Wyoming) in which the crime was committed—in other words, from that same part of Yellowstone which is in Idaho. The population of that area?
Zero.
Good luck finding that jury.
19. 10 Unforgettable Stories History Forgot
20. Human brain has more switches than all computers on Earth
A typical, healthy one houses some 200 billion nerve cells, which are connected to one another via hundreds of trillions of synapses. Each synapse functions like a microprocessor, and tens of thousands of them can connect a single neuron to other nerve cells. In the cerebral cortex alone, there are roughly 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies.
21. The Bookshelf as Memory Theater
What concerns me about the literary apocalypse that everybody now expects—the at least partial elimination of paper books in favor of digital alternatives—is not chiefly the books themselves, but the bookshelf. My fear is for the eclectic, personal collections that we bookish people assemble over the course of our lives, as well as for their grander, public step-siblings. I fear for our memory theaters. . . .
So far, for all the wonders they offer, the digital alternatives to a bookshelf fail to serve its basic purposes. The space of memory and thinking must not be an essentially controlled, homogenous one. Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad are noxious ruses that must be creatively resisted—not simply because they are electronic but because they propose to commandeer our bookshelves. I will defend the spirit of mine tooth and nail.
22. How Much Money You Need To Realistically Recreate The Scrooge McDuck ‘Gold Coin Swim’
In most money circles (insider tip: “money circles” is a term used by only the most elite investors), wealth is measured exclusively by how closely one can recreate this famed animation. It has come to represent success in America and anything less than doing the backstroke amongst a sea of Earth’s rarest metal should be considered an abject failure. A main problem of this measure, however, is that there is no agreed-upon Scrooge McDuck quantity of gold. In order to give the young investor a goal to shoot for, and to clear up this age-old question once and for all, the following is a precise judgment of exactly how money you need to be successful.
23. A Scientific Analysis of the 5-Second Rule*
On surfaces that had been contaminated eight hours earlier, slices of bologna and bread left for five seconds took up from 150 to 8,000 bacteria. Left for a full minute, slices collected about 10 times more than that from the tile and carpet, though a lower number from the wood.
Suggested revision:
If you drop a piece of food, pick it up quickly, take five seconds to recall that just a few bacteria can make you sick, then take a few more to think about where you dropped it and whether or not it’s worth eating.
* The old adage that if you drop food on the floor but pick it up within five seconds, it’s okay to eat it.
24. On the difference between play, work, and art:
A characteristic of play, in fact, is that it creates no wealth or goods, thus differing from work or art. At the end of the game, all can and must start over again at the same point. Nothing has been harvested or manufactured, no masterpiece has been created, no capital has accrued. Play is an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money ... As for the professionals—the boxers, cyclists, jockeys, or actors who earn their living in the ring, track, or hippodrome or on the stage, and who must think in terms of prize, salary, or title—it is clear that they are not players but workers. When they play it is at some other game.
25. Why knowing the periodic table is a waste of time:
In some sense, what you might have suspected from the first day of high-school chemistry is true: The periodic table is a colossal waste of time. Nine out of every 10 atoms in the universe are hydrogen, the first element and the major constituent of stars. The other 10 percent of all atoms are helium. That's already 100 percent. The rest of the periodic table, Elements 3 through 118, lithium through ununoctium, barely register on a cosmic scale. The rest of the universe, you and I included, is a rounding error.
26. Milan Kundera wonders why protagonists of great novels don’t have children:
I was rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude when a strange idea occurred to me: most protagonists of great novels do not have children. Scarcely 1 percent of the world's population are childless, but at least 50 percent of the great literary characters exit the book without having reproduced. Neither Pantagruel, nor Panurge, nor Quixote have any progeny. Not Valmont, not the Marquise de Merteuil, nor the virtuous Presidente in Dangerous Liaasons. Not Tom Jones, Fielding's most famous hero. Not Werther. All Stendhal's protagonists are childless, as are many of Balzac's; and Dostoyevsky's; and in the century just past, Marcel, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, and of course all of Musil's major characters...and Kafka's protagonists, except for the very young Karl Rossmann, who did impregnate a maidservant, but that is the very reason -- to erase the infant from his life -- that he flees to America and the novel can be born. This infertility is not due to a conscious purpose of the novelists; it is the spirit of the arc of the novel (or its subconscious) that spurns procreation.
27. Poetry Fact of the Week: Poets who eventually commit suicide use I-words [I, me, my] more than non-suicidal poets.
28. April 11 1954: Most boring day of 20th century
Researchers claim they have 'officially' discovered the most boring day of the 20th century… April 11 1954.
A team of Cambridge scientists say the day was devoid of any major news events or even the birth or death of any famous people.
They made the discovery after developing a new search engine which collates 300 million facts and can reveal what happened on certain days in history.
29. The Saddest Movie Scene of All Time
In 1979, director Franco Zeffirelli remade a 1931 Oscar-winning film called The Champ, about a washed-up boxer trying to mount a comeback in the ring. Zeffirelli’s version got tepid reviews. The Rotten Tomatoes website gives it only a 38 percent approval rating. But The Champ did succeed in launching the acting career of 9-year-old Ricky Schroder, who was cast as the son of the boxer. At the movie’s climax, the boxer, played by Jon Voight, dies in front of his young son. “Champ, wake up!” sobs an inconsolable T.J., played by Schroder. The performance would win him a Golden Globe Award.
It would also make a lasting contribution to science. The final scene of The Champ has become a must-see in psychology laboratories around the world when scientists want to make people sad.
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31. The Coconut – Nature’s Best Packaging Design
The humble and tropically ubiquitous coconut, besides producing one of the tastiest cocktail starters out there (mmmm…..piña coladas!), is one the best package design solutions for a perishable food item ever designed by nature. Not only do coconuts survive falling from heights of 50 feet to the ground (landing on anything from cushy golf courses to lava rock), but they often travel thousands of miles via ocean waves, still perfectly protected. Viable Caribbean coconuts, which are the seeds of the Coconut palm, have been found as far north as Norway, which is why the tree has propagated so successfully from 26 latitude North to 26 degrees latitude South.
32. An “Interview” with the Apostle Paul on the Law, Life, and Death
33. Forgetfulness - Billy Collins Animated Poetry