Category: trivia

Euphemisms for Stupid

This is the first update in a while, but it was well worth it.  If I missed one, please comment and I’ll include it.

If one of these offends you, take the complaints elsewhere, I’m the one that got dissed here.

A beer short of a six pack
A brick short of a load
A couple of eggs shy of a dozen
A couple of gallons short of a full tank
A few ants short of a picnic
A few beers short of a six-pack
A few bricks short of a pile
A few bricks short of a wall
A few cards short of a deck
A few clowns short of a circus.
A few feathers short of a whole duck
A few fries short of a Happy Meal
A few peas short of a casserole
A few tomatoes short of a good thick sauce

A few soldier short of a squad
A few trucks short of a convoy
A fortune cookie short of a Chinese dinner
A pepperoni short of a pizza
A photographic memory but with the lens cover glued on
A sandwich short of a picnic
A train short of a full service?
About as bright as a burnt out 20 watt light bulb.
About as useful as a chocolate fireguard
Ah say, that boy reminds me of Paul Revere’s ride; a little light in the
belfry
An experiment in Artificial Stupidity
An intellect rivalled only by garden tools
As much use as a hedgehog in a condom factory
As much use as an ashtray on a motorcycle
As quick as a tortoise on Prozac
As smart as bait

As smart as Joe Biden
As useful as a screen door on a submarine
As useful as a wooden frying pan
As useful as tits on a bull
Body by God, Mind by Mattel.
Bright as Alaska in December
Couldn’t pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel

Could screw up a one car funeral
Doesn’t have both oars in the water
Doesn’t have all his corn flakes in one box
Doesn’t have all his dogs on one leash
Doesn’t have all the dots on his dice
Donated his body to science before he was done using it
Dumb as a corn cob.
Dumb as a stump.
Dumber than a bag of hammers.
Dumber than a bag of rocks

Dumber than a lobotomized rock

Elevator don’t quiet make the top floor
Fell out of the family tree
Forgot to pay his brain bill
Goes surfing in Nebraska
Golf bag doesn’t have a full set of irons
Got a full 6-pack, but lacks the plastic thingy to hold it all together
Got into the gene pool when the lifeguard wasn’t watching
Gross ignoramus — 144 times worse than a normal ignoramus
Has an IQ of 2, but it takes 3 to grunt

This is the one —> Has delusions of adequacy.

Has two brains, one’s lost and the other is out looking for it
Having an intelligence rivalled only by garden tools.
He fell out of the Stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down
He had a little too much chlorine in his gene pool.
He is so dumb, he would look for a wishbone in a soft-boiled egg.
He is so dumb, the only thing he ever read was an eye-chart.
He played too much without a helmet
He’s got a mind like a steel trap, rusted shut
He’s got a leak in his think-tank
He’s got a mind like a steel sieve
He’s got his feet firmly planted 3 feet above the ground
He’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer
He’s so dense light bends around him
He’s so dumb he couldn’t pour the water out of a boot if the instructions
were on the heel
His belt doesn’t go through all the loops
His cheese has slipped off his cracker

His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork
His porch light ain’t on
I say, that boy is about as sharp as a sack of wet mice
If brains were chocolate – he wouldn’t have enough to fill an M&M
If brains were dynamite – he wouldn’t have enough to blow his nose
If brains were dynamite, he wouldn’t have enough to blow his hat off
If brains were gasoline, he couldn’t ride a moped around a fruit loop
If brains were taxed, he’d get a rebate
If he had a brain, he’d be dangerous
If he had another brain, it would be lonely
If he were any more stupid, he’d have to be watered twice a week
If stupid were a talent, he would be considered gifted

If stupid could fly, you’d be a jet.
If you gave him a penny for his thoughts, you’d get change back
If you stand close enough to him you can hear the ocean
Isn’t firing on all 6 cylinders
Isn’t firing on all thrusters
Its hard to believe that he beat out half a billion other sperm

If I wanted to kill myself I’d climb your ego and jump to your IQ
Kangaroo loose in the top paddock
Like a pair of children’s scissors, bright and colorful, but not too sharp
Million dollar body and a 2 dollar engine.
Mind is in neutral, body is in gear
Mind like a rubber bear trap.
Needing a few screws tightened
Not firing with all spark plugs
Not the brightest light in the harbor
Not the brightest light on the Christmas tree
Not the sharpest hook in the tackle box.
Not the sharpest pencil in the box
Off his rocker
On/off switch is broken in the off position
One Fruit Loop shy of a full bowl
One neuron short of a synapse
One taco short of a combination plate
One turbine short of an airplane
One-celled organisms out score him in IQ tests
Prime candidate for natural deselection
Proof that evolution CAN go in reverse
Requires directions to lay sod
Room temperature IQ
Running about a quart low
Running on empty
Sets the lowest possible goals, and consistently fails to achieve them.
Sharp as a bowling ball.
She is so dumb, she couldn’t tell which way an elevator was going if she
had two guesses.
She is so dumb, when I asked her to pass the plate, she said: “Upper or
lower?”
She’s not tied too tight to the pier
Some drink from the fountain of knowledge, he only gargled
Strong like bear, smart like tractor.
Takes him 1 1/2 hours to watch 60 minutes
The elevator is stuck between floors.
The lights are flashing, the gate is down, but the train isn’t coming
The lights are on, but nobody is home.
The wheel’s spinning, but the hamster’s dead
Too dumb to pull his head in before he shuts the window
Too many yards between the goal posts
Two hub caps short of a Buick.
Warning – Objects in mirror are dumber than they appear
Was left on the tilt-a-whirl too long as a baby
Would be out of her depth in a mud puddle.
Your the flower of my life (you blooming idiot)
You can’t call him an idiot, you’ll insult all the idiots in the world.

Your mouth is writing checks that your intellect cannot cash

One of my favorite Far Side Cartoon’s ever

Midvale School for the Gifted: Today's Government | Trade the Tape

Talk Like A Pirate Day

Well blow me down mateys, it be that time of year again!  This proud tradition started 27 years ago.  Don’t be a scurvy dog and forget to talk like a pirate, all day long!  In thewords of “Steve the Pirate” from the movie “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story”  –  “gar”.

Words I Made Up

Spell check catches a lot of my mistakes. I’ve noticed a trend recently when I write a word that I can’t find anywhere, so I started keeping a list. I’m sure that some of these should be words and I’ve used them in posts already.

Some may actually be words and I’m wrong about it, but I didn’t win the National Spelling Bee or grammar contest either.

Here’s my list so far. I’ll add to it as I make stuff up. I’ll take contributions if you have one and give you credit on the blog.

Christmasness – too much Christmas

Commerciality

Dickness – acting like a dick

Assholiness – speaks for itself

Incorrecter – more incorrect

Silenting – silencing someone

Frothily – frothy

Ender – the event that signals the end of something. That goal was the ender of the game.

Holify – translation of sanctify from the Greek, but we don’t have that word in english.

Sandwichable – things you can put in a sandwich, or a nice girl in a tight place

Introverting – avoiding people

Libtardedness

Conservatardedness

Ineptocracy – Biden administration

Fuckedupness

Propagandish – sort of propaganda

Pussify – make less manly or more cowardly

Impartation – to take part of

Hero’d – being a hero at something, I’m super hero’d out I’ve seen it so many times

Jonesy – jonesing about something, I feel jonesy

Dumbassery – doing dumb things

Unintimidating – not intimidating

John von Neumann, Nearly every computer built to this day, from mainframe to smartphone, is based on von Neumann’s design

More than anyone else, John von Neumann created the future. He was an unparalleled genius, one  of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, and he helped invent the world as we now know it. He came up with a blueprint of the modern computer and sparked the beginnings of artificial intelligence. He worked on the atom bomb and led the team that produced the first computerized weather forecast. In the mid-1950s, he proposed the idea that the Earth was warming as a consequence of humans burning coal and oil, and warned that “extensive human intervention” could wreak havoc with the world’s climate. Colleagues who knew both von Neumann and his colleague Albert Einstein said that von Neumann had by far the sharper mind, and yet it’s astonishing, and sad, how few people have heard of him.

Just like Einstein, von Neumann was a child prodigy. Einstein taught himself algebra at twelve, but when he was just six von Neumann could multiply two eight-digit numbers in his head and converse in Ancient Greek. He devoured a forty-five-volume history of the world and was able to recite whole chapters verbatim decades later. “What are you calculating?” he once asked his mother when he noticed her staring blankly into space. By eight he was familiar with calculus, and his oldest friend, Eugene Wigner, recalls the eleven-year-old Johnny tutoring him on the finer points of set theory during Sunday walks. Wigner, who later won a share of the Nobel prize in physics, maintained that von Neumann taught him more about math than anyone else.

Johnny’s plans (and by extension, the modern world) were nearly derailed by his father, Max, a doctor of law turned investment banker. “Mathematics,” he maintained, “does not make money.” The chemical industry was in its heyday so a compromise was reached that would mark the beginning of von Neumann’s peripatetic lifestyle: the boy would bone up on chemistry at the University of Berlin and meanwhile would also pursue a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Budapest.

In the event, mathematics did make von Neumann money. Quite a lot of it. At the height of his powers in the early 1950s, when his opinions were being sought by practically everyone, he was earning an annual salary of $10,000 (close to $200,000 today) from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the same again from IBM, and he was also consulting for the US Army, Navy and Air Force.

Von Neumann was irresistibly drawn to applying his mathematical genius to more practical domains. After wrapping up his doctoral degree, von Neumann moved to Göttingen, then a mathematical Mecca. There was also another boy wonder, Werner Heisenberg, who was busily laying the groundwork of a bewildering new science of the atom called “quantum mechanics.” Von Neumann soon got involved, and even today, some of the arguments over the limits and possibilities of quantum theory are rooted in his clear-eyed analysis.

Sensing early that another world war was coming, von Neumann threw himself into military research in America. His speciality was the sophisticated mathematics of maximizing the destructive power of bombs — literally how to get the biggest bang for the army’s buck. Sent on a secret mission to England in 1943 to help the Royal Navy work out German mine-laying patterns in the Atlantic, he returned to the US when the physicist Robert Oppenheimer begged him to join America’s atom-bomb project. “We are,” he wrote, “in what can only be described as a desperate need of your help.”

Terrified by the prospect of another world war, this time with Stalin’s Soviet Union, von Neumann would help deliver America’s hydrogen bomb and smooth the path to the intercontinental ballistic missile.

As he scoured the US for computational resources to simulate bombs, he came across the ENIAC, a room-filling machine at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania that would soon become the world’s first fully electronic digital computer. The ENIAC’s sole purpose was to calculate trajectories for artillery. Von Neumann, who understood the true potential of computers as early as anyone, wanted to build a more flexible machine, and described one in 1945’s First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC. Nearly every computer built to this day, from mainframe to smartphone, is based on his design. When IBM unveiled their first commercial computer, the 701, eight years later, it was a carbon copy of the one built earlier by von Neumann’s team at the IAS.

While von Neumann was criss-crossing the States for the government and military, he was also working on a 1,200-page tract on the mathematics of conflict, deception and compromise with the German economist Oskar Morgenstern. What was a hobby for von Neumann was for Morgenstern a “period of the most intensive work I’ve ever known.” Theory of Games and Economic Behavior appeared in 1944, and it soon found favor at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, where defense analysts charged with “thinking about the unthinkable” would help shape American nuclear policy during the Cold War. They persuaded von Neumann to join RAND as a consultant, and their new computer was named the Johnniac in his honor.

Since then, game theory has transformed vast tracts of economics, the wider social sciences and even biology, where it has been applied to understanding everything from predator-prey relationships to the evolution of altruistic behavior. Today, game theory crops up in every corner of internet commerce — but most particularly in online advertising, where ad auctions designed by game theorists net the likes of Google and Amazon billions of dollars every year.

More at this link

All Winning Streaks Come To An End, Matt Amodio Finally Loses On Jeopardy

After setting the second longest winning streak at 38 games with winnings of over $1.5 million, it happened last night.

Matt Amodio finally lost. You could feel it happening as he kept missing. In a way, it was almost like he wanted to end it because he wasn’t ringing in and was wrong when he did.

He was a great champion and was good for the ratings and the game.

I’ve seen all the champions win and lose. It is usually the same, a perfect storm where they answer wrong, the categories are not in their strengths and another contestant gets hot. That happened last night.

He also missed final Jeopardy after being nearly perfect for weeks.

He will be back in the Tournament of Champions. I look forward to it as he was also likeable, which sometimes they are not.

I’m sure he helped the ratings as everyone follows a streak, whether you want the person to win or lose. I pulled for him because he had a huge range of knowledge and bet big. He employed the James Holzhauer strategy of playing, something that takes big balls to do.

The people that de-throne the champions usually only last a couple of games.

I watched before Ken Jennings had the 74 game winning streak 17 years ago and I’ll watch tonight. The reason is the same, I want to get more right than the contestants.

Vegan Humor, All You Need Now Is Bacon

I have nothing against them, except they always tell you they are vegan. I feel sorry that they don’t get to enjoy the bacon cheeseburger that I’m having tonight.

Oh, I won’t be telling anyone I’m not vegan. They don’t want to know that either.

Random Funny Thoughts

I had amnesia once — or twice.

*****

Protons have mass? I didn’t even know they were Catholic.

*****

I am neither for nor against apathy.

*****

All I ask is a chance to prove that money can’t make me happy.

*****

If the world were a logical place, men would be the ones who ride horses sidesaddle.

*****

What is a “free” gift? Aren’t all gifts free?

*****

They told me I was gullible and I believed them.

*****

Teach a child to be polite and courteous in the home, and when he grows up, he’ll never be able to merge his car onto the freeway.

******

Experience is the thing you have left when everything else is gone.

*****

One nice thing about egotists … they don’t talk about other people.

*****

My weight is perfect for my height … which varies.

*****

I used to be indecisive. Now, I’m not sure.

*****

The cost of living hasn’t affected its popularity.

*****

How can there be self-help groups

*****

Show me a man with both feet firmly on the ground, and I’ll show you a man who can’t get his pants off.

*****

Is it just me, or do buffalo wings taste like chicken?

My Take On The Jeopardy Guest Hosts And The Replacements

It is probably the greatest game show created. It’s intellectually challenging. The others are generally tripe that targets those needing mindless entertainment or try to rip off Jeopardy.

I’ve realized that Alex Trebek was one of the best ever at this type of job and was significantly a reason for it’s success.

I recall him not liking Ken Jennings in the first couple of weeks of the 74 game winning streak. They eventually formed a bond, which I first believed was due to the huge ratings increase, but later led to their synergy around making Jeopardy great.

I, like everyone else try to beat the contestants and regularly do, with the exception of Final Jeopardy. Rarely solving this question keeps me from applying as I am about 1 for 15 in getting it right. I regularly beat everyone I play against (except my son, a bastion of knowledge), but fail in pop categories and celebrities. Those are issues I know and care little about. The combination of words, anagrams and Roman numeral addition questions stump me. Ken, Brad and James dominate there.

James Holtzhauer gave us a new way of playing, especially in how to bet. To this day, I love those who bet big. It’s not their money anyway if they don’t stay. You have to play to win and betting low is counterintuitive to winning.

Since Trebek, they have had a string of guest hosts. Some were great because they get what is the formula for success is. Others were fame seekers that had power in the Celebtard world.

THE BEST

The permanent replacements, Mayim Bialik and Mike Richards stood out as the best. They deserve the job. They were smooth, invested in the success of the show and didn’t try to be the reason people watched.

Honorable mention goes to Ken Jennings. He won the GOAT tournament and is forever ensconced in the history of the show. I knew he wouldn’t get the job due to other commitments, but he would have been a good one.

THE SECOND TIER

Bill Whitaker and Sanjay Gupta. Again, they didn’t try to be anything other than the facilitator. They were less polished than the best, but no one believed they were anything but a guest host. They wouldn’t have been good replacements though.

THE MAN WHO WANTED IT MOST, BUT COULDN’T PULL IT OFF

Aaron Rodgers wanted to be the guest host and made it clear. He tried, but is a Hall of Fame quarterback and not a TV personality. He stumbled too much, like Jeff Gordan and Dale Earnhardt Jr. in NASCAR. They were great athletes, but not good commentators. The show would have suffered under him.

AND THE REST, LOSERS, POSERS, CELEBTARDS AND SO FORTH

Dr. Oz has been on TV, but tried to be smarter than the contestants. He was arrogant as usual and not polished, despite being in front of a camera frequently. He cut off contestants and was rude to those who answered incorrectly.

Levar Burton tried too hard. He put on his TV voice and his appearance came off as a job interview rather than a host replacement. He was better than the rest below, but his fake enthusiasm was tough to take at times. He had a woke following that tried to get him hired via social media. The show would have suffered under him because he was hard to listen to in a very short period of time.

Robin Roberts was the wokest. She blatantly played favorites with female and minority contestants. A good host (and person) treats everyone the same, regardless of how they were born like Alex did. There is no justification for bias against anyone so this was inexcusable. She got the gig due to her other TV shows where she can spout her views with impunity. It was hard to watch.

Katie Couric should have been good. She answered “you got it” to every correct answer. I counted over 25 times on one show alone. She was the perky interviewer who failed as a newscaster, but her TV ability should have shown through better than it did. The ratings were poor under her and she is unlikable a lot of the time.

The same can be said for Anderson Cooper, teleprompter reader who is tedious to listen to. His ratings as a newscaster (and guest host) explain why he was so bad. Social media pilloried him. He was boring at best and clearly doesn’t have the intelligence to be a host for show requiring a 3 digit IQ.

THE WORST

Savannah Guthrie at best went through the motions. It was as if she didn’t care. She was disingenuous and dismissive when speaking to the players. She also was a “you got it” over doer. I thought she should have been way better, but didn’t seem to try. I am not a watcher of her regular program, but she was bad at the Olympics also, so I guess she’s consistent. She was the one I almost caused me not to watch the show for a couple of weeks, like Katie.

No one will be the winner because Alex is too hard to follow. He made the show great. It’s like having a famous parent and the kids rarely equal the star.

It’s a great show and has been around because of that. In a way it’s like golf, you can never beat it because you can’t know everything. Just try to beat the people you watch with and the contestants.

On a side note, I worked at IBM when Watson played. I talked to Sam Palmisano, then chairman and he said it was a marketing gimmick. The players never had a chance as the amount of computing horsepower behind the scenes was programmed to win at a certain task. Humans still are better to watch. Watson turned out to be a bust anyway.

Surprise! A Dogs Age Is Not 7 Times A Human’s – Here Is the Real Chart

If you want to do the math, here is how:

The most precise method involves the empirical equation that the researchers discovered, which is 16 x ln(dog’s age) +31 = human age, (that is the natural logarithm of the dog’s real age, multiplied by 16, with 31 added to the total.)

You can compute this using any calculator which has the ln function. Simply type your dog’s age. Press ln. Press x and type in 16. Press + and type in 31. Hit the equals sign and there you have it.

Hat tip to Psychology Todayhttps://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/canine-corner/202007/genetics-shows-how-convert-dogs-age-human-years

Humor Sayings – How To Count By That Famous Actor

“Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes.”

Mickey Mouse

I’m going to leave any sense of my usual pontificating based on wisdom here.  They of course couldn’t say it on TV, but the old locker room joke is that guys can count to 21, do the math.

I haven’t looked at his picture recently, but I don’t think Mickey had 5 fingers on his hand either.

What It’s Like To Have An Extremely High IQ?

Editors note:  Since I published this, the comments have been coming in and are now far better than the blog post.  I encourage you to read about the lives and struggles of those who have high IQ.  Their stories are quite revealing.-> It’s in the comments, hint, hint, hint.

Authors disclosure: I won’t disclose where I am on the IQ chart, but I do have some in my family with very high IQ.  My father had a gigantic IQ.   Here are the stories of those with high IQ and their travails. See if you identify with any of them.

The blog post actually starts here.  It is a compilation of individuals with their names mostly redacted who have written about the travails of a high IQ:

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – “The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.”

Update: 10/3/16 from Alison Craig

It sounds like you are in the beginning stages of an existentialist crisis. http://plato.stanford.edu/entrie…  I know the word “crisis” looks alarming, but it shouldn’t. In this case it just means you are examining the point of your own existence. Will I always be alone? Why am I here? Eventually you may even question all existence and come to the seemingly frightening conclusion that we’re all born alone and die alone and nothing in life has purpose.

“Well, that’s horrible! You’re depressing, why would you say such things?”

Again, I repeat- it is nothing to be alarmed about. Those things are true – to a degree. We are born alone and die alone, but we work to make connections with people who can support us, and that we can support in return. Intelligent or not, there will always be like minded people in the world somewhere and they are never easy to find for anyone. To me, making those connections is why I am here and is a large part of my purpose.

No matter how intelligent, wealthy or attractive a person is – it can always be difficult to find true connections so that all of the sharing and giving is not a one way street. Intelligent people may have stricter standards for making friends (in fashion or other), but so might a wealthy person, or a very attractive one. All people fear being used and some are just more cautious than others. An intelligent person can read books on understanding human nature ( Ten Keys to Handling Unreasonable & Difficult People), body language Psychology Today and other psychology tools to assist them in making life long connections with other people.

===============================================

From Shah Rukh Qasim on hiding your intelligence:

If you could generalize, the most common would be:

  1. You keep talking to a person, telling him something you think he doesn’t know. He keeps listening. Then he shares his insight which makes you think he has already known everything you told him. Smart people at often silent and active listeners.

Other signs will include:

  1. Good problem solvers. Not just mathematics problem. But even daily life problems. They’ll quickly find what’s wrong and take the best course of action to solve the problem.
  2. They’ll be different in views. And their views will always come with reason. A quote goes around: Small minds discuss people. Average mind discuss events. Great minds discuss ideas.
  3. “A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.” – William Shakespeare
  4. They often look for reasons. It goes in four levels (worst to best):
    1. What?
    2. How?

=========================================

It sucked when I was younger, but these days it’s just awesome.

There is a very common pattern among highly gifted people, namely:

  • When you’re young it’s very isolating, and it feels like everyone else is just stupid
  • As you grow older, you realize your gift. You also realize that raw intelligence isn’t everything, and that things like social skills matter a lot. Plus, you meet others like you.
  • Your social life improves as you get older and learn to connect on things other than intelligence or go to elite institutions where you can meet other highly gifted people.

Honestly, at this point in my life I feel like there are literally no downsides to having a high IQ. It’s like being born good looking or with great physical health: it’s not a silver bullet to a happy life, but it makes a lot of things much easier.

I only found out I had a high IQ (161) because my professional life was such a mess I had to see a psychologist.

If I had to sum it up in a few sentences, I would say that the most aggravating thing about being very intelligent is that you quickly see and understand things at a level of depth that most people don’t (or can’t), and it is very frustrating.  You want to move on, you want to be pushed, you don’t want to spend time explaining the details of things you have already grasped, but no one else is caught up yet, so you have to pause.  It is particularly painful when dealing with complex topics where the mental models involve feedback loops and non-linearities.

But that said, I’ve learned there is much more to life than intelligence, and being successful is more about hard work and good communication skills than anything else.

====================================================

“One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.”

Working successfully in society and business is limited by some really important social choke points.  One of them is that other people, even if they are intellectually slower, must be treated with respect.  Another is that even if you are correct you will have difficulty getting people to act on your insights until they understand why you are correct.  A third thing is that most important activities are done as a team and so taking action requires breaking down your insights into something that your slower peers and employees can understand.  If you try to blow past these choke points you will destroy relationships and even if you are right, your career will languish.  I try to remind myself that being successful is not well correlated to being right.

My career is going pretty well now that I’ve understood these constraints.  It is possible to turn intelligence to practical life-advantage but our educational system doesn’t really give a blueprint for this.  I left school thinking that it mattered that I understood things 5 minutes or 5 years before my classmates did.  It doesn’t.  Most people’s functioning adult lives are not spent solving tough problems.  They are spent going through well established rituals and patterns of relating to each other punctuated by an occasional tough problem.  In most cases, people can even skip the tough problems and still do okay in life.  So how do you convert a parlor trick (like knowing the ending of a movie after 5 minutes) into something that will make you happier?  Mostly, you don’t.  Use it when it’s valuable and relax a little when it’s not.

There’s a great Dilbert where someone invites him to join the company’s Mensa chapter and Dilbert asks why people who are so smart continue to work at the company.  The president of the Mensa chapter answers, “Intelligence has much less practical application than you’d think.”

==========================================

In a word, I find it alienating.

Extremely so, in fact.

And I think this is not only because of what makes me “smart”, but also because of what my brain has to sacrifice to be “smart” in that way.  (More on that in a sec.)

For the record, my IQ was measured (years ago) at 178. [ETA: Just looked up the percentile, and that’s about 1 in 2 million, for some perspective.]  I have 3 advanced degrees and a solid career.  But I’m still single and spend very little time around other people.

It took me some time as a young kid to figure out that the people around me weren’t interested in the same things I was.  And that, often, to talk about the things I found interesting turned people away.

So I hid that.

When they announced that I was valedictorian of my high school, I was in 1st period art class, and one of my classmates refused to believe that they’d said my name.

But I never felt like I belonged anywhere, and I still don’t.

I don’t have kids, TV doesn’t interest me, I don’t follow celebrities or watch sports.  My time is spent with my work, and researching the things that are important to me — astrophysics, particle physics, consciousness research, and although this might seem strange to some people, Biblical scholarship (tho I’m not a believer).

As a result, chit-chat is impossible for me, or else it’s so boring that it becomes impossible.

But like I said, the problem isn’t only that my brain is interested in things that most other brains aren’t.  It’s also what my brain can’t do.

There’s only a certain amount of space in the brain, and if one area is eating up the real estate with more neural power, some other part of the brain is likely losing out.

For me, it’s some of the automatic social functioning which tells you, for example, what emotion another person is feeling based on their facial expression, or whether someone’s being sarcastic or not.  (Sarcasm is a minefield for me, and meeting another person in a hallway is a nightmare — I cannot interpret when to look, or not, what to say, or not, etc.)

That said, I have an enormously rich life, and I’ve adjusted to it.  When I stopped trying to fit in, things got better.

=============================================

HOWEVER…..STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES

The smart can do stupid things such as:

  • Ignoring the importance of design and style – When the iPod originally came out, technical people complained about its lack of features and perceived high price (“ooh, who cares about another MP3 player, I can go buy one at Best Buy for $50” http://forums.macrumors.com/show…).  In the meantime, it was so cool and easy to use that normal people went out in droves to buy it.
  • Using terrible tools, and taking pride in their awfulness – Especially common with programmers, who take pride in using programming languages and text editors that have been designed by programmers, not updated since the 1970s, and never touched by anyone with a modicum of design sense. They believe that mastering arcane, overcomplicated commands and processes are a mark of pride, rather than a waste of time.  I will refrain from singling out specific programming languages and tools here, because smart people also like to get caught up in pointless flame wars about this sort of thing.
  • Following the pack – Many smart people often seem to be followers, probably because they grow up spending so much time pleasing others via academic and extracurricular achievement that they never figure out what they really like to work on or try anything unique.  Smart people from top schools tend to flock into the same few elite fields, as they try to keep on achieving what other people think they should achieve, rather than figuring out whatever it is they intrinsically want to do.
  • Failing to develop social skills – Some smart people focus exclusively on their narrow area of interest and never realize that everything important in life is accomplished through other people.  They never try to improve their social skills, learn to network, or self promote, and often denigrate people who excel in these areas. If you are already a good engineer you are going to get 10x the return on time spent improving how you relate to other people compared to learning the next cool tool.
  • Focusing on being right above all else – Many smart people act as if being right trumps all else, and go around bluntly letting people know when they are wrong, as if this will somehow endear others to them.  They also believe that they can change other people’s minds through argument and facts, ignoring how emotional and irrational people actually are when it comes to making decisions or adopting beliefs.
  • Letting success in one area lead to overconfidence in others – Smart people sometimes think that just because they are expert in their field, they are automatically qualified in areas about which they know nothing.  For instance, doctors have a reputation as being bad investors: http://medicaleconomics.modernme….
  • Underrating effort and practice – For smart people, many things come easily without much effort.  They’re constantly praised for “being smart” whenever they do anything well.  The danger is that they become so reliant on feeling smart and having people praise them, that they avoid doing anything that they’re not immediately great at.  They start to believe that if you’re not good at something from the beginning, you’re destined to always be terrible at it, and the thing isn’t worth doing.  These smart people fail to further develop their natural talents and eventually fall behind others who, while less initially talented, weren’t as invested in “being smart” and instead spent more time practicing.  http://nymag.com/news/features/2…
  • Engaging in zero sum competitions with other smart people – Many smart people tend to flock to fields which are already saturated with other smart people.  Only a limited number of people can become a top investment banker, law partner, Fortune 500 CEO, humanities professor, or Jeopardy champion.  Yet smart people let themselves be funneled into these fields and relentlessly compete with each other for limited slots.  They all but ignore other areas where they could be successful, and that are less overrun by super-smart people.   Instead of thinking outside the box, smart people often think well within a box, a very competitive box that has been set up by other people and institutions to further someone else’s interests at the expense of the smart person.
  • Excessively focusing on comparing their achievements with others – Smart people who have been raised in a typical achievement-focused family or school can get anxious about achievement to the point of ridiculousness.  This leads to people earnestly asking questions like: Success: If I haven’t succeeded in my mid 20s, could I be successful in the rest of my life? and Are you a failure if you are not a billionaire by age 30? What about 40?
  • Ignoring diminishing returns on information – Smart people are often voracious readers and can absorb huge quantities of information on any subject.  They get caught up in reading every last bit of information on subjects that interest them, like investing, lifehacking, or tech specs of products they’re planning on buying.   While some information is useful in making a decision, poring through the vast amount of information available online can be a waste of time.  They end up spending a lot of time gathering information without taking action.
  • Elitism – Smart people often use smartness as measure of the entire worth of a person.  They fail to see the value in or even relate with people who are different.  This is illustrated by the Yale professor who doesn’t have the slightest idea what to say to his plumber: http://www.theamericanscholar.or….  And questions like Am I an elitist to think that most people are stupid?

 

Cyclic Numbers, Interesting Math Fun

Not really a joke … just a tiny bit of math fun.

142857 is a cyclic number – its digits always appear in the same order but will rotate around when multiplied by any number from 1 to 6:

142857 x 1 = 142857
142857 x 2 = 285714
142857 x 3 = 428571
142857 x 4 = 571428
142857 x 5 = 714285
142857 x 6 = 857142

Pretty cool, huh? Now multiply 142857 by 7. (Spoiler below.)

142857 x 7 = 999999

What Are The Top 10 Things You Should Be Informed Of In Life

Again, these are not my answers, but are an interesting read on people.  It will offend some, but God is number one for me.  The rest of the lists below should offend someone or many.

1. Human psychology. It’s a young field, and no one has all the answers yet. But you can get a better understanding of why other people do what they do — and how to thread your way through life’s complexities — by studying at least a little of this field.

2. The basics of accounting. This will greatly reduce your chances of being swindled in life. It also will make it much easier for you to do some systematic planning, while keeping track of how you’re doing vis a vis your plans.

3. Music. It will calm you. It will inspire you. It will build bridges to a more interesting set of friends.

4. Your own family’s story. Where did your parents grow up, and how did that shape who they are? What are the formal or informal communities that help define your identity? (“We are athletes … we are Irish … we are restless spirits who move from city to city.”) Having an enduring sense of identity that goes beyond the ups and downs of your own life will be a source of comfort and motivation all your life.

5. The way your government really works. Find out why some laws are tightly enforced and others aren’t. Learn the best ways of influencing your government — whether it’s on matters of national significance or something as personal as winning a zoning variance for the cafe you run. Finally, gain some non-bitter insights about why society doesn’t always work the way you’d like.

6. Good nutrition and how to incorporate it into your life. Mike Leary is right.  In a poor society, this is the difference between life and death. In a rich society, it’s — surprise! — the difference between a long, robust future and chronic illness that can turn deadly far too soon.

7. Different cultural values. If you’re going to be effective outside a small cluster of people like you, you’ll need to understand and appreciate how other tribes work, too.

8. How to communicate your ideas to the wider world. Justin Freeman is right. Learn how to speak clearly and persuasively. Or to write well. Or to create useful and appealing computer code, video, music, etc. Pick the medium that works best for you, and make sure you don’t go through life being mute.

9. Effective parenting. Just because your parents didn’t quite get it right (no one ever does!) doesn’t mean that you can’t do better. Find your own style, stick with what works … but keep refining your approach as you learn from others. You owe it to the species.

10. Quora. It’s one-stop shopping for biased crap! Be aware of what’s on Quora, and you’ll know what not to believe.

Here’s another:

  1. Realize that nobody cares, and if they do, you shouldn’t care that they care. Got a new car? Nobody cares. You’ll get some gawkers for a couple of weeks—they don’t care. They’re curious. Three weeks in it’ll be just another shiny blob among all the thousands of others crawling down the freeway and sitting in garages and driveways up and down your street. People will care about your car just as much as you care about all of those. Got a new gewgaw? New wardrobe? Went to a swanky restaurant? Exotic vacation? Nobody cares. Don’t base your happiness on people caring, because they won’t. And if they do, they either want your stuff or hate you for it.
  2. Some rule breakers will break rule number one. Occasionally, people in your life will defy the odds and actually care about you. Still not your stuff, sorry. But if they value you, they’ll value that you value it, and they’ll listen. When you talk about all of those things that nobody else cares about, they will look into your eyes and consume your words, and in that moment you will know that every part of them is there with you.
  3. Spend your life with rule breakers. Marry them. Befriend them. Work with them. Spend weekends with them. No matter how much power you become possessed of, you’ll never be able to make someone care—so gather close the caring.
  4. Money is cheap. I mean, there’s a lot of it—about forty thousand billion dollars floating around the world, largely made up of cash whose value is made up and ascribed to it, anyway. Don’t engineer your life around getting a slightly less tiny portion of this pile, and make your spirit of generosity reflect this principle. I knew a man who became driven by the desire to amass six figures in savings, so he worked and scrimped and sacrificed to get there. And he did… right before he died of cancer. I’m sure his wife’s new husband appreciated his diligence.
  5. Money is expensive. I mean, it’s difficult to get your hands on sometimes—and you never know when someone’s going to pull the floorboards out from under you—so don’t be stupid with it. Avoid debt on depreciating assets, and never incur debt in order to assuage your vanity (see rule number one). Debt has become normative, but don’t blithely accept it as a rite of passage into adulthood—debt represents imbalance and, in some sense, often a resignation of control. Student loan debt isn’t always unavoidable, but it isn’t a given—my wife and I completed a combined ten years of college with zero debt between us. If you can’t avoid it, though, make sure that your degree is an investment rather than a liability—I mourn a bit for all of the people going tens of thousands of dollars in debt in pursuit of vague liberal arts degrees with no idea of what they want out of life. If you’re just dropping tuition dollars for lack of a better idea at the moment, just withdraw and go wander around Europe for a few weeks—I guarantee you’ll spend less and learn more in the process.
  6. Learn the ancient art of rhetoric. The elements of rhetoric, in all of their forms, are what make the world go around—because they are what prompt the decisions people make. If you develop an understanding of how they work, while everyone else is frightened by flames and booming voices, you will be able to see behind veils of communication and see what levers little men are pulling. Not only will you develop immunity from all manner of commercials, marketing, hucksters and salesmen, to the beautiful speeches of liars and thieves, you’ll also find yourself able to craft your speech in ways that influence people. When you know how to speak in order to change someone’s mind, to instill confidence in someone, to quiet the fears of a child, then you will know this power firsthand. However, bear in mind as you use it that your opponent in any debate is not the other person, but ignorance.
  7. You are responsible to everyone, but you’re responsible for yourself. I believe we’re responsible to everyone for something, even if it’s something as basic as an affirmation of their humanity. However, it should most often go far beyond that and manifest itself in service to others, to being a voice for the voiceless. If you’re reading this, there are those around you who toil under burdens larger than yours, who stand in need of touch and respect and chances. Conversely, though, you’re responsible for yourself. Nobody else is going to find success for you, and nobody else is going to instill happiness into you from the outside. That’s on you.
  8. Learn to see reality in terms of systems. When you understand the world around you as a massive web of interconnected, largely interdependent systems, things get much less mystifying—and the less we either ascribe to magic or allow to exist behind a fog, the less susceptible we’ll be to all manner of being taken advantage of. However:
  9. Account for the threat of black swan events. Sometimes chaos consumes the most meticulous of plans, and if you live life with no margins in a financial, emotional, or any other sense, you will be subject to its whims. Take risks, but backstop them with something—I strongly suspect these people who say having a Plan B is a sign of weak commitment aren’t living hand to mouth. Do what you need to in order to keep your footing.
  10. You both need and don’t need other people. You need others in a sense that you need to be part of a community—there’s a reason we reflexively pity hermits. Regardless of your theory of anthropogenesis, it’s hard to deny that we are built for community, and that ‘we’ is always more than ‘me.’ However, you don’t need another person in order for your life to have meaning—this idea that Disney has shoved through our eyeballs, that there’s someone out there for all of us if we’ll just believe hard enough and never stop searching, is hokum… because of arithmetic, if nothing else. Establish your own life—then, if there’s a particular person that you can’t help but integrate, believe me, you’ll know.
  11. Always give more than is required of you.

Go to the link above, there is more.

Add more in comments if you have a better suggestion than these.

Paraprosdokians (Figures of Speech)

First time I heard about parasprosdokians, I liked them. Sometimes known as Arasprosdokians are figures of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected.
 (Winston Churchill loved them)
1. Where there’s a will, I want to be in it.
2. The last thing I want to do is hurt you … but it’s still on my list.
3. Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
4. If I agreed with you, we’d both be wrong.
5. We never really grow up — we only learn how to act in public.
6. War does not determine who is right, only who is left.
7. Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
8. To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from many is research.
9. I didn’t say it was your fault, I said I was blaming you.
10. In filling out an application, where it says, “In case of emergency, notify…” I answered, “a doctor.”
11. You do not need a parachute to skydive. You only need a parachute to skydive twice.
12. I used to be indecisive, but now I’m not so sure.
13. To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target.
14. Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian, any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.
15. You’re never too old to learn something stupid.
16.  I’m supposed to respect my elders but it’s getting harder and harder for me to find one now.
17.  I’m not arguing with you, I’m explaining why you are wrong.

The Circle Game – Childhood Games That Are Still Fun, Punch You I Will

Even though I like to write about intellectual subjects, this one will have nothing to do with that.

Disclaimer: This game has been around for decades.  It is not the somehow now bad OK sign that the evil PC police have condemned.  When it was invented, no one cared about the OK sign.  FWIW, the circle is upside down in this game.  The PC SJW’s are dumbasses because a Reddit joke that trolled people by saying it was some supremacist sign.  The woke fell for it immediately because they want to cancel any fun.

If you know or have played the game, you will get this whole post without reading it, but I’m posting for those who do not get it.

I searched this on the Interweb and it stated that this started in the 1980’s.  Since I was in middle school way before this I’m calling BS and guessing that those before me have played it for 50 years.

So when I saw these examples, I knew what it was and it took me back to childhood, but I understood it without explanation.

The rules of the game are here:

Basically, you get someone to look at the circle below your waist against their will and you get to punch them.

It’s a game designed to be able to hit your friends and have them be ok with it.

The link provides other instructions like breaking the circle and not brushing it off, but they are just variations on being able to punch your friend.

We took it to all kinds of limits like drawing circles on the floor and other variations, but it’s simple.

I like all of these meme’s, but Darth Vader is my favorite.  Readers like the volleyball girl the best if you look at how many times it’s been downloaded off this post.

I think the girl is giving a sign as to the play to make, but if not, it’s a really good Internet punch.

The Walmart guy is funny on many levels.

The black hole circle is a Universal punch.

The duck is just funny.

I found a new one that isn’t really meant to be in the circle game, but is.

Fun Facts Like Betty White IS older than Sliced Bread, A Break from The News, Fake News and Shitholes

With all the crap that is in the news today, I’m taking a break of levity with some interesting facts.  Since I got this from someone else, some of it could be disputed, like peas on pizza, but it’s a hell of a lot closer to the truth than you’ll read in the news.
1. A strawberry isn’t a berry but a banana is.
2. Avocados and watermelon are berries, too.
3. Cashews grow on trees like this:
4. And Brussels sprouts grow in long stalks like this:
Flickr / Creative Commons / Katy Stoddard / Via Flickr: 68067047@N00
5. Chocolate milk was invented in Ireland.
6. Ketchup used to be sold as medicine.
7. Carrots were originally purple.
8. McDonald’s sells 75 hamburgers every second of every day.
9. Yams and sweet potatoes are not the same thing
10. Ripe cranberries will bounce like rubber balls.
11. An average ear of corn has an even number of rows, usually 16.
12. Betty White is actually older than sliced bread.
Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images for TV Land
13. Humans share 50% of their DNA with bananas.
14. Honey never spoils. You can eat 32,000-year-old honey.
15. Peanuts are not nuts. They grow in the ground like this, so they are legumes.
16. Vending machines are twice as likely to kill you than a shark is.
17. Coconuts kill more people than sharks every year. So do cows.
18. Pound cake got its name from its original recipe, which called for a pound each of butter, eggs, sugar, and flour.
19. The probability of you drinking a glass of water that contains a molecule of water that also passed through a dinosaur is almost 100%.
20. Honey is made from nectar and bee vomit.
21. Pineapples grow like this:
22. Quinoa is the seeds of this plant:
23. Kiwis grow on vines:
Bignai / Getty Images
24. Ginger is the root of a plant:
25. And cinnamon is just the inner part of this tree:
Flickr / Creative Commons / Abby Flat-coat / / Via Flickr: 22912005@N06
26. And artichokes are flowers that are eaten as buds. This is what they look like when flowered:
Flickr / Creative Commons / Wayne Marshall
27. “Spam” is short for spiced ham.
28. Popsicles were invented by an 11-year-old in 1905.
29. Apples, like pears and plums, belong to the rose family.
30. The official state vegetable of Oklahoma is the watermelon. 
31. Peas are one the most popular pizza toppings in Brazil:
32. There are over 7,500 varieties of apples throughout the world, and it would take you 20 years to try them all if you had one each day.
33. The twists in pretzels are made to look like arms crossed in prayer.
34. Canola oil was originally called rapeseed oil, but renamed by the Canadian oil industry in 1978 to avoid negative connotations. “Canola” is short for “Canadian oil.”
35. And no matter what color Froot Loop you eat, they all taste the same.

How Much Weight Can You Lose by Taking a Dump? Can You Weigh Farts? Everything You Wanted To Know About Your PooP

 

UPDATE: The 7 Reasons Farting is Good For You

Dropping a deuce, pinching a loaf, laying pipe, reading the sports page, seeing a man about a horse, all are names for the same thing.

But how much does it weigh? Can you lose weight by taking laxatives or giving birth to a legend size turn monster? How much does a fart weigh?  Do women fart as much as men? Let’s look into it.

How much your poop weighs

According to thrill list health:

To find out how much our stool adds to the scale, researchers (serious poop

researchers do exist, folks) collected samples from people living in 12

different countries to get a comprehensive overview.

They discovered that poop weighs between 2.5oz and 1lb, on average.

To find out how much our stool adds to the scale, researchers (serious poop

researchers do exist, folks) collected samples from people living in 12

different countries to get a comprehensive overview.

Have you ever weighed yourself before and then after taking a dump?

Of course you have! Who hasn’t? The best part is seeing the scale budge

in your favor after dropping the kids off at the pool.

So it stands to reason that if you could poop more, you’d lose weight, right?

Same for farting — gas has mass, after all. Could pooping and farting

be legit weight-loss secrets, or is it all just a lot of hot air?

Unsurprisingly, Westernized populations have the lowest poop weights,

thanks to a severe lack of fiber that comes with a fast-food diet. Western

samples only averaged between 3-4oz, which isn’t nearly enough to

make a difference in your skinny jeans.

 

How much do farts weigh? And how do you even weigh farts?

Very, very carefully. Gastroenterologists in England tried to determine

a fart’s weight by giving study participants 200g of baked beans in

addition to their normal diet. Even scientists know beans are a magical

fruit. To measure the toots these beans are known for, they used rectal

catheters over the course of 24 hours, which raises serious concerns

about the mental stability of the participants.

Despite the method, the data collected may surprise you more.

Scientists learned that the farts weighed between 16-50oz per day.

That’s right: You’re holding as much gas in your system as a small

Sweetums soda. And in case you’re wondering (you’re obviously

wondering), “Women and men expelled equivalent amounts,”

according to science.  That’s right.  Your sweet little cupcake is

cutting the cheese and stinking up the room just as much as you are.

Pooping to lose weight is actually a really bad idea

Of course, there are those out there who see “poop can weigh a pound”

and will try to up their poop game by taking laxatives. Bad idea.

Robert Herbst, an 18-time world-champion powerlifter and one of

the drug-testing supervisors at the Rio Olympics, says laxative-driven

weight loss happens even at the highest levels of sport, and it isn’t pretty.

Herbst confirms that dropping a deuce will in fact budge the number

on the scale, though it won’t alter your body composition or muscle

percentage, saying, “One pound in does not guarantee one [pound] out,”

because food is metabolized differently. Certain foods are absorbed

more efficiently, while others pass right through (looking at you, corn).

So while a pound of lettuce may work its way out to the porcelain

water slide, a pound of pie will most likely stick to your thighs.

Pooping isn’t a total elimination of all the calories you eat, since that

wouldn’t make any sense. Your body needs energy, so it’s not going

to shit it all out.

On top of that, Herbst’s experience monitoring weigh-ins taught

him that no one’s going to see Biggest Loser-type results. He says

you may see a 5lb drop (if that), depending on how much you currently

weigh. If you’re a big dude, you’re going to expel more in weight and

volume because you’re already eating more.

The majority of people will only be able to look forward to a mere

1-2lb difference (at most) if you’re an active person. Those losses

aren’t worth canceling your gym membership, and in extreme

cases, excessive laxative use can lead to all sorts of nasty medical complications.

What About Competitive Eaters?

I watch the July 4th Nathans Hot Dog Eating Contest yearly.  Joey Chestnut

knocked down 70 dogs in 10 minutes.  I’m not sure how much that

weighs, but given the average Joe spits out almost 2 pounds after a

few dogs at most, does that mean that Joey is somewhere between a

Saint Bernard and an elephant the day after the contest?

I found this gem THE 8 TYPES OF POOP YOU SHOULD NEVER

IGNORE because it means you have a problem

What Does Your Poop Say About You?

I found this gem at did you know your facts?

And finally, go to this link to evaluate your poop and pooping habits because you should examine your deuce to see if you are unhealthy or have a problem.

Alternate Meanings of Words. A Different Way of Thinking About Definitions

  1. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.
  2. Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightie.
  3. Coffee (n.), a person who is coughed upon.
  4. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.
  5. Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
  6. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.
  7. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent
  8. Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam.
  9. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.
  10. Flatulence (n.), the emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.
  11. Gargoyle (n.), an olive-flavored mouthwash.
  12. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified demeanor
  13. assumed by a proctologist immediately before he examines you.
  14. Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddish expressions.
  15. Circumvent (n.), the opening in the front of your boxer shorts.
  16. Frisbeetarianism (n.), the belief that, when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck there.
  17. Pokemon (n.), a Jamaican proctologist.

Gross and Icky Stuff You Still Will Read About Like Snot and Poop Color, and Do You Eat Boogers?

Why snot is green or yellow, or other color.  Click to read more.

Mucus is clear when you’re healthy and have no serious invaders. However, when bacteria or viruses attack, it will turn yellow or green due to the influx of iron-containing enzymes including myeloperoxidases, other oxidases and peroxidases. These enzymes are used by white blood cells, namely polymorphonuclear granulocytes, to help ingest and deactivate bacteria through an oxidative process. The combination of dead white blood cells, used up enzymes and eaten bacteria, all of which still contain a fair amount of iron, results in the green or yellow color.

Notably, the longer snot stays in your sinuses, the greener it will get.

Is eating boogers healthy for you? Click to read.

That said, while it may seem gross to those of us who’ve never tried (or don’t remember- nearly all children do this at one point or another), according to the sparse few studies that have been conducted on booger eaters, the vast number of people who eat their nasal mucus find it palatable, which probably isn’t a surprise to anyone as if they didn’t, they’d likely just stop. As SidneyTarachow in a 1966 report oncoprophagia (the compulsive eating bodily secretions) noted, “persons do eat nasal debris, and find it tasty, too!”

So to sum up, at least to date, there is no scientific proof that ingesting snot by passing it through your mouth is beneficial.  That said, it is plausible that the snot we do all ingest all the time is benefiting us in the way snot-eating proponents suggest.  It’s just that we don’t need to put it into our mouths to see the benefit, if such a benefit does exist as hypothesized.

In the end, though, as long as you’re careful, picking and eating is not generally going to hurt you, and many find it tasty… so, if that’s your thing, bon appétit!

Why is poop brown?  Click to read more.

Poop is brown due to bile from your gall bladder being metabolized by the bacteria in your intestines.  This results in a byproduct called stercobilin, which, in turn, makes poop look brown-ish.

Without this stercobilin, your poop would typically look grey-ish/white.  Because of this, a sure sign you are having problems with bile production, such as a blocked bile duct by a gall stone or something more serious like pancreatic cancer, is if you notice your poop is this white/grey-ish color.

In the end *pun intended*, brown poop is a pretty good sign you are a relatively healthy individual.  Some other common poop colors that generally aren’t a good sign of health are as follows:

  • If you notice your poop is red, this could be a sign of internal bleeding or could just mean you’ve recently eaten beets.  If the cause is bleeding and the bleeding is from your stomach or throat, however, your poop won’t be red, but rather black and will smell worse than that time you decided you should eat a box of Twinkies and a box of Cheesy Handi-Snacks all in one sitting.
  • Yellow poop means there is a lot of fat in your feces.  This is not a good sign.  Consider turning this into a positive by making poop candles with your fatty deposits. Yellow poop also has a very strong odor, which will give your poo-candles that little something extra.
  • Green poop is an indicator of some sort of bacterial infection or that you are a vegetarian and eat way too much leafy foods for your own good.  Seriously, try some bacon.  It’s delicious.

Bonus Facts:

  • When you see corn in your poop, this isn’t the whole kernel, though it may look like it.  What you are actually seeing is the outer yellow part, which is mostly cellulose and indigestible (fiber).  The inside of the kernel will have been digested as it is primarily starch.
  • Poop generally stinks because of the sulfur-rich organic compounds produced by bacteria, such as indole, skatole, and mercaptans.  Another contributing factor is an inorganic gas that is produced, hydrogen sulfide.
  • Poop of meat eaters smells worse than the poop of vegetarians.  You win this round, hippie.
  • Bird poop is white due to their kidney’s extracting nitrogenous wastes from their bloodstream and subsequently excreting it in the form of uric acid, which has a very low solubility in water and emerges as a white paste-like substance.
  • Animals such as dogs, rabbits, rodents, gorillas, etc often eat their poop to maintain proper health.  For animals such as rabbits who eat a lot of plants, their poop contains quite a bit of undigested plant matter; so eating their poop is a nice easy way to get more out of the food they eat.  For some animals, their poop can be very vitamin rich with the bacteria in their intestines producing vitamins they wouldn’t get otherwise.  For animals such as dogs, poop can be a good source of these vitamins and protein.  This is why dogs are so fond of cat poop; it is very high in protein.  Pro-tip, cut down on how much you need to clean your cat litter by allowing dogs and vegetarians access to it.  The dogs/vegetarians get a lot of protein (in the latter case something they are deprived of due to their hippie ways)  and you never have to clean poop from the liter; it’s win/win.
  • The word “poop” comes from the onomatopoeia poupen or popen, which originally meant “fart”.  “Poop” came into its current meaning around 1900.
  • You can tell an amazing amount of information about a person based on their poop.  Extraterrestrial enthusiasts theorize this is why when Aliens abduct humans they go straight to anal probing.
  • In South Asia and South-east Asia, it is common to find showers in the toilet room for cleansing one’s self after pooping.
  • With Islam, post-pooping requires a ritual cleansing.  One should enter the toilet room with the left foot first; ritually cleanse your butt-hole with water using your left hand; then step out of the toilet room with your right foot first.  As an aside, in many Muslim countries, toilet rooms are considered “Houses of Satan”.
  • In India, rather than use toilet paper, it is typical to simply use your left hand.
  • If you think that is bad, in Ancient Rome, a wet sponge on a stick was used.  That sounds all well and fine until you find out that that after being used, the sponge was placed back in a tub of salt water to await the next person to come along and wipe with it.  Suddenly the “left hand” method isn’t sounding so bad.
  • About 3/4 of an average piece of poop is made of water.  Of the remaining 1/4, about 1/3 of it is dead bacteria from your intestines; another 1/3 is fibrous matter; the remaining amount is made up of fats, phosphates, living bacteria, dead cells, mucus, protein, etc.

There of course are many links in these pages that lead to other gross stuff.  Enjoy.

 

 

Why Are Moths Attracted To Lights?

For many years it was thought the moon did have something to do with the attraction of moths to light. The so-called light-compass theory held that moths used the moon as a navigational beacon. By keeping it at a constant angle to their direction of travel, they were supposedly able to fly in a straight line. The trouble (for the moths) came when they made their sightings on a close-up light source like a candle flame. Instead of heading in a straight line, they flew around the flame in an ever-narrowing spiral until finally, phhhht, moth flambé.

But this theory had more holes in it than a moth-eaten sweater. The main problem was that moths simply don’t fly around lights in spirals. This was shown by an ingenious bug researcher named Henry Hsiao. He tethered moths to little styrofoam boats in a tiny artificial pond — I love guys like this — and tracked their flight as they headed toward a light source. He found the moths flew more or less straight at the light until they got up close, at which point they veered off and circled around it at a more or less constant distance. They seldom actually touched the light.

A number of other theories have also been discredited. Some claim that, to the moth, bright lights mean open space and open space means safety. But moths are nocturnal, and the night sky has no light sources anywhere near as bright as a porch light. Besides, why should the moth feel compelled to fly around the light in circles? Others argue that moths associate light with warmth. Yet ultraviolet lamps, which are much cooler than incandescent bulbs, attract more moths.

Henry Hsiao to the rescue. He said moths exhibit two kinds of behavior. When they’re distant from a light source (they’re drawn to light from as far as 200 feet away), they make a beeline straight toward it. Why, nobody knows. Maybe they’ve tumbled to the fact that lights mean people, and people mean: Wool sweaters! On an even more basic level, a light means: Other moths! Par-ty!

However, when the moths get close to the light, a different kind of behavior takes over. Instead of being attracted to the light, the moth is actually trying to avoid the light. When you think about it, this is only natural. To a creature of the night like a moth, daylight and by extension any bright light means danger. The moth doesn’t fly directly away from the light due to a peculiarity of vision called a Mach band. A Mach band, which apparently is common to all sighted creatures, is the region surrounding a bright light that seems darker than any other part of the sky.

Hsiao conjectured that the moth’s atom-sized brain figures the darkest part of the sky is safest. So it circles the light in the Mach band region, usually at a radius of about one foot, depending on the species. Eventually either its momentum carries it away or it finds a dark corner to hole up in.

In short, moths like some light but not too much — just like other creatures I could name. Nobody wants to get burned, naturally, but at some point in our lives, aren’t we all attracted to those bright porch lights?

 

Thanks to Cecil for this one.

How Cool Is This, The World Clock In Any Time Zone

OK, the title should really read useful now that I think about it, but so what.

For those who care about punctuality, or for those who don’t, how would you like to know the correct exact time wherever you are?

How about if you want to check and see if your Laptop, mobile device, watch or any other time piece is accurate?

Click this link and enter your time zone to find out!

Senior Moments or What happens in my brain when I can’t recall something I know?

An interesting subject, sometimes called a brain fart.  These are not my answers, but I thought it would be interesting until you can’t recall it.

While it is not known for sure what is happening, this is how current models of memory recall would explain it:

Memory recall in the brain is not like retrieving a file from disk on a computer. In the brain, memories are reconstructed rather than retrieved. The brain is constantly augmenting what is in “working memory” with related information from the past. This is why stream of consciousness and memory recall often work by free association: The information association process is already there and we just make use of it.

When attempting to recall something specific, like a name, we “trick” the name into appearing in working memory by thinking about concepts related to it: the person’s identity, when we saw them last, what they look like. Normally this process automatically brings the information into working memory as a side-effect of filling in related facts.

When a word is missing but you “think you know it,” what is probably happening is that a lot of information about that word has been reconstructed in working memory, but not enough to trigger the production of the word itself. The presence of related information signals that you’ve “almost recalled it,” but the failure to produce the word shows that the recall is incomplete.

Often when people can’t recall a word, someone else can fill it in for them. But sometimes the “tip of the tongue” word does not actually exist. Related words may come to mind and it may seem like there “should be a word” for whatever it is. Thus the tip of the tongue feeling is not infallible.

Or: you can use this one….

A Neural Network (computer software) is just a simple model of the brain – not sure if the brain has something to do with it, but NN is composed of interconnected neurons with synapses (software model artifacts.)

Each neuron is an adder with a threshold, and each synapse has a weight. Both the threshold and the weight holds a small unit of information (could be digital or analog.) The entire NN has a certain information capacity, and used wisely (as in VOT (voice to text) or OCR (optical character recognition)) they do quite a job!

However, NN theory (and practice) shows (if I recall well) that when this capacity has been used/filled more than 11% (or something like that) while ‘learning‘,  the network starts ‘ forgetting!’

I want to stress again that I’m not aware of any evidence that the real brain works like a computer neural network – even more a computer NN would be to a brain like a dog house to New York city – but here there is something to think about…

For more information, go here.

Great Sayings With Meaning, and Some Trivia Also

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” (Sign hanging in Einstein’s office at Princeton)

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” – Dale Carnegie

Robert Frost – “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”

arrêtez de ramer, tu attaques la falaise. (You can stop rowing now, you’re on the beach)

It is easy to lose one’s perspective in a mass of details. – Bible Study Fellowship

Failure is but a paragraph in the book of each human life. It is the pages that follow that ultimately define us

Laurence J. Peter – “An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.”

“Racing is Life.  Everything before and after is just waiting.” Steve McQueen from the movie LeMans

Albert Einstein open original article “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former

Joseph Heller -“The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.”

Sidney J. Harris – “A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.”

Abba Eban-“History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”

When you win, say nothing, when you lose, say less. -Paul Brown

You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them. -Michael Jordan

Every game is an opportunity to measure yourself against your own potential. -Bud Wilkinson

Excellence is not a singular act but a habit. You are what you do repeatedly. -Shaquille O’Neal

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” Winston Churchill, as quoted in The New American Newspeak Dictionary (2005) by Adrian Krieg, p. 96

 Rudeness is a weak person’s imitation of strength

Oscar Wilde

“What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Losers quit when they’re tired. Winners quit when they’ve won

370H-SSV-0773H  – read upside down

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race [is] not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so [are] the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.– Ecclesiastes 9:11,12 —

“Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.”  – John Kenneth Galbraith

If guns kill people, then pens misspell words, cars make people drive drunk, forks make you fat, and TVs make you watch porn.

Listen to people.  If they are worth talking to, they are worth listening to first.

You can’t change what happens to you in life.  All you can change is how you deal with it.

I think I’m emotionally constipated because I haven’t given a Rats Rump in days.

Liberalism: Moochers electing looters to steal from producers

Political Correctness –  A term used by whiny wussies that need stuff sugar coated

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.” -Albert Einstein

“I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.” Abraham Lincoln

  • “This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.” Elmer Davis
  • “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty.”  John F. Kennedy
  • “Sure I wave the American flag. Do you know a better flag to wave? Sure I love my country with all her faults. I’m not ashamed of that, never have been, never will be.”  John Wayne
  • “We must always remember that America is a great nation today not because of what government did for people but because of what people did for themselves and for one another.” Richard Nixon
  • “There is no limit to the greatness of America!” George W. Bush
  • “Liberals become indignant when you question their patriotism, but simultaneously work overtime to give terrorists a cushion for the next attack and laugh at dumb Americans who love their country and hate the enemy.” Ann Coulter
  • “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” Nathan Hale
  • “Patriotism is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.” Adlai E. Stevenson
  • “One, if you attack my integrity, I will defend myself. If you attack my patriotism, I will defend myself. If you come after my family, I will counter-attack viciously, I will destroy you.” Scott Ritter
  • “The American patriots of today continue the tradition of the long line of patriots before them, by helping to promote liberty and freedom around the world.” John Linder
  • “Patriotism is easy to understand in America. It means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country.” Calvin Coolidge
  • “This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a good place for all of us to live in.” Theodore Roosevelt
  • “You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world…. We are not a nation, so much as a world.” Herman Melville

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within – Ariel Durant

“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.”  – George Eliot

But isn’t it always that way with liberals? The only time they seem to make any sense at all is when they’re drunk or you are.

-Burt Prelutsky

Ya gotta be tough if your gonna be stupid.

“Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rapidly promoted by mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a piece of crap by the clean end.”


Laurence J. Peteropen

“Against logic there is no armor like ignorance.”

“Never judge a book by its movie.”

“Liberals are very broadminded: they are always willing to give careful consideration to both sides of the same side.”

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom
If the phone doesn’t ring, it’s me – Jimmy Buffett
The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.” – Thomas Jefferson
Pain is only temporary, victory is forever -Jeremy H. WinningLaurence J. Peter – “Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.”

Ronald Reagan – “The government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

Douglas Adams – “Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”

Ronald Reagan – “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'”

Mark Twain – “Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

Frank Zappa – “Communism doesn’t work because people like to own stuff.”

Peter Drucker – “So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.”

Michael Crichton – “Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.”

Thomas Sowell – “Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.”

Vince Lombardi – “If winning isn’t everything, why do they keep score?”

Ronald Reagan – “Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”

“Thanking Obama for killing Osama bin Laden is like going into McDonald’s and thanking Clown Ronald McDonald for the hamburger. The person cooking the burger should get the credit, not the Clown. It was the intelligence gained by the previous administration that found him.”

And you sir are weak! Unwilling and unable to look evil in the eye and deal with it!  – Jack Bauer

“If one does not fail at times, then one has not challenged himself.” -Ferdinand Porsche

Signs That Show You’ve Grown Up

Your potted plants are alive. And you can’t smoke a one of them.
Having sex in a twin-sized bed is absurd.
You keep more food than beer in the fridge.
6:00 AM is when you get up, not when you go to sleep.
You hear your favorite song on an elevator.
You carry an umbrella. You watch the Weather Channel.
Your friends marry and divorce instead of hookup and breakup.
You go from 130 days of vacation time to 7.
Jeans and a sweater no longer qualify as ‘dressed up.’
You’re the one calling the police because those darn kids next door don’t know how to turn down the stereo.
Older relatives feel comfortable telling sex jokes around you.
You don’t know what time Taco Bell closes anymore.
Your car insurance goes down and your car payments go up.
You feed your dog Science Diet instead of McDonald’s.
Sleeping on the couch makes your back hurt.
You no longer take naps from noon to 6 p.m.
Dinner and a movie = The whole date instead of the beginning of one.
Eating a basket of chicken wings at 3 a.m. would severely upset, rather than settle, your stomach.
You go to the drugstore for Ibuprofen and antacids, not condoms and pregnancy test kits.
A $4.00 bottle of wine is no longer ‘pretty good stuff.’
You actually eat breakfast foods at breakfast time.
“I just can’t drink the way I used to,” replaces “I’m never going to drink that much again.”
Over 90% of the time you spend in front of a computer is for real work.
You don’t drink at home to save money before going to a bar.

World’s Most Emotional Countries and Why

emotional-map2This is not my data, rather a Bloomberg study. What I can’t figure out is how the US is so emotional except for the political discord recently (the article below says they are happy).  I much more expected it from the Latin countries.

According to Bloomberg, the source of this map, here are the real reasons:

Singapore is the least emotional country in the world. ”Singaporeans recognize they have a problem,” Bloomberg Businessweek writes of the country’s “emotional deficit,” citing a culture in which schools “discourage students from thinking of themselves as individuals.” They also point to low work satisfaction, competitiveness, and the urban experience: “Staying emotionally neutral could be a way of coping with the stress of urban life in a place where 82 percent of the population lives in government-built housing.”

The Philippines is the world’s most emotional country. It’s not even close; the heavily Catholic, Southeast Asian nation, a former colony of Spain and the U.S., scores well above second-ranked El Salvador.

Post-Soviet countries are consistently among the most stoic. Other than Singapore (and, for some reason, Madagascar and Nepal), the least emotional countries in the world are all former members of the Soviet Union. They are also the greatest consumers of cigarettes and alcohol. This could be what you call and chicken-or-egg problem: if the two trends are related, which one came first? Europe appears almost like a gradient here, with emotions increasing as you move West.  (their emotions are sedated)

People in the Americas are just exuberant. Every nation on the North and South American continents ranked highly on the survey. Americans and Canadians are both among the 15 most emotional countries in the world, as well as ten Latin countries. The only non-American countries in the top 15, other than the Philippines, are the Arab nations of Oman and Bahrain, both of which rank very highly. (they have it good there)

English- and Spanish-speaking societies tend to be highly emotional and happy. Though the Anglophone nations of the world retain deep cultural links, it’s not clear if Spain’s emotional depth has anything to do with Latin America’s. According to Gallup, “Latin America leads the world when it comes to positive emotions, with Panama, Paraguay, and Venezuela at the top of that list.” Yes, even Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela is apparently filled with happy people. (they have to say that or be imprisoned)

Africans are generally stoic, with some significant exceptions. The continent is among the world’s least emotional, though there is wide variation, which serves as a non-definitive but interesting reminder of Africa’s cultural diversity. Each could be its own captivating case study. It’s possible that South Africa’s high rating has to do with its cultural ties to Western Europe, for example, and Nigeria’s may have to do with the recent protest movement in the south and sectarian violence in the north.  (life is tough for them, they cope)

The Middle East is not happy. Gallup notes, “Negative emotions are highest in the Middle East and North Africa, with Iraq, Bahrain, and the Palestinian Territories leading the world in negative daily experiences.” Still, that doesn’t quite fully explain the high emotions in the Levant and on the Arabian peninsula, compared to the lower emotions in Libya, Algeria, and Morocco. Perhaps this hints at how people in these countries are being affected by the still-ongoing political turmoil of the Arab Spring.  (they are rife with terrorists who brim with hate)

What am I missing? Every color-coded national boundary here tells a story. Why is Haiti so bereft of emotion compared to its neighbors? Why is Angola so heavy with feeling? Leave your thoughts in the comments or reach me on social media. (Haiti was founded on voodoo so they believe in the devil).

The Escape Key and The Guy Who Invented Ctl-Alt-Del….and Why

I worked in the PC Group, wisely sold to Lenovo years ago.  On the 20th anniversary, they looked for interesting tidbits from those who invented the PC.

David Bradley worked down the hall from me.  He’s the guy who invented Ctl-Alt-Del.  I asked him why and he told me DOS 1.0 keep crashing, so he wrote a quick and dirty program to restart the computer quickly without having to turn it off.

Later, David was kind enough to give me a copy of his personal copy of DOS 1.0 and Visicalc, a program for which I was a giant at using.  I still have it in my original IBM-PC I picked up off the trash pile while working there.

His best line though was when they had a reunion of the PC development team and Dave said to a reporter in front of everyone that he wrote the program, but Bill Gates made it famous.

THE ESC KEY

Bob Bemer invented this key.  I never worked with Bob, but per the NY Post, it goes like this:

The key was born in 1960, when an I.B.M. programmer named Bob Bemer was trying to solve a Tower of Babel problem: computers from different manufacturers communicated in a variety of codes. Bemer invented the ESC key as way for programmers to switch from one kind of code to another. Later on, when computer codes were standardized (an effort in which Bemer played a leading role), ESC became a kind of “interrupt” button on the PC — a way to poke the computer and say, “Cut it out.”

Why “escape”? Bemer could have used another word — say, “interrupt” — but he opted for “ESC,” a tiny monument to his own angst. Bemer was a worrier. In the 1970s, he began warning about the Y2K bug, explaining to Richard Nixon’s advisers the computer disaster that could occur in the year 2000. Today, with our relatively stable computers, few of us need the panic button. But Bob Frankston, a pioneering programmer, says he still uses the ESC key. “There’s something nice about having a get-me-the-hell-out-of-here key.”

I, KEYBOARD

Joseph Kay is a senior scientist at Yahoo! Research.

Why do outmoded keys, like ESC, persist? Our devices have legacies built into them. For more than a hundred years, when you wanted to write something, you sat down in front of a typewriter. But computers look different now — they’re like smartphones. It will be interesting to see whether in 10 or 15 years the whole idea of a keyboard will seem strange. We might be saying, “Remember when we used to type things?”

How would we control computers in this future-without-typing? Think of the Wii and Kinect, or even specialized input devices for games like Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution. All might be bellwethers for the rest of computing. We might see a rise in all sorts of input, like voice recognition and audio control — think about Siri.

Why Doesn’t Honey Spoil?

 

Compliments of Jonus Luster:

For something to spoil there has to be something to spoil it. Honey is almost unique among organic compounds in that it constitutes a “perfect storm” or attributes against spoilage:

Most honey is a supersaturated, the rest is a saturated solution of sugar. Sugar acts hygroscopic, that means it attracts water. Bacteria and some other microorganisms that come in contact with this solution are being desiccated (water is drawn from them into the solution) and explode (ok, ok, they kind of just shrivel, but I like the idea of them blowing up) and die.

This supersaturation of sugar also inhibits the growth of yeast and other fungal spores.

Its pH is 3.26 to 4.48, a killing field for bacteria. Combined with the above-mentioned supersaturation you have both a pH that weakens bacterial walls and a hygroscopic environment. Them bacters don’t stand no chance.

And if all that isn’t enough, bees process honey by means of an enzyme called glucose oxydase which modifies sugar into gluconic acid ( D-glucono-δ-lactone, a contributor to the above-mentioned pH) and hydrogen peroxide. You might know glucose oxidase from something else: it used to be called “Penicillin A” and is now known as Notatin. Poor bacteria, eh?

This is, by the way, why you should never leave a jar of honey standing open. The supersaturated sugar solution will absorb moisture from the air and gradually become weaker, losing its anti-bacterial properties.

One last warning: honey is, as we discover above, rather safe. It does, however, sometimes contain inactive spores of Clostridium botulinum, the bacterium responsible for botulism. Healthy humans don’t get sick from that but infants whose intestinal tract dilutes the honey without digesting it quickly can get sick from it. There is honey that has been radiated with gamma rays to kill those spores dead for good that can be purchased for lots of money. Just wait until the kid is a year old or so and you’ll be safe.

Things Airline Pilots Won’t Tell You

A collection of stories written by pilots
I’m an airline pilot flying domestically under the banner of a major airline.  Most people are unaware of how much of their flying is done by a “regional” airline.  Regional airlines today fly a huge percentage of the actual seat miles flown for their Major airline partner (Delta, United, US Air, etc.).  However we are paid a fraction of what the major airline pilots are paid, and even these major airline pilots are paid significantly less than their counterparts several years ago.
Many regional airline first officers make the same as your friendly pizza delivery driver.  (It is typical for most of them to make no more than 16K/year the first year.)Here are a few things we won’t tell you:-Don’t drink the coffee.  The potable water the aircraft is serviced with is absolutely disgusting.  Chemicals are inserted into the water tanks to prevent bad things from growing, but the bad taste of the coffee isn’t the coffee–its the chemicals…

-We don’t know where we are most of the time…  (kidding for the most part)  In all actuality there are much more sophisticated avionics units on most small general aviation aircraft.  Those units display many aspects of geographic awareness where most of ours simply display the route that we programmed in the flight management computer before departure.  We can tell you how far away we are from the next navigation facility and where we are in general terms, but aside from that and what we can see out the window, we typically only have a general idea of where we are when at cruise altitude.  Of course we all carry maps, but not too many of us will open the map and follow our progress on a 3 hour flight.  (That all changes as we begin descending toward the airport.  Situational Awareness is extremely important then.)

-We forget about the fasten seatbelt sign all the time.  When you look up at the sign (and disregard it typically) and it has been illuminated for the last 45 minutes in smooth air, we simply forgot.  Lots of guys will leave it on all the time.  However, sometimes we do have reports of choppy air ahead and will leave it on until we either experience it or take a wild guess that the air ahead will be smooth.

Some of us carry guns.  This is certainly public knowledge, but Federal Flight Deck Officers can carry a firearm in the cockpit.  Lots of protocol exists to ensure that the training, concealment, and utilization is standardized.

They never announce, “That was close !!” As in, a near mid-air encounter with other air traffic.Only from personal experience and asking the pilot as I disembarked from the aircraft, can I relate this story.Landing at Newark airport in 1986, I was sitting in a window seat about mid section, left side of the plane. I was looking out of the window for a good view of NYC. After seeing that, I was watching the area around the airport as we came in to land. We were about 300′ altitude, or less, and all of a sudden I was stunned to see another plane taking off. It was very close as it took off, nearly underneath our plane as it was climbing out. I don’t know how close we were, just that I could see the passengers in the windows of the other plane close enough to see if they were male or female. My view only lasted about 5 seconds, but I thought they were my last! When I got to the front of the plane and the pilot was standing there I said, “That was close…?” He said, “No, not really.” Very calmly.

I wonder how often that happens, and I bet they NEVER tell the passengers that piece of news!

Most pilots won’t tell you that “air traffic control delays” aren’t really ATC’s “fault”; these delays would be better termed “overscheduling delays”.The vast majority of what the airlines and system term “ATC delays” are actually from a pretty simple supply-and-demand situation.  There’s too many airplanes (demand) trying to land in a limited number of arrival slots (supply) at a given airport over a given time period.Airports have what are known as “arrival rates”.  A standard, one-runway airport with well-designed taxiways (including “high speed” taxiways) can safely handle, in good weather, around 60 operations an hour- one per minute.

This can be 60 landings in an hour, or 60 takeoffs in an hour, or 30 of each, or whatever combination you want to come up with, but that’s about the limit.

(This is a bit of an oversimplification with really good design, you can usually depart faster than arrive, but bear with me for now.)

So say you’ve got this airport, and say it’s got more than enough gates for all the airlines and planes that want to use it.  The only limiting factor is that 60/hour number, right?

Yeah- until crappy weather shows up.  Now they can only land 30 planes per hour.

Unfortunately, the ATC system- run by the FAA- does not regulate how many flights can be scheduled into an airport.  (That’s what deregulation gave us.)  So the airlines that operate in there all schedule as many as they think they can get passengers for.

So during this hour, the airlines have scheduled 60 arrivals, but only 30 planes can land because it’s a cloudy, rainy day.

What happens to the other 30 flights?  They get delayed.

And who delays them?  ATC.

And what do the airlines call these delays?  “Supply and demand delays”?  “Weather delays?”  Nope.

“ATC delays.”

But the reality is that they’re overscheduling delays.  If the airlines and/or the airports would limit the number of flights to the BAD weather limits, the number of delays in the system would be massively shrunk.

That the Airbus A320 is known to have routine cockpit power outtages.  And that this plane that you are on right now, which is among the most popular in the world, might not be fixed!

Such as United Flight 731 which “had no way to communicate with air traffic controllers or detect other planes around them in the New York City area’s crowded airspace.” [1]That “France-based Airbus told NTSB investigators in 2008 that 49 electrical failures similar to the Newark emergency happened on its planes in the U.S. and abroad before that episode. Nearly half involved the loss of at least five of six cockpit displays.” [1]And…that a mere 46 hours and $6,000 is the only thing holding back every single plane in the air from this crucial upgrade due to “economics”

The Airbus A320 family includes the A318, A319, A320 and A321 models — passenger jets with 100 to 220 seats.

And you wonder why I take trains and boats????

Note: these came from other people and I don’t guarantee 100% accuracy

Interesting Facts About Israel and the Middle East

Below is some vital information for you to assimilate and to ready to give to others who do not understand.

ISRAEL AND JERUSALEM FACTS

1. Israel became a state in 1312 B.C., two Millennia before Islam;

2. Arab refugees from Israel began calling themselves “Palestinians” in 1967, two decades after (modern) Israeli statehood;

3. after conquering the land in 1272 B.C., Jews ruled it for a thousand years and maintained a continuous presence there for 3,300 years;

4. the only Arab rule following conquest in 633 B.C. lasted just 22 years;

5. for over 3,300 years, Jerusalem was the Jewish capital. It was never the capital of any Arab or Muslim entity. Even under Jordanian rule, (east) Jerusalem was not made the capital, and no Arab leader came to visit it;

6. Jerusalem is mentioned over 700 times in the Holy Bible, but not once is it mentioned in the book of Qur’an;

7. King David founded Jerusalem ; Mohammed never set foot in it;

8. Jews pray facing Jerusalem ; Muslims face Mecca . If they are between the two cities, Muslims pray facing Mecca , with their backs to Jerusalem ;

9. in 1948, Arab leaders urged their people to leave, promising to cleanse the land of Jewish presence. 68% of them fled without ever setting eyes on an Israeli soldier;

10. virtually the entire Jewish population of Muslim countries had to flee as the result of violence and pogroms;

11. some 630,000 Arabs left Israel in 1948, while close to a million Jews were forced to leave the Muslim countries;

12. in spite of the vast territories at their disposal, Arab refuges were deliberately prevented from assimilating into their host countries. Of 100 million refugees following World War II, they are the only group to have never integrated with their co-religionists. Most of the Jewish refugees from Europe and Arab lands were settled in Israel , a country no larger than new jersey ;

13. there are 22 Muslim countries, not counting Palestine … there is only one Jewish state. Arabs started all five wars against Israel , and lost every one of them;

14. Fatah and Hamas constitutions still call for the destruction of Israel .. Israel ceded most of the west bank and all of Gaza to the Palestinian authority, and even provided it with arms;

15. during the Jordanian occupation, Jewish holy sites were vandalized and were off limits to Jews. under Israeli rule, all Muslim and Christian holy sites are accessible to all faiths;

16. out of 175 United Nations Security Council Resolutions up to 1990, 97 were against Israel ; out of 690 general assembly resolutions, 429 were against Israel ;

17. the U.N.. was silent when the Jordanians destroyed 58 synagogues in the old city of Jerusalem .. it remained silent while Jordan systematically desecrated the ancient Jewish cemetery on the mount of olives, an d it remained silent when Jordan enforced Apartheid laws preventing Jews from accessing the temple mount and Western Wall.

these are trying times. We must ask ourselves what we should be doing, and what we will tell our grandchildren about our actions during this crisis, when we had the chance to make a difference.