Showing posts with label lists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lists. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Eleven incredible facts that will change the way you blah blah blah.



1. Pizza Hut was founded closer to Cleopatra's lifetime than to the era of the construction of the pyramids.
I mean, this stands to reason.  We've all seen pictures of Cleopatra lounging around on some boat on the Nile, floating past the pyramids, so clearly they already existed by the time she came on the scene.  Mind you, it was in a movie.  Probably fucking Kubrick, faking Egyptian history just like he faked the moon landings.

2. More pictures are taken today of Justin Beiber than were taken of Justin Beiber in the whole of the 18th century.
Again, pretty obvious.  Justin Beiber was only born in 2008 so not many photographs of him COULD be taken in the 18th century. Especially since photography wasn't invented until the 19th century. Duh. Sub-prime crisis notwithstanding.

3. The gap between the invention of the written word and the very first tweet was a mere 5200 years.
Around 3200 BC, the Sumerians discovered that by scratching their names into wet concrete they could eternally preserve their ill-fated teenage romances in the sidewalk outside their houses.  Then in 1976 Tim Berners-Lee invented Al Gore and tweeted "Watson, come in here, I need you. LOL!!!" using his fax machine. This EXPONENTIAL development in communication was mostly funded by the military - loose lips sink ships?!



4. The average smart phone of today contains more explosive power than the Saturn V rocket than lifted Stanley Kubrick into space.
Point that browser to AddisonMashley.com - the website that lets you hook up with hot chefs suffering from endocrine disorders.  Conversely, I pointed my Saturn V there and it just crashed.

5. George Washington, first president of the United States, despite being "Father Of The Nation", had no offspring.
That is, none I could track down with a cursory reading of Wikipedia.  Next time I should look at the page about George Washington I guess.

6. Egypt's Sphinx was largely built with the aid of woolly mammoths.
Really, it's true.  At least it should be.  It would explain the nose. Or not, I suppose.

7. France was using the guillotine when Star Wars was released.
Although it was called "La Guerre Des Etoiles", which literally translated means something like, "I Played The Guitar On The Toilet", perhaps explaining the lingering popularity of the guillotine. Nevertheless, for a few months in 1977, it became fashionable among those about to be decapitated to say, "If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."



8. My daughter is literally older than sliced bread.
The Hatchling is five.  My bread was baked just last weekend.  No comparison.  But incredible to think about, really, when you consider that before sliced bread was invented, a sandwich could only be made by layering two whole loaves on top of each other, which was almost impossible to eat, moreso if you were only five.

9. If you were born in 1800, the world population has septunkled since your birth.
The population of Earth has increased from 1 billion to 7 billion in that time. This figure, however, doesn't take into account the precipitous crash in the world population of Tyrannosaurus Rex over the same time.  Tragically, by the dawn of the 21st century, less than 1000 T-Rexes were alive in the wild.  

10. There are whales alive today that have never read Moby Dick.
Despite some bowhead whales living off the coast of Alaska being up to 200 years old, and thus having had plenty of time to read Moby Dick, especially when you consider that almost none of them work full-time and in fact receive substantial government hand-outs so don't exactly have many demands on their time, researchers estimate that the majority of whales derive their at-best cursory knowledge of Moby Dick from the 1980's animated children's TV show, Star Blazers, in which the sunken WW2 battleship Yamato is converted to a starship and sent off on a desperate mission to save the earth - a fact which probably tells you more about whales than the aforementioned TV show does about Moby Dick.  Let's see how they do with Yann Martel.

11. If all of this year was represented by the Mesozoic Era, Easter would have been at the end of the Triassic.
200 million years is a long time between chocolate eggs, mass-extinction or not.




Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Fund-raising ideas


Movember - we've all seen the slow-mo train wreck happening year after year right?  It's all about guys growing a mo during November and getting sponsored to raise money for men's health issues.  It's not something I've done myself, despite knowing I would dominate, for two reasons:

  1. It really annoys me that people will happily donate to charity only when someone else is being made to suffer or look absurd.  The ice-bucket challenge - yeah it raised a lot of money but why can't people just donate to worthy causes without all these shenanigans?
  2. My Smaller Half says my Mo is too scratchy.  Sad face.
Nevertheless, it seems to be an effective way to raise money for worthy causes.  Since I won't actually participate in these fund-raisin exercises, I decided that the best way for me to contribute would be to suggest some other monthly fund-raising activities for worthy causes that sometimes struggle to get the support they desperately need.  

  1. Jamuary - Broadcast noise on your neighbor's wi-fi frequencies for a month, and raise money for music education in schools.
  2. Sledruary - Get sponsored to use a toboggan as your sole means of personal transport.  Funds raised to support measures preventing global warming.
  3. Fartch - Raise money by catching all your farts in a jar for a month.  Monies used to support research into Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
  4. Tape-ril - Help raise money for diabetes research by swallowing tapeworm eggs and getting sponsors to pay you for every pound you shed in the next month.
  5. Nay - All you have to do is say "Nay" and "Yea" instead of "No" and "Yes" for a month to help set up holiday farms for retired racehorses.
  6. Dune - To raise money for water purification kits for African villages, get sponsored to wear blue contact lenses all month.  Bonus sponsorship for drinking your own urine.
  7. Jewly - Vow to not visit cheezburger.com for a month to raise money for charities fighting antisemitism.
  8. Orcgust - Get your sponsors together and play D&D every night for a month to help fund the fight against autism.
  9. Sectember - Get sponsors to contribute for each follower you indoctrinate into your personal cult.  Have a blast and gather donations for Scientology de-programming all month.
  10. Cocktober - Wear only a chicken suit all month to raise money for eliminating non-free-range chicken farms.
  11. Movember - See the intro...
  12. Freecember - Get your friends/family/colleagues to pledge to support you to eschew money and only engage in barter for a month.  All donations go to the IMF.

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Placebo effect



The placebo effect is oft misunderstood.  Strictly speaking, the placebo effect is the subjective or objective improvement in a patient's health after being administered a deliberately inert treatment which they believed would genuinely benefit them.  The label tends to get stuck on any number of unrelated though equally baffling phenomena.  Here's a few examples of similar effect which are in fact not placebo effects:

The nocebo effect. This is the subjective or objective deterioration in a patient's health after being administered a deliberately inert treatment which they believed would genuinely harm them.

The albedo effect.  This is the subjective or objective improvement of a patient's surface reflectivity after being adminisered a deliberately inert treament which they believed would genuinely make them more shiny.

The gazebo effect. This is the subjective or objective transformation of the patient into an outdoor, open-walled roofed area, usually octagonal, after being administered a deliberately inert treatment which they believed was a psychedelic drug.

The Placido effect.  This is the subjective or objective improvement in a patient's singing voice, particularly in the tenor range, after being administered a deliberately inert treatment which they believed was a gift from the Aoedean muse.

The libido effect.  This is the subjective or objective improvement in a patient's sexual drive or endurance after being administered a deliberately inert treatment which they believed was an aphrodisiac.

The bushido effect.  This is the subjective or objective improvement in the patient's ability to temper his violent martial instincts with forebearance, serenity and insight, after being administered a deliberately inert treatment which they believed was prescribed by the long-dead Japanese author and diplomat Nitobe Inazo. To be honest, it doesn't really come up that often but I thought I'd include it for completeness.

So the next time you go to your doctor complaining of having changed into a pavilion, belvedere, rotunda or pergola while you were tripping, and he mistakenly suggests that perhaps it was due to the placebo effect, you'll know precisely what to say!

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Investigative phrenology

My parents had a small phrenology bust sitting on the mantlepiece in the seldom-used dining room, where the shiny table, uncomfortable chairs and musty lounge-suite also lived.  I was poking at the lumps and bumps in the Hatchling's head and wondering what the significance of them might be when I started wondering if perhaps the entire scientific bulwark of phrenology might be undermined by interpersonal variation in the character of each region of the skull.

A small amount of experimentation on myself involving three D-batteries, a wire coat-hanger, and a couple of largish gramophone needles enabled me to map out the contours of my own cognition.  A fascinating GAAAAAAAARRRGHH process indeed.  Since I'm not much of a artiste on ye olde computer I googled up a numbered version of the phrenology head (pictured above), which you can correlate with the list below:
  1. Pride
  2. Envy
  3. Corduroy
  4. Love
  5. Depth perception
  6. Embezzelment
  7. Puns
  8. Man-o-wars
  9. Beft
  10. Musicality
  11. Vengeance
  12. The Spanish civil war
  13. Chocolate
  14. Slip-slop-slap
  15. Soviet monuments
  16. Running writing
  17. Writing running
  18. Willpower
  19. Blogging
  20. Chronic condition self-management
  21. Batman
  22. Fashion
  23. Sex
  24. Arithmetic
  25. Taxidermy
  26. Comparative religion
  27. Black powder
  28. Bacon
  29. Architecture
  30. Flattery
  31. Insolence
  32. Procrastination
  33. Politics
  34. Fatherhood
  35. Erbium
What I find fascinating GRAAAAAAAGHH is the fact that every single experience, thought, emotion and memory that I ever have had or will have can be expressed as a combination of items from the list above.  For example, last week when I graduated with a medical degree and stood proudly on stage as a doctor, that experience was basically 1 + 18 + 23 + 26 + 28, or more descriptively, Pride + Willpower + Sex + Comparative Religion + Bacon.

You should try it yourself.  It could change your GAAAAAAHKK life.