I’ve always been taught that different areas of the tongue are sensitive to different taste types.
Turns out that this is a lie!
All tastes can be detected all over the tongue.
The myth seems to have arisen due to an incorrect translation of a paper written in 1901.
It seems that for decades the world’s most successful directors have been taking out full-page ads to congratulate each other on records.
When Star Wars beat Jaws for the box office record Spielberg took out this ad congratulating George Lucas.
The tradition is explained in this Reddit comment:
“Later, after ET retook the record, Lucas ran an ad with R2D2 putting a crown on ET’s head.
Then in 1997 when the Star Wars Special Edition regained top-grossing spot, Spielberg’s congratulatory ad showed a long line of movie characters with R2D2 zipping past to the front of the line.
This ad of ET returning the crown to R2D2 fits in there somehow as well. I hadn’t heard of this one before toefer dug it up.
I guess it’s time for Jim Cameron to run an ad congratulating himself for beating his own record.”
This is my favorite version – the congratulations sent from Lucas to Cameron when Titanic took over the record.
Marie Claire SA just love what they call “The Naked Issue”. They get South African celebrities to pose naked in order to “raise awareness” for various charities.
I’m sure that it doesn’t hurt sales either.
My wife took one look at this image in the latest edition and said in a sympathetic voice “Oh no”. I thought the picture looked great so I asked her what could possibly be wrong.
Jules is a graphic designer and a perfectionist, so she noticed immediately that some poor designer had cut off Jeannie’s tummy. She pointed out that something looked funny about the stomach.
Even I could see (once shown) that the designer who cut off the tummy took things a little too far and chopped off some thigh at the same time.
It’s embarrassing for Jeannie D, but I strongly suspect that Jules was feeling sorry for the designer. And the editor that signed off the image.
This kind of mistake is Julie’s nightmare!
We all know that these images are retouched. But something like this just puts it right in your face. For instance, now I looked more closely and I strongly suspect that some of her bum has also been removed.
It all seems a little silly in the edition that is supposed to be natural.
China is an amazing place – massive, beautiful, and so different to what we Westerners are used to. It is a wonderfully beautiful country and I have blogged about it before.
National Geographic has this short photo essay of aerial photographs of China – “China From Above“. Below are some of the better images.
This one shows limestone pinnacles along the Li River
Blooming fields of rapeseed weaving through the hills. I like the way these steep hills look as if they regularly pop out of a flat landscape.
This one is interesting. They have planted rows of vegetation alongside the roads to keep the desert sands back. The buildings dotting the roadside every few miles house the workers who maintain the greenbelt.
This is a pretty cool extreme close up of a grain of salt and a peppercorn. It was taken using an electron scanning microscope and the original was in black and white – it was coloured digitally. Still pretty cool. Source
I recently read an unusual article in The Economist about a controversial phenomenon known as ball lightning. Basically ball lightning is a rare and unpredictable phenomenon where lightning forms a glowing ball which can persist and move around for several seconds rather than the normal flash.
Ball lightning appears to be inconsistent in color (pale blue, yellow, green, red and white), size (pea sized to several meters) and behavior (dropping form the sky, moving along the ground, and sometimes nailing people).
Yeah it sounds like bull, but they have been seen thousands of times by thousands of witnesses over the last few centuries. Several scientific groups are working on explaining ball lightning. Hell, even The Economist (normally very skeptical) has written a detailed article about the studies attempting to explain them.
Wikipedia has a detailed article on lightning balls which mentions that they were often sighted by fighter pilots during World War 2. Now we need a little aside: early in the war poorly trained Japanese pilots often flew erratic trajectories and the Allied pilots developed a derogatory term for them – foo fighters. The name came from a comic strip popular at the time, Smokey Stover, which often made use of the nonsense word foo.
So when the pilots repeatedly saw the erratically moving balls of fire they became known as foo fighters. Because lightning balls (foo fighters) were/are largely unexplained a lot of people think that they are UFOs (rubbish). Someone who is fascinated by UFOs is Dave Grohl who therefore chose the name for his band the Foo Fighters.
It’s like the whole 6 degrees idea but for concepts instead of people. Awesome.
When I was a teenager I used to enjoy testing my ability to hold me breath. My eventual record was 2 minutes and 8 seconds. I was pretty happy with that but I was aware that pros like Houdini and pearl divers could do that same for 4 or 5 minutes.
Then I read this report about what seems to be a bogus claim to have set the record at 15:58! It might be true, but there are some definite doubts cast in the comments attached to the article.
A more accepted record is 13:42 set by a guy named Robert Foster in 1959. That one was included in the Guinness Book of Records until they stopped reporting records that may tempt dangerous attempts.
This is the text from the 1978 edition of the book:
The world record for voluntarily staying underwater is 13 min 42.5 sec by Robert Foster, aged 32, an electronics technician of Richmond, California, who stayed under 10 ft 3.05m of water in the swimming pool of the Bermuda Palms Motel at San Rafeal, California, USA, on 15 March 1959. He hyperventilated with oxygen for 30 min before his descent. The longest unprepared record is 6 min 29.8 sec by Georges Pouliquin in Paris on 3 Nov. 1912. It must be stressed that record-breaking of this kind is extremely dangerous.
These are incredible records – even 5 minutes is a very, very long time to imagine not breathing. 2:08 is more than enough for me!
Here is a weird and interesting page showing pictures from an exhibition of portraits of people before and after their deaths. It’s pretty haunting to see – one of those things that gets you to think about things differently. Clicking through to the pictures enhances the effect because there are little excerpts about the people before and after death.
This is the text from the guy on the left above:
Peter Kelling, 64
First portrait: November 29 2003
Peter Kelling had never been seriously ill in his life. He was a civil servant working for the health and safety executive, and didn’t allow himself any vices. And yet one day he was diagnosed with bowel cancer. By the time I met him, the cancer had spread to his lungs, his liver and his brain. “I’m only 64,” he muttered. “I shouldn’t be wasting away like this”Second portrait: December 22 2003
At night he was restless, he told me, and kept turning things over in his mind. He cried a lot. But he didn’t talk about what was troubling him. In fact he hardly talked at all and his silence felt like a reproach to those around him. But there was one thing that Peter Kelling followed to the very last and that was the fortunes of the local football team. Until the day he died, every game was recorded on the chart on the door of his room
The associated blog says that a lot of people are offended by these pics. Bollocks… Death is a fact of life and these guys all consented to being part of the exhibition. Facing mortality might be distressing but instead of getting offended you should explore your feelings and thoughts. Hard thoughts should be faced not hidden behind outrage.
I was emailed this analogy illustrating progressive tax a while back. It’s brilliant – we need more clear explanations like this. A similar one for evolution would be great…
Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
So, that’s what they decided to do.
The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. “Since you are all such good customers,” he said, “I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20.” Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.
The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men – the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’ They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay. And so:
Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.
“I only got a dollar out of the $20,” declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,” but he got $10!”
“Yeah, that’s right,” exclaimed the fifth man. “I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got ten times more than I!”
“That’s true!” shouted the seventh man. “Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!”
“Wait a minute,” yelled the first four men in unison. “We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!”
The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.
The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!
And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore.
Here is an report about a dummy tourist in Australia who spotted a 4m saltwater croc approaching his boat. He wanted a good photo with the thing so he leaned out of his boat and started “teasing it”. Long story short, he got his good picture but almost lost an arm! Stupid…
