Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm; it moves stones, it charms brutes.
Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity and truth accomplishes no victory without it.

- Bulwer-Lytton
 

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

 - The web

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

- Thoreau
 

The Secret Life of Plants - "We now know there's an ability of self-recognition in plants, which is highly unusual and quite extraordinary that it's actually there," says Dr Trewavas.  "But why has no one come to grips with it?  Because the prevailing view of a plant, even among plant biologists, is that it's a simple organism that grows reproducibly in a flower pot..." Also auroras and jellyfish, if you really want to know...

Following Benford's Law - Dr Theodore P Hill asks his mathematics students at the Georgia Institute of Technology to go home and either flip a coin 200 times and record the results, or merely pretend to flip a coin and fake 200 results.  The following day he runs his eye over the homework data, and to the students' amazement, he easily fingers nearly all those who faked their tosses. "The truth is," he said, "most people don't know the real odds of such an exercise, so they can't fake data convincingly..."

Liberalism and Neurology: Free to Choose? - Free will is one of the trickiest concepts in philosophy, but also one of the most important.  Without it, the idea of responsibility for one's actions flies out of the window, along with much of the glue that holds a free society (and even an unfree one) together.  If businessmen are no longer responsible for their contracts, criminals no longer responsible for their crimes and parents no longer responsible for their children, then social relations will be very different...

Film Studies - includes Talk to Her, Irma Vep and a comparison of Rashomon and Citizen Kane, Sam Peckinpah, Solaris (both versions - AND the book - and Donnie Darko.  More to come...

Let's Go for a Drive - Street naming conventions...

Loosen Your Tie - The history of neck gear, how to buy a good one...

Are You a Professional? - According to Andersen Consulting Worldwide, 90% of professionals they tested got all 4 questions wrong; many preschoolers got several correct answers.

Consciousness Machine - If you can measure levels of unconsciousness, by default you must be able to measure levels of consciousness.  Just don't try doing it on a Monday morning...

Do Not Dodge Moral Anguish - She continued to appear to enjoy music until her death some years later.  This patient demonstrated the dilemma we face in determining whether people in an apparent persistent vegetative state have any residual human capacity that would persuade us to sustain their lives, even by artificial means.  Her case was a reminder of how much we don't understand about the brain - even those in apparent vegetative states may have ways of connecting to the world around them...

Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty - This unusual artwork is visible only when the waters of the Great Salt Lake drop below 4,197.8 feet (1,280.2 m) - sometimes years go by between sightings...

Butt Face it - When you've made an ass of yourself, what else is there?

Eye Test - We have the results right here...

Face Ache - Migrating migraine?

Genetic Engineering Run Amok? - We could pack zoos into a much smaller space if we just concentrated on combining the animals' best features...

IQ - Since an Intelligence Quotient uses your age as the divisor, that means you must keep getting smarter as you get older just to stay in the same place.  Life is like that.  This article contains a sample IQ test with answers.

If Buying Paint Were Like Buying an Airline Ticket - "We sell only a certain number of litres on any given weekend.  Oh, and by the way, the price just went up..."

Deep into Sleep - While researchers probe sleep's functions, sleep itself is becoming a lost art

In Writing As in Life - This rather longish short story manages to incorporate characters and meaning so unclear that Hemingway scholars more than 5 decades later cannot agree on what the characters represent, what (if any) insight the characters achieved, who (if anyone) was the protagonist, who served as models for the characters, where the idea for the plot came from, nor how to interpret Ernest’s remarks about this story uttered many years later.

Mensa Quiz - You may have the potential to become a Mensa member.  Do you care?

Mezzo Cammin - Poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Carlos Williams, Donald Rumsfeld and others...

Which way to Rattlesden - Why?  Who would want to go there anyway?

Games People Play - Many people, it is said, regard life as a game. Increasingly, both biologists and economists are tending to agree with them.  Game theory, a branch of mathematics developed in the 1940s and 1950s by John von Neumann and John Nash, has proved a useful theoretical tool in the study of the behaviour of animals, both human and non-human...

La Cucarachas - Cockroaches eat almost anything, including each other if necessary.  An A4 piece of paper will feed one cockroach for a week.  One cockroach is thought to have travelled to space after it was found in the Apollo XII command shuttle...

Pilots - Fly the friendly skies!

The lighter side of bombs - "Army bomb disposal experts have blown up a box stuffed full of used tampons in New Zealand..."

Passing the 8th Grade plus a few Infrequently asked questions such as: "The sun is 400 times larger than the moon and nearly as many times as far away from the earth, so the moon sometimes gets the chance to blot out the sun perfectly.  People have always overreacted to such total eclipses, hence the fact that: (choose one of the following)...

Triangle Area Problem - How can this be?

Transforming Experiences - three pictures that begin as one thing and end up as something else...

Young Bill Gates - Travelling through life at high speed...

I shoulda stayed in shcool instead of getting a job painting signs!...

Brits have 7 new Classes: higher; middle; and lower professional and managerial;  self- and small employers; lower technical; lower-level service and sales; and routine.  Routine?

Come again?  You'd like to drink cow piss??

Conflating News, Entertainment and Propaganda - young people, by far the hardest to reach segment of the political news audience, are abandoning mainstream sources of election news and increasingly citing alternative outlets, including comedy shows such as the Daily Show and Saturday Night Live, as their source for election news...

Nuclear Waste - the radioactive material that's left over - and the money that isn't...

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