Sucks to be Phillip Wilcher

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Phil's a great guy, but seriously. It sucks to be him.

For those of you who don't know -- which would be most of you, I assume -- Phillip Wilcher is the legendary Fifth Wiggle. The one who left The Wiggles because he was too "serious" about his music.

Ouch, Phil.

Ouch.

What IQ Actually Is

What actually is IQ?

We all know that it stands for 'intelligence quotient', or maybe we don't, but I did, and that it is a number. The bigger the number, the more intelligent you (allegedly) are!

An IQ of 100 is considered to be the average, and each standard deviation is 15 points. That is how the IQ is actually defined; so, say, if the population gets increasingly more intelligent, your IQ will drop. Unlucky, you!

This means that 95% of the population is between the IQs of 70 and 130. That means if your IQ is over 130, you're smarter than 97.5% of the population! While people disagree on what a 'genius' actually is -- some say you need an IQ of at least 150, others say 180, those people are probably jerks and racists -- I think we can agree that if your IQ is over 130, you should be allowed to high five in public spaces without 97.5% of the population giving you weird looks.

Jerks AND racists.

Avo Pataca -- What a wonderful phrase!

If you're like me, you've never heard of Macau before in your life. As it turns out, it's a lovely little "special administrative region" (technical term, apparently) of the People's Republic of China, like Hong Kong, except nowhere near as well known. Also unlike Hong Kong, I had a tendency to believe that the people who lived there were actual macaws until I looked into it further.

Naturally, the fact that this was not the case disappointed me greatly.

Anyway, as lovely as I'm sure Macau is, it's not what this is blog post is about. It's about something completely different: the pataca!

The pataca is the Macanese (read: Macau-ian) unit of currency. It's 100% backed by the Hong Kong dollar, rather than being its own thing, and according to Wikipedia, HKD$1.00 = MOP$1.03. Wicked!

Despite using the dollar sign, the pataca isn't a dollar. It's a pataca! And MOP$0.01 isn't one cent, it's one avo. Ten avos make a ho, and so, accordingly, ten hos make a pataca. That's something to keep in mind next time you see a lot of skin out on town; "Oh look," you can wryly comment to your cultured clubbing buddies, "the collective noun for that group of females is a pataca."

Baby Pelican Seizures

In unsurprising news, parent pelicans feed their young. In more surprising news, however, it turns out that young pelicans undergo violent seizures just after they've been fed.

Unlike the effects of sugar on your usual five year old, however, a totally normal and healthy pelican child will seizure itself into unconsciousness after eating. What. Let me run that by you again, just so you can see exactly how much sense it doesn't make:

After eating, a child pelican will violently seize until it falls unconscious.

Fortunately for the pelican children, by looking into it a bit deeper, you can make it make sense. Hooray! Unfortunately for the pelican children, this is achieved by mentioned that mother pelicans drag their children around by the head before feeding them. "Roughly" was the precise adverb used. What the devil, mother pelicans? Why would you drag your children around by their heads at all, never mind do it roughly? Are you actively trying to encourage them to spaz into submission?

WHAT KIND OF PARENTS ARE YOU?

Anyway, I started writing this several hours ago, and then I went to the theatre to see Rent. It was pretty darn good and I recommend it! Kudos to all involved. Now I've forgotten my train of thought, but hey. You get the idea.

Parents' Names

Mitchell Crouch says (9:43 PM)

Okay. Today I learn that apparently it throws me more than it should when people refer to their parents by their names.

It was like a roadblock in my train of thought. Interestink.

Also, ducks and pandas! I made a note of them because they're interesting, but I didn't get a chance to write anything. Didn't quite finish the lab report due at 8:30 tomorrow morning but oh well. I'll do a killer post on Saturday, hopefully, and with any luck, a decent one tomorrow as well. I'm working Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, with a test on Wednesday, so I don't know how much interesting stuff I'll learn then. Just a head's up in advance. :\

The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis

Cats and kittens, I'm about to blow your minds.

Today I learnt that there is a subset of academia who believe that the distinctiveness of Homo sapiens, compared to other apes, is due to us having evolved from aquatic apes. That is to say (in layman's terms), there are people who believe that we are, all of us, sea monkeys.

Keep in mind that this is just a theory, of course, not absolute solid fact. There is some pretty interesting evidence to support it, too. Activate: dot point mode!

• Bipedalism is a nonsense way of going about being terrestrial! It is stupid for your back, knees and organs. In the water, however, your torso and joints are supported and you can breathe more easily.
• We are pretty hairless! You know what other mammals are pretty hairless? Rhinoceroses and elephants, and we already know that they have aquatic ancestors. Also dolphins and whales! Need I say more?
• Our babies are fat. Apparently the specific type of fat (i.e. subcutaneous) is good for insulation and streamlining in the water.
• We have descended larynxes. Only (other?) aquatic mammals and large deer have this trait.

• A bunch of stuff in our nose to stop water from getting in there.
• Glands (sebaceous glands) all over our skin to produce a magical kind of lubricant.
• Our brains require iodine (and a few other things also), which is (are) most easily obtained from seafood.
• Voluntary breath control, which allows us to hold our breath under water, and also pronounce vowels! That is why lesser apes cannot speak our holy tongue. They can't breathe properly, because evolution did them wrong.
• Vestigial webbing between our fingers. I think most of us commented on how our hands looked like duck's feet when we were kids. Or maybe I just had a bizarre childhood.

• Our spawn have waxy coatings over them. Oh those crazy spawn of ours!
• Our kidneys. Apparently they are aquakidneys.

And, last but not least:

• The mammalian diving reflex!

Dot point mode, deactivate! DYOO dyoo dyooooo...

The mammalian diving reflex lets us stay underwater for a longer amount of time by optimising our breathing systems. It's like a Game Booster for our respiration system. Seals, otters and dolphins all have pretty strong MDFs, and we also have a cheap pirated version of it! Hooray for pirate diving reflexes!

The reflex itself works by slowing our heart rate down 10-25% as soon as our face comes in to contact with water below 21 C. That's pretty impressive, body! Unfortunately, seals do it better, dropping from 125bpm to 10bpm. So. Thanks for showing us up there, seals. After that, the blood in our hands and feet stops circulating, because hey, we don't need those! If we go deep enough, eventually everything except our brain and heart is cut off. Which is kind of creepy, in my opinion, but no one cares what a crazy man on the internet has to say about these sort of things.

Obviously, this all sounds pretty good for a case for the aquatic ape hypothesis. Unfortunately, most of the evidence can be explained more easily with a less radical account of human evolution. It isn't disproven or anything, I'm just sayin' so you don't all run around declaring us all to be merman.

I find the aquatic ape hypothesis interesting from a cultural perspective too, though. What if Atlantis isn't so far from the truth after all? And mankind has had a strong affinity with sailing and everything. Even the native Hawaiians canoed to New Zealand. I also read somewhere that water was "Jesus' element", since he walked on it and turned it to wine and was himself "the fisher of men" and all that. But water is also vital to our very lives, so I guess it's not that surprising that we should find a few cultural allusions to it.

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• Police sniffer dogs are trained using some chemical that isn't illegal. Which isn't surprising. I wish I could remember what it was.
• People get sleepy in the early afternoon, after lunch, because it's twelve hours after our sleepiest part of sleep and our biological clocks are whacky
• 'n', apparently. I have written 'n' on my hand to remind me of something else that was fascinating that I learnt today. I have no idea what it was, though.

Lightning Strikes

Lightning strikes most frequently in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to NASA. I think their results are biased towards land, though, and they don't keep a very close eye on what goes on in the middle of the ocean, probably because nobody cares.

Sorry I don't have more to say, I've wasted my day playing Magicka. It's been awesome.

Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson

If you ever played the classic '90s 'Incredible Machine' games, you'd already be familiar with the basic principles behind Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson's work. Rube and Heath were two amazingly talented artists/inventors who drew overly complicated machines designed to accomplish a simple task for the lols. Lol!

Anyway their stuff is really cool and you should check it out instead of focussing on how late this update is. I still have essays and lab reports to write and daily updates are tricky. :(

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• The difference between 'distinctly' and 'distinctively'
• Cotton has a fire point of 210 C
• The rest of lyrics I didn't already know to 'Savages' from Disney's Pocahontas

Cancer and Crabs

So everyone knows that the animal symbol thing for the starsign Cancer is a crab, and everyone also knows that cancer is a horrific, painful disease. What you probably do NOT know, however, is that cancer the disease is named for the Lat root word that means 'crab', since the pain of cancer was described as being similar to that of being pincered by a crab. That makes a lot more sense now!

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• The mineral dundasite was named after Dundas, in Tasmania, Australia
• 'Kibitz' is synonymous with 'chat'
• This is supposedly the most expensive painting in the world. I'm not joking.

'Hugger-Mugger' is an Actual Word

No, seriously. It is.

Furthermore, it's one of those great words that doesn't mean what it sounds like it should. I don't know if there's a word to describe those kind of words, but I think there should be. 'Antiphononym', or something like that, literally meaning 'opposite of sound word'. My Greek is right up there with my the Lat, clearly.

Anyway, hugger-mugger sounds to me like it's the kind of word that would describe a person who would appear to be your hugger, but is actually your mugger. Sort of like a frenemy, but perhaps more antagonistic, like a betrayer? Maybe they are literally mugging you for your hugs, the devious cads.

A hugger-mugger should be the kind of person who threatens who with death unless you hug you them, and then once you're dead, they'll hug you anyway.

But no. In actuality, it has two meanings, and neither of them are anything like that. The first meaning is 'disorder or confusion'.

...and the second meaning is 'secrecy'.

So what's up with that, hugger-mugger? I guess I am confused about the secrets behind why such a cool phrase is being wasted on such rubbish definitions, but beyond that, we may never make any more sense out of this.

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• Mangoes grow on the flowering plants Mangifera, which are part of the chashew family
• The chemistry textbook 'Atkins and Shriver' was written by Atkins and his colleagues, none of whom were named Shriver, but one of whom was named...
• ...'LeGrande Slaughter'. Someone named 'LeGrande Slaughter' actually legit exists. This world is amazing.

Blogger Maintainence

Sorry for the downtime there, folks! As I understand it, Blogger is back up and running now, and the post about pasta has been restored. Unfortunately, read-only mode meant that I couldn't get a post in yesterday, and I don't really have time to try for a catch up. Sorry!

Yesterday I learn that Blogger is an unreliable platform, and updates will be back to usual this evening after I've learnt something interesting today.

Pasta is Egg and Flour

Also, it's believed to have originated in China, not Italy. Ouch, Italians! I'd love to tell you more about this because it's actually pretty interesting but I have lab reports to do instead. Ouch, me!

Also Blogger is experiencing technical difficulties as a result of scheduled maintenance (or so I understand) and this has failed to post a few times now, so here's hoping that it goes up now and y'all can party harder.

The Difference Between Real and Fake Smiles

So according to the BBC, I only have about a 50% success rate of determining whether a smile is genuine or fake. Unlucky, me! Fortunately, at the end of the lovely little quiz to which I've just hyperlinked you, they explain some cool stuff about fake smiles.

Sure, you could go there and read the serious, factual version, but you could also stay here and read the fun, exciting version!

Or BOTH.

The primary difference between real and fake smiles comes down to the muscles that are used, since they are controlled by different parts of your brain. Fair dinkum smiles are generated automatically, and your cheek muscles rear up, creasing your eyes a bit, and your eyebrows dip slightly. This, then, is a trustworthy face.

On the other hand, a fake smile is generated consciously, by pulling the cheek muscles outwards. Intense fake smiles can also have lines around the eyes.

Or something like that, anyway. I only spent two minutes reading and regurgitating and now I have to get back to uni work. But there you go! Now you know what kind of face to trust and what kind of face to stab to death.

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• Joe Walker looks uncannily like Mark Hamill
• Canada has nuclear reactors
• The appearance of our letter 'A' is derived, in a very convoluted way, from that of an ox. That may have made for a more interesting blog article, actually. Oh well.

Life is Busy!

Well, today I picked up a few interesting tidbits:

• How metal poisoning works
• Things actually have a critical mass beyond which they go nuclear
• Apparently Norwegians apply some magic fishing oil to their hands or something?

I'd love to go into these in a bit more detail, but I'm afraid that I don't really have the time, what with me needing to pump out either an essay or a lab report each day for the next week or so. Which is unfortunate, but you know. Oh well.

In your spare time, you can analyse the following Pokemon team! RANDOM:

• Zangoose
• Skorupi
• Bastiodon
• Exeggutor
• Corphish
• Primeape

'Bar' Has 37 Different Meanings

...according to the World English Dictionary. Twenty seven of these are nouns, eight are verbs and two are prepositions.

Cognitive Dissonance and Crazy UFO Cults

So cognitive dissonance, eh? It's one of the most well-studied theories of psychology that pretty much says that when experiences don't match up with expectations, the human mind does some hasty rationalising and makes excuses for itself to try to improve your horribly crushed self esteem.

See, it's like a political cartoon! That's the joke. And long story short, today I learnt that I don't know how to draw anvils. You can all leave now.

Or you can stay! And I will tell you that when one certain Leon Festinger heard about one certain Dorothy's Martin's crazy UFO cult, he decided to write a study about it! This is because the crazy UFO cult (henceforth referred to as "the crazy UFO cult") believed that on the 21st of December, in the Year of Our Lord 1954, the world would end in a giant wet Cataclysm and everyone would die except for them, because their buddies the aliens would rock up at midnight and save them.

The crazy UFO cult knew that this was true because Dorothy Martin had been told so by the aliens from 'Clarion' who wrote stuff using her body as their pen. That is to say, because she wrote it down. And I'm pretty sure Clarion is in Illinois. Or Utah.

EDIT: As it turns out, it's in Illinois AND Utah! And Iowa, and Pennsylvania, and any other number of places that have placed called 'Clarion'.

Well, the crazy UFO cult was in Chicago, which is in Illinois, too, so the aliens weren't really that far away. Maybe Dot was just expecting some light rain in Chicago and thought her sister-in-law from Clarion could come pick her up, and the whole thing spiralled out of control?

Or, more likely, the crazy UFO cult was just crazy.

Anyway, Leon was all like, woah, dudes, check it out, this crazy UFO cult is crazy and also wrong, let's infiltrate it to see how badly they break down due to cognitive dissonance when they realise just how wrong they are!

So, in the interests of ethical science and totally not producing many lulz-worthy Facebook statuses for their friends, they did just that. Apparently it was quite difficult to convince the crazy UFO cult that the sadistic cognitive psychologists were genuine and not just trying to goof them, which makes sense, considering that most of the members of the crazy UFO cult were crazy and had forsaken their entire lives (given up all their worldly possessions, left jobs, uni, husbands, goldfish, wives, etc.) so that Dot's sister-in-law from Clarion could pick them up. Which precisely why Leon wanted to study (and not laugh at and publicise) their reaction to being so, so, SO wrong.

So finally, the big night arrived! All the crazy UFO cult cultists gathered on their crazy UFO cult hill ready and eager to be abducted as soon as midnight arrived.

And then midnight arrived!

And nothing happened.

So the very first rationalisation was: our watches are fast! It is only 1954 and our televisions still use cathode rays. We will wait a bit longer until midnight!

And nothing happened.

At about four o'clock in the morning, when it became clear that the crazy UFO cult could have just bloody well walked to Clarion by now, Dotty K began to cry bitter tears of being forsaken by her alien pals. Fortunately, as soon as she was done, she received another telepathic SMS from them saying that the crazy UFO cult had done SUCH a great job believing in them, that Alien-God had decided not to Cataclysm after all, jolly good, pat on the back, so go spread word about how nice I am, and that if people ever stop believing in me then they will burn in fire and also brimstone.

So at this point, reasons Leon, the crazy UFO cult cultists' cognitive dissonance is leading the reasoning in their head to go a little something like this:

Oh balderdash,

The world didn't end

And everyone thinks I'm crazy.

I'm feeling more than a little sheepish right now,

Let me tell you!

IT IS TIME TO MAKE EVERYONE THINK THE SAME THING I DO SO THEN MY CRAZINESS ISN'T CRAZY,

IT IS INSTEAD JUSTIFIED BY AN IMPARTIAL MAJORITY.

I'm going to avoid drawing any parallels between the crazy UFO cult and any classical theological positions, but I will just say that I definitely respect the beliefs of anyone who has beliefs, even if they are in a crazy UFO cult or think that psychology is an actual science.

Bam!

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• We have had six successful lunar landings, all within the Apollo program
• The first self-righting lifeboat was invented in 1851
• One can never unsee the sight of one's mother doing Zumba

The World's Lowest Natural Temperature is -89.2 C

So as it turns out, Earth is a cold place! I mean, it pops under 20 C and I begin to feel a tad chilly, but the global average temperature is only slightly above 14 C.

I discovered this, you see, because the temperature would have been around 18 C (I guess?) yesterday when I remarked to a friend that it was a "bit nippy". Something like "9/10 nippies". Clearly, it's time for the nippy to be defined as an actual unit of temperature.

My initial thoughts for defining the nippy scale were that 10/10 nippies sh

ould be absolute zero (Kelvin). I quickly abandoned this line of reasoning for two reasons:

1. I had no idea what 0/10 nippies would be
2. If 0/10 nippies was defined to be relevant to us at all, then it was unlikely that we'd get even to 0.2 nippies before we'd be freezing, and 0.2/10 doesn't sound all that impressive

It was this second point that lead me to decide that, like all truly arbitrary units in science, the nippy should be defined by how relevant it was to us. I mean, look at Celsius. Bitches love Celsius.

And so, with this thought in mind, I went on to discover what temperatures existed on Earth. I was expecting the range to be more like -20 C to 60 C, since that's about 20 C either side of what I've experienced. But no. The lowest natural temperature is a wholly insane -89.2 C, and the highest natural temperature is a mere 57.8 C.

What's even going on there, guys? When did our planet get SO COLD (spoilers: it was about 110,000 years ago that the last Ice Age began), and why are so many people against global warming? Clearly we need it.

So, with this in mind, I began to calculate nippy values based on 0/10 nippies being equal to 57.8 C and 10/10 nippies being equal to -89.2 C. For your reference, but sparing you the boring table, this gives you a freezing point of 0 C at a mere 4/10 nippies.

Clearly, this is still way too cold, and further relativising was needed. So, picking up the stats for New South Wales, where the minimum recorded temperature was -23 C and the highest was 50 C, I instead got around 7/10 nippies.

It was at this point I said, "You know what, this is balderdash, I'm going to choose my own flipping temperatures even more arbitrarily than I was already."

So, for your delight and misuse, I present to you:

The Nippy Temperature Scale

Celsius Conversion Chart

0/10 nippies = 50 C

1/10 nippies = 45 C

2/10 nippies = 40 C

3/10 nippies = 35 C

4/10 nippies = 30 C

5/10 nippies = 25 C

6/10 nippies = 20 C

7/10 nippies = 15 C

8/10 nippies = 10 C

9/10 nippies = 5 C

10/10 nippies = 0 C

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• One of the earliest known references to "La Cucaracha" was in 1819
• The BBC is the largest broadcaster in the world
• Some philosophers are actually paid good money to debate the possibility of the existence of zombies

Gamer Cocktail Bars Exist

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Whoa.

Needless to say, the general state of internet cafes is a bit dodgy. Sure, you can find a few decent ones around, but by and large you'll get stuck with the dingy greasy hole in the wall whose only menu consists of the output of the nearest malfunctioning coffee machine. I know this as an Irrefutable Fact, because I have been to like, at LEAST three internet cafes in my time, and I'm apparently bad at statistics.

But here, at the Mana Bar in Brisbane (soon Melbourne also!) we have an actual, functioning hub of gamer culture. This is absolutely fascinating. It's almost like a casino, but with games I would actually pay money to play.

That is, it's like a casino, but good.

This is somewhere where I can imagine gamers would actually go to, y'know, hang out on a Saturday night. They might play a few rounds with their friends here and there, but the focus is on the socialising. It's almost as if they got a normal nightclub and replaced the d-floor with the video games (or so I assume, my sole experience with this enterprise being the website and Facebook page).

But wait, my friends, it only gets better.

As it turns out, the Mana Bar is also owned by none other than Yahtzee (et al.), of Zero Punctuation fame, and has plans to spread all over Australia AND THEN THE WORLD. It's as if someone took a good hard look at Australia's inventory and equipment, and made a smart flipping decision for once.

The sheer number of levels on which I support this movement astounds me, which you can probably tell by my jumping around from point to point like a hyperactive flea, who is also blind.

But the level on which I'm most supportive of this is the social (and, yes, 'casual') aspect it brings to gaming. I have lots to say about this, but frankly, that would involve a much more thorough discussion of the material, and therefore, more forethought than I actually put into these posts.

Feel free to let me know what you think of this, though. Does gaming need a physical community? Is this the end for the indie net cafe? If so, is that necessarily a bad thing? Shoot me some thoughts on this. I really do think that games, as a medium, are only just starting to pick up the recognition they deserve, and I think in the years to come we're going to see a lot of gaming paradigms come into play in relation to more traditional media and pastimes. Only time will tell, I suppose.

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• Arbitrarily defined units are often the most relevant to real life (as opposed to real world) applications (compare degrees Celsius with Kelvin, for example)
• The scene in The Lady and the Tramp wherein Lady was given to the lady in a hatbox as a present was based off a real actual event in Walt Disney's life
• Allie Brosh is writing a book and I couldn't be more excited about this

Squirrels live for Six Years

Oh, squirrels. The adorable, fuzzy-tailed rodents we all know and love, unless you're a racist. A squirrel racist.

Their tails are SO fuzzy, in fact, that that's actually from when they acquired their name! Modern English 'squirrel', from Anglo-Norman 'esquirel' from Old French 'escurel' from the Lat 'sciurus', which you already know since their biological family is called Sciuridae (not to be confused with an ice cream sundae) which in turn comes from the Greek 'skiouros', meaning shadow tailed. Presumably the 'ski' part is the shadow, and I would assume that 'ouros' is the same as in 'ouroboros'.

Oh, it's funny how etymology works. That does explain why there are so many different species of squirrel, though; evolution had to go nuts (excuse the pun) to stop them from eating themselves to extinction, to the point where now, in the modern age, a happy, healthy, wild, average squirrel can merrily survive to the ripe old age of six.

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• Clouds have three stages of development
• The rate at which cane toads are killing off goannas is much higher than I previously thought
• President Obama would make an excellent stand-up comedian

Starship is Awesome

You should watch it if you haven't already.

Latin has Six Tenses

If you're like me -- and you're probably not, but we can ignore that for a moment -- then you already knew that Latin had a weirdiculous amount of tenses in its language. "Like, nine or something," I believe was the exact amount I specified when asked.

Well, cats and kittens, I was mistaken!

For those of you who can't speak English or have little to no interest in 'the Lat', as it is called on the streets, let me quickly explain what a tense in. Then you will understand, and therefore care!

In English, we have three tenses: Courage, Wisdom, and Power. Each one of them roughly

corresponds to the three ACTUAL tenses of the English language, that being past, present and future. Which one you decide aligns with which one is entirely at your discretion, but know that you CAN be wrong about this, and your neighbours WILL judge you for it.

In Latin, however, they have six tenses! Three are 'simple' and three are 'perfect'. All of the 'perfect' tenses are in the past. The Lat is all about the past!

That's why they're dead and no one speaks their language any more!

The first of the simple tenses is the present tense, which functions much the same as the English present tense.

e.g.
I run from velociraptors.

The second is the imperfect tense, which is one of the past tenses that conveys an actual this is or was incomplete.

e.g.

I was running from velociraptors.

The third and last of the simple tenses is the future tense, which again is roughly synonymous with the English future tense.

e.g.

I will run from velociraptors.

The fourth and first of the perfected tenses is the perfect tense, which is used for completed ('perfected') actions.

e.g.

I ran from velociraptors.

The fifth tense is the pluperfect tense, which is used to indicate that the action was completed before something else.

e.g.

I had run from velociraptors.

The sixth and last of the tenses is the future perfect tense, which is used to indicate that something will be completed in the future.

e.g.

I will have run from velociraptors.

And now you can speak the Lat! Impress your friends with your incredible vocabulary of the Lat terms. You can even tell jokes in the Lat and be the life of the party! "I was running from velociraptors I ran from velociraptors!" See who laughs and gets it and who isn't cool enough to speak dead languages!

Their neighbours will surely judge them if they don't.

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• Your big toe is called your hallux
• Tapirs are arguably the cutest creatures on Earth
• Crouchmas is sometimes also called 'Roodmas' by people who are, y'know, wrong

'Full Steam Ahead' is for Boats, Not Trains

Toot toot!

This is another one of those things I always just sort of suspected and assumed but didn't actually for certain know. Well, now I do!

By my reasoning and intimate knowledge of history, at some point in the past, some primitive man-ape creature discovered fire.

Several millenia passed, and finally, mankind was evolved enough to beat two sticks and a rock together to invent the miracle of the steam engine.

Naturally, it was around the same time that everyone started to dress well and the world went monochrome.

Once the steam engine was invented, it was clear what came next: applying to things that we already had. Hamburgers, zombies, and, yes, even boats, now became steam-powered. It wouldn't be for another few years until we thought to apply steam engines to new uses, and a myriad of brilliant new devices were invented: the printing press, lightsabers, and trains.

Since steamboats had such a headstart over any sort of train (the first sort of which was the steam train), it was for the steamboat that the phrase "Full steam ahead!" evolved, meaning, of course, to convert as much heat energy to mechanical energy as was possible to increase the velocity of the vessel and go as fast as one could.

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• The philosopher John Dewey was 92 when he died
• Osama bin Laden has been killed by American troops in Pakistan
• 'Caterpillar' is a particularly delightful word to say!

Subway Meatballs are 65% Beef!

I, uh... I don't know what the other 35% is.

Zombie-Proof Houses Exist

No, really. They do.

In an unexpected turn of events, I actually feel much safer in my vulnerable not-zombie-proof house knowing that just around the corner could lie an impenetrable bastion against the undead hordes; that somewhere in this world, humanity could be preserved, even if civilisation falls.

On the other hand, I am, of course, now paranoid by the obvious deficiencies in my own home. My house isn't from Cybertron at all, and is therefore not wont to fold in on itself to protect against invasion. My windows are but glass, and I'm afraid that I don't have concrete blocks that are going to flip out in front of them to box them in. Is this a serious flaw in home design?

Is this a serious flaw in home design that has penetrated the deepest circles of architecture for centuries?

My answer is probably not, but maybe! We all know that Freemasonry has been up to something shady for about the same amount of time; maybe the mason symbolism was more than just symbolism, and they've been actively working to make us more vulnerable to zombie attack?

I mean, let's face it. The average home isn't particularly well equipped to deal with a zombie apocalypse. Out in the 'burbs, no one can hear you scream, except for your hundred or so nearest neighbours who have already been zombified.

Most houses -- okay, I don't actually know the statistics, but what seems like a LOT of houses have windows on the ground level through which a zombie could easily stumble, as opposed to a drawbridge on the second level being the only possible entry point. That's commitment on the part of the zombie-proof house designers, and also on the part of the people who live there and who have to go up and down all the bleeding time.

So, in conclusion, we're all pretty poorly equipped for a zombie outbreak, except for the specific few people who live in this verifiable fortress or a home styled off its design, and I guess I don't know much about Freemasonry beyond the insane whisperings of half-baked conspiracy theories.

Other things I've learnt today:

• Montpellier is in the south-east of France
• The fossa, a cat/mongoose creature, is endemic to the island of Madagascar
• It's entirely possibly to be literally standing a hundred metres from a phone tower in a CBD, with full signal and full credit, and still not be able to connect a call. Nice one, Telstra!

Pippa gets her own Coat of Arms

When pondering what wonderful new piece of information I would share with you all today, I decided to go for the most topical. Lest history should forget it, or Blogger mistake the date, let me note the historical significance of today, Friday the 29th of April, 2011; the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

Rockin'!

Well, it's rockin' once you ignore the fact that they're twelfth cousins once removed, anyway, but fortunately for them, genetics is totally cool with that, and unless something else goes horribly, horribly awry, their babies won't have blue feet growing out of their foreheads or anything.

I guess it's interesting, really, that in England, where they do everything so properly and have such a history of making sure that things are done properly, that so many of their monarchs are inbred. Not any more, of course, and like I said, that's nothing wrong with twelfth cousins once removed -- that's a pretty distant relation -- but still. Interesting.

But because England does have this history of doing things properly, it meant, of course, that Kate Middleton had to have a coat of arms designed for her for the wedding.

That, to me, is incredibly awesome. Heraldry is designed to be forever. The entire Middleton family, for centuries to come, has just been defined by the Middleton family as it is right now, because Kate's marrying a prince. I really need to lift my game so that all my ancestors get to be defined by me. I think they'd appreciate that.

Backtracking a moment, I'd just like to emphasise that Kate had the coat of arms designed for her. That is, she has her own specific version of the coat of arms that's lozenge-shaped and with a blue ribbon that symbolises and means "Middleton spinster". Of course, Kate's getting married in... three hours, by my watch, and so she will no longer be a Middleton spinster, so the shape changes and this changes and that changes and all this special symbolic heraldic things which are cool and fascinating but too boring to go into detail here.

So what happens to this form of the coat of arms?

It now represents, solely, her younger sister Pippa.

In all honesty, I've got to say that I'm a little bit jealous of ol' Pip. She gets her own coat of arms now, and why? Because her sister is marrying a prince. It's not even the usual fuddy-duddy of inheriting it because some ancestor was a knight in the 16th century (which, by the way, he was) or whatever, but because her sister is getting married.

One day my sister will get married, too, and I fully expect our family to get its own coat of arms because of it.

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• Queen Juliana of the Netherlands spent a lot of time in Canada, and they loved her for it
• Glacial acetic acid smells simultaneously disgusting and delicious (think: the strongest vinegar in the world)
• The first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was called the USS Enterprise

Also, for those who were wondering, the specific "spinster" version of the Middleton arms won't die out (necessarily) with Pippa, since Kate and Pippa also have a brother whose daughters would get it. More you know!

Not All Kookaburras are Kookaburras

So I've known for a while now that kookaburras are kingfishers. For some reason, this information caught me off guard, like I was expecting kookaburras to be part of their own special super-secret club, and no one else was allowed to join.

But no. That's not the case at all. The family Halcyonidae, kingfishers, is home to the genus Dacelo, which is the kookaburras. As a quick recap for those who have forgotten their biological classifications, just remember your amusingly bad English:

PLEASE COME OVER FOR GAME SOCCER

They taught us that on my very first day of university so that we could remember Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species, in that order, but the degree to which the phrase doesn't actually make sense (and the fact that it skips out Kingdom altogether) stuck it in my head, which actually makes it pretty useful as a mnemonic.

Kookaburras, then, are classed as:

K: Animalia

P: Chordata

C: Aves

O: Coraciiformes

F: Halcyonidae

G: Dacelo

We'll ignore, for the moment, that contemporary biological classification hasn't really quite caught up to birds being in the clade of theropods (my favourite sub-order, incidentally), and just accept the relevant piece of information here: kookaburras are in the genus Dacelo which is defined in a few (fairly sketchy) places as 'Australasian kingfishers'. That's

their 'thing'. That is the kookaburra hood, that is the kookaburra's turf, and that makes the family Halcyonidae a cosmopolite.

Unfortunately, that is not to be confused with a polite cosmonaut.

...though I agree, that would be more awesome.

A cosmopolite is a type of creature that can be found just about anywhere in the world (as opposed to being anywhere that is not the world, because they are polite cosmonauts and have no need for our terrestrial realm). For example, the class Insecta is cosmopolitan, as is the species Homo sapiens.

The inclusion of Dacelo in Halcyonidae is important for the kingfisher krew because they're now also in the Cool Cosmo Club. They're living it up where ever they want, including Australasia, because as you'll recall, Dacelo are the Australasian kingfishers.

Let's back up a moment.

"Australasia?" dudes are saying in confused voices. "Can we not just quickly define where, exactly, 'Australasia' is?"

Of course we can, dudes! All you need do is ask.

According to Wikipedia, which is not only conveniently bookmarked here but generally 'good enough' (technical term there) in terms of information quality, 'Australasia' consists of

Australia, New Zealand, the island of New Guinea

and some other little islands of which no one else has really heard (sorry, the rest of Australasia).

So quick recap, Dacelo is:

• kookaburras
• Australasian kingfishers

and Australasia is:

• Australia
• New Zealand
• New Guinea
• et. al

So then, it stands to reason that if we grab a species of kookaburra, from, say, New Guinea, then it will be in the genus Dacelo.

It's time to introduce you to my friend, Clytoceyx rex.

Unfortunately, that is not to be confused with Tyrannosaurus rex.

...though I agree, that would be more awesome.

C. rex, known more commonly as the shovel-billed kookaburra, is a kookaburra from New Guinea. It is also the only non-Dacelo kookaburra, and is the sole representative of the genus Clytoceyx.

This, to me, to be honest with you, seems silly, and like the problem is primarily a linguistic one. I can't actually find any more definitive criteria for Dacelo beyond "Australasian kingfisher", and Clytoceyx is even less documented. The former was formally identified by William Leach in 1815, and the latter by Richard Sharpe in 1880. Maybe Sharpe just didn't know about Dacelo? How well was biological taxonomy centralised in the late 19th century? Or is there an actual, real, noticeable difference between Dacelo and Clytoceyx that I just can't identify by comparing pictures on Google Images?

Unfortunately, these are not to be confused with rhetorical questions. They are 100% genuine, my friends, and I'm not about to whip out some killer bio facts and put you all in awe of my genius.

...though I agree, that would be more awesome.

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• Carbon-13 has a natural abundance of only about 1%
• The world's largest cannon on wheels, the Jaivana, was cast in 1720
• Enough people still buy (and use!) Sony's products for the PS3 hack to be a big deal

Pascal's Triangle and Quantum Mechanics

Pascal's Triangle has got to be one of the most useful things in the history of useful things. To give some perspective on just how many applications it has, keep in mind: I was learning about Pascal's Triangle in my first year 7 maths lesson and my last HSC Extension 2 maths lesson. Triangles don't get any more diverse than Pascal's.

For those of you who either don't know or can't remember what Pascal's Triangle is, it's a pretty simple mathematical... toy, I guess you'd call it. Or maybe you wouldn't, but I would. Pascal's Triangle is a toy, and like all the best toys, it's easily constructed and useful for all your life, ever, forever, like Lego. Pascal's Triangle is created by starting with the number 1 at the top of the triangle. The next line is the sum of the two numbers directly above it. So 1 and 1. And then then next line will be 1, 2, and 1. And so on:

1

1 1

1 2 1

1 3 3 1

1 4 6 4 1

1 5 10 10 5 1

1 6 15 20 15 6 1

1 7 21 35 35 21 7 1

There are the first eight lines for you, just to get you started. You'll soon discover why I chose eight lines, but now it's time to do cool, improbable stuff with it!

For starters, look at the second (or second last) number on each line. You'll notice it has the pattern 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc. It just counts. Which is obvious, really, because you'll be adding 1 to it each time, but it still looks cool. You know what else looks cool?

Sierpinski's Triangle.

Sierpinski's Triangle is what happened when Nintendo realised what a goldmine they were sitting on with the Legend of Zelda series. Shigeru Miyamoto drew a Triforce. In each of those Triforces, he drew another Triforce. And then another. And another. And another, until he had such a cool looking pattern that you didn't even notice that I've already begun eight sentences with conjunctions this blog post.

So that's cool, now we have two funky looking triangles. But (nine) what's that all about? The cool thing is, if you colour in all the odd numbers in your Pascal's Triangle, guess what you end up with?

1

1 1

1 2 1

1 3 3 1

1 4 6 4 1

1 5 10 10 5 1

1 6 15 20 15 6 1

1 7 21 35 35 21 7 1

Sierpinski's Triangle, aka Pascal's Triforce. I just ended a sentence with a preposition and I don't even care. That's how exciting this is. I am throwing grammar to the winds and mathsing this right up now, because it only gets better.

Some of you probably now realise why I had eight lines. Eight lines is the perfect amount to demonstrate a Pascal's Triforce. Four would be perfect to show off just a normal triangle, since the fourth line is comprised entirely of odd numbers, like the eighth. Also like the first and second.

1, 2, 4, 8... check it out, you guys, the next time this happens will be line 16! Computer scientists and maths nerds will recognise this pattern immediately as being 2^0, 2^1, 2^2, 2^3, etc., and normal people will put it more succinctly as "it doubles each time". This is officially whacky!

"This is cool and all," I can hear you saying, "but that isn't quantum mechanics, and frankly, there's only so much of a maths lesson you can give me before you get really boring really quickly." Well, let me tell you: you're right! That isn't quantum mechanics. Also, you're wrong. You can never have too much of a maths lesson. But (ten) ignoring what is actually my favourite use of Pascal's Triangle (i.e. binomial expansion, exciting, right?), let's move on to what I actually learnt today.

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance! It's a lot of fun and useful for determining different things about different chemical structures, but that's not the point. The point is that if one faerie is near another faerie, it creates a unicorn not only for itself but one for its friend faerie, too. If there is a third faerie nearby, they will channel their magical power and there will be two normal unicorns, and one unicorn with a horn twice as long as the other unicorns. If there is a fourth faerie, then there will be two normal unicorns, and two unicorns with horns three times as long as a normal unicorn's!

Do you see where I'm going with this?

Obviously, this example is imperfect, since by 'faerie' I mean 'proton' and by 'unicorn horn' I mean 'spike in the NMR reading due to spin-spin couplings which are pretty much quantum entanglement', but I think most people probably understand this example a lot better. Maybe you don't? The beautiful thing is, you don't really have to understand what's going on there.

Today I learnt that Pascal's Triangle has applications in quantum mechanics, and spent the rest of my chemistry lecture fixated on that rather than on what they were.

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• River deltas are called deltas because they resemble an uppercase letter delta
• The velvet on an antler supplies the growing bone with blood and nutrients
• "It [chemically equivalent spin couplings] is like boy and girl fall in love. When you in love, you not have two horns on your head each." That's the only other thing I took out of that lecture.

The Mexican Standoff is Australian

They say you learn something new every day. I'm not sure who they are, and frankly, I think they're underestimating me a bit, but I've decided to set out to prove it and keep a record of the interesting little tidbits of information I learn each day. Each post won't be long, but just a short little explanation of some piece of trivia I've stumbled across that I found interesting enough to record.

First of all, today I learnt that the phrase 'Mexican standoff' has its origins in Australian slang. A Mexican standoff is, for those of you late to the Mexican standoff party, more or less an impasse; two (or more, if you're in to group standoffs) parties are threatening each other without wanting to resort to doing what they're threatening, as then the other party might also do what they're threatening, and that would be bad.

For example, let us consider the hypothetical situation of a hypothetical man named Gonzales. Gonzales has a moustache the size of a small European nation and enjoys long walks in the desert with his sombrero and twin pistols, as well as snacking on burritos and tacos. What Gonzales hates, however, is ethnic stereotyping, which is what his arch enemy Julio is all about. "Yo, Gonzales," Julio says each morning as Gonzales strums his guitar whilst leaning on a cactus, "I am all about ethnic stereotyping." Well, thinks Gonzales, that is just not on. Eventually, after many mornings of such taunting, Gonzales finally snaps and reaches for a pistol. Julio does the same. The two men are staring at each other intently, each with a hand on his pistol, and neither one willing to move an inch in case it prompts the other to shoot him dead.

This is an example of a Mexican standoff, even though Gonzales is Norwegian and Julio is Sudanese.

I think I find this interesting because 'Mexican standoff' doesn't really blend in with other Ocker phrases such as 'Ocker', 'crikey', 'g'day' or 'fuggya'. It just doesn't sound particularly Skippy. I'd always assumed that it was North American, since that's where most contemporary English phrases seem to originate, and it's referencing Mexicans. Americans love referencing Mexicans! If popular media is to be believed, it's their number one past time over in the States.

But no; the Cambridge Online Dictionary describes it as belonging to "[a] type of English used primarily in Australia and New Zealand". Struth! Okay so maybe that doesn't mean it's actually Australian; it could be New Zealish. I assume that since England produces English and Finland produces Finnish that New Zealand produces New Zealish; I think I've only ever heard the phrase 'New Zealander' but that doesn't seem to do justice for this context.

If the phrase is New Zealish, and not Australian, then I can't help but feel that perhaps the New Zealanders should spend more time developing useful self-descriptive words than cinematic tropes.

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• The average mosquito has forty seven teeth
• Somali isn't a safe tourist destination
• Chickens can swim... but not very well