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.