Trivia Gibs #5

Napoleon was not French, but Corsican. Hitler was not German, but Austrian. Stalin was not Russian, but Georgian.

The country with the lowest average IQ is Sudan, with an average of 72. The country with the highest is Hong Kong, with an average of 107. The United States isn't even in the top 10. This, according to the book "IQ and the Wealth of Nations", grain of salt prescribed.

North Dakota has the lowest divorce rate (8.1%) in the United States, where the average for the country is 3.4 per 1000. Of divorced women, more than one-fourth of them are under the age of twenty.

The sun loses an average equivalent of one Earth every 100,000,000 years because of radiation. Solar wind wipes out another one-fourth of that mass in the same time period.

A nanocentury is exactly Pi seconds long.

If you stored the Library of Congress on computers, you would only need less than 30 terabytes.

Being able to quit smoking easily and not have it bother you can be a positive thing - or an early sign of Alzheimer's disease.

The composer of the battle hymn "Onward, Christian Soldiers," Sabine Baring-Gould, also kept a pet bat - which was so tame that he'd greet guests with it perched on his shoulder.

Which movie script is the most foul-mouthed? "Pulp Fiction"? "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut"? Not even close! In terms of dropping the F-bomb, the winning film so far is "Tigerland" (2000), with an F-word count of 527 for a 100-minute film - working out to five f***s per minute!

We bless sneezes with "God bless you" because it was ordained so by Pope Gregory the Great in the year 600 AD, by official papal decree. So there.

How one hack for playing a TRON lightcycle game went on an Apple IIgs

Folks, I was there in those ancient days of computing yore, and reading pixels off the screen for collision detection was exactly how I did games, too. I even still have code that does that lying around somewhere for some silly screensaver modules I wrote. Anyway:

"The algorithm to determine which pixel to check next used some fast assembler math to calculate a memory address – either one pixel above, below, to the left, or to the right of the current pixel.  But since any given pixel on the screen was really just a memory address, the algorithm simply calculated a new memory location to read.  So when the light cycle left the screen, the game happily calculated the next location in system memory to check for a wall crash.  This meant that the cycle was now cruising through system RAM, wantonly turning on bits and “crashing” into memory.

Writing to random locations in system memory isn't generally a wise design practice. Unsurprisingly, the game would generate spectacular crashes as a result.  A human player would be driving blind and usually crash right away, limiting the scope of system casualties.  The AI opponents had no such weakness.  The computer would scan immediately in front, to the left, and to the right of its position to determine if it was about to hit a wall and change directions accordingly.  So as far as the computer was concerned, system memory looked no different than screen memory."

Real Life Tron on an Apple IIgs

You young'uns might recognize this game better as 'Snake' as played on your phone.

Paul the Psychic Octopus

From 2008 to 2010, a pet octopus named "Paul" was given the rather burdensome chore of predicting the outcome of World Cup soccer matches. His handlers would put food into two boxes at a time, each box decorated with the flag of their respective country's teams, then whichever one Paul decided to chow down on first would be the predicted winner. Over his two-year career, Paul got it right 11 out of 13 times.

Of course, nobody's really suggesting that Paul was following soccer games. Rather, plain old luck doesn't put the odds too far away - one might get the same sort of record flipping a coin. Some have speculated that Paul was attracted to flags with horizontal stripes, which just raises the question of why countries with horizontally-striped flags should win soccer matches more often.

Paul was the subject of international fame - for an octopus, anyway - and was widely missed after his passing at old age of octopus years. And just when this story couldn't get any sillier, there's conspiracy theories around his passing.

Here's Paul in action during one of his televised picks:

Paul and his handler also got death threats and recipe suggestions after Paul's predictions proved accurate:

OK, now that's silly enough!

Get hit by lightning seven times; kill yourself at age 71 by gunshot

Roy Sullivan got into the Guinness Book of World Records as having been struck by lightning seven times - and survived them all! This was seven separate incidents, mind you, over a period of years from 1942 to 1977. He also claimed an eighth strike which happened to him as a child, but never bothered to record it.

Perhaps bothered too much by the way God seemed to have it in for him, he committed suicide by gunshot at age 71. His experience, however, form an important contribution to the specialized medical field of Keraunopathy - the study of the effects of lightning strikes on the human body.

Edmund Trebus, notorious hoarder

In Crouch End, North London, Trebus was constantly at odds with police over his hoarding behavior. He would come home with wheelbarrows of trash and lovingly sort it into piles in his home and yard. Amongst his many acquisitions were almost every record recorded by Elvis Presley.

Despite these problems, he lived to the age of 83.

Today he stands as one of history's most famous hoarders.

One wonders why more researchers don't tie hoarding disease to rampant capitalism. When you build an entire society based on owning more and more crap, what can you expect but that some people take it to an extreme?

Now go clean your house.

Wacky medieval laws

During the height of witch-hunting in the 15th century, there was a book published in Germany that was a sort of "Witch-Hunting for Dummies" guide, name of Malleus Maleficarum.

Full page scans available at Cornell's online repository, and while you're there, they have a few other witch-related tomes to check out for all your witchery needs. There's also a full site devoted to this and other witch-related beliefs, even into the present day.

But even practices for catching plain old criminals wasn't much better. For instance, there was the process of cruentation, in which an accused murderer was brought together with the corpse of the presumed victim and ordered to lay their hands upon the carcass. If the dead body should then spontaneously begin bleeding from its wounds, that would be a sign from on high that the defendant was guilty. One can only imagine how many murderers got off scott-free.

Many such practices are covered in the blanket category of "Trial by Ordeal," where you get all the variations on tying you up and throwing you into the river to see if you sink or swim, or plunging your hand into boiling water to see if God healed you, or simply swallowing poison, or other such life-jeopardizing trials. In some cases, surviving the ordeal unscathed meant that God had declared you innocent, while in other areas it was considered just the opposite proof, that you had escaped by the Devil's aide.

Then there was the practice of compurgation, a law which meant that you could be found innocent if you could find twelve people who said they believed your side of the story. Well, who couldn't scare up twelve friends?

One more curiosity is the German principle of "stadtluft macht frei," a kind of statue-of-limitations where if a serf had managed to escape capture for a year-and-a-day, they was no longer open to being re-chained.

And for a final medieval law oddity, animals could be tried in a court of law exactly as if they were human.

Trivia Gibs #3

The world's heaviest statue is the American Statue of Liberty. It's solid copper and weighs more than 200 metric tonnes.

One thing that the Biblical books "Esther" and "Song of Solomon" have in common: neither of them contain the word "God".

Ronald McDonald was not the first mascot for the McDonald's restaurant chain. That title belongs to "Speedee", a chef character conceived to play up the "fast food" aspect of the hamburger chain, then still a novelty.

Despite his lifelong achievements, 62 albums, and enduring popularity, Frank Zappa's only Top-40 charting hit was 1982's "Valley Girl". To add insult to injury, the following year a film was released by the same title to capitalize on the popularity of the song but without containing Zappa's song in the soundtrack; Zappa sued for infringement and lost.

The Swingline stapler company did not originally make a red model. Consumer demand, following the 1999 film "Office Space", caused them to start manufacturing one. The prop in the film was simply a standard black stapler painted red.

Albert Einstein was born on "Pi Day" (March 14th).

The United States' first Saab dealership, in Cape Cod, was managed by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - yes, the famous author, before he made it big!

Ray Chapman (1891-1920), shortstop for the Cleaveland Indians, was the only Major League Baseball player to have died from being hit by a pitch.

Less time passed between the death of Cleopatra (30 BC) and the first moon landing (1969 AD) than passed between the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza (2560 BC) and the birth of Cleopatra (69 BC) - by almost half a millennium!

The Klingon alphabet, in case you were wondering

From kli.org, the official Klingon language resource. I've known a couple Trek fans who were at least somewhat fluent. Apparently there's a whole Unicode block reserved in some fonts. Given the letter-to-letter translation from English, one could even fathom a Bash script that translates phrases using imagemagick to shoot out an image with the equivalent Klingon text.

What, don't look at me? I don't even speak it!

Man draws maze by hand, takes seven years

Like mazes? You'll be begging for a copy of this one. A Japanese woman unearthed her father's maze, which he spent seven years drawing. Is he a graphics artist or perhaps in some mathematical or engineering field? No, he is a janitor at a university.

There are undiscovered universes inside of all of us.

"Simplified" Ptolemaic family tree

From the Wikipedia article on the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, 305-30 BC.

Either this chart is too confusing or there was some nauseatingly impossible feats of coupling and whelping going on (some of these look like they had 3 parents?). It takes inbred family trees to new... something.

The airplane junkyard

What, did you think old airplanes just get patched up and sent back in the sky? Silly you.

That's an aerial the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, just near Tucson, Arizona. Messy Nessy calls it a "boneyard" but unless you're deliberately invoking imagery from The Who's Tommy, I don't see the connection. It's a junkyard, for planes instead of cars.

If we fret every time a CRT monitor goes into a landfill, what happens when we run out of places to put all these planes?

Welcome to Vernon California, where homes are nonexistent and the votes don't matter.

Here is the perfect Industrial Gothic set-up: A city with only 90 residents, told whom to vote for, tightly controlled, existing as a paradise exclusively for corporations. You say corporations are people? Well just wait until they kick you out of your house and take over!

The few residents "lucky" enough to get in enjoy largely ceremonial occupations at cushy wages. But it comes at a price: You live as a virtual prisoner of the city council, told what to do, and especially how to vote. One citizen's experience:

"Algee said he got his ballot by mail and decided to go to City Hall to fill it out and turn it in; as he stood at the counter, a city employee hovered nearby, watching him mark his choices.

'I pointed to one of their candidates and looked at her and she nodded, yes, that one,' he said. 'So I went to the next one and looked at her and she nodded again. That's how it worked.'"

The eerie government setup of Vernon, California, has led to uncontested incumbent elections since 1980. A quote from that Wiki:

"Most of the city's less than 90 voters are city employees or connected to city employees who live in homes rented at a nominal fee. In 1979 a firefighter tried to run for mayor and was immediately evicted and told he couldn't run. In 2006 a group of outsiders tried to move into Vernon and run for office. The city tried to cancel their registrations but was ordered to allow them to run and to count the ballots. Almost none of the city employees voted for them. Leonis Malburg, the mayor for fifty years, was convicted of voter fraud, conspiracy, and perjury in December 2009. In May 2011, the former city administrator Bruce Malkenhorst, Sr., accepted a plea deal for misappropriating $60,000 in public funds."

In spite of the austere population, close to 100,000 people are employed at warehouses and factories within the city limits. The city motto is indeed "Exclusively industrial". With the tightly controlled government fortress and virtually no one to cry foul, companies can get away with things in this city that us mere mortals are denied. For instance, city leaders had the power to kick Southern California Edison out of town and build their own power plant - which charges them rates 40% lower than the California standard.

Manhattan Solstice

Manhattanhenge is what happens when the sun lines up perfectly with the concrete-canyon streets of New York City. Due to the angle of the city's layout, this doesn't map to our traditional times of equinox and solstice, but New Yorkers mark their own.

Need a shredded document restored? Hire a carpet weaver!

From the new York Times article 'Back Together Again':

"In its crudest form, the art of reconstructing shredded documents has been around for as long as shredders have. After the takeover of the United States Embassy in Tehran in 1979, Iranian captors laid pieces of documents on the floor, numbered each one and enlisted local carpet weavers to reconstruct them by hand, said Malcolm Byrne of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. 'For a culture that's been tying 400 knots per inch for centuries, it wasn't that much of a challenge,' he said. The reassembled documents were sold on the streets of Tehran for years."

The article details that shredding documents, just like encrypting electronic data, has arms races on either side to both conceal and reveal.

Your moment of Trekkie Zen: 3-Dimensional Chess

Find out about attempts to de-fictionalize the game of 3-D Chess from the Star Trek universe and even places that will sell you a set, if you just gotta play it for yourself. Be warned: Games thought up in fictional universes tend to look like more fun in the story than they do in real life.

The deepest note in the universe is a B-flat

 At least, according to NASA's study of the sound that black holes make. The B-flat is well below the human range of hearing, at 57 octaves below middle-C. The sound's frequency is a million billion times deeper than anything any human has ever heard.

Trivia Gibs #2

The song "Hound Dog", written by Leiber & Stoller and popularized by Elvis Presley, wasn't originally done by Elvis. It was a cover of the version done by earlier blues singer "Big Mama" Thornton, for whom Leiber & Stoller wrote the song first.

Which US states have a one-syllable name? There's only one: Maine.

Out of all the world's animals classified as mammals, one in five is a bat.

The strongest muscle in the human body isn't in the arm or leg. It's the masseter, located in the jaw.

The only time a month can both begin and end on the same day of the week is February during a leap year.

The world's most popular transportation company doesn't run an airline, a train, or a fleet of cruise ships. It's the Otis Elevator Company, whose products transport more people than any other transportation fleet.

The US state with the longest coastline is neither Florida nor California, but Alaska. All those nooks and crannies really add up!

The 1970s TV sitcom "Good Times" was the show which debuted Jay Leno, in a guest star role which was the first time the subject of STDs was brought up on a prime time TV show.

Play-Doh, the kid's modeling toy, was based on a formula originally intended as a substance that cleans wallpaper.

The Monty Hall Paradox

It's well-known amongst the oldsters of the web, but it's time to introduce it to a new generation. So: The most famous nonintuitive puzzle in probability mathematics:

You're on a game show (the problem was named after the TV game show Let's Make A Deal, hosted by Monty Hall. You have three closed doors in front of you. You're told that two of the doors have a goat behind them, while the other door has a car behind it, but you don't know ahead of time which is which.

Let's belay all the devil's advocates who say they want a goat. You want a car.

The game works like this: You pick a door. Then Monty Hall opens one of the doors you did not pick, and shows you a goat behind it (he always picks a goat door). Now there's two doors left - one you picked, and the other you didn't pick. One has a car, and one has a goat. Now you get the opportunity to switch your decision to the other door, Either that, or you stay with what you've got. After you make this decision, all doors will be opened and you get whatever is behind the door you picked.

Now, what's your best strategy to win the car? Stay or switch?

The answer is that you switch. You win 2/3rds of the time if you switch, and lose only 1/3rd of the time when you stay with your initial pick.

Wikipedia has one of the most complete entries ever explaining the problem and all of the math behind it. However, what's really interesting is the story of the problem's history.

Cognitive psychologists have tested and studied people extensively on this, and no matter how far along we go on the scientific and mathematical literacy scale, the vast majority gets this problem wrong on the first guess. World-renowned Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos first heard of the problem and got it wrong. But the most notable hullabaloo was when high-IQ columnist Marilyn vos Savant gave her answer to the problem in her column in Parade magazine... and in the ensuing months the magazine received nearly 10,000 letters from readers arguing with it, a thousand of those from readers who held PHD degrees or better. She argued back and forth with readers for months, and classrooms across the country started testing it with their own simulations an discovered that she was right.

For those of you wanting to test this out, we have these wonderful modern computers now that are so good at this. Here's just one Monty Hall simulator that's usable online.

The puzzle has also taken on a life of its own in the media, being the subject of a Mythbusters episode, several mystery TV series, stage magicians' acts, and classroom exercises. Alas, Discovery channel hordes their shows' videos on their own channel, so all I can embed is this funky video:

Now don't stay up all night puzzling over this!

Diamonds: A big, fat scam

If you're thinking of buying a gift for your sweetheart this Christmas that involves diamonds, you might want to think twice after reading Cecil Adams' column. From the site:

"I'll focus on whether diamonds are worth the exorbitant sums charged for them. Answer: Of course not. Prices are kept high by a cynical cartel that preys on vanity and stupidity."

Cecil goes on to explain that diamonds are an artificial monopoly, and in fact De Beers corporation has been convicted in an antitrust case pursued by the US Justice department, which so far has done nothing but make De Beers fork over the $10 million fine out of petty cash.

Your word for the day...

Pop quiz: What is this man doing?

• Trying out for a part in David Lynch's Pinocchio.
• Using the latest model of inconspicuous weed vape.
• Playing a synthesized nose trumpet.
• Using an olfactometer.

Well, big surprise, it's the last one. From this site. It's kind of law enforcement equipment, like binoculars for your nose.