6 Creepy Animal Behaviors That Science Can't Explain. Animals do a lot of strange things: dogs will go after their own butts for hours, some fish fly and if some people are to be believed, sheep have the amazing ability to attract New Zealanders and Scotsmen. But there are some things about the animal world that leave the smartest of us scratching their heads in puzzlement saying, "Fucked if I know... " One of the major things that separate humans from animals is that most lower life forms have an intense will to live. Unless they are defending their babies or food, most animals will prefer to run off than fight, because life is precious. Plus, given the fact that most don't really appear to be all that self aware, the likelihood of goth hamsters and emo pigeons seems pretty thin.
Then why do some animals just up and decide to off themselves sometimes? We've already shown you a bridge that seems to drive dogs into a suicidal frenzy, but that kind of thing doesn't happen often, does it? How Long Has This Been Going On? That's a tough one. Mind = Blown. 5 Mind Blowing Things Crowds Do Better Than Experts. There's nothing stupider than a crowd. Take an average, intelligent person and put him in an emergency and he'll likely remain calm and await instructions. Put him in a crowd and he'll start screaming, looting and overturning cars. Right? Well ... not really. "Crowdsourcing" is one of those business buzzwords that actually represents something very simple: letting crowds of strangers do your work for you. . #5. Obviously, no random StarCraft or Tower Defense-playing teenager is going to know more about military strategy than a trained professional with combat experience.
But what if you created a war game that mimicked the "rules" of actual war -- the units have the same capabilities of actual units, the map is similar to an actual map and all of the real-world complications have to be dealt with. It would be like Ender's Game, but with more homoerotic subtext. It's not just some war gamer geek's dream -- the military is betting on it. The U.S. Wikipedia"Shit, it's boobsmcgee900! " #4. . #3. FREEWAYBLOGGER.com - Free Speech: Use It or Lose It. California woman swears off mirrors for a year. Kjerstin Gruys likes her legs now — and the feel of her cheeks as she applies makeup. Even perfumes smell better, she says, since she stopped looking in mirrors six months ago. Last March, the 28-year-old PhD student embarked on a year-long project, banning herself from gazing at her own reflection — no mirrors, no reflective surface at all. Denied access to her own reflection Gruys says she has become happier with her own appearance.
She’s paying less attention to her soft tummy, which used to consume her. And she’s started to admire her strong legs, earned from years of running. Gruys, who suffered from eating disorders in high school and college, blames mirrors for many body image issues. Too many women are obsessed with their image, she says, quoting a British study that revealed that women spend the equivalent of five days each year staring, often critically, at their own reflection.
She later posted on her blog, “At some point my dress search stopped being fun. 6 Things You Won't Believe Animals Do Just Like Us. Being a human is a pretty sweet gig, all things considered. We've got opposable thumbs so dexterous they could start their own Cirque du Soleil troupe and brains so ripped our skulls can barely contain them. But before you grab your dog and give him a triumphant "IN YOUR (FAITHFUL, ADORABLE) FACE! " you should know that some of the traits and behaviors that make us human are also demonstrated by other animals. Animals that apparently think they're people. #6. What to name a baby is one of the first things that expecting parents obsess about. GettyAll babies look alike, even Theobold Pimpmeister here. And more than that, individual names also make humans special. "Never mind, Christine. Except the talking animals depicted in Disney movies aren't so far off the mark, at least when it comes to a few select species.
Wait, what? Dolphins, crows, primates and parrots have all been observed using unique calls when they want the attention of specific members of their groups. Getty"GWAAK! Getty"Hi! Life Hacks. Revolution in America. : freegan.info. 6 Beneficial Things They Made You Stop Doing in School. It's easy to think of a classroom as a battle of wills between kids who want to dick around all day and teachers who actually want to make them learn. But it's not that simple. A lot of the things that will get you yelled at in a classroom are, in fact, beneficial to learning. They're just really annoying to other people (and the teacher). Consider this the next time you hear ... #6. Getty Teachers must look at the cell phone as the modern plague on their profession. Getty"You can have it back at the end of the semester, if it doesn't sell on eBay.
" But teachers have a reason to hate texting above even other high-tech time-wasters like portable games. Everybody should stop and take a deep breath, because texting actually improves both your language skills and your ability to pay attention in class. Getty"Holly balls, I understand calculus! " Wait, What? Yes, you read that right. Mark van LaereIt's not Hemingway, but it is a form of literacy. Sounds counter-intuitive? #5. Right. #4. How To… Embed This Infographic <a href= "><img src=" title="10 How Tos" alt="How To Infographic" border="0" class="nopin" /></a><br />Source: <a href=' title='Interesting Facts'><a href=' title='Interesting Facts'>Today I Found Out</a></a> 1) How to drastically increase the life of your shaving razor Before or after you shave (I prefer before so that the blades are dry), place your jeans on a hard flat surface; then run the razor up the pant legs about 10-15 times quickly; then repeat running it down the pant legs 10-15 times quickly.
No need to press that hard, but a little pressure is necessary. necessary. In both instances, you want to point the top of the razor in the direction you are rubbing the shaver on the pants. 2) How to make your teeth whiter With the engine on: 1. 2. Cellphone Battery Designed To Fail At First Drop Of Water? Human-Body-Facts-2-copy.jpg (JPEG Image, 620x8050 pixels) 25 Everyday Things You Never Knew Had Names: Pics, Videos, Links, News.
Fourteen Defining Characteristics Of Fascism. 8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance. The ruling elite has created social institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance.Bruce E. LevineAlterNet Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination. Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it. A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?”
Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no. How exactly has American society subdued young Americans? 1. Today in the United States, two-thirds of graduating seniors at four-year colleges have student-loan debt, including over 62 percent of public university graduates. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. The Acceleration of Addictiveness. July 2010 What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating. We wouldn't want to stop it. No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much. [2] As far as I know there's no word for something we like too much.
The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. Most people won't, unfortunately. These two senses are already quite far apart. Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things. As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed. It took a while though—on the order of 100 years. In fact, even that won't be enough. Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. Notes. YooouuuTuuube. 5 Insane Ways Words Can Control Your Mind. On some level we already know that language shapes the way we think.
We're automatically more afraid to fight a guy named Jack Savage than somebody named Peewee Nipplepuss, even if we've never seen either of them before. It's totally illogical, but you probably run into an example of that every day, and don't notice it. While we tend to think words are just sounds we make to express ideas, science is finding that language is more like a fun house mirror, warping what we see in mind-blowing ways. For instance ... Speaking English Makes Us More Likely to Blame People Let's say your roommate Steve is jumping on your bed. How will you answer? Keep in mind, Steve pulls this shit all the time. The answer largely depends on what language you speak. Stanford scientists did experiments on this, by having speakers of various languages watch videos featuring, in various situations, people breaking eggs or popping balloons, sometimes on purpose, sometimes on accident.
Will nothing stop his madness? The NASA Space Pen. In this week's Friday funny, journalist and author Eugene Byrne looks at an amusing urban legend much beloved of engineers, and frequently used in management seminars because of its powerful moral about overcomplicated solutions. The story In the 1960s, the story goes, NASA realised that astronauts would need a special pen for recording data, instrument readings etc. when in space.
This pen would have to be capable of writing upside-down, in zero gravity, and in extremely high and low temperatures. NASA enlisted some of the finest minds in the country and set them to work. After much trial and error, years of work, and the expenditure of 1.5 million dollars, they finally succeeded in developing a space pen. And the Russians? The Russians used pencils. The truth Initially, American astronauts used pencils, too, but they weren't popular. It was actually an American pen manufacturer, Paul C Fisher (1913-2006) who came up with the solution in 1965. What You'll Wish You'd Known. January 2005 (I wrote this talk for a high school.
I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.) When I said I was speaking at a high school, my friends were curious. What will you say to high school students? So I asked them, what do you wish someone had told you in high school? Their answers were remarkably similar. So I'm going to tell you what we all wish someone had told us. I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life. If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you like, but it turns out to be hard, partly because it's hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs. But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them yet.
What they really mean is, don't get demoralized. Which is an uncomfortable thought. Now. People-about-religion-atheism-18482548-1280-805.jpg (JPEG Image, 1280x805 pixels) - Scaled (78. Industry veteran: LimeWire pirates were iTunes’ best customers. Internet pirates are always portrayed as parasitic freeloaders responsible for countless instances of DRM, the "death" of PC gaming, ISP bandwidth caps and more, but according to one industry veteran, that's entirely unfair. During a keynote speech at CA Expo in Sydney, former Google CIO and EMI executive Douglas C. Merrill said that he believes filesharers shouldn't be punished for downloading copyrighted material because it often drives them to make legitimate purchases. While employed by EMI (one of the world's largest music labels and an RIAA member), Merrill supposedly profiled LimeWire users and discovered that they were actually some of the biggest spenders on iTunes.
"That's not theft, that's try-before-you-buy marketing and we weren't even paying for it… so it makes sense to sue them," Merrill said sarcastically. In an amusing analogy, he said that suing people for filesharing "is like trying to sell soap by throwing dirt on your customers. " How to Disagree. March 2008 The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts. Many who respond to something disagree with it. That's to be expected.
Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. The result is there's a lot more disagreeing going on, especially measured by the word. If we're all going to be disagreeing more, we should be careful to do it well. DH0. This is the lowest form of disagreement, and probably also the most common. U r a fag!!!!!!!!!! But it's important to realize that more articulate name-calling has just as little weight. The author is a self-important dilettante. is really nothing more than a pretentious version of "u r a fag.
" DH1. An ad hominem attack is not quite as weak as mere name-calling. Of course he would say that. DH2. DH3. This is often combined with DH2 statements, as in: DH4. DH5. DH6. Related: JPG Dump. All sizes | SETI infographic. Amazing we breathe the air molecules of our ancestors the great and infamous. One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Number 9: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal. One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Number 9 One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Number 9: False Positives Suppose that we have a test for a disease that is 98% accurate: if one has the disease, the test comes back "yes" 98% of the time (and "no" 2% of the time), and if one does not have the disease, the test comes back "no" 98% of the time (and "yes" 2% of the time). Suppose further that 0.5% of people--one out of every two hundred--actually has the disease.
Your test comes back "yes. " How worried should you be? How likely is it that you have the disease? Suppose just for ease of calculation that we have a population of 10000, of whom 50--one in every two hundred--have the disease. If you test "no" you can be very happy indeed: there is only one chance in 9752 that you are the unlucky guy who had the disease and yet tested negative. If you test "yes" you are less happy. From John Allen Paulos's Innumeracy . Infoverse - octomatics. One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Number 7: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal. One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Number 7 One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Number 7: Julius Caesar's Last Breath What's the chance that the breath you just inhaled contains at least one air molecule that was in Julius Caesar's last breath--the one in which he said (according to Shakespeare) " Et tu Brute ?
Then die Caesar"? Assume that the more than two thousand years that have passed have been enough time for all the molecules in Caesar's last breath to mix evenly in the atmosphere, and that only a trivial amount of the molecules have leaked out into the oceans or the ground. Assume further that there are about 10 44 molecules of air, and about 2 x 10 22 molecules in each breath--yours or Caesar's. That gives a chance of 2 x 10 22 /10 44 = 2x 10 -22 that any one particular molecule you breathe in came from Caesar's last breath. . [1-2x10 -22 ] [2x10^22] How to evaluate this? [e [-2x10^(-22)] ] [2x10^(22)] From John Allen Paulos's Innumeracy .
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Facts About Being Left-Handed [PIC] Seth Godin: This is broken. 5 Unexpected Downsides of High Intelligence. Ask a Mathematician / Ask a Physicist | Your Math and Physics Questions Answered. 5 Ancient Acts of War That Changed the Face of the Earth. Practical Advances In Everyday Living. The Hidden Message in Pixar’s Films | Science Not Fiction. More intresting1.