Roadside Ear Cleaners...

Apparently roadside ear cleaners (that is, people who specialize in cleaning ears who ply their trade at the side of the road) are common in India.  This is one of 10 things I didn't know about India...

Magnificent Chickens...

When I first visited this site, my internal comment was ... “Really?”

And the answer is ... “Yes, people really do compete in chicken magnificence”

Oh, my...

Submarine Cables...

Today's Internet is very dependent on undersea (submarine) cables that link various parts of the world together.  We can seamlessly link between web sites in various countries only because these cables exist.  Less obvious, but economically perhaps even more importantly, these cables enable many other kinds of communications traffic: email, voice phone, fax, instant messaging, and much, much more.  They are, these days, vital conduits of economic activity – it's hard to imagine any kind of business that isn't dependent on them.

These cables (see diagram at right) are the most concentrated information conduits in the world.  When one of them breaks, the impact is large and immediate.  In some cases around the world, a single submarine cable is the only high-bandwidth link between some region and the rest of the world.  When one of those links breaks, large numbers of people are sawed off from the rest of the world – no web, no email, no phones, just ... crickets.

Here's a nice explanation of all this...

Misconceptions...

Statoliths: How Plants Tell Up from Down...

Interesting article from NPR (though they've spelled “statolith” incorrectly on their drawing!) and a more detailed explanation...

Do You Know...

...where the word “hello” came from?

Watching the Odometer...

Are you one of those people who watchs your car's odometer roll over from 9,999 to 10,000, etc.?  If so, you'll enjoy this letter to the London Times (June 17, 1978):

Sir,

It is not only dates that make nice patterns of numbers. Some years ago I was bringing a Destroyer home from the Far East and was required to report my position twice a day.

One evening, I saw that we would be passing close to where the Greenwich Meridian cuts the Equator so arranged to arrive there dead on midnight. Once there I altered course to due North and stopped engines so my position signal read:

At 0000 my position Latitude 00°00′N, Longitude 00°00′E. Course 000°. Speed 0.

I had considered saying I was Nowhere but thought (probably correctly) that Their Lordships would not be amused.

Yours faithfully,

Claud Dicken

The green arrow on the map at right shows the point Mr. Dicken took his destroyer to...

EPA Fraud...

You've probably seen those claims about all-electric vehicles getting 75, 90, or more “miles per gallon”.  Where do those numbers come from?  Are they actually meaningful?

Short answer: No.

Ode to Trader Joe's...

The anti-Whole Foods...

Son of Hitler?

There's some interesting evidence that Adolf Hitler had a son:

Jean-Marie Loret, who died in 1985 aged 67, never met his father, but went on to fight Nazi forces during the Second World War.

His extraordinary story has now been backed up by a range of compelling evidence, both in France and in Germany, which is published in the latest edition of Paris's Le Point magazine.

Hitler is said to have had an affair with Mr Loret's mother, Charlotte Lobjoie, 16, as he took a break from the trenches in June 1917.

What a mind-blowing thing it would be, to discover that Hitler was your dad...

Easy Corn on the Cob...

I haven't tried this yet, but it sure looks easy!

What's the Chance...

...that the breath you just took had some molecules of air that were part of Julius Caesar's last breath?

Answer here.

The Secret Life of the Pilcrow...

Do you know what a pilcrow is?

Frazil Ice...

Now this is really cool!  Via my mom...

Factoid of the Day...

Retiring Justice Stevens was a WWII cryptographer.

Obscura...

According to this web site, “obscura” are wonders, curiousities, or esoterica (though I couldn't find anyone else defining the word this way).  Whatever the correctness of that definition, the collection certainly is interesting.  The “Take me to a random place” at the top right is quite entertaining...

Benford's Law...

Have you ever noticed that a disproportionate amount of numbers start with the digit one?  For instance, if you were to go through a newspaper and tally up the numbers that appear there, you'd find that about 30% of them start with a one.  Why is it 30%? This odd phenomenon continues with the other digits – about 16% of numbers start with a two, and smaller and smaller proportions until you get to nine.  What's going on here?

The first person to study this was a fellow named Frank Benford, and the proportions above are said to follow “Benford's Law”.  If you follow the news carefully, you may recognize Benford's Law, as it was used last year to prove that the election results from Iran were faked – the returns should have followed Benford's law, but they did not.

If you'd like to understand more about both what Benford's Law actually is (it's a bit more complex than the simple version I gave above), and especially why it is, here's an easy-to-understand explanation.

Strange Factoid of the Day...

I can't even come up with a theory about this one.

The chart at right shows the average credit score for people with email addresses at various Internet domains.  For instance, if your email address is crazy_pecan@aol.com, then you'd be counted in the AOL domain.

Someone at CreditKarma came up with this study.  Why they would look at this correlation is just as interesting a question as the results of it.

Why on earth should people with a Yahoo email address have a (much) lower credit score than those with a BellSouth email address?  I have no idea.

Anyone got a theory?

Update:

My friend Doug W. (a clear thinker who is mathematically inclined) says, in effect, “Move along, there's nothing to see here!”  His explanation, which makes sense to me, though I certainly didn't catch it at first:

I’m not convinced there’s anything real here. My first gut feeling is that it’s a distribution to be expected, but there just isn’t enough info to draw any conclusions. For example, what is the standard deviation of credit scores? The range here is not that large, and they don’t say how many samples there are from each domain. Let’s take a simple model, which is probably wrong but illustrative nonetheless. There are 7 domains listed, and a total of 20,000 credit scores, so suppose that there are ~3000 per domain (certainly it isn’t evenly distributed, but the results wouldn’t chance much). The expected standard deviation given N samples is about sqrt(N), or 1/sqrt(N) as a fraction. So, for 3000 samples, you’d expect about 1/54 ~= 2% as a std deviation. So you’d expect 95% of samples to be within ~4% of the mean. If the mean is 665, and the std deviation is 15, then everything is exactly as you’d expect.

Worldometers...

Interesting set of realtime statistics at Worldometers...

Origin of Corn Flakes...

Now here's something completely unexpected (to me, at least!): several now-common foods were invented for the purpose of suppressing our animal passions. One specific example: the Kellogg brothers invented corn flakes as part of a dietary program, one objective for which was to reduce masturbation and other dangerous sexual behaviors.

No, I'm not kidding. Read more here, here, and here.

I'll never be able to look at corn flakes or graham crackers the same way again!