Trivia & Miscellaneous

[Daniel E.]

Fresca - Wikipedia

U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Fresca drinker, had dedicated signal boxes installed in his White House offices. These typically featured four buzzers: one to page his secretary, one for the Chief of Staff, and two for a military valet stationed in a small office next to the Oval Office. He would bring Johnson either a Fresca or coffee, depending on which button the President pushed.

 

[Daniel E.]

Bayesian Approach - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics

A Bayesian approach is a conditional probability or a probabilistic construct that allows new information to be combined with existing information: it assumes, and continuously updates, changes in the probability distribution of parameters or data.

 

[Daniel E.]

Wonderchicken: Oldest bird fossil discovered

 

[Daniel E.]

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - Wikipedia

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1 May 1881 – 10 April 1955) was a French idealist philosopher and Jesuit priest who trained as a paleontologist and geologist and took part in the discovery of the Peking Man. He conceived the vitalist idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving), and he developed Vladimir Vernadsky's concept of noosphere. Teilhard's ideas had a profound influence on the New Age movement.

(His most quoted saying: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”)

 

[David Baxter PhD]

That's similar to this I came across years ago, attributed to a Chinese proverb:

"On earth we are not humans trying to be spiritual... We are sprites trying to learn to be human..." ~ (Chinese proverb)

 

[Daniel E.]

Playing with a Google tool that analyzes word frequency in Google Books up to 2008:

Google Ngram Viewer: mindfulness,CBT,DBT

Google Ngram Viewer: bipolar,OCD,neurosis,mania

Google Ngram Viewer: pandemic,coronavirus

 

[Daniel E.]

Going retro:



Google Ngram Viewer: CompuServe,AOL,modem

 

[Daniel E.]

Why 40% of Vietnamese People Have the Same Last Name

In the United States, the most popular last name is Smith. As per the 2010 census, about 0.8 percent of Americans have it. In Vietnam, the most popular last name is Nguyen. The estimate for how many people answer to it? Somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the country’s population. The 14 most popular last names in Vietnam account for well over 90 percent of the population. The 14 most popular last names in the US? Fewer than 6 percent.

In the U.S., an immigrant country, last names are hugely important. They can indicate where you’re from, right down to the village; the profession of a relative deep in your past; how long it’s been since your ancestors emigrated; your religion; your social status.

Nguyen doesn’t indicate much more than that you are Vietnamese. Someone with the last name Nguyen is going to have basically no luck tracing their heritage back beyond a generation or two, will not be able to use search engines to find out much of anything about themselves.

This difference illustrates something very weird about last names: they’re a surprisingly recent creation in most of the world, and there remain many places where they just aren’t very important. Vietnam is one of those...

 

[Daniel E.]

nikhedonia (s) (noun), nikhedonias (pl) The elation and exultation of anticipating a victory or success.

Etymology: from Nike, "the Greek goddess of victory" + hedone, "pleasure".

Source: Word Info

 

[Daniel E.]

Mastering the Art of Making a French Omelette | The New Yorker

According to the rules of French cooking, a three-egg omelette constitutes a main course (Jacques Pépin makes his with four), and a two-egg version is merely a starter (the French don’t usually eat omelettes for breakfast).

 

[David Baxter PhD]

A Spanish omelette is definitely more a lunch or dinner thing, I think.

Of course, if you don't speak French or Spanish, you can always make just an American or Canadian (eh?) or Australian one.

 

[Daniel E.]

Paradoxes of Probability and Other Statistical Strangeness

Multiple Comparisons Fallacy

What is it?

This is where unexpected trends can occur through random chance alone in a data set with a large number of variables.

How does it happen?

When looking at many variables and mining for trends, it is easy to overlook how many possible trends you are testing. For example, with 1,000 variables, there are almost half a million (1,000x999/2) potential pairs of variables that might appear correlated by pure chance alone.

--

The Misleading Effect of Noise: The Multiple Comparisons Problem

Fortunately, most statisticians and researchers are honest and use methods to account for the multiple comparisons problem. The most common technique is called the Bonferroni Correction.

 

[Daniel E.]

The Forgotten Uses of 8 Everyday Objects

The Drawer Under Your Oven

If you keep cookie sheets, cupcake pans, and pancake griddles in that narrow little drawer under your oven, you’re in good company—so does most of the rest of the world. But in many cases, that’s not how the manufacturer intended you to use it. Often, the compartment is intended to be a warming drawer, a place to keep finished food warm while other dishes are cooking.

 

[David Baxter PhD]

I just read about this recently actually. Of course, that was before microwaves and lids for the pans.

 

[Daniel E.]

and before global warming

 

[Daniel E.]

The Good Guy/Bad Guy Myth

The first time we see Darth Vader doing more than heavy breathing in Star Wars (1977), he’s strangling a man to death. A few scenes later, he’s blowing up a planet. He kills his subordinates, chokes people with his mind, does all kinds of things a good guy would never do. But then the nature of a bad guy is that he does things a good guy would never do. Good guys don’t just fight for personal gain: they fight for what’s right – their values...

Stories from an oral tradition never have anything like a modern good guy or bad guy in them, despite their reputation for being moralising. In stories such as Jack and the Beanstalk or Sleeping Beauty, just who is the good guy? Jack is the protagonist we’re meant to root for, yet he has no ethical justification for stealing the giant’s things. Does Sleeping Beauty care about goodness? Does anyone fight crime? Even tales that can be made to seem like they are about good versus evil, such as the story of Cinderella, do not hinge on so simple a moral dichotomy. In traditional oral versions, Cinderella merely needs to be beautiful to make the story work. In the Three Little Pigs, neither pigs nor wolf deploy tactics that the other side wouldn’t stoop to. It’s just a question of who gets dinner first, not good versus evil...

 

[Daniel E.]

Crane fly - Wikipedia

An adult crane fly, resembling an oversized mosquito, typically has a slender body and stilt-like legs.



What's Up With All the Crane Flies? | University of Arizona

Nearly 100% of the energy that crane fly adults have comes from the food they ate as larvae – the adults don't eat any food at all. Imagine if we stopped eating food at age 18, and had to get by our entire adult lives on the food we ate as children. Similarly, crane flies have to conserve their limited energy resources and just hang out doing nothing quite a lot.

 

[Daniel E.]

Cambridge University Study States Software Bugs Cost Economy $312 Billion Per Year

 

[Daniel E.]

Ask a Ranger: Great snakes alive | azdailysun.com

The rattles [of rattlesnakes] are made of keratin, the same protein in our fingernails.

 

[Daniel E.]

Ann Weiser Cornell, an expert on Focusing, is the sister of the late computer scientist Mark Weiser who advocated for calm technology that "informs but doesn't demand our focus or attention."