In 1811 the French admiral Louis-Antoine de Bougainville died, aged 81. In 1769 he had become the first Frenchman to circumnavigate the globe and the first person to do so accompanied by naturalists and geographers. One of these scientists, the botanist Philibert Commerçon, named the South American shrub bougainvillea after his captain. He also smuggled his mistress Jeanne Baré on to the ship by pretending she was his valet. Although later unmasked, she became the first woman to circumnavigate the globe.From the QI feature at The Telegraph.
The experiment went like this: Mischel invited a four-year old student at the Bing Nursery School into a small room, barely bigger than a closet. He then made her an offer. She could either eat one marshmallow right away or, if she was willing to wait fifteen minutes while he ran an errand, she could eat two marshmallows. Needless to say, most kids decided to wait. Mischel then left the room, but told the child that if she rang the bell on the table he would come running back and she could eat the marshmallow. However, this meant forfeiting the chance to get a second marshmallow.What I learned tonight is that there was a followup to this study:
The vast majority of four-year-olds struggled to resist the allure of the marshmallow. (The average waiting time was less than two minutes.)...
To extend their limited self-control, the little kids spontaneously invented a variety of mental strategies. Some covered their eyes with their hands or stood in the corner of the room, so that they couldn’t see the temptation. Others start kicking the desk, or tugged on their pigtails, or began stroking the marshmallow as if it were a stuffed animal. For about twenty-five percent of four-year olds, these strategies allowed them to successfully delay gratification until the experiment was over.
Fast forward twelve years: the preschoolers are now in high-school. Mischel sent out an extensive questionnaire to the parents, teachers and academic advisors of the nearly 600 subjects who participated in the marshmallow task. The multiple-choice survey had no single theme. Instead, Mischel asked about every trait he could think of, from the ability of the teenagers to control their temper to whether or not they “embraced challenges” and got along with their peers. He also requested a copy of their SAT scores.Further details at Wired Science.
The correlations were clear: The children who rang the bell within a minute were much more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention in class and had serious problems with their temper. The difference between a child who could only wait thirty seconds and a child who could wait fifteen minutes was that the high-delayer had an SAT score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than the kid who couldn’t wait....
Goosey Goosey Gander where shall I wander,Here's one explanation for this curious verse:
Upstairs, downstairs and in my lady's chamber.
There I met an old man who wouldn't say his prayers,
I took him by the left leg and threw him down the stairs.
"I read that it referred to the post Civil War period (middle 17th century) and Cromwell's soldiers who marched in "goose-step", which gives the title and first line. Also, the version of the rhyme I heard had the third line as, "There I met an old man a-saying of his prayers". This referred to (as you mention) a Catholic, possibly a Priest, praying and the line: "I took him by the left leg and threw him down the stairs" alluded to the nickname "left-footer", that a Catholic is sometimes called in Britain. The overall meaning was that the Roundhead soldiers were searching out Catholics, particularly Priests, hiding in the houses of friends, and when found they were ill-treated".
When it was signed into law six weeks after the attacks, the act made it easier to wiretap American citizens suspected of cooperating with terrorism, to snoop through business records without notification, and to execute search warrants without immediately informing their targets (a so-called sneak-and-peek). Privileges once reserved for overseas intelligence work were extended to domestic criminal investigations. There was less judicial oversight and very little transparency.Text and image from New York Magazine, via prima mangiare e dopo filosofare.
When the babies are around a month old, the mother spider rolls over on her back allowing the spiderlings to clamber over her, kill her by injecting their venom and digestive enzymes into her body, and eat her. After the young gobble her up, they turn on each other and cannibalize as many of their siblings as they can before leaving their mother’s web.Source: Research by Trine Bilde at Aarhus University, via Animals, Animals, Animals.
Story from MSN, via Lowering the Bar (a blog of legal humor).
The Metro Narcotics Agency had "credible information from a reliable source" that the woman had concealed up to an ounce of heroin, which led to a search warrant on July 1, said Metro Sgt. Mike Alba. The woman was searched at Memorial Medical Center, which then billed her for $1,122. No heroin or any other narcotic was recovered from the exam. The woman was not arrested or charged. The woman had no criminal history in New Mexico.
A talk box is usually an effects pedal that sits on the floor and contains a speaker attached with an airtight connection to a plastic tube...Text from Wikipedia, which also has a history of the development of the talk box and its use by other musicians.
When activated, the sound from the amplifier is reproduced by the speaker in the talkbox and directed through the tube into the performer's mouth. The shape of the mouth filters the sound, with the modified sound being picked up by the microphone. The shape of the mouth changes the harmonic content of the sound in the same way it affects the harmonic content generated by the vocal folds when speaking. The performer can vary the shape of the mouth and position of the tongue, changing the sound of the instrument being reproduced by the talkbox speaker. The performer can mouth words, with the resulting effect sounding as though the instrument is speaking. This "shaped" sound exits the performer's mouth, and when it enters a microphone, an instrument/voice hybrid is heard.
Observing tiny songbirds as they flew for hours in a state-of-the-art wind tunnel, biologists at the University of Western Ontario in Canada discovered that the animals conserve water by burning muscle and organs instead of fat.
The protein in muscle doesn't provide as much energy as fat, but it can release five times as much water — enough to keep birds going during their nightlong flights, according to a study published Friday in the journal Science...
They analyzed the body composition of each bird in the QMR [quantitative magnetic resonance analysis] device before putting the animals into the wind tunnel, letting them fly for an average of about 2 1/2 hours, and then measuring their body composition again at the end of the flight... Birds flew one at a time and completed flights at 80% relative humidity and at 10% relative humidity... No birds became dehydrated, and all burned significantly more protein tissue under dry conditions than under wet conditions.
Yin is the black side with the white dot on it and yang is the white side with the black dot on it.
