Blindfolded people can't walk in a straight line

I was watching QI the other night and I discovered that nobody knows why blindfolded or blind people are unable to walk in a straight line. Now I never actually knew that when you were blindfolded that it is impossible to walk in a straight line, as the only times that I have tried was to hit a pinata, play pin the tail on the donkey, or  play other games indoors where there are things to walk into, so it is impossible to walk in a straight line anyway. So when I heard that it was impossible, I was intrigued. Apparently it has been tested that if somebody is blindfolded, told to walk in a straight line and set loose in an open space, they always walk with a curve to one side, even though they are convinced that they are walking in a straight line.

QI informs me, as well as a brief Google search, that science is unable to solve this mystery. Now I am not concerned that this puzzle is not solved by science because, if you have been reading my blog previously you might already know, I think spending science dollars to research inconsequetial facts such as this, is a waste money. Especially when you consider that there are cures still to be found to many fatal diseases and much poverty in the world. However that fact that people are unable to walk in a straight line whilst blindfolded is intriguing and I feel that I want to test this theory myself. I think it might be fun to try and prove people wrong by walking in a straight line whilst blindfolded. Even if they are most likely correct, it doesn't mean I try to be the exception to the rule!

Cat games on ipads

I was chatting to a friend of mine at lunch the other day and she was telling me about a game that you can get for your ipad, which is made for cats. Basically the game consists of a mouse running around the ipad screen and the cat has to hit the mouse with its paw. It is a very simple concept and apparently cats love it. My friend told me her friend's cats play it all the time, often enough that the protective casing on her ipad is covered in scratches.

At lunch there was also a little girl, who I noticed could use an iphone more adeptly than I can, and also seems to know how to do more things on the iphone than I do. I am ok with a child being better at using technology than myself, because nowadays they are probably already using them in their cradles, however hearing about this new electronic game for cats depressed me a little, because now I can see a future, in my lifetime, where not only will children be better with technology than I am, but where pets will be better with technology too. I just don't think I am ready for that future! I still remember a time before there were VCRs, and when the walkman was the coolest invention ever!

The Sinking Library

I was watching How I met Your Mother the other night, and Ted was telling Robin about an architect who designed a library, however when he was doing the calculations he forgot to factor in the weight of the books, and as a result the library started to sink a little each year, until it was eventually condemned. I thought that this was an interesting story, so I decided to Google a little more to discover where that library was built and who designed the building. If the story was true I was sure Google would have the answer. What I discovered however, was that the whole story was an urban legend, apparently for years there have been stories floating about regarding how libraries across the world had been the victims of this architectural flaw. However the few libraries that have actually been sinking were always found to be the result of faulty materials, shoddy workmanship, or poor investigation of the soil prior to building the library.

I must say that I was quite disappointed that this story wasn't true. I had once heard a story about an architect who built a supermarket, and had used all available space to maximise the shop floor to fit in more goods, however didn't provide an access point for disabled people, and so the company had to purchase land next door in order to fit in a ramp for disabled access. This bluder cost the site construction a few delays and a decent chunk of money, however it didn't result in the building being unusable. So I guess I wanted to hear a story about a bigger blunder, and was disappointed that I hadn't found it in the sinking library story. I suppose I will just have to settle with the Leaning Tower of Pisa!

Flexible e-paper

I read a little while ago on The Age website, about a new product being launched by LG. The product is an Electronic Paper Display (EPD) product, basically it is like an e-book but is 0.7 millimetres thick, can almost fit into the palm of your hand (it is only 1024 x 768 screen size) and can be bent up to 40 degrees. Apparently it can also survive a drop of up to 1.5 metres height without sustaining any damage. Currently it is only available in Europe with no set dates for release in the United States or Australia, however this new product could compete very well with the popular e-books currently on the market.

My thoughts are that eventually this new technology could lead to the creation of e-books that actually feel like you are reading a real book. You could buy a book with 100 flexible e-pages and flick through the electronic display pages of your favourite novels as if they were in real books. A newspaper sized e-paper could also be developed that could replace what we currently know as reading the paper. There would be no more trees cut down to make a paper everyday, and no more newsprint on your fingers when you read. I do however, wonder how you would fill in your crossword or sudoku, because you wouldn't be wanting to draw all over your screen because it would ruin the next page of reading. However since this new EPD is also scratch resistant, perhaps you could just wipe the answers away before you read the next page of the paper. Who knows really what the future may hold!

If you would like to read the article, check out The Age online.

Worm Grunting

I was watching QI the other day and I learnt about an obscure hobby called worm grunting. Now generally people who participate in worm grunting, or worm charming as it is also known, are people who are looking to obtain worms for fishing. However, there are a few of these grunters who are actually in it for the competition, and to whom it is considered a sport. I had never heard of this hobby, let alone the fact that it was a sport previously, but I learnt that some people in Britain, Canada and America compete in worm grunting competitions every year.

Basically the sport consists of people vibrating the soils in order to collect the most worms in a set amount of time and they are usually given a space of three square yards from which they can obtain their worms.  Apparently the reason that worms come to the surface when the ground vibrates, is that they believe that there is a mole in the vicinity, because the vibrations created are similar to the disturbance a mole causes, and moles prey on earthworms. The sport is not considered to be a mainstream sport, so I doubt that it will be making an appearance in the Olympic Games any time soon, however the skills are passed down through the generations in order to preserve this dying pass-time. I  expect that there are few, if any, physical benefits to worm grunting, so I don't see myself trying it any time soon, but you never know what the future may bring (I'm fairly certain I know what it will bring on this particular topic though).

Sharks have no backbones

I was watching QI the other day and I learnt an interesting fact, sharks don't have backbones. Their skeleton is not made of bone but of cartilage. The reason for this is that it allows the shark's body to be more flexible, which enables it to have greater movement in the water. However, since their 'spine' is made of cartilage and not bone, I guess in essence you could consider a shark to be spineless. Now a spineless creature, to me, has always been defined as one lacking courage, a real coward. However, sharks are not considered to be lacking in courage, and are in fact a creature that instils fear and scares away cowards, so does this mean that we should redefine what spineless means?

I suppose when they created the term spineless they were thinking of creatures such as worms or snails, creatures that don't instil fear, and that hide away when they sense danger. The fact of the matter is though, that there are other spineless creatures that will attack rather than hide, such as the scorpion. So perhaps more work should have been done when creating the term spineless, to see if it is really an accurate portrayal of all spineless creatures. In this instance though, since this term is already in effect, I guess we just need to accept that they are wrong but let them have their way.

Japanese Spider Crabs

I was speaking to my travel agent the other day and she emailed me a picture of these giants crabs that, I will admit, freaked me out a little. To be fair, she did warn me that these crabs freaked her out also, so I knew what I was getting myself into when I asked to see a picture of the giant crab. Now the main reason that I was freaked out, was because they looked like a spider, and spiders have always been creepy to me, ever since I saw the movie Arachnophobia when I was younger! The official name of these giant crabs, is actually the Spider Crab, another inventive name, and they can have legs up to 3.8 metres long and can weigh up to 19 kilograms! However the average length of their legs is generally 1 to 1.2 metres. Thankfully these creatures are mainly found off the coast of Japan, which is a decent distance from Australia, so there is no need for me to start expecting to see them if I swim in the beaches around Victoria.

One thing that is a little worrying is that they can have a life span of up to 100 years! That really is a long time for a spider looking creature to live. The one thing that I like most about spiders, is that they usually have a life span of only two years, often less. However spiders are much more prolific breeders than Spider Crabs, so I think that it probably evens out a little in the end. To be fair it is said that the Spider Crab has a gentle disposition, which means that I really shouldn't be worried about getting attacked by one, so their lifespan shouldn't disturb me or even concern me. However that doesn't stop them from looking creepy!

To see a picture of the Spider Crab check out Google Images, or to read more about them check out Wikipedia.

The Fog Index

I was speaking to my mum the other day and she told me to research the fog index, and that I would probably be surprised by what I discovered. My first thought was that is was something to do with the weather, which judging from the name would be a natural assumption. Perhaps they had some sort of rating system as to how dense the fog is, as to how long it will take to clear. However it turns out that I was way off! The fog index's full name is, the Gunning fog index and it measures the readability of English writing. Robert Gunning is an American businessman who created the fog index in 1952, and the name apparently derives from how foggy a piece of writing is to understand. The lower the score on the index, the clearer, or less foggy, a piece of text is to understand. The index is most commonly used to determine if a text is pitched at the right level for the intended audience and as a rule of thumb, text which is intended to be understood universally, requires a fog index of eight or lower.

There is a formula which is used to determine the fog index of a piece of text, which incorporates the number of words in a sentence, and the number of complex words in a sentence, divided by the overall number of words. The full formula and how to determine the fog index of a text can be found on Wikipedia, however a much more expedient way of measuring the fog index is to take a block of text, approximately 100 words (one or more full paragraphs), copy, then paste the sentence into the Gunning fog Index website, and click calculate. The Gunning fog index rates this entire blog at a 14.79 on the index, which means that it won't be understood universally. So if you are reading and understanding this blog, then feel special, because, according to the Gunning fog index, this text is a little too foggy to be understood by every English speaker in the world.

Hot dog stuffed pizza crust

I learnt the other day that Pizza Hut in the United Kingdom has released a new type of stuffed crust pizza, those of you who read the title will be aware that they have stuffed the crust with a hot dog. You may remember that Pizza Hut was also the company that released cheese stuffed pizza crusts, probably to the general groan of cardiac surgeons across the globe. I guess those same surgeons will be groaning again with the news of the latest stuffed crust. This new menu creation astounds me because I just don't understand why a company in this day and age, where obesity is nearly becoming an epidemic, finds it acceptable to be introducing menu items that make an already unhealthy dish even more unhealthy. To give you some perspective the new pizza contains approximately 270 calories per slice, compared with a plain cheese pizza which contains approximately 140 calories per slice. An average male is expected to consume around 2500 calories per day, so to eat just three slices of this new pizza, you would be consuming around a third of your recommended calories per day in one sitting. If you were to consume a whole pizza (which some people are known to do) you would have consumed all of your recommended calories at once!

However leaving the lowing of nutrition standards aside, I think the biggest surprise is that this pizza is being launched in the United Kingdom and not the United States. Hearing that this was launched in the United States would have surprised me about as much as seeing the sun rising in the morning. I say this because I heard a few years ago about a beef burger that was sold in the United States which contained a beef pattie and lettuce, however in place of the burger bun, was a sliced open Krispy Kreme doughnut. It sickened me to learn about the Krispy Kreme burger almost as much as it has about the hot dog stuffed pizza. My personal opinion is that companies around the world should be spending their menu development funds on discovering ways to make healthy food taste as delicious as unhealthy food. I mean imagine a lettuce that tasted as good as chocolate, but was as healthy as lettuce! That would be a better spend of resources because people would be rushing to buy something that will improve their health, instead of rushing to buy something that will eventually require them to seek the services of a good cardiac surgeon.

The Pilcrow

My friend sent me a link to a blog about shady characters, I was intrigued by the title, but once I actually started reading I was even more surprised about the content of the blog. I have always been a bit of a word nerd and liked the book 'Eats, shoot and leaves' which is about the decline of our modern day punctuation. So when the topic of shady characters was punctuation, I read on with interest. The blog was a three part story loosley focused on the story of the pilcrow, it takes many asides into the history of punctuation and the place of the pilcrow in punctuation. Now at this point you are probably asking yourself, what is a pilcrow? Most of you will know it as the mark in Microsoft Word, that when you turn on the hidden formatting symbols it marks the end of each paragraph. ¶

The story of the pilcrow and of punctuation in general is an interesting one. Back in the days of Ancient Greece, and later the days of Ancient Rome, punctuation was not used and words were written without spaces, with each word running into the next. Punctuation was first used to assist orators to read text aloud, rather than to assist readers to be able to read the text to themselves. It took many years after the first inception of punctuation, and a period where it fell into disuse, before what was to become modern day punctuation was born. 

The pilcrow was originally designed to be used to mark the beginning of paragraphs, not the end of them as it does nowadays in Microsoft Word. When writing a document, a writer would leave a blank space at the beginning and add the pilcrows in last. However due to deadlines being tight (yes tight deadlines have been around for a long time), often manuscripts would be published without the pilcrow, instead with just a blank space for the intended pilcrow. This practice gave birth to using indentation as the mark of a new paragraph, instead of the pilcrow, and was the reason for the pilcrow's fall into disuse. It has only now been revived with the creation of word processing programs, such as Microsoft Word, which have once again adopted the pilcrow as a paragraph mark.

This is a brief story of the pilcrow, I would recommend reading the full story on the Shady Characters blog, which covers many other facets of the history of punctuation in addition to the pilcrow.

Kleftiko

I was out the other night at my favourite Greek Restaurant in Melbourne, Tsindos. Whilst I was reading the menu I noticed a dish called Kleftiko. It was a lamb dish and the menu also told a little about the history of the dish and its unusual cooking style. Apparently during the time that the Ottomans occupied Greece, the freedom fighters who lived in the hills had to steal their meat in order to be able to have a full meal. They also devised a way of cooking this stolen meat which was to seal it in special earthenware pottery, and then bury the pottery in the ground. The pottery was buried with coals and these coals would cook the meat, however since it was buried it didn't give off any smoke or show any flames, which allowed the freedom fighters to remain hidden in the hills and still be able to have a cooked meal. This way of cooking meat became known as Kleftiko and was the dish that was available on the menu that night. 

I am assuming that in a modern day restaurant that they no longer bury the food underground to cook, as they wouldn't have any need, I assume, to hide that they were cooking food in a place that people visit to purchase cooked food. However I am sure that they still seal the meat in similar earthenware pottery and cook it over coals. On this occasion I didn't happen to try the dish, I had other dishes in mind that night, but I think next time that I visit Tsindos I will give the Kleftiko a try.

Dogs at work reduce stress

The other day I was having a discussion with friends of mine at work and we decided that we wanted to bring our co-worker's dogs into work and have a little puppy creche so that we could have some distractions at work. We all had a laugh at this idea knowing that we would never be allowed to do set it up. A few days later one of the friends I was having the discussion with emailed me an article from the BBC News website. Apparently there have been studies done in the United States around the benefits of brings your dogs into work! I was astounded that a workplace would allow this distraction, however it seems that the trial has shown many benefits.

They trailed having some people bring in their dogs, another group who owned dogs but left them at home and a third group who did not own dogs. The results of a study of these groups over a week was that in the mornings all groups had the same stress level, however the group that had brought their dogs to work had their stress levels lowered throughout the day as oppose to the other groups who had their stress level rise throughout the day. Also when it was tested that the people who brought their dogs to work, left them at home for a day, their stress levels rose on that day. The results show that bringing dogs to work is actually a stress reliever, so our idea was not as hopeless as we had first assumed. Armed with this knowledge I think I might try to implement a similar policy at my workplace, however first I will have to start owning a dog, so baby steps might be best practised here!

If you want to read the full article check out BBC News.

Roman vomitoriums

I was chatting to a friend of mine from work the other day and somehow it came up in conversation that the ancient Romans used to have special areas or rooms, called vomitoriums, that they could visit during a meal in order to void their stomachs, to enable them to continue feasting. I must admit that I was sceptical when I heard this, mainly because I have actually been to Rome and visited many Roman ruins around the world and have never heard of this practice or seen any evidence of these rooms in any ruins. I have also never heard any mention of the practice in books that I have read about Rome or in any of the novels that I have read that were set in ancient Rome. The lack of reference to this practice made me decide to try and verify this fact via Google.

It turns out that vomitoriums, as described above, are a myth. The Romans never practised vomiting to make room for more feasting nor did they preserve spaces in their homes for the practice. The word vomitorium, is a Latin word which means 'to spew forth', and it actually refers to the passageways that lead in and out of auditoriums. The design of these vomitoriums enabled many people to enter and exit from venues in a very short amount of time. The vomitoriums in the Roman Colosseum were so well designed, that it is said that the 50,000 seat venue could be filled in around fifteen minutes. This efficiency makes me think that perhaps we need to look at adding a few vomitoriums to our sports stadiums. Overall, sorry to all of you believers out there that thought that ancient Romans loved their food so much that they would vomit up earlier courses in order to enjoy more, it is just not true!

The moon is moving away from the Earth

I went to see a comedian the other week, as it was Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and it was mentioned that the Moon is moving away from the Earth a little each year. I found this interesting because I don't really have much knowledge of how the Moon and the Earth interact with each other, so I decided to do a little Google investigation. During my intense investigation (I looked at the one website called astronomy.com), I discovered that the Moon revolves on its own axis, once for each time it passes around the Earth and the reason this occurs is due to Earth's superior gravitational pull. Additionally it tells (which I already knew) that the Moon's pull towards the Earth is what produces our tides.

This doesn't explain why the Moon is receding from the Earth, but the website provided a very scientific explanation. I won't go into the same detail as the website, but basically the Moon is not quite pulling at the Earth properly because the Earth spins faster than the Moon. This improper pulling on the Earth, in turn makes the Moon spin a little faster. The increased spin rate of the Moon then causes it to spin a little wider, so as it is taking a wider lap around the Earth, it is moving further and further away from the Earth. This movement will not be noticed in our lifetimes, however in a few million years, tides will be weaker than currently, the moon will no longer cause a full solar eclipse (it will look smaller as it is further away, and so won't be able to block out the full sun as it does now) and our days will be longer (currently they are increasing at a rate of about one second every 50,000 years). All in all what should have been a night of laughs, has turned into one of doom and gloom, but at least it won't be doom and gloom that will be affecting me in my lifetime, so there is always a silver lining!

To read a full scientific explanation, check out astronomy.com.