Trivia

• The toxicology hypothesis — Vomiting while motion sick can be traced back to the same sensors for motion sickness being associated with detecting if we are poisoned (since this also causes nausea). Hence, the response is to throw up the poisoned food.

  • Rotten potatoes can produce a lethal gas called Solanine

• Penguin, Depressed. When sad, penguins will just wander on their own willingly — as if starving themselves.

• Chinese Ghost Marriages are marriages in which one or both parties are deceased.

  • People have exploited this practice for profit due to cultural beliefs about having children that are married.
  • Said exploiters perform grave robbery or murder women to then sell — “Fresh Ones” are those recently deceased or about to die; “Wet bodies” are those who have died within a few weeks and “Dried Meat” who have died longer.

• Crowd Crushes are a thing — the crowd becomes so dense that it behaves like a fluid (with deadly consequences).

• Caskets can fail and when they do they leak blood and embalming fluid

• The Dragon Paradox - If Dragon’s aren’t real, then why do many cultures from around the world allude to dragons.

• S Risks — Fate’s Worse than extinction - S risks pertain to events that have astronomically high scope and high severity. They typically share common elements

  • (1) they involve many more beings than currently exist;
  • (2) are brought about by significant technological advancements;
  • (3) involve suffering due to a part of a larger process; and
  • (4) are preventable with foresight

• Functional Fixedness can be overcome as follows:

  • Uncommitting - abstract the problem down to its essential components.
  • Draw inspiration from other places.
  • Draw opinions from other fields

• Our right and left hemispheres of the brain experience consciousness differently. Splitting them apart leads to some weird behaviors. Dissecting the brain reveals that the most predominant aspect of it is involved in justifying and rationalizing our decisions and experiences, even if it is done so incorrectly or irrationally.

• Tautomers are structural isomers of chemical compounds that readily interconvert. That is, through a process called tautomerization, one can convert one into the other and vice versa.

• In Japan, bowing is a sign of respect. The deeper / longer the bow, the more formal and respectful.

• Japanese people avoid physical contact.

• Meishi - business cards exchanged when meeting someone in a business situation for the first time.

• Japanese give their names family name first and given name last. They do not have middle names.

• Poludnitsa - A mythical figure in Slavic mythology associated with heat stroke.

• The Ghost of Kyiv - a flying ace who shot down six Russian planes during the Kyiv offensive

• Odesa Catacombs - a vast network of catacombs in Ukraine. It is easy to get lost in these catacombs.

• The Strid - A portion of the River Wharfe in England. While it looks like an ordinary stream of water on the surface, underneath it consists of a network of sedimentary rock that can rip a human to shreds.

  • What lies at the bottom

• Gout was also called the “Disease of Kings”

• The same neural clusters that are used in sensory perception are used in conceptual imagining.

• Storytelling is really what the brain does. We experience the world as a sequence of events that flow, generally, from one to the next over time. When we try to communicate with others and with ourselves, we actually construct stories

• RAMBO Attack - an attack involving writing to RAM and picking up on the EM signals emitted.

• Jerusalem Syndrome - a psychological phenomenon associated with tourists visiting Jerusalem.

• The Ignoble Prize (2024). All of these are based on one paper. Skepticism allowed but these are silly facts nonetheless.

  • Beards most likely evolved as a mechanism to protect the jaw. Hence, why they only grow on a specific part of the face.
  • You can control impulsive behavior by controlling your urge to pee.
  • You can relieve an itch by having an image of scratching a non-itchy area.
  • You can train people with dog clickers effectively (via operant conditioning)
  • Orgasms can help decongest a clogged nose.
  • There are 100 hairs per nostril regardless of sex and race.
  • The left scrotum tends to be warmer than the right.
  • There is a correlation between finding a romantic interest and synchronized heart rates
  • There is a correlation between narcissism and having distinct eyebrows.
  • There is a memetic effect induced by looking at a window which attracts a crowd to look at the same window. The contagiousness is dependent on whether the person looking stops what they are doing.

Bottom §

Unstructured exploration goes here