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Hijo Del Helmsley posted:As a non-American, I seriously had no idea you could go inside the Washington Monument. I thought it was just a big obelisk and that was it. There are lots of the stones from different countries. There's one mysterious one from Japan in 1853, and a newer legible one from the 80s... Plus boring ones from printing groups or firefighters in the late 1800s. It's really crazy because they just sort of find places to shove in these gifts in the marble. Yes, the interior of the Washington Monument is like Victorian NASCAR. When I visited in the late 80s they may or may not have been installing a stone and I may or may not have collected pieces of scrap marble that had fallen on the stairs. Had I done such a thing, it would only be to keep someone from inadvertently slipping on the way down. EDIT: Oh, and a LOT of Freemason stuff and commemorative stones in the Washington Monument, so if any of you want to go down that rabbit hole, have fun!
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Mar 26, 2015 02:23
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Double Plus Good posted:It depends. Drawing, writing, and reading are all assessed separately from language. And reading in different scripts can impact different parts of the brain, meaning that you can be dyslexic in one script but not in another: quote:For years the latter viewpoint had the upper hand. But last September a team of researchers led by Li Hai Tan published a paper in Nature saying: Not so fast. Li and friends performed brain scans of Chinese readers, both normal and dyslexic, who were taking reading tests. They found that normal Chinese readers show increased activity in the brain's left middle frontal gyrus, thought to specialize in remembering visual patterns (e.g., the thousands of Chinese characters), whereas Chinese dyslexics show less activity there. In contrast, readers of English show high activity in a different cranial district called the left temporoparietal regions, whereas English dyslexics show less. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2591/is-it-possible-to-be-dyslexic-in-chinese http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040830/full/news040830-5.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographies_and_dyslexia
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Apr 9, 2015 23:35
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There was the 2008 Chinese Milk Scandal in which baby formula was found to be adulterated with melamine, the same chemical that killed a bunch of cats and dogs from tainted pet food. But here's the one that has always terrified me: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2008/09/22/2003423869 quote:Thirteen babies died of malnutrition in 2004 and almost 200 were hospitalized in Anhui Province after drinking milk powder with no nutritional content. A baby formula company was literally making formula with no nutritional content. And that's not a case of somebody not wearing a hair net or some bizarre cow disease, it's an entire company deciding to cut corners by making something that would vaguely look like milk when combined with water.
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Apr 17, 2015 23:18
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wootsie posted:Pro click, but apparently it was over 15000 PAGES. There's also a documentary from 2004 that I'm watching at the moment. The documentary is really good. If you just heard, "Ah, here's this oddball who draws naked girls with penises getting punished by aliens AND he works as a custodian at an elementary school and always wanted to adopt a kid..." You'd think he was a monster. But he appears to be a fairly harmless guy with some mental issues that he dealt with in a harmless (and private) way. I've always wondered if he really wanted any of this published after his death.
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May 6, 2015 01:32
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BattyKiara posted:A bit of googling of Sporadic E led me to this: http://www.apts.org.uk/recording.htm There is the practice of meteor burst communications. During heavy meteor activity you can get radio reception from far away with fairly low-powered equipment. The signals bounce off of ion trails in the atmosphere and if you're lucky enough to get a few pointed in the direction of transmitter-->receiver, then it's kind of like having an extra length of cable up in the sky for fractions of a second.
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Jun 5, 2015 22:59
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Nckdictator posted:James Baskett... later becomes the first African-American to win a Oscar for his role in Song of the South Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar for Gone With The Wind in 1939. Baskett's Oscar was an honorary one, while the first regular Oscar won by an African American male was Sidney Poitier for 1963's Lilies of the Field.
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Oct 7, 2015 12:20
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Sex Hobbit posted:I used to work in a funeral home and brains actually MELT at room temp once they're dead. You'd try to pick up the brain slices the pathologist left you and they just schlurp right through your fingers. The texture is something between undercooked scrambled eggs and butter that's been softened in a warm room. All of my experience with brains comes from pigs, but it's amazing that something so fragile (and frankly, just one big ball of fat) is so powerful.
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Oct 10, 2015 01:32
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edrith posted:Qisuk was eventually reburied with proper rights, but the story is an insight on how hosed up early anthropology/polar exploration could be. I'm always amazed at the brief but popular history of Human Zoos at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th: sometimes entire villages from Africa or other places were transplanted to the US or Europe, in other cases humans were exhibited in animal zoos, like Ota Benga, who was displayed in the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo. This was done with Native Americans as well, and human zoo exhibits were really popular at World Fairs during those years. Lots of pictures here NSFW.
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Oct 12, 2015 22:44
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At the intersection of football hooligans and newspapers comes the Millwall brick: an improvised weapon made out of newspaper devised after stadium police started confiscating anything that could possibly be a weapon in the 1960s. I think I first learned about it in Bill Buford's Among the Thugs, recommended to me by an anthropology professor. Video tutorial
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Nov 16, 2015 23:29
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artichoke posted:Can't recommend that book enough. I have zero interest in football and I loved this book. Just fantastic writing and a very interesting take on why we find ecstasy in violence. I was recommended the book because I'd just read a dozen ethnographies of various cultures, written by Brits. All sorts of nasty things done by tribes around the world. So for perspective, I got to read an American author witnessing things like an English football fan sucking the eyeball out of a policeman's skull during a bar fight. 
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Nov 19, 2015 02:13
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Literally Kermit posted:I just got an alert that Arkansas has a live shooter right now. I wonder if it has anything to do with this upcoming event, which I think is one of the dumbest ideas ever conceived.
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Dec 10, 2015 21:47
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