Last Week’s Derren Tweets
12th Jan – Been run down, limp and covered in snot all week. Not shifting. Cough! You all have my germs, how unfair.
12th Jan – Send me your top joke and if I like yours best I’ll follow you and RT all your tweets til I feel better and have something to say.
12th Jan – Fave so far RT @DanielNothing Throwing acid is wrong. In some people’s eyes.
12th Jan – Great but can’t ALL be Jimmy Carr RT @AnnekaHansen why don’t boxers have sex before a fight? Because they don’t fancy each other.
12th Jan – Generally poor, but occasional goodie: RT @nickhucks When women live together, apparently their periods become synchronised. I found that out from two girls who share a pad.
12th Jan – Will check later in the day: must go to meeting now. Suggest leaving it for a few hours so your top notch entries don’t get lost.
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Isaac Newton’s Falling Apple Story Drops Into The Web
“It is the most famous apple in science. The fruit that bounced from Sir Isaac Newton’s head, as he pondered the universe in his orchard, supposedly inspired the great scientist to develop his theory of gravity. Unfortunately, like so many tempting tales, this one is not quite true.
Now, anyone who wants to study the best original source of one of science’s key insights can do so. The Royal Society is making available online for the first time a 100-page manuscript by the physician William Stukeley, who wrote the Memoirs of Newton’s Life.
“After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank tea, under the shade of some apple trees,” wrote Stukeley, in the papers published in 1752 and previously available only to academics. “He told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself.”"
Read more at Guardian (Thanks SonOfSam)
Hard As Nails: Pain From “Injury” Entirely Psychological
“Tom alerted me to this fantastic brief case published in the British Medical Journal where a builder is admitted to hospital in great pain after a nail penetrated all the way through his boot. But it turned out that the pain was entirely psychological, as the nail had missed his foot by sliding between his toes.
“A builder aged 29 came to the accident and emergency department having jumped down on to a 15 cm nail. As the smallest movement of the nail was painful he was sedated with fentanyl and midazolam. The nail was then pulled out from below. When his boot was removed a miraculous cure appeared to have taken place. Despite entering proximal to the steel toecap the nail had penetrated between the toes: the foot was entirely uninjured.”
As Tom mentioned “One of the things I love about it is that the builder had no incentive to ‘fake’. He knew he should have acted tough so we know that the pain he felt wasn’t over-acting. It was imaginary pain, but it was real imaginary pain!”"
Read more at Mind Hacks
Earthquake Survivors Get Solar-Powered Bibles
“As international aid agencies rush food, water and medicine to Haiti’s earthquake victims, a US faith-based group is sending Bibles to Haitians in their hour of need. Not just any Bible. These are solar-powered audible Bibles that can broadcast the holy scriptures in Haitian Creole to 300 people at a time.
Called the “Proclaimer,” the audio Bible delivers “digital quality” and is designed for “poor and illiterate people”, the Faith Comes By Hearing group said. According to their website, the Proclaimer is “self-powered and can play the Bible in the jungle, desert or … even on the moon!”
The Albuquerque-based organisation said 600 of the devices were already on their way to Haiti. It said it was responding to the Haitian crisis by “providing faith, hope and love through God’s Word in audio”.”
Read more at News.com.au
Self Control – Or The Lack Of It – Is Contagious
“Before patting yourself on the back for resisting that cookie or kicking yourself for giving in to temptation, look around. A new University of Georgia study has revealed that self-control — or the lack thereof — is contagious.
In a just-published series of studies involving hundreds of volunteers, researchers have found that watching or even thinking about someone with good self-control makes others more likely exert self-control. The researchers found that the opposite holds, too, so that people with bad self-control influence others negatively. The effect is so powerful, in fact, that seeing the name of someone with good or bad self-control flashing on a screen for just 10 milliseconds changed the behavior of volunteers.”
Read more at Science Daily
Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe – New series starts tonight
Phillis is running round in circles with glee as Charlie Brooker’s new series of Newswipe starts tonight at 10.30pm on BBC4. Be sure to tune in! If you’re not sure what it’s all about, here’s a clip from the last series:
@charltonbrooker says tonights episode is “With snow! The pantsbomber! Nuclear war! Everything!”.
How Winning Can Mean Losing In Poker And Life
“You can learn a lot about gambling if you’re willing to analyze 27 million hands of online poker. Don’t have time for that? No worries; sociology doctoral student Kyle Siler of Cornell University has done it for you. His counterintuitive message: the more hands you win, the more money you’re likely to lose — and this has implications that go well beyond a hand of cards.
Siler, whose work was published in December in the online edition of the Journal of Gambling Studies and will appear later this year in the print edition, was not interested in poker alone but in the larger idea of how humans handle risk, reward and variable payoffs. Few things offer a better way of quantifying that than gambling — and few gambling dens offer a richer pool of data than the Internet, where millions of people can play at once and transactions are easy to observe and record.
To gather his data, Siler used a software system called PokerTracker and directed it to collect and collate information on small- medium- and large-stakes games. He limited the games to no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em with six players in order to eliminate at least some extraneous variables. It was in the course of crunching all that information that he found the strangely inverse relationship between the number of hands won and the amount of money lost. He also noticed that it was novice players who lost the most.
The reason for the paradoxical results was straightforward enough: the majority of the wins the players tallied were for relatively small stakes. But the longer they played — and the more confident they got — the likelier they were to get blown out on one or a few very big hands. Win a dozen $50 pots and you’re still going to wind up far behind if you lose a single $1,000 one. “People overweigh their frequent small gains vis-à-vis occasional large losses,” Siler says.”
Read more at The Times
Sceptics taking part in mass homeopathic ‘overdose’
“At 10:23am on January 30th, more than three hundred homeopathy sceptics nationwide will be taking part in a mass homeopathic ‘overdose’ in protest at Boots’ continued endorsement and sale of homeopathic remedies, and to raise public awareness about the fact that homeopathic remedies have nothing in them.
Homeopathy is an unscientific and absurd pseudoscience, yet it persists today as an accepted complementary medicine.
Ask many people what they think homeopathy is, and you’ll be told “it’s herbal medicine” or “it’s all-natural”. Few realise that it’s been proven not to work; even fewer know it involves substances so dilute that there’s nothing left in them. Homeopathy takes advantage of this uncertainty to sit alongside real, proven medicines on the shelves of our major pharmacies.
Sceptics and consumer rights activists will publicly swallow an entire bottle of homeopathic ‘pillules’ to demonstrate that these ‘remedies’, prepared according to a long-discredited 18th century ritual, are nothing but sugar pills.
The protest will raise public awareness about the reality of homeopathy, and put further pressure on Boots to live up to its responsibilites as the ‘scientist on the high street’ and stop selling treatments which do not work.”
Read more at 1023.org.uk
There’s also a Facebook Group and Twitter account you can join.
U.S. Military Weapons Inscribed With Secret ‘Jesus’ Bible Codes
The following report is from ABC. We have no evidence to back it up so would appreciate if there’s any military people out there who can. Report as follows:
Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.
The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army.
U.S. military rules specifically prohibit the proselytizing of any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan and were drawn up in order to prevent criticism that the U.S. was embarked on a religious “Crusade” in its war against al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents.
One of the citations on the gun sights, 2COR4:6, is an apparent reference to Second Corinthians 4:6 of the New Testament, which reads: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”
Other references include citations from the books of Revelation, Matthew and John dealing with Jesus as “the light of the world.” John 8:12, referred to on the gun sights as JN8:12, reads, “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
Full Report from ABC News
