Fact O' The Day

[Krandall]

"The FDA has approved a hangover cure."

New York-based Rally Labs has developed an FDA-approved over-the-counter hangover pill. "Blowfish" contains a maximum-strength dose of aspirin and about as much caffeine as a cup of coffee. The tablet takes effect more quickly than its ingredients would on their own, according to Brenna Haysom, who came up with the idea for Blowfish while she was studying as a grad student at Harvard.

[Peelz]

ibuprofen, and water before you go to bed. same in morning, Maybe a little coffee... No need for special drug. but bet it sells.

[Krandall]

I try to make sure I drink either a gatorade or water before I go to bed. i had a heck of a time a few weeks ago after our car club christmas party. forgot, woke up and felt like crap!

[Krandall]

"Forgetting why you've walked into a room is partly caused by how your brain perceives doorways."


Notre Dame researchers conducted a series of experiments studying living spaces and their effect on memory. In one of these, the participants were supposed to take a specific object from one table and put it on a different table. The participants were separated into two groups; both were traveling the same distance, but one group passed through a doorway, and the other didn't. People in the doorway group were three times as likely to forget the details of their task. Doorways are "event boundaries," explained researchers; decisions made in another room often get filed away and forgotten after you've crossed the threshold of a doorway.

[Peelz]

thats actually quite interesting   

Explains why I forget shit when I leave the room all the time

[Krandall]

lol

[Krandall]

"Wi-Fi in laptops may be dangerous to men's reproductive health."


According to a study in the journal Fertility and Sterility, Wi-Fi-enabled laptops may endanger sperm. Researchers placed semen samples from 29 healthy men under laptops connected to the internet via Wi-Fi, then checked on the samples four hours later. They found that 25% of the sperm were no longer active (11% more than in the sample not exposed to Wi-Fi) and 9% showed DNA damage (three times the rate of the control samples). According to the researchers electromagnetic radiation is to blame, furthermore, a separate test recorded no radiation from active laptops that weren't connected via Wi-Fi.

[Peelz]

not mine. I'm good to go.   

[Krandall]

"Posture influences your sense of power more than your actual title or position."


A study at the Kellogg School of Management placed participants in high-power and low-power roles, and in open or closed physical positions. The researchers found that posture had more influence on behavior than the participants' actual roles; participants with high-power roles said they felt powerful but didn't actually behave that way. Open-posture participants took more risks, exhibited more power-related behaviors and were more likely to take decisive action, regardless of their roles.

[Krandall]

"People often perceive several gifts as less valuable than a single one of those same offerings."


A study in the Journal of Consumer Research indicated that, in some cases, more gifts can seem to have less total value than a few (of the same) gifts. One experiment divided 54 participants into "presenters" and "customers;" it was the presenters' job to put together the most valuable-seeming package (their materials were either an iPod Touch with a cover, or an iPod Touch, a cover and one free song). While 92% of the presenters figured it was most valuable to include the free song, the customer group was actually likely to pay more for the package without the free song.

[Colorado700R]

AN ENGINEERING PERSPECTIVE ON CHRISTMAS

There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world.

However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan) religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the population reference bureau).

At an average (census) rate of 3.5children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming there is at least one good child in each. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second.

This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child,Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stocking, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney,jump into the sleigh and get onto the next house.

Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks.

This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second -- 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.

The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized LEGO set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself.

On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds.

Even granting that the "flying" reindeer can pull 10 times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them -- Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).

600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft reentering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would adsorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake.

The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.

Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 mps in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.

Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now. Merry Christma

[Krandall]

"One-third of Americans have been arrested by the age of 23."


The first study in 50 years to examine nationwide arrest histories for a sample of young adults found an increase of 8% over the previous arrest rate -- 30% of 23-year-olds had been arrested (discounting traffic violations), compared to 22% when last recorded (1965). Furthermore, the study (published in the journal Pediatrics) found that the likelihood of an arrest also appears to leap right around the age of 18 and then to decline as people enter adulthood. The study relied on data from 7,335 participants who enrolled in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in 1996 and have been interviewed every year since then.

[Krandall]

"Urban areas could potentially weather a flu epidemic much better than rural ones."


The general perception is that crowded cities, teeming with people living in close quarters, would be devastated by a flu epidemic. But a new study of the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak by Norwegian School of Public Health researchers indicates that the opposite might be true. In some cases, the H1N1 strain of that flu only killed about 1% of people dwelling in urban centers, while its fatality rate approached 90% in some rural communities. City dwellers had built up stronger immune systems due to their lifelong exposure to various strains of flu, and were therefore dramatically more likely to survive the H1N1 strain, researchers found.

[Krandall]

"The Scottish accent is deemed the most sensible and responsible of Anglo-Saxon accents."

A survey conducted by UK-based communications consultant The Aziz Corporation found that 43% of respondents believed a person with a Scottish accent to be responsible, 40% of respondents assumed them to be hardworking and 31% found them trustworthy. Only 9% believed that someone with a Liverpudlian accent would be hardworking and reliable. Other UK accents (Newcastle, London Cockney) fell somewhere around the middle of the spectrum.

[Peelz]

"The Scottish accent is deemed the most sensible and responsible of Anglo-Saxon accents."

A survey conducted by UK-based communications consultant The Aziz Corporation found that 43% of respondents believed a person with a Scottish accent to be responsible, 40% of respondents assumed them to be hardworking and 31% found them trustworthy. Only 9% believed that someone with a Liverpudlian accent would be hardworking and reliable. Other UK accents (Newcastle, London Cockney) fell somewhere around the middle of the spectrum.

and by far the least understandable.  Have you ever spoken with a scotsman?