I’m a Nerd

Posted on 9 April 2016 by Larry Russwurm

I’m a nerd, that’s the word,
That says I’m smart you turd,
Your insult now is blurred,
This is the same as saying honky,
I’d have said right up your donkey,
That’s your ass, sasafrass,
When you have power you don’t need class.
Any insults can be passed.

I’m a nerd, I’m preferred,
When you need to surpass the herd
And simply to be heard,
Nerds are rarely shunned
When you need that great big fund.
When you need to surpass the market,
Your money, you cannot park it,
Let a nerd make your target.

I’m a nerd and that’s a bird,
Also a dinosaur I’ve averred,
I know what once occurred,
We keep sifting through the facts,
That’s all of science’s great big act,
I’ve seen all of the sky,
And I sometimes ask “Why?”
All the gods let me pry.

I’m a nerd, I’m lightly furred,
Sometimes I’ve even purred,
For what’s right I’ve been spurred,
And sometimes I’ve even kept it,
For what’s right I’ve even helped it,
Chaotic good and lawful good,
I sometimes do what I should,
I’ve tried to do what I could.

I’m a nerd, it’s a word,
That I’ve often preferred,
Competence is averred,
By this word.

Posted in Science, Social Science, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Assigning IQs to Freud and Jung

Posted on 2 April 2016 by Larry Russwurm

Psychology has taken to assigning IQs to people who have never taken IQ tests. Einstein only garners an IQ of 160, thus we have to put up with an article every week that declares a kid “smarter than Einstein”. Who knows what biases reign supreme while assigning an IQ without an IQ test?

I guess there is nothing to stop psychologists from assigning however arbitrary an IQ to whomever they want. I do draw the line somewhere. Psychologists should be banned from assigning IQs to psychologists. This is reasonable. Like the fact that police should never be in charge of investigating police.

So I have taken it upon myself to assign IQs to both Freud and Jung. I have never taken a psychology course. To ensure that there is no monkey business, I will clearly show my assumptions.

The first thing to do is to look at the most prevalent ideas of both men. We will then decide how old you have to be to come up with such a theory. Then we will divide that age by the actual age of the esteemed psychologist when they came up with that theory. We will then multiply that number by 100 to get the actual IQ of the psychologist. In theory, IQ or intelligence quotient is mental age over actual age multiplied by 100. Thus someone of average intelligence has a score of about 100.

Many of Freud’s theories concerned sex. Even what some say is his best work, The Interpretation of Dreams, has parts that later would become his theory of the Oedipus complex. So I have to ask myself, what age group can’t help but concern itself with sex, no matter the topic? Why middle school kids. They have just awakened to their own sexual desires and wonder if absolutely everything has a sexual side they hadn’t considered when they were younger.

So, despite all his training, I think Sigmund Freud had a mental age about 12 years old. Wait a second, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say his theories showed a mental age of 13.

He willingly published books and papers that allowed sexuality to dominate them as early as 1895 when he was about 40 years old.

So 13 divided by 40, times 100 gives Freud an IQ of about 33.

Carl Jung is best known for his archetypes. He first mentioned them in 1919 when he was about 43 years old.

The age you are when you first realize that humans come in certain varieties is about 6 years old. You have reached your second teacher so you realize that is a type and you find out your friends each have a mother and a father. Obviously people fit into various types, again and again.

So Jung’s mental age of 6, divided by 43, times 100 gives an IQ of 14.

So let’s say you’ve just taken an IQ test and you realize it says you are about average because you only got 100. Well now you can say, “I’m three Freuds!” Or “I’m 7 times smarter than Jung.” Isn’t psychology so comforting?

Posted in Humour, Pseudo Science, Science, Social Science | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Why Escaped Horses Rarely Become Mighty Mustangs

Posted on 26 March 2016 by Larry Russwurm

From about 4 until the age of 13, I grew up with a horse and a pony. I know, every kid, especially girls, dream of having a pony in their youth. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. And no, I’m not whining about the chores I had to do to keep them. I did nothing. My Dad did all the work including shoveling out their shed and feeding them regularly. All I had to do was to, sometimes, when I felt like it, bring down a scoop of oats to the horses.

No, what I am complaining about is the temperament of our two horses. The first day we got them the pony kicked me. I was four and I don’t remember but everyone older does. The horses were in a small enough of an enclosure that they ate all the grass (which they preferred to hay) early every year. So, once done that, they would reach over the fence and and all the grass within reach would be mowed much shorter than the other grass. As a kid, I remember trying to make friends with the horses and ripped off some grass further afield and gave it to the horses to eat. I knew the proper way to feed horses, which was to place the food in my hand, palm flat. The pony bit me.

The pony wasn’t broken (this was much before the horse whisperer) and ridable. So my second oldest sister’s friend (who was very much into horses) tried to break the pony. Breaking is such a strong word. What is actually meant by this is that the rider climbs on the horse or pony and stays on long enough that the horse gives up. What happened with my sister’s friend, is that she ended up being bucked off enough times that she quit.

A few years later, my third oldest sister had friends also into horses. Two of them heard about the unbroken pony and offered their services. I don’t know what this pair did that was correct (I was probably 11), but they succeeded. So for a couple years we had it so both horses were ridable.

The horse could only be ridden by a good rider or when led. Outside the enclosure, she was given to taking off suddenly. Or she would ride slowly away from the pony, only to charge her way back. The two were good friends. In the enclosure she was prone to try to swipe people off by going under a tree branch or (as we learned with my fourth oldest sister’s friend who was into horses) try to go back into the low shed if the door was left open.

So if you wish to buy a horse or pony for your kids, make sure you pick one with a nice temperament. It is worth the extra cost.

Anyhow these horses escaped our enclosure about ten different times. I don’t remember the adventures they had when I was little, but when I was about 12, I was expected to get or help get these horses. Because they were very close, if you captured the horse or the pony, the other one would follow. So that made the work easier.

But what really made the work a lot easier is that they didn’t flee for the nearest hills to be amongst their mustang relatives. The call of the wild isn’t as big as the call of the garden for horses.

When they got loose they always ended up there, in the vegetable part of the garden or the neighbours’ garden. Sometimes when you would go to try to catch them they would flee to the other garden. But I think they were ready to come in after they got their fill of flavourful vegetables.

It usually only took about half an hour to get those horses back in their enclosure. To live their safe boring lives eating hay, oats, a salt lick and bark off the trees. Indeed, my family called their enclosure the orchard. But after a decade of horses eating bark to horse height, all the trees died. And that is my final lesson about horses that I am going to give you today.

Posted in Humour, Pets | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Cats = Love

Posted on 19 March 2016 by Larry Russwurm

Some of you are taken aback that I made this equation knowing full well that cats are carnivores. Well, it gets even worse. I have actually seen cats playing the cat and mouse game. Well the cat is playing. It captures the mouse, holds it for awhile then lets it go briefly, so the cat gets to pursue again. Each time the mouse gets clawed anew and is weaker.

Still I want to prove my original point about cats equating to love so let’s look at the origins of a cat using its claws. As recently born kittens, they find food through their mother’s teat. But the flow is difficult to get. Then the cat tries kneading its mothers breast. They are fed to their satisfaction so all cats knead as a way to show love.

Have you ever seen a cat settle down in a spot? Especially if that spot is soft, the cat will circle around and then it purrs while its claws knead the spot. Every single cat I have ever seen settling down has done this. They love their spot to sleep, especially if it is soft.

Have you ever played with a cat? You throw the approved toy (cats always need to approve of it) and the cat lunges after it, clawing as it captures it. After you wrestle the toy away from the cat to continue the game, you then throw it and the pounce happens again. Cats love to play like this, They will do it for maybe ten minutes before becoming disinterested. When cats and dogs first diverged, dogs got the endurance and cats got the speed. So ten minutes is a valiant effort on the cat’s side.

So when that cat first jumps on that mouse, does it not use its claws as if kneading? Sure, it’s harmful to the mouse, but aren’t cats just saying “I love you” ? So the cat let’s the mouse go because she loves it so much and then realizes she can show her love by pouncing again. The loving continues until the mouse is dead.

Didn’t you feel for the character of Lennie in ‘Of Mice and Men’? Even if Lennie did stroke too hard and hurt or killed, he didn’t realize it until afterwards. That’s exactly what cats are like. They accidentally kill those smaller than themselves. Which is why I will never own a cat bigger than a housecat.

So the title “Of Mice and Men” means Lennie is the man and the weaker ones (everyone else) are all mice, scurrying around, trying not to be harmed by him. Don’t believe that the title refers to a line from the poem ‘To a Mouse’ that means, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” There, Lennie is said to be the mouse since he has a mental affliction and he can’t think on the past and future but only the moment. And, as the poem shows, the men (everyone else), however, are cursed to thinking too much about the past and future.

Posted in Pets, Social Science, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

All Alien Spaceships

Posted on 12 March 2016 by Larry Russwurm

What can we say about alien spaceships that hasn’t already been speculated on? Well I just noticed two things that are the same with all alien encounters that are depicted on the screen. The aliens always have lights and some even have searchlights which suggests that they don’t know where everything is. The second observation is that the spaceship always causes the human observers’ hair to fly around because of all of the wind that the spaceship produces.

Why, if it wasn’t for the lack of noise, I swear that all these spaceships could easily have been police or army helicopters. But wait, maybe they are.

I’ve heard that high tech helicopters have become stealth helicopters. Now this might simply mean the same thing as for planes – they are just invisible to radar. But the first world armies have had that for decades. Instead, there are supposed to have been helicopters produced that make little or no sound.

Knowing this, it becomes quite clear that the government has been sending out its “alien spacecraft” to do something with its own populace. But what exactly could this be?

The government is of course most concerned with its population’s well being. That being said, a large number of alien abductees claim to have been given anal probes.

Now that we know it is the benevolent government behind all of this, we can only conclude that the government has been using this ruse to give people colonoscopies. An easy check of this would be to determine the age of those who have had anal probes. If the majority of the abductees were 50 years or older (the recommended ages for colonoscopies to be performed) then we will be able to point our fingers at the government for being a little too benevolent.

Surely there are UFOlogists who can do the age studies on those who have been abducted.

Of course those benevolent “aliens” would have removed any possibly cancerous polyps and there are now fewer bad outcomes with colon cancer.

Obviously when those aliens say “Take me to your leader,” they mean their own leader in our obviously benevolent political regimes around the world.

Posted in Humour, Politics, Science, Science Fiction | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

More Bad News for Edgar Rice Burroughs

Posted on 5 March 2016 by Larry Russwurm

Well actually the man is dead so it’s not that bad of news. I am just bothering to get around to attacking the foundations of his Tarzan series of books. Not because they are bad writing (although coincidences do abound in his books), but because the science has caught up with him. I’ll now look at the premise with long overdue skepticism, since I’ve been engrossed by Tarzan as recently as the film Greystoke.

Poor Burroughs! Science has jumped all over his John Carter of Mars series and has said from on high that human or large alien life is not possible there. Indeed, we’ll be lucky if one celled organisms are capable of living there.

And the thing he chose to copy from Jules Verne is wrong, too. The centre of the earth holds molten iron and nickel and little else. Pelucidar is simply impossible. The world inside the world with the interior sun will never be.

I’ve never seen the Tarzan premise attacked with any gusto. Maybe it is because of all the babies-raised-by-animals stories, it is billions of times more likely to have occurred than any of the rest. I’m looking at you, Romulus and Remus, raised so well by wolves, that you managed to found the city of Rome.

Unlike ape babies, human babies can’t cling and support their weight until many months have passed. I think that in the meantime, any would be ape foster mother would have had to leave the baby once too often alone and thus little Tarzan will have been gotten by a predator.

It seems to me, out of all the creatures of earth, human babies cry the loudest and for the longest time. I can see mother ape dropping pounds as she is unable to forage for food with baby Tarzan crying all the time. Eventually she will lose so much weight that she can’t produce enough milk for little Tarzan and he will perish.

Surely mother ape has already encountered the black people indigenous to her area and realized that besides some colouring, little Tarzan looks exactly like them. If this doesn’t cause her to abandon the baby then as it grows it will exhibit habit after habit that is the same as the black people. Eventually the ape will either abandon Tarzan or give him to the black people to care for.

For the same reason that the ape didn’t like the crying of baby Tarzan, the black people will abandon kid Tarzan because of his Tarzan yell, and the fact that they can’t stalk prey with that amongst them.

Tarzan: the loudest thing in the jungle. As such, he will likely die very young.

Posted in Humour, Science, Science Fiction | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Superior to Superior

Posted on 27 February 2016 by Larry Russwurm

[Most of this post’s ideas are from Wikipedia’s stats about the largest lakes in the world. I was unaware of many of these comparisons until the last decade so I bring them here to you as many more people might be unaware.]

When European people got to Lake Superior, they gave it its obnoxious name because they “knew” it was the largest lake in the world. These Europeans and proto Americans and proto Canadians breathed a collective sigh of relief when Lake Victoria in Africa was found to be slightly smaller than Lake Superior.

But the problem with obnoxious names is that they are usually found out to be wrong, largely because of some overzealous person or group with an attachment to one possibility. Indeed, the only reason the Caspian Sea was ever called a sea was because it is full of salt water. In truth it is one giant salt lake bigger in area than all of the great lakes combined. Sea is definitely a misnomer here as it is totally inland. So henceforth it shall be known as the Caspian Lake. So Superior is only the second largest lake in the world. Or is it?

Lake Superior isn’t even the biggest lake of the Great Lakes. Now I’m not sure who made the mistake of separating Lake Huron and Lake Michigan but they are attached by a narrow channel and not a river. That is both lakes are at the same elevation which is the definition of being one lake. By area, Lake Huron-Michigan is the second biggest lake in the world.

Which puts Lake Superior in third place for the largest lakes in the world by area.

But some of you might know that Lake Superior is deeper than any of the Great Lakes so it may contain more water than Lake Huron-Michigan. You would be right in assuming so. By volume of water, Lake Superior is bigger than Lake Huron-Michigan. But what about the Caspian Lake?

The Caspian Lake is deeper than Lake Superior and thus has a much greater volume of water. So is Lake Superior the second biggest lake by volume? No.

Lake Baikal in Asia is way deeper than Lake Superior. It has more fresh water than all the Great Lakes combined.

Then there is Lake Tanganyika in Africa. It, too, is much deeper than Lake Superior and thus also contains more water.

So Lake Superior is the fourth biggest lake by volume of water. It is hardly superior. So why the name?

Well I’m thinking it has to do with its relation to the other Great Lakes. Lake Superior’s drainage basin doesn’t have a large area to draw from. In other words, Lake Superior is downstream of only a precious few rivers and lakes. But all the other Great Lakes are downstream of lake Superior. All the other Great Lakes take Lake Superior’s waste. And that can make Lake Superior feel a bit superior.

Posted in Geography, Humour | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Lucky Charms

Posted on 20 February 2016 by Larry Russwurm

Be honest. Most people play with their food just a little. Whether it is a little bit of plowing the fields with your fork before applying gravy to mashed potatoes or it’s making a foam design on your coffee, others play with their food, too.

But some think I take it to extremes. I like bran flakes and raisins just not both together. So as a child when Raisin Bran was bought for the household, it meant that I would take five minutes longer to eat my cereal, painstakingly eating all the flakes before beginning on the raisins. This was good practice for what I am about to discuss.

Eating all the cereal part of Lucky Charms is necessary so you can find out just how many “charms” or marshmallow shapes are left. Over the last year I have painstakingly separated my cereal to find out what might have been guessed. The most common charm is Lucky’s hat which contains the most easily thought of lucky charm – the four leaf clover. Lucky is of course the leprechaun mascot of this cereal. The least common lucky charm appears to be the blue moon. Which is as it should be. Blue moons are supposed to be rare.

Still some may say I’m an odd bird for separating my cereal and it does permeate its way to my other eating habits. With multi course meals it has been pointed out by various people that I very oddly eat each course separately.

This specific oddness led to being a common question to the now gone advice columnist Ann Landers. She would tell parents to let their children eat how they like, because this sorting and organizing trait led some of the children to become engineers and get these and other good paying jobs. While I didn’t become an engineer, I did take university level physics (which is closely related – engineering can be thought of as applied physics) so there is some truth behind this advice.

So you can laugh at me for my my-way-or-the-highway eating habits, but I can just say that they are a sign of a well organized mind.

Posted in Mathematics, Social Science, Wee Bit O' Humour | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Many More Ways for the Same Old Lists to be Everywhere on the Internet

Posted on 13 February 2016 by Larry Russwurm

If you are like me you are annoyed that every list or ranking of things gets linked to by just about every site on the Internet. You don’t see just one link bait for the same list article but at least 5 link baits. I thought that this on its own was annoying enough.

But here I’ve found an article about a list that only discusses the bottom ten entries in the list. It does link to the full list but the article is only about “The Worst Cities to Try to Find a Job in Canada”. It has probably opened the floodgates if they hadn’t been opened before. I firmly believe that there is an article about “The Best Cities to Try to Find a Job in Canada”. I haven’t seen it yet but I am familiar with the goings on of the Internet. It exists.

So now we’re going to find articles about both the bottom ten rankings and the top ten rankings of any list. But why stop there?

Perhaps you could have an article about “The Mediocre Cities in Canada to Find a Job. Such a heading might not encourage people to read it and be good link bait. But link bait is rarely honest. You could have an article called Finding Jobs in Canadian Cities in the Teens. This article could be about finding jobs in Canadian cities during this decade. But it would really be about those cities that ranked 10 to 19 on that original list. This link bait might actually work.

You know, in the heady early days of the Internet I thought there were going to be many more news stories. Or at least different points of view. But that is not the case at any of the big sites. They race to cover or link to the same things. I guess I should traipse through more blogs to uncover different perspectives and perhaps a different kind of news.

Posted in Humour, Language, Mathematics, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Felix the Cat “Rewarded” in Britain

Posted on 6 February 2016 by Larry Russwurm

Felix has kept the Huddersfield train station in West Yorkshire mouse and rat free since 2011. So the staff at said station has now “promoted” Felix to Senior Pest Controller. To go with the promotion, she was given a name badge and a high vis jacket.

I must congratulate the mice and rats on raising enough money to pay for the high vis suit. And the idea to call it high vis instead of high visibility, to let it get over the heads of all the humans that work at the station, was pure genius. Now all the mice and rats will be able to see Felix long before she’s close enough to catch them.

I have heard of mice elsewhere who came up with the genius plan to bell a cat so they could hear it long before it was near. Now all they have to do is send it as a package in the mail to the human owners of the cat with a nice note saying that the cat is so great it deserves the bell and all the attention it will get because of the noise.

Mice everywhere are thinking about what might be a real revolution. Noisy and highly visible cats are just around the corner.

Posted in Humour, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment