Big Pickles

Once when I was a kid, I mentioned to my mom that I tend to associate numbers with certain colors. She responded that it sounded like I had a neat idea for a Swatch watch. This was the eighties, after all, when Swatches were all the rage.

I didn't think much of it, really. When you're a kid, it seems like colors are often used as a memory aid. In first grade, Mrs. Parker's class was green, Mrs. Tyler's class was blue, etc. So I always assumed that the letter P is green and the month of May is yellow because I had some memory of similar associations from childhood. Probably I'm just remembering some colored refrigerator magnets or something.

Today, my officemate Scott directed me to the wikipedia page on synesthesia. He was reading about a piano player that had it, and it reminded him of Ratatouille, where the rat sees colors and hears music when he tastes certain flavors. He thought it would be a cool condition to have.

I'm now convinced I have grapheme-color synesthesia. It's strongest for digits, but I also get colors for letters, days of the week, months of the year, etc. I don't know why it would be cool to have, though. I can't remember it ever coming in handy for anything. I just figured everyone did this.

The colors I see:

Labels: wikipedia

Charles Darwin said it first: "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." But Dunning and Kruger designed some experiments around the idea and quantified the Dunning-Kruger effect, which states that incompetent people tend to overestimate their level of skill, and that you actually have to have some degree of skill before you can begin to perceive your lack of it.

It might well be called the Dilbert effect, as much as Scott Adams talks about it. (Not to be confused with the Dilbert Principle, which states that companies intentionally promote incompetent people into management to limit the amount of damage they're capable of.) The one problem with the world, he claims, is that most of us are dumb about most things. Because of that, not only do we fail to recognize our own ignorance--and therefore inflate the importance of our own opinions--but we also fail to recognize the genuine skill and knowledge of those who aren't dumb about those particular things, and therefore we wind up discounting their opinions because they are usually different from our own.

Labels: dilbert, wikipedia

Ah, Wikipedia, always good for a laugh.

Labels: wikipedia

Have you ever noticed how fast Wikipedia updates? Whenever there is some breaking story in the news, you can usually go to Wikipedia to get the latest information.

Wikiclock takes that phenomenon to the extreme. It's a clock that runs solely on wiki technology. So far I haven't seen it off by more than 15 minutes.

Labels: internet, wikipedia

Who knew? The opposite of Absolute Zero is the Planck temperature, 10^32 Kelvin, the temperature beyond which the molecules of matter become black holes unto themselves, or something.

Some scientists believe that we, or at least our universe, have already experienced the Planck temperature, although it went by so quickly you may have missed it. It occurred at 10^-43 of a second after the Big Bang, the great cataclysm in which the universe was born. (10^-43 of a second, in case you're not hip to the notation, is an incredibly tiny fraction of time. Time enough to create the universe, but not, as a University of Chicago physicist was once at pains to explain, time enough to get off a disputed last-tenth-of-a-second shot against the Chicago Bulls.)

(I had no idea that Planck had so many units.)

Labels: science, wikipedia

Wikipedia is great with these lists. Plenty of magic tricks, including several exposures.

Labels: wikipedia

I'm reasonably certain that this is the most interesting page on Wikipedia to date.

I dare you to find a more fascinating article.

Ready, go!

Labels: wikipedia