Random Thought of the Day

I swear when I was younger I was never bothered by eating luncheon meat. Now if I have any of that stuff, after a few hours I am absolutely dying of thirst, have to keep drinking and drinking water. And it's kind of an unpleasant condition. Probably I first noticed this when I was about 50 or so. Younger, I wouldn't have much known what anybody was talking about if it was mentioned.

Quote:

Kozloski says about 90 percent of the energy consumed by the brain is unaccounted for, which is a considerable amount given that the brain takes 20 percent of the body's total energy.

He proposes that the brain is actually always looping signals through a series of pathways in the brain, made of neurons and tissue. Kozloski says these pathways are like city streets, and the brain is always tracing them, retracing them, and then tracing them again. The pathways themselves lead through three areas of function in the brain: sensory (what’s happening), behavioral (what can I do about it), and limbic (what does it mean to me).

http://www.popsci.com/ibm-research-thinks-its-solved-brain

The existence of "stand-up philosophers" in ancient Rome ought to be a hot topic among historians.

Grrrr..... was smokin' the Jeopardy! test and came to the last question, got brain-sludged. KNEW it. Own the damned DVD's and album. And couldn't get it written out in time to score it. I HATE that. Arggghhh.

FWIW, in the category "Before and After", the answer is, "Where the Crawley family lives with the album containing the song "Here Comes the Sun".

Decided (very very likely because of Clue) to look up actual murder weapons. Yah, I can see how clobbering someone with the lid of toilet tank would do the trick. But killing someone with a ball point pen would probably take some luck or precise blows, or perhaps the person was tied up already. One was killed with a pickle jar. It didn't even break the glass. And you probably heard about someone being killed with a stiletto (the shoe). That too! (or is it also?)

Stiletto might as well be a ball peen hammer with an ice pick head. There's a steel shaft (usually) running the sole of the shoe, connected to the heel, which is rigid and solid. Grab it by the toes and swing it into someone's face or cranium, they're toast.

When they first came in, in the early 60's, I was still crawling. My mom was going out (with my dad) that night, and stepped back on my hand before she realized it. Went right down to the bone. I still have a square white scar on the back of my hand, about 1/4" across.

dwelling on this stuff can get a little perverse, but, hey, dwelling on it has to be what mystery writers do.

I'm a little surprised that different methods of asphyxia aren't used more to murder, at least in fiction [perhaps I am unaware of some]. Inert gas asphyxiation - such as using nitrogen gas - works quite well. "The exposed person has no warning and cannot sense that the oxygen level is too low" according to the Wikipedia article. Suicide is one of the topics in that article, but not murder.

Interesting post in Neurologica about conspiracies:

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/math-vs-conspiracies/

This quantifies something reasonable people have always known: that tens to hundreds of thousands of people cannot keep something this big secret for years and years.

The article also mentions real conspiracies which have been exposed. On this, I thought of other large, complex endeavors which involved hundreds of thousands of people, and were kept secret for weeks or even months. Which are these? Why, combat operations.

Consider the D-Day landings. The numbers are staggering. The measures taken to keep it secret were also tremendous. But this worked because there was a time limit on it, and because the Allies also leaked misinformation to mask their intentions. As Churchill said about truth in war being so precious that "it needs a bodyguard of lies."

But this is also meant to be exposed, when the trap is sprung.

When one perceives randomness they are just failing to understand the algorithm.

Quote: rxwine

Decided (very very likely because of Clue) to look up actual murder weapons.

btw, best you not murder anybody now with this search part as evidence to be discovered. Maybe if you destroy your hard drive, not sure about that. Did you search with google while signed in with google?

Me too with that search for inert gas asphyxia, at least I won't be able to use that method LOL.

Makes me think this would be a good addition for a new mystery to be written. A murder is committed and its hard to sort out the clues, of course, but one sharp detective notices one suspect got rid of his newish computer. Maybe later they track it down and the hard drive is missing.