Lazyant

I had trouble getting to sleep when I was younger and I was facing a test or something in the morning. Besides the usual no caffeine/moderate exercise/moderate eating etc good advice I came up with a “mind hack” inspired by Richard Feynman.

Summarizing: try to re-play or think about dreams that you had before. If you don’t remember any, think of a story that looks like a dream (with impossible things happening etc).

The trick is that when we transition between awake and asleep we have a train of thought and suddenly there are dream-like things like surprising jumps in the thoughts, impossible occurrences etc (this is what Feynman remarked and I observed too), so I try to recreate that state.

It worked for me.

Google has published the 1000 most-visited sites on the web (they mention “Keep in mind that the list excludes adult sites, ad networks, domains that don’t have publicly visible content or don’t load properly, and certain Google sites.”)

 An HN user got the response headers from these sites and I just parsed the given file and used Google charts to generate this images (yes, the default colors are meh and I know pie charts are bad)

The Mythbusters guys could use a science guy. 

I’m all for practice instead of theory and I love this show but there are some instances where a scientist on the show with some back-of-the-envelope calculations could have predicted some of the experiments’ outcome (heck, I did).

Let’s see:

• Checking if a coin (a dime or quarter, can’t remember) dropped from the Empire State can kill someone
• Testing if you can kill or hurt someone by throwing a playing card
• Checking if you get more wet if you run in the rain, instead of walking
• Replicating a story about a Chinese king and a chair loaded with powder rockets

The first two can easily be calculated to be mostly harmless due to the low mass of the objects (coin and card). I mean Chris Ferguson can cut carrots throwing cards but that’s it.

The fact that you get more more if you run under the rain instead of walking, that can be proven with some math, a freshman in Physics should be able to do that.

For the rocket chair, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see that the thing had no control at all; all the rockets cannot be positioned exactly a the same angle, with the same power and be ignited exactly at the same time, so any variation and the thing will go like when you let go a party balloon and that’s what happened.

I got a suggestion from Amazon, it was a “watch mover” and for a moment I pondered if it was something different from what my initial thought was but no, a watch mover moves watches, what a surprise.

So are you kidding me? what kind of person has a movement-powered watch, doesn’t wear it but needs it to be ticking? Oh well, I guess somebody with 10 expensive watches who picks a different one on different days and can’t be bothered with setting the right time when putting them on.

I also saw in a toy store a cup stacker game. Can you believe? just a bunch of plastic cups, for the people who don’t have the imagination of getting them at Wall-Mart or whatever. But the jaw-dropper happened when I saw a rock, paper, scissor game, wtf?

I get a gratifying feeling sometimes when walking around a big store and thinking “you know what, I don’t need almost anything of this”.

Teen arrested in Australia for playing ‘offensive’ rap music from car WTF?

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