Extras
The Straight Dope by Cecil Adams, crossword by Matt Jones, News of The Weird
What happened to all the supergeniuses?
The supergeniuses we recognize today created their fields (Galileo) or revolutionized them (Einstein). Psychologist Dean Keith Simonton argues that for a century no disciplines have been created wholesale, but rather combined with existing fields into hybrid forms: astrophysics, biochemistry.
Weirdos, Train Surfers, and Animal Troublemakers
About two dozen car owners in the Nob Hill neighborhood of Snellville, Georgia, were perturbed in late October by what they thought was vandalism.
Fish, Fire, and Flight 666
Ewwwww! Quick-thinking paramedics in Dorset, England, saved the life of a man whose fishing outing went south when a dover sole jumped down his throat and blocked his windpipe on […]
Why are some English names pronounced so differently than they’re spelled?
The tendency to pronounce a word more succinctly than its spelling would suggest pervades the language in both Britain and North America, particularly when it comes to place names
Does artificially altering hurricanes’ strength have any effect?
The thinking went that if you could seed a hurricane with something that would cause the supercooled water to cohere into raindrops, this would release pent-up heat energy and disrupt the wall of thunderstorms that define the hurricane’s eye
Why do we hate some noises?
The authors noted that the waveforms of the sound resembled the alarm cries of macaque monkeys and speculated that perhaps our aversive reaction is a vestigial reflex
More than you wanted to know about the Mad Pooper
LEAD STORY — What’s Old Is Weird Again You may have seen the widely distributed weird news story about the Mad Pooper, a woman who has been seen defecating on […]