Turns out vuvuzelas may be more than just annoying - they just might be a great way to spread disease. Researchers found that the annoying horns excel at expelling particles in the 0.5 to 5 micron range (an ideal size for getting trapped in your lungs), emitting around 4 million of the little potential plague-bearers every second. This is about ( Read more... )

There's a proposal over in England to heat the local swimming pool using the excess heat from the local crematorium.

The facility's cremators dispatch the departed into the hereafter at 800°C, the Telegraph notes, and that heat is lost to the heavens ( Read more... )

Yesterday, I mentioned the new "rule" in a soccer league in Ottawa, where if one team gets ahead by more than five goals, they lose. So, here's a thought - if your team is behind by five goals, and you get the ball, what should you do to help your team win? What about scoring an own-goal? That would then put the other team up by six, which, by ( Read more... )

In the city of Ottawa (well, in Gloucester), if your kid is playing in the Dragons Recreational Soccer League, don't tell him or her to "Do their best". Why? Because, if their soccer team wins a game by more than five goals, then they lose.

Can eating too much pork make you fail a drug test? Apparently so, if the claims of Chinese Olympic athletes can be believed. Apparently, a substance called clenbuterol, more normally used to treat breathing problems, is sometimes used to keep livestock leaner than it would otherwise be. It's also banned for IOC-tested athletes, so a couple of ( Read more... )

Apparently, yesterday was Opening Day, the first day of the baseball season. As a form of celebration, my favourite statistician has run some numbers on the teams. Among the more startling statistics is that, according to the medical profession, over 75% of professional ball players are "overweight" or "obese" per their Body-Mass Index (BMI ( Read more... )

By now, just about everyone in Canada is aware that we pretty much had a banner year at the just-completed Olympic games. Not only did we finish an entirely respectable third in the overall medal count, we actually took more gold medals than anyone else (and set a new record in the process).

However, if you look at the statistics, this isn't much ( Read more... )

In downtown Toronto, at TD Plaza, there's a reunion of the 1992-1993 Blue Jays World Series Champions going on right now. I don't remember where I was in '92, but in 1993, vampyrehunterm and I had travelled down to Toronto (we were going to school in Ottawa at the time) for the weekend to see Phantom of the Opera at what was then the Pantages theatre (now Canon ( Read more... )

More than a third of the curling stones in Australia have been stolen. The 58 stones (out of 150 in the whole country) were stored in a refrigerated trailer which was stolen from outside an arena.