Santa Claus, aka Saint Nicholas, was actually a real guy. He was a Greek guy born around 270 AD in what is now Turkey but what was then the Roman province of Asia. When he died, Saint Nicholas' bones were kept in his monastery.

The Roman empire became the Eastern Roman Empire aka the Byzantine empire, and in 1071 the Byzantines lost the Battle of ( Read more... )

A few years ago at Burning Man someone brought a copy of "You Are Going To Prison", an advice book by Jim Hogshire about the penal system. It starts with the basics like the difference between being "detained" and "arrested", what to say (and not say) during these interactions, what happens when you're booked, what to do (and avoid) when you're in ( Read more... )

In honor of World Homeopathy Awareness Week I thought I'd re-run an excellent video. Dr. Charlene Werner, opthamologist and homeopath, explains how homeopathy works based on the principles of Cosmology and Quantum Physics. It's a little over eight minutes long and is one of the most rambling, incomprehensible things I've ever heard or seen.

Click to view

To be ( Read more... )

The new version of Android uses the speech-to-text feature from Google Voice to let you do text input by speaking. It actually works pretty well: you hit a 'microphone' button, speak into the phone, and what you said appears in the active dialog box. Behind the scenes Android sends your voice to Google's servers, and the server decodes the speech ( Read more... )

I just came across an extremely interesting nugget of information while writing a comment to a comment on my last post.

10 days before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima the United States issued the Potsdam Declaration demanding an unconditional Japanese surrender or face "prompt and utter destruction". Behind closed doors Prime Minister Kantarō ( Read more... )

Let me walk you through this one:

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I'm at CLT airport in Charlotte NC, fairly amused by this ad for the Billy Graham Library. Not just because there are "no books to check out" there, but that this is an advertised selling point.


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This year in Japan our friends told us a weird story about the way that McDonalds did their launch of the product that we call the Quarter Pounder ( Read more... )