Thursday, November 15, 2007

Miracle fruit

Now this sounds interesting. I’d love to try this.

At a party here one recent Friday, Jacob Grier stood on a chair, pulled out a plastic bag full of small berries, and invited everyone to eat one apiece. “Make sure it coats your tongue,” he said.

Mr. Grier’s guests were about to go under the influence of miracle fruit, a slightly tart West African berry with a strange property: For about an hour after you eat it, everything sour tastes sweet.

Within minutes of consuming the berries, guests were devouring lime wedges as if they were candy. Straight lemon juice went down like lemonade, and goat cheese tasted as if it was “covered in powdered sugar,” said one astonished partygoer. A rich stout beer seemed “like a milkshake,” said another.

Political Correctness Must Die

It’s gotten out of hand a decade or two ago. But this is ridiculous.

Santas in Australia’s largest city have been told not to use Father Christmas’s traditional “ho ho ho” greeting because it may be offensive to women, it was reported Thursday.

Sydney’s Santa Clauses have instead been instructed to say “ha ha ha” instead, the Daily Telegraph reported.

One disgruntled Santa told the newspaper a recruitment firm warned him not to use “ho ho ho” because it could frighten children and was too close to “ho”, a US slang term for prostitute.

The Theory of Everything, Cracked?

That is what some people are saying about the work of Garrett Lisi, 39. A surfer, no less.

The picture above is a two dimensional representation of E8, a geometric pattern that Lili claims is the shape of the universe. His theory can be read here if you understand physics. Here’s an excerpt:

All fields of the standard model and gravity are unified as an E8 principal bundle connection. A non-compact real form of the E8 Lie algebra has G2 and F4 subalgebras which break down to strong su(3), electroweak su(2) x u(1), gravitational so(3,1), the frame-Higgs, and three generations of fermions related by triality. The interactions and dynamics of these 1-form and Grassmann valued parts of an E8 superconnection are described by the curvature and action over a four dimensional base manifold.

Quote of the Day

“The north polar ice cap is melting, the fires are burning, the sea level is rising, living species are going extinct.  These and many other manifestations, including half the U.S. being in drought last year, are visible to the naked eye.  We have got to recognize that even though it’s never happened before, it is happening right now.”

Al Gore, Rolling Stone Interview on Global Warming

Uh, never happened before? We’ve never had fires before? We’ve never had droughts before? Species have never gone extinct? Sea levels have never risen? Polar ice has never retreated?

And we’re supposed to take this guy seriously? What’s sad is, some people do. Some people even admire him. Hell, he won a Nobel Peace Prize.

This American Thinker article does a nice job of skewering Gore’s specious arguments.

UPDATE: North Pole Melting?