{"id":382,"date":"2010-02-02T14:14:57","date_gmt":"2010-02-02T12:14:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/?p=382"},"modified":"2010-02-07T10:39:40","modified_gmt":"2010-02-07T08:39:40","slug":"what-i-learned-last-week-32","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/2010\/02\/02\/what-i-learned-last-week-32\/","title":{"rendered":"what i learned last week"},"content":{"rendered":"

1. the catholic church actively disputes human equality. link<\/a><\/p>\n

2. paris is boring. link<\/a><\/p>\n

3. in south america, there are places where fireflies do not blink randomly – they blink in unison. tens of thousands of them blink together at the same rate, lighting up the trees, then leaving them in blackness, over and over.<\/p>\n

4. the scientist who discovered the importance of pheromones to ants, back when he was first spreading the word of his discovery, would do demonstrations be dragging an ant’s pheromone-producing organ across a surface, and show other ants following the trail. it was not unusual for him to write his name with the organ, which resulted in him spelling his name in ant.<\/p>\n

5. science, generally speaking, has had a great deal of success over the past couple of hundred years with reductionism. in order to understand a system, the philosophy of science has been to break it down to its smallest constituent parts. however, there is a relatively new branch of science called “emergence” that goes the other way – it moves upwards to the whole instead of the component. this is the better way to understand things like ant colonies. ants, individually, are stupid. ants in colonies are incredibly smart.<\/p>\n

6. there are ants who, just ahead of the monsoon season, build a small ridge around the opening to their colony. this raises the entrance above the surrounding ground. as a result, the colony doesn’t flood when the rain comes.<\/p>\n

7. the ipad is not the first device to be poorly named… (okay, i already knew this, but there are some funny ones out there…) link<\/a> and link <\/a>and link<\/a> and link<\/a> and link<\/a> and link<\/a> and link<\/a> and link<\/a> and link<\/a> and… never mind…<\/p>\n

8. you can’t get rich on feng shui. link<\/a><\/p>\n

9. when you’re surfing the internet for porn at work, you should always check first to make sure that there is nobody behind you, getting interviewed on national television… link<\/a><\/p>\n

10. stealing from the girl guides will not go unpunished. link<\/a><\/p>\n

11. relative to the size of the economy, british banks are 10 times larger than they were in 1970. link<\/a><\/p>\n

12. 33.8% of americans are obese – a rate that is 10 times higher than japan’s. 68% of americans are obese or overweight. estimates based on current trends indicate that 100% of america will be overweight by 2048. link<\/a><\/p>\n

13. power makes some people loonie. link<\/a><\/p>\n

14. people who own cats are smarter than people who own dogs. link<\/a><\/p>\n

15. having heard the jonas brothers perform live on television twice, i can say that they are completely unencumbered by talent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1. the catholic church actively disputes human equality. link 2. paris is boring. link 3. in south america, there are places where fireflies do not blink randomly – they blink in unison. tens of thousands of them blink together at the same rate, lighting up the trees, then leaving them in blackness, over and over. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fluff"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p48hIM-6a","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":386,"href":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions\/386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}