The following are the first five domestic appliances to be electrified:
- Sewing machine
- Fan
- Kettle
- Toaster
- Vibrator
The vibrator was electrified a decade before the vacuum cleaner or the iron.
Category: History & Literature
Three Daughters
A man asked how old a man’s three daughters were. The father replied with the following statement.
“The product of their ages is 36.”
“It’s hard to determine their ages from just that.” the man asking replied.
“The sum of their ages is same as the number of my house.”
“I still can’t figure out the answer!” the man replied again.
“My eldest daughter is blonde.” the father said, and the man, now smiling, replied.
“Oh, is that so? Then I can figure out how old your daughters are.”
How old is each daughter? And how did the man figure it out?
A computer cannot solve this problem, as it can only be solved using human logic.
Continue reading “Three Daughters”
Karaoke
Karaoke are entertainment machines that play music without the vocal track, so that users can sing along to the song (where lyrics are usually put up on a screen also). It is a great addition to any party and is found in almost every city nowadays, especially in Asia.
The word karaoke means “fake orchestra” in Japanese, and this is linked to the story of its inception. A musician/entertainer by the name of Daisuke Inoue was often approached by patrons at cafés he played in, asking him to record his tracks so that they could play it anywhere. That, along with his laziness, led him to devise a machine that played pre-recorded tracks when coins were inserted, thus removing the need for an actual band to be present. This idea became instantly popular, and he loaned karaoke machines to businesses, updating the song database himself so that users did not have to purchase new songs every time they came out.
He was awarded the prestigious Ig Nobel Peace Prize for inventing the karaoke, “thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other”.
Judgement Of Paris
This is the story of how one man’s choice lead to a great war.
One day, Zeus held a banquet to celebrate a marriage, but did not invite Eris, the goddess of discord, for obvious reasons. Infuriated, she came up with a cunning plan, in which she arrived at the banquet, tossed a golden apple at the crowd, and disappeared.
On the apple, it was inscribed: For the fairest one.
Three goddesses approached the apple, claiming that it belonged to them: Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. They demanded that Zeus be the judge of who was the fairest, but Zeus knowing it was a catch-22 delegated the task to a mortal: Paris of Troy. This shepherd-prince was approached by each goddess, who offered a bribe using their godly powers.
Hera, the queen of gods, offered to make him the king of Eurasia, symbolising power and wealth.
Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, offered great strength and wisdom.
Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, offered the most beautiful woman in the world: Helen of Sparta.
After some thought, Paris presented the apple to Aphrodite, giving her the title of the “fairest one”. This earned him not only the beautiful Helen – who became infatuated with him under Aphrodite’s powers and brought to Troy – but also the scorn of the other two goddesses. Using their influences, and the fact that Helen was the wife of Menelaus – king of Sparta – the Trojan War sparked as Sparta formed a Greek alliance force to attack Troy, to reclaim their queen and seek vengeance and blood.
This goes to show how a man’s life, or his nation in the case of Paris, can be destroyed by the basic instinct of lust.
Unicorn
The unicorn is pictured as a white stallion with a single, prominent horn on its forehead. It is still loved and is one of the most well-known mythical creatures. As with any mythical beasts, there are interesting stories related to the unicorn.
The horn is the source of the unicorn’s strength – the infinite fountain of magical power that grants the unicorn unmatched strength and speed. If it meets an enemy it either sprints and disappears, or uses its large weapon to impale even the hardest armour. This makes it extremely hard to capture.
Medieval people believed the horn of the unicorn to be a highly valuable magic ingredient, with extremely potent cleansing properties that could purify even lakes and seas. But as the only way to attain the horn is to capture a unicorn, it was an extremely rare commodity.
To catch a unicorn, one must know its most important (yet not well-known in the modern age) trait. Although they are wild beasts with a savage temper, they calm down like lamb in front of one group of people – virgin maidens. If it detects even the faintest scent of a virgin, it rushes towards her and places its head on her lap, soundly falling asleep. Due to this characteristic, it is often portrayed as a symbol of purity and chastity, and also Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary.
According to notes written by Leonardo Da Vinci himself, hunters used this trick to capture unicorns that would fall asleep on a virgin’s lap (whom they brought with them to aide in the hunt). Even a mighty beast has a weakness that can be exploited.
On a side note, it is also written that if the unicorn senses that the maiden is not a virgin, it would instantly use its large weapon to impale her until death.
Mayday
Mayday is the universal phrase for requesting emergency assistance in a crisis situation on the sea or in the air.
It was first created by Frederick Stanley Mockford, who was a senior radio office trying to figure out a simple distress call sign. As he worked at Croydon Airport, London, and dealt with traffic mainly between England and France, he decided on the word mayday, which is derived from the French words venez m’aider, meaning “come help me”.
Another famous distress call is SOS, or … – – – … in Morse code. It was first used by German radios but then became the worldwide standard in 1906. Although it is often thought to stand for “save our souls”, it is in fact a backronym that was made decades after it came to be. Instead, it was chosen as it is simple to remember (the backronym may have been devised to help people remember the letters) and easy to signal via Morse code. It was most famously used by the RMS Titanic.
The reason why mayday was created (and set as a standard in 1927) was due to the need for a spoken word as the audio radio transmitters were developed.
Pope Joan
There is a legend in papal history regarding a certain Pope John VIII, who is believed to have reigned between 853 – 855 AD. The reason this pope is so famous is that legends state that “he” was in fact a woman, making her the first (and only) female pope in history.
Legend has it that she was a very talented and intelligent woman who, with the help of disguising herself as a man as education was forbidden to females in those times, quickly rose in the church hierarchy to eventually become the pope. After a couple years of power, her true sex was discovered when she gave birth to a child one day.
There is reasonable evidence of her existence, ironically through the extensive cover up of her existence by the church. After finding out that she was a woman, history tried its best to forget the fact by constantly removing evidence of her existence. For example, in the 14th century a series of busts of past popes were made for the Duomo of Siena, one of which was named “Johannes VIII, Foemina de Anglia”, suggesting a female pope by the name of John VIII.
It is possible that she managed to deceive people of her gender by having a form of adrenal hyperplasia, which would lead to her having abnormally high levels of androgen during development. This would lead to ambiguous secondary sex characteristics, such as facial hair, androgynous appearance and possibly even an ambiguous genitalia (but of course she would have had a mild form as she was able to conceive and birth a child).
Pope Joan had a significant impact in papal traditions. Two which are famous are the change in the papal procession path and the sedia stercorania.
The childbirth scene that exposed her occurred during a papal procession, whilst passing a narrow lane. That lane is no longer passed after that event occurred.
The sedia stercorania is a chair with a hole in it that was used to install new popes. The reason for the hole was so that a junior cardinal could reach below the chair on which the pope was sitting on, and check whether he had testicles, after which he would announce: “Duos habet et bene pendentes” (he has testicles and is well hung). This became a compulsory examination after the scandal of Pope Joan.
Big Mac Index
The Big Mac is McDonald’s poster product, with the key characteristics of two beef patties and three buns. This hamburger has spread to almost every country in the world thanks to globalisation, which allows it to be used in an interesting study in economics.
Although every country’s Big Mac varies in ingredients and nutritional values slightly, they are similar enough to be considered a universal standard. Therefore, the price of a Big Mac in each country can be used to find what is called the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). The PPP is an index to show how much money in Country A’s currency is required to buy goods that cost $1 of Country B’s currency.
Finding the Big Mac index is quite simple. First, find the prices of Big Macs in two countries. Then, divide the first price by the second price (without converting currencies), and find the ratio. This ratio (i.e. the PPP) is then compared against the actual exchange rate, using percentage. As it is hard to explain in words, here is a mathematical expression of what is said above (using July 2008 figures):
- A Big Mac costs $3.57 in the US and £2.29 in the UK on average
- $3.57/£2.29 = 1.56 (PPP)
- Actual exchange rate: USD$2.00 : GBP£1.00 = 2.00
- (2.00 – 1.56)/1.56 = 0.28 = +28%
- Therefore, the pound is 28% overvalued
The PPP shows that the exchange rate does not show the actual value of a currency compared to another currency. As in, although the official exchange rate is $2.00=£1.00, using the Big Mac index the actual value ratio between the two currencies is $1.56=£1.00.
Even complicated economic concepts can be explained with everyday objects such as hamburgers, or “burgernomics”.
Michelangelo’s Model
There are few (intellectual) people who do not know the master artist of the Renaissance, Michelangelo. His works are well-known for powerfully expressing the beauty of the male body and the energy it contains. However, there is a secret that lies in many of his paintings.
The work that most obviously shows this is the famous ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This giant painting features many characters from the Bible and Greek mythology, one of which includes the Sybils, or female prophets. In particular, the one called The Libyan Sybil shows a woman holding up the pages of a large book. However, on closer inspection it can be seen that she has a very muscular build and very large shoulders – features of the male anatomy. In fact, this feature is found in almost all of the Sybils and many other supposedly “female” characters.
The reason being, Michelangelo was a misogynist and admirer of the male form, thus he frequently (and almost exclusively) used male models for his paintings. For example, the model of The Libyan Sybil was one of his studio assistants. He believed that beauty of the human body peaked only in men, which combined with his talents for expressing vigour and energy in his art produced some of the most powerful, masculine paintings.
Of course, him being attracted to the nude male beauty both aesthetically and emotionally have given birth to many theories that he was a homosexual.
The Raven
Edgar Allan Poe is quite possibly the father of horror literature, well-known for his macabre works such as mystery novels, poetry and critiques. His stories are uncanny and gripping at the same time, and it can only be described as “mad genius”. Among his most famous works is a poem called The Raven.
It is a story about a young scholar whose lover has passed on, and his eerie, dream-like conversation with a raven on a winter night. The poem repeats the word nevermore extensively, creating a powerful effect as its meaning varies for every stanza. The narrator constantly cries out to the raven, expressing pain and torment, to which the raven replies – cold and succinctly – “Nevermore”, depriving him of hope.
Here, the raven is a metaphor of the man’s anguish and his eternal devotion and love. Furthermore, as a raven is often a symbol of logical thought and darkness, it sets the atmosphere of the poem very nicely. Lastly, as the reader is left pondering whether the bird actually converses with the narrator, or simply repeating the same word meaninglessly, it brings upon a chill down the reader’s spine, as the man is placed in a perverse conflict between desire to forget and desire to remember. The raven leads him through his descent from weakness and frailty to confusion, and from confusion to madness.
However, the reason The Raven is so famous is not just because of its sinister mood, the metaphor of the young man’s sorrow and anguish or the powerful repetition of the word nevermore, but also because of the actual structure. Poe wrote the poem in the meter of trochaic octameter, where stressed syllables and unstressed syllables alternate to produce beautiful fluidity. The meter together with the rhyming scheme (including internal rhymes and alliterations) allows the poem to be read in a dreamy way, reinforcing the question of whether the raven comes to the man in reality or in his dream.
(Original poem after the break)
