Tag: encyclopaedia

Posted in Life & Happiness

One Hundred Eggs

Posted on by Jinavie

How many eggs can you eat in one sitting? Three? Half a dozen? No matter how big or hungry you may be, eating a hundred eggs is just unthinkable. Whether you fry it, boil it, scramble it or straight out drink it, “one hundred’ is simply too much. Too difficult to imagine how much one hundred eggs would be? A hundred eggs weigh about 4~5kg. Considering a steak is usually 200~400g, this is an incredible amount. The nutritional values cannot be ignored either. A hundred eggs contain about 32350kJ of energy (7750 calories), 56g of carbohydrates, 530g of fat and 630g of protein. It is an astonishing amount of food. How could anyone eat such a massive amount in one sitting?

Surprisingly, even a petite, slim girl can eat a hundred eggs. The secret lies in how the eggs are cooked. The best thing about eggs is that they can be cooked in various ways, such as fried eggs, poached eggs, scrambled eggs and boiled eggs. The following is a fascinating way of cooking eggs to maximise the amount of eggs you can eat in one sitting. The secret method is noodles.

This is not the same as standard “egg noodles” that merely contain eggs. This is noodles only made of eggs. As strange as it sounds, once you learn the recipe and some simple scientific facts, it all becomes very clear.

Firstly, take a hundred eggs, crack them into a very large bowl and whisk thoroughly. This may be difficult due to the sheer amount of eggs as mentioned above. Next, take a cupful of the whisked eggs and strain it through a sieve straight into boiling water. The egg instantly solidifies into thin, long noodle-shapes. The reason you strain it is to make the texture smoother. Repeat this method until all of the eggs are used up and then cook the noodles in whatever way you fancy.

How does turning eggs into noodles let you eat more of it? The reason being, two-thirds of an egg is just water. Most lifeforms contain a large proportion of water. For example, about two-thirds of your weight is water too. By dripping the whisked egg in the boiling water, the water disperses out while the proteins and fat solidify to form noodles. Ergo, the nutritional components of the eggs are preserved but the filling portion is thrown away. Any other way of cooking eggs causes the water to be trapped in the final product.

Of course, this is an extremely wasteful way of eating eggs, but it can be of some benefit for a person seeking a high-protein diet to bulk their muscles.

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Posted in Life & Happiness

Point Of View

Posted on by Jinavie

Sometimes, we make a mistake while talking to someone and say something to offend them. But what is worse than accidentally doing so is not understanding why they were offended, or why they are suddenly angry at you. Everyone’s life is as unique as their fingerprints, with different experiences leading to the forming of different values. If you do not consider someone’s point of view, what may appear harmless to you may end up being a hurtful comment for the other person.

Even when the message was not particularly offensive, not taking a person’s point of view in consideration can lead to an uncomfortable moment. For example, imagine that you were giving someone a friendly advice when they suddenly turned angry and walked away. If you were to come to me and ask why the person became angry, I could reply in two ways. If I said “Well no surprises there, you clearly didn’t consider their feelings and she had a right to be angry”, you would probably feel quite down. The reason being, you were reaching out with a genuine desire to help, but it ended up with you feeling as if you hurt that person instead. No matter how good your intentions were, the way you say it and the way the other person hears it can turn it into an insult.

Let us use an analogy to make the above lesson easier. Now, let us imagine that I suddenly threw a candy at you with no warning. You will probably be surprised and not catch the candy, letting it drop to the ground. Even though what I threw at you was a sweet candy, throwing it at you when you were not ready just made that candy fall so no one could eat it. Even worse, I might have accidentally thrown it too high and hit your face. Like so, if I throw something at a time I judge to be right, the other person will find it difficult to catch it. But if I was to ask you “Are you ready?” first, then you would find it much easier to catch the candy. The key is to say something when the other person is ready, and in a way that they could accept.

No matter how good your intentions may be, first consider whether the person is prepared to receive that message. Thinking before you speak, being considerate of others and respecting their points of view will quickly make you a beloved friend who everyone wants to talk to.

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Posted in Science & Nature

Banana Equivalent Dose

Posted on by Jinavie

No form of energy has been more feared or creatively explored in science fiction (e.g. Godzilla) as radiation, yet the layman tends to know little about the actual properties and effects of radiation. The word “radiation” is commonly associated with things like Chernobyl, mutation and cancer. However, most people only know that radiation is “bad” while not knowing exactly how and why it is dangerous. Radiation is essentially high-frequency light which can deliver a large dose of energy (just like how microwaves cook food and sunlight can burn paper when focussed through a magnifying glass). When this high-dose of energy passes through living organisms, it damages the DNA in cells, potentially causing irreparable damage. This can lead to mutation and disruption of cell division (which can lead to cancer) or cell death (which is why radiation is ironically used to kill cancer cells).

The more technical question is “how much” radiation is harmful. For example, how much more dangerous was the Chernobyl incident compared to an x-ray? Like many other things in science, radiation is measured using an internationally universal unit called the Sievert (Sv). The radiation received from standing next to the Chernobyl reactor core after meltdown was 50Sv, while a chest x-ray is 20μSv (1000μSv = 1mSv, 1000mSv = 1Sv). Therefore, the Chernobyl incident could be considered to be as strong as 2.5 million chest x-rays. Although there is great variation, it is considered that a dose of 400mSv can cause symptoms of radiation poisoning, while 4~8Sv of radiation will lead to certain death.

Fascinatingly, radiation is not an uncommon thing. Radiation is all around us, with an average person receiving about 10μSv of background radiation per day just by living on Earth. Ergo, two days of walking around gives you the same amount of radiation as a single chest x-ray. A CT scan gives out a significantly greater dose of radiation at about 7mSv (approximately 350 x-rays or a year’s worth of background radiation).

However, the Sievert is a unit that is difficult to understand. Thus, some scientists devised a clever, humorous equivalent unit called the banana equivalent dose (BED). Bananas contain a certain amount of radioactive isotopes (radioactive potassium), making them technically radioactive. A banana contains 0.1μSv of radiation. Ergo, a chest x-ray is the equivalent to eating 200 bananas, a CT scan is 70000 bananas, while the Chernobyl incident gave people nearby a dose of roughly 500 million bananas.

The banana equivalent dose is a rather useful (and hilarious) way of comparing the danger of radiation from different sources. The next time you go to hospital for an x-ray, just picture 200 bananas being shot through your chest.

Posted in Science & Nature

Pi

Posted on by Jinavie

Pi (π) a mathematical constant that is defined as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. It is approximately equal to 3.14159, but since it is an irrational number (cannot be expressed as a ratio), the decimal places go on and on with no repeating segments. The history of pi extends back to almost 5000 years ago, as it plays such a crucial role in geometry, such as finding the area of a circle (A = π ²). It is not an understatement to say that pi is among the top five most important numbers discovered in history (0, 1, i and e being the others).

The interesting thing about pi is that it is an irrational number. As mentioned above, this means that pi has an infinite number of non-repeating decimal places, with numbers appearing in random sequence. For example, pi to a 30 decimal places is 3.141592653589793238462643383279… Because of this feature, pi contains all possible sequences and combinations of numbers at a certain point. The corollary to this fact is, if pi is converted into binary code (a number system of only 0 and 1, used by computers to encode information), somewhere in that infinite string of digits is every combination of digits, letters and symbols imaginable. The name of every person you will ever love. The date, time and manner of your death. Answers to all the great questions of the universe. All of this is encoded in one letter: π.

That, is the power of infinity.

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Bad Hair Day

Posted on by Jinavie

Have you ever had a day (or in some people’s cases, their whole life) where you cannot help but think that everyone is judging you because your hair just does not look right? Almost everyone has at least one “bad hair day”, when they feel self-conscious about their appearance and how others in society perceive them. Depending on the person’s general confidence level and self-esteem, the effect of a bad hair day can range from being harmless to completely ruining someone’s mood.

A psychologist named Professor Marianne LaFrance at Yale University decided to study how physical appearance affects people’s feelings. She separated 120 volunteers into three groups. Group 1 was asked to recall a bad hair day, group 2 was told nothing (control group) and group 3 was asked to recall a day in which they had difficulty opening a package (bad experience unrelated to appearance). She then measured the change in mood among the participants to see how the memory of a bad hair day could affect mood and self-esteem. To no surprise, the results showed that those who recalled a bad hair day suffered from much lower self-esteem and mood. Group 1 felt less smart and confident compared to the other groups and felt “embarrassed” in general.

The reason for the drop in self-esteem is that we are socially educated to feel that we are judged on our appearance. We have an inherent belief that an untidy appearance will mean that others will judge us as being unorganised, unprofessional and not trustworthy. This applies to anything that might potentially affect our image, such as an embarrassing moment or an unsightly accident. We become fixated on this idea and shine a “social spotlight” on ourselves, thinking that any embarrassing moment for us will be instantly judged by those around us. In psychology, this is known as the spotlight effect and it can be quite a powerful effect.

But here is the kicker: nobody cares. We have a psychological tendency to overreact to such situations where a spotlight might be turned on us, when in truth, others do not notice it as much as we think they do. There have been many experiments (mostly involving university students) where surveys showed that fellow students barely paid attention to or had little recollection of another student’s embarrassing moments or dishevelled appearances. Although it may have been the most embarrassing moment in the person’s life, to other people, it is at best a comedic happening that fades away in their memories.

So the next time you feel that others are judging you and you feel the blinding spotlight on you, just remember: the greatest, and only important judge of your character, is yourself.

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Skin Colour

Posted on by Jinavie

The world is full of people of all creed and races and it is a common fact that people from certain races have different skin colours to people from other races. But other than the range of normal skin colours, there are certain skin colours that can occur with specific medical conditions.

The most common reason for a change in skin colour is a suntan, which damages the skin and causes darkening of the skin (hyperpigmentation). However, some diseases are also known to cause hyperpigmentation, such as Addison’s disease or haemochromatosis.

The converse is lightening of the skin (hypopigmentation) and can happen with diseases such as leprosy, vitiligo or albinism. Alternatively, people can look pale when they are anaemic or extremely frightened, triggering a sympathetic nervous response, shutting down blood circulation to the face and extremities.

It is common to see red skin with flushing, sunburns, skin infections or numerous dermatological conditions such as rashes. Occasionally, these rashes may be associated with serious diseases such as lupus or Crohn’s disease.

Cyanosis (literally “blueness” in Latin) causes the skin to bluish-purple and it is due to the lack of oxygen in the blood. This could be caused by any number of reasons that causes hypoxia. For example, babies can be born with a heart defect that causes mixing of oxygenated and deoxygenated blood, leading to something called “blue baby syndrome”.

Liver dysfunction can present as jaundice, which is yellowing of skin and the white of the eyes due to a build-up of bilirubin.

Some stranger skin changes can be caused by certain chemicals. Carrots contain beta-carotene (which gives carrots their orange colour) and excess consumption can cause carotenosis (or carotenodermia), a yellowing of the skin. Eating too many tomatoes causes a similar condition called lycopenodermia, which presents as reddened skin (lycopene gives tomatoes their red colour). A combination of the two produces a distinctively orange colour. Both conditions are harmless and disappear after reducing the amount of carrots and tomatoes eaten.

Even stranger still is a condition called argyria, which can be caused by exposure to silver, either through medications especially alternative medicine), mining or contamination of the water supply. Silver causes skin to turn a deep blue colour and the pigmentation is irreversible. Similarly, copper can turn skin green and gold can turn skin grey.

Posted in Philosophy

This Is Not A Pipe

Posted on by Jinavie

This is a painting named The Treachery of Images, painted by the famous surrealist artist René Magritte in 1929. The picture shows a pipe and below it, the words Ceci n’est pas une pipe, which is French for “This is not a pipe”. However, the painting clearly shows a plain pipe. Is Magritte implying that he did not actually draw a pipe? Is the object actually some other clever invention?

What Magritte is saying is that this is not a pipe, but an image of a pipe. The painting is only a realistic representation of a pipe, but it is not real. No matter how hard you try, you will not be able to stuff the pipe and smoke it. Ergo, if Magritte had written “This is a pipe” under the image, he would have been lying.

Magritte was a master of painting realistic pictures and then changing something subtly (or sometimes obviously) to completely change the context, making the picture very surreal. He knew for a fact that his painting of the pipe and the “paradoxical” subtext would rub people the wrong way because people are predictable in some ways. Without the explanation that it is an image of a pipe, many people will experience cognitive dissonance as they see a pipe, yet something is telling them it is not a pipe. This makes people wonder about what Magritte means, until they either figure it out, ask someone about it, or become angry and insult the painting because they have no idea what it means.

Posted in Science & Nature

Units

Posted on by Jinavie

In September of 1999, NASA ambitiously launched a Mars weather satellite. But the satellite did not even reach its destination, instead exploding in the atmosphere soon after launch. Why was this? The reason was so stupidly simple. The failure was because of units.

The satellite that was designed by Lockheed Martin was designed using the imperial system (pounds, feet and yards), whereas NASA’s systems used the internationally-used metric system. Because of this simple error, the pride of the USA space program fell to the ground and an astronomical amount of money was burnt to ashes in the air.

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Posted in Science & Nature

Mathematical Beauty

Posted on by Jinavie

What is the most “beautiful” mathematical equation? For millenia, many mathematical formulas and concepts have been described as beautiful (and some defining beauty, as the golden ratio does). In the mathematical world, the adjective “beautiful” is used in the sense that certain mathematical concepts, despite the fact they are rational and objective, are so pure, simple and elegant that they can only be described as art.

One such formula is Euler’s identity:

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Renowned physicist Richard Feynman described it as “the most remarkable formula in mathematics”. What makes this array of symbols and numbers so beautiful? Firstly, it contains the three basic arithmetic operations exactly once each: addition, multiplication and exponentiation. It also connects five fundamental mathematical constants with nothing other than themselves and the arithmetic operations.

0 is the additive identity, as adding it to another number results in the original number. 1 is the multiplicative identity for the same reason as 0. Pi(π) is one of the most important mathematical constants in the history of mathematics that is ubiquitous in Euclidean geometry and trigonometry. Euler’s number(e) is the base of natural logarithms and is used widely in mathematical and scientific analysis. i(√-1) is the imaginary unit of complex numbers, a field of imaginary numbers that are not “real”, allowing for the calculation of all roots of polynomials. Euler’s identity neatly sums up the relation between these five numbers that are so crucial in the field of mathematics. It is also interesting to note that these five numbers were discovered at different points in history spanning over 3000 years.

Some people describe mathematics as a distinct language in itself. Not only that, but mathematics is considered the universal language as it is both universal and ubiquitous. If that is the case, than Euler’s identity can be considered an extremely pithy literary masterpiece.

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Child Prodigy

Posted on by Jinavie

At the age of 6, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart toured Europe to astound audiences with his mastery of the violin, organ and keyboard. At the age of 11, Judit Polgár defeated a Grandmaster in chess, later becoming a Grandmaster herself at the age of 15. By the time he finished elementary school, Saul Kripke had taught himself ancient Hebrew, finished the works of Shakespeare and mastered the works of Descartes and complex mathematical problems.

Each of these people is considered a child prodigy – person who develops and shows extreme talent in a skill at a level far beyond the norm for their age. The term wunderkind (German for “wonder child”) is also used. For some unexplained reason, these people are far beyond the average level of children at their age in terms of intelligence or a certain talent.

Prodigies are actually a subset of a condition known as precocity, where a young child shows unusually early development or maturity, especially in mental aptitude. For example, a German child called Christian Friedrich Heinecken is known to have talked within a few hours after his birth, learnt the key events of the first five books of the Torah within a year, mastered the Bible at age 2 and had a working knowledge of universal history and geography, Latin and French at age 3. Unfortunately, he was struck ill at the age of 4, and shortly after predicting his death, passed away. Heinecken’s case is an extreme example of precocity, but nonetheless most precocious children show at least an outstandingly advanced level of mental maturity compared to other children. Along with prodigies, savants and children with extraordinarily high IQ (over 160) are also considered precocious.

Although precocious children enjoy their extreme talent (for which they usually have deep passion for) and may even become famous for it like Mozart, they are almost always at risk of certain problems. One common issue is that they tend to be placed on pedestals as people constantly praise their ability. This can quickly evolve into narcissism, setting a major expectation that the child battles with throughout his or her life. Children with advanced intellect are often unable to fit in to society as they are far more intelligent than their peers. Not only do other children shy away from them, but they feel too bored and unstimulated by other children and choose to alienate themselves. Furthermore, although they may have the intelligence and maturity to comprehend philosophical concepts, they still have the emotions of a child, meaning they are tormented by the dissonance between the rational mind and their emotions. All of these factors combined lead to a great increase in risk of depression in precocious children.

Essentially, the main conundrum for child prodigies is trying to balance their amazing talent with a happy life in a “normal” society. This could be achieved by parents keeping things real and not placing excessive expectations on the child, and giving the child a way to vent their genius in some way. For example, chess has been a classic way of keeping children with high intellect engaged. Having this kind of vent allows the child to still engage with other members of his or her society (other children), while honing their great skills for an even brighter future. The child must stay engaged and passionately practise and advance their skill so that they do not stay in a perpetual rut all their life.

With great power, comes great responsibility.