Project Omniscience

Heterodontism! (alternative title: Correct Horse Battery Staple)

2011-08-09T21:48:00.000-07:00

(Or if you prefer, correcthorsebatterystaple.)

Heterodontism is the quality of possessing more than one tooth morphology. Mammals, for instance, are generally heterodont, because they have incisors, canines and molars. Reptiles, amphibians and fish are generally homodont instead.

What does this have to do with correct horse battery staples? Very little, but isn't it nice that you, dear reader, went googling for a term which showed up on xkcd and just happened to learn a new word? Two new words, actually.

Stick around, you might learn something interesting about zebras.

Jajireddigudem!

2011-05-31T21:51:00.000-07:00

Jajireddigudem! It's not very interesting, but it has a great name.

It's a mandal in India. What is a mandal, though? I'm so glad you asked. It's an administrative division, smaller than a state but larger than a town.

Jajireddigudem, specifically, is a mandal in the Nalgonda district and contains such fine towns as Adivemla, D. Kothapally, Jaji Reddy Gudem, Kesarla Pahad, Kodur, Kommala, Kunchamarthy, Loya Pally, Machireddy Pally, Nagaram, Persaipally, Thimmapur and Vardhamanukota.

Man, I really hope Mortal Kombat was right about that no-knowledge-that-is-not-power thing. In the meantime, here's a picture of a Boyar Hat, a fur hat worn by Russian nobility between the 15th and 17th centuries:

Aardvarks!

2011-05-28T17:34:00.000-07:00

Listen up, motherfuckers. I'm going to tell you about aardvarks. And you're gonna sit there and like it.

The aardvark (scientific name Orycteropus afer) is a medium-sized burrowing anteater native to Africa. It's a member of the clade Afrotheria, along with its close relatives the tree shrews, hyrax, terecs, elephants and manatees. Yes that's right motherfuckers, aardvarks are closely related to both elephants and sea cows.

The etymology of the word "aardvark" is Afrikaans, as if we care about that. It means "earth pig". If you're wondering how the fuck that distinguishes it from a regular pig, which also lives on the Earth, then you're not fucking alone. Afrikaans is a fucking stupid language.

Here is a picture of an aardvark.

All aardvarks look pretty much like that. If you see something that doesn't look like that it's probably not an aardvark.

Aardvarks mostly eat ants. They also eat one fruit: the aardvark cucumber. That's what it's called.

In African folklore, the aardvark is (so wikipedia tells us) much admired because of its diligent quest for food and its fearless response to soldier ants. That's what it says. The fact that a three-to-four foot long, hundred-pound mammal specialised for eating ants is not afraid of ants is apparently considered to be particularly respectable in African folklore. Remember, these guys live on the same continent as the fucking lion.

That's all you need to know about aardvarks. Next!

Gurning!

2011-05-28T11:56:00.000-07:00

In the early 90s, when I was a kid, manufacturers of arcade games were under pressure from parents' groups about the negative influence their games were supposedly having on children. After all, on any random afternoon you'd find a bunch of teenagers wagging school to hang around at the video arcade. In response, manufacturers started including earnest (and completely random) messages in their video games, exhorting players and bystanders to "Say No To Drugs" and "Stay In School".

Mortal Kombat also got caught up in this, but instead of the unrelated and earnest approach they simply had the machine, when in attract mode, every so often just bring up a screen which said:

What an improvement! Instead of giving the kiddies an out-of-context lecture about staying in school, simply hotwire their need for education directly into their will-to-power, until they realise that that the acquisition of knowledge is just as powerful as the ability to rip a man's heart out of his chest. Or something.

Anyway, this could almost be an unofficial motto of this blog, because you just never know when a given piece of knowledge is going to come in handy. Knowledge pays compound interest, because the more you understand about the world the better equipped you are to understand the next piece of knowledge that comes in. And this brings me to today's article, on the subject of gurning.

A gurn is a distorted facial expression, a typical example of which (apparently) involves projecting the lower jaw forward as far as possible and covering the upper lip with the lower lip, though apparently any distorted expression counts, as a picture in the article helpfully illustrates:

The article goes on to assure us that gurning competitions are a rural English tradition, and that the one at the Egremont Crab Fair dates back to 1267. This sounds just like the kind of made-up shit that you might expect to find on a page which has presumably been edited by the crazy-looking idiot pictured above, but I did a bit of external research and apparently it's true, or at least the organizers of the Egremont Crab Fair assure us that it is.

Last year's winners, apparently. Honestly, you'd think that after 830 odd years you'd have run out of new ways to gurn.And y'know what? I think they have.

What else is there to be said about gurning? Very little, which is why one must wonder whether in fact this is the kind of knowledge that is not, in fact, power. Gurning is merely the act of pulling a silly face (though apparently restricted to silly faces which can be pulled without the aid of the hands), and "gurn" merely a local term for it from North-West England. I remain confident, however, that this knowledge, like all knowledge must inevitably improve our lives.

If it doesn't, then I've got problems.

Pants!

2011-05-28T06:11:00.000-07:00

Pants, wikipedia usefully informs us, are an item of clothing worn on the lower part of the body, covering each leg separately. If that's not enough information, a helpful illustration is provided:

You'll notice that the colour has been drained from everything except the actual pants, in order to make it clearer just which part of what we're looking at is the pants.

OK, you probably knew all this. You probably also knew that pants is a plurale tantum but you might not have known the term for it - it's something that's always plural like the English words clothes, scissors, entrails, pants, trousers, and feces, the Russian word den'gi [деньги] ("money"), the Swedish word inälvor ("intestines"), or the Dutch word hersenen ("brains").

Pants are first recorded in the 6th century BC, when the Greeks first recorded the existence of horse-riding pant-wearing Persian horse-riders in Iran. The Greeks did not themselves ride horses (possibly because they had no pants) so it must have been a big shock for them. "Holy shit, those Iranians are riding horses and wearing pants!"

So, now I know more about pants, I should go and put some on.

Walter Maddock!

2011-05-27T22:21:00.000-07:00

But it can't all be fun and zebras. It's time to get stochastic!

Yes folks, today we're going to be talking about Walter Maddock (thank you, random article button). Who was that? Why, he was the fifteenth governor of North Dakota, 1928 to 1929. He became Governor after his predecessor Arthur G. Sorlie died in office. He served out the remainder of Sorlie's term and stood for re-election at the end of 1928, but for some reason decided "Fuck it" and switched from Republican to Democratic. He was also the first Governor of North Dakota to be born in North Dakota (the state didn't actually exist until 1889).

And if that's not enough to convince you that this guy is awesome, check out his hair:

Zebras!

2011-05-27T18:37:00.000-07:00

Let's get going, shall we? And what better place to start than with zebras? Sure, you know they look like horses and have stripes, but did you know that they have enormous penises?

OK, perhaps you did. But wikipedia knows more about zebras than you do. For instance, there are three species of zebra: the Mountain Zebra, which lives in the mountains, the Plains Zebra, which lives on the plains, and the Grevy's Zebra, which also lives on the plains. And if you're wondering who Grevy was, he was a President of France, known for his billiard playing and truly awesome sideburns,

and who apparently didn't discover the Grevy's Zebra and probably never even went to Africa. Cool sideburns, though.

Tangents, however, are an occupational hazard. We must return to the subject at hand, the zebra. Wikipedia also states, in all seriousness, that it was previously thought that zebras were white with black stripes, but that embryological evidence now shows that they are in fact black with white stripes. Zebras move like horses but not quite as fast, they weigh up to 700 lb, have excellent eyesight, and can bark, whinny or bray.

Zebras, unlike other equines, have never really been successfully domesticated, though it isn't for lack of trying. The second Baron Rothschild, for instance, used to ride around London in a carriage drawn by four zebras.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is all you need to know about zebras. Impress your friends today with this astounding zebra fact.

One more question: why do zebras have stripes? Wikipedia's article: nobody knows, they just fucking do.

Damn, this omniscience thing is hard.

Omniscience! (OK, you've scrolled all the way back to the first post now)

2011-05-27T17:11:00.000-07:00

Hello, beautiful and/or handsome reader, and welcome to my new blog, Project Omniscience.

Ever since I was a kid, I've always wanted to know everything. To be the smartest man in the world. To always win at Trivial Pursuit. To be, in a word, omniscient, just like God, but less judgmental and with better hair. Sure enough, many years of hard work later, I know an awful lot of stuff, but for everything I learn, it only makes me more aware of the stuff I don't know.

Confucius once said: "To know that one knows what one knows, and to know that one doesn't know what one doesn't know, there lies true wisdom". I say: fuck Confucius, true wisdom is knowing fucken everything and not having any areas of ignorance left. And with our old friend wikipedia, and you, beautiful and/or handsome reader, I'm gonna become motherfucking omniscient.

There are 3.6 million articles on the English-language wikipedia, which is to a good approximation the sum total of human knowledge. If I become an expert on a new subject every day, 365 days a year, and 366 days on leap years, then I can get through the whole thing in 9,800 years. This might seem like a fairly long time, so I guess that some days I can do two. And of course this will only work if no new articles get added, but hey, what are the chances of that?

So, this is my humble goal. I'm gonna read the entirety of Wikipedia, one article at a time, become an expert on each subject, and then communicate my fascinating new knowledge to you, generically-good-looking reader, so that you too can benefit from the interesting bits of it. My main tool for this will be wikipedia's "Random Article" button, but I reserve the right to skip (or rather postpone for nine thousand years) any articles that are stubs, or that are about generic towns in Iowa, or that are otherwise kinda boring. I also reserve the right to throw in the occasional subject just because it's interesting.

And on that note, the first subject I've chosen is omniscience itself, since I strictly speaking should know what I'm in for before I start. Wikipedia notes that this is considered an attribute of God in both Christianity and Islam (in which one of the many names of Allah is Al'Aleem, or all-knowing, a name which I have modestly chosen as my nom de plume for this blog.)

It goes on to distinguish between inherent omniscience, the ability to know everything, and total omniscience, the characteristic of actually knowing everything. Apparently some theologians have suggested that God's omniscience is merely inherent rather than total, so he can know anything at any point he chooses, but that he doesn't absolutely have to, a distinction presumably made by folks somewhat embarrassed by the idea that God is watching them on the toilet.

Another fun controversy is whether omniscience is compatible with free will. Are you still free if God already knows exactly what you're going to decide? The obvious answer is no, as apparent from the extent to which people are apparently willing to go to argue the other way. A third big problem arising from omniscience is whether an omniscient being can create things which it doesn't already know. I shall spare you, reader-who-is-probably-at-least-better-than-average-looking, the details of all these arguments since they get rather silly. Theologians are folks who, upon realising that their premises are entirely logically inconsistent, just decide that this means they need to assert them faster and more loudly.

So there you have it, dear reader; you and I have together become experts on the subject of omniscience. I hope you'll continue to join me as we join hands and skip together through the knee-deep seas of human knowledge. And if you don't like that, then here's a video of a tiger riding a horse: