Month: July 2006

Toynbee Plaques

Damn Interesting had a well-written look at the mysterious Toynbee plaques/tiles,

In 1992, a chap in Philadelphia by the name of Bill O’Neill starting noticing strange tiles randomly embedded in local roads. They were generally about the size of a license plate, and each had some variation of the same strange message: “TOYNBEE IDEA IN KUbricK’s 2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER.” They varied a bit in color and arrangement, but they were all made of an unidentifiable hard substance, and many had footnotes as strange as the message itself, such as “Murder every journalist, I beg you,” and “Submit. Obey.” Some were accompanied by lengthy, paranoid diatribes about the newsmedia, jews, and the mafia.

So Bill started asking around about these tiles, but nobody knew anything about their origin or meaning. So, he created a website devoted to the mysterious tiles, and in doing so learned that it is not just a local phenomenon. Similar tiles have appeared in many US cities, including Washington DC, Pittsburgh, New York City, Baltimore, Boston, and many more. Some have even shown up in South America; in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. To date, about 130 tiles have been discovered. Somehow, someone is managing to embed these tiles into public roads– some of which are busy 24/7– without being spotted.

Toynebee.Net has a list of locations where the tiles have been spotted in the United States, and the handful of tiles that have been spotted in South America.

The Toynbee referred to is believed to refer to historian Alfred Toynbee, who died in 1975.

Almost as weird as those Andre the Giant Has a Posse stickers.

Just How Fast Is Warp 5 Anyway?

Unfortunately, the actual speed that warp speed represents depends on whether you’re watching The Original Series or the knockoffs. In TOS, Warp 5 is 125 times the speed of light, compared tot he later series where it is 215 times the speed of light.

There is nice chart and explanation of warp speeds in the various Star Trek series.

Symbolizing Dead Soldiers

Sgt. Patrick Stewart, 34, was killed in Afghanistan last September when his helicopter came under enemy fire. His widow and family are in a dispute with the Department of Veteran Affairs over the religious symbol on his grave. Specifically, Stewart was a Wiccan and the Department of Veteran Affairs doesn’t have an approved symbol for Wiccans/pagans/neo-pagans/witches/whatever-the-hell-they’re-calling-themselves-this-week.

It is a bit strange that there is no approved Wiccan/whatever symbol given that there are almost 40 other approved religious-oriented symbols. On the other hand, the Wiccans might want to be careful what they wish for. As the Associated Press notes,

The Veterans Affairs’ National Cemetary Adminstration allows only approved emblems of religious beliefs on government headstones. Over the years, it has approved more than 30, including symbols for the Tenrikyo Church, United Morovian Church and Sikhs. There’s also an emblem for atheists — but none for Wiccans.

Sounds good, except the atheist symbol is that piece-of-crap symbol that the American Atheists in the 1960s — a stylized picture of an atom with a capital A in the middle. According to the American Atheist site,

When American Atheists was formed in 1963, a contemporary scientific symbol was chosen; this acknowledges that only through the use of scientific analysis and free, open inquiry can humankind reach out for a better life.

This is a bit like approving a single image of Akhnaton to be used by Jews, Christians, Muslims and other monotheists (and, in case you haven’t noticed, atheists for some reason are litigious-prone — someone’s bound to sue at some point). And the explanation for the symbol makes no sense. Hundreds of years from now, future generations are going to come along and think people buried in those graves were some strange electron worshipping cult or something.

Frankly, I’ve always thought that a better choice for an atheist symbol would be the logical negation symbol: ¬

Then again, I think we should put Cthulhu on the $5 bill, so I may be a bit out of the loop with my fellow atheists.

Source:

For Wiccan soldier, death brings fight. Associated Press, May 25, 2006.

Will 4 grams of Caffeine Kill You?

Update, 5/30/2021: This old blog post recently got a lot of traffic which made me revisit the claim that as little as four grams of caffeine could be fatal.

What I would add to the (somewhat embarrassing) polemic below is that, well, it depends. While a potentially fatal caffeine dose for healthy adults appears to be in the 7 grams to 10 grams range, individuals with heart and other health conditions may be susceptible to severe problems from even smaller doses.

For example, in 2011, a young woman died after consuming two cans of Monster energy drink over a couple of days that contained a total of 480 milligrams of caffeine. The young woman suffered from several pre-existing heart conditions, including an enlarged heart, mitral valve prolapse, and myocardial fibrosis.

Monster disputed that the cause of death was “caffeine toxicity,” noting that the medical examiner who ruled that the death was caused by caffeine never actually performed any blood tests on the decedent.

As with all things, do not take medical advice from blogs like this. Talk with a physician about safe caffeine consumption.

In another case of everything-on-the-Internet-must-be-true, the widely-read Boing! Boing! is helping to publicize false health information from, of all places, the unreliable Erowid site which seems to promote, if not advocate, the use of psychoactive drugs.

The idiots at the Center for Science in the Public Interest are on one of their anti-caffeine binges and have an analysis of caffeine content in various products. Starbucks 16oz coffee grande tops the list with 550mg of caffeine.

Boing! Boing! then republishes the following comment from one of its readers as if it were accurate,

Reader comment: Aaron says:

I saw your caffine post and it reminded me that according to the Erowid drug information site, the L.D. 50 for caffeine (the amount that is lethal for 50% of a test population) is between one and four grams. So, according to the link you posted, a single grande coffee at Starbucks is just over half of the bottom of that range. It’s also worth noting that they list anything over 400mg as a “heavy” dose.

Okay, a dosage of one to four grams may kill you depending on your weight . . . if you inject that much caffeine intravenously.

If, like most of us, you get your caffeine through oral consumption of food and drinks, the lethal dose for adults starts at 7-10 grams depending on your weight, and increases from there the more you weigh. To start to get anywhere near a lethal dose of caffeine from Starbucks, most of us would be looking at a minimum of 9 or 10 of these 16 ounce drinks consumed very rapidly.

As Mrvos, et al noted in a case study of a woman who died from caffeine overdose from swallowing large numbers of diet pills,

Caffeine has long been recognized as an addictive substance with numerous toxic effects. Death due to caffeine overdose is rare, due in part to its marked gastric irritation resulting in spontaneous emesis.

That’s a scientifically correct way of saying that if you try to achieve a lethal dose of caffeine by downing lattes, the caffeine will give you an incredible stomach ache and you’ll wind up puking the caffeine on the floor long before you are even close to killing yourself.

A look at caffeine-related fatalities from PubMed makes clear that cases of caffeine fatalities are almost exclusively from excessive, often accidental, consumption of diet pills and other drugs.

Toward An Annotation Standard

At his excellent TeleRead.Org blog, David Rothman tackles has an intriguing look at initial attempts to create annotation standards for e-books, web sites and other electronic documents.

One existing initiative trying to move toward open standards for annotation of web documents is the W3C’s Annotea project where “annotations are stored externally in annotation servers and presented to the user by a client capable of understanding annotation metadata and capable of interacting with an annotation server.” The Annozilla project is work to create an extension for Firefox to implement the Annotea method of annotation in that browser.

Rothman has a long list of suggestions for what an annotation system should address, including:

  • Provisions for a universal spec that would encompass not just e-books but every conceivable digital object, from Moby Dick to a JPEG of Herman Melville or the sounds of a whale. . . .

    • . . .

  • Provisons for moderation as needed.

One of the things that an annotation system should have is the ability to easily choose from among different annotators and groups of annotators, which would eliminate the need for any moderation system to be built into the annotation system. What I need is the ability to say I want to see annotations from X, Y and Z and only annotations from those individuals/groups.

Maps of Religious Belief/Membership in United States

As part of his American Ethnic Geography courser, Valparaiso professor Jon Kilpinen has posted a gallery of maps that show how religious belief/church membership is distributed across the United States. The data is taken from the Glenmary Research Center’s Religious Congregations and Membership in the United States, 2000.