The Weirdness of Life...

Here is some weirdness for you!

1. I read an article in this week's People Magazine about a school in New Orleans (pronounced "nar-lins" - it really is, just wait until you go) where the student body wants paddling brought back. I saw the title and thought, "I'm sorry?" How does this happen?

Apparently when the kids are late or don't do homework, now, they don't care. There is no negative reinforcement. So the kids want to have the corporal punishment back. I'm going with brainwashed. I just can't imagine anything else. If a teacher attempted to strike me, I raised my hand back. There are a gazillion things teachers can do to torture kids who aren't pulling their weight or are consistently late. I never had any liking for what my teachers did. However, they had zero rights to touch me.

Yup. Brainwashed.

2. Automotive collisions. Why is it three people in two vehicles who just had a fender-bender are walking around? How stupid-- I mean, really. If it was just one time or two, I would shake my head and move on. However, it is more like 98% of the MVCs I see. What makes people do that? What creeps into their brain and tells them to get out of their vehicles and wander aimlessly about a highway? I know people are told not to do that - I knew that before EMS training - but everyone does it! I don't get it.

3. Garmin has a device that you can put on... things... like your backpack, your dog or your kid... (I'm not sure it is legal to put a LoJack device on your child) and you can check on its whereabouts with your phone. And people get upset when I suggest putting a leash on their kids. Why is that unreasonable? The Garmin thing was showcased on C-Net. The battery dies fast no matter what on this, so I would recommend the actual LoJack instead.

4. Luis' coworked had - well, still has - a Motorola Galaxy Zoom tablet. It was bricked (yes, I had to ask what that meant). What it means is the user downloaded things that were not approved to for use by Motorola, and then it ceased to work. So now it is brick. Oops. That's what I would do with a mutli-hundreds of dollars toy. (Here I am dying to have an iPod II and I would treat it like it was gold. Someone else gets a comparable item and willfully destroys it.) Is there an award for this sort of thing? There should be.

5. Justin Bieber, some skinny-ass little kid who for reasons passing understanding is really popular, got two tattoos. Do we care? I think not.

6. This is NOT idiocy:

22-Year-Old Stuent Finds Universe's 'Missing Mass'

SYDNEY (AFP) – A 22-year-old Australian university student has solved a problem which has puzzled astrophysicists for decades, discovering part of the so-called "missing mass" of the universe during her summer break. Undergraduate Amelia Fraser-McKelvie made the breakthrough during a holiday internship with a team at Monash University's School of Physics, locating the mystery material within vast structures called "filaments of galaxies".

Monash astrophysicist Dr Kevin Pimbblet explained that scientists had previously detected matter that was present in the early history of the universe but that could not now be located. "There is missing mass, ordinary mass not dark mass ... It's missing to the present day," Pimbblet told AFP. "We don't know where it went. Now we do know where it went because that's what Amelia found."

Fraser-McKelvie, an aerospace engineering and science student, was able to confirm after a targeted X-ray search for the mystery mass that it had moved to the "filaments of galaxies", which stretch across enormous expanses of space. Pimbblet's earlier work had suggested the filaments as a possible location for the "missing" matter, thought to be low in density but high in temperature.

Pimbblet said astrophysicists had known about the "missing" mass for the past two decades, but the technology needed to pinpoint its location had only become available in recent years. He said the discovery could drive the construction of new telescopes designed to specifically study the mass. Pimbblet admitted the discovery was primarily academic, but he said previous physics research had led to the development of diverse other technologies.

"Whenever I speak to people who have influence, politicians and so on, they sometimes ask me 'Why should I invest in physics pure research?'. And I sometimes say to them: 'Do you use a mobile phone? Some of that technology came about by black hole research'. The pure research has knock-on effects to the whole society which are sometimes difficult to anticipate."

That's awesome!

Is that enough idiocy for one day? I believe so.