The 6 Most Frequently Quoted Bullsh*t Statistics Every once in awhile, you'll hear a statistic so striking you can hardly believe it's true. Our first impulse is to repeat it, because knowing interesting things tends to make people like us better.
Unfortunately, some people are so desperate for interesting facts to quote, that they'll just pull them right out of their ass. Then those facts get repeated, by--you guessed it--people like us.
The six most quoted "too awesome to be true" stats that, in fact, are ...
One more article about St. Patrick before forgetting about him for another year.
St. Patrick Revealed Today we raise a glass of warm green beer to a fine fellow, the Irishman who didn't rid the land of snakes, didn't compare the Trinity to the shamrock, and wasn't even Irish. St. Patrick, who died 1,507, 1,539, or 1,540 years ago today—depending on which unreliable source you want to believe—has been adorned with centuries of Irish blarney. Innumerable folk tales recount how he faced down kings, negotiated with God, tricked and slaughtered Ireland's reptiles.
The First Parade. St. Patrick's Day is celebrated on March 17—his religious feast day and the anniversary of his death in the fifth century. The Irish have observed this day as a religious holiday for thousands of years.
On St. Patrick's Day, which falls during the Christian season of Lent, Irish families would traditionally attend church in the morning and celebrate in the afternoon. Lenten prohibitions against the consumption of meat were waived and people would dance, drink, and feast—on the traditional meal of Irish bacon and cabbage.
The first St. Patrick's Day parade took place not in Ireland, but in the U.S. Iris
h soldiers serving in the English military marched through New York City on March 17, 1762. Along with their music, the parade helped the soldiers to reconnect with their Irish roots, as well as fellow Irishmen serving in the English army.
And a little background on old Patrick himself:
Saint Patrick (Latin: Patricius[2], Irish: Naomh Pádraig) was a Roman Britain-born Christian missionary and is the patron saint of Ireland along with Brigid of Kildare and Columba. When he was about 16 he was captured by Irish raiders and taken as a slave to Ireland, where he lived for six years before escaping and returning to his family. He entered the church, as his father and grandfather had before him, becoming a deacon and a bishop. He later returned to Ireland as a missionary in the north and west of the island, but little is known about the places where he worked and no link can be made between Patrick and any church. By the eighth century he had become the patron saint of Ireland.
Just for fun, here's Lucky's back story:
The Leprechaun. The original Irish name for these figures of folklore is lobaircin, meaning "small-bodied fellow." Belief in leprechauns probably stems from Celtic belief in fairies, tiny men and women who could use their magical powers to serve good or evil. In Celtic folktales, leprechauns were cranky souls, responsible for mending the shoes of the other fairies. Though only minor figures in Celtic folklore, leprechauns were known for their trickery, which they often used to protect their much-fabled treasure.
Leprechauns had nothing to do with St. Patrick or the celebration of St. Patrick's Day, a Catholic holy day. In 1959, Walt Disney released a film called Darby O'Gill & the Little People, which introduced America to a very different sort of leprechaun than the cantankerous little man of Irish folklore.
This cheerful, friendly leprechaun is a purely American invention, but has quickly evolved into an easily recognizable symbol of both St. Patrick's Day and Ireland in general.
The shamrock, which was also called the seamroy by the Celts, was a sacred plant in ancient Ireland because it symbolized the rebirth of spring. By the 17th century, the shamrock had become a symbol of emerging Irish nationalism. As the English began to seize Irish land and make laws against the use of the Irish language and the practice of Catholicism, many Irish began to wear the shamrock as a symbol of their pride in their heritage and their displeasure with English rule.
Atoast for tonight: As you slide down the banisters of life, may the splinters never point the wrong way. Slainte!
Here's an interesting little tidbit of counterintuitive information from Chris Bowers at OpenLeft:
Reductive Thinking About The Nomination Campaign More people over the age of 60 have voted for Barack Obama than people under 30. More people in Generation X have voted for Barack Obama than people over the age of 60. And more Boomers have voted for Obama than Generation Xers. In other words, Obama has received fewer votes from Generation Y than from any other generation in this nomination campaign.
Fewer than half of Hillary Clinton's votes have come from white women. Barack Obama has received about 60% more votes from whites than he has from African-Americans.
And there is more, too, including that nearly 40% of pledged delegates from caucuses and conventions have gone to a candidate other than Barack Obama. While I still think it is possible to predict how somehow will vote in the primary with reasonable accuracy once a complete psychographic profile of that person is developed, it is a lot more complex than the simplistic and reductivist "young voters" or "white women" arguments that are being thrown around. There are literally dozens of factors at play, not just age, gender, and race / ethnicity.
New research debunks the idea that chameleon's change color to hide. Excerpt from Science Now:
Everyone knows what makes the chameleon so special: its rapid color-changing camouflage. But the bug-eyed lizard's reputation as a master of disguise is being challenged by new research published today in PLoS Biology. Its flexible pigmentation may actually be a sexy, albeit dangerous, way to stick out.…
Male chameleons are usually a dull shade of brown or green. But thanks to a special lining of skin cells wired directly to their brains, the lizards can quickly flash to a variety of other colors, including bright green, yellow, and even pink. Past research has shown that the lizards use these colors to intimidate other males when fighting or to impress females when flirting. But the belief persists, even among biologists, that the color change also evolved to help chameleons hide from the birds that hunt them.
Talk of the Nation, January 25, 2008 · The well known "six degrees of separation" idea traces back to a 1967 experiment by Stanley Milgram, who tried to determine how many acquaintances it would take to pass a letter between two randomly selected people.
The result that entered the public imagination was that, in general, it took six steps or fewer to bridge the gap between any two people. But is that result accurate?
Judith Kleinfeld, a professor of psychology at the University of Alaska, researched Milgram's original experiment in the hopes of updating it for the digital world.
"Milgram's startling conclusion turns out to rest on scanty evidence," she says. "The idea of 'six degrees of separation' may, in fact, be plain wrong — the academic equivalent of an urban myth."
