Tag Archives | Stupidity

‘Please Don’t Try This At Home—We Are Fully Trained Idiots’

By on March 26, 2013 in News 0

Trinidad Scorpion Butch T pepper. Photo: Vicary Archangel (CC)

Do you like hot, spicy food? Not like these guys, you don’t. Spencer Jakab reports on the men who are trying to eat the world’s hottest peppers, for the Wall Street Journal:

“Please don’t try this at home—we are fully trained idiots.”

So went the disclaimer back in October 2010 as British pepper aficionado Leo Scott and his friend Lok Chi uploaded a video of themselves eating a new variety, the Naga Viper, developed by fellow grower Gerald Fowler. The warning was warranted as the two very experienced chiliheads sweated, writhed in pain and briefly lost the ability to speak after each chewing and swallowing one of the bright-red capsicums.

A month later, the Guinness Book of World Records certified what Mr. Scott found out the hard way: The Naga Viper was the hottest pepper ever grown, measuring 1.382 million Scoville Heat Units, the standard measure of heat.

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Why Smart People Are Stupid

By on June 12, 2012 in News 21

Some fascinating insights into stupidity courtesy of Jonah Lehrer in the New Yorker:

Here’s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs ten cents. This answer is both obvious and wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and a dollar and five cents for the bat.)

For more than five decades, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been asking questions like this and analyzing our answers. His disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way we think about thinking. While philosophers, economists, and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents—reason was our Promethean gift—Kahneman and his scientific partner, the late Amos Tversky, demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe.

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Stoner Mom Places Baby On Roof Of Car, Drives, Baby Falls Off…

By on June 6, 2012 in News 36

It’s been fairly well established that it’s safer to drive stoned than drunk, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea … from Reuters:

A marijuana-smoking woman was arrested on Saturday in Phoenix after she accidentally drove away with her five-week-old son in a child safety seat on the roof of her vehicle, police said.

The baby fell off the car in the middle of an intersection and was found unharmed and strapped into the seat, said Phoenix police spokesman James Holmes.

The mother Catalina Clouser, 19, was booked into jail on child abuse and aggravated assault charges…

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Don’t Wanna Be An American Idiot (In Congress)

By on May 24, 2012 in News 1

Reports Tamara Keith on NPR:

Members of Congress are often criticized for what they do — or rather, what they don’t do.

But what about what they say and, more specifically, how they say it? It turns out that the sophistication of congressional speech-making is on the decline, according to the open government group the Sunlight Foundation. Since 2005, the average grade level at which members of Congress speak has fallen by almost a full grade.

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First U.S. State Capital Ever To File for Bankruptcy: Harrisburg, PA

By on October 12, 2011 in News 10

Harrisburg, PAAmerica (in this case, Pennsylvania), Fuck YA! AFP via Google reports:

Pennsylvania’s state capital Harrisburg has declared bankruptcy, according to a court filing seen on Wednesday, raising the specter of a string of local defaults across the United States.

The city — whose finances have been ravaged by the costs of upgrading a once-mothballed trash incinerator — filed late Tuesday to seek protection from creditors. The city reportedly owes around $310 million.

According to the Bankruptcy Court filing, Harrisburg has between one and 49 creditors. It also reported a roughly equal amount of assets and liabilities, in the range of $100-500 million.

The state of Pennsylvania had tried to force Harrisburg to sell off those assets in order to pay bondholders, but the city council reportedly voted by a margin of four to three on Tuesday to opt for bankruptcy. The result is a rare, but not unexpected, US municipal bankruptcy amid a faltering economy.

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If 10% of the Population Believes a Stupid Thing, The Majority Will Too

By on July 28, 2011 in News 33

IdiocracyVia ScienceDaily:

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.

The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion.

The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.”When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”

As an example, the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt appear to exhibit a similar process, according to Szymanski.

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