* * IDEABANK: IDEA03.BNK (Article Ideas) * * DATE: 19980220 * * * NUMBER OF ARTICLE IDEAS: 24 * (The hope is that this number will get smaller and smaller...) * * * * I51 -- Insects * I52 -- Timezones * I53 -- Mopeds * I54 -- Metrogenesis * I55 -- Roadside Litter * I56 -- Roadkill Lookalikes * I57 -- Murphy's Revenge * I58 -- Party Tricks * I59 -- Flying in Dreams * (I60) -- What To Do When You Have (Acquired) Eternal Life (written) * I61 -- Mosquetoes * I62 -- Jupiter-People * I63 -- Phonograph Records, 101 Uses For * I64 -- Ancient Civilization, Earth * I65 -- Hair Cut, Cheap Ways To Get A * I66 -- Traffic Cones * I67 -- Books * I68 -- To See And Not Be Seen * I69 -- Is It Worth To Run In The Rain * I70 -- Dimention * I71 -- Fingers, Where To Leave Your * I72 -- Pyramids * I73 -- Bank-O-Mat, Getting Money From A * I74 -- Dirty Cars, Things To Write On * I75 -- Many Similar Worlds Theorem, The * * %t Insects %n I51 %s Annoying Little Buggers %c Roel van der Meulen (vdmeulen@strw.leidenuniv.nl) *EOA* %t Timezones %n I52 %s All The Hitchhiker Or PGG Field Researcher Needs To Know About Them %c Roel van der Meulen (vdmeulen@strw.leidenuniv.nl) * Ryan Tucker (rtucker@ins.infonet.net) wanted to start on this one * after he got his floride treatment rinsed out (19940718) %e The most important timezones are the ones were Australia, the USA, and Europe lie in. Take a look at when people rize and go to bed in these timezones and when they overlap. Ryan: The most important timezone is Coordinated Universal Time. It's where the leap seconds, etc. hang out. :-) %e *EOA* %t Mopeds %n I53 %s The Most Stinking, Polluting And Noisy Means Of Transportation %c Roel van der Meulen (vdmeulen@strw.leidenuniv.nl) %x Means Of Transportation For The Earth-Confined Hitchhiker *EOA* %t Metrogenesis %n I54 %s How To Grow Your Own Town %c Ryan Tucker (rtucker@ins.infonet.net) %i Poligenesis %x Mountain Home, Baxter County, Arkansas, USA, Earth %e Reply to original article of Ryan Tucker, by Roel: > Wasn't the traffic light responsible for the birth of this town/place? > Just put a traffic light somewhere and keep it on red for long enough and > a town will have sprouted just in front of it. Ryan: Hey -- I suppose it was. Dirk van Deun (hw41652@vub.ac.be): > "Metrogenesis" would mean something more like "How to grow your own > mother". Try "Poligenesis" Chris Carter (cwc@pseserv2.fw.hac.com): > Building a bypass will also result in metrogenesis. I recently saw a > picture of what the north side of Fort Wayne looked like before they built > the first bypass (then called just "The Bypass") about 30 years ago. Farm > after farm after farm, with a small race track in the middle. Now, as you > might guess, Coliseum Boulevard (Truth in Advertising laws prompted a name > change from The Bypass) is the busiest street in town. The state just > finished building another bypass several miles farther out. Right now, > most of the interchanges off that bypass border on farmland. How long do > you think that will last? %e *EOA* %t Roadside Litter %n I55 %s Everything from empty pop cans to used kleenex... and other gross things %c Ryan Tucker (rtucker@ins.infonet.net) %e Use your imagination... describe what's outside YOUR door! %e *EOA* %t Roadkill Lookalikes %n I56 %c Ryan Tucker (rtucker@ins.infonet.net) %e On the way home, we noticed a piece of sod that fell out of a truck. It was positioned so that it looked like a schmooshed bear. %e *EOA* %t Murphy's Revenge %n I57 %c Steve Baker (swbaker@vela.acs.oakland.edu) %e Something about Murphy's law, I don't know what exactly. Not too obvious. >> Steve >> PGG Victim of Murphy's Revenge Hopefully it's not like Montezuma's Revenge (sp?) %e *EOA* %t Party Tricks %n I58 %s Novel Party Tricks Guaranteed To Get A Laugh %c William Cooke (wcooke@acorn.co.uk) *EOA* %t Flying in Dreams %n I59 %c Roel van der Meulen (vdmeulen@strw.leidenuniv.nl) %x Flying %i alt.dreams %e A followup to Paul Clegg's Flying article. There are different ways you can fly in dreams. Although flying like superman can be possible, the most common way of flying in dreams is making swimming motions. %e *EOA* %t Mosquetoes %n I61 %s Bloodsuckers Of The Summer Domain %c Ryan Tucker (rtucker@ins.infonet.net) %e What are they, how do the damned things breed, how do you get rid of the towel-less Vogon-simulating larvae-infested buggers... %e *EOA* %t Jupiter-People %n I62 %s The True Leaders Of The Cat Populace %c Ryan Tucker (rtucker@ins.infonet.net) %e Ask around rec.pets.cats ... they know Jupiter People VERY well. :-) Also note that most cats are going fruvious since Jupiter is being attacked by comets. For example, my cat just attacked my door, ate a diskette, laid down on my other computer's keyboard, fell asleep, and suddenly jumped up and started gnawing on my toe again, and then went back to sleep on the same keyboard. Weird? It gets weirder. Don't ask. %e *EOA* %t Phonograph Records, 101 Uses For %n I63 %c Don Goodman (dgoodman@MSMS.DoE.k12.MS.US) %x Ancient Earth Civilization * ^^ hey, now there's another good idea... %e hey, just for the sake of contemporary silliness, this should be done... and vinyl's coming back anyway, so... blah %e *EOA* %t Ancient Civilization, Earth %n I64 %s [various cultures] %e well, if this is gonna be a real guide, we need some history here, eh? this should definately be a mass effort, with people knowledageble of (excuse my poor spelling) various cultures writing a short article on it... %e *EOA* %t Hair Cut, Cheap Ways To Get A %n I65 %c Roel van der Meulen (vdmeulen@strw.leidenuniv.nl) %e Does anyone know cheap ways to get your hair cut, with or without a disatrous result? Two words: Lawn Mower. Two different words: Ceiling Fan Go to china. They have hairdressers sitting on boxes outside. VERY Cheap. To make it even cheaper: Don't let him wash the hair before, even if you have been out in a desert for two weeks and not washed your hair. This will of course result in a harcut disaster, but what the heck, its cheap. 5-10 cents or so. %e *EOA* %t Traffic Cones %n I66 %s The Most Fun That Can Be Had With A Traffic Cone %c William Cooke (wcooke@acorn.co.uk) * Aaron Rice (a.rice@ukonline.co.uk) wrote about traffic cones, although he * didn't mention what fun can be had with them, so the idea remains! *EOA* %t Books %n I67 %s A Remedy For A Lot Of Unpleasant Awarenesses, Exept Hunger %c Roel van der Meulen (vdmeulen@strw.leidenuniv.nl) %e In the summer, when you're boiling away in the heat, read a book about an extremely cold place and feel the cold (you *do*!) In the freezing winter read a book that takes place in a desert... you will get warm fast. When you're hungry, don't read a cookbook, because your hunger will increase. So don't send any cookbooks to the third word. %e *EOA* %t To See And Not Be Seen %n I68 %s The Art Of Observation %c Roel van der Meulen (vdmeulen@strw.leidenuniv.nl) %e There are many ways of observation without being observed. You have camouflage, one-way mirrors, binoculars (distance). You also have just looking at things that can't observe. Tell us more about these things. (looking at things through a microscope) %e *EOA* %t Is It Worth To Run In The Rain? %n I69 %i Rain, Running In It %c Roel van der Meulen (vdmeulen@strw.leidenuniv.nl) %e Subject: Is it worth it to run in the rain? Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban cho@bu.edu (Michael Cho): > I remember reading an article about whether it was worth it to run in the > rain versus walking. I think I read that a scientist did a study and > found out that you are only ?90%? as wet if you run in the rain versus > just walking. Of course that depends on the conditions ( amount of rain, > wind, puddles :) so do you guys think. hagst3+@pitt.edu (Herschel A Gelman): > It seems that if it was just a light drizzle, there'd be a pretty big > difference between walking and running, while with a heavy rain I could > see there being very little difference, since you'd get soaked either way > (depending also on how far you have to go). > > But then again, it's more fun to walk in a drizzle and to run during a > heavy thunderstorm, no matter how wet you get. dawolkes@netcom.com (Fred and Evelyn Wolke): > I am the proud holder of a degree in Mathematics, BA, no less (No BS > here) and I can truthfully say, without fear of contradiction, that... > It depends. > Mostly on the wind, but also on: > How fast you can run. > How fast you walk. (The greater the difference between running and > walking speed, the more likely running is better.) > How tall you are. (The taller, the better for you to walk.) > How broad you are. (The broader, the better for you to run.) > Whether you are moving into the wind, or with it. greez@bga.com (Dave Fricke): > Seems like I remember the Boy Scout Manual instructing that it was good > for young men to run in the warm rain. hibob@interceptor.cds.tek.com (Bob Hiebert CDS): > In article <31ulfl$nei@news.bu.edu> cho@bu.edu (Michael Cho) writes: > > > I think I read that a scientist did a study and found out that you are > > only ?90%? as wet if you run in the rain versus just walking. Of course > > that depends on the conditions (STUFF and psuedo smiley deleted) so do > > you guys think. > > There is also something like ?100%? increase in the likelihood that you > will fall down and get an owie. Cracked two ribs doing that one night. > The beer had nothing to do with it. Jo@kenjo.demon.co.uk (Jo Walton): > What is definitely not worth it is to screw your face up in the rain. It > doesn't stop you getting wet, it doesn't stop rain getting in your eyes > but it does make you feel depressed. It you're walking along in the rain > and feeling miserable, consciously unscrew your face, and suddenly > everything seems much more cheerful. dbd@martha.utcc.utk.edu (David DeLaney): > Jo@kenjo.demon.co.uk writes: > > > What is definitely not worth it is to screw your face up in the rain. It > > doesn't stop you getting wet, it doesn't stop rain getting in your eyes > > but it does make you feel depressed. It you're walking along in the rain > > and feeling miserable, consciously unscrew your face, and suddenly > > everything seems much more cheerful. > > I tried that once. It fell off and I had to spend ten minutes feeling > around on the sidewalk to find it again. I suppose it did take my mind off > of my other troubles though. volcifer@ccs.neu.edu (Mark Wojcik): > > more cheerful. > > I read an article about this for a soft science class (psych or sociology, > but I don't remember which) in which it was claimed that smiling and > frowning had been shown to affect brain chemistry in a way that tended to > modify emotions directly. The article attributed this to a study, but > didn't mention the methodology. > > In my experience, I've found that it seems true that it takes more > musculature to frown than to smile. Of course, I've found that it takes > even fewer muscles to hold a poker expression, which can serve double > duty. As for the rest, who knows. rudolph@cis.umassd.edu (Lee Rudolph): > > directly. The article attributed this to a study, but didn't mention > > the methodology. > > Methodology, I can do; brain chemistry, maybe not. "In general, people do > report feeling the emotions their faces are expressing (Adelman & Zajonc, > 1989; Laird & Bresler, 1990). A particularly intriguing method to > demonstrate these effects is depicted [in a figure I can't include]. The > researchers asked people to write while holding a pencil in their mouths. > There were two pencil positions. As you can see from the photographs > [it's true], the pencil, when held in the teeth, causes an expression like > a smile. But when it is held pursed in the lips, it induces an unhappy > expression that has elements of anger and disgust. As [William] James > would have predicted, the subjects reported feeling happier during the > first expression (Strack, Martin & Stepper, 1988)." (Quoted from Laird > and Thompson, _Psychology_, Houghton Mifflin 1992; ISBN 0-395-47090-0. > A&Z is in _Annual Review of Psychology_, 40, 249-280; L&B is in > _Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin_, 16, 636-651; and SM&S is in > _Journal of Personality and Social Psychology_, 53, 805-816.) > > I did not type this while holding a keyboard in my mouth. To this, Mark Seaborn (mseaborn@argonet.co.uk) adds: > If you take infinitely long to reach your destination in the rain by going > infinitely slowly, you'll get infinitely wet. On the other hand, if you > reach your destination infinitely quickly (ie. in zero time), you'll scoop > up all the rain hanging in the air in your path, but only get finitely > wet. > > So clearly the answer lies somewhere between not moving at all in the > rain, and moving at infinite speed. :-| But there is probably a certain > level of wetness that you cannot hope to avoid. %e *EOA* %t Dimention %n I70 %c Roel van der Meulen (vdmeulen@strw.leidenuniv.nl) %d 19960104 %e A story based on a misspelling of dimension. Should contain references to Dimentia, Dimension, possibly also Dime, Mention, Men, Whatever. %e *EOA* %t Fingers, Where To Leave Your %n I71 %c Roel van der Meulen (vdmeulen@strw.leidenuniv.nl) %d 19960105 %e Don't pluck your nose, scratch your head, tap with a pen, smoke, or... but... %e *EOA* %t Pyramids %n I72 %s Emergency Planetariums %c Roel van der Meulen (vdmeulen@strw.leidenuniv.nl) %d 19960205 %e All that crazy claptrap about pyramids! It's simple! You know about all those holes they found in them pointing towards where important stars stood so many years ago? Well, they aren't there to catch the light of the star, they are there to project light on the celestial sphere should all the stars go out all of a sudden. Then they'd at least still have the most important ones... %e *EOA* %t Bank-O-Mat, Getting Money From A %n I73 %a Michael Bleyer (michael.bleyer@student.uni-ulm.de) %d 19960309 %e Heres an idea I recently had. I worked it out a little bit and thought that this could be something from several authors, if others contribute more locations/countrys it would become a better survey. The countrys with no entry are places where I used a Bank-O-Mat already, but I can't remember much about it. Feel free to add comments or whole parts, either per mail or followup. gruezi, Mike * * * As a smart hitchhiker you are certainly making use of modern technology on your travels, in other words: plastic money. Plastic money has the acknowledged advantage that it produces small amounts of a foreign paper currency in conjunction with machines called "Bank-O-Mats". If you ever run out of paper currency in a foreign country on a sunday morning, you'll find yourself in a situation where you'll have to deal with such a beast. If you happen to run out of luck at the same time and haven't read this article in advance, you will most likely have to rely on your hitchhikers improvisation skills. Austria: Finnland: Despite some popular beliefs, Finnland is a modern country. As such, it has it's very own breed of Bank-O-Mats. Finnish Bank-O-Mats are very convenient and most likely capable of your mother language. They gladly accept any plastic card that you happen to have along, ask for the secret code, then ask how much money you want. Now the machine reaches a state where its behaviour differs from the usual routine: it spits your card back out and along comes a notice with an error message in your language. The error message reads something like: "Cannot complete the requested operation. Sorry. Error Nr. 3241 Please inquire within." You then take your plastic money and the slip of paper with the notice inside to a smiling, friendly accountant who cannot read the error message because it's not finnish. At this point you recall that the symbol on your card was not among the dozen others on the Bank-O-Mats panel. On the evening of your last day in Finnland, you will mysteriously discover that one of the symbols on the panel actually matches one on the back of a cheapo, no-good-for-nothing service card of your home bank. It's actually not even a real bank card and usually you never take it along because it only works with a single machine in the front hall of your bank back home. If you have the nerve to try it, you'll find out that it actually works. This leaves you with a lot of cash that you have no need for, because you were just about to leave the country anyway. France: Germany: Bank-O-Mats in Germany are like bureaucrats: very correct. They do not accept any wrong cards and they offer only the service that Bank-O-Mats are supposed to offer: dispensing money. Just face it, you're not supposed to do anything else there. If you want to check your account, transfer money or do any other fancy stuff then you'll just bloody well have to go inside to the counter. The available languages are german, and if you're lucky, english and french. After all, germans get along with it just fine, so why shouldn't everybody else? And since they're patriotic europeans, the fees for getting money with Eurocards is much lower than for credit cards like Master or Visa. If all these american and japanese tourists can shell out the cash to get here, they might as well leave a little more money with the banks too. Italy: Scotland: Scottish people are nice, even to visitors and therefore put up Bank-O-Mats even in remote little towns where one wouldn't even expect them. They are also proud people, so the scottish Bank-O-Mats dispense only pound bills issued by the Bank of Scotland. Don't worry, these are gladly accepted anywhere throughout Scotland, but rumours have it that they don't count as real currency back in England. You may want to exchange these into "Bank of England"-bills before you return, to avoid embarrasing situations and being snobbishly looked down upon. Alternatively you could invest them into a round of fine scottish beer before you leave. Kevin O'Rourke (Kevin@campbell.demon.co.uk): > Over here they go by all sorts of names (officially ATMs - automated > teller machines) but main ones are 'Cashline' (Royal Bank of Scotland), > various things with the word 'link' in the title (Abbeylink etc.) and > Clydesdale Bank's 'Autoteller'. > > Royal Bank machines are special, if you're foreign they are actaully > quite useful they take cards from England, France, Spain, Belgium and > most of the rest of the world but very, very few Scottish cards. > > I agree about the Scottish beer though :-P %e *EOA* %t Dirty Cars, Things To Write On %n I74 %i Cars, Dirty, Things To Write On %d 19960417 %c Roel van der Meulen (vdmeulen@strw.leidenuniv.nl) %e "I am dirty" is a thing often read on extremely dirty cars. Do the authors suppose that this text is going to help to move the owner to clean his or her car? I don't think this text is very effective. I think a more effective text would be: "For Sale". Does anyone else have better or at least other ideas? %e *EOA* %t Many Similar Worlds Theorem, The %n I75 %d 19960425 %c Roel van der Meulen (vdmeulen@strw.leidenuniv.nl) %x Alternate Universes %e The many worlds theorem states that for every probability there exists a universe. So what if a universe splits up into two universes, one in which a certain electron has a spin-up and one a spin-down, and on a moment in future the spins are similar again and nothing else has changed? It _is_ possible. What happens now, do those universes fuse back into one? Or are there just two universes that are exactly the same, which will evolve (and split up) similarly? Or is the question of no use, because an exact similar universe is by defenition the _same_ universe? So, it could well be that there are countless universes that are exactly the same on the same moments (if you can speak of that). In fact, they are so much the same that there takes place a lot of tunneling effects. Countless particles hop from one universe to the other (cross-breeding), and even whole humans are subject to that. So, as a consequence, every universe that exists has countless similar ones, and at this moment, we are constantly tunneling between similar universes. There is no way to check it, so why bother. It is nice to think about it, though. %e *EOA* * * End of file: IDEA03.BNK *