What’s Wrong In This Picture?

Oh my, that’s something very very wrong in this picture…

The World’s Hardest Riddle…

…with the world’s simplest answer!

I turn polar bears white

and I will make you cry.

I make guys have to pee

and girls comb their hair.

I make celebrities look stupid

and normal people look like celebrities.

I turn pancakes brown

and make your champagne bubble.

If you squeeze me, I’ll pop.

If you look at me, you’ll pop.

Can you guess the riddle?

According to statistics, 97% of Harvard graduates cannot figure this riddle out, but 84% of kindergarten students were able to figure this out in 6 minutes or less. Can you guess the riddle? Click more to find out the answer…

How Not To Write Your Job Application Letter

Well, I just saw this post off Friendster and thought it was rather interesting and so would like to share with all of you.

According to the post, this letter is real and was actually delivered to Malaysia Airlines System’s Human Resources department! (Sorry to those that can’t understand Malay)

Mohd Kamal Bin Abdul Ghafar
5 Jalan 3/4
Taman Bukit Indah
68000 Ampang Selangor.
(Rumah pakcik saya)

Tuan Pengurus Besar Kanan
Malaysia Airlines System
21 Sep 2005

Tuan,

Memohon Pekerjaan di Malaysia Airlines System.

Sehubungan dengan perkara diatas, saya Mohd Kamal Bin Abdul Ghafar no k/p 831021-10-5889 mahu memohon untuk bekerja disyarikat tuan dalam bidang teknikal. Ini kerana saya sangat berminat & bersungguh2 sampai tak boleh tido malam mengingatkan pekerjaan dalam dalam bidang ini. Walaupun begitu saye mengaku sebab saye mintak kerja disini kerana saya juga adalah seorang petani anggur. Disebabkan begitu pihak tuan kenalah ambil saya bekerja disini.

1. Pihak tuan perlu tahu juga bahawasanya bapa saya iaitu ABD GHAFAR adalah seorang ahli KWSP. Jika pihak tuan tidak mengambil saya bekerja saya serta merta akan menyuruh bapa saya membekukan pengeluaran KWSP pihak tuan
masa tua nanti. Jika pihak tuan tak nak susah baiklah ambil saya bekerja disini. Itu saja keotaian saya.

2. Untuk pengetahuan pihak tuan, disini saya akan tampilkan kelayakan akademik dan pengalaman kerja saya sebelum ini kepada tuan.

3. Akademik Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia Vokasional 1999-2000 Matapelajaran : (gred)

Bahasa Malaysia 6D

Bahasa Inggeris 6D

Sains 7E

Matematik 6D

Pendidikan Islam 5C

Sejarah 7E

Lukisan Geometri 7E

Teknologi air-condition 6D

Kerja bengkel 3B

Sijil Kemahiran Malaysia 2001-2002 (MLVK) Sijil Kejuruteraan Automotive (Tahap 1&2) dari Institut Latihan Perindustrian Kementerian Sumber Manusia Malaysia.

4. Pengalaman kerja

• Pembantu mekanik kereta di Yusuf Workshop, Ipoh, Perak
• Pembantu mekanik kereta di Dunlop Servitekar di Leboh Ampang, Kuala Lumpur (kedai gemok) p/s (alignment kat situ tipu)
• Staff pejabat di Gesundheit Worldwide di Semabok, Melaka (Pusat Serenti)

5. Hanya ini sahaja dapat saya tampilkan kepada pihak tuan.

Diharap dengan kelayakan yang saya ada, permohonan saya untuk bekerja disyarikat tuan dapat dipertimbangkan oleh tuan. Dan saya berasa gembira & seronok & akan belanja satu MAS makan sekiranya diterima bekerja di syarikatt tuan dan saya berjanji akan bekerja dengan bersungguh-sungguh disamping bangun awal dan datang kerja awal.

Saya tak tipu nie. Walaupun saya pernah ponteng skolah dan ditangkap beberapa kali saya akan insaf juga jika saya dapat kerja ini. Saya tidak akan hisap ganja lagi jikalau saya dapat kerja disini. Sekiranya saya didapati bersalah dalam apa2 juga kesalahan pihak tuan tidak boleh ambil tindakan yg kuat disamping menjentik jari saya sahaja.

Untuk makluman tuan saya sangat kurus jikalau dirotan sekali tulang2 saya akan bersepai dan pihak tuan akan mendapat susah yang amat sangat. Saya juga berjanji tidak akan mencuri skru2 nat2 yg lawa2. jika saya nak mencuri saya akan ambil sahaja dan masuk dalam poket seluar itu tidak dikira mencuri. Saya pun dah penat menulis segala nya bermula & berakhir dgn baik. Jika pihak tuan tidak mengambil saya bekerja hidup pihak tuan akan berakhir dengan bacaan yasin. Dan kunjungan org ramai.

Sekian, terima kasih.

Yang benar,

XXX

An Indian Boy…

 Got this from Lim Kit Siang’s blog. Very interesting…

An Indian boy on his first day at school in the US

It was the first day of school and a new student named Chandrashekhar Subrahmanyam entered the fourth grade.

The teacher said, “Let’s begin by reviewing some American History.

Who said, “Give me Liberty , or give me Death”?

She saw a sea of blank faces, except for Chandrashekhar, who had his hand up: “Patrick Henry, 1775″ he said.

“Very good!” Who said, “Government of the People, by the People, for the People, shall not perish from the Earth?”

Again, no response except from Chandrashekhar.” Abraham Lincoln, 1863″ said Chandrashekhar.

The teacher snapped at the class, “Class, you should be ashamed.

Chandrashekhar, who is new to our country, knows more about its history than you do!”

She heard a loud whisper: “F**k the Indians,”

“Who said that?” she demanded.

Chandrashekhar put his hand up. “General Custer, 1862.”

At that point, a student in the back said, “I’m gonna puke.”

The teacher glares around and asks “All right! Now, who said that?”

Again, Chandrashekhar says, “George Bush to the Japanese Prime Minister, 1991.”

Now with almost a mob hysteria someone said, “You little shit. If you say anything else, I’ll kill you.”

Chandrashekhar frantically yells at the top of his voice, “Gary Condit to Chandra Levy, 2001.”

The teacher fainted. And as the class gathered around the teacher on the floor, someone said, “Oh shit, we’re fucked!”

And Chandrashekhar said quietly, “George Bush, Iraq , 2005.”

What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years - A Prediction

This is the most accurate prediction I’ve ever read in my entire life! A prediction made by Jojn Elfreth Watkins Jr. in the year 1900 about how the future is going to look like in a century from then i.e. the present!

The Ladies Home Journal from December 1900, which contained a fascinating article by John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years”.

Mr. Watkins wrote: “These prophecies will seem strange, almost impossible. Yet, they have come from the most learned and conservative minds in America. To the wisest and most careful men in our greatest institutions of science and learning I have gone, asking each in his turn to forecast for me what, in his opinion, will have been wrought in his own field of investigation before the dawn of 2001 - a century from now. These opinions I have carefully transcribed.”
During the Year 2000, we included Mr. Watkins research in our feature articles. We invite you to comment on these predictions, whether they have been realized in some way or how they can never be accomplished! In any event, we know you’ll enjoy these entries.

Prediction #1: There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in America and its possessions by the lapse of another century. Nicaragua will ask for admission to our Union after the completion of the great canal. Mexico will be next. Europe, seeking more territory to the south of us, will cause many of the South and Central American republics to be voted into the Union by their own people.”

Prediction #2: The American will be taller by from one to two inches. His increase of stature will result from better health, due to vast reforms in medicine, sanitation, food and athletics. He will live fifty years instead of thirty-five as at present – for he will reside in the suburbs. The city house will practically be no more. Building in blocks will be illegal. The trip from suburban home to office will require a few minutes only. A penny will pay the fare.

Prediction #3: Gymnastics will begin in the nursery, where toys and games will be designed to strengthen the muscles. Exercise will be compulsory in the schools. Every school, college and community will have a complete gymnasium. All cities will have public gymnasiums. A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling.

Prediction #4: There Will Be No Street Cars in Our Large Cities. All hurry traffic will be below or high above ground when brought within city limits. In most cities it will be confined to broad subways or tunnels, well lighted and well ventilated, or to high trestles with “moving-sidewalk” stairways leading to the top. These underground or overhead streets will teem with capacious automobile passenger coaches and freight with cushioned wheels. Subways or trestles will be reserved for express trains. Cities, therefore, will be free from all noises.

Prediction #5: Trains will run two miles a minute, normally; express trains one hundred and fifty miles an hour. To go from New York to San Francisco will take a day and a night by fast express. There will be cigar-shaped electric locomotives hauling long trains of cars. Cars will, like houses, be artificially cooled. Along the railroads there will be no smoke, no cinders, because coal will neither be carried nor burned. There will be no stops for water. Passengers will travel through hot or dusty country regions with windows down.

Prediction #6: Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today. Farmers will own automobile hay-wagons, automobile truck-wagons, plows, harrows and hay-rakes. A one-pound motor in one of these vehicles will do the work of a pair of horses or more. Children will ride in automobile sleighs in winter. Automobiles will have been substituted for every horse vehicle now known. There will be, as already exist today, automobile hearses, automobile police patrols, automobile ambulances, automobile street sweepers. The horse in harness will be as scarce, if, indeed, not even scarcer, then as the yoked ox is today.

Prediction #7: There will be air-ships, but they will not successfully compete with surface cars and water vessels for passenger or freight traffic. They will be maintained as deadly war-vessels by all military nations. Some will transport men and goods. Others will be used by scientists making observations at great heights above the earth.

Prediction #8: Aerial War-Ships and Forts on Wheels. Giant guns will shoot twenty-five miles or more, and will hurl anywhere within such a radius shells exploding and destroying whole cities. Such guns will be armed by aid of compasses when used on land or sea, and telescopes when directed from great heights. Fleets of air-ships, hiding themselves with dense, smoky mists, thrown off by themselves as they move, will float over cities, fortifications, camps or fleets. They will surprise foes below by hurling upon them deadly thunderbolts. These aerial war-ships will necessitate bomb-proof forts, protected by great steel plates over their tops as well as at their sides. Huge forts on wheels will dash across open spaces at the speed of express trains of to-day. They will make what are now known as cavalry charges. Great automobile plows will dig deep entrenchments as fast as soldiers can occupy them. Rifles will use silent cartridges. Submarine boats submerged for days will be capable of wiping a whole navy off the face of the deep. Balloons and flying machines will carry telescopes of one-hundred-mile vision with camera attachments, photographing an enemy within that radius. These photographs as distinct and large as if taken from across the street, will be lowered to the commanding officer in charge of troops below.

Prediction #9: Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later. Even to-day photographs are being telegraphed over short distances. Photographs will reproduce all of Nature’s colors.

Prediction #10: Man will See Around the World. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span. American audiences in their theatres will view upon huge curtains before them the coronations of kings in Europe or the progress of battles in the Orient. The instrument bringing these distant scenes to the very doors of people will be connected with a giant telephone apparatus transmitting each incidental sound in its appropriate place. Thus the guns of a distant battle will be heard to boom when seen to blaze, and thus the lips of a remote actor or singer will be heard to utter words or music when seen to move.

Prediction #11: No Mosquitoes nor Flies. Insect screens will be unnecessary. Mosquitoes, house-flies and roaches will have been practically exterminated. Boards of health will have destroyed all mosquito haunts and breeding-grounds, drained all stagnant pools, filled in all swamp-lands, and chemically treated all still-water streams. The extermination of the horse and its stable will reduce the house-fly.

Prediction #12: Peas as Large as Beets. Peas and beans will be as large as beets are to-day. Sugar cane will produce twice as much sugar as the sugar beet now does. Cane will once more be the chief source of our sugar supply. The milkweed will have been developed into a rubber plant. Cheap native rubber will be harvested by machinery all over this country. Plants will be made proof against disease microbes just as readily as man is to-day against smallpox. The soil will be kept enriched by plants which take their nutrition from the air and give fertility to the earth.

Prediction #13: Strawberries as Large as Apples will be eaten by our great-great-grandchildren for their Christmas dinners a hundred years hence. Raspberries and blackberries will be as large. One will suffice for the fruit course of each person. Strawberries and cranberries will be grown upon tall bushes. Cranberries, gooseberries and currants will be as large as oranges. One cantaloupe will supply an entire family. Melons, cherries, grapes, plums, apples, pears, peaches and all berries will be seedless. Figs will be cultivated over the entire United States.

Prediction #14: Black, Blue and Green Roses. Roses will be as large as cabbage heads. Violets will grow to the size of orchids. A pansy will be as large in diameter as a sunflower. A century ago the pansy measured but half an inch across its face. There will be black, blue and green roses. It will be possible to grow any flower in any color and to transfer the perfume of a scented flower to another which is odorless. Then may the pansy be given the perfume of the violet.

Prediction #15: No Foods will be Exposed. Storekeepers who expose food to air breathed out by patrons or to the atmosphere of the busy streets will be arrested with those who sell stale or adulterated produce. Liquid-air refrigerators will keep great quantities of food fresh for long intervals.

Prediction #16: There will be No C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary. Spelling by sound will have been adopted, first by the newspapers. English will be a language of condensed words expressing condensed ideas, and will be more extensively spoken than any other. Russian will rank second.

Prediction #17: How Children will be Taught. A university education will be free to every man and woman. Several great national universities will have been established. Children will study a simple English grammar adapted to simplified English, and not copied after the Latin. Time will be saved by grouping like studies. Poor students will be given free board, free clothing and free books if ambitious and actually unable to meet their school and college expenses. Medical inspectors regularly visiting the public schools will furnish poor children free eyeglasses, free dentistry and free medical attention of every kind. The very poor will, when necessary, get free rides to and from school and free lunches between sessions. In vacation time poor children will be taken on trips to various parts of the world. Etiquette and housekeeping will be important studies in the public schools.

Prediction #18: Telephones Around the World. Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York to Brooklyn. By an automatic signal they will connect with any circuit in their locality without the intervention of a “hello girl”.

Prediction #19: Grand Opera will be telephoned to private homes, and will sound as harmonious as though enjoyed from a theatre box. Automatic instruments reproducing original airs exactly will bring the best music to the families of the untalented. Great musicians gathered in one enclosure in New York will, by manipulating electric keys, produce at the same time music from instruments arranged in theatres or halls in San Francisco or New Orleans, for instance. Thus will great bands and orchestras give long-distance concerts. In great cities there will be public opera-houses whose singers and musicians are paid from funds endowed by philanthropists and by the government. The piano will be capable of changing its tone from cheerful to sad. Many devises will add to the emotional effect of music.

Prediction #20: Coal will not be used for heating or cooking. It will be scarce, but not entirely exhausted. The earth’s hard coal will last until the year 2050 or 2100; its soft-coal mines until 2200 or 2300. Meanwhile both kinds of coal will have become more and more expensive. Man will have found electricity manufactured by waterpower to be much cheaper. Every river or creek with any suitable fall will be equipped with water-motors, turning dynamos, making electricity. Along the seacoast will be numerous reservoirs continually filled by waves and tides washing in. Out of these the water will be constantly falling over revolving wheels. All of our restless waters, fresh and salt, will thus be harnessed to do the work which Niagara is doing today: making electricity for heat, light and fuel.

Prediction #21: Hot and Cold Air from Spigots. Hot or cold air will be turned on from spigots to regulate the temperature of a house as we now turn on hot or cold water from spigots to regulate the temperature of the bath. Central plants will supply this cool air and heat to city houses in the same way as now our gas or electricity is furnished. Rising early to build the furnace fire will be a task of the olden times. Homes will have no chimneys, because no smoke will be created within their walls.

Prediction #22: Store Purchases by Tube. Pneumatic tubes, instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles. These tubes will collect, deliver and transport mail over certain distances, perhaps for hundreds of miles. They will at first connect with the private houses of the wealthy; then with all homes. Great business establishments will extend them to stations, similar to our branch post-offices of today, whence fast automobile vehicles will distribute purchases from house to house.

Prediction #23: Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of today. They will purchase materials in tremendous wholesale quantities and sell the cooked foods at a price much lower than the cost of individual cooking. Food will be served hot or cold to private houses in pneumatic tubes or automobile wagons. The meal being over, the dishes used will be packed and returned to the cooking establishments where they will be washed. Such wholesale cookery will be done in electric laboratories rather than in kitchens. These laboratories will be equipped with electric stoves, and all sorts of electric devices, such as coffee-grinders, egg-beaters, stirrers, shakers, parers, meat-choppers, meat-saws, potato-mashers, lemon-squeezers, dish-washers, dish-dryers and the like. All such utensils will be washed in chemicals fatal to disease microbes. Having one’s own cook and purchasing one’s own food will be an extravagance.

Prediction #24: Vegetables Grown by Electricity. Winter will be turned into summer and night into day by the farmer. In cold weather he will place heat-conducting electric wires under the soil of his garden and thus warm his growing plants. He will also grow large gardens under glass. At night his vegetables will be bathed in powerful electric light, serving, like sunlight, to hasten their growth. Electric currents applied to the soil will make valuable plants grow larger and faster, and will kill troublesome weeds. Rays of colored light will hasten the growth of many plants. Electricity applied to garden seeds will make them sprout and develop unusually early.

Prediction #25: Oranges will grow in Philadelphia. Fast-flying refrigerators on land and sea will bring delicious fruits from the tropics and southern temperate zone within a few days. The farmers of South America, South Africa, Australia and the South Sea Islands, whose seasons are directly opposite to ours, will thus supply us in winter with fresh summer foods, which cannot be grown here. Scientist will have discovered how to raise here many fruits now confined to much hotter or colder climates. Delicious oranges will be grown in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Cantaloupes and other summer fruits will be of such a hardy nature that they can be stored through the winter as potatoes are now.

Prediction #26: Strawberries as large as apples will be eaten by our great great grandchildren for their Christmas dinners a hundred years hence. Raspberries and blackberries will be as large. One will suffice for the fruit course of each person. Strawberries and cranberries will be grown upon tall bushes. Cranberries, gooseberries and currants will be as large as oranges. One cantaloupe will supply an entire family. Melons, cherries, grapes, plums, apples, pears, peaches and all berries will be seedless. Figs will be cultivated over the entire United States.

Prediction #27: Few drugs will be swallowed or taken into the stomach unless needed for the direct treatment of that organ itself. Drugs needed by the lungs, for instance, will be applied directly to those organs through the skin and flesh. They will be carried with the electric current applied without pain to the outside skin of the body. Microscopes will lay bare the vital organs, through the living flesh, of men and animals. The living body will to all medical purposes be transparent. Not only will it be possible for a physician to actually see a living, throbbing heart inside the chest, but he will be able to magnify and photograph any part of it. This work will be done with rays of invisible light.

Prediction #28: There will be no wild animals except in menageries. Rats and mice will have been exterminated. The horse will have become practically extinct. A few of high breed will be kept by the rich for racing, hunting and exercise. The automobile will have driven out the horse. Cattle and sheep will have no horns. They will be unable to run faster than the fattened hog of today. A century ago the wild hog could outrun a horse. Food animals will be bred to expend practically all of their life energy in producing meat, milk, wool and other by-products. Horns, bones, muscles and lungs will have been neglected.

Prediction #29: To England in Two Days. Fast electric ships, crossing the ocean at more than a mile a minute, will go from New York to Liverpool in two days. The bodies of these ships will be built above the waves. They will be supported upon runners, somewhat like those of the sleigh. These runners will be very buoyant. Upon their under sides will be apertures expelling jets of air. In this way a film of air will be kept between them and the water’s surface. This film, together with the small surface of the runners, will reduce friction against the waves to the smallest possible degree. Propellers turned by electricity will screw themselves through both the water beneath and the air above. Ships with cabins artificially cooled will be entirely fireproof. In storm they will dive below the water and there await fair weather.

Source 

Why are Cucumbers Better than Men

The Average cucumber is at least six inches long Cucumbers stay hard for a week

A Cucumber won’t tell you that size doesn’t count Cucumbers don’t get too excited

A Cucumber never suffers from performance anxiety Cucumbers are easy to pick up

You can fondle Cucumbers in the supermarket…and you know how firm it is before you take one home Cucumbers can get away any weekend

With a Cucumber you can get a single room…and you won’t have to check in as Mrs Cucumber

A Cucumber will always respect you in the morning

You can go to a movie with a Cucumber and see the movie At a Drive-In you can stay in the front seat

A Cucumber can always wait until you get home

A Cucumber won’t eat all the Popcorn…or send you out for milk duds

A Cucumber won’t drag you out to a John Wayne film festival A Cucumber won’t ask “Am I the first”

Cucumbers don’t care if your a virgin

Cucumbers won’t tell anyone your not a virgin anymore

With Cucumbers you don’t have to be a virgin more than once Cucumbers don’t have sex hang-ups

Cucumbers won’t make you wear kinky clothes or go to bed with boots on Cucumbers aren’t into rope and leather, talking dirty or swinging with fruits and nuts

You can have as many Cucumbers as you can handle

You only eat Cucumber when you feel like it

Cucumbers never need a round of applause

Cucumbers won’t ask: Am I the best`, How was it, Did you cum, how many times

Cucumbers aren’t jealous…of your gynecologist, ski instructor, or hair dresser

A Cucumber won’t want to join your support group

Cucumbers aren’t into meaningful discussions

Cucumbers won’t ask about your last lover..or speculate about the next one A Cucumber will never make a scene because there are other Cucumbers in the refrigerator

A Cucumber won’t mind hiding in the refrigerator when your mother comes over

No matter how old you are, you can always get a fresh Cucumber

Cucumbers can handle rejection

A Cucumber won’t pout if you have a headache

A Cucumber won’t care what time of the month it is

A Cucumber never wants to get it on when your nails are wet

A Cucumber won’t give it up for lent

With a Cucumber you never have to say your sorry

Cucumbers don’t leave whisker burns, fall asleep on your chest, or drool on the pillow

Cucumbers can stay up all night…and you don’t have to sleep on a wet spot

Afterwards a Cucumber won’t: want to shake hands and be friends, say “I’ll call you a cab, tell you he’s not the marrying kind, tell you he is the marrying kind, call his mother, ex-wife, or therapist, take you to confession

Cucumbers don’t leave you wondering for a month

A Cucumber won’t make you go to the drugstore

Cucumbers won’t tell you a vasectomy will ruin it for them

A Cucumber a day keeps the OB-Gyn away

A Cucumber won’t work your crossword puzzle in ink

A Cucumber isn’t allergic to your cat

With a Cucumber, you don’t have to play Florence Nightingale during the flu season

Cucumbers never answer your phone or borrow your car

A Cucumber won’t eat all your food or drink all your liquor

A Cucumber doesn’t turn your bathroom into a library

Cucumbers won’t go through your medicine chest

A Cucumber doesn’t use your toothbrush, roll-on, or hairspray

Cucumbers won’t leave hair in the sink or a ring in the tub

Cucumbers don’t leave dirty shorts on the floor

A Cucumber never forgets to flush the toilet

A Cucumber doesn’t flush the toilet while your taking a shower

With a Cucumber the toilet seat is always the way you left it

Cucumbers don’t compare you to a Centerfold

Cucumbers can’t count to ten

Cucumbers don’t tell you they liked you better with long hair

A Cucumber will never leave for: another woman, another man, another Cucumber

A Cucumber will never call and say “I have to work late, Honey,” and then come home smelling like another woman

A Cucumber never snaps your bra, pinches your butt, or gives you a wedgie You always know where your Cucumber has been

A Cucumber never has to call “the wife”

Cucumbers don’t have mid-life crisis

A Cucumber won’t leave you for a cheerleader or an ex-nun

Cucumbers don’t play the guiter and try to find themselves

You won’t find out later that your Cucumber: is married, is on penicillin, likes you, but loves your brother

A Cucumber doesn’t have softball practise on the day you move

Cucumbers never tell you what they did on R and R

A Cucumber won’t ask for a transfer just when you’re up for a promotion Cucumbers don’t care if you make more money than they do

A Cucumber won’t wear a leisure suit to your office christmas party

You don’t have to wait till half time to talk to your Cucumber

A Cucumber won’t take you to a disco and dump you for a flashy outfit Cucumbers never want to take you home to mom

A Cucumber doesn’t care if you always spend the holidays with your family A Cucumber won’t ask to be put through med school

A Cucumber won’t tell you he’s outgrown you intellectually

Cucumbers never expect you to have little Cucumbers

Cucumbers don’t say,”let’s keep trying until we have a little boy.”

A Cucumber won’t insist the little cukes be raised Catholic, Jewish or Orthodox Vegetarian

It’s easy to drop a Cucumber

A Cucumber will never contest a divorce, demand a property settlement, or seek custody of anything

13 things that do not make sense

I found this in the New Scientist Space website. The article’s about 13 of the most unexplainable phenomenon known to mankind. Very interesting read.

13 things that do not make sense

Saturday March 19, 2005

by Michael Brooks

1 The placebo effect

Don’t try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it’s not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don’t know.

Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson’s disease (Nature Neuroscience, vol 7, p 587). He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients’ brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson’s symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer “bursts” of firing - another feature associated with Parkinson’s. The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something.

We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body’s biochemistry. “The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction,” he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don’t know.

2 The horizon problem

OUR universe appears to be unfathomably uniform. Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other, and you’ll see that the microwave background radiation filling the cosmos is at the same temperature everywhere. That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old.

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.

This “horizon problem” is a big headache for cosmologists, so big that they have come up with some pretty wild solutions. “Inflation”, for example.

You can solve the horizon problem by having the universe expand ultra-fast for a time, just after the big bang, blowing up by a factor of 10⁵⁰ in 10^-33 seconds. But is that just wishful thinking? “Inflation would be an explanation if it occurred,” says University of Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees. The trouble is that no one knows what could have made that happen.

So, in effect, inflation solves one mystery only to invoke another. A variation in the speed of light could also solve the horizon problem - but this too is impotent in the face of the question “why?” In scientific terms, the uniform temperature of the background radiation remains an anomaly.

“A variation in the speed of light could solve the problem, but this too is impotent in the face of the question ‘why?’”

3 Ultra-energetic cosmic rays

FOR more than a decade, physicists in Japan have been seeing cosmic rays that should not exist. Cosmic rays are particles - mostly protons but sometimes heavy atomic nuclei - that travel through the universe at close to the speed of light. Some cosmic rays detected on Earth are produced in violent events such as supernovae, but we still don’t know the origins of the highest-energy particles, which are the most energetic particles ever seen in nature. But that’s not the real mystery.

As cosmic-ray particles travel through space, they lose energy in collisions with the low-energy photons that pervade the universe, such as those of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Einstein’s special theory of relativity dictates that any cosmic rays reaching Earth from a source outside our galaxy will have suffered so many energy-shedding collisions that their maximum possible energy is 5 × 10¹⁹ electronvolts. This is known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit.

Over the past decade, however, the University of Tokyo’s Akeno Giant Air Shower Array - 111 particle detectors spread out over 100 square kilometres - has detected several cosmic rays above the GZK limit. In theory, they can only have come from within our galaxy, avoiding an energy-sapping journey across the cosmos. However, astronomers can find no source for these cosmic rays in our galaxy. So what is going on?

One possibility is that there is something wrong with the Akeno results. Another is that Einstein was wrong. His special theory of relativity says that space is the same in all directions, but what if particles found it easier to move in certain directions? Then the cosmic rays could retain more of their energy, allowing them to beat the GZK limit.

Physicists at the Pierre Auger experiment in Mendoza, Argentina, are now working on this problem. Using 1600 detectors spread over 3000 square kilometres, Auger should be able to determine the energies of incoming cosmic rays and shed more light on the Akeno results.

Alan Watson, an astronomer at the University of Leeds, UK, and spokesman for the Pierre Auger project, is already convinced there is something worth following up here. “I have no doubts that events above 10²⁰ electronvolts exist. There are sufficient examples to convince me,” he says. The question now is, what are they? How many of these particles are coming in, and what direction are they coming from? Until we get that information, there’s no telling how exotic the true explanation could be.

4 Belfast homeopathy results

MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen’s University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These “basophils” release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn’t contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths’ claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this “mother tincture” in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.

You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. “We are,” Ennis says in her paper, “unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon.” If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.

5 Dark matter

TAKE our best understanding of gravity, apply it to the way galaxies spin, and you’ll quickly see the problem: the galaxies should be falling apart. Galactic matter orbits around a central point because its mutual gravitational attraction creates centripetal forces. But there is not enough mass in the galaxies to produce the observed spin.

Vera Rubin, an astronomer working at the Carnegie Institution’s department of terrestrial magnetism in Washington DC, spotted this anomaly in the late 1970s. The best response from physicists was to suggest there is more stuff out there than we can see. The trouble was, nobody could explain what this “dark matter” was.

And they still can’t. Although researchers have made many suggestions about what kind of particles might make up dark matter, there is no consensus. It’s an embarrassing hole in our understanding. Astronomical observations suggest that dark matter must make up about 90 per cent of the mass in the universe, yet we are astonishingly ignorant what that 90 per cent is.

Maybe we can’t work out what dark matter is because it doesn’t actually exist. That’s certainly the way Rubin would like it to turn out. “If I could have my pick, I would like to learn that Newton’s laws must be modified in order to correctly describe gravitational interactions at large distances,” she says. “That’s more appealing than a universe filled with a new kind of sub-nuclear particle.”

6 Viking’s methane

JULY 20, 1976. Gilbert Levin is on the edge of his seat. Millions of kilometres away on Mars, the Viking landers have scooped up some soil and mixed it with carbon-14-labelled nutrients. The mission’s scientists have all agreed that if Levin’s instruments on board the landers detect emissions of carbon-14-containing methane from the soil, then there must be life on Mars.

Viking reports a positive result. Something is ingesting the nutrients, metabolising them, and then belching out gas laced with carbon-14.

So why no party?

Because another instrument, designed to identify organic molecules considered essential signs of life, found nothing. Almost all the mission scientists erred on the side of caution and declared Viking’s discovery a false positive. But was it?

The arguments continue to rage, but results from NASA’s latest rovers show that the surface of Mars was almost certainly wet in the past and therefore hospitable to life. And there is plenty more evidence where that came from, Levin says. “Every mission to Mars has produced evidence supporting my conclusion. None has contradicted it.”

Levin stands by his claim, and he is no longer alone. Joe Miller, a cell biologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has re-analysed the data and he thinks that the emissions show evidence of a circadian cycle. That is highly suggestive of life.

Levin is petitioning ESA and NASA to fly a modified version of his mission to look for “chiral” molecules. These come in left or right-handed versions: they are mirror images of each other. While biological processes tend to produce molecules that favour one chirality over the other, non-living processes create left and right-handed versions in equal numbers. If a future mission to Mars were to find that Martian “metabolism” also prefers one chiral form of a molecule to the other, that would be the best indication yet of life on Mars.

7 Tetraneutrons

FOUR years ago, a particle accelerator in France detected six particles that should not exist. They are called tetraneutrons: four neutrons that are bound together in a way that defies the laws of physics.

Francisco Miguel Marquès and colleagues at the Ganil accelerator in Caen are now gearing up to do it again. If they succeed, these clusters may oblige us to rethink the forces that hold atomic nuclei together.

The team fired beryllium nuclei at a small carbon target and analysed the debris that shot into surrounding particle detectors. They expected to see evidence for four separate neutrons hitting their detectors. Instead the Ganil team found just one flash of light in one detector. And the energy of this flash suggested that four neutrons were arriving together at the detector. Of course, their finding could have been an accident: four neutrons might just have arrived in the same place at the same time by coincidence. But that’s ridiculously improbable.

Not as improbable as tetraneutrons, some might say, because in the standard model of particle physics tetraneutrons simply can’t exist. According to the Pauli exclusion principle, not even two protons or neutrons in the same system can have identical quantum properties. In fact, the strong nuclear force that would hold them together is tuned in such a way that it can’t even hold two lone neutrons together, let alone four. Marquès and his team were so bemused by their result that they buried the data in a research paper that was ostensibly about the possibility of finding tetraneutrons in the future (Physical Review C, vol 65, p 44006).

And there are still more compelling reasons to doubt the existence of tetraneutrons. If you tweak the laws of physics to allow four neutrons to bind together, all kinds of chaos ensues (Journal of Physics G, vol 29, L9). It would mean that the mix of elements formed after the big bang was inconsistent with what we now observe and, even worse, the elements formed would have quickly become far too heavy for the cosmos to cope. “Maybe the universe would have collapsed before it had any chance to expand,” says Natalia Timofeyuk, a theorist at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK.

There are, however, a couple of holes in this reasoning. Established theory does allow the tetraneutron to exist - though only as a ridiculously short-lived particle. “This could be a reason for four neutrons hitting the Ganil detectors simultaneously,” Timofeyuk says. And there is other evidence that supports the idea of matter composed of multiple neutrons: neutron stars. These bodies, which contain an enormous number of bound neutrons, suggest that as yet unexplained forces come into play when neutrons gather en masse.

8 The Pioneer anomaly

THIS is a tale of two spacecraft. Pioneer 10 was launched in 1972; Pioneer 11 a year later. By now both craft should be drifting off into deep space with no one watching. However, their trajectories have proved far too fascinating to ignore.

That’s because something has been pulling - or pushing - on them, causing them to speed up. The resulting acceleration is tiny, less than a nanometre per second per second. That’s equivalent to just one ten-billionth of the gravity at Earth’s surface, but it is enough to have shifted Pioneer 10 some 400,000 kilometres off track. NASA lost touch with Pioneer 11 in 1995, but up to that point it was experiencing exactly the same deviation as its sister probe. So what is causing it?

Nobody knows. Some possible explanations have already been ruled out, including software errors, the solar wind or a fuel leak. If the cause is some gravitational effect, it is not one we know anything about. In fact, physicists are so completely at a loss that some have resorted to linking this mystery with other inexplicable phenomena.

Bruce Bassett of the University of Portsmouth, UK, has suggested that the Pioneer conundrum might have something to do with variations in alpha, the fine structure constant (see “Not so constant constants”, page 37). Others have talked about it as arising from dark matter - but since we don’t know what dark matter is, that doesn’t help much either. “This is all so maddeningly intriguing,” says Michael Martin Nieto of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. “We only have proposals, none of which has been demonstrated.”

Nieto has called for a new analysis of the early trajectory data from the craft, which he says might yield fresh clues. But to get to the bottom of the problem what scientists really need is a mission designed specifically to test unusual gravitational effects in the outer reaches of the solar system. Such a probe would cost between $300 million and $500 million and could piggyback on a future mission to the outer reaches of the solar system.

“An explanation will be found eventually,” Nieto says. “Of course I hope it is due to new physics - how stupendous that would be. But once a physicist starts working on the basis of hope he is heading for a fall.” Disappointing as it may seem, Nieto thinks the explanation for the Pioneer anomaly will eventually be found in some mundane effect, such as an unnoticed source of heat on board the craft.

9 Dark energy

IT IS one of the most famous, and most embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998, astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at ever faster speeds. It’s an effect still searching for a cause - until then, everyone thought the universe’s expansion was slowing down after the big bang. “Theorists are still floundering around, looking for a sensible explanation,” says cosmologist Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. “We’re all hoping that upcoming observations of supernovae, of clusters of galaxies and so on will give us more clues.”

One suggestion is that some property of empty space is responsible - cosmologists call it dark energy. But all attempts to pin it down have fallen woefully short. It’s also possible that Einstein’s theory of general relativity may need to be tweaked when applied to the very largest scales of the universe. “The field is still wide open,” Freese says.

10 The Kuiper cliff

IF YOU travel out to the far edge of the solar system, into the frigid wastes beyond Pluto, you’ll see something strange. Suddenly, after passing through the Kuiper belt, a region of space teeming with icy rocks, there’s nothing.

Astronomers call this boundary the Kuiper cliff, because the density of space rocks drops off so steeply. What caused it? The only answer seems to be a 10th planet. We’re not talking about Quaoar or Sedna: this is a massive object, as big as Earth or Mars, that has swept the area clean of debris.

The evidence for the existence of “Planet X” is compelling, says Alan Stern, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. But although calculations show that such a body could account for the Kuiper cliff (Icarus, vol 160, p 32), no one has ever seen this fabled 10th planet.

There’s a good reason for that. The Kuiper belt is just too far away for us to get a decent view. We need to get out there and have a look before we can say anything about the region. And that won’t be possible for another decade, at least. NASA’s New Horizons probe, which will head out to Pluto and the Kuiper belt, is scheduled for launch in January 2006. It won’t reach Pluto until 2015, so if you are looking for an explanation of the vast, empty gulf of the Kuiper cliff, watch this space.

11 The Wow signal

IT WAS 37 seconds long and came from outer space. On 15 August 1977 it caused astronomer Jerry Ehman, then of Ohio State University in Columbus, to scrawl “Wow!” on the printout from Big Ear, Ohio State’s radio telescope in Delaware. And 28 years later no one knows what created the signal. “I am still waiting for a definitive explanation that makes sense,” Ehman says.

Coming from the direction of Sagittarius, the pulse of radiation was confined to a narrow range of radio frequencies around 1420 megahertz. This frequency is in a part of the radio spectrum in which all transmissions are prohibited by international agreement. Natural sources of radiation, such as the thermal emissions from planets, usually cover a much broader sweep of frequencies. So what caused it?

The nearest star in that direction is 220 light years away. If that is where is came from, it would have had to be a pretty powerful astronomical event - or an advanced alien civilisation using an astonishingly large and powerful transmitter.

The fact that hundreds of sweeps over the same patch of sky have found nothing like the Wow signal doesn’t mean it’s not aliens. When you consider the fact that the Big Ear telescope covers only one-millionth of the sky at any time, and an alien transmitter would also likely beam out over the same fraction of sky, the chances of spotting the signal again are remote, to say the least.

Others think there must be a mundane explanation. Dan Wertheimer, chief scientist for the SETI@home project, says the Wow signal was almost certainly pollution: radio-frequency interference from Earth-based transmissions. “We’ve seen many signals like this, and these sorts of signals have always turned out to be interference,” he says. The debate continues.

12 Not-so-constant constants

IN 1997 astronomer John Webb and his team at the University of New South Wales in Sydney analysed the light reaching Earth from distant quasars. On its 12-billion-year journey, the light had passed through interstellar clouds of metals such as iron, nickel and chromium, and the researchers found these atoms had absorbed some of the photons of quasar light - but not the ones they were expecting.

If the observations are correct, the only vaguely reasonable explanation is that a constant of physics called the fine structure constant, or alpha, had a different value at the time the light passed through the clouds.

But that’s heresy. Alpha is an extremely important constant that determines how light interacts with matter - and it shouldn’t be able to change. Its value depends on, among other things, the charge on the electron, the speed of light and Planck’s constant. Could one of these really have changed?

No one in physics wanted to believe the measurements. Webb and his team have been trying for years to find an error in their results. But so far they have failed.

Webb’s are not the only results that suggest something is missing from our understanding of alpha. A recent analysis of the only known natural nuclear reactor, which was active nearly 2 billion years ago at what is now Oklo in Gabon, also suggests something about light’s interaction with matter has changed.

The ratio of certain radioactive isotopes produced within such a reactor depends on alpha, and so looking at the fission products left behind in the ground at Oklo provides a way to work out the value of the constant at the time of their formation. Using this method, Steve Lamoreaux and his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico suggest that alpha may have decreased by more than 4 per cent since Oklo started up (Physical Review D, vol 69, p 121701).

There are gainsayers who still dispute any change in alpha. Patrick Petitjean, an astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, led a team that analysed quasar light picked up by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and found no evidence that alpha has changed. But Webb, who is now looking at the VLT measurements, says that they require a more complex analysis than Petitjean’s team has carried out. Webb’s group is working on that now, and may be in a position to declare the anomaly resolved - or not - later this year.

“It’s difficult to say how long it’s going to take,” says team member Michael Murphy of the University of Cambridge. “The more we look at these new data, the more difficulties we see.” But whatever the answer, the work will still be valuable. An analysis of the way light passes through distant molecular clouds will reveal more about how the elements were produced early in the universe’s history.

13 Cold fusion

AFTER 16 years, it’s back. In fact, cold fusion never really went away. Over a 10-year period from 1989, US navy labs ran more than 200 experiments to investigate whether nuclear reactions generating more energy than they consume - supposedly only possible inside stars - can occur at room temperature. Numerous researchers have since pronounced themselves believers.

With controllable cold fusion, many of the world’s energy problems would melt away: no wonder the US Department of Energy is interested. In December, after a lengthy review of the evidence, it said it was open to receiving proposals for new cold fusion experiments.

That’s quite a turnaround. The DoE’s first report on the subject, published 15 years ago, concluded that the original cold fusion results, produced by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and unveiled at a press conference in 1989, were impossible to reproduce, and thus probably false.

The basic claim of cold fusion is that dunking palladium electrodes into heavy water - in which oxygen is combined with the hydrogen isotope deuterium - can release a large amount of energy. Placing a voltage across the electrodes supposedly allows deuterium nuclei to move into palladium’s molecular lattice, enabling them to overcome their natural repulsion and fuse together, releasing a blast of energy. The snag is that fusion at room temperature is deemed impossible by every accepted scientific theory.

That doesn’t matter, according to David Nagel, an engineer at George Washington University in Washington DC. Superconductors took 40 years to explain, he points out, so there’s no reason to dismiss cold fusion. “The experimental case is bulletproof,” he says. “You can’t make it go away.”

Dear Mr. President

I found this letter written by Michael Moore to the President of the United States of America and it’s hilarious! I had to share this! Read on.

Dear Mr. President: Send Even MORE Troops (and you go, too!) …from Michael Moore

Dear Mr. President,

Thanks for your address to the nation. It’s good to know you still want to talk to us after how we behaved in November.

Listen, can I be frank? Sending in 20,000 more troops just ain’t gonna do the job. That will only bring the troop level back up to what it was last year. And we were losing the war last year! We’ve already had over a million troops serve some time in Iraq since 2003. Another few thousand is simply not enough to find those weapons of mass destruction! Er, I mean… bringing those responsible for 9/11 to justice! Um, scratch that. Try this — BRING DEMOCRACY TO THE MIDDLE EAST! YES!!!

You’ve got to show some courage, dude! You’ve got to win this one! C’mon, you got Saddam! You hung ‘im high! I loved watching the video of that — just like the old wild west! The bad guy wore black! The hangmen were as crazy as the hangee! Lynch mobs rule!!!

Look, I have to admit I feel very sorry for the predicament you’re in. As Ricky Bobby said, “If you’re not first, you’re last.” And you being humiliated in front of the whole world does NONE of us Americans any good.

Sir, listen to me. You have to send in MILLIONS of troops to Iraq, not thousands! The only way to lick this thing now is to flood Iraq with millions of us! I know that you’re out of combat-ready soldiers — so you have to look elsewhere! The only way you are going to beat a nation of 27 million — Iraq — is to send in at least 28 million! Here’s how it would work:

The first 27 million Americans go in and kill one Iraqi each. That will quickly take care of any insurgency. The other one million of us will stay and rebuild the country. Simple.

Now, I know you’re saying, where will I find 28 million Americans to go to Iraq? Here are some suggestions:

1. More than 62,000,000 Americans voted for you in the last election (the one that took place a year and half into a war we already knew we were losing). I am confident that at least a third of them would want to put their body where their vote was and sign up to volunteer. I know many of these people and, while we may disagree politically, I know that they don’t believe someone else should have to go and fight their fight for them — while they hide here in America.

2. Start a “Kill an Iraqi” Meet-Up group in cities across the country. I know this idea is so early-21st century, but I once went to a Lou Dobbs Meet-Up and, I swear, some of the best ideas happen after the third mojito. I’m sure you’ll get another five million or so enlistees from this effort.

3. Send over all members of the mainstream media. After all, they were your collaborators in bringing us this war — and many of them are already trained from having been “embedded!” If that doesn’t bring the total to 28 million, then draft all viewers of the FOX News channel.

Mr. Bush, do not give up! Now is not the time to pull your punch! Don’t be a weenie by sending in a few over-tired troops. Get your people behind you and YOU lead them in like a true commander in chief! Leave no conservative behind! Full speed ahead!

We promise to write. Go get ‘em W!

Yours,

Michael Moore

Totally hilarious! Maybe President Bush should consider this wonderful proposal, it could in fact end the war in Iraq!