Notes from the Brooklyn Polygnostic Institute

M

mikelibrarian

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#201
#201
Fun Fact

Boxing amongst members of the Lepus capensis, or brown hare, species is so well known that it has lead to the expression "mad as a March hare." However, while most people believe that the fighting involves males competing for passive females. instead, most of the fighting involves females trying to get rid of unwanted males.

Source : A Natural History of Sex : The Ecology and Evolution of Mating Behavior. By Adrian Forsyth.
 
M

mikelibrarian

Lost in the stacks.
#202
#202
Fun Fact

Psychic Researcher Robert G. Jahn has developed a robot that responds to the mental activity of a flock of chickens.

May be verified in the article Unlocking Minds by Jerry Adler in the March 19, 2007 issue of Newsweek.
 
M

mikelibrarian

Lost in the stacks.
#203
#203
Fun Fact

Despite his later fame as an astronomer, Galileo was a very poor astrologer. His prediction of a long and happy life for his patron, the Duke of Tuscany, was proven wrong when the Duke died two weeks after the horoscope's publication.

May be verified in The Mask of Nostradamus : A Biography of the World's Most famous Prophet. By James Randi.
 
M

mikelibrarian

Lost in the stacks.
#205
#205
Arcanum

Galileo made the classic rookie mistake of having his left pinky be in front of the telescope lens when studying the sky, and compounded his error by mistaking his pinky for Venus and really bolloxed things up because his pinky hid saturn descending in Leo from view.
 
M

mikelibrarian

Lost in the stacks.
#206
#206
Update

mikelibrarian said:
Puppets have a .034% chance per hour of use of becoming infected with an evil spirit and gaining an unholy power of mobility. This was first noted after a rash of ventriloquist dummies running amok in the mid 1930’s, one of the causes of the death of vaudeville. Famous puppets that have had to be put down include Mortimer Snerd, Sam the Eagle, the Swedish Chef and three different versions of Kermit the Frog. Particularly worrying was a Bert that got got loose and is apparently still at large, most likely in Central Asia.

Because of this, professional puppeteers have to retire their puppets annually, on the anniversary of their receipt of their licenses, and warnings have accompanied all puppets sold in the United States since 1980. Similar legislation was passed in Canada in 1962. The original Howdy Doody was kept in a bulletproof glass case in a secure area of the Smithsonian Institution, but five minutes with a nostalgic George W Bush in 2002 lead to its coming to life and only quick action by the secret service kept the idol of millions from killing the president. None of the secret servicemen had the heart to kill the demonically possessed adorable little cowboy, and the homunculus is now kept in a secure bunker. The creature does not sleep and spends its time verbalizing and pantomiming obscenities that have shocked seasoned sex crimes investigators for the FBI. He supposedly has a hilarious rendition of the Aristocrats, but he was forbidden to be filmed due to the impact it might have on the nation’s psyche.

Interestingly enough the first sculpt of the Baby Alive doll had a .55% chance per hour of similarly suffering from demonic possession, but slight modifications to the design has fixed this flaw.
Click to expand...
Faithful reader Commsolo has additional information on this phenomenon, including a colloquial term that is in use among the mainstream media.

I read about this in Time Magazine like four years ago, and the new data states that the chances are much higher on the Eastern Seaboad due to the population density in the New York/New Jersey area. Chicgao, Atlanta, and Seattle are all on the top ten list for evil pupitile mobility, or EPM. EPM is affecting more and more puppets each year, and it scares the living {Anglo Saxonism meaning excrement deleted on Professor's order} out of me.
 
M

mikelibrarian

Lost in the stacks.
#208
#208
Fun Fact

Lesbianism has been discovered among a species of whiptail lizards, Cnemidophorus, found in the South Western United States. This lizard lays fertile eggs without being inseminated and each egg contains a clone of the mother. However, before laying the eggs, this lizard usually needs to be mounted and have simulated copulation with a female lizard of the same species.

May be verified in : A Natural History of Sex : The Ecology and Evolution of Mating Behavior. By Adrian Forsyth.
 
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M

mikelibrarian

Lost in the stacks.
#213
#213
Arcanum

The largest prime number starts with a 5, ends in a 7 and has an infinite number of digits in between. The most common digit is 8, which accounts for 10.00081% of the digits, the least common is 0 accounting for 9.99999739995%.
 
M

mikelibrarian

Lost in the stacks.
#214
#214
Arcanum

Due to the ever increasing human population and a concurrrent decrease in the populations of the higher primates, dolphins and elephants, 43% of the souls that transmigrated to humans born after 1960 belonged to beings from other planets in their most recent life.
 
M

mikelibrarian

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#216
#216
Arcanum

Squirrels tend to be the least religious of all rodents, and those that are believers (as much as a creature that cannot understand human speech and has a brain the size of a peanut can be) have a greater chance of having heterdox belief systems.

One might regard church mice as the most religious of rodents, or bats, as their having the ability to fly, and tendency to roost in church steeples, has lead many lesser scholars, most notably Heinrich of Mainz the Lesser (1463-1518) , to posit that they are the most spiritual of rodents, both species fall well within the bell curve of rodentine religiousity, the Brown rat, Rattus norvegicus”, is the most religious rodent species, being 2.34 standard deviations more religious than baseline rodentia.
 
M

mikelibrarian

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#217
#217
Arcanum

Our system of Math, in which one can say that a triangle has three sides and that 2+2 is equal to 4, is intuitively obvious to only 37.04356% of the intelligent species in the Universe.

Another 8.08% are capable of discovering our form of mathematics, but it is far from intuitive and can only be discovered after millions of being hours spent in mathematical research, akin to our own species' discovery of higher dimensional geometry and quantum physics. 12% of those species regard our type of mathematics as an intellectual curiousity with no practical applications. 74% view it as a specialty branch of mathematics that has a few esoteric applications. 14% would regard our type of mathematics as superior to their indigenous variants. Unfortunately, 21% of such socities proscribe the death penalty or other extreme punishments for deviation from their standard mathematics, for religious, political or academic tenure related reasons, and practioners of our type of mathematics suffer from various forms of social ostracism in another 28% of such societies.

18.757% of intelligent species are unable to comprehend our type of mathematics, even if they were tutored in it by a human or SQRuplaidein from birth. 4% of such species could be driven insane or killed by an average first grade math class.
 
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M

mikelibrarian

Lost in the stacks.
#218
#218
Fun fact

Gulper eels are deep dwelling creatures with huge mouths that allow them to swallow creatures that are larger than itself. Because of this, if two gulper eels meet, each one is capable of eating the other one, a rather unusual predator/prey relationship, and one that would result after grim, slow, silent, lethargic battle. The winner would survive for six months on the loser assuming they were of equal size.

Source : Secrets of the Sea by Readers Digest.
 
M

mikelibrarian

Lost in the stacks.
#219
#219
Fun Fact

Molecular Nebula Sagittarius B2 contains an Octillion (One followed by 27 zeroes) liters of alcohol. Due to the nebula's large size, 150 light years, one earth volume would have the same alcohol content as a glass of wine.

May be verified in Guinness World Records 2006.
 
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