Totally useless information/trivia

[Stevo985]

My mom was born and raised in ireland and i've gone there (probably literally) hundreds of times.

I'll tell people I@m half Irish, but if anyone seriously asks my nationality I'd say I'm British.

It's sort of opinion really. I had an ex who insisted that people's nationality should be their origin. So even if my great great great grandfather was born in britain and then moved to USA, but the rest of the family after him were all born and raised in the US, we'd still be British.

I did point out that there would be an issue with where you drew the line but she was rather insistent

[mjmooney]

This is going to be ­awkward, but someone has to tell you, so it may as well be me: you're kind of a loser. You know that feeling you sometimes have that your friends have more friends than you? You're right. They do. And you know how almost everyone at the gym seems in better shape than you, and how everyone at your book club seems better read? Well, they are. If you're single, it's probably a while since you dated – what with you being such a loser – but when you did, do you recall thinking the other person was more romantically experienced than you? I'm afraid it was probably true.

The only consolation in all this is that it's nothing personal: it's a ­bizarre statistical fact that almost all of us have fewer friends than our friends, more flab than our ­fellow gym-goers, and so on. In other words, you're a loser, but it's not your fault: it's just maths. (I mean, it's probably just maths. You might be a catastrophic failure as a human being, for all I know. But let's focus on the maths.)

To anyone not steeped in ­statistics, this seems crazy. ­Friendship is a two-way street, so you'd assume things would average out: any given person would be as likely to be more popular than their friends as less. But as the sociologist Scott Feld showed, in a 1991 paper bluntly entitled Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do, this isn't true. If you list all your friends, and then ask them all how many friends they have, their ­average is very likely to be higher than your friend count.

The reason is bewilderingly ­simple: "You are more likely to be friends with someone who has more friends than with someone who has fewer friends," as the ­psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa puts it. You're more likely to know more popular people, and less likely to know less popular ones. Some people may be completely friendless, but you're not friends with any of them.

The implications of this seeming paradox cascade through daily life. People at your gym tend to be fitter than you because you tend not to encounter the ones who rarely go; any given romantic partner is likely to have had more partners than you because you're more likely to be part of a larger group than a small one. ("If your lover only had one lover," Kanazawa writes, "you are probably not him.") This is also why people think of certain beaches or museums or airports as usually ­busier than they actually are: by ­definition, most people aren't there when they're less crowded.

This takes some mental ­gymnastics to appreciate, but it's deeply reassuring. We're often told that comparing yourself with others is a fast track to misery – "The grass is always greener" – but the usual explanation is that we choose to compare ourselves with the wrong people: we pick the happiest, wealthiest, most talented people, and ignore how much better off we are than most.

Feld's work, though, suggests that this is only half of the problem. When it comes to those people we know well, the field from which we're choosing our comparisons is statistically skewed against us to begin with.

So next time you catch yourself feeling self-pityingly inferior to ­almost everyone you know, take heart: you're right, but then, it's the same for them, too.

Grauniad, et al

[theunderstudy]

Actually we had two walkie talkies and we were pretending to remotely hijack barges going past. The amount of fun you cab have wirh a walkietalkie and casual racism is astounding. I miss my GCSE summer.

[BOF]

Very interesting Mike, thanks for that. I never thought of it like that but it does make sense.

[mjmooney]

The English language makes a distinction between blue and green, but some languages do not. Of these, quite a number, mostly in Africa, do not distinguish blue from black either, while there are a handful of languages that do not distinguish blue from black but have a separate term for green. Also, some languages treat light (often greenish) blue and dark blue as separate colors, rather than different variations of blue, while English does not.

According to Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's 1969 study Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, distinct terms for brown, purple, pink, orange and grey will not emerge in a language until the language has made a distinction between green and blue. In their account of the development of color terms the first terms to emerge are those for white/black (or light/dark), red and green/yellow.

Many languages do not have separate terms for blue and green, instead using a cover term for both (when the issue is discussed in linguistics, this cover term is sometimes called grue in English). For example, in Vietnamese both tree leaves and the sky are xanh (to distinguish, one may use xanh lá cây "leaf grue" for green and xanh dương "ocean grue" for blue). In the Thai language, เขียว (khiaw) means green except when referring to the sky or the sea, when it means blue; เขียวชอุ่ม (khiaw cha-um), เขียวขจี (khiaw khachi), and เขียวแปร๊ด (khiaw praed) have all meant either intense blue or garish green, although the latter is becoming more usual as the language 'learns' to distinguish blue and green. Chinese has a word 青 (qīng) that can refer to both, though it also has separate words for blue (蓝 / 藍, lán) and green (绿 / 綠, lǜ). The Korean word 푸르다 (pureuda) can mean either green or blue. In Japanese, the word for blue (青 ao) is often used for colors that English speakers would refer to as green, such as the color of a traffic signal meaning "go", or the color of unripe fruit such as bananas. Some Nguni languages of southern Africa, including Tswana utilize the same word for blue and green. In traditional Welsh (and related Celtic languages), glas could refer to blue but also to certain shades of green and grey; however, modern Welsh is tending toward the 11-color Western scheme, restricting glas to blue and using gwyrdd for green and llwyd for grey. Similarly, in Irish, glas can mean various shades of green and grey (like the sea), while liath is grey proper (like a horse), and the term for blue proper is gorm (like the sky or Cairngorm mountains), although gorm can also in some contexts mean black - sub-Saharan black people would be referred to as daoine gorma, or blue people. In Old Norse the word blå was also used to describe black (and the common word for people of African descent was thus blåmenn 'blue/black men'). In Swedish, blå, the modern word for blue, was used this way until the early 20th century.

Wiki

[BOF]

True. In Irish a black man is a `fear gorm` (blue man)

[theunderstudy]

The inside of a banana skin can be used to rub on mosquito bites and for shining shoes

[Chindie]

In the city of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, a person wishing to wear high heeled shoes with a heel height of more than 2 inches and a heel base of less than 1 square inch requires a permit.

[BOF]

In the city of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, a person wishing to wear high heeled shoes with a heel height of more than 2 inches and a heel base of less than 1 square inch requires a permit.

My first question is always 'Why?'. Wikipedia says "the law was enacted to prevent lawsuits arising from tripping accidents caused by irregular pavement. These laws, however, are currently not enforced."

[Chindie]

But if you do trip and sue the city, you're required to produce a currently standing permit, so while the law isn't enforced by the police it is by city hall

[mjmooney]

Is Clint Eastwood still mayor of Carmel? He certainly used to be.

[claret75]

What a bizarre law, the land of the free my arse

[claret75]

My mom was born and raised in ireland and i've gone there (probably literally) hundreds of times.

I'll tell people I@m half Irish, but if anyone seriously asks my nationality I'd say I'm British.

It's sort of opinion really. I had an ex who insisted that people's nationality should be their origin. So even if my great great great grandfather was born in britain and then moved to USA, but the rest of the family after him were all born and raised in the US, we'd still be British.

I did point out that there would be an issue with where you drew the line but she was rather insistent

If asked I say my nationality's English, but I don't feel particularly anything. I'm half Welsh, half English and going back further on my Moms side, her Mom and Dad are half Irish and half Jew.

The older I get the less I think of myself as English.

[legov]

It's sort of opinion really. I had an ex who insisted that people's nationality should be their origin.

[packoman]

According to Sharenator 1 in every 65,789 internet users visit Villatalk.com daily (probably inaccurate)

[The_Rev]

It's a shame the stats dont tell us how many unique users visit VT, or what the record number of people online at the same time is.

There are 450 online at the moment, 450*65,789 is 29.6m users. Google says there are (as near as dammit) 2bn people with internet access in the world as of June 2010. I guess with 3000 unique users a day then it could be accurate.

[mjmooney]

Dunning–Kruger effect

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. "Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."

The Dunning–Kruger effect was put forward by Justin Kruger and David Dunning. Similar notions have been expressed – albeit less scientifically – for some time. Dunning and Kruger themselves quote Charles Darwin ("Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge") and Bertrand Russell ("One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision."). W.B. Yeats put it concisely thus: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." The Dunning–Kruger effect is not, however, concerned narrowly with high-order cognitive skills (much less their application in the political realm during a particular era, which is what Russell was talking about.) Nor is it specifically limited to the observation that ignorance of a topic is conducive to overconfident assertions about it, which is what Darwin was saying. Indeed, Dunning et al. cite a study saying that 94% of college professors rank their work as "above average" (relative to their peers), to underscore that the highly intelligent and informed are hardly exempt. Rather, the effect is about paradoxical defects in perception of skill, in oneself and others, regardless of the particular skill and its intellectual demands, whether it is chess, playing golf or driving a car.

[mjmooney]

Heil Hitler Away

For those of you who may have wondered what book laid on the reading table next to Adolph Hitler’s bed, you might be surprised to learn it was likely a Western.

In his 1976 prison memoir Spandau: The Secret Diaries, Minister of Armaments and War Production for the Third Reich Albert Speer recorded:

“Hitler was wont to say that he had always been deeply impressed by the tactical finesse and circumspection that Karl May conferred upon his character Winnetou.... And he would add that during his reading hours at night, when faced with seemingly hopeless situations, he would still reach for those stories, that they gave him courage like works of philosophy for others or the Bible for elderly people.”

On January 18, 1933, Hitler and Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels saw a movie that had premiered in Berlin just the day before, Der Rebell, starring Luis Trenker.

Twelve days later, Hitler became chancellor of Germany. The only Nazi Western filmed in America would begin shooting two and a half years later.

The swastika once flew over the American West. Well into the early 20th century, the flag of the U.S. Reclamation Service (renamed the Bureau of Reclamation in 1923) had a swastika as part of its design because the “whirling winds” shape represented life and good luck to many southwestern American Indian tribes.

In Karl May’s Winnetou novels, an illustrator incorporated this swastika symbol; some historians suspect May’s books might be where a young Adolf Hitler first became fascinated with the swastika. May (1842–1912) is the most popular author in German history, and his adventures of the fictional Mescalero Apache chief Winnetou and his Teutonic companion Old Shatterhand in the Wild West remain the German-speaking world’s biggest-selling series of novels.

Hitler often quoted May in his speeches, and he had 300,000 copies of May’s novels distributed to Nazi troops during the war; on June 26, 1944, a Berlin newspaper reported that large numbers of German soldiers were grateful to Karl May—who, ironically, was a pacifist—for providing them with the “best manuals of anti-partisan warfare.”

Although Western movies were made in Germany during the silent era—long before he flapped his wings as Dracula, Hungarian-born Bela Lugosi played an American Indian in a pair of 1920 James Fenimore Cooper adaptations, Der Wildtöter und Chingachgook (The Deerslayer and Chingachgook) and Der Letzte der Mohikaner (The Last of the Mohicans)—none of the Winnetou and Old Shatterhand tales reached the screen until 1962.

Even so, May’s peculiarly Teutonic vision of the West exerted a strong influence on Der Kaiser von Kalifornien (The Emperor of California), a 1936 anti-capitalist propaganda diatribe about the rise and fall of German immigrant Johann Augustus Suter that was the first Nazi Western film.

Suter (Americanized as John Sutter) was an ambitious German-born Swiss trader and farmer who became famous because of the 1848 discovery of gold on his property at Sutter’s Mill in California, which inspired the Gold Rush. Squatters would overrun his property, and Suter eventually went bankrupt, dying nearly penniless in 1880.

The historical Suter (as John Sutter) made his first appearance on film in 1924, depicted as, of all things, an action hero, in Days of ’49, a silent 15-chapter serial released by the Arrow Film Corporation. By 1934, Universal had Howard Hawks set to direct an epic version of Suter’s life based on a treatment written by Nobel Prize–winning novelist William Faulkner. Yet Hawks walked off the project after growing frustrated by Universal’s budget restrictions. Universal would still make the film, under director James Cruze, calling it Sutter’s Gold.

The Nazi Western Kaiser was written, produced and directed by Luis Trenker, who also starred as Suter. Trenker had made his mark as a leading man in Bergfilm (mountain film), the man-versus-nature adventure genre popular in Germany’s pre-Hitler Weimar Republic, but he is a forgotten figure of film history today, especially in America.

“The mountain film was to Germany what the Western was to America,” wrote respected film historian William K. Everson in 1984’s Films in Review, “and Trenker, as its leading practitioner, was in a sense Germany’s John Wayne and John Ford rolled into one.”

Incredibly, some of Kaiser’s outdoor scenes were actually shot on location in the United States, and in the film, Sedona, Arizona, is Suter’s Valhalla.

The cash to shoot in America came from outside Germany, from a Tobis subsidiary based in Holland, Tobis Maatschappij Amsterdam. What Trenker always failed to mention was that in February 1935, Tobis Amsterdam’s parent company, Internationale Tobis NV (or Intertobis), was secretly purchased by the Nazi front company Cautio GmbH as part of the Reich’s covert plan to seize control of the German film industry; by 1939, the Nazis would have absolute authority over every division of Tobis in Europe.

After Trenker and his crew arrived in America, the Germans headed west by train. Their landing in Hollywood made Variety’s front page on August 7, 1935: “Nazis in Hollywood on Kaiser Location.”

Kaiser filming apparently started in California. Trenker wrote of working near Mount Whitney in Alles gut gegangen; that’s confirmed by a few quick shots photographed in Lone Pine’s easily recognizable Alabama Hills. In one sequence, he rides a horse through the boulder-strewn pass that would soon become

B-western hallowed ground: the “Lone Ranger Ambush Site” of Republic Pictures’ 1938 serial The Lone Ranger. More filming definitely took place in nearby Death Valley.

Trenker distinctly remembered renting a stallion named Sheik from a Kernville, California, rancher for the duration of Kaiser’s shoot. Sheik was used often in low-budget Westerns, ridden by the likes of John Wayne, William Boyd and Tim McCoy, and he would later face off against Rex in the filmed-in-Sedona King of the Sierras. Because Sheik was distinctively marked by heavy mottling on his face, it’s easy to spot him in at least two Kaiser sequences: the trek through California’s Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area and in one of the scenes filmed in Sedona, where he’s ridden by actor Reinhold Pasch.

Trenker purchased a secondhand Packard automobile and three used Chrysler limousines in California for the company to drive to Arizona, where they took rooms in the El Tovar Hotel on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. German audiences expected mountain climbing in Trenker’s films, and in Kaiser he obliged spectacularly by scaling the walls and rocks of the Grand Canyon during Suter’s quest for California. The long climb climaxes when, through the magic of creative editing, he reaches the top of the canyon only to be overwhelmed by the panoramic view of California—actually Sedona—spread out before him, excitedly exclaiming “California! Hello!” at the breathtaking vision.

This is an unnerving sequence, and not just because of the dizzyingly high views and mixed-up geography. As British arts and culture historian Sir Christopher Frayling pointed out in his book Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone, the music heard during Trenker’s ascent of the Grand Canyon and subsequent descent of Schnebly Hill into Sedona is an eerie mix of the Nazi party anthem “Horst-Wessel-Lied” and America’s national anthem “The Star Spangled Banner.”

On September 11, 1935, Trenker, his wife Hilde, cinematographer Albert Benitz and other crew members arrived at Foxboro Ranches in Sedona. Sedona sequences were staged at what is now State Route 89A (near the foot of today’s Airport Road), the banks of Oak Creek, Munds Mountain Trail, Schnebly Hill and high atop the Mogollon Rim overlooking Little Horse Park.

As was the usual procedure for European films, the scenes photographed in Sedona were shot without sound. The German-language dialogue (“Look at the soil,” Trenker says in one scene, as the red dirt of Schnebly Hill slowly runs through his fingers; “it is like bread”) was looped in later during post-production.

Sedona looks exceptionally beautiful in Kaiser and has more screen time than in some better-remembered Westerns, like 1949’s Hellfire (starring “Wild Bill” Elliott) and 1968’s Firecreek (starring James Stewart and Henry Fonda). Albert Benitz’s low-angled photography of crisp skies and billowing white clouds seductively shadowing the peaks of the area’s massive rock formations provides some of the most heroic (and fascist) images of Sedona ever projected on a movie screen, visuals closer in style to the 1935 Hitler documentary Triumph of the Will than 1931’s Riders of the Purple Sage, shot in Sedona.

Trenker’s group spent three days at Foxboro before heading to Yuma, on September 13, where desert scenes were shot in the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area on the California border.

Before sailing back to Germany, the Kaiser company made a brief detour to Washington, D.C. to film the master shot of the elderly, almost penniless Suter slumped on the steps of the U.S. Capitol for the film’s climactic scene.

Shortly after arriving back in Berlin, Trenker reiterated Kaiser’s theme of Lebensraum to a German reporter, making it clear that he intended Kaiser to “capture the expansiveness of the world. We need the world. We are a people without a space, and it is the most important project of our future that we can solve and carry out this problem.. . . Is it not providence that this first real colonizer of California was a German?”

Due to budget cuts and the bitterly cold winters in Germany, most of Kaiser was shot in Italy.

Der Kaiser von Kalifornien had its world premiere in Berlin on July 21, 1936, at a gala held at the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda to honor Bernardo Attolico, fascist Italy’s newly appointed ambassador to Germany. Hitler and a rogues’s gallery of Nazi hierarchy were in attendance, including Goebbels, Reichsführer of the SS Heinrich Himmler and Reich Minister Ambassador-Plenipotentiary at Large Joachim von Ribbentrop.

Kaiser was awarded the Coppa Mussolini (Mussolini Cup), the top prize for best foreign film, at the Venice International Film Festival in 1936. Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town was also nominated in the best foreign film category in 1936; although it lost to Kaiser, it did win an award of “Special Recommendation.”

Hard as it is to believe today, the Third Reich repeatedly topped the list for the number of foreign films released in the U.S. during the 1930s. Sixty-nine of 216 imported films in 1937 originated in Germany, including Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, which had its American premiere on May 7 at New York City’s Casino Theatre.

The New York Times’s critic Harry T. Smith was surprisingly enthusiastic after he caught a screening at the Casino, declaring it “justifies the belief of many film patrons that semi-historical pictures can be interesting and entertaining without apocryphal heroines and phony comedians.”

But when the film opened in Great Britain in mid-1938 (a year before England and France declared war on Germany), critic A.V. of Monthly Film Bulletin raised a warning flag, pointing out that “one may note in passing that whereas Suter and his chief henchman (who gives his life for him) have Teutonic names, the villains of the piece (and they are villains indeed) have English names.”

Kaiser’s reviews were generally far more favorable than the ones garnered by Sutter’s Gold, which finally premiered in late March 1936. Time panned Gold as “eighty-five minutes of dignified boredom.” Gold reportedly cost $2 million to produce and was Universal’s biggest box-office flop of the era.

More Westerns were produced in Germany during the Third Reich, including Wasser für Canitoga (Water for Canitoga, which, despite having a character named Old Shatterhand, is not based on a story by Karl May), Sergeant Berry and Gold in New Frisco, directed by Paul Verhoeven, the actor who played Billy in Kaiser; all three films were made completely in Europe and released in 1939. After Kaiser, no other Nazi features were photographed on location in the United States.

Kaiser was one of the few Nazi films shown extensively in pre–WWII France. In Germany, it was designated one of the “Great National Films” revived to boost morale after Hitler ordered creation of the Volkssturm(people’s storm) militia of old men and teenage boys in September 1944 in a last-ditch attempt to hold off the advancing Russian army.

Despite the almost total destruction of Germany during the war, Kaiser exists today in almost pristine condition, in far better shape than almost every other film made in Sedona before it. With the ban on public exhibition lifted long ago, it is readily available on home video in Germany.

After 1945, Trenker always denied accusations that he was an opportunistic fellow traveler who embraced Nazism, and instead portrayed himself as a victim of political persecution. “I never paid much mind to politics,” insisted Trenker, always saying the Nazis used him for their own diabolical means before suppressing him and his work when they were no longer useful to them.

Trenker relocated to Rome before the war ended. In 1947 he made scandalous headlines around the world when he sold a diary attributed to Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun, to a German book publisher. His former costar and lover Leni Riefenstahl (whom the diary said danced nude for Hitler’s pleasure) claimed libel and joined with Braun’s family to win an injunction against the publisher to halt publication. Trenker, who was suspected of forging the diary himself, remained in Italy, safely out of reach of German criminal prosecution, adding yet another incident rarely mentioned by his defenders in accounts of his life.

Trenker returned to his homeland of South Tyrol (which stayed a part of Italy after the war) in 1949 to write and direct short films about the mountains and their inhabitants for his Munich-based production company. Within a few years, he was publicly rehabilitated as a beloved, white-haired, pipe-smoking grandfather figure who appeared regularly in films and on German and Austrian television.

In 1983, the Federal Republic of Germany’s Goethe-Institut sent him to the U.S. with prints of Der verlorene Sohn (a film he had starred in) and Der Kaiser von Kalifornien as part of a series of events celebrating the German immigrant experience in America. The tour culminated with an enthusiastic tribute held in his honor at the 10th annual Telluride Film Festival in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. It would not be until after his death in 1990 at age 97 and the reunification of Germany that a membership card discovered in his file at the Berlin Document Center would prove he’d joined the Nazi party in 1940. “I made my pictures a little with the brain and much with the heart,” Luis Trenker told the audience at Telluride in 1983, and perhaps it is this confession that should stand as his true, ignominious epitaph.

True West

[legov]

Google says there are (as near as dammit) 2bn people with internet access in the world as of June 2010

Really? That makes me very happy.

[Qwpzxjor1]

Footballer David Pratt, of Chippenham, is the fastest recorded red card; after being sent off after 3 seconds in the British Gas Premier Division in 2008.

The League record is with goalkeeper Kevin Pressman, who was sent off after 13 seconds for Sheff Wednesday in 2000.

Tim Flowers, Ben Thatcher and Bruno N'Gotty are the only players to have been given a red card in the 1st minute of a Premiership match.

Via Opta Stats