My favorite so far:
College Humor:
Twilight: Three Wolf Moon
And again (warning: bad language)
Twilight: Deleted Sex Scenes
This one wasn't as good, but here ya go.
2009/11/23
2009/11/22
Scale
If you took a piece of thin paper, say 0.35mm thick, and folded it in half, it's now about 1mm thick. So without using a calculator, how thick do you think it might be if you fold it 40 times? 10 meters? A mile? Just try to imagine it without doing the math.
A) 1 meter
B) 10 meters
C) 1 Kilometer
D) Distance from Earth to Moon
E) 1 Light Year
What do you think? No cheating!
A) 1 meter
B) 10 meters
C) 1 Kilometer
D) Distance from Earth to Moon
E) 1 Light Year
What do you think? No cheating!
2009/11/10
Hairpins
If I had any super power, it would be the ability to travel back in time, to be invisible, and to observe hairpins.
For any two animals* A and B, there were once two sisters A' and B', one whose descendants led to animal A and the other whose descendants led to animal B. In fact, the sister A' is also the direct ancestor of ALL other species more closely related to A than B. (And B' is also the direct ancestor of ALL other species more closely related to B than A).
Dawkins calls the mother of these two sisters a hairpin (source). If you go back in time looking at ancestors of animal A you would eventually get to A' and then the hairpin. Then you can go forward in time on a different path (B') to eventually lead you to animal B. While this is a basic concept of evolution, this is something lost on a lot of people. The hairpin is the common ancestor of the two animals. It is not the same as a modern living creature. We are not descendants of chimpanzees and there are no crocoducks.
There are as many hairpins as there are species alive today minus one. Think of a tree where the tips of the branches (leaves) are modern living species, each point in the tree that splits (internal node) is a hairpin.
*The sisters idea breaks down when you get to closely related examples: such as me and my aunt, but the hairpin idea still holds.
For any two animals* A and B, there were once two sisters A' and B', one whose descendants led to animal A and the other whose descendants led to animal B. In fact, the sister A' is also the direct ancestor of ALL other species more closely related to A than B. (And B' is also the direct ancestor of ALL other species more closely related to B than A).
Dawkins calls the mother of these two sisters a hairpin (source). If you go back in time looking at ancestors of animal A you would eventually get to A' and then the hairpin. Then you can go forward in time on a different path (B') to eventually lead you to animal B. While this is a basic concept of evolution, this is something lost on a lot of people. The hairpin is the common ancestor of the two animals. It is not the same as a modern living creature. We are not descendants of chimpanzees and there are no crocoducks.
There are as many hairpins as there are species alive today minus one. Think of a tree where the tips of the branches (leaves) are modern living species, each point in the tree that splits (internal node) is a hairpin.
*The sisters idea breaks down when you get to closely related examples: such as me and my aunt, but the hairpin idea still holds.
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