Do barefoot cultures have a word for stubbing their toes?

[Tags: puzzle ]

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To be a Most Annoying Nitpick, a comment has to be obvious, predictable, and unimportant.

For example:

“You know, in space an explosion wouldn’t make any noise.”

Runners up include:

“Jeesh. Dinosaurs were dead for hundreds of millions of years before humans came along.”

“Computer viruses are operating-system specific, so one of ours couldn’t infect an alien computer.”

“In the original comic book, he couldn’t fly, just jump.”

In fact, I’d be willing to consider any nitpick that begins with the phrase “In the original comic book” as a candidate for the Most Annoying.

[Tags: doep puzzle cliches nitpicks ]

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Since there are no (?) instances when we are encouraged to scratch ourselves for health reasons (exception: to dislodge bugs from our various pelted patches?), why did natural selection favor near-hairless mammals who scratch themselves inappropriately?

Bonus question: Since it’s well known that we cannot tickle ourselves, why does scratching ourselves feel so darn good? Ahhhh….. [Tags: doep puzzle]

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Why do some economically well off cultures have good food and others do not? Wouldn’t making good food — by which I mean delicious food that you love to eat — be a prime directive of every land? They’ve had thousands of years to work on getting some great recipes down. After all, there are poor cultures that have great food. So, why do entire cultures screw up this most basic of human pleasures?

EXTRA CREDIT question: Last night I gave a talk and afterwards was taken to dinner (thank you very much for the food and conversation) at an Italian restaurant at which every dish had at least twelve ingredients: Rare roasted veal stuffed with striped bass crusted in romano crumbs roasted with fennel basted in onion pate fried in the oil of squid grown in olive oil and fed striped bass found inside the gullets of ocean-farmed veal. Question: Is this the sign of a chef who is insecure or imaginative? Creative or bored? (The right answer is probably the right answer to most questions: It depends.) [Tags: food cooking chefs puzzle doep]

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To win this quiz (and receive absolutely nothing), your answers have to be within an order of magnitude.

According to an article in today’s Boston Globe: 1) How many Dunkin Donut stores are there? 2) How many donuts do they serve per year? 3) How many pounds of fat do they use for frying up those donuts? (It’s transfatty oil at this point.)

The answers are in the first comment. [Tags: quiz donuts ]

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How much money do you think is in a typical fully-stocked ATM?

Not that I’m contemplating anything. Just wondering. Also, Any ideas about how to put a false bottom into a duffel bag? Just curious. [Tags: doep puzzle atm]

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During a speech a couple of weeks ago, I characterized the crawl on the bottom of CNN as “news delivered at 4 mph.” I made up the speed, but it seemed like a reasonable approximation, since it seems to go at about walking speed.

This morning I was watching a news channel on the little TV in our bedroom: It took about four seconds to go across a screen about 15″ wide. If I were watching it on, say, a 60″ wide TV, it would have taken four seconds to cover four times the distance and thus would be traveling four times as fast. If it were a 4 mile wide screen, it’d be travelling at a mile per second.

So, how fast does a news crawl (if a news crawl could crawl news)? And why doesn’t it look faster on a big set?

I know it’s so elementary that it’s embarrassing, but I’m sick, ok? Slightly feverish. Really. [Tags: doep puzzle]

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Here’s a question I try to answer in the latest issue of my (free) newsletter: If too much information is noise, what’s too much meaning?

In fact, here’s the table of contents of that issue. (Note: The answer I come up with is not good enough to count as a spoiler.)

[Tags: doep puzzle everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Why do shampoo bottles tells us to wash our hair twice? The stuff we use to clean whitewall tires (well, those of us who clean whitewalls, which definitely seems like a losing proposition) doesn’t tell us to lather, rinse and repeat. Is our hair really that dirty? Or — perish the thought — is this just a way of getting us to use up the shampoo twice as quickly?

Science? Marketing? Just good hygiene? [Tags: doep puzzle]

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In tonight’s State of the Union address, there are some words and phrases that are bound to appear — “prevail,” “work together,” and “that our military leaders have requested” — and we could play Bingo with them, or take a shot of tequila every time they show up.

Instead, let’s play Negative Bingo in which you are given a card with phrases on it (or perhaps you should be allowed to purchase words the way you can buy search terms at Google) and you lose points for every one that does show up. (Caution: Don’t take a shot every time one of your words is not used.)

For example, here are some terms unlikely to show up in the mouth of the Great Decider tonight:

“Victory parade” “As I was reading in the Koran recently…”

“Abu Ghraib” “Raise taxes” and “to pay for” in the same sentence

“The right of women to…” “Osama Bin Laden”

“Maimed” “Thanks to Al Gore…”

Any admission of error expressed in the active voice

The terms have to have some likelihood of showing up, so you don’t get credit for Bush not using the phrases “prolapsed anus” or “I’m sorry.” In fact, different terms should be worth different amounts. A negative words market perhaps?

Anyway, what words would you put on your negative bingo card?

No need to believe me on this—much less to care—but I think I was one of the inventors of the sort of phrase-bingo people play at speeches like this. In the early 1990s, when I was at Interleaf, I created phrase bingo cards for a company meeting. I even wrote a Lisp script to generate them, which for me was like programming the lunar lander. I thought it was a new idea then, although I’m sure its eventual success was due to someone else inventing it earlier or afterwards. Anyone know the history of this epiphenomenon? [Tags: does politics bush humor bingo]

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