[NEW FAQ] The revised alt.folklore.urban FAQ [Part 1 of 4]
AFUBOT
The alt.folklore.urban FAQ
Version: 0.3 (+/- 2.50) Mon Apr 8 14:37:07 CDT 2002
First public revision
FAQ peon: wari...@xnet.com (comments and suggestions welcome)
The alt.folklore.urban FAQ is a work in progress and is being modified
as you read this. Please stay tuned for further improvements.
TABLE OF CONTENTS TO THIS AND THE OTHER PARTS OF THE FAQ LIST
Part 1 - Urban legends sections:
- The Misappliance Of Science
- The 'Plane Truth (What Goes Up...)
- Does Not Compute
- Mad Medicine
- Stupid People Tricks
PART 2 - Urban legends sections:
- Stupid Academia Tricks
- What's In A Word?
- Reefer Madness
- How Firm Is Your Foundation?
- Kill Your Television!
- Astonishing Antipodean Antics
- Lewd Food
- Snuff Movies
PART 3 - Urban legends sections:
- Upstanding Legends Of The Penis And Scrotum
- Hide The Salami
- Disney Dementia
- Question Authority (And Other Conspiracies)
- Legal Beagles
- Wild Life In The Fast Lane
PART 4 - Urban legends sections:
- Astounding Avian Anomalies
- Doggie-Style and Catty-Wumpuss
- Other Animal (But Non-Buggy) Crackers
- Arthropod Crackers
- Urban Angst
- Take Me To Your Leader
- Dead Horses
AFU Legend Taxonomy
Legends are more complicated than can be adequately described by True,
False, or Unknown. There are shades of meaning that get left out, so
tha= t quite often these simple descriptions are an ill fit. More
descriptive power is required, and after much learned debate and
profanity, the old system of T, F, U, etc, was replaced with the
following:
True (formerly T): True according to the laws of nature as currently
understood. Soldiers break step when marching across bridges, because
th= e marching frequency can resonate with the bridge and cause damage
or collapse.
Documented (formerly T): True according to evidence. It is true that
you must have a permit to own a gerbil in California, and this is
proved by reading the California Code of Regulations.
In Dispute (formerly U): Credible evidence exists on both sides of the
argument. The Baby Ruth bar very likely was named after Babe Ruth, as
hi= s estate contends, yet the Curtiss Candy Company strongly denies
it, and ha= s won judicial decisions on the issue. Until
unimpeachable evidence surfac= es, it will remain In Dispute.
Unknown (formerly U): No evidence exists, with nothing to support
either truth or falsehood. The pot smoker pulled over by the cop for
going 5 mp= h is a common joke, and while no evidence has yet surfaced
to support it, i= t is not so extraordinary that it defies
imagination. It is mundane enough= to have happened, and unremarkable
enough to escape special notation.
Unknowable (formerly U): No evidence exists, and no evidence can ever
possibly exist. No two snowflakes are alike is an Unknowable theory.
Debunked (formerly F): False according to evidence. Anti-racism
advocate= s sometimes tell the ironic story that African-American
Dr. Charles Drew, a pioneer of blood transfusions, died because the
racist hospital refused h= im the treatment he helped create. Friends
of Dr Drew who witnessed the sce= ne deny this accusation.
Impossible (formerly F): False accroding to the laws of nature as
current= ly understood. If you wear contact lenses, the myth that
they=B9ll fuse to = your eyeballs if you look at the arc unprotected
is impossible: there is no process that could conceivably cause this.
Copycat (formerly Ft): A true occurance of something in imitation of a
preexisting legend. Poisoned halloween candy has long been a common
lege= nd which lacked all evidence for years, but has fairly recently
inspired peo= ple to use this legend to attempt murder.
The Misappliance Of Science
Debunked: You can make as much ice faster by starting with warmer
water.
True: Boiled water freezes faster than ordinary water at same
initial temperature.
Debunked: A penny falling from the top of the Empire State Building
in New York City will embed in the pavement, or kill you if it hits
you, or any of several other destructive things.
Debunked: Bath water drains the other way round in other hemisphere,
due to Coriolis.
True: Coriolis force affects fluids if you take incredible pains to
isolate it.
Debunked: Putting your panties into the microwave is a good way to
kill any yeast bacteria they may carry.
Debunked: Coloring the rims of your CD's with a marker will enhance
the sound quality. Usually green is the color of choice, and
sometimes a special marker is required.
Unknown: CDs are the size they are because it could hold Beethoven's
9th symphony.
Debunked: People explode/boil/something in the vacuum of space.
Debunked: Eelskin wallet demagnetizes bank cards
Debunked: Daylight sky appears dark enough to see stars from bottom
of deep well.
True: Venus and perhaps a few other bright stars/planets can be seen
in daylight.
Debunked: Bubbles in bubble wrap contain a cheap, but toxic gas.
Unknown: East German secret police "bug" factory now uses skills to
make hearing aids.
Debunked: Hot-drying acid-washed jeans "re-activates" the acid.
Debunked: Ontario Hydro mandated poor installation,so copper fails
as often as aluminium.
T: Fluorescent lamp will light up when held near high-voltage line.
Tb: Fluorescent light will break down vitamins in clear milk
containers.
F: Fluorescent lights leach vitamins from your body.
Tb: Leather saddles used to be treated with llama dung to avoid
scaring horses.
Tb: The spec. for leather saddles got copied for leather jackets...
T: 3M "post-it" notes were invented & marketed as an unofficial
project
T: Subliminal messages in advertising are ineffective, but outlawed
anyway. ["Media Sources and Business Legends" in TCD] ...Ted Frank
cited USA law.
Unknown: Filamentous phage M13 obtained from lab's letter rejecting
the transfer!
T: Long term storage of paper in a PVC envelope is harmful (fumes
degrade it).
T: Some combinations of metal tooth fillings can receive radio
signals.
F: Printer/copier toner is carcinogenic. [But be careful about
breathing it.]
F: The moon looks larger near the horizon than up in the sky due to
refraction.
T: The above is due to an optical illusion.
T: Indiana House Bill #246 of 1897 is a piece of gibberish that
could be interpreted to mean pi = 3.2, 4, or 160/49. Killed in state
Senate.
Fb: Some state (e.g., KS, OK, etc.) once considered a bill setting
pi = 3 (or some other arbitrary, non-transcendental number).
Debunked: US and Russia won't destroy their stocks of smallpox for
fear of being unprepared for the other country renegging and
launching a biological attack.
Debunked: People only use 10% of their brain capacity, and if we
only were able to harness the other 90%, we'd all be telepathic
genius superheroes.
Impossible: If the entire population of China jumped up at the same
time, either the Earth's orbit would be disturbed, or the US would
be swamped by a tidal wave, or some other bad thing would happen.
Impossible: If all the Chinese screamed at the same time, people in
the US could hear it.
True: There was a natural nuclear reaction in Africa long ago.
Debunked: If you swim right after eating you'll get cramps and
drown.
Impossible: Squeezing out the air from a partially consumed plastic
soda bottle will keep soda from going flat.
Debunked: There are bodies of workmen who fell into the poured
concrete of Hoover Dam and are entombed there to this day.
Debunked: There is a pillar in India made of metal found nowhere
else in the world.
True: Tomatoes are not vegetables, they're fruit, specifically
berries.
Documented: Tomatoes are legally defined as vegetables, however.
Documented: Workers in old watch factories got poisoned by licking
the brushes they used for applying radium compound to watch faces.
Debunked: You can see glass flow in the windows of old buildings.
Debunked: Large telescope mirrors often become distorted due to
glass flow.
Debunked: Glass is not a crystal, therefore it is a liquid and
flows.
Documented: MRI used to be called "NMR" or "NMR Imaging", with the
"N" standing for "Nuclear", but the "N" was dropped due to perceived
public fear.
Impossible: Daylight-Saving Time is an evil manipulation of Time,
and will cause chickens to stop laying, cows to become confused, and
the extra hour of sunlight will scorch the plants and fade the
curtains.
Documented: A newspaper once substituted "in the African-American"
for "in the black."
Impossible: Welding while wearing contacts can cause them to stick
permanently to your eyeballs if you look at the arc without goggles.
Debunked: NASA sent some very thin threads of gold to watchmakers in
Switzerland, to show off some manufacturing technology. The
watchmakers sent them back drilled with holes.
Debunked: Only on the spring equinox can you stand an egg on its
end.
Debunked: The "Philadelphia Experiment" was a top secret, successful
experiment where the US Navy made a battleship invisible. And maybe
they teleported it, too.
Debunked: If you are completely covered in paint, you will die of
asphixiation because your skin can't breathe.
Debunked: Scientists once concluded that it was "impossible" for
bumblebees to fly.
Unknowable: No two snowflakes are alike.
Debunked: A woman faints in a grocery store checkout line from what
turns out to be hypothermia. She "froze her brain" trying to
shoplift a frozen chicken by hiding it under her hat.
Debunked: There is no Nobel Prize for mathematicians because
Mrs. Nobel was fooling around with one.
Debunked: There was a "missing day" that was discovered by a NASA
scientist.
In Dispute: The first bomb dropped on Berlin during World War II
killed the only elephant in the city.
The 'Plane Truth (What Goes Up...)
True: 800ft diameter asteroid passed within 500K miles of hitting
earth in 1989.
T: Confused pilots occasionally land on tiny strip short of correct
airport.
Documented: P-51 Mustang can flip over if you mash on the throttle,
but not due to engine torque.
In Dispute: US Govt fixed plane transponders always report
positions(catch drug imports)
Documented: Airforce/manufacturers tests planes by firing chickens
from special cannon.
Impossible: Chicken cannon causes massive damage because chicken was
frozen.
Impossible: Chicken cannon causes massive damage due to a cat that
crawled in looking for chicken.
T: Cessna planes used to not be sold in the US due to threat of
liability suits but Beechcraft and Mooney did still make & sell
planes in the US.
T: Pilot can discreetly signal a hijack by setting the transponder
to "7500"
Tb: Leave flaps down when off the active as a request for armed
intervention!!
F: The Great Wall of China can be seen with the naked eye from the
moon.
T: Many manmade structures can be seen with the naked eye from Earth
orbit.
F: Shuttle crew did secret experiment on how to make love in zero
gravity.
Tb: Jet lag is exacerbated by alcohol consumption.
T: Parachute mishap brought down a Cessna (gently) on a novice's
parachute.
F: Airlines use a gas to keep passengers mildly sedated and less
troublesome.
U: Similar story of lowering cabin pressure below usual.
Fb: Both pilots on airliner end up locked out of cockpit in lavatory
mixup. ["Death and Danger in the Air" in CBA]
U: In 90% of plane crashes, the words "Oh sh*t!" appear on the
flight recorder.
Fb: Another passenger arrives for full plane; airline employee Gay
must give up his seat. Someone else answers yes to "Are you Gay?";
Gay says "I'm Gay"; more passengers chime in that they're gay and
"They can't kick us all off."
F: Bank programmer makes big bux by skimming off or rounding
calculations in a payroll or interest compounding program. [AKA
"Salami" method.]
T: Institutions are very reluctant to report frauds so may be
difficult to ID.
T: There're lots of stories about how the Challenger astronauts
died.
T: ...Check out Challenger's "Final Minutes"?
T: On 2 July 1982, some lawn chairist w/lots of hot air went to 16K
ft.
F: Neil Armstrong may have helped an old neighbor named Gorsky get a
blowjob when he took that step. [See the full transcript with
Armstrong's comments at the Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal]
Does Not Compute
True: Computers have been stolen.
Documented: Apple uses a Cray to design hardware systems; Cray uses
an Apple...
True: Prodigy grabs large sectors of the disk, containing data from
deleted files.
Debunked: Prodigy slyly reads your disk & nefariously uploads
your top secrets to IBM.
Debunked: Stories about Seymour Cray's strange hobbies (annual boat
burning etc).
Debunked: The FCC is proposing a modem tax (Nope, the proposal died
in 1987).
True: Bill Gates has $750K Porsche 959 he can't use;no type
compliance,no license!
Unknown: New computer system "lost" a Montgomery Ward Calif
warehouse for 3 years...
True: "q=q++;" is an undefined statement under ANSI C(same object
modified twice).
True: Calling "#" a pound sign as in common US parlance really riles
some folks up
True: "#" is frequently referred to as a "hash" mark outside the US.
Debunked: Russian/Chinese mechanical translator translates "out of
sight, out of mind" into "blind and insane". Also "Spirit is
willing, but the flesh is weak" as "the drink is good but the meat
is rotten."
Unknown: IBM ordered a whole bunch of "THIMK" games; but printer
changed to "THINK". ...a.B. Mayers claimed to have dug up a receipt
for same. Getting close.
True: In 1947 a moth was found in a relay of the Harvard Mark II
machine, and taped into the logbook as the "first actual case of bug
being found."
True: The log book, with the moth still taped by the entry, used to
be in building 1200 "K-lab" of the Naval Surface Warfare Center
Computer Museum at Dahlgren, Virginia. until 1988. Now at the
Smithsonian MoAH.
Debunked: Grace Hopper coined the term "bug" as a result of this
event.
True: Grace Hopper was a programmer for the Mark II and often told
the moth story.
True: "Bug" was used to mean a design defect as far back as Edison's
time.
True: If you feel a need to finger a coke machine,try finger
co...@cs.cmu.edu
True: See the alt.internet.services FAQ for more neat-and-keen
stuff.
True: The "Good Times" virus is bogus. See Les Jones' most excellent
FAQ on the Good Times Virus Hoax at the Department of Energy URL
listed below.
Mad Medicine
Documented: London doctor struck off for inveigling Turkish peasants
to donate a kidney.
Debunked: Dr. C. Drew, a plasma researcher; bleeds to death when
hospital turns him (a black man) away.
Debunked: Flowers are bad in hospital rooms because they suck oxygen
out of air.
Documented: (Wo)man takes huge quantity of baking soda as an antacid
and ends up with CO2 rupturing stomach.
Impossible: Person's hair turns entirely white "overnight" from
stress.
Documented: Some people sneeze when exposed to bright light ("photic
sneeze effect").
Debunked: You can catch diseases (crabs, lice, herpes, VD, etc) from
public toilets.
Debunked: Coca-Cola is an effective contraceptive
Documented: Coke is acidic, dissolves teeth, etc
Debunked: Drinking large quantities of deionized/distilled water
over a long period of time can screw you up due to ion imbalances.
Documented: Water can be toxic.
Impossible: Hair and nails continue to grow after death.
Debunked: Hair grows back thicker or faster if you shave it.
Unknown: A woman sees doctor with an irritated eye. She says a male
stripper rubbed his pouch in her eye, or flung his G-string onto her
face. The doctor examines her, and removes a louse from her eye (or
face, or eyebrow).
Debunked: An autopsy reveals big hairballs in lungs of a man who
breathed in bits of hair while he worked, and thus suffocated him.
Documented: Girl dies of big hairball in stomach from chewing on
ends of her braids.
Debunked: B.F. Skinner's daughter died/committed suicide/sued
because of she was reared in a Skinner box/special crib.
Debunked: Left-handed people have shorter life spans than righties.
Debunked: Women/people shouldn't sit on cold cement or metal 'cause
it might hurt their plumbing or cause piles.
Debunked: You can catch a cold by being chilled.
Documented: There're all sorts of rumors about the AIDS virus being
developed by various institutions.
Unknowable: Guillotined persons may remain conscious long enough to
blink.
Debunked: Knuckle cracking will lead to arthritis.
In Dispute: It may damage your hand in other ways, though.
Debunked: Drunks are more relaxed, less likely to be hurt in car
accidents.
Debunked: A series of hospital deaths was due to a janitor who
unplugged life- support systems to plug in a floor polisher.
Debunked: Dr. C. Drew, a plasma researcher; bleeds to death when
hospital turns him (a black man) away.
Documented: Corn chips can damage the esophagus
In Dispute: Supercooled Siberian vodka causes instant death when
overeager drinker takes a slug.
Debunked: Asbestos is added to tampons to force women to use more,
thus increasing the rate of cervical cancer.
Debunked: Soda cans are frequently coated with rat urine, which is
deadly to humans
Debunked: Shock-rocker has ribs removed so he can perform
autofellatio
Debunked: 19th century women wore corsets so tight their internal
organs were deformed.
In Dispute: People have had their ribs removed to make their waist
look smaller.
Documented: Student lives on Kraft dinner, gets scurvy
In Dispute: Women in close proximity synchronise periods
Documented: Maggots and leeches are still used in modern medicine
Debunked: Mountain Dew makes you less of a man; Diet Dew pickles you
in formaldehyde.
Debunked: Eye contact with waterproof sunscreen causes blindness.
Impossible: Baby eats dog food after meal of Enfalac formula,
stomach explodes.
Documented: Pacemakers can explode when burned; they must be removed
before cremation.
In Dispute: Nuclear-powered pacemakers are especially dangerous in a
cremation explosion because of the risk of radioactive fallout.
Impossible: "Innocent" man is repeatedly arrested for drunkenness,
but claims not to drink; turns out he has a "mutant yeast" in his
stomach which ferments ingested carbohydrates into alcohol.
In Dispute: Coughing forcefully may save your life if you're alone
and having a heart attack.
In Dispute: Red cordial (ObTWIAVBP: non-carbonated fruit-flavoured
drink concentrate) can prevent traveller's diarrhoea.
Documented: Women should wear a wetsuit when
waterskiing/watersliding, to avoid mysterious and unpleasant
injuries to their reproductive organs.
Impossible: Little bubbles of air in an injection syringe or IV can
kill you.
Documented: A patient's intestine explodes from cauterization during
surgery due to gas; A patient's intestine exploded during a
colotomy.
Debunked: Cats shouldn't be allowed near newbor babies, as the cat
will "steal the baby's breath".
In Dispute: There have been isolated reports of babies being
smothered by cats. These reports have been disputed by some.
Unknown: Girl replaces her own urine with secreted boyfriend's urine
at "abortion mill," is declared pregnant and advised to abort.
T: There are many stories about musicians and bands, especially
after they die or are dead. Most aren't very interesting or novel.
Stupid People Tricks
Documented: Craig Shergold, UK cancer kid, sought get-well cards to
break the Guinness record, overwhelmed with over 80 million.
True: Craig Shergold's 13th birthday was June 24, 1992. From now
June 24 is AFUday
Debunked: The American Cancer Society sponsors a chain letter for
"Jessica Mydek."
Documented: People have been injured/killed by rocking a vending
machine that falls on them.
Unknown: Man's house demolished after friend places an ad in paper
for a joke.
True: The authorities demolish (burn, blow-up) the wrong house by
accident.
Unknown: US GI captures Iraqi soldier during Gulf War - they knew
each other from Chicago.
Debunked: Special chemical for swim pools, turns bright color on
contact with urine.
Debunked: In the "Wizard of Oz" film you can see a body of someone
who hung himself.
Unknowable: Wife sprays toilet with flammable bug spray, husband
shits, smokes, explodes. Wife sprays toilet with flammable hair
spray, you know the rest, etc. ["Hilarious Accidents" in
TMP. Variations in TVH.]
Debunked: Aluminum ring pull tabs are collected & exchanged for
dialysis machine time. ["Redemption Rumors" in TMP]
Documented: ...Some places or people (e.g., The Ronald McDonald
House in Rochester, MN) do collect tabs for their scrap value and
raise $$ for various causes.
Documented: There are two Canadians who collect them for
wheelchairs. See Fred Ennis's article.
Impossible: Chanting "Mary Worth" or some other phrase three or more
time before a mirror summons dead spirit at slumber parties ["I
Believe in Mary Worth" in TMP]. AKA Bloody Mary and La Llorona.
Unknowable: Male athlete cheats drug test with wife's pee; test
shows he's pregnant.
Documented: People have set themselves on fire occasionally. Some of
them burn more completely than do others.
Impossible: People occasionally spontaneously combust and burn to
death. Whoompfh!
Debunked: Kid sends badly broken Cabbage Patch dolls back. Death
certificate sent to kid.
Debunked: Someone is crushed to death trying to shrink blue jeans by
wearing in tub. ["Product Defect and Liability Legends" in The
Chocking Doberman]
Debunked: Tourists' room is burgled, later finds snaps of
"toothbrush up thief's ass".
F: Two guys see kid fishing; kid says fish aren't biting but worms
are; on way back; they discover kid slumped over; worms were baby
water moccasins! ["The Can of Snakes" in TMP]
F: Some boys go swimming and taunt each other to jump in
first. First kid in warns everyone to stay back! They rescue him and
he's badly snakebitten. ["The Incautious Swimmer" in TMP]
Documented: "little gator" S. Mudgett is mentioned in one of Cecil's
books.
Debunked: Folks find casks of wine in cellar of old house. Tap and
drank from several of them. Later, preserved body found in cask.
Documented: Nautical saying: "Tapping the Admiral" is based on the
above.
Unknown: Boyfriend tells girlfriend they're through and she should
leave when he leaves on a long trip. He returns to find phone off
the hook connected to the "time" recording in Japan/some far away
place.
Debunked: Helicopter fights forest fires by scooping water from
lake. Charred body of scuba diver found in ashes.
True: Then there are others who compete in
http://www.firediving.com/
Debunked: Fat person on airline toilet has intestines sucked out due
to vacuum.
In Dispute: Apparently, a "slightly obese" person on ship toilet has
had intestines sucked out due to vacuum.
Documented: A similar accident happened to a little girl who sat on
a wading pool drain in North Carolina on 16 June 1991 [she didn't
die].
Debunked: Halloween sadists randomly give poisoned candy to
children.
Documented: A Texas child was poisoned in this manner by his father
on Halloween in 1974. Another child died on Halloween after
stumbling onto a family member's heroin stash and consuming it.
Documented: Well how about razor blades in apples? Or pins in
apples?
Debunked: Woman frequents tanning salons; develops funny smell;
innards cooked!
Documented: You can burn yourself to death in a tanning salon if you
are taking certain drugs that make the skin more photosensitive.
Documented: A guy goes a-shooting at Saguaro cacti; hits one. It
falls and kills him! ["The Plant's Revenge" in CBA]
Debunked: Someone dies because another person in their panic
couldn't call for help during a fire because they couldn't dial the
"11" in "911". ["Dial 911 for Help" in The Choking Doberman]
True: People were once frequently mistaken for dead and were buried
alive.
True: Edison's last breath is kept in a jar in Michigan. (Well, sort
of).
Fb: Co-ed loses tampon inside prior to blind date; worried; sees
school intern; is acutely embarrassed. Her date turns out to be the
intern!
Fb: Young man buys condom from pharmacist; he's embarrassed so
boasts of date. He picks her up, pharmacist/dad answers the door!
["The Blind Date" in TMP]
F: Bride at big wedding thanks each person, then thanks groom for
sleeping w/maid-of-honor. Then throws bouquet, etc. ["The Bothered
Bride" in TMP]
Debunked: Kid in Michael Jackson's commercial breaks neck and dies
from: breakdancing, OD, hit by motorcycle.
Debunked: Phil Collins' song "In the Air Tonight" is about a death
witnessed by Phil.
Documented: ...Sheesh! This was even debunked in Parade magazine.
T: Crotch seam rivet in original Levi's dropped due to pain from
standing near fires.
Fb: Some famous artist (Picasso/da Vinci/etc.] wants a new piece of
furniture or furniture to be moved. Draws sketch for workman; who
says no charge for the artist if he can keep the sketch.
F: Couple hires hippie-type babysitter. Later, mother calls and
sitter says everything is fine; she's stuffed the turkey and put it
in the oven. Mom worries since they don't have an turkey; parents
rush home and find that stoned sitter has (or is about to) put baby
in the (microwave) oven. ["The Hippie-Babysitter" in TVH.]
F: "Clever" babysitter stops baby crying by holding its head in
oven. ["The Clever Babysitter" in TMP]
U: A plain-Jane coed invited to special night out by a BMOC. As she
gets ready, has bad gas from lunch. Date arrives;so plans to fart in
car before he gets in. She farts and quickly rolls down window. Date
gets in, says,"I'd like you to meet Tom and Mary in the backseat."
["The Fart in the Dark" in TVH.]
Debunked: Family visits wilderness park. They see bears and want to
get "cute pics" of bear w/child so they smear honey on his
cheek. Bear eats child's face.
Debunked: Bride's father at wedding goes to pay caterer, but wallet
is missing and has to take up collection from guests. Later viewing
of wedding video shows groom's father lifting bride's father's
wallet! ["Sex Scandals" in TCD]
Tb: Some guys who make $ recycling aluminum strip a house with new
siding.
T: People (mostly guys) have been electrocuted pissing on a subway's
3rd rail.
T: Common UL mills include Dear Abby, Ann Landers, and Paul Harvey.
Debunked: Woman lighting fire opens door with a hot poker; robber at
door thinks it is a gun and grabs it!
F: Clocks are commonly displayed at 8:18/8:20/10:10 because that's
when JFK or Abraham Lincoln was shot.
Fb: Henry Ford/Gen. Douglas McArthur/IBM Rep./et al. tests an
interviewee by when they salt their food during lunch.
T: The song "Happy Birthday" is copyrighted.
F: ...Paul McCartney owns the rights.
Fb: Some guy who works at a factory takes home a part a day until
some time later he has a Cadillac/tank/truck (and has been
immortalized in song).
Tb: Putting a sleeping person's hand in water will cause him/her to
pee. Anecdotally, it seems to work for some people but not for
others.
Debunked: The bizarre suicide involving a guy (variations include
Ronald Opus and Paul Aulphis), a tall building, an old couple, and a
shotgun (or rifle) is totally bogus but pretty damn good.
Debunked: People are much loonier (e.g., shoot, screw, etc.) during
a full moon.
F: Woman jokes with maitre d' to tell her husband that he won the
lottery. ...he does, husband then says all is hers as he's
"shagging" her sister.
Debunked: Drug smugglers stuff a baby's corpse with cocaine and
pretend it's "sleeping."
Documented: Fin-de-siecle Frenchman, Le Petomane, got rich farting
as music hall act.
U: Blowback (blowforward?) from ignited fart, singed frat-boy's
intestines.
U: Vet cut vent-hole in cow's flank, lit escaping gases, burned down
barn... ...the veterinarian known as "James Herriot" claims this
happened to him.
Debunked: A female reporter asks a general about training a group of
visiting boy scouts to shoot and ends up asking him if he isn't
equipping them to become "violent killers." The general responds
that the reporter is equipped to be a prostitute.
David Winsemius
Lara Hopkins
> The alt.folklore.urban FAQ
> Version: 0.3 (+/- 2.50) Mon Apr 8 14:37:07 CDT 2002
> First public revision
> FAQ peon: wari...@xnet.com (comments and suggestions welcome)
Woohoo!
Kudos to the FAQ peon and to my co-sub-peons.
Lara
--
Toy poodles are to intelligence as
toaster heating elements are to amperage.
- Chris Clarke explains electrophysics to the afu polloi.
>>> Check out the AFU FAQ and archive at www.urbanlegends.com <<<
John Francis
>
. . .
>tha= t quite often these simple descriptions are an ill fit. More
>th= e marching frequency can resonate with the bridge and cause damage
>hi= s estate contends, yet the Curtiss Candy Company strongly denies
>it, and ha= s won judicial decisions on the issue. Until
>unimpeachable evidence surfac= es, it will remain In Dispute.
>going 5 mp= h is a common joke, and while no evidence has yet surfaced
>to support it, i= t is not so extraordinary that it defies
>advocate= s sometimes tell the ironic story that African-American
>Dr. Charles Drew, a pioneer of blood transfusions, died because the
>racist hospital refused h= im the treatment he helped create. Friends
>of Dr Drew who witnessed the sce= ne deny this accusation.
etc., etc. You've got some odd characters in there.
> T: Confused pilots occasionally land on tiny strip short of correct
> airport.
>
These all still seem to have the old T/F classifications,
as do several other entries later in the list.
Lara Hopkins
>
> These all still seem to have the old T/F classifications,
> as do several other entries later in the list.
Yep. Volunteer editors are welcomed.
Burroughs Guy
working AFU FAQsters.
AFUBOT wrote:
> Debunked: Coloring the rims of your CD's with a marker will enhance
> the sound quality. Usually green is the color of choice, and
> sometimes a special marker is required.
Wrong. In the mid-1980s, in the early days of CDs, there was a magic
green felt pen available which improved the sound quality of many then
existing CDs. I am not a relying on Paul Harvey here, but Dennis Prager,
a Los Angeles talk jock who is above reproach. He said he didn't believe
it himself, until a friend gave him the pen and he used it on his CDs.
Of course the CD makers changed their manufacture technique to render the
magic pen obsolete.
> T: 3M "post-it" notes were invented & marketed as an unofficial
> project
This is somewhat misleading. It is (or was) 3M policy to encourage
unofficial products like that. Arthur Fry was trying to invent a cheap
and reliable bookmark.
> T: Subliminal messages in advertising are ineffective, but outlawed
> anyway. ["Media Sources and Business Legends" in TCD] ...Ted Frank
> cited USA law.
I don't know about the existance of such a law, but I have no doubt that
subliminal messages work.
> Debunked: There are bodies of workmen who fell into the poured
> concrete of Hoover Dam and are entombed there to this day.
Dead bodies would weaken the concrete, so they had to be fished out.
> True: Tomatoes are not vegetables, they're fruit, specifically
> berries.
No, no, no. All fruits are vegetables. Or not. It depends on how you
define vegetables.
> Debunked: Only on the spring equinox can you stand an egg on its
> end.
I prefer it this way:
True: You can stand an egg on end on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.
True: You can do it on the other 363 days as well.
> F: Shuttle crew did secret experiment on how to make love in zero
> gravity.
I Have Been Told (tm) that the first married couple sent up on the Space
Shuttle had sex in space and filed an official report on the subject. I
will remain skeptical on this one.
> Debunked: Dr. C. Drew, a plasma researcher; bleeds to death when
> hospital turns him (a black man) away.
The legend as told by Alan Alda on M*A*S*H is false. However, if you read
the official debunkage of the legend, everyone admits Drew was turned away
by a white hospital and subsequently died. The best I understand it, the
claim is that if the hospital took him in, he would have died anyway.
> Debunked: Dr. C. Drew, a plasma researcher; bleeds to death when
> hospital turns him (a black man) away.
Documented: There's a redundancy in this FAQ.
> Debunked: 19th century women wore corsets so tight their internal
> organs were deformed.
Really? I thought this was documented.
> In Dispute: Women in close proximity synchronise periods
I think it's documented, I've heard women report it happening, and there
are good evolutionary reasons for it to be true.
> Impossible: "Innocent" man is repeatedly arrested for drunkenness,
> but claims not to drink; turns out he has a "mutant yeast" in his
> stomach which ferments ingested carbohydrates into alcohol.
The story as I read it in the Los Angeles Times was of a young boy who
often arrived at school drunk with alcohol on his breath. The parents
were at risk of losing their child, but a doctor established that the
boy's intestines contained a yeast that produced alcohol. Are you saying
the LATimes article was a hoax? I don't know where the "impossible" tag
is coming from. Has someone proven that alcohol can't be produced at the
temperature of the human intestines?
> Debunked: Aluminum ring pull tabs are collected & exchanged for
> dialysis machine time. ["Redemption Rumors" in TMP]
Hansen's soda turned this legend on its head two years ago. The valuable
tabs were colored red. I think the charity was breast cancer research.
> Debunked: Family visits wilderness park. They see bears and want to
> get "cute pics" of bear w/child so they smear honey on his
> cheek. Bear eats child's face.
The story as I remember it was of a Canadian woman putting honey on her
3yo niece's hands to get picture of the bear licking honey off the girl's
hands. The bear ate the girl's hands. This appeared in National
Lampoon's True Facts column and many other sources. There's no reason to
believe the story is true without more evidence.
> T: Common UL mills include Dear Abby, Ann Landers, and Paul Harvey.
Believe it or not, Robert Ripley was a source of many ULs. He even put
out some stories that he knew to be false. The people who took over his
column after he died were much more rigorous. I know this because Paul
Harvey said so.
David J. Martin
>
> Documented: Burroughs Guy is happy to see a new FAQ, and thanks the hard
> working AFU FAQsters.
>
> AFUBOT wrote:
>
> > Debunked: Coloring the rims of your CD's with a marker will enhance
> > the sound quality. Usually green is the color of choice, and
> > sometimes a special marker is required.
>
> Wrong. In the mid-1980s, in the early days of CDs, there was a magic
> green felt pen available which improved the sound quality of many then
> existing CDs. I am not a relying on Paul Harvey here, but Dennis Prager,
> a Los Angeles talk jock who is above reproach. He said he didn't believe
> it himself, until a friend gave him the pen and he used it on his CDs.
>
> Of course the CD makers changed their manufacture technique to render the
> magic pen obsolete.
Documented: Burroughs Guy has foafs and he knows how to
use 'em.
In dispute: Buroughs Guy can offer cites to support his
views in regards to FAQ "errors".
David "all my foafs are imaginary" Martin
Gerald Belton
<BurroughsG...@aol.com> wrote:
>> Debunked: Dr. C. Drew, a plasma researcher; bleeds to death when
>> hospital turns him (a black man) away.
>
>The legend as told by Alan Alda on M*A*S*H is false. However, if you read
>the official debunkage of the legend, everyone admits Drew was turned away
>by a white hospital and subsequently died.
"Everyone" admits no such thing. Dr. Drew was taken to the nearest
hospital, was treated there, and died despite their best efforts to
save him.
I don't have time to reply to all of the other serious errors in your
ctitique of the new FAQ. This one just really pissed me off.
Gerald
--
The TV business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway
where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There's also a
negative side. -- Hunter Thompson
Alan J Rosenthal
Louise Bremner
> Debunked: Flowers are bad in hospital rooms because they suck oxygen
> out of air.
Has it been debunked? My mother told me that when she was training to be
a nurse in the 30s in Britain, the textbook stated that all plant
material must be removed from the wards at night, because it emits a gas
that is poisonous to humans. She worked out for herself that this was
ridiculous (since the patients and staff themselves emit far more of
that same gas), but still had to go through the ridiculous routine of
moving all flowers and plants into the sluices each night, then
reuniting them with their owners in the morning, because it was The
Rule.
When she was admitted to the Middlesex Hospital in the mid-70s, she said
she was amused to see that the nurses were still moving the plants back
and forth each night, although none of the ones she asked knew why--it
was just The Rule.
________________________________________________________________________
Louise "this was my mother, etc...." Bremner (log at gol dot com)
If you want a reply by e-mail, don't write to my Yahoo address!
David Winsemius
>
> The alt.folklore.urban FAQ
> Version: 0.3 (+/- 2.50) Mon Apr 8 14:37:07 CDT 2002
> First public revision
> FAQ peon: wari...@xnet.com (comments and suggestions welcome)
>
In my eagerness to pick nits I forgot to say thanks, place my hands
together, and bow respectfully towards the FAQ re-editors.
David " " Winsemius.
Lara Hopkins
> Documented: Burroughs Guy is happy to see a new FAQ, and thanks the hard
> working AFU FAQsters.
Thanks.
> AFUBOT wrote:
[snipped to the three items I was involved in researching and writing]
> > Debunked: 19th century women wore corsets so tight their internal
> > organs were deformed.
>
> Really? I thought this was documented.
>
> > In Dispute: Women in close proximity synchronise periods
>
> I think it's documented, I've heard women report it happening, and there
> are good evolutionary reasons for it to be true.
>
> > Impossible: "Innocent" man is repeatedly arrested for drunkenness,
> > but claims not to drink; turns out he has a "mutant yeast" in his
> > stomach which ferments ingested carbohydrates into alcohol.
>
> The story as I read it in the Los Angeles Times was of a young boy who
> often arrived at school drunk with alcohol on his breath. The parents
> were at risk of losing their child, but a doctor established that the
> boy's intestines contained a yeast that produced alcohol. Are you saying
> the LATimes article was a hoax? I don't know where the "impossible" tag
> is coming from. Has someone proven that alcohol can't be produced at the
> temperature of the human intestines?
I would be more than happy to discuss these three items with you once
you've read everything I and others have previously written on them in
this group. I get a bit tired of repeating myself.
Lizz Holmans
Bremner) wrote:
>AFUBOT <st...@urbanlegends.com> wrote:
>
>> Debunked: Flowers are bad in hospital rooms because they suck oxygen
>> out of air.
>
>Has it been debunked? My mother told me that when she was training to be
>a nurse in the 30s in Britain, the textbook stated that all plant
>material must be removed from the wards at night, because it emits a gas
>that is poisonous to humans. She worked out for herself that this was
>ridiculous (since the patients and staff themselves emit far more of
>that same gas), but still had to go through the ridiculous routine of
>moving all flowers and plants into the sluices each night, then
>reuniting them with their owners in the morning, because it was The
>Rule.
>
>When she was admitted to the Middlesex Hospital in the mid-70s, she said
>she was amused to see that the nurses were still moving the plants back
>and forth each night, although none of the ones she asked knew why--it
>was just The Rule.
Well, when I graduated from nursing school in 1980 we weren't told a
damn thing about plants. The only gas emitted from plants (OK, I
didn't do a scientific analysis, but I did take biology) is oxygen.
Lizz 'Why do you cut the ends of your roasts, Grandma?' Holmans
>
>________________________________________________________________________
> Louise "this was my mother, etc...." Bremner (log at gol dot com)
> If you want a reply by e-mail, don't write to my Yahoo address!
--
Boys is easier, and if you have sons it's worth trying for three.
Nanny Ogg
Louise Bremner
> >Has it been debunked? My mother told me that when she was training to be
> >a nurse in the 30s in Britain, the textbook stated that all plant
> >material must be removed from the wards at night, because it emits a gas
> >that is poisonous to humans. She worked out for herself that this was
> >ridiculous (since the patients and staff themselves emit far more of
> >that same gas), but still had to go through the ridiculous routine of
> >moving all flowers and plants into the sluices each night, then
> >reuniting them with their owners in the morning, because it was The
> >Rule.
>
> Well, when I graduated from nursing school in 1980 we weren't told a
> damn thing about plants.
Good--it was a silly waste of nurses' time.
> The only gas emitted from plants (OK, I
> didn't do a scientific analysis, but I did take biology) is oxygen.
...during the day, but this nasty insidious patient-killing gas during
the night....
________________________________________________________________________
Louise "'nasty'" Bremner (log at gol dot com)
Len Berlind
Lizz Holmans <di...@jackalope.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>Well, when I graduated from nursing school in 1980 we weren't told a
>damn thing about plants. The only gas emitted from plants (OK, I
>didn't do a scientific analysis, but I did take biology) is oxygen.
And carbon dioxide. The process of photosynthesis shuts down in
the absence of (guess wot?) light, but cell respiration continues. So
the ratio O/CO2 tends to zero and that may be the basis of the
legend...Or it may be that the little green bastards are truly out to get
us and have used Vegan mind control to block all nursing school references
to their evil ways.
L"Night of The Triffids."B
Chris Clarke
lber...@xcski.com (Len Berlind) wrote:
> In article <i6m4dukq54oq87f4s...@4ax.com>,
> Lizz Holmans <di...@jackalope.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> >Well, when I graduated from nursing school in 1980 we weren't told a
> >damn thing about plants. The only gas emitted from plants (OK, I
> >didn't do a scientific analysis, but I did take biology) is oxygen.
>
> And carbon dioxide.
And ethylene, for cut flowers and fruit.
--
Chris Clarke | Editor, Faultline Magazine
www.faultline.org | California Environmental News and Information
Lizz Holmans
wrote:
>In article <aatrv8$dbr$1...@allhats.xcski.com>,
> lber...@xcski.com (Len Berlind) wrote:
>
>> In article <i6m4dukq54oq87f4s...@4ax.com>,
>> Lizz Holmans <di...@jackalope.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>> >Well, when I graduated from nursing school in 1980 we weren't told a
>> >damn thing about plants. The only gas emitted from plants (OK, I
>> >didn't do a scientific analysis, but I did take biology) is oxygen.
>>
>> And carbon dioxide.
>
>And ethylene, for cut flowers and fruit.
I said I did biology, not botany, for Pete's sake.
Lizz 'And I won't stop Michael from giving me tulips' Holmans
Alan Follett
> Lizz Holmans <di...@jackalope.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > >Has it been debunked? My mother told me that when she was training to be
> > >a nurse in the 30s in Britain, the textbook stated that all plant
> > >material must be removed from the wards at night, because it emits a gas
> > >that is poisonous to humans. She worked out for herself that this was
> > >ridiculous (since the patients and staff themselves emit far more of
> > >that same gas), but still had to go through the ridiculous routine of
> > >moving all flowers and plants into the sluices each night, then
> > >reuniting them with their owners in the morning, because it was The
> > >Rule.
> >
> > Well, when I graduated from nursing school in 1980 we weren't told a
> > damn thing about plants.
>
> Good--it was a silly waste of nurses' time.
>
> > The only gas emitted from plants (OK, I
> > didn't do a scientific analysis, but I did take biology) is oxygen.
>
> ...during the day, but this nasty insidious patient-killing gas during
> the night....
>
the dark are not churning out oxygen to counterbalance it. In theory,
sufficient concentrations could be lethal; but it hardly seems likely
that the ward would be so tightly sealed that a geranium or two would
significantly enrich the CO2 mix. Anyway, the *patients* are
producing carbon dioxide too, and presumably in much larger
quantities.
Alan "However, a potted upas tree is right out" Follett
Charles A Lieberman
<YmFydGljdXM=.42dde14bd256b069...@1020362842.cotse.net>
>Documented: Burroughs Guy is happy to see a new FAQ, and thanks the hard
>working AFU FAQsters.
So how come all your alleged "errors" are for entries listed as false in
some way. We already know you heard it different -- if no one had ever
heard it different there'd be no FAQ, there'd be no group, and at least
ten people would be rather less happy than they are now. I'm even
willing to go out on a limb and guess you can provide a Web site or book
that has it different. Doesn't make it so. What you have been told is
interesting on the group (well, not so much what *you* have been told)
but irrelevant for the FAQ.
But this gets me thinking, is there a great deal of documentation
claiming true ULs are false?
--
Charles A. Lieberman | "As a trainee linguist, such things draw me
Brooklyn, New York, USA | like magnets draw repetitive science
cali...@bigfoot.com | experiments." --Rae Gunter
http://calieber.tripod.com/
Lee Ayrton
On or about Fri, 3 May 2002, Louise Bremner of dame_...@yahoo.com wrote:
> AFUBOT <st...@urbanlegends.com> wrote:
>
> > Debunked: Flowers are bad in hospital rooms because they suck oxygen
> > out of air.
>
> Has it been debunked? My mother told me that when she was training to be
> a nurse in the 30s in Britain, the textbook stated that all plant
> material must be removed from the wards at night, because it emits a gas
> that is poisonous to humans. She worked out for herself that this was
But the flower-gas is only poisonous at night. I quite like that.
> ridiculous (since the patients and staff themselves emit far more of
> that same gas), but still had to go through the ridiculous routine of
> moving all flowers and plants into the sluices each night, then
> reuniting them with their owners in the morning, because it was The
> Rule.
Sluices? I'm unfamilar with that term as a part of hospital archtecture,
(I'm guessing that it means hallway) but it brings to mind a image of
California miners panning for gold in the utility room slop sink.
I checked the home stacks, but couldn't come up with any period cites for
removing flowers at night. For the Court's information, I'll report what
I did find:
"American Red Cross Text-book on Home Hygiene and Care of the Sick" (4th
ed.) Jane A. Delano, R. N.; The Blakiston Company, Philadelphia; 1933.
Chapter VII gives detailed suggestions on the home sick-room and
antisepsis. Floor coverings, woodwork and wall treatment, ventilation and
heating are all addressed, with keeping stimulation of the infirm to a
bare minimum a priority (it even suggests putting the coal in paper bags
to be added to the fire as needed, to keep the noise down). Patterned
wallpaper, for instance, is right out as nervous patients might "become
quite exhausted from attempting to follow an intricate pattern" and warns
that "the patient [might see] grotesque faces and figures in the design".
Given the above, I had thought that perhaps the scent of flowers might be
seen as too stimulating at night. But flowers are encouraged. From page
191:
[quote]---------------
Flowers give great pleasure to the sick by adding color, variety
and interest to their surroundings. Cut flowers often stay fresh and
beautiful for several days when carefully tended and given fresh water
daily."
[unquote]-------------
No mention of removing them at night. Back to the stacks.
"Humphreys' Mentor and Medical Advisor" F. Humphreys, M. D., Humphreys'
Homeopathic Medicine Co., New York. (1926) One of those early 20th C.
home medical manuals, this one geared to selling Humphreys' patent
medicines (by the numbers, no less! "...six pellets of No. EIGHT should
be taken...") From p. 143:
[quote]---------------
[...] Do not suffer the sick to lay all day staring at blank walls, or at
strange, unsympathizing faces; but remember that flowers, bright and
~fresh~, pictures around the room...
[unquote]-------------
But no warning to remove them at night.
So I checked "Practical Nursing -- A Text-book For Nurses" (3rd ed.) Anna
Caroline Maxwell and Amy Elizabeth Pope, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York,
1907, 1914. I could find nothing `bout flowers at all, although it does
make quite a point about the importance of dusting.
So I wonder if the warning to remove flowers from patient rooms at night
because they emit some unhealthful gas is a UK-specific thing.
> When she was admitted to the Middlesex Hospital in the mid-70s, she said
> she was amused to see that the nurses were still moving the plants back
> and forth each night, although none of the ones she asked knew why--it
> was just The Rule.
Heh. "We've always done it this way". Do you suppose that it was just
some martinet head nurse's way of 1) ensuring that the dusting was done
and 2) that someone looked at the flowers and discarded the wilted ones
nightly and 3) ensuring that those lazy night-shifters had work to do?
Lee "bedpan alley" Ayrton
--
"I'd probably also do #2 as well."
JamiJo explains to AFU how a time machine can be employed to eliminate
bathroom odors.
Joseph M. Shair
Guy or anyone he or she knows opine:
> Documented: Burroughs Guy is happy to see a new FAQ, and thanks the hard
> working AFU FAQsters.
>
> AFUBOT wrote:
>
> > Debunked: Coloring the rims of your CD's with a marker will enhance
> > the sound quality. Usually green is the color of choice, and
> > sometimes a special marker is required.
>
> Wrong. In the mid-1980s, in the early days of CDs, there was a magic
> green felt pen available which improved the sound quality of many then
> existing CDs. I am not a relying on Paul Harvey here, but Dennis Prager,
> a Los Angeles talk jock who is above reproach. He said he didn't believe
> it himself, until a friend gave him the pen and he used it on his CDs.
True: Burroughs Guy is fined 10 x two-fifty for fishing
without a license.
Just outta curiosity, why is this "Debunked" rather than
"Impossible"?
Joe "Also thanks the FAQ Peons and Sub-Peons, whom he
offered to help, but whose help was declined for
no given reason, which leads him to suspect that
(for some unknown reason) people may think him to
produce overly wordy text rather than the clear,
concise, succinct writing desired for such a FAQ
document or, perhaps, that he might even have a
very slight tendency to use run-on sentences and
(or, perhaps, 'or') excessive punctuation which
may not meet the approval of the 'editors' (rather
than 'editors') among the AFU posters (or lurkers),
and, thus, would not constitute a favorable first
impression to (or rath*&^*&%^%%#####NO TERMINATION
Nathan Tenny
Charles A Lieberman <cali...@bigfoot.com> wrote:
>But this gets me thinking, is there a great deal of documentation
>claiming true ULs are false?
I think there's a natural bias for documentation to claim things are
true, both because of proving-a-negative issues and because it's not
as much fun to deflate an interesting story as to support it.
It's also *really* easy to propagate false documentation---consider,
for instance, how often Gunther Burpus (the guy who got stuck in the
cat door) is documented with names and dates and many nice plausible
details. People less often believe and pass on fictitous debunkings
that just say "nope, didn't happen".
Offhand, the best I can do for a true UL that gets "mis-debunked" is
the Ozzy Osbourne Decapitated Flying Animal Saga; there are two true
stories, one with a bat and the other with a dove, the bat being the
more famous incident at the time, and there are some written sources
that debunk the bat story on the basis that it was really a dove. I
admit it's not a great example, though.
NT
--
Nathan Tenny | A foolish consistency
Qualcomm, Inc., San Diego, CA | recapitulates phylogeny.
<nten...@qualcomm.com> |
Leo G Simonetta
<sant...@adams.fnordnet> wrote:
> On or about Thu, 2 May 2002 14:07:22 -0400 (EDT), did Burroughs
> Guy or anyone he or she knows opine:
> > Documented: Burroughs Guy is happy to see a new FAQ, and thanks the hard
> > working AFU FAQsters.
> >
> > AFUBOT wrote:
> >
> > > Debunked: Coloring the rims of your CD's with a marker will enhance
> > > the sound quality. Usually green is the color of choice, and
> > > sometimes a special marker is required.
> >
> > Wrong. In the mid-1980s, in the early days of CDs, there was a magic
> > green felt pen available which improved the sound quality of many then
> > existing CDs. I am not a relying on Paul Harvey here, but Dennis Prager,
> > a Los Angeles talk jock who is above reproach. He said he didn't believe
> > it himself, until a friend gave him the pen and he used it on his CDs.
> <hack/>
>
> True: Burroughs Guy is fined 10 x two-fifty for fishing
> without a license.
>
> Just outta curiosity, why is this "Debunked" rather than
> "Impossible"?
Good question. Its one of those things where you have to make
decisions on the margin. In the past I gone back and forth on a
couple of items between Impossible and Debunked. Finally I
decided (sorta) that if was suitable for debunking at length
(Woman frequents tanning salons; develops funny smell; innards
cooked!) I would debunk it cites and all while if it was not
suitable for counter-citation (Chanting "Mary Worth" or some
other phrase three or more time before a mirror summons dead
spirit at slumber parties) I would merely mark it impossible.
I suspect other sub-peons came up with somewhat different
decision rules.
> Joe "Also thanks the FAQ Peons and Sub-Peons, whom he
> offered to help, but whose help was declined for
> no given reason, which leads him to suspect that
> (for some unknown reason) people may think him to
> produce overly wordy text rather than the clear,
> concise, succinct writing desired for such a FAQ
> document or, perhaps, that he might even have a
> very slight tendency to use run-on sentences and
> (or, perhaps, 'or') excessive punctuation which
> may not meet the approval of the 'editors' (rather
> than 'editors') among the AFU posters (or lurkers),
> and, thus, would not constitute a favorable first
> impression to (or rath*&^*&%^%%#####NO TERMINATION
There is still plenty of work to be done. I have quite a few
that I haven't finished off in Stupid People Tricks and some
sections are virtually untouched.
Contact the el jefe de peons at wari...@xnet.com for more info
or just step aboard the black chopper that is out making the
rounds recruiting more cannon fodder.
Leo "Post-Joycean League" Simonetta
--
"I don't think you understand how it's done. Flashes of
lucidity rarely produce children." Jeremy W. Burgeson
explains the facts of life.
Thomas Prufer
<di...@jackalope.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>Well, when I graduated from nursing school in 1980 we weren't told a
>damn thing about plants. The only gas emitted from plants (OK, I
>didn't do a scientific analysis, but I did take biology) is oxygen.
My wife was trained in Germany as a "Pflegehelferin", a nursing
assistant, in 1981. I asked her: She was told to remove flowers during
the night because a) they consumed oxygen during the night and b) the
smell could interfere with sleep. (If I recall correctly, plants do
take up oxygen and release carbon dioxide during the night, though the
amounts for cut flowers must be microscopic compared to a breathing
human).
Also, potted plants were absolutely verboten, because of bacteria,
fungi, spores etc. in the soil -- but that's pretty reasonable.
Thomas Prufer
Michael
> My wife was trained in Germany as a "Pflegehelferin", a nursing
> assistant, in 1981. I asked her: She was told to remove flowers during
> the night because a) they consumed oxygen during the night and b) the
> smell could interfere with sleep. (If I recall correctly, plants do
> take up oxygen and release carbon dioxide during the night, though the
> amounts for cut flowers must be microscopic compared to a breathing
> human).
>
> Also, potted plants were absolutely verboten, because of bacteria,
> fungi, spores etc. in the soil -- but that's pretty reasonable.
>
> Thomas Prufer
Jeeze, here in the states, plants (both cut flowers and potted plants)
are part of a patients decor if they are in the hospital for more than a
day. I believe a patient would be amazed if they saw the staff removing
the plants at night. [never heard of this]
In fact it is a matter of pride for the patient that there are those
that care enough to send flowers.
As far as removing them at night? Where are they taken and how are they
kept track of? Do they just set them in the halls?
--
Michael
I have three e-mail addresses :
mitc...@image-link.com mitc...@att.net mitc...@attbi.com
If one doesn't work, well...
Lee Ayrton
[snip flowers removed from hospital rooms nightly]
>
> As far as removing them at night? Where are they taken and how are they
> kept track of? Do they just set them in the halls?
Ever hear the one about the night shift nurse's aide sent to clean all the
dentures on the ward?
She went from bedside stand to bedside stand, collecting them all in a
large basin...
Lee "randomized" Ayrton
Michael
>
> On or about Fri, 3 May 2002, Michael of mitc...@image-link.com wrote:
>
> [snip flowers removed from hospital rooms nightly]
>
> >
> > As far as removing them at night? Where are they taken and how are they
> > kept track of? Do they just set them in the halls?
>
> Ever hear the one about the night shift nurse's aide sent to clean all the
> dentures on the ward?
>
> She went from bedside stand to bedside stand, collecting them all in a
> large basin...
Leggo a my leg.
> Lee "randomized" Ayrton
>
> --
> "I'd probably also do #2 as well."
> JamiJo explains to AFU how a time machine can be employed to eliminate
> bathroom odors.
Thomas Prufer
wrote:
>As far as removing them at night? Where are they taken and how are they
>kept track of? Do they just set them in the halls?
Used to be they were put in the hall (and brought back in the morning,
of course).
No longer done, though.
Thomas Prufer
Burroughs Guy
> On or about Thu, 2 May 2002 14:07:22 -0400 (EDT), did Burroughs
> Guy or anyone he or she knows opine:
> > Documented: Burroughs Guy is happy to see a new FAQ, and thanks the
hard
> > working AFU FAQsters.
> >
> > AFUBOT wrote:
> >
> > > Debunked: Coloring the rims of your CD's with a marker will
enhance
> > > the sound quality. Usually green is the color of choice, and
> > > sometimes a special marker is required.
> >
> > Wrong. In the mid-1980s, in the early days of CDs, there was a magic
> > green felt pen available which improved the sound quality of many then
> > existing CDs. I am not a relying on Paul Harvey here, but Dennis
Prager,
> > a Los Angeles talk jock who is above reproach. He said he didn't
believe
> > it himself, until a friend gave him the pen and he used it on his CDs.
> <hack/>
>
> True: Burroughs Guy is fined 10 x two-fifty for fishing
> without a license.
I doubt nearly everyone in this world, but Prager is above reproach. If
he says he colored the rims of his CDs with a magic pen and heard the
difference, then he did.
> Just outta curiosity, why is this "Debunked" rather than
> "Impossible"?
How could it be impossible? I'm sure any competent engineer could design
a system with a fault that was corrected with a green pen.
Burroughs Guy
> >> Debunked: Flowers are bad in hospital rooms because they suck
oxygen
> >> out of air.
> Well, when I graduated from nursing school in 1980 we weren't told a
> damn thing about plants. The only gas emitted from plants (OK, I
> didn't do a scientific analysis, but I did take biology) is oxygen.
Plants don't just convert CO2 to O2 via photosynthesis, but also convert
O2 to CO2 as they metabolize the carbohydrates thus produced. If it's
dark enough, a plant is a net O2 to CO2 engine, hence the "wisdom" of
removing plants from hospital rooms at night. In fact, the net O2 loss
even in total darkness is miniscule, hence the correct debunkage above.
John Francis
Burroughs Guy <BurroughsG...@aol.com> wrote:
>>
>> True: Burroughs Guy is fined 10 x two-fifty for fishing
>> without a license.
>
>I doubt nearly everyone in this world, but Prager is above reproach. If
>he says he colored the rims of his CDs with a magic pen and heard the
>difference, then he did.
No he didn't. He might have convinced himself that he did,
but that's another kettle of fish. See 'double blind' testing.
>> Just outta curiosity, why is this "Debunked" rather than
>> "Impossible"?
>
>How could it be impossible? I'm sure any competent engineer could design
>a system with a fault that was corrected with a green pen.
"It could have happened, so it must have happened?" I don't think so.
There's no reason to build such a circuit into a CD player.
Do us all a favour, and go read up on the many debunkings of this
particular myth. Digital audio is (simplistically) error free by
the time it gets to the sound generation phase. The best a green
pen could do would be to give the error-correction logic less
work to do.
Ed Kaulakis
"Burroughs Guy" <BurroughsG...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:YmFydGljdXM=.8f660cbcfa91e075...@1020459369.cotse.net.
..
Leaving the question of whether they *did* do so lying in the gutter,
twisted fingers reaching in pathetic entreaty... What's that? The
question doesn't beg? It *is* begged? I'll be damned! That makes no
sense at all! Anyways, let's see if I can explain this without
techno-gibberish...
It's as if there were a message embedded acrostically in the first
letter of each of the answers in a crossword puzzle - and someone told
you that rubbing butter on the newspaper would improve the grammar of
the message. Nope, it just makes the clues harder to read.
--
Ed "analogous" Kaulakis
"Sorry, no signed documents available.
Believe me or go fuck yourself."
- Nina Neudorfer, in email
Len Berlind
>dentures on the ward?
>She went from bedside stand to bedside stand, collecting them all in a
>large basin...
No, but I heard the one about the li'l old lady in the retirement
home who stole all the other residents' dentures and hoarded them in her
bedside cabinet. Which is why, according to my Dentist, Washington State
law requires that all removable bridgework and dentures be marked with the
denturee's last name.
L"This is my Dentist we're talking about!"B
Louise Bremner
> > ...moving all flowers and plants into the sluices each night, then
> > reuniting them with their owners in the morning, because it was The
> > Rule.
>
> Sluices? I'm unfamilar with that term as a part of hospital archtecture,
> (I'm guessing that it means hallway)...
Nope--it might be a purely local term, of course. I remember a sluice as
a small room full of sinks and drains, separate from the
food-preparation areas and even the toilets. (Far smaller than a ward,
so I'm now wondering why all this poisonous gas didn't accumulate in the
sluice overnight and kill the first nurse to come in of a morning....)
> Floor coverings, woodwork and wall treatment, ventilation and
> heating are all addressed, with keeping stimulation of the infirm to a
> bare minimum a priority (it even suggests putting the coal in paper bags
> to be added to the fire as needed, to keep the noise down). Patterned
> wallpaper, for instance, is right out as nervous patients might "become
> quite exhausted from attempting to follow an intricate pattern" and warns
> that "the patient [might see] grotesque faces and figures in the design".
And a little voice at the back of my skull, fed by childhood memories of
a water stain that seemed to creep closer in the night, wonders why the
inevitable cracks and other blemishes in the naked plasterwork wouldn't
have the same effect?
> So I wonder if the warning to remove flowers from patient rooms at night
> because they emit some unhealthful gas is a UK-specific thing.
Could be. I'd suspect Florence Nightingale as the originator, myself.
There's a lot of daftness credited to her (such as long trains to
nurses' skirts, to ensure there's no glimpse of ankle to over-excite a
patient when a nurse bends over).
> >...it was just The Rule.
>
> Heh. "We've always done it this way". Do you suppose that it was just
> some martinet head nurse's way of 1) ensuring that the dusting was done
> and 2) that someone looked at the flowers and discarded the wilted ones
> nightly and 3) ensuring that those lazy night-shifters had work to do?
Yup. As if the nurses didn't have plenty else to do, understaffed as
National Health hospitals were.
________________________________________________________________________
Louise "...and maybe still are?" Bremner (log at gol dot com)
Louise Bremner
> Plants don't just convert CO2 to O2 via photosynthesis, but also convert
> O2 to CO2 as they metabolize the carbohydrates thus produced. If it's
> dark enough, a plant is a net O2 to CO2 engine, hence the "wisdom" of
> removing plants from hospital rooms at night. In fact, the net O2 loss
> even in total darkness is miniscule, hence the correct debunkage above.
Thanks. That answers the question. But, thinking of the total amount of
time wasted on this stupidity over the years, where were you when my
mother was learning to be a nurse?
________________________________________________________________________
Louise "metaphorically speaking, of course" Bremner (log at gol dot com)
Louise Bremner
> Also, potted plants were absolutely verboten, because of bacteria,
> fungi, spores etc. in the soil -- but that's pretty reasonable.
Interesting. In Japan, they are discouraged as a gift to a patient for a
completely different reason--they imply that the giver of the plant
wishes that the illness of the givee will take root.
________________________________________________________________________
Louise "" Bremner (log at gol dot com)
Lee Rudolph
>Thomas Prufer <pru...@i-dial.de> wrote:
>
>> Also, potted plants were absolutely verboten, because of bacteria,
>> fungi, spores etc. in the soil -- but that's pretty reasonable.
>
>Interesting. In Japan, they are discouraged as a gift to a patient for a
>completely different reason--they imply that the giver of the plant
>wishes that the illness of the givee will take root.
So, by contrast, a nice epiphyte would be a perfect sickbed gift?
Lee "keep hanging in there!" Rudolph
Michael Schmidt
> Burroughs Guy <BurroughsG...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>> Plants don't just convert CO2 to O2 via photosynthesis, but also convert
>> O2 to CO2 as they metabolize the carbohydrates thus produced. If it's
>> dark enough, a plant is a net O2 to CO2 engine, hence the "wisdom" of
>> removing plants from hospital rooms at night. In fact, the net O2 loss
>> even in total darkness is miniscule, hence the correct debunkage above.
>
> Thanks. That answers the question.
Not really. The question was answered about ten posts previously, but as
seems to be usual around these parts, no one seemed to notice. Most
"plants" delivered to gladden the hearts of hospital residents are "cut,"
aka "dead." If there is an issue (with which I do not concur) it's assorted
decomposition products.
Cheers
Louise Bremner
> >> Plants don't just convert CO2 to O2 via photosynthesis, but also convert
> >> O2 to CO2 as they metabolize the carbohydrates thus produced. If it's
> >> dark enough, a plant is a net O2 to CO2 engine, hence the "wisdom" of
> >> removing plants from hospital rooms at night. In fact, the net O2 loss
> >> even in total darkness is miniscule, hence the correct debunkage above.
> >
> > Thanks. That answers the question.
>
> Not really. The question was answered about ten posts previously, but as
> seems to be usual around these parts, no one seemed to notice.
Not really. The question was answered in parts in various different
posts previously, but the above post was the first to put all the parts
together in a coherent whole.
________________________________________________________________________
Louise "or my news-feed has gaps" Bremner (log at gol dot com)
Chris Clarke
"Ed Kaulakis" <kaulaki...@pacbell.net> wrote:
> "Sorry, no signed documents available.
> Believe me or go fuck yourself."
> - Nina Neudorfer, in email
She's not a lurker, and that's hardly support. Otherwise, no problem.
Michael Schmidt
news:aauv81$57h$1...@panix2.panix.com:
I have observed, unfortunately, that high end audio lacks objectivity as
badly as any human endeavor. Proof:
Read http://www.sundial.net/~rogerr/wire.htm
Then go to any high end audio group and read the impassioned stuff that you
will almost certainly find that takes as a given how great <megabuck>
speaker wire "sounds." A green marker on the edge of CDssounds like a
pretty cheap^W economical high to me.
Cheers.
Songbyrd11
>> Debunked: Aluminum ring pull tabs are collected & exchanged for
>> dialysis machine time. ["Redemption Rumors" in TMP]
>
>Hansen's soda turned this legend on its head two years ago. The valuable
>tabs were colored red. I think the charity was breast cancer research.
Not sure how this would turn the above on its ear. McDonalds has collected the
tabs of soda for years for Ronald McDonalds Houses. Even that does not change
the debucking above. "dialysis machine time" is the key, not breast cancer
research.
Song "This is just a sot in the dark" byrd
keith lim
> I doubt nearly everyone in this world, but Prager is above reproach. If
> he says he colored the rims of his CDs with a magic pen and heard the
> difference, then he did.
If you're going to take that line of argument, at least use the
established wording: "Hey, this is *Prager* we're talking about". That
is the proper way to leave no doubt in anyone's mind about the
unquestionable voracity of your source.
keith "ya gotta have a sense of tradition" lim
--
keith lim keit...@pobox.com http://pobox.com/~keithlim/
AFU will never waver in its solemn duty to wipe away
intellectual crap with the toilet paper of reason. --Ed Dimmick
Mitch Barrie
Bremner) wrote:
# Interesting. In Japan, they are discouraged as a gift to a patient for a
# completely different reason--they imply that the giver of the plant
# wishes that the illness of the givee will take root.
Those wacky Japanese!
Mitch
Kai Henningsen
> Good question. Its one of those things where you have to make
> decisions on the margin. In the past I gone back and forth on a
> couple of items between Impossible and Debunked. Finally I
> decided (sorta) that if was suitable for debunking at length
> (Woman frequents tanning salons; develops funny smell; innards
> cooked!) I would debunk it cites and all while if it was not
> suitable for counter-citation (Chanting "Mary Worth" or some
> other phrase three or more time before a mirror summons dead
> spirit at slumber parties) I would merely mark it impossible.
Strange: "Impossible" sure sounds rather stronger to me than "Debunked".
"Most sold brand of cars is X" can be debunked (by pointing to documented
numbers showing brand Y sold more), but it is certainly not *impossible* -
whereas "compression program will reversibly compress *every* file by at
least a factor of 16" is clearly impossible.
Kai
--
http://www.westfalen.de/private/khms/
"... by God I *KNOW* what this network is for, and you can't have it."
- Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu)
Harry MF Teasley
> Strange: "Impossible" sure sounds rather stronger to me than "Debunked".
> "Most sold brand of cars is X" can be debunked (by pointing to documented
> numbers showing brand Y sold more), but it is certainly not *impossible* -
> whereas "compression program will reversibly compress *every* file by at
> least a factor of 16" is clearly impossible.
Debunked is "false through evidence" and Impossible is "false because it
violates the laws of nature". I rewrote the CD marker entry, and I think I
just labelled it Debunked without thinking. It clearly is Impossible: as
I said in the expanded entry, analogue changes to the disc cannot
"improve" the quality of the digital information. 1s and 0s remain 1s
and 0s until the point of D/A conversion.
I'll relabel it: thanks for picking it up.
Harry "anyone who wants to help with the FAQ, email me" Teasley
David Winsemius
>
> On Fri, 3 May 2002 09:44:11 +0900, dame_...@yahoo.com (Louise
> Bremner) wrote:
>
> >AFUBOT <st...@urbanlegends.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Debunked: Flowers are bad in hospital rooms because they suck oxygen
> >> out of air.
> >
>
> Well, when I graduated from nursing school in 1980 we weren't told a
> damn thing about plants. The only gas emitted from plants (OK, I
> didn't do a scientific analysis, but I did take biology) is oxygen.
>
Nobody has brought up the President R<bleep> R<bleep> comment about trees
emitting 80% of the pollutants? It's a favorite of Ed's(1). Search on
"isoprene killer trees."
Funny, .. that particular speech (2)(to Canadian journalists I read in other
versions) doesn't seem to get much ASCII-play in the web-accessible RR
speech transcripts.
David "VOCing trees" Winsemius.
(1) email.
BOP? This is a UL dammit. Gots desire to believe, mutations, repetition.
Lara Hopkins
> I would be more than happy to discuss these three items with you once
> you've read everything I and others have previously written on them in
> this group.
[4 days later]
You got anything for me, Burroughs Guy?
Lara "these tenterhooks are hurting" Hopkins
--
Toy poodles are to intelligence as
toaster heating elements are to amperage.
- Chris Clarke explains electrophysics to the afu polloi.
>>> Check out the AFU FAQ and archive at www.urbanlegends.com <<<
David Winsemius
>
> On Fri, 3 May 2002 09:44:11 +0900, dame_...@yahoo.com (Louise
> Bremner) wrote:
>
> >AFUBOT <st...@urbanlegends.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Debunked: Flowers are bad in hospital rooms because they suck oxygen
> >> out of air.
> >
> >a nurse in the 30s in Britain, the textbook stated that all plant
> >material must be removed from the wards at night, because it emits a gas
> >that is poisonous to humans. She worked out for herself that this was
> >ridiculous (since the patients and staff themselves emit far more of
> >that same gas), but still had to go through the ridiculous routine of
> >moving all flowers and plants into the sluices each night, then
> >reuniting them with their owners in the morning, because it was The
> >Rule.
> >
> >she was amused to see that the nurses were still moving the plants back
> >and forth each night, although none of the ones she asked knew why--it
> >was just The Rule.
>
> Well, when I graduated from nursing school in 1980 we weren't told a
> damn thing about plants. The only gas emitted from plants (OK, I
> didn't do a scientific analysis, but I did take biology) is oxygen.
>
Hey, Howcum nobody has brought up the President R<bleep> R<bleep> comment
about trees emitting 80% of the pollutants? It's a favorite of Ed's(1).
Search on "isoprene killer trees."
Funny, .. that particular speech (2)(to Canadian journalists I read in other
versions) doesn't seem to get much ASCII-play in the web-accessible speech
David Winsemius
>
> On Fri, 3 May 2002 09:44:11 +0900, dame_...@yahoo.com (Louise
> Bremner) wrote:
>
> >AFUBOT <st...@urbanlegends.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Debunked: Flowers are bad in hospital rooms because they suck oxygen
> >> out of air.
> >
>
> Well, when I graduated from nursing school in 1980 we weren't told a
> damn thing about plants. The only gas emitted from plants (OK, I
> didn't do a scientific analysis, but I did take biology) is oxygen.
>
Nobody has brought up the President R<bleep> R<bleep> comment about trees
emitting 80% of the pollutants? It's a favorite of Ed's(1). Search on
"isoprene killer trees."
Funny, .. that particular speech (2)(to Canadian journalists I read in other
versions) doesn't seem to get much ASCII-play in the web-accessible RR
David Winsemius
>
> On Fri, 3 May 2002 09:44:11 +0900, dame_...@yahoo.com (Louise
> Bremner) wrote:
>
> >AFUBOT <st...@urbanlegends.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Debunked: Flowers are bad in hospital rooms because they suck oxygen
> >> out of air.
> >
> >a nurse in the 30s in Britain, the textbook stated that all plant
> >material must be removed from the wards at night, because it emits a gas
> >that is poisonous to humans. She worked out for herself that this was
> >ridiculous (since the patients and staff themselves emit far more of
> >that same gas), but still had to go through the ridiculous routine of
> >moving all flowers and plants into the sluices each night, then
> >reuniting them with their owners in the morning, because it was The
> >Rule.
> >
> >When she was admitted to the Middlesex Hospital in the mid-70s, she said
> >she was amused to see that the nurses were still moving the plants back
> >and forth each night, although none of the ones she asked knew why--it
> >was just The Rule.
>
> damn thing about plants. The only gas emitted from plants (OK, I
> didn't do a scientific analysis, but I did take biology) is oxygen.
>
Hey, Howcum nobody has brought up the President R<bleep> R<bleep> comment
about trees emitting 80% of the pollutants? It's a favorite of Ed's(1).
Search on "isoprene killer trees."
Funny, .. that particular speech (2)(to Canadian journalists I read in other
versions) doesn't seem to get much ASCII-play in the web-accessible speech
David Winsemius
>
> On Fri, 3 May 2002 09:44:11 +0900, dame_...@yahoo.com (Louise
> Bremner) wrote:
>
> >AFUBOT <st...@urbanlegends.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Debunked: Flowers are bad in hospital rooms because they suck oxygen
> >> out of air.
> >
>
> Well, when I graduated from nursing school in 1980 we weren't told a
> damn thing about plants. The only gas emitted from plants (OK, I
> didn't do a scientific analysis, but I did take biology) is oxygen.
>
Nobody has brought up the President R<bleep> R<bleep> comment about trees
emitting 80% of the pollutants? It's a favorite of Ed's(1). Search on
"isoprene killer trees."
Funny, .. that particular speech (2)(to Canadian journalists I read in other
versions) doesn't seem to get much ASCII-play in the web-accessible RR
David Winsemius
David Winsemius
>
> On Fri, 3 May 2002 09:44:11 +0900, dame_...@yahoo.com (Louise
> Bremner) wrote:
>
> >AFUBOT <st...@urbanlegends.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Debunked: Flowers are bad in hospital rooms because they suck oxygen
> >> out of air.
> >
> >a nurse in the 30s in Britain, the textbook stated that all plant
> >material must be removed from the wards at night, because it emits a gas
> >that is poisonous to humans. She worked out for herself that this was
> >ridiculous (since the patients and staff themselves emit far more of
> >that same gas), but still had to go through the ridiculous routine of
> >moving all flowers and plants into the sluices each night, then
> >reuniting them with their owners in the morning, because it was The
> >Rule.
> >
> >When she was admitted to the Middlesex Hospital in the mid-70s, she said
> >she was amused to see that the nurses were still moving the plants back
> >and forth each night, although none of the ones she asked knew why--it
> >was just The Rule.
>
> damn thing about plants. The only gas emitted from plants (OK, I
> didn't do a scientific analysis, but I did take biology) is oxygen.
>
Hey, Howcum nobody has brought up the President R<bleep> R<bleep> comment
about trees emitting 80% of the pollutants? It's a favorite of Ed's(1).
Search on "isoprene killer trees."
Funny, .. that particular speech (2)(to Canadian journalists I read in other
versions) doesn't seem to get much ASCII-play in the web-accessible speech
David Winsemius
>
> On Fri, 3 May 2002 09:44:11 +0900, dame_...@yahoo.com (Louise
> Bremner) wrote:
>
> >AFUBOT <st...@urbanlegends.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Debunked: Flowers are bad in hospital rooms because they suck oxygen
> >> out of air.
> >
>
> Well, when I graduated from nursing school in 1980 we weren't told a
> damn thing about plants. The only gas emitted from plants (OK, I
> didn't do a scientific analysis, but I did take biology) is oxygen.
>
Nobody has brought up the President R<bleep> R<bleep> comment about trees
emitting 80% of the pollutants? It's a favorite of Ed's(1). Search on
"isoprene killer trees."
Funny, .. that particular speech (2)(to Canadian journalists I read in other
versions) doesn't seem to get much ASCII-play in the web-accessible RR
David Winsemius
>
> On Fri, 3 May 2002 09:44:11 +0900, dame_...@yahoo.com (Louise
> Bremner) wrote:
>
> >AFUBOT <st...@urbanlegends.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Debunked: Flowers are bad in hospital rooms because they suck oxygen
> >> out of air.
> >
stuff
>
> Well, when I graduated from nursing school in 1980 we weren't told a
> damn thing about plants. The only gas emitted from plants (OK, I
> didn't do a scientific analysis, but I did take biology) is oxygen.
>
Hey, Howcum nobody has brought up the President R<bleep> R<bleep> comment
about trees emitting 80% of the pollutants? It's a favorite of Ed's(1).
Search on "isoprene killer trees."
Funny, .. that particular speech (2)(to Canadian journalists I read in other
versions) doesn't seem to get much ASCII-play in the web-accessible speech
David Winsemius
>
> On Fri, 3 May 2002 09:44:11 +0900, dame_...@yahoo.com (Louise
> Bremner) wrote:
>
> >AFUBOT <st...@urbanlegends.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Debunked: Flowers are bad in hospital rooms because they suck oxygen
> >> out of air.
> >
> >a nurse in the 30s in Britain, the textbook stated that all plant
> >material must be removed from the wards at night, because it emits a gas
> >that is poisonous to humans. She worked out for herself that this was
> >ridiculous (since the patients and staff themselves emit far more of
> >that same gas), but still had to go through the ridiculous routine of
> >moving all flowers and plants into the sluices each night, then
> >reuniting them with their owners in the morning, because it was The
> >Rule.
> >
> >When she was admitted to the Middlesex Hospital in the mid-70s, she said
> >she was amused to see that the nurses were still moving the plants back
> >and forth each night, although none of the ones she asked knew why--it
> >was just The Rule.
>
David Winsemius
>
> On Fri, 3 May 2002 09:44:11 +0900, dame_...@yahoo.com (Louise
> Bremner) wrote:
>
> >AFUBOT <st...@urbanlegends.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Debunked: Flowers are bad in hospital rooms because they suck oxygen
> >> out of air.
> >
>
> Well, when I graduated from nursing school in 1980 we weren't told a
> damn thing about plants. The only gas emitted from plants (OK, I
> didn't do a scientific analysis, but I did take biology) is oxygen.
>
Nobody has brought up the President R<bleep> R<bleep> comment about trees
emitting 80% of the pollutants? It's a favorite of Ed's(1). Search on
"isoprene killer trees."
Funny, .. that particular speech (2)(to Canadian journalists I read in other
versions) doesn't seem to get much ASCII-play in the web-accessible RR
David Winsemius
David Winsemius
Deborah Stevenson,,,
[and writes and writes and writes]
Between you and Michael Schmidt, it looks like AT&T has serious reflux
disease today. Might be worth checking with them on what gives.
Deborah Stevenson
(stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
Ed Kaulakis
"David Winsemius" <dwins...@attbi.com> wrote in message
news:3A6296D3...@attbi.com...
> Lizz Holmans wrote:
> >
>
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=ronald+reagan++trees+group:alt.folklor
e.urban&hl=en&selm=HI9s5.192%24v3.2757%40uchinews&rnum=2
>
> BOP? This is a UL dammit. Gots desire to believe, mutations,
repetition.
>
>
(3)http://groups.google.com/groups?q=ronald+reagan++trees+group:alt.folk
lore.urban&hl=en&selm=HI9s5.192%24v3.2757%40uchinews&rnum=2
This ain't the way the masters do it. I can't rate this much better than
junior assistant coat-trailer IIIrd. In the old days, they knew how to
*bait*. Arrr. Kids today.
The way I had it 'splained to me, it's the incitement. You don't want
to attract them guys in special[1] hats[2], on account of they might
puncture a beer keg or something else important when they have their
showdown in the main street. Which eventually leads to a drunk Tommy,
and *nobody* wants that.
Thus, there are ULs that are BoPworthy. Yeah, it's a shame. This one is
not inside the picket fence designed to make sure that ({T*,R*}{K*,R*}
is a *!!! 1!) stays forever outside. Mmmpht[3].
[1] To the protagonists each own-hat appears just slightly off-white,
and each other-hat dead black. It might be the lighting coming from one
side or the other, polarization, or just weird. Nobody much cares.
Lo-cals call this odd color plague-on-both-your-houses gray.
[2] Definitely not Hats.
[3] Mmmpht.
Ed "and now for the big transpondian grudge match! Wayne Kerr vs Dzer
Kauff!" Kaulakis
Drew Lawson
David Winsemius <dwins...@attbi.com> writes:
>Nobody has brought up the President R<bleep> R<bleep> comment about trees
>emitting 80% of the pollutants? It's a favorite of Ed's(1). Search on
>"isoprene killer trees."
And so you're making up for it in volume?
I'll reply because I got royally (and deservedly) flamed for making
fun of that a while back. Apparently the claim was that trees are
responsible for $BigNum percent of *hydrocarbon* emmissions. In
some places, that is true.[1]
Drew "doubt the rightist conspiritors will notice this" Lawson
[1] Or so I'm told.
--
Drew Lawson | Though it's just a memory,
dr...@furrfu.com | some memories last forever
Burroughs Guy
> Do us all a favour, and go read up on the many debunkings of this
> particular myth. Digital audio is (simplistically) error free by
> the time it gets to the sound generation phase. The best a green
> pen could do would be to give the error-correction logic less
> work to do.
Thanx for admitting that you're being simplistic. In the complex world,
what happens when the CD is too dirty to be error corrected? In my
experience, if you get enough greasy fingerprints on a CD you get inferior
sound reproduction (ie, noise). Are you claiming that CD error correction
is always able to produce error-free sound, no matter how dirty the CD?
Or does your machine just stop and give you a blue screen?
John Francis
You're clutching at straws, here (and not enough of them to build
a decent strawman). Obviously it's possible for a CD to be dirty
enough to exceed the correctable error limit. But that's not the
normal case.
And, lest you had forgotten, you were talking about a digital
audio system being used by an audio god. Somehow I don't see
dirty CDs being an issue here - I expect he'd know enough about
care of his CDs to know how to clean a dirty CD before playing it.
Like I said - read the debunkings.
Mind you, you're ahead of the game here. At least you understand
the concept of error correcting circuitry. Several of the green
pen supporters seem to argue that a digital stream that was read
correctly the first time produces better analog(ue) sound than
that generated from an error-corrected digital stream.
--
John "or you could just admit you're wrong" Francis
Ed Kaulakis
"Burroughs Guy" <BurroughsG...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:YmFydGljdXM=.d044b0f63e547ccd...@1020705522.cotse.net.
..
Lord have mercy, he's got the bit between his teeth! We have a runner
here, laideez and gentlemen!
The probability of a green marker giving the error correction mechanisms
less rather than more work to do is negligible. But it's not *logically*
impossible, even if neither I nor anybody else can dream up a plausible
mechanism.
When the CD is too dirty for error correction, there can be periods when
no digital information is available for conversion to analog. These are
called dropouts. Short dropouts are covered by repeating the previous
audio frame. Long ones produce silence.
*NO* amount of degradation in the digital playback path can produce
subtle frequency-domain analog effects in the audio output audible only
to a "golden ear".
Ed "except for 4'33" of course" Kaulakis
deacon b.
<stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu> posted a message that said, at least in
part:
>Between you and Michael Schmidt, it looks like AT&T has serious reflux
>disease today. Might be worth checking with them on what gives.
You know how nature compensates? That is, more than 90% of the time
when one leg is shorter, the other leg will be longer?
Maybe ATTBI is doing extra posts in order to compensate for Comcast
Internet having a systemwide failure Sunday night for something like
six hours.
deke
------------------
If the "black box" flight recorder is never
damaged during a plane crash, why isn't the
whole damn airplane made out of that stuff?
Remove spam block to reply....
Drew Lawson
deacon b. <deke...@BLOCK.generous.net> writes:
>On Mon, 06 May 2002 14:18:50 GMT, Deborah Stevenson,,,
><stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu> posted a message that said, at least in
>part:
>
>>Between you and Michael Schmidt, it looks like AT&T has serious reflux
>>disease today. Might be worth checking with them on what gives.
>
>You know how nature compensates? That is, more than 90% of the time
>when one leg is shorter, the other leg will be longer?
>
>Maybe ATTBI is doing extra posts in order to compensate for Comcast
>Internet having a systemwide failure Sunday night for something like
>six hours.
I think someone at attbi is just trying to fuck with the "number
of words posted" statistics.
Drew "quantity, not quality" Lawson
Simon Slavin
Harry MF Teasley <he...@panix.com> wrote:
> Debunked is "false through evidence" and Impossible is "false because it
> violates the laws of nature". I rewrote the CD marker entry, and I think I
> just labelled it Debunked without thinking. It clearly is Impossible: as
> I said in the expanded entry, analogue changes to the disc cannot
> "improve" the quality of the digital information. 1s and 0s remain 1s
> and 0s until the point of D/A conversion.
I know either too much or too little about this topic to be happy
with that. Let me explain what I know and ask what I don't.
The sound on a CD is broken-up into 'frames' which last one 75th
of a second. Each frame has some form of parity-check or check-
sum. So if there's a drop-out on a CD it's not for the duration
of one 'bit' of music (which would last an unhearable 44.1
millionth of a second) but for a period of 75 times that, about
half a millionth of a second. This is still an unhearable
period of time. Every CD has a number of unreadable frames due
to tiny parts of the shiny layer which didn't form neat pits.
But damage to a disk surface doesn't tend to sit neatly over
the very small area of one frame, it's spread over more of the
surface. So you can build up a long run of damaged frames
(especially if you clean your CDs by turning them rather than
from centre to edge).
So the normal pattern of post-manufacture damage leaves a
continuous series of frames which are known to be bad. If you
just leave the level at (to take a guess) .5 here you'll get a
click where the damage starts and another where it ends. To
avoid this there's a layer of decoding which trying to
interpolate the missing data. It uses some number of frames
before the gap and some after the gap and assumes they form
part of a curve. If I recall correctly the first generation
of players fit the known data to a cubic curve. This would
leave a 'mushy' part in music -- much better than the clicks
you'd get without the curve-fitting. Any professional music-
listener could notice a significant run of curve-corrected
frames.
Now, what effect could a green marker have on the laser beam's
path through the transparent layers of the CD and bounce off
of the shiny layer ? These are physics questions and I don't
know. Perhaps the layer of green much would cut down on the
amount of beam reflected by the interface between the air and
the transparent layer. This would certainly reduce the error
rate.
What's the average corruption rate of an average CD played on
an average deck ? How many of them could be avoided by
reducing undesired beam-reflections ? Without access to test
equipment I couldn't tell you.
Simon.
--
http://www.hearsay.demon.co.uk | [One] thing that worries me about Bush and
No junk email please. | Blair's "war on terrorism" is: how will they
| know when they've won it ? -- Terry Jones
THE FRENCH WAS THERE
Harry MF Teasley
> Now, what effect could a green marker have on the laser beam's
> path through the transparent layers of the CD and bounce off
> of the shiny layer ? These are physics questions and I don't
> know. Perhaps the layer of green much would cut down on the
> amount of beam reflected by the interface between the air and
> the transparent layer. This would certainly reduce the error
> rate.
This was the old justification for the UL. It's a compelling idea if one
throws out how CD players and lasers actually work, and one throws in a
generous dose of acceptance at the idea that a person could do something
precise enough with a marker that *enhances* the accuracy of a laser beam
that deals in sizes several orders of magnitude below our ready
perception.
Harry "but I'm sold!!1! Where can I get one of these markers!!1!" Teasley
Michael Schmidt
>>
>>Maybe ATTBI is doing extra posts in order to compensate for Comcast
>>Internet having a systemwide failure Sunday night for something like
>>six hours.
Nope
>
> I think someone at attbi is just trying to fuck with the "number
> of words posted" statistics.
Nope again, though I wish I could claim a fraction of that much cleverness.
>
>
> Drew "quantity, not quality" Lawson
Had a fight with Xnews. I lost. My apologies to the group.
Cheers.
Daniel W. Johnson
> Now, what effect could a green marker have on the laser beam's
> path through the transparent layers of the CD and bounce off
> of the shiny layer ? These are physics questions and I don't
> know. Perhaps the layer of green much would cut down on the
> amount of beam reflected by the interface between the air and
> the transparent layer.
Maybe. IF the green were in the beam path rather than out at the rim of
the CD. And even then, it would attenuate the desired reflection from
the metal layer more than the undesired reflection from the plastic
layer.
Ed Kaulakis
"Simon Slavin" <sla...@hearsay.demon.co.uk@localhost> wrote in message
news:B8FCCA91...@0.0.0.0...
> In article <ab2dbf$jp2$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
> Harry MF Teasley <he...@panix.com> wrote:
>
> > Debunked is "false through evidence" and Impossible is "false
because it
> > violates the laws of nature". I rewrote the CD marker entry, and I
think I
> > just labelled it Debunked without thinking. It clearly is
Impossible: as
> > I said in the expanded entry, analogue changes to the disc cannot
> > "improve" the quality of the digital information. 1s and 0s remain
1s
> > and 0s until the point of D/A conversion.
>
> I know either too much or too little about this topic to be happy
> with that. Let me explain what I know and ask what I don't.
http://www.ee.washington.edu/conselec/CE/kuhn/cdmulti/chap1/encode.htm
gives an overview of the encoding process.
Some highlights:
The encoding of digital audio on CD player is governed by IEC 908. This
standard is available in the library for your perusal. (Notice that
every other page is missing -- this is because the standard is written
in both French and English and I took out the French pages!) This
information is also covered more generally in Chapter 3 of Ken Pohlman's
book The Compact Disk Handbook, (A-R Editions, 1992).
CD players use parity and interleaving techniques to minimize the
effects of an error on the disk. In theory, the combination of parity
and interleaving in a CD player can detect and correct a burst error of
up to 4000 bad bits -- or a physical defect 2.47 mm long. Interpolation
can conceal errors up to 13,700 or physical defects up to 8.5 mm long.
> The sound on a CD is broken-up into 'frames' which last one 75th
> of a second. Each frame has some form of parity-check or check-
> sum. So if there's a drop-out on a CD it's not for the duration
> of one 'bit' of music (which would last an unhearable 44.1
> millionth of a second) but for a period of 75 times that, about
> half a millionth of a second. This is still an unhearable
> period of time. Every CD has a number of unreadable frames due
> to tiny parts of the shiny layer which didn't form neat pits.
> But damage to a disk surface doesn't tend to sit neatly over
> the very small area of one frame, it's spread over more of the
> surface. So you can build up a long run of damaged frames
> (especially if you clean your CDs by turning them rather than
> from centre to edge).
>
> So the normal pattern of post-manufacture damage leaves a
> continuous series of frames which are known to be bad.
Here's the digital nub of it, and where digital systems defy intuitions
honed on their analog counterparts.
With error-correcting codes data can take a lot of damage before they're
not *perfectly* recoverable.
There is nothing else in the Universe of which this can be said. This is
the technology that allowed Voyager pictures of Jupiter to be sent to
earth with minimal power. It is sufficiently close to magic.
> If you
> just leave the level at (to take a guess) .5 here you'll get a
> click where the damage starts and another where it ends. To
> avoid this there's a layer of decoding which trying to
> interpolate the missing data. It uses some number of frames
> before the gap and some after the gap and assumes they form
> part of a curve. If I recall correctly the first generation
> of players fit the known data to a cubic curve. This would
> leave a 'mushy' part in music -- much better than the clicks
> you'd get without the curve-fitting. Any professional music-
> listener could notice a significant run of curve-corrected
> frames.
>
> Now, what effect could a green marker have on the laser beam's
> path through the transparent layers of the CD and bounce off
> of the shiny layer ? These are physics questions and I don't
> know. Perhaps the layer of green much would cut down on the
> amount of beam reflected by the interface between the air and
> the transparent layer. This would certainly reduce the error
> rate.
I think you're (a) reaching for an explanation for an effect that isn't
demonstrated, and (b) addressing a *different* scenario than the one
claimed. Will your explanation stretch to fit the marker-on-the-edges
claims? Dunno. But why bother?
The claim, as I understand it, and as both the cites below understand
it, is that marker applied to the *edges* (not the surface) of the CD
reduces internal backscatter. While this backscatter (or its
edge-marker-induced absence) *might* be detectable in the raw photon
count, I'd like to see evidence, if it exists[1]. Then I'd like to see
evidence of its effect all the way to the reconstituted digital audio.
Is there a cite that anyone has *ever* demonstrated a reduction of the
post-decode digital error rate with a green marker, in any modality?
This is in my opinion an extraordinary claim, yada yada.
The physics argument: The detector photodiode is looking straight at the
CD, optimally placed to see direct reflections of the illuminating
laser. A photon would have to travel a very special (i.e. very unlikely)
path to make it from the laser, to the surface, take a right-angle turn
for no particular reason, make it to an edge, be reflected perfectly
back along its path to the focus spot, and again make a right angle turn
for no particular reason back to the detector[2].
The systems engineering argument is that CDs became feasible when
cheap-enough, adequately bright, well-collimated light sources became
available. The system as a whole is designed so that straightforwardly
reflected photons, from pit or unpitted surface, handily swamp *all*
extraneous photons at the detector. If the claimed backscatter effect
exists, headroom to defeat it is already factored into the size and
depth of the pits.
Claims, pro:
http://www.tweakaudio.com/Cd%20tweaks.html
and con:
http://twcny.rr.com/technofile/texts/greenink86.html
[1] How can this controversy have persisted so long without *somebody*
publishing a definitive finding? I can't find it though.
[2] Other more complex trajectories are logically possible - but
remember the photon has a chance of absorption or escape every time it
changes direction, making them less and less likely to be significant in
the outcome.
Ed "not an EEE, but I impersonate one near computers" Kaulakis
Lon Stowell
Simon Slavin <sla...@hearsay.demon.co.uk@localhost> wrote:
>In article <ab2dbf$jp2$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
>Harry MF Teasley <he...@panix.com> wrote:
>
>> Debunked is "false through evidence" and Impossible is "false because it
>> violates the laws of nature". I rewrote the CD marker entry, and I think I
>> just labelled it Debunked without thinking. It clearly is Impossible: as
>> I said in the expanded entry, analogue changes to the disc cannot
>> "improve" the quality of the digital information. 1s and 0s remain 1s
>> and 0s until the point of D/A conversion.
Short answer, if anyone knows how to reach Jim Johnson, aka
j...@alice.att.com, ask this question. Not too many folks better
on digital stuff where it comes to audio, sound, etc.
Except that the 1's and 0's off the cd are read by an inherently
analog process, with a pickup beam that tracks the data with another
inherently analog process. [If you've ever looked at an eye pattern
off a CD, it is surprisingly low in Signal/Noise ratio.]
You don't get 1's and 0's until that analog signal is scrunched
thru an extremely high gain amp with the dual purpose of
yielding reliable ones and zeroes but more importantly, nice
steep edges.
NOT that the green marker or CD demagnetizer do anything for this.
A quick and dirty model of the distance from the laser to the
CD, the beam width, the beam dispersion, and how far it is from
the beam to the edge of the CD, thus the angle of reflection it would
take [so close to 90 degrees the minutes won't matter] for any
photons from the laser to reach the edge to be reflected or absorbed
should be good enough. Or if one bounces the beam at a smaller
angle off the reflecting layer, how many bounces it would take
to reach the edge and bounce back such that even a few photons
reach the pickup.... and how miniscule that signal would be
compared to the normal signal/noise ratio...and how poorly the
alleged noise would survive the trip thru the clipping and
squaring circuitry to ever be detected as minute variations
in the 1.s and 0's.....
>
>I know either too much or too little about this topic to be happy
>with that. Let me explain what I know and ask what I don't.
>
>The sound on a CD is broken-up into 'frames' which last one 75th
>of a second. Each frame has some form of parity-check or check-
>sum. So if there's a drop-out on a CD it's not for the duration
>of one 'bit' of music (which would last an unhearable 44.1
>millionth of a second) but for a period of 75 times that, about
>half a millionth of a second. This is still an unhearable
>period of time. Every CD has a number of unreadable frames due
>to tiny parts of the shiny layer which didn't form neat pits.
Audio CD's can COMPLETELY recover from the entire loss of
a larger amount of data. Inherent in the interleaving of
the data bits into encoded words, which are themselves spread
over blocks.
A good CD player can recover without interpolation or concealment
a surprising wide wedge of lost data in an audio CD.... much
better coding than data CD's which are still pretty robust.
>
>But damage to a disk surface doesn't tend to sit neatly over
>the very small area of one frame, it's spread over more of the
>surface. So you can build up a long run of damaged frames
>(especially if you clean your CDs by turning them rather than
>from centre to edge).
Close, not that the music signal is neatly divided into
frames of successive samples of the audio. If you scratch
radially, you can get up to a good fraction of a millimeter
before it even causes interpolation [which is distorting]
as opposed to total reconstruction from the remaining
data. A scratch along the track can render it pretty
much unplayable.
>If I recall correctly the first generation
>of players fit the known data to a cubic curve. This would
>leave a 'mushy' part in music -- much better than the clicks
>you'd get without the curve-fitting. Any professional music-
>listener could notice a significant run of curve-corrected
>frames.
The bigger problems with Gen 1 players was crappy servos.
And decoders that were 12 bit at best, rarely even 14 bit.
Cannot think of a single Gen 1 player that actually had
a 16 bit D/A convertor. Not that there were any linear
16 bit convertors in anywhere but marketing dreams and
professional equipment at the time.
Then you had pickups that couldn't hit 3 dB on a good
day downhill with a tailwind. The resulting recovered
clock had sufficient non-euphonic jitter in it the poor
D/A convertor didn't have a chance.
Even the Gen 2 and 3 players had rather unimpressive
linearity except in expensive decks until the PWM 1-bit
units became more popular.
>
>Now, what effect could a green marker have on the laser beam's
>path through the transparent layers of the CD and bounce off
>of the shiny layer ? These are physics questions and I don't
>know. Perhaps the layer of green much would cut down on the
>amount of beam reflected by the interface between the air and
>the transparent layer. This would certainly reduce the error
>rate.
First the photons have to hit the green. Back to that model
of just how narrow the beam is, how thin the CD is, and
how difficult it would be to get enough photons to make
a bit of difference.
>
>What's the average corruption rate of an average CD played on
>an average deck ? How many of them could be avoided by
>reducing undesired beam-reflections ? Without access to test
>equipment I couldn't tell you.
Not that many players have error indicators for 'corrected it',
'interpolated it', 'concealed it', and 'fucking silenced it',
incidents only the latter 3 of which are corruption.
How much corruption would be due to a worn stamper would be
more productive.
Or we could mention the notorious "CD-Rot" and question whether
or not aluminum a few molecules thick can be magnetized, or
whether the data layer can be corrupted by a corrosive ink
in the printing going right thru the thin protective lacquer
layer.
Lon Stowell
David Winsemius <dwins...@attbi.com> wrote:
>Lizz Holmans wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, 3 May 2002 09:44:11 +0900, dame_...@yahoo.com (Louise
>> Bremner) wrote:
>>
>> >AFUBOT <st...@urbanlegends.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >> Debunked: Flowers are bad in hospital rooms because they suck oxygen
>> >> out of air.
>> >
>stuff
>>
>> Well, when I graduated from nursing school in 1980 we weren't told a
>> damn thing about plants. The only gas emitted from plants (OK, I
>> didn't do a scientific analysis, but I did take biology) is oxygen.
>>
>
>Nobody has brought up the President R<bleep> R<bleep> comment about trees
>emitting 80% of the pollutants? It's a favorite of Ed's(1). Search on
>"isoprene killer trees."
Actually someone has. About a dozen times or so lately.
Now if they could just find the help menu for their newsreader....
Lon Stowell
John Francis <jo...@panix.com> wrote:
>In article <YmFydGljdXM=.d044b0f63e547ccd...@1020705522.cotse.net>,
>Burroughs Guy <BurroughsG...@aol.com> wrote:
>>John Francis wrote:
>>
>>> Do us all a favour, and go read up on the many debunkings of this
>>> particular myth. Digital audio is (simplistically) error free by
>>> the time it gets to the sound generation phase. The best a green
>>> pen could do would be to give the error-correction logic less
>>> work to do.
>>
>>Thanx for admitting that you're being simplistic. In the complex world,
>>what happens when the CD is too dirty to be error corrected? In my
>>experience, if you get enough greasy fingerprints on a CD you get inferior
>>sound reproduction (ie, noise). Are you claiming that CD error correction
>>is always able to produce error-free sound, no matter how dirty the CD?
>>Or does your machine just stop and give you a blue screen?
>
>You're clutching at straws, here (and not enough of them to build
>a decent strawman). Obviously it's possible for a CD to be dirty
>enough to exceed the correctable error limit. But that's not the
>normal case.
Worse, the thickness of a CD means that dirt and most scratches
are so far out of focus that they have absolutely no effect on
the signal from the data tracks.... which are small enough that
they work on a scattering of photons rather than what is commonly
presumed to be the case.
>
>And, lest you had forgotten, you were talking about a digital
>audio system being used by an audio god. Somehow I don't see
>dirty CDs being an issue here - I expect he'd know enough about
>care of his CDs to know how to clean a dirty CD before playing it.
You get your blankety blank greasy fingerprints on MY
audio CD's and you won't have fingers to print with any more.
Rarely see a dirty CD, even around kids, fairly young ones
at that.
>
>Mind you, you're ahead of the game here. At least you understand
>the concept of error correcting circuitry. Several of the green
>pen supporters seem to argue that a digital stream that was read
>correctly the first time produces better analog(ue) sound than
>that generated from an error-corrected digital stream.
None of them explain how the laser beam could reach the edges
in the first place.
Most of the green pen supporters also claim that you can make
your system sound better by demagnetizing the few molecules
of aluminum in the data layer, a metal that is disgustingly
difficult to magnetize in the first place. Magnetizing the
air in front of your speaker would be almost exactly as easy.
And most of them also claim that you get better sound by
sticking rocks on your cables.
--
I'm right. Period. Anyone who believes different is retarded.
JamiJo explains the standards of evidence to the unwashed.
David Winsemius
>
> "David Winsemius" <dwins...@attbi.com> wrote in message
> news:3A6296D3...@attbi.com...
> > Lizz Holmans wrote:
> > >
>
> >
> http://groups.google.com/groups?q=ronald+reagan++trees+group:alt.folklor
> e.urban&hl=en&selm=HI9s5.192%24v3.2757%40uchinews&rnum=2
> >
> > BOP? This is a UL dammit. Gots desire to believe, mutations,
> repetition.
> >
> >
> (3)http://groups.google.com/groups?q=ronald+reagan++trees+group:alt.folk
> lore.urban&hl=en&selm=HI9s5.192%24v3.2757%40uchinews&rnum=2
>
> This ain't the way the masters do it. I can't rate this much better than
> junior assistant coat-trailer IIIrd. In the old days, they knew how to
> *bait*. Arrr. Kids today.
>
> The way I had it 'splained to me, it's the incitement. You don't want
> to attract them guys in special[1] hats[2], on account of they might
> puncture a beer keg or something else important when they have their
> showdown in the main street. Which eventually leads to a drunk Tommy,
> and *nobody* wants that.
>
> Thus, there are ULs that are BoPworthy. Yeah, it's a shame. This one is
> not inside the picket fence designed to make sure that ({T*,R*}{K*,R*}
> is a *!!! 1!) stays forever outside. Mmmpht[3].
Ok, a valuable^W learning opportunity. Didn't help that I had postal
diarrhea either.
Parse, substitute, parse, substitute, parse......({T*,R*}{K*,R*}is a *!!!
1!)?
(James) Terry Kirk? Teddy Kennedy? The R*n*ald King Raygun? The lumbeR
KaRtel?
search ...single hit for "T U R K i Y E i K i N C i F U T B O L L i G
i"
What the lesson am I missing, oh great obfuscatory mage?
David "eschewz you" Winsemius.
Karen J. Cravens
news:ab7gvk$i1a$1...@bob.news.rcn.net:
> Rarely see a dirty CD, even around kids, fairly young ones
> at that.
You'll see 'em around my place, in Nathan's toybox. Hey, what else am I
going to do with all the AOL and Earthlink CDs I get? Besides glue them
to the truck or something, that is.
(He also has a CD player to put them in... old Technics, 5-disc changer,
mfg 1989, burned-out laser thingummy. It's headed for the trash,
eventually, once he gets tired of pushing the buttons and spinning the
turntable.)
I suppose it's not teaching him very good CD-handling habits, though. But
CDs other than his own are, inexplicably, "movies" (well, we *do* have a
DVD player), and they're untouchable Daddy stuff, so it hasn't been a
problem. Yet.
--
Karen J. Cravens
John Francis
Lon Stowell <lsto...@dnai.com@localhost> wrote:
>
> A good CD player can recover without interpolation or concealment
> a surprising wide wedge of lost data in an audio CD.... much
> better coding than data CD's which are still pretty robust.
Thats contrary to what I remember from the orange/yellow/blue books.
At the lowest level audio CDs and data CDs use the same structure.
A data CD gives up some of the signal bandwidth of the audio CD to
additional error-correcting code, simply because it's essential that
a data CD be read error-free - even a single bit of unrecoverable
data can render the entire CD worthless.
An audio CD is less likely to be read absolutely error-free than
a data CD, but has additional partial-signal-recovery options
that don't make any sense on a data CD (interpolation, for one).
Thomas Prufer
wrote:
> First the photons have to hit the green. Back to that model
> of just how narrow the beam is, how thin the CD is, and
> how difficult it would be to get enough photons to make
> a bit of difference.
Now this could be used for a nice reductio ad absurdum, just to have a
spare one around the house:
Assume the signal is affected by backscattering from the edge. Then
the effect must be more pronounced when the data is being read real
close to the edge than when it's further away. So you should be able
to hear whether a track is from the beginning or the end of a
green-edged CD, whether the audio is from a small green-edged "single"
CD, and whether the magick pen is applied to the outer edge and/or the
edge of the inner hole.
Naah...
Thomas Prufer
Kai Henningsen
> begin lsto...@lenny.sfrn.dnai.com (Lon Stowell) quotation from
> news:ab7gvk$i1a$1...@bob.news.rcn.net:
>
> > Rarely see a dirty CD, even around kids, fairly young ones
> > at that.
>
> You'll see 'em around my place, in Nathan's toybox. Hey, what else am I
> going to do with all the AOL and Earthlink CDs I get? Besides glue them
> to the truck or something, that is.
Hey, those things are dangerous! CD splinters are rather sharp.
Kai
--
http://www.westfalen.de/private/khms/
"... by God I *KNOW* what this network is for, and you can't have it."
- Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu)
Kai Henningsen
> Audio CD's can COMPLETELY recover from the entire loss of
> a larger amount of data. Inherent in the interleaving of
> the data bits into encoded words, which are themselves spread
> over blocks.
I understand this system, somewhat enhanced on the basis of audio
experience, is used for both audio and data on DVDs.
Lee Rudolph
> First the photons have to hit the green.
Don't I know it.
Lee "you wouldn't *believe* how many
photons I've lost in the rough" Rudolph
David J. Martin
I think that everyone is getting too complex on this. As Daniel
points out, the UL involves a green line on rim of the CD. Most
of the time that line isn't going to interact with the laser.
You might as well put the line on your forehead.
David "My tatoo improves CD performance" Martin
Charles A Lieberman
> Now, what effect could a green marker have on the laser beam's
> path through the transparent layers of the CD and bounce off
> of the shiny layer ? These are physics questions and I don't
> know.
Mine.
--
Charles A. Lieberman | "These are physics questions and I don't
Brooklyn, New York, USA | know." -- Simon Slavin, specialist.
cali...@bigfoot.com http://calieber.tripod.com/
Nathan Tenny
Karen J. Cravens <silve...@phoenyx.net> wrote:
>begin lsto...@lenny.sfrn.dnai.com (Lon Stowell) quotation from
>news:ab7gvk$i1a$1...@bob.news.rcn.net:
>
>> Rarely see a dirty CD, even around kids, fairly young ones
>> at that.
>
>You'll see 'em around my place, in Nathan's toybox.
You know, this made perfect sense before I realized it wasn't
about me.
> Hey, what else am I
>going to do with all the AOL and Earthlink CDs I get? Besides glue them
>to the truck or something, that is.
My wife made a drop spindle out of a stack of AOL CDs. I assume the
Earthlink ones would work as well, unless the data is distributed
differently so that they aren't balanced or something.
NT
--
Nathan Tenny | A foolish consistency
Qualcomm, Inc., San Diego, CA | recapitulates phylogeny.
<nten...@qualcomm.com> |
Jim Everman
. . .
> >going to do with all the AOL and Earthlink CDs I get? Besides glue them
> >to the truck or something, that is.
>
> My wife made a drop spindle out of a stack of AOL CDs. I assume the
> Earthlink ones would work as well, unless the data is distributed
> differently so that they aren't balanced or something.
>
> NT
I've resisted for a couple days, but I guess the time has come to
join the crafts group. How about a glitter ball?
<http://webusers.anet-stl.com/~everman/gltrbal.html>
--
Jim Everman mailto:eve...@Anet-STL.com
http://www.Anet-STL.com/~everman/
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by
stupidity.
Simon Slavin
sla...@hearsay.demon.co.uk@localhost (Simon Slavin) wrote:
> So if there's a drop-out on a CD it's not for the duration
> of one 'bit' of music (which would last an unhearable 44.1
> millionth of a second)
Received polite email pointing-out that I'd confused my megas and
kilas. The numbers are wrong but I think my reasoning still works.
Ed Kaulakis
"Simon Slavin" <sla...@hearsay.demon.co.uk@localhost> wrote in message
MINE!
--
Ed "the Collector" Kaulakis
"I've lost grants because of the Digest"
- James V. McConnell
Burroughs Guy
> Assume the signal is affected by backscattering from the edge. Then
> the effect must be more pronounced when the data is being read real
> close to the edge than when it's further away.
This is a straw man. I don't know how the green marker improved early CD
quality, but you're claiming that you do. With straw man arguments, I can
disprove anything:
Let's take on this claim, that over 10,000 years ago people traveled from
Asia to North America via a land bridge. Okay, let's assume there was a
land bridge. If there was a bridge, there must have been toll booths.
But money hadn't been invented yet, so they couldn't pay the tolls. Even
if there was a land bridge, no one was able to cross it.
(Actually, they arrogantly passed the toll booths without paying. No one
had invented cops to arrest them.)
Here's another straw man at http://www.snopes2.com/music/info/greening.htm
> I decided to give it a try anyway. It
> seems that the preferred color of the
> marker is green. But I used paint instead:
> Pactra Acrylic Enamel A46 bought
> at a hobby shop and applies with a small
> brush. And the color I chose was not
> green, but flat black, for reasons that
> will be explained later.
Everything I read which attempts to debunk the green marker legend is full
of this sort of falacious debunkage. If the story of the green marker is
really false, why doesn't soemone debunk it? Why are all the debunkers so
insistent on debunking something else?
Burroughs Guy
> Ed "except for 4'33" of course" Kaulakis
You mean 4'33" available on CD? I'm going to toss my well worn old analog
45 rpm copy and run out and buy it. That will be quite a treat to hear
4'33" with digital clarity.
Now that I think of it, this is from a digital master, right?
Ed Kaulakis
news:YmFydGljdXM=.7a555c8eee51224e...@1020815513.cotse.net.
..
> Thomas Prufer wrote:
>
> > Assume the signal is affected by backscattering from the edge. Then
> > the effect must be more pronounced when the data is being read real
> > close to the edge than when it's further away.
>
> This is a straw man. I don't know how the green marker improved early
CD
> quality, but you're claiming that you do. With straw man arguments, I
can
> disprove anything:
(aside) Chris, send me a gross of heavy-duty ironymeters, will ya, I
just ran out. Again.
The only straw here, you provide. Thomas never said that.
(i) You don't know[1] *that* the green marker improved early[2] CD
quality. Jumping over this little pit to get to *how* is called begging
the question, for reasons that elude me.
(ii) Thomas didn't claim he knew how the green marker improved early CD
quality. He said, assuming the effect exists, it should have
thus-and-such behavior, because of known laws of photonics. It was a
perfectly valid hy-po-thet-ic-al.
[1] If you do, produce a scientifically acceptable cite.
[2] Claim mutating under pressure alert! Is the 1999 tweak cite early
enough?
Ed "" Kaulakis
Ed Kaulakis
Nope, it's synthesized directly from the score. Much better, no audience
noise, and a real outdoorsy ambiance. The ending is a little sloppy,
but, oh well. Can't have everything with primitive technology.
here it is in stunning ASCII digital railway-diagram:
>>+>>>>0>>>>>+>>
..^ v
..^ v
..+<<<<<<<<<<+
non-burroughsians, read "0, repeat as needed"
Ed "and many similar works besides" Kaulakis
Chris Clarke
"Ed Kaulakis" <kaulaki...@pacbell.net> wrote:
> (aside) Chris, send me a gross of heavy-duty ironymeters, will ya, I
> just ran out. Again.
Sorry. All I have left are the old SCSI ones, and their drivers conflict
with Outlook.
--
Chris Clarke | Editor, Faultline Magazine
www.faultline.org | California Environmental News and Information
Lon Stowell
John Francis <jo...@panix.com> wrote:
>In article <ab7ea2$5pv$1...@bob.news.rcn.net>,
>Lon Stowell <lsto...@dnai.com@localhost> wrote:
>>
>> A good CD player can recover without interpolation or concealment
>> a surprising wide wedge of lost data in an audio CD.... much
>> better coding than data CD's which are still pretty robust.
>
>Thats contrary to what I remember from the orange/yellow/blue books.
Y'all are absotively correct. Mea Gluteus Maximus Culpa.
Lon Stowell
>
>Everything I read which attempts to debunk the green marker legend is full
>of this sort of falacious debunkage. If the story of the green marker is
>really false, why doesn't soemone debunk it? Why are all the debunkers so
>insistent on debunking something else?
I suspect they are too busy putting tollbooths on the bering strait
to deal with the physics and electronics involved.
Lon Stowell
Nathan Tenny <nten...@qualcomm.com> wrote:
>In article <Xns9206E9E2...@130.133.1.4>,
>Karen J. Cravens <silve...@phoenyx.net> wrote:
>>begin lsto...@lenny.sfrn.dnai.com (Lon Stowell) quotation from
>>news:ab7gvk$i1a$1...@bob.news.rcn.net:
>>
>>> Rarely see a dirty CD, even around kids, fairly young ones
>>> at that.
>>
>>You'll see 'em around my place, in Nathan's toybox.
>
>You know, this made perfect sense before I realized it wasn't
>about me.
>
>> Hey, what else am I
>>going to do with all the AOL and Earthlink CDs I get? Besides glue them
>>to the truck or something, that is.
>
>My wife made a drop spindle out of a stack of AOL CDs. I assume the
>Earthlink ones would work as well, unless the data is distributed
>differently so that they aren't balanced or something.
Personally I wish AOL would stop changing the scheme. Just about
the time I get almost enough to make a set of class coasters,
they change the damn things again.
However, I do keep those mailing boxes they were using for a while,
they are resuable and a pretty good way to mail CD's to friends.
PS. Anyone still use floppies, and want a box of AOL's for reuse?
---
Karen J. Cravens
> However, I do keep those mailing boxes they were using for a while,
> they are resuable and a pretty good way to mail CD's to friends.
When we got the first one of those, my husband said "That's the first
useful AOL mailing I've gotten since they quit sending me free floppies!"
--
Karen J. Cravens
Steve Smith
> I have observed, unfortunately, that high end audio lacks objectivity as
> badly as any human endeavor. Proof:
>
> Read http://www.sundial.net/~rogerr/wire.htm
From my own screwing around^W^Wexperimentation with my stereo, there's
no difference at all with the *type* of wire. There is a major
difference, however, with the connectors. Hypothesis -- the high end
cables have the connectors properly soldered on, and are replacing
cables with poorly attached connectors or no connectors at all.
> Then go to any high end audio group and read the impassioned stuff that you
> will almost certainly find that takes as a given how great <megabuck>
> speaker wire "sounds." A green marker on the edge of CDssounds like a
> pretty cheap^W economical high to me.
I haven't seen an A/B test of the green-edged CDs anywhere. Obvious
assumption -- the True Believers will say that the debunkers' ears
aren't good enough, and the TBs won't run any tests as they already know
the answer (or maybe they did the tests and don't want to look stupid
...)
At least the green pen won't hurt the CDs.
--
Steve Smith s...@aginc.net
Agincourt Computing http://www.aginc.net
"Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense."
Thomas Prufer
<BurroughsG...@aol.com> wrote:
>Thomas Prufer wrote:
>
>> Assume the signal is affected by backscattering from the edge. Then
>> the effect must be more pronounced when the data is being read real
>> close to the edge than when it's further away.
>
>This is a straw man. I don't know how the green marker improved early CD
>quality, but you're claiming that you do.
You don't know how it improved early CD quality, but you do know it
did? Not all of us are willing to accept your knowledge as universal
truth without some reasonable sequence of cause and effect; this is
what we are discussing.
And you've read what I wrote, but you haven't understood what I meant:
I said "Assume the signal is affected by backscattering from the edge"
and then proceeded to make a series of deductions from that
assumption, and came to a statement ("it should sound even better
towards the green edge") that was not included in your (or any other)
green-pen anecdotals. To make an assumption, reason from it, and then
come to a statement which differs from a known truth is a valid method
of proving or disproving the original assumption. So I have a)
dignified the "green pen" with the label "truth" for purposes of this
argument and b) shown that the assumption that backscattering causes
the effect is false, even under the premise that there is a green-pen
effect.
I haven't claimed that I know what makes CD sound better when marked
with a green pen, just that it isn't backscattering, because that
would cause effects that no one has observed.
Thomas Prufer