Archive for the ‘General Knowledge’ Category
Monday, June 16th, 2008 |
AMAZING. Dr. Duncan MacDougall actually managed to estimate the weight of human soul!
Dr. MacDougall postulated that when human approaches death, the weight of the body decreases because the human soul was material, and hence has mass. It is believed that when a person dies, his/her soul leaves the body. This was proven when the doctor placed dying patients on a sensitive scale to detect any change of weight when a patient expires.
The doctor experimented with dogs too, but there was no drop of weight at death. This was consistent to the doctor’s religious beliefs that animals have no soul.
When the patient was dying, his weight dropped slowly due to evaporation of breath and sweat. Then, when the patient finally finishes his last breath, the scale recorded a sudden drop of approximately 21.3 grams. There weren’t anything else to explain the sudden drop of weight.
You can read the full paper on the subject in the third link below.
References:
http://www.snopes.com/religion/soulweight.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_MacDougall_%28doctor%29
http://www.ghostweb.com/soul.html
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Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 |
When I was young my parents brought me to Thailand for holiday. The tour guide mentioned something about a “Tiger show”, and boy, was I excited. I thought I was going to see four legged ferocious felines with beautiful orange and white stripes all over its body.
But I sat there quietly to avoid embarrassing myself. The adults were all laughing and discussing about the idea of attending such a show. Then the wet blanket came. The tour guide said children are not allowed in so someone had to stay out to look after all the children.
I was puzzled for a while. Why the hell let the adults run loose in the zoo and lock the kids safe in a hotel room?
It wasn’t until years later that I realized that the show wasn’t exactly what I thought it was. Turns out that, the term “Tiger Show” results from a mispronunciation of “Thai Girl Show”. The “l” of “Girl” somehow got lost in translation and sounded more like “ThaiGir Show”. Not long after people started to mistaken such shows as another visit to the zoo.
Now, what is a “Thai Girl Show”? According to The Urban Dictionary, the term refers to a special sex show that involves a number of acrobatic displays. This might include ridiculous (yet entertaining, to some) acts such as shooting darts and ping pong balls between their legs. They can even open beer bottles with their privates!
Some time ago I heard a casual description of a Thai Girl Show as a performance by at least two people having intercourse in front of an audience. Whether acrobatic acts are performed are well beyond my imagination. But there isn’t too much of a significance to differentiate between the two descriptions. It’s all curious tourists or local perverts having fun looking at naked women.
I might have been to such a show before, but I was probably too young to know much about it. To be exact, it was a transvestite show, where the transvestite dressed as a woman and then slowly stripped in front of the audience. At the end she flicked her robes wide open to expose her fake breasts. My mother had to whisper to me that she’s actually a man. I got even more confused after that. I just can’t understand why a man would have mammary glands. Probably a transvestite show is a totally different thing.
As a conclusion, “Tiger Show” is not about watching a performer entertaining the crowd taming a tiger to perform various acts out of obedience. It’s is actually “Thai Girl Show” where people are entertained with performances in the red light district.
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Sunday, June 1st, 2008 |
I have been reading Doraemon comics since the age of 12. There used to be a huge stack of Doraemon comic books in my bookshelves, until my mother decided to give them away. I didn’t have the complete set though, there were some volumes missing here and there, because the shops would sometimes run out as Doraemon had a huge fan base back in the old days.
Yesterday I turned on the TV and watched a cartoon very similar to Doraemon. It was Kiteretsu. Having my laptop right in front of me, I googled Kiteretsu and found a result in Wikipedia. It was obvious that the persons who drew Kiteretsu were also the ones who created Doraemon, due to the huge resemblances of the characters and storyline.
Some clicks here and there, I ended up on the Doraemon page on Wikipedia. There was a part about how the series ended, and that intrigued me the most. There were a few rumours about how the series ended, but only one of them was true.
The first rumour was that Nobi Nobita is a very sickly kid, and he daydreamed about the whole series while being bedridden. The stories about Doraemon, Doralin and even his friends were all just a fragment of his imagination. The series end when Nobita breathes his final breath. When I first heard about this years ago, I was outraged as the ending is just too abrupt and simple. It wasn’t that appropriate pushing the idea of a dying kid in a popular cartoon.
The second one was much more acceptable. Doraemon collapsed because his battery had died. There were only two ways to resurrect Doraemon. The first way was to reset him and he will come back alive instantly. The only catch is that he will lose his memory. The second way was to wait for a technician skilled enough to fix him. Nobita took the second option, and swore to be the technician that saved Doraemon.
I think in the end, the second ending was published as the finale. There are comic strips out there in the WWW, just Google it.
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Monday, April 21st, 2008 |
No, not that North Borneo rebel in the Malaysian history. I’m talking about the term ‘Mat Salleh’ that Malaysians often use to call Caucasians. Despite ‘Salleh’ being a Malay male’s name, sometimes I hear people calling Caucasian ladies ‘Mat Salleh’ as well. Shouldn’t it be ‘Minah Salleh’?
I ran a search in Google about the origin of ‘Mat Salleh’, and most of the blog posts returned tell the same tale. They say the term actually originated from the term ‘Mad Sailor’. This was because during the British rule, there were many British sailors who often got drunk and harassed the people. Some locals were beaten up, while some were even raped. The locals began to call the British ‘Mad Sailors’. However, due to some problems with pronunciation, the locals could only managed to say something like ‘Mat Seler’. This, in time, became what we know today as ‘Mat Salleh’.
There was another story found in the Cari forums. In the past there was one sailor Mud Sulley who came to Malaya to stock up some provisions before continuing his travel to Australia. Sulley was sailor who loved to drink. One day, the Sultan of Selangor invited him for a meal in the palace. Sulley doesn’t understand the culture of eating with hands. The Sultan explained that he used his hand because he cleaned his hand personally and it is cleaner than the cutlery cleaned by someone else. Sulley did not understand and continued to use his spoon and fork. Right after the meal, Sulley asked the Sultan arrogantly “What kind of dinner is this without rum or wine?” The infuriated Sultan banished Sulley from the palace. Henceforth, the name Mud Sulley was used on people who are rude and insensitive to local culture. In time, the term “Mud Sulley” also became Mat Salleh.
What about ‘Minah Salleh’? One of the blogs went on to say that when sailors arrived at the shores of Malaya, the captain brought two twin sisters along with him. When asked who are the two twin sisters, a harbor master called them ‘Minor Sailors’, and hence the term somehow became the ‘Minah Salleh’ of today.
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