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18.10.13

Clearing Out The Brain Box

When you spend a lot of time thinking about the Universe, questions start to pile up.  Once in a while, you have to clear them out, or they start to go bad and smell up the place.  The problem is that these questions just don't have obvious answers and if you let them continue to pile up, then you start tripping over them looking for other stuff.

So, time to clear out the Ponder Pan and ask the readers to take partial responsibility for chewing on these persistent problems.  If you have some answers, be sure to share with the rest of us.  We'd all like to know.

If you lined up two mirrors so that they would reflect light from one to the other and back again, would a laser beam keep bouncing back and forth forever?

How did 'faggot', meaning a bundle of twigs, come to mean a homosexual male?

Why do they lie to you in high school and say you can't take the square root of a negative number, then in college they tell you it's i?  Why not just say you'll learn about that later, like sex?

If all colors have compliments (blue and yellow, etc.), what are the compliments of silver and gold?

Who invented the Thai alphabet and were they shot shortly afterward?

If you work in the entertainment industry, does that take the fun out of it?  If you work in the leisure industry, what do you do when you retire?

How come a stitch in time saves nine?  Why not 10 or 8?

I must have gotten a good computer, because my cursor never says a harsh word.

Isn't a near miss actually a crash?  If you don't crash, isn't that a 'near hit'?  (that was George Carlin's, but worth the ponder)

Why do we call things on a computer 'pages' and 'tabs' and so on?  Aren't they really just colored dots arranged in patterns that don't exist in real life?  We should make some new words for this stuff.

Back in Roman times, how did they mark a place when they were finished reading?

Why is north always at the top?  Related to that, why are left-handers 'south paws' but right-handers aren't 'north paws'?

Who invented the neck tie and were they instantly shot dead?

Is the sky really blue?  It could be red, but the first guy called it blue by accident and so everyone after that thought red is blue and we've all been wrong all these years.

How come all the planets are named after Roman gods except Earth?

Why is Greenpeace violent?  Can you really have a passive activist?  Do animals actually receive any money donated to the World Wildlife Fund?

People are so stupid.  Companies pay huge amounts of money to display their logo, yet people pay huge amounts of money for items with the same logos.  Think how much money they could all be earning!

How come there's a Medieval period in history, but no Early Eval or Late Eval periods?  Is someone hiding large chunks of history from us?  Million Dollar Idea: Renaistrants - A chain of theme restaurants serving northern Italian food.

So many things taste just like chicken, but how do you describe the taste of chicken?  Tastes just like frog legs?

Did you know the little dent between your nose and lip is called the philtrum?  Whose job was it to come up with a name for it?  Were they paid or shot?

 Why does half the world drive on the left side and the other half drive on the right?  Couldn't they just put the driver in the middle and save all the trouble?

I think the two most useless jobs in the world are politician and hair dresser.

On the telephone, why does the person answering always talk first?  I think it should be the caller's job to start the conversation, since they initiated the call.

Finally, if Monsanto and DuPont wanted to do something really valuable, they'd create money that really grows on trees.