Revelation

"Did you ever talk about a movie with someone who read the book? They're always so condescending, like "oh the book was much better than the movie." I say "Oh really? What I enjoyed about the movie was this: no reading. It only took two hours, and then I took a nap." […] Every now and then I'll read a book and be so proud of myself that I'll try to squeeze it into conversations. People say "Hey Jim, how are you doing?" and I'll say "I read a book that was two-hundred and fifty pages!" and they'll say "that's great, what was it about?" I say "I have no idea. It took me two years to read it!"—Jim Gaffigan (link)

"Many warnings have been uttered by eminent men of science and by authorities in military strategy. None of them will say that the worst results are certain. What they do say is that these results are possible, and no one can be sure that they will not be realized. We have not yet found that the views of experts on this question depend in any degree upon their politics or prejudices. They depend only, so far as our researches have revealed, upon the extent of the particular expert's knowledge. We have found that the men who know most are the most gloomy."—Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein (link)

"One of the best established facts in sleep regulation in mammals is that slow-wave activity increases in proportion to the duration of prior wakefulness and progressively decreases during sleep. […] Is such slow-wave activity a mere epiphenomenon, or does it have some functional significance? According to the [synaptic homeostasis] hypothesis, slow waves occurring in the cortex during sleep would actively promote a generalized depression or downscaling of synapses. In this way, the total synaptic weight to neurons would progressively return to a baseline level, thus effecting a kind of synaptic homeostasis. […] A need to rescale synaptic weight after learning, in order to preserve a constant level of synaptic input without obliterating memory traces, confer stability to neuronal firing, and prevent runaway potentiation or depression, has long been recognized in computational models of synaptic plasticity. […] Provided there is a threshold below which synapses become ineffective or silent, synapses contributing to the noise, being on average weaker than those contributing to the signal, would cease to interfere in the execution, and the [signal-to-noise ratio] would increase."—Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli (link) via RadioLab (31:20)

Knowledge

"The single great existential fact of plant life is... well, they can’t locomote. They can move with the wind and water, but they can’t pick themselves up and go. So what they’ve worked on, what they have, are chemicals instead of legs. Cannabis works on our minds in order to borrow our feet, basically. And plants have developed this incredible variety of molecules either to attract or repel other species. They have to rely on chemistry for their defense and for their propagation: for their movement. And they’ve gotten really, really good at this."—Michael Pollan (link)

"If I sit back and say "what's the purpose in life? Why should anyone care that I live here and you live here and so on?" In the end, after many drinks, I've come to the conclusion that the goal in life is to acquire knowledge, and to make sure that knowledge is preserved. […] We're now finding earth-like planets that are "only thirteen light-years away!" Isn't that great? I think that's wonderful, but how long would it take to get a human there? Will they survive? Probably not. If we want to explore the universe, then I think we have to do it with machines that don't breathe oxygen and are not sensitive to the things we are sensitive to. And so in the end here I think this is all about accelerating knowledge accretion, and intelligent machines are an amazing tool for accelerating that."—Jeff Hawkins (50:00)

"Other seeds are able to remain alive for astonishing periods. One of the most remarkable examples comes from an archaeological site in Japan. Two thousand years ago, a small settlement stood at a place called Asada. The people who lived here had only just begun to master the art of working metal. They were also among the first people in Japan who knew how to plant and reap rice. They stored this in small pits in the ground. In one of those pits scientists found a magnolia seed. They took that strange ancient seed, planted it, and it grew. In its tenth year it produced its first flower buds. Magnolias typically have six petals on their flowers, but this plant had a variable number of petals on each flower. Could this be an ancient species that has only survived with that one lone seed in an archaeological ruin? This is surely a marvelous example of the fact that plants with their seeds are not only extraordinary travelers in space, but incomparable travelers in time."—David Attenborough The Private Life of Plants (45:00 or 00:00)

Accidental

"A Canadian tourist whose body was discovered in a water tank atop a downtown Los Angeles hotel four months ago died in an accidental drowning, coroner's officials said Thursday. A maintenance worker discovered the body of Elisa Lam, 21, on Feb. 19 after residents of the Cecil Hotel complained about low water pressure. Lam had been missing for three weeks before being found. During that time, detectives with the LAPD's Robbery-Homicide Division appealed to the public for help in the case that included the release of video of her inside a Cecil Hotel elevator. In surveillance footage, Lam could be seen pushing buttons for multiple floors and at one point stepping out of the elevator and waving her arms."—Andrew Blankstein (link)

"According to the report, 31- year-old Chad Wolfe "suffered complete dislocation of cerviical vertibre 5 & 6, with spinal cord laceration due to blunt impact to head and neck." Investigators have determined that shortly after midnight on the 15th, Wolfe entered an elevator on the third floor of the main [Tampa International Airport] terminal that stopped on the seventh floor of the Short Term Parking Garage. Later, Wolfe apparently forced open the elevator door to gain entry. He fell and landed on top of the elevator."—WFTS (link) "But on Thursday, 10 News obtained surveillance video from inside the airport that captures Wolfe's bizarre behavior just minutes before his death."—WTSP (link)

"The Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office told The Valdosta Daily Times that 17-year-old Kendrick’s Johnson’s body was found upside-down, lodged inside a wrestling mat at the Lowndes High School gym. “At some point, Kendrick Johnson either reached into the center of one of the rolled mats or fell into the center opening of the mat and became lodged,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement to the Daily Times. “We feel like he was trying to reach a shoe that was down that hole, but no one knows (why he reached into the mat) but him and the good Lord.” The sheriff’s office says that the rush of blood to Johnson’s head over a period of time caused him to pass out and eventually die. Despite what authorities have said, Johnson’s family believes the teen was murdered."—CBS (link)

Intentions

"Hilltops have been leveled to make room for the [California marijuana] crop. Bulldozers start landslides on erosion-prone mountainsides. Road and dam construction clogs some streams with dislodged soil. Others are bled dry by diversions. Little water is left for salmon whose populations have already been decimated by logging. The idea that the counterculture’s crop of choice is bad for the environment has gone down hard here. For the professed hippies who moved here decades ago, marijuana farming combines defiance of society’s strictures, shared communal values and a steady income. “These grow sites continue to get larger and larger.” […] “There is a gold rush, and it’s a race to the bottom in terms of environmental impact.”—Felicity Barringer (link)

"Three to five percent of the long sisal leaf consists of a tough fiber demanded in temperate zone countries for use as twine in baler and binder machines operating in grain fields. For a variety of reasons, the world price for hard fibers rose to an unparalleled high in 1951. This price stimulus combined with government incentives led to the establishment of the first extensive sisal plantations in the states of Paraiba and Bahia [Brazil]. Subsequent boom years in 1960-62 further stimulated expansion of the crop, and, in some areas as much as fifty percent of the total land was planted in sisal. […] A concomitant of the introduction of sisal was the widespread abandonment of subsistence agriculture. This was particularly true of small landholders who, in the years of highest prices, were motivated to fill all or most of their small plots with sisal plants. […] The process is nearly irreversible because sisal, once planted, is very difficult to eradicate." —Daniel Gross (link)

"From Figure 1 we can see that something very dramatic happened in the late 1960s. This was the availability of low cost synthetic competition in the form of Polypropylene slit film twine. Its use as a sisal substitute in cordage started to take off around 1970 and its growth has scarcely paused during the past thirty years. I have little doubt that this pattern will continue during the next decade, as projected in Figure 2. Polypropylene, having penetrated sisal's core markets in agricultural twine and cordage, in effect capped the price possibilities for sisal. This, in turn, forced raw sisal prices down."—Gordon Mackie (link)

Complacent

"A University of South Florida engineering professor who often warned his students about the dangers of lightning died a day after he was struck by a bolt while walking on campus. Richard Stessel, an associate professor who had been at the school since 1982, died Saturday without regaining consciousness. "He was very aware of lightning issues. He was always warning us," said Maysson Sallam, a doctoral candidate. Stessel, 44, was walking near tall trees when he was struck as a thunderstorm approached Friday."—Orlando Sentinel (link)

"The work of the Kraffts [documenting lava flows] was highlighted in a National Geographic video which featured a large amount of their footage and photographs as well as interviews with both. Maurice is famous for saying in the video that "I am never afraid because I have seen so many eruptions in 23 years that even if I die tomorrow, I don't care", coincidentally on the day before he and his wife's death in the Mt. Unzen [volcanic eruption]."—Wikipedia (link)

"On 9 April 2004, a DEA agent (who has not been identified by name in press accounts) delivered a presentation on gun safety to about 50 adults and students at an event sponsored by the Orlando Minority Youth Golf Association. Partway through his lecture, the agent picked up his .40-caliber duty weapon and held it up for the audience to see as he announced: "This is a Glock 40. Fifty Cent, Too Short, all of them talk about a Glock 40, OK? I'm the only one in this room professional enough that I know of to carry this Glock 40." Seconds later the gun discharged, wounding the agent in the thigh."—Snopes (link)

Control

"The real danger of psychedelics is not so much neurological as political—that 'turned-on' people are not interested in serving the power games of the present rulers. Looking at the successful men, they see completely boring lives. In the Epilogue I shall make it clear that psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. When you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope; he goes away and works on what he has seen. Furthermore, speaking quite strictly, mystical insight is no more in the chemical itself than biological knowledge is in the microscope. There is no difference in principle between sharpening perception with an external instrument, such as a microscope, and sharpening it with an internal instrument, such as one of these drugs."—Allan Watts The Joyous Cosmology 1965 (link)

"Some people say brains can't understand brains. Very Zen-like. Whoo. It sounds good, but why? I mean, what's the point? It's just a bunch of cells. You understand your liver. It's got a lot of cells in it too, right? I don't think there's anything to that. Some people say "I don't feel like a bunch of cells, I'm conscious. I've got this experience, I'm in the world, you know. I can't just be a bunch of cells." Well people used to believe there was a life force to be living, and we now know that's not true at all. People just have a disbelief that cells can do what they do. And so some people have fallen into the pit of metaphysical dualism, and some really smart people, too. But we can reject all that. There's another reason we don't have a good brain theory, and it's because we have an intuitive, strongly-held, but incorrect assumption that has prevented us from seeing the answer. There's something we believe that's obvious but wrong. It turns out it's really hard to think of [theories], but once you've thought of them, it's easy to understand [phenomena]. The answer was there all along, but we ignored it because it was an intuitive, strongly-held belief that was wrong. […] We all intuitively know the Earth isn't moving. Do you feel like you're moving a thousand miles an hour? Of course not. And if someone said it was spinning around in space and it's so huge, they would lock you up, and that's what [we once did]."—Jeff Hawkins (7:15)

"Addiction, drug abuse, are the [diseases] that are the most stigmatized. They are diseases of the brain that produce a loss of your ability to exert control, or what we call "free will." Free will is not something that's spontaneous, it's a product of the biology of the brain, and there are certain circuits that enable you to do it. Drugs disrupt those specific circuits. As a result, even though you are aware that you shouldn't be taking drugs, you cannot stop it."—Nora Volkow (4:00)

Fate

"Civilization is a complex human society that has advanced to the point of establishing dysfunctional political structures, unfair social hierarchies, and economic systems that clearly do not work. A civilization is often characterized by its shoddy public education and its decrepit mass transit. In some fields of modern scholarship, the term is associated with “culture,” which refers to the unreadable literature, overwrought paintings, and mindless, lowest-common-denominator music that together make up the arts."—The Onion Book of Known Knowledge (Page 42)

"Fate will give you a lot to do next week, and you had better do exactly as you are told or Fate will start executing hostages."—The Onion Horoscope (link)

"Billions of years from now, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will collide, marking the end of the galaxy as we know it"—Elizabeth Landau (link)

Turk

"Of the 1,000 jobs, 375 would be "higher-wage quality jobs," according to the county, with average annual pay of $47,581. Commissioner Sandra Murman, who represents the area where the distribution center is being considered, said she's "ecstatic." "This is the big silver bullet we've needed to kick off our economic development efforts," Murman said. When the facilities are operational, Amazon will begin collecting the 6 percent state sales tax as required under Florida law. Negotiations between Amazon and the state seemed dead last month after Scott signaled that he would not support a proposal that would include — essentially — a tax increase for many Floridians. But Scott spokeswoman Melissa Sellers said the deal announced Thursday was not a reversal of his earlier stance but a "culmination of ongoing discussions."—Michael Van Sickler and Bill Varian (link)

"Only one of the employees interviewed described it as a good place to work. Workers said they were forced to endure brutal heat inside the sprawling warehouse and were pushed to work at a pace many could not sustain. Employees were frequently reprimanded regarding their productivity and threatened with termination. […] During summer heat waves, Amazon arranged to have paramedics parked in ambulances outside, ready to treat any workers who dehydrated or suffered other forms of heat stress. Those who couldn't quickly cool off and return to work were sent home or taken out in stretchers and wheelchairs and transported to area hospitals. And new applicants were ready to begin work at any time. […] When Amazon workers asked in meetings why [loading dock doors weren't left open to allow air to circulate] at the Amazon warehouse, managers said the company was worried about theft."—Spencer Soper (link)

"Whenever he clocked out after his 12-hour shift at an Amazon warehouse, Jesse Busk had one more critical task to perform before he could hop into his car and head home to sleep: Pass through the sprawling warehouse security checkpoint. The purpose of the checkpoint was to prevent workers like Busk from pilfering electronics or other pricey goods from the Amazon stock. The process deeply annoyed Busk, but not because of any indignity he may have felt in being checked for contraband. What bothered him was the time it required after an exhausting day -- up to 25 minutes, all of it unpaid."— Dave Jamieson (link)

Fitness

"The fear mongering about China is one aspect of [Geoffrey Miller's Edge.org essay, Chinese Eugenics], although to be fair there are some sentences in the end that suggest Miller’s fear mongering is more like an idealisation of what he fancies to be the Chinese state and culture. I thought the strangest part of his piece is he takes it for a given that eugenics work, and the only reason it is not done in the west is some kind of backward political correctness. The man is a proper nazi. That would be my main problem with him. By the way, selective breeding on livestock did produce more milk producing cows and more obedient dogs, but all these races are hopelessly unadapted to the changing natural environment and would not stand competition with their natural counterparts outside their human protected enclave. I think it would be the same if some people played with selecting people’s genes to maximise one trait at the expense of other traits."—Anonymous (link)

"As with all fine-tuning stories, however, an unresolved question lurks in these and other examples: why does variety persist? […] no matter how much a potential mate might admire your intelligence, for example, he or she might think twice about you if you lack bodily coordination or adequate social skills. We choose whole individuals to mate with, warts and all, and we also have no reliable way of predicting how our genetically unique offspring will turn out. Further, every individual belongs to a population, and that population to a species. Those species and populations are also out there competing in nature with similar entities; and the excellence of your adaptations as an individual will count for little if your population as a whole is being edged out."—Ian Tattersall (link)

"Dear obese PhD applicants: if you didn't have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won't have the willpower to do a dissertation. #truth."—Geoffrey Miller (link) *by way of Le Show

Deception

"The center of cougar genetic diversity is in Brazil, but the Western Hemisphere has six robust subspecies in all. The Florida panther was listed as endangered in 1995, when eight Texas female cougars were released in South Florida in a last effort to save them from extinction. It worked. The Florida panther, it turned out, [was not a separate species, but] is a North American cougar whose kinked tails, heart defects, small litters and short lives were consequences of prolonged inbreeding. From fewer than 30 in 1995, the panther population in southwestern Florida has grown to more than 150."—Guy Gugliotta (link)

"The tests were conducted six times over a three-month period, and the results were not encouraging. Only 65 percent of the designated drivers showed no blood alcohol content, 17 percent registered 0.02 percent to 0.049 percent, and 18 percent measured 0.05 percent or higher. “When you look at evaluations of designated driver campaigns, they’re really ineffective,” said the study’s lead author, Adam E. Barry, an assistant professor of health education at the University of Florida. “Often people choose designated drivers because they’re the ones who’ve drunk the least. The most practical recommendation is that if you drive, you shouldn’t drink at all.”—Nicholas Bakalar (link)

"In all, Zions [Bank of Salt Lake City, Utah,] let roughly $39 million be withdrawn from hundreds of thousands of accounts from 2007 to 2009. Much of that money was ultimately transferred to bank accounts in Canada, India and the Caribbean, according to a Times review of court records. Many of the Internet merchants’ customers were older people and others on shaky financial footing. But that, too, worked in banks’ favor: the withdrawals set off a cascade of insufficient fund fees — more than $20 million in all, court records show."—Jessica Silver-Greenberg (link)

Guilt

"Collectively the 50 worst charities raised more than $1.3 billion over the past decade and paid nearly $1 billion of that directly to the companies that raise their donations. If that money had gone to charity, it would have been enough to build 20,000 Habitat for Humanity homes, buy 7 million wheelchairs or pay for mammograms for nearly 10 million uninsured women. […] Florida-based Project Cure has raised more than $65 million since 1998, but every year has wound up owing its fundraiser more than what was raised. According to its latest financial filing, the nonprofit is $3 million in debt."—Kris Hundley and Kendall Taggart (link)

"Doug White is one of the nation's foremost experts on the ethics of charity fundraising. A consultant to nonprofits for more than 30 years, White teaches in Columbia University's fundraising management master's degree program. He said charities with high fundraising expenses often rationalize that such costs are inevitable in the early years. But White said the Times/CIR findings, based on a decade of data, show that the nation's worst charities can't use that excuse. White also criticized reputable nonprofits that refuse to condemn bottom-tier charities. "When you start a charity, you have a sacred compact with society," said White, one of 30 charity experts interviewed for this series. "They are ripping off the public under the guise of an organization that's supposed to do good for society."—Kris Hundley and Kendall Taggart (link)

"After facing criticism for high fundraising costs year after year, charities and fundraisers have learned how to hide the costs of telemarketing and direct mail. Some have obscured costs by reporting mailing expenses and other fees separately. Others run their own telemarketing operations in-house. Some of the charities' IRS filings were incomplete or had not been filed. Others contained obvious errors that sometimes could not be clarified."—Kendall Taggart and Kris Hundley (link)

Progress

"The reason there wasn't thermonuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis was because a single deputy commander of a Soviet submarine refused to take orders. One human being. If he hadn't done that, how many people would have perished? If that had happened, Steven Pinker's numbers [on the worldwide decline of violence] would be rather different, wouldn't they? A hundred million people down the tubes pretty quickly, and then the breakdown of production and distribution, illness, horrible death. Multiply Hiroshima or Nagasaki by a hundred or two hundred and that's what you'd get. That was one human being. So where is the great inexorable progression toward peace coming from?"—John Gray (45:00)

"Eugenicist ideas and racist forms of biology were strong right up until the start of the second World War, and not only in Nazi Germany in the interwar period, but in Britain and the whole of Europe in the latter part of the 19th century. Some of these ideas, such as craniometry, even entered into law. These ideas about improving the stock of humanity by eliminating inferior elements were not defeated within the context of science, they were only defeated by the military defeat of Nazism. They didn't go away completely, of course, but they were set back. Were they set back by meritocracy in science? No. They were set back by a military defeat. If the defeat didn't happen, I bet you they would still be around."—John Gray (50:00)

"Growth of knowledge is very powerful, but what it produces is new forms of civilization and new forms of barbarism. […] Although science is an embodiment of rationality, the long-run impact of science on society is not to make human beings more reasonable, it simply enables them do what they want to do with greater effectiveness. It gives human beings more power."—John Gray (16:15)

Loneliness

"Victor Crist, a republican [Hillsborough County Commissioner] said "The [gay pride] festivals, the activities and things need to have a little different tone to them. Parading around in lingerie, pasties, g-strings and outfits that promote your sexual organs is not necessarily an appropriate thing to do in Hillsborough County." A member of the audience replied "that's Gasparilla," bringing laughter."—Bill Varian (link)

"All vectors have a right to exist."—Dr. Paul J. Schmidt, professor of pathology, University of South Florida, in response to a question about medical defenses for as-yet unknown pathogens, asked by myself during a lecture about the accidental transfusion of AIDS/HIV to healthy patients before suitable blood tests were developed. 12 October 2012.

"My wife is my only friend."—Tampa bus driver, from an overheard conversation with a fellow passenger. 7 June 2013, 4:30 A.M.

Blinding

"The eyeball cannot register an image at the point at which the optic nerve attaches, and hence that point is known as the blind spot. No one can see an object that appears in the blind spot because there are no visual receptors there. Your brain uses information from the areas around the blind spot to make a reasonable guess about what the blind spot would see if only it weren't blind, and then your brain fills in the scene with this information. That's right, it invents things, creates things, makes stuff up! It doesn't consult you about this, doesn't seek your approval. It just makes its best guess about the nature of the missing information and proceeds to fill in the scene."—Daniel Gilbert (page 90)

"In the early 1950s researchers used technology to counteract eye movements by mounting a tiny slide projector onto a contact lens affixed to the observer’s eye with a suction device. This retinal stabilization technique forces the image to remain still with respect to the eye, even when the eye continues to move. The images, in these experiments, fade away perceptually, because of the lack of neural stimulation."—Susana Martinez-Conde (link)

"My reaction to reading the article was a mixture of incredulity and amazement at the complexity of our biological clocks — and the continuing ability of sleep research to overturn our presumptions. Instead of exposing their subjects' eyes to light, sleep researchers at the Cornell Circadian Rhythm and Sleep Laboratory delivered the light to the skin on the back of the knees. Incredibly, they measured significant changes in the subjects' circadian rhythms as a result of this seemingly innocuous light exposure."—William C. Dement (page 95)

Rollin'

"Songs can have multiple meanings, but to think the author [of Creedence Clearwater Revival's Proud Mary] didn't intentionally reference drugs is like being in a room with an elephant and deciding to close yours eyes and say there's no elephant. It is there. Also, it doesn't matter what the band said or didn't say. There could be a million reasons why he would rather give one answer in an interview rather than another. And Rob (Novi, MI) did you write this straight from DEA headquarters? On your lunch break maybe?"—Karl, Seattle, WA (link)

"With the benefit of hindsight we can now safely say that this opening [for the 1989 Academy Awards show] was the worst fucking idea in the history of the universe. A myopic Carr imagined that a theatrical conceit that barely made sense within the context of a raunchy San Francisco revue would work just as well as the opening of cinema’s most important and self-serious night."—Nathan Rabin (link)

"Steve wanted it to be five or six minutes long at the most, but Allan got nervous and threw in everything but the kitchen sink."—Jo Schuman Silver
"When you see something that doesn't work, by four minutes it's terrible, by five minutes it's outrageous, by eight minutes it's the kiss of death, and by 12 minutes it's the worst thing you've ever seen in your life."—Gilbert Cates (link)

Post-hoc

"The neuroscience supports the claim that self is constructed. For example, Michael Gazzaniga demonstrated that split-brain patients presented with inconsistent visual information would readily confabulate an explanation to reconcile information unconsciously processed with information that was conscious. They would make up a story. Likewise, Oliver Sacks famously reported various patients who could confabulate accounts to make sense of their impairments. Ramachandran describes patients who are paralyzed but deny they have a problem. These are all extreme clinical cases but the same is true of normal people. We can easily spot the inconsistencies in other people’s accounts of their self but we are less able to spot our own, and when those inconsistencies are made apparent by the consequences of our actions, we make the excuse, “I wasn’t myself last night” or “It was the wine talking!” Well, wine doesn’t talk and if you were not your self, then who were you and who was being you?"—Bruce Hood (link)

"The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules) we don't seem to be good at getting. We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion."—Nassim Nicholas Taleb (page xxi)

"This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing— and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness."—Nassim Nicholas Taleb (page 84)

Breezy

"The sea breeze accounts for 70 percent of annual rainfall in the state of Florida. Central Florida is located in a prime spot to receive a sea breeze from both the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. In light wind regimes, two sea breezes typically form. However, prevailing winds can blow these toward one another, forming one intense thunderstorm line down the middle of the state. Thanks to a higher tropical tropopause, Florida's thunderstorms easily grow to heights greater than 10 miles. When coupled with abundant moisture and slow movement, it is not uncommon for Florida thunderstorms to drop four or more inches of rain in less than one hour."—H. Michael Mogil (link)

"Florida is the lightning capital of the United States. Tampa has about 50 cloud-to-ground flashes per square mile per year, the highest of any U.S. location. When coupled with an active, outdoor lifestyle, lightning can be a major killer. Ron Holle, a renowned lightning expert, noted that 74 deaths occurred in Florida during the period from 1998- 2007. Florida ranks fifth in lightning deaths when data is adjusted for population but first in actual fatality numbers."—H. Michael Mogil (link)

"The sea breeze circulation reverses at night and becomes the land breeze. The land becomes cooler than the water and thus the placement of the low and high pressure areas reverse. Locally, when the land breeze encounters the warm Gulf Stream, a line of nocturnal thunderstorms is often observed offshore of the coast."—NOAA (link)

Gay

"All men, to varying degrees, have the ability and desire to form affectionate ties with other men. Women have a corresponding ability and desire to form affectionate ties with other women. Attraction to members of the same sex and expression of that attraction is in no way contrary to or an alternative for attraction to members of the other sex. Homosexuality is an emergent quality of individual selection for same-sex affiliation and has been a part of the human experience, perhaps all primate experience, since its inception."—R.C. Kirkpatrick (link)

"Although homosexuality is a widespread phenomenon, in some societies homosexuals confront repression or ridicule. In parts of the United States, for example, public displays of same-sex affection between men in particular are often looked upon as distasteful or even disgusting. One nationwide exception is the football field, where an extreme measure of rough-and-tumble masculine behavior makes it possible for players to pat each other on the behind, exchange celebratory hugs, and even leap into each other's arms without bringing their sexual orientation into question."—William A. Haviland (link)

"Among the most thoroughly homosexual societies known are the Etoro of New Guinea. As reported by anthropologist Raymond Kelly, the Etoro believe that semen is a precious life-giving fluid which each man possesses in limited supply. Without semen, a man withers and dies. They believe that semen can be acquired only as a gift that one male bestows on another. To ensure that semen is properly distributed and used for worthy social purposes, older Etoro men are expected to transfer their semen to young boys. This is done by penis-to-mouth intercourse (fellatio) between seniors and juniors respectively, who sleep together in a village men’s quarters—a separate large house—from which all females are barred."—Marvin Harris (link)