from point a to point b

Friday, February 09, 2007

Lets start with beer and see where it takes us...

  • Beer is the world's oldest and most popular alcoholic beverage, selling more than 133 billion litres (35 billion gallons) per year. Sales of beer are four times as much as wine, the second most popular alcoholic beverage. The moderate consumption of alcohol, including beer, is associated with better health and greater longevity than is either abstaining or drinking heavily. Beer, like wine, is hormetic.
  • Hormesis is the term for generally-favorable biological responses to low exposures to toxins and other stressors.
  • A toxin is a poisonous substance produced by living cells or organisms.
  • Deadly nightshade or belladonna (Atropa belladonna) is a well-known perennial shrub, with leaves and berries that are highly toxic. It is in the nightshade family which it shares with potatos, tomatoes, eggplants, tobacco and chili peppers.
  • In The Nightmare Before Christmas, Sally poisons Dr. Finkelstein with deadly nightshade on several occasions. In the film, however, the plant acts as a sedative and is apparently not fatal.
  • In The Nightmare before Christmas, two toys that Jack delivers reference Batman Returns, the film Tim Burton had directing commitments towards at the time. One is an evil duck on wheels, which is the vehicle that the Penguin drives. The other is an evil cat doll, which has the same head as the mascot for Shreck's corporation.
  • Many lauded Batman Returns dark atmosphere and intense characters; however, some others found the film to be overly dark and sadistic; McDonal's marketing tie-ins, including special cups and Happy Meal toys, were protested by parents' groups.
  • The term Happy Meal is also a name given to an Ethernet adapter used in Sun Microsystems machines. The interface name is shown as hme when one views the interfaces via the ifconfig command.
  • Sun Microsystems is derived from the initials for Stanford University Network.
  • In Stanford, at any time, around 50 percent of the graduate population lives on campus. Stanford is home to three housed sororities and seven housed fraternities
  • The terms "Fraternity" and "sorority" (from the Latin words frater and soror, meaning "brother" and "sister" respectively) may be used to describe many social and charitable organizations.
  • Latin remains the official language of Vatican City.
  • Vatican City has the highest per capita crime rate of any nation on earth, more than twenty times higher than that of Italy. In his 2002 report to the pontifical court, Chief Prosecutor Nicola Picardi quoted statistics of 397 civil offenses and 608 penal offenses. Each year, hundreds of tourists fall victim to pickpockets and purse snatchers. The perpetrators, who are also visitors, are rarely caught, with 90% of crimes remaining unsolved.
  • Per capita is a Latin phrase meaning for each head.
  • In many cultures, covering the head is seen as a sign of respect. Often, some or all of the head must be covered and vieled when entering holy places, or places of prayer. For many centuries, women in Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia, have covered their hair as a sign of modesty.
  • Modesty can be controversial. An alternative term for modesty used by some critics is body shame or gymnophobia. Excessive modesty is called prudishness. Excessive immodesty is called exhibitionism.
  • Gymnophobes may experience their fear of nudity before all people, or only certain people, and may regard their fear as irrational. This phobia often arises from a feeling of inadequacy that their bodies are physically inferior, particularly due to comparison with idealized images portrayed in the media.
  • The term Irrational is used to describe thinking and actions which are, or appear to be, less useful or logical than the rational alternatives. These actions tend to be regarded as emotion-driven. There is a clear tendency to view our own thoughts, words, and actions as rational and to see those who disagree as irrational.
  • Emotion is an intense mental state that arises autonomically in the nervous system rather than through conscious effort, and evokes either a positive or negative psychological response. An emotion is often differentiated from a feeling.
  • Feelings are affective states of consciousness, triggered by physiological changes arising from both sensory perceptions and memories in comparison to internally stored norms or ideals.
  • Loss of memory is known as amnesia. There are various types of amnesia. Global Amnesia is total memory loss. This may be a defense mechanism which occurs after a traumatic event and is a common motif in fiction despite being extraordinarily rare in reality. Anterograde amnesia is where new events are not transferred to long-term memory. After the onset of the disorder, the sufferer will not be able to recall events which occurred only moments earlier, once their attention has shifted to something else, some films like Memento, Clean Slate and 50 first Dates, show this type of anmesia. Lacunar Amnesia is the loss of memory about one specific event. It is a type of amnesia that leaves a lacuna (a gap) in the record of memory, this is featured in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Ok, enough for one day, I hope you enjoyed it or at least learned something ;) once again, thank you Wikipedia