h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

John Adams is supposed to have said,

"In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress."

You can divide people in two groups:
One that doesn't believe in statistics.
And one that belives you can divide people in two groups

http://youtu.be/bJ2wyFTvMp8

On the statistics question I often tease them about using whole stoiochiometric sets, no 'statisticians' appealing to fractional entities, people for example, need apply.

You can divide people in two groups yep! with a chainsaw

My favorite of late:


There are two kinds of people:
Those that can extrapolate from limited information.

copy/pasted

There are two kinds of people in the world:
Those who think there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t

Only 2 types??????? More like 54 types

nah! only 2
ones who "do it" and ones that say "they CAN do it"

I don;t mind that men are form Mars, or that Women are from Venus. It's the ones who are from uranus hat I worry about.

argh! north of the border Ben Doone and Phil Mc Cavity are already here

I doubt that they're north of *my* border.

There are 10 types of people, those who understand binary numbers and those who don't.

F S

I'm sure there are some types of people whose existence I'm happily in the dark about....

Darkness only lasts so long. As proven by yesterday's eclipse

...a 'trey' formulation:

those who learn from the experience of others;

those who learn only from their own experience;

those who don't learn from experience...





Observation on ground squirrels:

Some, seeing and hearing a vehicle coming, simply stayed where they were and went on doing whatever they'd been doing unless the vehicle stopped, in which case they quickly got under cover.

Some fled in a blind panic away from the roadway.

Some fled in a blind panic across the roadway, in the process developing two additional categories, roadkills and lop-tails.

The loptails were ground squirrels that had their tails run over while crossing the road.

Occasionally one would see one curled up beside the road, cradling its injured member, evidently in great pain.

In a few days, the destroyed part of the tail would be drooping at right angles and then ît would fall away.

The loptails did not learn from experience, but continued fleeing in blind panic across the roadway when affrighted by an oncoming vehicle, though I got a sense with some of them that it was not fear that made them run across the path of oncoming vehicles, but instead, dare-devil bravado.

Speaking of roadkill, I think it was Thursday that I saw a roadkill gator on my way to work. And my reaction was a sad "aww".

The way I felt seeing the occasional shiny black tarantula* with an abdomen somewhat larger than a golf ball turning up occasionally in the California central coast roadkills.

Sad.




*There's also a somewhat smaller hairy black tarantula in the same region.

As I may have mentioned once or twice before: Sometimes there is a fine line between roadkill and street food

I can't stay mad at skwirls for long, especially when are far more destructive in my garden,.

Actually, my fsvorite group of squirrels from that period was an enterprising family that moved into a storm drain on an island in the middle of a moderately busy intersection, drove out the rats in the storm drain and took it over.

I used to watch them sunning themselves, lolling around their storm drain on their traffic island as the cars went by.