More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 23 - November 25, 2023
I believe we should all be cultivating a healthy Rough Corner in our minds. A small nook at the back of the brain that ensures we never fail to get goosebumps when we’re told a mad-as-hell idea, no matter how batshit it may be.
R.A.W. Would approve
However, I know it’s not up to me what you’ll make of all these theories, no matter how much I warn you against them. Any idea you connect with that helps make sense of your place in this universe can develop into an unstoppable force.
which is that no matter where you look in this world, you can guarantee that something bizarre, improbable, and unexplained is going on.
Feel that coincidences have meaning?
Yes, i feel sorry for people who don't, I mean, what a boring way to live
Imagine if The Celestine Prophecy had set up its own Hogwarts and made The Secret author Rhonda Byrne headmistress.
The trifecta
Steiner was not a good guy,
Naming just his last name here, I can't think of anything but the prowrestler Scott Steiner. His "percentages" promo is so funny!!!!
top marks in History for a presentation I decided to give on how the secret passages below the Great Pyramids of Giza were said to contain ancient crystal computers from the lost city of Atlantis.
(he was a huge advocate and frequent user of LSD), and the questionable practices—like including random irrelevant images of naked women in his slide shows when lecturing on scientific topics.
Just giving his colleagues some good mammaries
This might account for why the term “PCR” has become recognised in households globally, but the name Kary Mullis hasn’t. He was too controversial to promote.
Nobelitis, or the Nobel Disease, is a condition whereby the recipient of the prize suddenly feels they’re an expert on things they know next to nothing about.
number 137 to show them we’re of a higher intelligence. “It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics,” wrote Feynman. “A magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man.” It’s the number that many physicists believe might hold the key to cracking the theory of everything and explaining the universe.*
It's not 42????
one group of scientists concocted a stunt to hoax Pauli into believing he was the causer of chaos by rigging a chandelier to fall from the ceiling as soon as he walked into the room. However, when he arrived, the mechanism built to drop the chandelier got stuck, and the prank failed—further proving his effect.
This is like reading something out of hitchhiker guide to the galaxy
when he died after a short illness at the Rotkreuz hospital in Zurich, in room number 137.
Fitting
In the poem that Tu’s father took her name from, the bleating deer is chewing on a single plant. Of all the tens of thousands of different species that plant could have been, it just so happens that the one the deer is seen to be eating is the exact same plant that Tu would go on to discover to be the cure for malaria: the qinghao.
It is a little-known fact that the reason Ringo Starr is such a unique drummer is because as a young boy his grandmother performed multiple exorcisms on him.
Eligibles, who in 1959 released a song called “Car Trouble,” which, when played backwards, revealed the nonsense garble to be “And you can get my daughter back by 10:30, you bum!” and “Now, lookit here, cats, stop running these records backwards.”
Great trivia
“Made by John Lennon.” “It’s impossible,” said Paul. And how could it be anything but? What are the chances that a completely randomly chosen bit of audio, played backwards, would form a coherent set of words, let alone result in the person saying their own name?*
From the song Free as a bird, which I only vaguely recall, what a great story. The part about the peacock hits hard for me as we had a similar thing with a robin after our dog died. While I was digging her grave, this robin hung out with me the whole time never farther away then a couple feet. This was quite a long time as the digging was slow due to all the tree roots. More astonishing, for the next few days anytime I was outside the house this robin (with this unatural behaviour, so I assumed the same one) would be close by.
this album special is that each of the pieces is unique, in that none of them appear in any other catalogues of published works by these composers. This is because all of the composers wrote these pieces long after they had died.
ChatGTP before was it was cool
although it was thought highly unlikely that testimony by ouija would be accepted by the court. If this had happened, however, it would have been a game-changing moment on every level. Imagine the ghost of Mark Twain successfully testifying to a jury, who, let’s remember, were living in a time when spiritualism was hugely popular, and many believed it possible to communicate with the dead.
It would certainly "liven" up the court proceedings
The spirit of Dickens told Doyle that he hadn’t. However, the spirit of Dickens suggested that James wasn’t making it all up, and that he had channelled another spirit who had pranked him by posing as Dickens.
It wasn’t the first time Doyle had been engaged in one form or another at the venue—in 1901 he had been there as a judge for the world’s first-ever bodybuilding contest,
Great trivia. No suit Sherlock
phenomenon known as the “third man.” The third man is the idea that in moments of great trauma, a spirit, an entity, a presence of some sort will arrive to provide comfort.
The Third Man Factor by Canadian author John Geiger, who claims that it’s not just experienced by explorers but has been reported by many other people, such as those rushing out of the Twin Towers on 9/11. Geiger points out that it’s a sort of positive hallucination that actively gives us support. It’s as if our brain has worked out that in times of extreme peril we need someone beside us, so we very literally conjure up an imaginary friend to help us survive, or rather comfortingly, see us through to the end.
surgeon Joseph Henry Green. I believe Green achieved something wholly original with his last word. He became the first person in history to pronounce themselves dead. As he lay dying in his bed, Green placed his fingers on his wrist, monitoring his slowing pulse. As the last throb came and went, Green said “Stopped,” and then promptly died.
What a control freak
But I think my friend was a bit unnerved to discover that despite all his rationalism, somewhere within him he held the belief that his actions were going to affect the outcome of the game.
Once he discovered this, Agassi’s biggest challenge was to avoid Becker spotting what he was doing. “I had to resist the temptation of reading his serve for the majority of the match and choose the moment when I was gonna use that information on a given point to execute a shot that would allow me to break the match open,”
Like the dilema when the allies cracked the nazi's code
the counterculture guru Robert Anton Wilson
I'm so glad he's mentioned in the book
Alan Watts, “One would expect at any moment to come across a Mahatma or a high Lama visiting England on a secret mission to feel out potential initiates for the Great White Lodge, and who might arrange for you to be whisked off to an unknown sanctuary in Bhutan.”
She predicted that Neanderthals were redheads.
With no soul she added gingerly
Atlantic, leaving four survivors on a lifeboat. In order to survive, the crew were forced to kill and eat one of their members. His name was Richard Parker.
I read about this in another book about strange facts. And someone should name a snack company Richard Parker. I mean there's the meal replacement company named Soylant so....
Teller went on to a career in magic, and, along with Penn Jillette, created Penn and Teller.
The best
Titan measuring 880 feet, while the Titanic was 882.5 feet;
I C dead people -he had The Sixth Sense writting it.
“It is extraordinarily difficult for most people to grasp the fact that some improbable events are extremely probable, and in some cases absolutely certain.”
“This is the ark,” he’d tell people. “That’s my story, and I’m going to stick to it.”
It's his story ark
Another clever idea came from the architect Charles Smith, who in 1914 proposed attaching electromagnets to a submarine, thereby letting the Titanic do the work of drawing in the submarine.
Is this an editing error? This sounds more like a way to find the Titanic not raise it
The average volume of a human being is 0.062m³,
I like this, we're always thinking in terms of height and weight with people. Of course it's easier to find these measurements with simple tools. I imagine finding the volume of a person would be a little trickier
If we were hit today by another flare the size of the one in 1859, scientists claim it would cause up to $2 trillion of damage by crippling communications, from which it would take us four to ten years to recover.
And as time goes on, more and more tech gets added to the mix increasing the potential damage costs
It is widely argued that had the Titanic been travelling at a slower speed, the collision with the iceberg would have opened up fewer watertight compartments, which would have meant that the ship, though completely wrecked, wouldn’t have sunk.
The coal's note edition
Armstrong and Watson combed through medical data from a period spanning seven years and noticed that there had been a decline in cases of patients reporting lice.
Combed? LOL
it ended up being done on an office desk with everything pushed off.
Like a sex scene
each harbouring the lice on their bodies for a period of two to three weeks at a time, before picking out some of the lice and giving them to the next volunteer via a jar, for them to be infected with the species
A jar? Where's the fun in that?
Dr. John C. Lilly
The O.G. Ketamine, isolation tank psychonaut
was actually co-authored with a collection of “plant people,” who dictated their parts of the book to her.
SwampThing
Gagliano started talking to plants after a series of lucid dreams led her to Peru, where she spent time with shamans doing the hallucinogenic ayahuasca, as well as other spiritual practices.
Way ahead of that wave
In 2000 a fishing trawler was spotted on the ocean floor in a site known as Witch’s Hole. (I was most disappointed to discover that “Ship sunk by massive fart from Witch’s Hole” isn’t a headline to be found anywhere online.)
say as part of a hip replacement or from any other reconstruction—the metals are then collected afterwards from the ashes and sent off to be recycled for further use. Some of those metals will often end up being used to make new aeroplane parts,
Certainly puts the kibosh on the whole ghost theory from the replacement parts from the crashed plane
There’s a theory that the reason life on Earth began is because billions of years ago some aliens pit-stopped on our ancient planet for a picnic, and then didn’t tidy up properly after themselves.
Makes me think of the Farside cartoon where a baby alien is playing with blocks and a bigger alien is saying "it's time to go." Of course the blocks are Stonehenge
THE ORIGIN OF FAECES
His humour is truly evolutionary
which was this: UFOs aren’t the vehicles, but are the aliens themselves.
Oh wow, I forgot about this idea. We had a comicbook when I was a kid and I have a vague memory that one of the tales was like that. I think it was more akin to living clouds then metal things
“They don’t shapeshift. They just alter your vision so you think they’re human beings.”
Rowdy Piper wants you to put the sun glasses on.
