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Is there any truth to the story that Heinlein and Hubbard bet over this one? I thought there wasn't.

Whenever he was talking about being hard up he often used to say that he thought the easiest way to make money would be to start a religion."
-- reporter Neison Himmel: quoted in "Bare Faced Messiah"** p.117 from 1986 interview. Himmel shared a room with LRH, briefly, Pasadena, fall 1945.

The incident is stamped indelibly in my mind because of one statement that Ron Hubbard made. What led him to say what he did I can't recall--but in so many words Hubbard said:
"I'd like to start a religion. That's where the money is!"
--Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, "Over My Shoulder: Reflections on a Science Fiction Era", pages 125 and 126

http://www.urbanlegends.com/le gal /pi_indiana.html

From: snyary@life.timeinc.com (Sasha Nyary )
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Penguins in the Falklands
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 1997 18:06:13 -0500

I didn't see this on the UL Website, and I don't read this newsgroup often, so forgive me if this story is an old one. I recently got taken in by it and thought it was worth sharing. It's a great yarn -- too bad it's not true.

Here's the story, followed by the rebuttal:

Penguins and Pilots (supposedly from the Audubon Society magazine)

A Mexican newspaper reports that bored Royal Air Force pilots stationed on the Falkland Islands have devised what they consider a marvelous new game. Noting that the local penguins are fascinated by airplanes, the pilots search out a beach where the birds are gathered and fly slowly along it at the water's edge. Perhaps ten thousand penguins turn their heads in unison watching the planes go by, and when the pilots turn around and fly back, the birds turn their heads in the opposite direction, like spectators at a slow-motion tennis match. Then, the paper reports, "The pilots fly out to sea and return directly toward the penguin colony and over-fly it. Heads go up, up, up, and ten thousand penguins fall over gently onto their backs."

Captain Claire Lucas, RAF public relations officer in the Falkland Islands:

According to Captain Lucas, who laughed and said this is a great story but not true, this is one of those legendary tales that gets passed around and resurfaces periodically. She's heard the story before. She says the Penguins actually hate the noise and scatter as the planes approach the beach.

LeoC - posting as an AC because /. doesn't let me login anymore.

I'm sorry, but you're wrong. Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. Bill Gates never said that; it's just used by people jealous of his success.

(This is why windowpanes in very old houses are thicker at the bottom. Really.)

Windows in old buildings are thicker at the bottom because builders found it easier to put the heavier, thicker ends of uneven panes of glass at the bottom rather than the top. Clever, huh?

See www.urbanlegends.com

• Science/Glass Flow/glass flow the thread
• Science/Glass Flow/debunking cites ian

(This is why windowpanes in very old houses are thicker at the bottom. Really.)

Windows in old buildings are thicker at the bottom because builders found it easier to put the heavier, thicker ends of uneven panes of glass at the bottom rather than the top. Clever, huh?

See www.urbanlegends.com

• Science/Glass Flow/glass flow the thread
• Science/Glass Flow/debunking cites ian

As a side note, Chevrolete had a hard time selling the Chevy Nova in Latin America. Someone finnaly realised that Nova or "No Va" means "It Doesn't Go".

I used to think that as well, but I found out recently that it's an urban legend. The Chevy Nova sold well in Latin America, and "Nova" has a colloquial meaning as "new" (think "bossa nova," whatever that means).

The only problem is that no linguist who has done any serious experimentation on the subject has been able to support Sapir-Whorf to any reasonable degree. Furthermore, they pretty much managed to undermine their own argument: in saying that an Inuit might have one word for snow lying on the ground, and another for snow falling, for example, you can see that we don't need a specific lexeme to grok the difference between falling snow and lying snow.

With that in mind, I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that language ain't got much to do with it. Maybe our keyboards would look different, and we'd all having Unicode native operating systems - which, now that I think about it, would be pretty damn cool - but I don't see that programming languages would be otherwise greatly affected.

Nova means "star" in Spanish; nobody would confuse it for "no va". The Chevy Nova sold well in Spanish-speaking countries.

A wise man one said that 640k would be enough for anyone :-)

No, he didn't. Sorry.

Check out http://www.urbanlegends .com/products/chevy_nova_mexico.html

Actually, it's 79%:
http://www.jatox.com/abstr acts/1996/jul-aug/213-cone.htm
Here as well:
Urba nLegends

An urban legend.

Of course, he could just be covering his ass, but have you ever seen an actual source of the quote?

Actually, the "Hitler was a vegetarian" thing isn't quite true.
--
-jacob

You're thinking of Captain Pugwash, a BBC program, and it isn't true.
From Urban Legends...

There is a character referred to as Mister Mate, but that's about it.

That Bill Gates quote appears to be an urban legend.

>glass is a liquid which flows over
> centuries rather than minutes.

[snip]

1) Obsidian knives in Egyptian tombs are still razor sharp. Is 5000 years in desert heat longer than "centuries?" And with a tight radius of curvature at the start, too.

2) Obsidian cliffs are still up there, under lots of pressure, for some millions of years. Where's the ooze?

3) But wait! The foregoing is all bullshit because it happens over such large unobserved periods of time! No problem. Take some
sodalime glass, heat it with a propane torch to soften, stress it but don't anneal. When returned to room temp, place between crossed polarizers. You can now QUANTITATIVELY measure the internal strain by the birefringence evidenced by the colored lines. Take a picture - it's hundreds of psi. Put it on your keychain for safe keeping, wait a year, take another photo of the birefringence. No change, bozo. And that is a lot smaller than flow. Say it softly... TEMPERED
GLASS. So sad.

4) Glass fiberoptic strands don't deform over decades. Their exquisite sensitivity to geometry, flaws, and stress birefringence is real time up your nose.

A rebuttal to the myth (there are many). There's no such language as "Eskimo," and, like the fish in the proverbial fish story, the number of snow words tends to grow with each retelling.

The URL is http://www.urbanlegends.com/

and Fermats last theorem info

As to the theorem itself -
There are no positive integers such that x^n + y^n = z^n for n>2.
I've found a remarkable proof of this fact, but there is not enough space in the margin [of the book] to write it

To summarize the Urban Legends site, Andrew Wiles has tried two different approaches, both of which have significant shortcomings, and both of which are into very esoteric realms of mathematics. The summary starts Both manuscripts have been published. Thousands of people have a read them. About a hundred understand it very well.

For further information, apply to the Annals of Mathematics or Urbanlegends.com

This has been a test of the Slashdot Broadcast Network . . .

The URL is http://www.urbanlegends.com/

and Fermats last theorem info

As to the theorem itself -
There are no positive integers such that x^n + y^n = z^n for n>2.
I've found a remarkable proof of this fact, but there is not enough space in the margin [of the book] to write it

To summarize the Urban Legends site, Andrew Wiles has tried two different approaches, both of which have significant shortcomings, and both of which are into very esoteric realms of mathematics. The summary starts Both manuscripts have been published. Thousands of people have a read them. About a hundred understand it very well.

For further information, apply to the Annals of Mathematics or Urbanlegends.com

This has been a test of the Slashdot Broadcast Network . . .

The hoax part could be pretty simple like this: cross-reference with the 5 best sites listing and explaining hoaxes, then add to the first lines of the mail (this could be shared as a joke too) that this is a hoax and not to be takes seriously and few links to sites explaining the hoax. It would require some intelligence to detect variations of a theme. Since we have language barriers it's next to impossible start judging the senders intentions so it's not good to just delete the mail outright.

Few sites:

• http://www.urbanlegends.com/ (exellent)
• http://www.Europe.F-Secure.com/viru s-info/hoax/ (focuses on viruses, very good/exellent)
• http://www.scambusters.com/ (good)
• http://www.urbanmyths.com/ (worth checking)
• http://www.nonprofit.net/hoax/ (usable)
• http://urbanlegends.about.com/ c ulture/urbanlegends/ (not so good)

Spam doesn't have the language problem (it's mainly english anyways) but it is certainly hard to recognize without some kind of AI (spammers will surely come around any simple script).

It would be good if this could be implemented as some kind of plugin/API so that any mailserver could use with as little variation as possible.

This would be ultra cool and nail the goddam spammers for good, it would also significantly reduce damage from hoaxes and even (hopefully) educate the masses of hoaxes (by telling what they are).

I sure hope no one thinks Beta died just because it didn't have enough dirty movies for its format.

A much better and more accurate rundown of Beta's rise and fall is available here.

The "urban myths" link you pointed has got to be wrong. Why would any movie company have to approach JVC or Sony to get permission to release movies on VHS or Betamax? JVC's and Sony's licensing schemes don't work like that! You need a license to manufacture VCRs or tapes for their format, not to release movies! I could pick up a few spanking new DVHS decks and a truckload of blank tapes and start cranking out my own DVHS porno movies and I certainly don't need Philips's or JVC's permission to do so.

One thing the link may be right about is the picture quality differences between the formats and the different tape lengths. But it conveniently leaves out an important detail...

The standard recording speed on VHS is SP and runs at 3.33cm/s. The standard recording speed on Beta is BII and runs at only 2cm/s. The picture quality is the same, yes, but Beta is able to record the same picture quality with less tape!

And about the tape lengths... A VHS T-120 is two hours long on SP, but while Beta L-750 tapes advertised only 90 minutes recording time on the BI speed, remember that BII is the standard, which doubles the tape length to three hours. Which is the "inferior technology" with the "shorter tape length" now??

The longest tape length for VHS available during the '80s (when the two formats were sparring) was a T-160, which gives 2 hours and 40 minutes. The longest Beta tape was an L-830, which gave 3 hours and 20 minutes.

Of course, this was only good for prerecorded tapes. If you wanted to squeeze as much material on a tape as possible, you could switch a VHS machine to EP and record 6 hours (T-120) or 8 hours (T-160). But a Beta could only drop down to BIII and get 4.5 hours (L-750) or 5 hours (L-830).

This makes me wonder why Beta used the same 1:1, 1:2, 1:3 ratios for tape speeds as VHS did. It would have made more sense to use 1:1, 1:2, and 1:4. With the slowest tape speed four times slower than the fastest, it would be able to fit 6 hours on an L-750 and 6 hours and 40 minutes on an L-830. Although the longest Beta tape length still wouldn't beaten the longest VHS tape length, it would have at least stood a better chance, due to the "standard" tape lengths (T-120 and L-750) being much more prevalent.

It's worth noting, as long as anyone is still reading this long-winded discussion about tape lengths, that in order to fit more tape into a cassette once the reels are full, the tape must be made thinner. The "original" VHS tapes were T-120s like we have today, and the tape was made thinner to make a T-160. The tape thickness of an L-750 is the same as that of a T-160, and considering that thinner tape is more prone to stretching, crinkling, and breaking, one can see that Beta tapes really couldn't get much longer. An L-1000 Beta tape (4 hours on BII, max. 6 hours on BIII to match a T-120) has finally been invented and can be bought from Absolute Beta, but it's only used by hobbyists.

Also, in case anyone cares, here's the deal with why that Beta machine in your closet or attic only does BII and BIII but not BI: Sony doesn't want you to record on BI because that think that will make the tapes look too short. Originally, BI was the standard, but when RCA and JVC rolled out VHS's LP and EP speeds in the late '70s, Sony knew they'd have to do something. Remember that video cassettes were really expensive then. So, in 1979, Sony decided that BII was the new standard and that all commercial Beta videos should be recorded in that speed. BI recording capability was discontinued. It was later reintroduced in a slightly evolved as "BIs" form on the higher-end SuperBeta machines in starting in 1986, and later in a further-evolved form called BI-SHB (Super Hi-Band) so as to appeal to power users. The only real difference was that its pre-emphasis/de-emphasis curve now matched that of BII and BIII.

Anyway, that was pretty long-winded, wasn't it? But this discussion of tape speeds and like always fascinates me.

Anyway, I'm afraid I don't have any hard proof about the picture quality except my word and everyone else's. However, I can say that given the business with the "standard" tape speed for each format (SP (1:1) and BII (1:2)), try seeing if material recorded in LP (1:2) matches BII (1:2). I've tried, and I can say that it definitely isn't as good. As for BI/BIs/BI-SHB (1:1) vs. SP (1:1), I can say that I was able to copy a segment of a DVD to my Beta machine in BIs, and picture quality looked almost as good as that of the original disc! Using BII (which we have established is practically equal to VHS's SP), the picture looked a little grainy and colour reproduction wasn't as faithful. Well, then, I guess I know what the outcome of a BIs vs. SP comparison would be. I'll have to try a real DVD to VHS SP copy sometime, of course...

Well, that's quite a lot I've written. I thank you if you're still reading. And if you were one of ones who bought VHS in the '80s and sneered at your Beta-using friends, don't worry. Even if you disagree with all that I've written, there's no need to defend VHS's honour. It won the format wars! That's all I have to say about that! (I was a VHS user in the '80s who sneered at Beta users, but in 1990 I got a Beta machine at a garage sale, and I got converted. Rather bad timing though, eh?)

I don't know if I want to post all this, but I might as well since I've taken the time to write it...

Well, Einstein did do very poorly in mathematics (possibly failing, don't recall) until his (uncle?) tutored him in Algebra and showed him the "interesting" side of solving problems with Math rather than rote memorization...

Sigh. No, he didn't. That's the legend. Look here.

--

Greetings New User! Be sure to replace this text with a

It seems that net hoaxes are now reaching the level of urban legends -- you know, the "my brother's friend told me this true story.... that KFC chicken has chemicals that sterilize black men", etc.

An excellent book to read if you're interested in urban legends is I Heard It through the Grapevine by Patricia Turner, a folklore sociologist. Even if you don't read the book, read the blurb on Amazon.

Another interesting web site to visit is AFU Urban Legends.com. They have pretty much every one listed.

The interesting thing about net hoaxes is that the chain mail ones are semi-participatory. That is, action taken actually (is supposed to) results in something happening, i.e. getting a free PC or cargo pants or whatever.

I wonder how soon it'll be before someone invents an intelligent filter that removes these from mailboxes as well as SPAM. This to me would be one of the really useful uses of AI technology. I have so many clueless relatives and "friends".....

Karen

or at least pretty damn close to it...

or at least pretty damn close to it...

Betamax died because, when it and VHS first started competing in the late '70s, blank videotapes were very expensive, and the first Beta tapes (L-500) were only one hour long while the first VHS tapes (T-120) were two hours long. One hour just wasn't long enough for movies or many TV recording applications. Both formats had only one tape speed when they started, but even when the 2:1 (LP on VHS and BII on Beta) and 3:1 (EP and BIII) speeds were introduced, VHS still had longer recording times (6 hours on a T-120 vs. 4.5 hours for Beta on an L-750 -- simple mathematics). Maybe it would have been smarter if Beta's slowest tape speed offered 4:1 compression instead of 3:1, as then it would have equalled VHS's recording time.

It's a very common myth that "Sony did not license Beta." Beta was as much open standard as was VHS. It's just that it didn't have as many licensees as VHS, and Sony was always the dominant maker of Beta machines. Third-party makers of Betamax VCRs included: Sanyo (remember the "Betacords"?), NEC, Zenith, Toshiba, Marantz, Sears, Pioneer, Realistic, and Aiwa. Of all the Betas sold, 76% were by Sony. Sanyo was the next most popular with 11%.

A better analysis of the home videotape format wars can be found here.

A short history of the Beta format and a list of the licensees and most popular models can be found here.

Glass does not "flow".

Really, you could look it up if you wanted, but the usual citation against the slow flow of glass is old ground and polished lenses. Accuracy of these lenses is measured in fractions of a light wave front, so if a 500 year old window shows visually perceptable flow, certainly it would show up in a 100-200 year old lens?

It hasn't happened yet.

See the FAQ for more details.

A Very Long Time(tm).

There's quite a lot of information at http://www.urbanlegends.com/science /glass .flow/ that suggests glass flow is indeed a myth.

What Unix _is_, is a system of tools which have been refined for 30+ years....New doesn't mean better, and in many cases, it can mean untested or unproven.

Fundamentally, Unix hasn't changed much since sockets and TCP/IP support were added to 4.2 BSD, because it's a highly optimal solution for running a bunch of different stuff at the same time on one machine. Yes, a few neat modifications like loadable kernel modules have come along, but today's Unix would still be largely familiar to a programmer from 15 years ago. Can the same be said of Windows, or MacOS?

In 1897, the state of Indiana nearly passed a bill decreeing that Pi is equal to 3.2 (it also said that sqrt(2) = 10/7). The bill unanimously passed the state House of Representatives (on a vote of 67-0), and went from there to the Senate. First it was referred to the Committee on Temperance, apparently as a joke, and the committee recommended approval. Then there was a floor debate in the Senate, full of puns and ridicule, in which all of the Senators who spoke admitted their ignorance on the merits of the bill. Importantly, they didn't kill it because it was a mathematical falsehood, but because the Senators thought they shouldn't be writing a law about something like that.

There's a story about it on the urban legends site. Evidently, a crank mathematician named Dr. Edwin J. Goodwin M.D. "discovered" this new fact about Pi, and offered to let Indiana use it in their school textbooks without royalties if they passed the law. His state Representative bought into it and introduced the bill.

I wonder if Kansas has any plans these days concerning Pi? :-)

In 1897, the state of Indiana nearly passed a bill decreeing that Pi is equal to 3.2 (it also said that sqrt(2) = 10/7). The bill unanimously passed the state House of Representatives (on a vote of 67-0), and went from there to the Senate. First it was referred to the Committee on Temperance, apparently as a joke, and the committee recommended approval. Then there was a floor debate in the Senate, full of puns and ridicule, in which all of the Senators who spoke admitted their ignorance on the merits of the bill. Importantly, they didn't kill it because it was a mathematical falsehood, but because the Senators thought they shouldn't be writing a law about something like that.

There's a story about it on the urban legends site. Evidently, a crank mathematician named Dr. Edwin J. Goodwin M.D. "discovered" this new fact about Pi, and offered to let Indiana use it in their school textbooks without royalties if they passed the law. His state Representative bought into it and introduced the bill.

I wonder if Kansas has any plans these days concerning Pi? :-)

Don't believe me? In Indiana, they (almost) did...

Silly americans

The world would be a little boring if everything that we shall ever invent has already been invented.

This was supposedly said by the U.S. Patent Office over a century ago. However, it appears to be an urban legend.

Augh!!!!!

Pulling out the plans for the Saturn V would be quite a trick. Supposedly all the mechanical drawings and all existing tool and die setups for building Saturn V's were destroyed on orders from Nixon as a political favor - to ensure that NASA got funding for the Shuttle.

Supposedly, a semi-intelligent /. reader could use something called the World Wide Web to research an urban legend before posting it. The plans for Saturn V exist on microfilm. The tool and die setups may have been destroyed, but how many tools and die setups from other products of the 1960's still exist?

To summarize from the sci.space.FAQ, the microfilm plans exist, the launch pad and Vehicle Assembly Building have been converted to shuttle use, and much of the specialized hardware (they mention guidance equipment) would have to be built from scratch.

George

That's an urban legend.

http://www.urbanlegends.com/ulz/xema iltax.html

Don

The AFU FAQ Shows this as False

No. The bit about the helicopter rescue is untrue. Read this.

I know Jon K. was kidding, but its an urban legend that Walt Disney is frozen. AFU (and "Ask Cecil") put that one to rest a while ago.

For myself, I resolve to stop making resolutions.

-FreshGroundPepper

(Yes this is sort of off-topic, but the geek in me can't let this slide without saying something :)

But that's irrelevant to most of us because most of us don't speak Spanish and didn't know the Spanish meaning of the word. Deborah and Ian, who created Deb-Ian (geddit?) probably didn't know either.

Personally, I think Debian is a rather cute name. Before I checked out the distros for my second Linux installation (the first was Slackware), I already had a more positive attitude to Debian than Red Hat, simply because I liked the name better.
--

It seems that's an urban legend. See the article on the Urban Legends site for an extended history of this idea, and an essay speculating on how this idea came to be "common knowledge". There's also an excerpt from Who Stole Feminism analyzing the political uses of this legend in activism against domestic violence.

This anti-domestic violence page repeats the legend uncritically and gives a date (1767) for this supposed law, but provides no further cite. This might be a reference to Blackstone's famous legal commentaries, which were published around that time; he does talk about the history of common-law rights for a husband to "correct" a wife, but he doesn't seem to mention thumbs.

And of course Disney's crowning failure came at the very end of his life. The attendant physicians misunderstood his last request, and (alas) instead of preserving his magnificant brain, we now have "Disney on Ice!"

Disney was fried, not frozen -- this is one of many urban legends surrounding Disney and his creations.

The famous line from John F. Kennedy's Berlin speech is as follows:

Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was "civis Romanus sum." Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is "Ich bin ein Berliner."

...according to http://www.historyplace.com/speec hes/berliner.htm. The German phrase could be interpreted as either "I am a citizen of Berlin" or "I am a jelly doughnut". Those listening knew perfectly well that he meant the former, although "Ich bin Berliner" (no "ein") would be more grammatically accurate. This is briefly explained at http://www.urbanle gends.com/language/kennedy_berliner_quote.html.

For that matter, so does Babel Fish. InterTran translates Ich bin Berliner as "I am doughnut" and Ich bin ein Berliner as "I am one doughnut" -- not too swift. At least it handles a ton more languages than Babel Fish does (even Japanese with Shift JIS encoding to some extent).

And you don't have to always have English as a language being translated to or from, either.

What gets reported in the media has more to do with our prejudices than with the prejudices of those present or the actual facts.

This is similar to how rumors spread. Rumors don't spread based on how much factual basis there is for them. Instead they spread based on how much they resonate. People want to believe that the criminals are part of marginalized groups. So the coincidence of clothing makes them "trench coat mafia". It makes them gay. People want to believe that they are bad people, out to target a group. But they hit a lot of different people so they are targeting blacks, Christians, and jocks. (Hmmm...between those groups you can "explain" a *lot* of deaths.)

And people don't want to ask questions. So articles to the contrary (for instance the Rolling Stones article that someone mentioned) get ignored. This one will as well - it does not make good copy.

These are phenomena familiar to all members of disliked minorities. But people really don't want to think about that. And so we accumulate a few more urban legends...

Regards,
Ben

The Dvorak keyboard is an alternative layout, not a superior one.

F. Russian/Chinese mechanical translator translates "out of sight, out of mind" into "blind and insane". Also "Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" as "the drink is good but the meat is rotten."

Not that I saw! And you didn't even have the guts to sign it.

Let me take this bit by bit.

There is no proof that Evoltion is true.

You cannot even spell Evolution! As for evidence, you did look in the FAQs that were pointed to above?

Darwin himself later in life admitted that he was wrong.

The infamous Lady Hope story. Known to be a lie.

There is only evolution with in a class.

It seems that you have a common confusion about what macroevolution is and isn't.

Every "ape man" ever found has been proved wrong. The bones that they found where hundreds of feet even miles apart and in different layers of the earth.

You clearly don't have a clue what you are talking about. In a word, "Lucy".

In evolution you only evolve to have what you need. So since we don't need a third arm that is why we don't have a third arm. Well then how come we only use 10% of our brain. Why did we "evolve" to have such a big brain?

Warning, warning, urban legend alert! Do do have a reference?

If Evolution is real then there would be hundreds even thousands of transition fossils and yet there isn't even one!

Funny, the scientists seem to think otherwise.

Evolution is a theory and all it takes is one thing to prove it wrong and then it should thrown out. There are to many things that prove evolution to be wrong and not enough to back it up.

May I hold Creationism to the same standard?

To me it is easier to beleive that a living God made the earth and it didn't just happen. Have you ever seen a tornado go through a junk yard and assemble a perfectly working car. No! So what makes you think that something as big and complex as the earth and every living thing on it can happen by chance.

And that is a straw-man argument.

If you just look around you you will see that there is someone out there that is bigger than each and everyone of us. Just open your eyes and you will see.

Is closing my eyes also a pre-requisite? So far your batting average is pretty darned pathetic...

Sincerely,
Ben Tilly

Urbanlegends.com, of course, has the story.

The guilty state was Indiana. (however, we doubt the Oracle was consulted...)

--
Repton.