Miscellanea

-- Did you ever wonder how many clicks it takes to officially wear out a Lego brick? Probably not, but Phillipe Cantin did, and he built a robot to find out by putting two bricks together and taking them apart, over and over again. After 37,112 joinings and separations, the two bricks would no longer hold to each other. Cantin notes that they would, however, still click together with an unworn brick, so they were not entirely useless.

-- Back in 1866, Arthur Martine wrote a book called Martine's Hand-Book of Etiquette, and Guide to True Politeness. In it, he includes the following suggestion:

“In disputes upon moral or scientific points, ever let your aim be to come at truth, not to conquer your opponent. So you never shall be at a loss in losing the argument, and gaining a new discovery.”

If this bit of advice were to take hold, we would lose all of Fox News after 7 PM, all of MSNBC during the same time frame and at several points during the day, Salon.com, The Nation, the website Newsbusters, Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, the Daily Kos, 75% of what my friends post on Facebook and most (but not nearly enough) of Twitter. I'm trying to find the downside, because I'm sure there has to be one.

-- If you ask most folks why movie reboots/remakes fail, they will have a simple answer: Because they stink. Different words may sub in for the verb in that sentence, but the idea is the same. A writer at io9.com thinks that's a little too circular of an explanation and so he offers eight reasons. They're kind of clever, but they basically boil down to eight different facets of "Because they stink." Sometimes Occam's razor really does work.