fun facts for the next time someone asks

Three Men Make a Tiger: People will believe anything if enough people tell them it’s true. It comes from a Chinese proverb that if one person tells you there’s a tiger roaming around your neighborhood, you can assume they’re lying. If two people tell you, you begin to wonder. If three say it’s true, you’re convinced there’s a tiger in your neighbor... See more

Buridan’s Ass : A thirsty donkey is placed exactly midway between two pails of water. It dies because it can’t make a rational decision about which one to choose. A form of decision paralysis.

Cobra Effect: Attempting to solve a problem makes that problem worse. Comes from an Indian story about a city infested with snakes offering a bounty for every dead cobra, which caused entrepreneurs to start breeding cobras for slaughter.

A bibliophagist is a devourer of books.

There is no formula, scoring system or checklist. One thing to remember is that it is not our intent to honor the dead; we leave the tributes to the eulogists. We seek only to report deaths and to sum up lives, illuminating why, in our judgment, those lives were significant. The justification for the obituary is in the story it tells.

Anscombe’s Quartet : Four sets of numbers that look identical on paper (mean average, variance, correlation, etc.) but look completely different when graphed. Describes a situation where exact calculations don’t offer a good representation of how the world works.

Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

Weasel Words : Phrases that appear to have meaning but convey nothing tangible. “Growth was solid last quarter,” or “Many people believe.”

According to data from Forbes, there were 2,781 billionaires worldwide as of March. The combined net worth of U.S. billionaires totals $5.7 trillion, more than any other country. China’s billionaires rank second, worth $1.3 trillion, and India’s billionaires rank third at $954 billion.

The first time the word “podcast” appeared in print (alongside “podcasting”) was on Oct 14 2004 in The Los Angeles Times, and taken up by The New York Times, on Oct 28 2004.