The new laws will also apply to astrologers and driving instructors.

It seems that in the early 1940s Life magazine filled the niche that I Can Has Cheezburger currently occupies. So while it’s true that the Internet makes you stupid, it’s not exactly without precedent.

Arika Okrent’s In the Land of Invented Languages offers an overview of the history of artificial languages (Esperanto, Lojban, Klingon, etc.). I’m pretty sure that anyone who likes my blog would enjoy it. *cough* Julia.

I was originally going to do a well-researched write-up of this situation, but honestly I can’t phrase it any better than Andrei Codrescu, so I’ll just quote him verbatim:

There is still a Lenin statue in Kalmykia. After the death of communism and leninism, Kalmykia’s dictator, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, a bona fide Grand Master of Chess [and current FIDE president], conceived of the idea of lifting his desert people in Southern Russia from poverty into 20th-centry affluence by means of chess. Like a Pharoah using the entire country’s resources, he built Chess City in Elista, the capital, to host a World Tournament of Chess. The teaching of chess was made obligatory for all school grades, and chairs of chess were established at the university. He intended, as he told a journalist, to make chess “the religion” of the Kalmyk people. The Kalmyk religion is Tibetan Buddhism, and the Kalmyk lamas are appointed directly by the Dalai Lama, who visited Kalmykia in the 1990s. For six decades of Soviet rule, Buddhism was dismissed as a superstition, but the religion revived with great fervor after the USSR dissolved. Ilyumzhinov’s effort to replace both communism and Buddhism with the religion of chess was met with derision, but that response was quickly silenced by the brutal suppression of critics. Lenin’s birthplace, after the death of leninism, rose from the ashes as a dictatorship of chess.

- The Posthuman Dada Guide

If you didn’t get the idea, Kirsan Nikolayevich Ilyumzhinov is crazy.

In 1758, he planned an addition to the Champs-Élysées in Paris, to be constructed where the Arc de Triomphe now stands. It consisted of three levels, to be built in the shape of an elephant, with entry via a spiral staircase in the underbelly. The building was to have a form of air conditioning, and furniture that folded into the walls. A drainage system was to be incorporated into the elephant’s trunk. The French Government, however, was not amused and turned him down.

Little of his work now survives.

Purported professional pencil sharpener David Rees invites you to “reacquaint yourself with the pleasures of a hand-sharpened pencil.”

A terrific collection of World Wars-era listening devices.

Using absolutely bulletproof science, we demonstrate that 35.3 spidermen are created annually and that hundreds live secretly among us.

Introduction

Prompted by arguments about the possibility of radioactive spidermen living among us, Mr. Harman and I decided to use science to determine how many spidermen (if any) exist on Earth. It’s difficult to extrapolate from the single known instance of a spiderman (hereafter the SKI), but following the example of the Drake equation we’ve developed a predictive formula. Behold the incontrovertible majesty of the Harman-Schwartz equation:

Our equation states that:

N = P_e × f_s × f_r × f_l × f_p × f_g

where:

Total Population

Note that by using the above formula we’ve only calculated the number of spidermen being generated each year and not the total number of spiderman living on earth at any given time. This can be calculated by the following equation:

N_tot = N(<A_d> – <A_c>)

where:

N_tot

is the total number of spidermen living on earth at any given time.

<A_d>

is the expected age at which a spiderman dies.

<A_c>

is the expected age at which a spiderman is created.

Plugging in the Numbers

P_e

The population of the Earth is around 6.67 billion.

f_s

We estimate that about 1.66 × 10^-3% of people are bitten by a spider each year.

f_r

Between Chernobyl, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, and assorted other tests and accidents, about 2.55% of the land area of the Earth has been irradiated to some degree. We can use this as f_r if we assume an evenly distributed spider distribution.

f_l

The vast majority (about 99.9%) of people survive spider bites, but obviously irradiated spiders are more deadly. Let’s set f_l to 50%.

f_p

Working off the SKI, we’d have to assume that this is 100%. Let’s be conservative, though, and say only a tenth of people bitten by radioactive spiders develop superpowers.

f_g

We’re totally guessing here and saying that 25% of superpowered radioactive spidermen will dedicate their lives to doing good.

Plugging those figures into the equation, we estimate that on average, 35.3 spidermen are created annually.

<A_c>

The median age in the world’s population is 27.5 years, which is what we’re using.

<A_d>

This is a controversial term. For the purposes of our study, we’ve made the simplifying assumption that spidermen have an average lifespan equal to the human average (73.1 years). It could be argued for the that spidermen are especially prone to an early violent death, but following the example of the SKI we argue that the rates of violent death and cloning are approximately equal, thereby sidestepping the whole issue.

By plugging these numbers into our final equation, we find that at any given time on Earth, on average there are 1,609 radioactive spidermen living secretly among us. ☐

“This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.”

oops lol.