Collecting Awesome Knowledge #1

I think I'm going to start a new blog series that will include many riveting posts about math, science, and other fun poop like that. I'll try to keep it interesting, too, so it doesn't look like a boring reprint of your least favorite school textbooks.

I rather enjoy that the acronym for this segment (CAK) sounds like an exotic bird puking up its breakfast.

Today's Topics:

Math: To the power!
Science: Synesthesia
History: That wasn't very nice...☤

To the power!

A lot of you probably understand that 3 to the power of 3, or 3- squared, is 9. Say someone writes down '3 to the power of 3 to the power of 3', and asks you to solve it.

To solve it, you'll need to separate the second and third threes. Although it pains me, (you'll find out why in the science section...) I'll color the other threes blue. The biggest three will remain red.

You will need to solve the blue threes first.

3^{3 = 3x3x3 = 27}

You've just solved one portion of the equation. Now you can set the bigger three to the power of 27.

So now you think, "Wow, twenty-seven is a lot of threes to multiply by each other. But I guess it can't be too big of a number."

Just think about it- 2 to the power of 2 to the power of 2 is 16. This number won't be much bigger, right?

I kid you not. Go use Google's calculator if you don't believe me. Though, since there are too many digits to show, it will say 'E12' at the end. That means you move the decimal point to the right twelve places. (There's a decimal point between the 7 and the 6, but don't think it says '7.6'.) There will be seven numbers you skip the decimal over before you run out. Add five more zeros and move it down until it sits after the last zero. You've moved it down twelve times, and the exact number is 7,625,597,500,000.

More calculations:

1^1^1= 1

2^2^2= 16

3^3^3= 7,625,597,500,000 (7.6 trillion)

4^4^4=13,407,810,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (13.4 unquintagintillion)

5^5^5= Calculator tries to tell me it’s  ∞. (Too many digits.)

...Dang, right?

 Synesthesia

As I was writing the top portion, I envisioned many colors. It pained me to turn red 3s blue, and it took me three tries to even type the words 'I'll color the other threes blue.' First I wrote 'other twos blue', and then I wrote 'other threes red'. Unless you're totally unobservant, you've probably noticed that I wrote every letter in the title a different color. That's because those are the colors I see the letters in my mind. I have the most common form of something called 'synesthesia'.

There are many types of synesthesia. Some people may give textures to certain days of the week. Monday may be soft, while Thursday is rough. Others may see colors when they hear music. F# may paint an orange color in their mind. Other synesthetes position numbers in their head differently than most do. They may pictures lines and loops with certain numbers on the side. Sometimes the shapes are in clock form, and sometimes they look like spaghetti.

An example: http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v6/n6/images/nrn1684-i1.gif

The kind of synesthesia I have is called grapheme-color synesthesia. Actually, I believe I also have a second type called ordinal-linguistic personification (OLP). Someone who has the grapheme-color type envisions things like numbers and letters as having certain colors. Someone with OLP applies personalities to such things. While I apply colors to numbers, letters, and the days of the week, others may only apply colors to numbers, and their colors may be much different.  Everybody's synesthesia is different, but I'll tell you about mine.

Numbers- Color, gender, personalities

Letters- Color, gender, some have not-so-developed personalities

Days of the week- Color, gender, I have teensy tidbits of a couple of their personalities

Iv'e never really noticed it, because I've always done it, but I do see colors in my head as I read. Do I actually see them? No, but some people do. I am associator, which means I only 'see' the colors inside my brain. Quick, imagine a hippo! Unless you're stubborn, you just saw a hippo in your mind's eye. Did you actually see it as an external object? No. When I read, I see the colors like you just saw the hippo, although sort of on top of the letters...But not...Because although I see the 'a's a yellow and the 'b's as blue, I still see the black text, because that's what's really there. (In case you're wondering, the combinations of colors look prettier inside my mind than they do when I write them out...They look disgusting when I see them externally.)

However, I'm just some silly associator. Projectors, who are estimated to make up 1-2% of all synesthetes, literally 'see' these colors. As their name suggests, they project the color onto the number or letter or whatever it is. This is really rare, though.

With numbers, I pretty much only have colors for digits 0-9. Ten and eleven are both one color, white, but that doesn't count. Both '1' and '0' are white. Every number after 9 is just a blend of the colored digits. 27, 68, 54, 102. For some reason, the '1's when I get into the 100s seem to be black.'1' is strange- a while ago I was having trouble telling whether it was white or black. I guess it's both, but usually white.

Examples of my grapheme-color synesthesia:

C, Q, Thursday, Wednesday, 8, 4. The word 'garden' is orange and green, because the 'g' and 'd' stand out the most when I think of the word in my mind. When I put letters together as words in my mind, their colors can disappear or even shift. In the word 'orange', I envision the 'o' to be orange rather than white. Usually the word is the same color as the first letter, but I've also notice that middle letters contribute to color, too. These are also usually the letters I still see colored. Cherry is red, since the first two and middle-ish letters are all red. I see a trace of yellow when I envision the 'e', and I may see white on the 'y'. Dunno. Sometimes it's hard to tell if you can see the color, since it's in your mind...If that makes any sense.

Examples of my OLP synesthesia:

K is nice. 3 and 5 are loud, obnoxious, and fight with each other, and 3 tries too hard to be a 'cool' tomboy. Sunday seems to be nice and motherly. I wish I could slap 8 upside her non-existent face. She's loud, bossy, and overreacts when 7 trolls her. I believe my least favorite (simple) math equation is 3+5=8, because it involves all the numbers I hate from digits 0-9.

I suggest looking up 'synesthesia' (or synaesthesia if you're British) to see if you have any form of it.

That wasn't very nice...☤

Gather around, kids. History time is story time! Today we're going to talk about a sly and evil lady named Linda Hazzard. Let her last name be your first clue. I watched a short documentary on the Travel Channel, but I'll be double-checking this online. I'd like to know the exact dates, too.

Ahem.

In the early twentieth century, an infamous book was published by a Mrs.-oh, sorry- Doctor Linda Hazzard. Although she didn't even have a medical degree, a loophole in some licensing law allowed people like Linda, who practiced alternative medicine, to do their thing. Hazzard was known to get testy with people who did not refer to her as 'doctor'. In reality, however, she really wasn't one at all.

Old Hazzy here opened up an institution and preached the word of her miracle treatment. The aforementioned 'infamous book' was titled Fasting for the Cure of Disease, and told of Hazzard's insane treatment. Hazzard the Great Quack claimed that dieting until starvation would cure anything from a malignant tumor to a stomachache. Basically she went around telling people 'If you starve yourself to death, all your medical problems will be gone! Because you'll be dead." You know what's even worse? People actually believed her, and the Wilderness Heights institution (nicknamed 'Starvation Heights') was open for business. Excuse me while I go cry.

Hazzard fed her patients very little and also gave them rough and painful massages. Imagine hardly eating anything for a couple of weeks and then having some unusually strong lady beat on your back and forehead. Yeah, not cool. You may be wondering, "Was this legal?" Unfortunately, yeah. She had her stupid right to practice medicine, and since patients were coming to her willingly, the authorities were kind of like, "Ehh, it looks pretty shady, but we can't really do anything..." This whole story shows how laws can go wrong. A loophole in a law allowed Hazzy the Great Quack to start this in the first place, and the same law plus some technicalities prevented the law from investigating for quite a while.

I won't be showing pictures of the patients, because the story will disturb you that much more. I will tell you that lots of Hazzy's patients died. No kidding, Sherlock! You'd think that after a few deaths people would start to get suspicious. Heck, some people were even approached by escaped patients with emaciated bodies who begged them for food!

Did people throw up their hands and say "Forget dis!" and seek treatment from a certified doctor who didn't murder their patients? Nope. She still steadily acquired many new patients. Do you feel frustrated yet?

Then, there's the tale of two sisters. Dorothea and Claire Williamson were a couple of rich chicks who decided to check out Her Quackiest themselves. Hazzy put them on a diet of thin vegetable broth, stimulated their bowel movement (ew) to drain them of the the little food they got, and maniacally 'massaged' them. Two more flies caught in her web.

After a couple months, the sisters were in terrible condition. While weak and delirious, the girls had given Hazzard rights to some of their money, and also allowed her to keep their diamond jewelry and real estate deeds in a safe. (Something tells me it wasn't for safe-keeping.)

As a result of the treatments, Claire died and Dorothea was basically insane. If she hadn't been rescued from Hazzard, who had become her legal guardian, Dorothea would have also been dead. Hazzy was arrested and put on trial. Her jail sentence was 2-20 years, and she served only two until she released on parole. She continued her practices and killed even more patients, and also considered herself to be a dietitian. Ha. No. She built a sanitarium and called it a 'school of health', since her medical license had been pulled. More loopholes, yay... When the sanitarium burned down fifteen years later (either a gift from God or a heroic arson, you decide), she continued her practices for three more years, until she got a taste of her own medicine...literally.

Hazzard had the whole "I'm gonna do it, and it's gonna work!" attitude, and started fasting. Guess what happens next? She dies from self-starvation. Wheeeee.

Linda Hazzard was a cruel scammer who acquired much wealth through her practices. She even forged Claire Williamson's will in order to obtain diamond rings. I believe her reign of terror in the world of osteopathic treatment could not have ended better...But it could have happened sooner...

I think we can all believe that what Linda Hazzard did was not very nice.