Archive for the Research Category
A new study out today says that if you are an old man, eating whole grain cereals can cut your risk of heart failure by twenty-nine percent. But for a woman, the effects are somewhat less clear. However, if you are neither a man nor a woman, it follows quite easily that whole-grain cereal pretty much isn’t going to do anything to help your heart. That will especially be the case if you are a robot, since you won’t have a heart.
But robots still can have health problems nonetheless. Technically speaking, these health problems can be effectively prevented by effective prevention techniques.
Let’s discuss the number one health problem that can kill a robot: the dreaded power attack. Now, I’m sure that you’ve all seen lightning. It can be a fascinating sight, especially if it doesn’t hit you. But for a robot, lightning is like cancer. If it hits any source upon which the robot depends for its power, the robot gets an unwelcome load of electricity. This electricity spreads all through the robot, frying its circuit boards until they look like toast made by an amateur. That’s the devastation a power attack causes. Life for a robot is just never the same after something like that happens.
Continue Reading “What Every Robot Should Know About Whole-Grain Electricity” »
I’m going to form a fairly blunt yet concise hypothesis:
If thou are not Al Gore or the IPCC, then thou did not win the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.
Perhaps this revelation doesn’t really bother you, and perhaps you believe (as many sauhard.com staff members, including myself, do) that Al Gore deserved the prize for his work on sounding the alarm on the dangers of global warming and climate change.
But perhaps you are hyper-competitive, and are thus upset that you didn’t win a Nobel Peace Prize. If you are such an individual, do not despair, as I have something important to tell you.
As Al Gore and many other environmentalists have pointed out, global warming has the potential to affect all species on Earth in an adverse manner. That includes Pisum sativum, which are generally referred to in conversational English as “pea plants.”
Now, we humans have been eating peas for almost as long as we have existed. We should be wary of the fact that peas are endangered in the long run. I decided to do a research project to figure out just how much climate change they can really withstand.
Continue Reading “A Greener Alternative to the Nobel Peace Prize” »
The blogosphere is a pretty large sphere. Millions of new blogs are created on a daily basis, making it larger still as I speak. But here is the kicker: How many of them actually last?
26-year-old computer geek Adam finds that many blogs die almost as quickly as they are created, so the actual growth rate of the blogosphere is much slower than it is hyped to be. When I interviewed Adam, I withheld my identity from him, by wearing tons of makeup, just to see how things would go.
Sauhard: Hello there, Adam. Thanks for allowing me to interview you.
Adam: WOAH! SO MUCH MAKE-UP! IT’S BRITNEY!
Sauhard: You’d be surprised. There are a lot of people out there who look like Britney. Anyway, you wanted to talk about your interesting discoveries about the blogosphere?
Adam: Oh, yes. I think the statistics out there about the blogosphere are so misleading. Seriously, the blogosphere just isn’t growing as fast as some people would like you to believe.
Sauhard: Why do you say that?
Adam: Well, you see, it’s all too common an occurrence to have some enthusiastic person (with no social life) to sign up on WordPress or LiveJournal or whatever and writes a couple of prolific (but ultimately meaningless) entries. Then they wake up the next day and consider writing another entry, but go like meh and skip it. Then they skip the next day. And the next day. And the next day. Soon, they forget that they even have a blog.
Sauhard: What happens then? Does the blog die?
Adam: Some might say that, yes. But, blogs are not people. All that happens is some database containing all the entries somewhere gets a little rusty. But it can be revived. After all, it’s just an SQL database at the other end, and the server gets a little bored because it no longer has to serve any pages. But it doesn’t truly die.
Sauhard: Interesting, Adam. Can you give me some examples of blogs that have gone through this phenomenon?
Adam: Ah yes. There was this thing I used to read last month, called sauhard.com. It was really good, but I was a little disappointed that it seems to have been aband–
Sauhard: Oh shoot, OH SHOOT. LOOK AT THE TIME! I’m sorry Adam, but I must really go. I’m getting late for my next appointment.
Do you live a high-pressure life? If so, you may be intimately familiar with the sensation of over-tight muscles and rigid joints that accompany stressful situations. Perhaps this bothers you, and perhaps you may wish to do something about it.
In that case, you need to hear about Jim, a Canadian chiropractor. He once received hundreds of patients every week, all of whom had such problems. He got tired of watching his patients come in moaning and groaning about their stiff bodies, seeking treatment through his therapeutic tactics. He felt frustrated that despite treatment, they always came back the next week, worse off than before. He called this vicious cycle “stiff stuff syndrome” (abbreviated S3 syndrome).
As Jim’s patient load continued to rise, his job eventually became so stressful that he too fell victim to the evil forces of stiff joints and metallic muscles. He tried to perform his techniques on himself, but he strained his arm while lying down on a table and attempting to massage his back to improve blood flow. It was at that point that his frustration boiled over, and he decided to put an end S3 syndrome — forever!
A shocking new study, as described by a Reuters article, finds that binge drinkers lack impartiality when choosing the type of alcohol to hire for their nighttime “social productivity tasks.” If given a choice between a mug of beer and a glass of wine, the binge drinker is more likely to choose the beer, even if the liquor was equally well-qualified for the job.
I was somewhat unsure of the validity of the results of this study, and so I decided to independently corroborate its findings. In doing so, I attended a party at The University of Phoenix (using my press pass), and met a binge drinker, named Buzz. Buzz was enjoying himself, dancing with the ladies, and playing beer pong (aha!) But as a mere field observation like that was hardly enough to convince the skeptic in me, so I waited until he was really drunk. Then, seeing that the social lubricant had really set in on him, I went up and started a conversation with him, carefully crafting my questions in a dumbed-down manner:
Continue Reading “Drinkers Hire Beer, Leaving Liquor Unemployed” »