DAY FOURTEEN

Well, that juice detox was a crazy idea. Thank god that difficult time is over! Now I can drink all the nut juice I want without feeling like it's breaking the detox fast. I still think coffee is totally a fruit juice.

Pinocchio is a really hard word to spell. And it was an utterly terrifying story back in the day: "For his sins Pinocchio is not only hanged but robbed, kidnapped, stabbed, whipped, starved, jailed, punched in the head, and has his legs burned off. Worse, however, is the psychological abuse. At different points he is tricked into believing that he has killed both his “father” (Geppetto) and his “mother” (the Blue Fairy). Collodi savors Pinocchio’s comeuppances, recounting each one in loving, histrionic detail. When Pinocchio is caught in an iron trap he is “so giddy with pain that stars of every colour danced before his eyes.” During one of his several bouts of starvation, Pinocchio’s stomach is “like an apartment that had been left empty and uninhabited for five months.”"

I am super intrigued by auditory illusions. I don't think I've heard any before, but they're so interesting! This one scientist, Diana Deutsch, has discovered at least five different illusions all in the last forty years. Oddly, I discovered all of these while looking up barber poles.

Who knew the Titanic was only the sixth most deadly shipwreck in terms of loss of human life during peacetime? I think the "peacetime" argument is a bit misleading, though, given that the Halifax disaster happened during war; the ship was laden with "wartime explosives" and ran into another ship in the harbor. The French abandoned the boat, screaming out warnings that were not understood by the English speaking onlookers, who rushed to help. This one's particularly interesting as, in addition to the third most deadly shipwreck, it's also the largest human made accidental non-nuclear explosion. Which makes me wonder - has there been an accidental nuclear explosion larger than this? The list of military nuclear accidents is quite long but upon a cursory glance it doesn't appear to have any huge mushroom clouds with thousands of dead. Stay tuned for DAY FOURTEEN POST TWO to find out more about accidental nuclear and non-nuclear explosions (and non-human made nuclear explosions), sabatoge and largest explosions of conventional weapons.