There's No "F" in Broccoli, and other tales involving intellectually challenged persons.

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IRRELEVANT COMMENTS ON MY POSTS…

They’re Always Entertaining.

Dear Friends:

I am a staunch proponent of free speech as it was, some time ago, actually protected by the United States Constitution. It’s a delightful irony when some spammer or misguided soul posts an irrelevant or downright indecipherable comment on one of my blog posts for my consideration – it is at those times when I realize that the right to exercise “free speech” is sometimes actually interpreted by some to be synonymous with the right to promote “valueless speech,” which is something slightly different.

Here’s a great one that appeared in my inbox today regarding a post which I made on one of my old, inactive blogs. Before you read it, open a window, get a box of tissues and sit down in a comfortable chair.

_____________

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Public Service Announcement: HEALTHCARE-ASSOCIATED...":

“good morning dudes. I'm honestly into shoes and I had been digging as far as something that meticulous brand. The prices seeking the boots were approximately 320 pounds everwhere. But finally I bring about this locate selling them someone is concerned half price. I really love those [url=http://www.shoesempire.com]prada sneakers[/url]. I will absolutely purchase those. what can you tell me about these?” Publish this comment. Reject this comment. Moderate  comments for this blog.  

____________

If I were a mean-spirited fellow, which I am not, I would probably say something like, “The person who left that comment would probably sit down in a hardware store and order a corned beef sandwich.” But I won’t.

Faithfully,

Douglas Castle

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Braintenance: Sand Sifting and Cypherin'

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Braintenance: Sand Sifting and Cypherin’

Here's a Braintenance question from over a week ago, with the answer posted right underneath it. I’ll bet you’d thought that I’d forgotten about it. Well…I never forget; I just get distracted.

Since we've become much more knowledgeable about cylinders and cones, this question has two parts:

If we wanted to divide a truckload of 100 cubic feet of sand (note that we're working on sand, because it's easier to part the sand than to part the sea, generally speaking) equally into two containers, and one of them is a cylinder with a base (radius) of three feet, and the other is a cone with a radius of nine feet, how tall must the cone be? How tall must the cylinder be?

As we recall:

The Formula for the Volume of a Cylinder = Pi x radius^2 x height [or Pi, times the radius squared, times the height]

The Formula for the Volume of a Cone = 1/3 x Pi x radius^2 x height [or one-third of Pi, times the radius squared, times the height]

Pi is the Greek letter representing the constant ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter, which is often expressed as either 22/7, or as 3.14.

To get the answers, we just substitute the radius measurements and the amount of square footage of sand (both of which we’ve been given, thank goodness) into the formulas:

For the cylinder, it will be –
Pi x 3 feet^2 x height = 50 cubic feet, or
3.14 x 9 x height = 50, or
28.26 x height = 50, or
Height = 50/ 28.26 = 1.769 feet in height. (a short, squat cylinder…kind of stumpy, in fact)

For the cone, it will be –
1/3 x Pi x 9 feet^2 x height = 50 cubic feet, or
1/3 x 3.14 x 81 x height = 50, or
84.78 x height = 50, or
Height = 50/ 84.78 = 0.589 feet in height (a short, squat cone…even stumpier than the cylinder)

Observation = The height of the cone is one-third the height of the cylinder when the radius of the cone is three times that of the cylinder. Is this reciprocal relationship always true? Yes it is. In every case where the relationship between the cone's radius and the cylinder's radius is 1 to 3 (or 1:3), the ratio of the heights (assuming that they each contain the same volume of sand, or something more interesting) will be the inverse, or 3 to 1 (or 3:1).

My, but this gets me tired. I'm leaving. See you soon.
Faithfully,

Douglas Castle
  

About Douglas Castle 
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SOLUTIONS (and more problems, of course)

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Dear Friends:

Firstly, here are the answers to "Get On The Brain Train" from several days ago:

1. How much better (in terms of a percentage) than the original is a new model which costs half the price and does the job in half the time?

A: If the new model costs half the price, it is also twice (2 times) as inexpensive; and, if the new gadget does the job in half the time, it is also twice (2 times) as powerful as the old one. The new gadget is 2 x 2 times as efficient as the old one, which means that it is 4 times as effective (400%) as the old one. Since the new one is operating at 400%, and the old one was operating (setting the standard of measurement) at 100%, the new gadget is 300% better. Remember: The answer is not 4 times better, or 400%, because the question asks for the difference. Mrs. Scenendorf, my third-grade teacher, said that "difference means subtract." Not well stated, but I understood.
2. How much better (in terms of a percentage) than the original is a new version that does three times as much work at one-fourth the price?

A: As in the question above, 3 x 4 = 12 (or 1,200%). Subtracting 100% (by the Schenendorf Principle) gives us 1,100% better.

3. If Juan has only 80% of the IQ of his elder brother, Pincus (both children are the products of either an adoption or a mixed marriage), but Juan always earns 50% more than his brother, how much more efficient (in terms of a percentage) is Juan?

A: Juan is 80% as bright as his brother (or expressed in another way, he must think 100%/80% or 125% harder than his brother), but he earns 150% of what his brother earns (something must be said here about the virtues of ambition and hard work). Juan does more with less...first, we do the multiplication: 1.25 x 1.5 = 1.875. Juan is 187.5% as efficient as Pincus. But to answer the question as it was asked (and using the Schenendorf Principle), Juan is 87.5% more efficient.

4. If you take three steps forward and one step back, how long (in total steps forward) will it take for you to advance by fifty steps? Is there a formula for solving this type of problem?

A: Take 3 steps forward in order to advance 2 steps, then you must actually take 6 steps forward in total) in order to advance 4 steps, and 9 steps forward in order to advance 6 steps, and 12 steps forward to advance 8 steps ...Do you detect a pattern? Let's give your mind an additional day or two to identify the pattern, and to come up with the answer without actually pacing around in your house to do it empirically.

5. If your anticipated lifespan is 80 years, and you spend an average of 8 hrs per day sleeping, for how many years of your life will you have been awake?

A: Each day lasts for 24 hours (although sometimes it seems much longer, or much shorter -- but that is perception, and not measurement), so if you sleep 8 hours, you spend 8/24 or 33.33% of your day sleeping. If you continue to do this for 80 years, you'll have sleeping for 33.33% of 80 years, or 26.66 years sleeping. Applying the Schenendorf Principle, 80 total years minus 26.66 years sleeping leaves 53.33 years awake.

See you soon. Or as they used to say in the cult TV series, THE PRISONER, "BCNU."

Faithfully,

Douglas Castle

*Follow BRAINTENANCE on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Braintenance .
*Follow DOUGLAS CASTLE's Blog at http://aboutdouglascastle.blogspot.com/ .
*Follow DOUGLAS CASTLE on Twitter at http://twitter.com/douglascastle .
*Also: Take a look at the following sites ---
HUMANITAS MAXIMUS, TAKING COMMAND!, INTERNAL ENERGY PLUS BLOG, INTERNAL ENERGY PLUS WEBSITE, THE NATIONAL NETWORKER, THE GLOBAL FUTURIST, THE INTERNATIONALIST PAGE.
*Contact the author at douglas.castle@yahoo.com .

CHAINS AND COMPARISONS (RE-POST...Math and Metaphor)

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Dear Braintenance Buffs:

I had a high school teacher who was obsessed with "chain calculations" and "comparison calculations". These are simple but time- consuming arithmetic operations which are undertaken in order to convert or express one quantity in terms of another, or in order to support (or refute) an idea or argument. A simple one might be (just for example), "How many inches are in a mile?" This type of computation does have the benefit of giving us a sense of perspective.

With the help of some Search engines and a calculator, you may wish to answer the following questions:

1. How many Angstrom Units are there in one inch?

2. If Bill Gates were to divide his current net worth amongst the entire population of the United States, how much additional wealth would each of us have?

3. At today's prices, how many ounces of gold would it take to pay for a home valued at $240,000.00?

I'll be posting your answers on August 20th. Stay tuned.

Soon!

Faithfully,

Douglas Castle

p.s. The picture posted in the upper right-hand corner is not of Bruce Willis' character in "THE TWELVE MONKEYS". It is a retouched photo of a fellow (who looks somewhat like Bruce Willis) who would rather remain anonymous. We had lots of fun playing around with the photo, though.







*Follow BRAINTENANCE on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Braintenance .
*Follow DOUGLAS CASTLE's Blog at http://aboutdouglascastle.blogspot.com/ .
*Follow DOUGLAS CASTLE on Twitter at http://twitter.com/douglascastle .
*Also: Take a look at the following sites ---
HUMANITAS MAXIMUS, TAKING COMMAND!, INTERNAL ENERGY PLUS BLOG, INTERNAL ENERGY PLUS WEBSITE, THE NATIONAL NETWORKER, THE GLOBAL FUTURIST, THE INTERNATIONALIST PAGE.
*Contact the author at douglas.castle@yahoo.com .

CHAINS AND COMPARISONS

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Dear Braintenance Buffs:

I had a high school teacher who was obsessed with "chain calculations" and "comparison calculations". These are simple but time- consuming arithmetic operations which are undertaken in order to convert or express one quantity in terms of another, or in order to support (or refute) an idea or argument. A simple one might be (just for example), "How many inches are in a mile?" This type of computation does have the benefit of giving us a sense of perspective.

With the help of some Search engines and a calculator, you may wish to answer the following questions:

1. How many Angstrom Units are there in one inch?

2. If Bill Gates were to divide his current net worth amongst the entire population of the United States, how much additional wealth would each of us have?

3. At today's prices, how many ounces of gold would it take to pay for a home valued at $240,000.00?

I'll be posting your answers on August 20th. Stay tuned.

Soon!

Faithfully,

Douglas Castle

p.s. The picture posted in the upper right-hand corner is not of Bruce Willis' character in "THE TWELVE MONKEYS". It is a retouched photo of a fellow (who looks somewhat like Bruce Willis) who would rather remain anonymous. We had lots of fun playing around with the photo, though.







*Follow BRAINTENANCE on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Braintenance .
*Follow DOUGLAS CASTLE's Blog at http://aboutdouglascastle.blogspot.com/ .
*Follow DOUGLAS CASTLE on Twitter at http://twitter.com/douglascastle .
*Also: Take a look at the following sites ---
HUMANITAS MAXIMUS, TAKING COMMAND!, INTERNAL ENERGY PLUS BLOG, INTERNAL ENERGY PLUS WEBSITE, THE NATIONAL NETWORKER, THE GLOBAL FUTURIST, THE INTERNATIONALIST PAGE.
*Contact the author at douglas.castle@yahoo.com .

BRAINTENANCE: Frequency 528

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Dear Friends:

Greetings!

Just a quick review...please be certain that you've completed the exciting BRAINTENANCE exercises in the last post, http://braintenance.blogspot.com/2009/07/braintenance-screedindeed.html. If you haven't...well then do it after the next part.

FREQUENCY 528 Hz

For a number of years, some esoteric physicists (I see one twice yearly to clean my cosmic wormholes and charm my quarks), cellular biologists and alternative healers of various types have been exploring the possibility that listening to the sound of Frequency 528 Hz, which is sometimes called the Solfeggio Frequency or the Love Frequency can actually heal damaged DNA, re-energize the body and elevate the mood.

I believe that this is at least partly true -- although I do not dispense healthcare or medical advice -- that when you spend 5 or 10 minutes listening to Frequency 528, you somehow seem to feel mentally (and psychically) rejuvenated. It may well be worthwhile for you to try.

Scroll up on this blog (http://braintenance.blogspot.com/) until you get to a place labeled EXERCISE YOUR MIND 6: MEDITATION, STIMULATION AND RELAXATION...you'll recognize it because it has a big YouTube video screen embedded into it. When you click on each of the video frames on the right-hand side of the video player, you'll see it's number. Go to Video #9 (titled: frequency 528), click on it, sit back and listen. Be patient...give it at least five minutes.

Let me know what you think.

Faithfully,

Douglas Castle

Terms and Labels for this post: Frequency 528, Solfeggio Frequency, DNA healing, sounds that heal, vibrational medicine, Braintenance, blogs by Douglas Castle, meditation, videos, cognitive enhancement, depression, love, relaxation, Humanitas Maximus, Internal Energy Plus, The National Networker, entrainment, psychic phenomena, Twitter, YouTube, Google, Blogger, The DaVinci Code, energy work, esotericism, mi frequency, CIA, mood...

*Follow BRAINTENANCE on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Braintenance .
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*Also: Take a look at the following sites ---
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*Contact the author at douglas.castle@yahoo.com .

BRAINTENANCE: Screed?....Indeed!

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Dear Friends:

I dislike writing in the Arial font. I prefer Times Roman, Bookman Old Style or Goudy Old Style. When I've used Copper Plate (admittedly, an archaic font), smart-alecky friends have remarked that my documents looked like "funeral announcements." Sometimes I think that my friends are the ones who openly criticize me, and my enemies are the ones who continue to smile despite the fact that my fly is open, there is toilet paper trailing from my shoe, or I have a piece of spinach the size of a cellular telephone lodged between my teeth. Anyway, enough about me.

How about you? Here are some items for your cerebration (never be too lazy to use a dictionary to confirm your guesses at word definitions through "use in context"):

1. 87.5% of Americans (the English-speaking ones) do not know what the word "screed" means. They're flummoxed. http://twitlik.com/screed
Posted to Twitter at 07:39 PM on 07/01/2009.

2. If I work on a quality control line at the Zenobia Nut Company, and I routinely eliminate 10% of the nuts which pass me by because they (presumably) don't meet my exacting nut standards, 90% of the nuts will be left over. If a certain practical joker at the company knows that I routinely cull 10% of any given batch of nuts simply because of my unmedicated Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and he keeps re-cycling the remaining nuts by me for my inspection/ selection process time after time, how many passes (including the first) will it take for me to have eliminated 30% of the original batch of nuts? Remember: on the second pass, the total batch is only 90% of the size of the original batch.

3. Where in blazes are your Haikus? Create a few and place them in the "Comments" section at the bottom of this post. If you don't know what a Haiku is, simply refer to the last post at http://braintenance.blogspot.com/2009/06/braintenance-do-you-haiku.html. These Japanese-inspired poem forms are a wonderful mental exercise. C'mon. My life's ambition (the other one) is to publish a volume of Haiku producted by my fellow Braintenance enthusiasts. As you may recall, my sample Haiku (comprised of 5 syllables in the first line, 7 in the second, and 5 in the third) was:

I have walked these streets
In my hours of loneliness
Hearing your last words

Now...get to work!

Faithfully,

Douglas Castle

*Follow BRAINTENANCE on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Braintenance .
*Follow DOUGLAS CASTLE's Blog at http://aboutdouglascastle.blogspot.com/ .
*Follow DOUGLAS CASTLE on Twitter at http://twitter.com/douglascastle .
*Also: Take a look at the following sites ---
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*Contact the author at douglas.castle@yahoo.com .

BRAINTENANCE: Do You Haiku?

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PLEASE SUBMIT YOUR ORIGINAL HAIKU - Just go to the "comments" link at the bottom of this article, and a window will open up for you to post them!

Dear Readers:

Please note the nifty new subscript at the end of this post, laden with hyperlinks. Click on them. Don't be afraid. I promise you a wonderful time.

For this week's exercise, compose several Haiku. Haiku is an ancient form of structured Japanese poem comprised of three lines, and subject to the following rules:

1. The first line must consist of exactly five syllables

2. The second line must consist of exactly seven syllables

3. The third line must consist of exactly five syllables

The mental discipline of conforming to this structure is an unusually powerful mind-building exercise. The artistic objective is to express a thought, a mood or an image within the Haiku form. As an example, here's one that I have written:

I have walked these streets

In my hours of loneliness

Hearing your last words

~~~

Try your very best to compose as many of these as you can. Please submit your favorites (either anonymously, or under your name, so that you may receive credit) to me by clicking on the link for "comments" immediately under this post.

I would like to publish a volume of Haiku written by my friends and readers, so please...submit your best ones as soon as you can. The deadline to be included in the publication is August 15th, this coming. That date also coincides with the anniversary of my Father's passing. I would like to honor his memory in this way.

By the way, if you do not receive either the RSS feed or the free Daily Email Feed from this site, scroll back up the page a bit, and get your free subscription. Let's build better brains together.

Faithfully,

Douglas Castle

*Follow BRAINTENANCE on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Braintenance .
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*Follow DOUGLAS CASTLE on Twitter at http://twitter.com/douglascastle .
*Also: Take a look at the following sites ---
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*Contact the author at douglas.castle@yahoo.com .

I'M STILL ON VACATION, Which Rhymes with LINGOVATION

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FROM THE TNNW DAILY EMAIL AND RSS NEWSFEED @ http://thenationalnetworkerweblog.blogspot.com/ .

Dear Readers:

I am bursting with joy. I received an email from an ardent fan (a woman with too much idle time on her hands and a husband who works for a long-distance hauling company) complimenting me on my invention of the terms OMNIGADGET, PROCRASTINERTIA and EXPONENTIALITY. She actually expressed gratitude for my having introduced these terms into the English language (American version), and into industry parlance. It was akin to receiving the Nobel Peace Prize (or winning $5.00 on a scratch-off lottery ticket). After my initial deluge of tears, I wrote her a brief thank-you note and decided to write this post.

Inventing terms, where existing language does not quite suffice, is a very fine means by which to accomplish several things simultaneously:

1. It helps to facilitate better, more precise communications -- to get your point across more efficiently;

2. It strengthens your personal brand, and the creates a mental link (in the minds of the masses) between you, as an individual, and a particular term which you've coined;

3. It gives you (and your newly-created term) high search engine prominence;

4. It forces new acquaintances, usually hard-won through rigorous networking, to ask you the question, "What does that mean?" Note: If they just nod their heads like dashboard bobbles, you know that they are either hard of hearing, embarrassed to admit ignorance (such is the Sin of Pride), or in a hurry to get to teir part of the conversation while impatiently tolerating yours...there are often body language signs which further affirm this, such as rapid toe-tapping, looking downward, staring at a wristwatch, yawning, or, in extreme cases, rapidly running off to the restroom. It's always helpful to know with some immediacy whether or not a person is actually interested in what you want to say;

5. It stimulates your imagination and enhances your cognitive ability - it's fun.

To illustrate the wonder of this hobby (inventing words, which I call "LINGOVATION") just try to imagine the unbridled joy of the person who coined the term "stagflation"... or, "spork"? Sadly for me, I had tried some years ago to popularize the term "FOON" with the objective of replacing the term "SPORK," but, like such other greats as Tesla, Galileo [I might have invented my own spelling here, too], Copernicus, Jackie Mason and Joan of Arc, I was subjected to great ridicule.

A truly pitiful example of an unimaginative, non-value-added lingovation is the "Wonkavator." Lingovation is little more than oratory excrement if it is not born of genuine innovation and a love of verbal communication. "Brangelina" speaks in stentorian tones of societal decay, and declining intellectual standards. These abuses of linguisitic license make me choke on my own bile.

One of my college roomates once referred to the binocular-laden patrons of the Audubon Society as "birdbrains." That was clever, but not a good example of a legitimate lingovation. I am certain that if you have been able to read this far (with at least 72% comprehension), you have the inherent potential (which latter word pairing is redundant) to become a Lingovator.

Participate in the evolution of the language -- become a LINGOVATOR.

Faithfully,

Douglas Castle

http://aboutDouglasCastle.blogspot.com

Visit with me on http://twitter.com/douglascastle, http://twitter.com/TNNW-BUZZWORKS, and http://twitter.com/Braintenance.

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