Aphrodite’s temple ruins found by Love

Archaeologists and various scholars had been searching for the Temple of Aphrodite at Knidos, Greece, since the town’s rediscovery about two centuries ago. Some ancient Greek texts indicated that the town’s temple housed one the most beautiful sculptures ever created, that of Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love, in her simplest garment. The statue was the creation of Praxiteles, one of Greece’s most celebrated sculptors, who lived in Knidos in the 4th century BC.

The temple was finally discovered in 1969 by archaeologist Iris C. Love, on the very same day that Neil Amstrong’s crew landed on the Moon. Incidentally, the worship of Aphrodite, goddess of love, was conducted in conjunction with the Moon.

Ruins of the Temple of Aphrodite. All rights belong to Dick Osseman (source: http://www.pbase.com/dosseman/image/29742946)

Aphrodite of Braschi by Praxiteles. (cc) Wikipedia Commons (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aphrodite_Braschi_Glyptothek_Munich_258.jpg)

How much dynamite do you need to surf ?

The question was triggered by watching the video below, where 3 sticks of what looks like dynamite are lit and thrown in a canal, creating a 3-foot wave. Pretty cool video !
Now, 3 sticks of dynamite is roughly 4 pounds of TNT. In real life, that would make a nice splash, but barely a 1-inch ripple on the water. As Kari, Grant and Tory from Mythbusters have found out, you would need about 200 pounds of TNT for a 3-foot wave ! But even if you can get your hands on that much explosives, you would have to be so close to the deflagration to be able to surf the wave that the shockwave would perforate your lungs.

Go find another sport, crackhead.

Exploding Potatoes - Culinary Alert

Please be advised that baking potatoes in a regular or microwave oven can be hazardous. The unstable tuberous vegetable can explode if mishandle. Please, always wear protective goggles when handling spuds.
Potatoes contain a lot of water. When heated, that water becomes steam which is trapped inside the potato. The pressure builds until the spud can't take it anymore and explodes. To avoid this, one can simply poke holes in the potato before cooking; the steam thus has a way to exit the potato.
The larger the potato, the larger the explosion. So imagine if Khalil Semha, the Lebanese farmer who dug up a 11kg spud in December 2008, had decided to bake his monstrous tuber and forgot to poke holes in it.
Boom.

Picture is the property of AFP (c) December 2008.

Here follows some psycho-metaphysics...

Order, Disorder, & Chaos
"Both order and disorder are man-made concepts and are artificial divisions of PURE CHAOS, which is a level deeper than is the level of distinction making.
With our concept-making apparatus called 'mind' we look at reality through the ideas-about-reality which our cultures give us. The ideas-about-reality are mistakenly labeled 'reality' and unenlightened people are forever perplexed by the fact that otehr people, especially other cultures, see 'reality' differently. It is only the ideas-about-reality which differ. Real (capital-T True) reality is a level deeper than is the level of concept.
We look at the world through windows on which have been drawn grids (concepts). Different philosophies use different grids. A culture is a group of people with rather similar grids. Through a window we view chaos, and relate it to the points on our grid, and thereby understand it. The ORDER is in the GRID. [...]
Western philosophy is traditionally concerned with contrasting one grid with another grid, and amending grids in hopes of finding a perfect one that will account for all reality and will, hence, (say unenlightened westerners) be True. This is illusory [...]. Some grids can be more useful than others, some more beautiful than others, some more pleasant than others, etc., but none can be more True than any other.
DISORDER is simply unrelated information viewed trough some particular grid. But, like 'relation', no-relation is a concept. Male, like female, is an idea about sex. To say that male-ness is 'absence of female-ness', or vice-versa, is a matter of definition and metaphysically arbitrary. [No-relation is an artificial concept.]
The belief that 'order is true' and disorder is false or somehow wrong, is [an illusion]. To say the same of disorder, is [also an illusion].
The point is that (little-t) truth is a matter of definition relative to the grid one is using at the moment, and that (capital-T) Truth, metaphysical reality, is irrelevant to grids entirely. Pick a grid, and through it some chaos appears ordered and some appears disordered. Pick another grid, and the same chaos will appear differently ordered and disordered."

Taken from Princípia Discordia, pp.00049-00050. [slightly amended by me for enhanced readability]