Penis Panic

I remember during college when I was working 50 hours a week in the data center of a bank at the same time I was a full-time student with up to 23 credit hours per trimester. I used to wish I didn’t have to sleep. I actually didn’t get much sleep in those days but I survived, graduating with years of relevant experience, a bachelor degree and 135 pounds on my six-foot frame.

And now I read that it wasn’t just a pipe dream. It was actually possible to forgo sleep.

I read an article about a man in Vietnam that has not slept in 33 years, over 11,700 consecutive sleepless nights.

“Sixty-four-year-old Thai Ngoc, known as Hai Ngoc, said he could not sleep at night after getting a fever in 1973, and has counted infinite numbers of sheep during more than 11,700 consecutive sleepless nights.”

His wife said when Ngoc went to Da Nang for a medical examination, doctors gave him a clean bill of health, except a minor decline in liver function.

On Ngoc’s prolonged insomnia, Phan Ngoc Ha, director of the Hoa Khanh Mental Hospital in Danang said sleep disorders often cause anorexia, lethargy, and irritability

But, in special cases some people can handle it and still live and work normally, although this was a very small ratio among insomniacs, Ha added.

And there are other strange things that can happen to you:

ALICE IN WONDERLAND SYNDROME

Also called micropsia, this condition distorts visual perception so that objects that are close appear disproportionately tiny, as though viewed through the wrong end of a telescope.

PICA

This is a compulsive appetite for non-edible items, including clay, stones, cigarette ash, paint, glue, laundry starch, ice and even hair.

FOREIGN ACCENT SYNDROME

Foreign Accent Syndrome, which can set in after strokes or other brain trauma, allows people to speaking their native tongue with a different accent. Anything from Swedish to South African and victims need never have heard the accent in question.

ONDINE'S CURSE

A sleep disorder resulting from a malfunctioning autonomic nervous system. Its victims are unable to breathe spontaneously but must consciously will each breath, so will suffocate if they fall asleep.

ALIEN HAND SYNDROME

Another condition arising from brain trauma, this bizarre syndrome involves losing control of one hand, which can do anything from gesticulating to unbuttoning clothes its owner is trying to put on with his or her other hand.

POLYDACTYLISM

Polydactylism is a congenital abnormality involving being born with too many digits, ranging from rudimentary nubbins to fully formed fingers or toes. Notables with the condition have included Henry VIII's ill-fated second wife Anne Boleyn (whose extra pinky sparked rumours of her being a witch), war photographer Robert Capa and cricketer Garry Sobers. According to The Guinness Book of Records, the record for extra digits goes to Indian brothers Tribhuwan and Triloki Yadav, who boast 20 fingers, four thumbs and 24 toes between them.

CAPGRAS SYNDROME

This syndrome involves the delusion that a significant other, such as a parent, spouse or other relative, is being impersonated by an imposter. Sufferers sometimes attack the supposed double. The delusion can also extend even to oneself, with the person convinced that the reflection in the mirror is that of an imposter.

RILEY-DAY SYNDROME

Feeling no pain; it doesn't sound like a problem, but it can be lethal for the victims of a syndrome involving, among other symptoms, insensitivity to pain. Caused by a chromosomal abnormality found among Ashkenazi Jews - people of Eastern European Jewish descent - the syndrome makes its victims exceptionally accident-prone because they simply don't register warning signs of tissue damage such as wounds, bruising and burns. They are even oblivious to oxygen deprivation, which means that when they hold their breath, as infants often do, they do so until they black out. Riley-Day patients tend to die young - around half before the age of 30 - from their injuries.

JERUSALEM SYNDROME

A religious psychosis triggered by a visit to Jerusalem. Observed since medieval times, its victims may believe that they are prophets and parade around the city proclaiming the Holy Writ or exhorting sinners to repent. Affecting around 100 tourists per year, it generally clears up once they leave town. However, it can have serious repercussions, as with the widespread rioting that ensued when Australian man Michael Rohan set fire to the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in 1969, convinced he was the "Lord's emissary".

HYPERTRICHOSIS

People with hypertrichosis, a congenital condition involving hair growing all over the body - including eyelids and even ears, which can sprout long curls.

PENIS PANIC

Genital Retraction Syndrome victims become convinced that their genitals are disappearing into their bodies. It can be contagious, sparking off "penis panics", such as the one that overtook Singapore in 1967 in which thousands of men became convinced that their penises were being stolen; it was contained by a complete media blackout on the condition.

PROTEUS SYNDROME

Named after Proteus, the Greek god famous for changing his shape, this is a progressive disorder causing disfiguring tumours and abnormal bone development. It's extremely rare, with just over 100 cases confirmed since it was first identified in 1979. Its most celebrated victim was Joseph Merrick, aka "The Elephant Man", a grotesquely deformed man befriended by Dr Frederick Treves, a physician at London Hospital.

Rocky the Flying Squirrel

The other day I was reading the NY Times and on the front page there was a picture of this pre-historic cross between a beaver and a platypus. To me it looked a lot like a flying squirrel.

It reminded me of the time I blasted a flying squirrel.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about the appropriate verb to use to accurately describe the event in which I dispatched that poor squirrel but blasted seems to work best. I was even describing the event to my friends Congo Kate and Pundista and after their initial reaction of awwhhh, the poor flying squirrel, they got on to the real business of “what kind of gun did you use?”.

It was a “22”, for which the bullet travels a mile. But it was safe as there were no neighbors for at least a mile in the direction I was shooting. They also agreed with me that “blasted” was the most descriptive term I could use to portrait the events that took place that day long ago in Minnesota.

That day, my dad came into my room saying, there’s a rabid squirrel on the deck of the house. It was threatening my two baby sisters who were playing on the same deck. I went outside to investigate.

The squirrel was awesome looking. Like no squirrel I had ever seen before. It had insane eyes, like a bush baby on steroids with batman-type wings. And it was aggressive. And she was standing on the triangular-type bird house I had built in Boy Scouts. She was wild-eyed and literally hissing at us while we were standing on the deck. Drastic actions were definitely in order.

So I blasted her.

Being a well-trained hunter from a proper family, a burial in the pet cemetery (near the garden with other pets, road-kill and birds-that-had-hit-the-window), and a thorough investigation of the situation was in order.

And then we heard the squeaking. Squeaking coming from the very bird house the rabid, evil-looking squirrel was protecting. It contained six baby flying squirrels. I had killed Rocky and Rocky was a mom.

So we began to feed those baby flying squirrels with an eye dropper. Every four hours for weeks.

The baby flying squirrels survived and we took them fifty miles to the Duluth zoo where their descendents hopefully live peacefully today in the woods surrounding the zoo. I now believe I actually helped the species as according to Wikipedia, “Though their lifespan is only about five years in the wild, flying squirrels often live between 10 and 15 years in captivity”.

Rock on Rocky (and your decendents).

The greatest language

I believe that the great leveler of the societies of the first and second worlds is not the English language or any of the other 82 languages shown above. I believe the greatest language of all is the language of computer science. The concept of ideas, functions and operations expressed through an intermediate language.

I am poor at languages. My first language is English and I’ve studied French, Japanese and Cantonese. But even after “immersion”, I still suck at all my second languages. At one point in my education, I got very good at learning languages, computer languages. At one point, during graduate school, I learned 17 languages in ten weeks. In those ten weeks, I learned useful languages such as Snoball4, LISP, PL/1 and 14 others. Later at work I learned COBOL, C, SQL, C++, JCL and Assembler. Computer languages all. At first I thought that this would be important for me and my career and then as each of them became obsolete, I began to doubt their importance.

And then I began to travel. During this time I realized that the commonality of all societies is not necessarily the language and culture, but the ideas, functions and operations of daily life. Just like computer science languages. The great leveler.

I’ve visited 37 countries (16%) of the recognized countries on Earth. (You too can determine where you’ve been at the site World66). My conjecture is that the past 20 years have been the only time in the history of mankind that you could take a person with no other language skills and provide them with a lucrative and transferable means of not only communicating, but thriving in a majority of the places on Earth.

Like everything else, you think you’ve done a lot and been a lot of places and then you realize that where you’ve been or what you’ve done is minutia. So how countries should you travel to before you can consider yourself an experienced person or a world traveler?

First off, how many countries and territories are there?

Many sources offer different answers, and depending on the source, there are 189, 191, 192, 193 or 194 independent countries in the world today. The United Nations has 191 members (including East Timor, the newest nation) but that number does not include the Vatican, an independent nation.

How about if you had your own plane…and you were the most traveled president of the US?

• Bill Clinton made 133 visits to foreign nations -- a Presidential record (see Appendix 1 for a year-by-year listing of Clinton's trips).
• These 133 visits break down into an average of 16.6 nations visited per year, another Presidential record.
• In his eight years, Clinton made more foreign visits than Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon combined (over the years 1953 -1974).
• In his eight years, Clinton visited almost as many nations as Presidents Carter, Reagan, and Bush combined (over the years 1977-1993).
• While Clinton was President for one-sixth of the period analyzed (eight of the 48 years between 1953 and 2001), he accounted for almost one-third of all Presidential visits.
• Clinton visited 74 different countries or entities

But even the President of the United States pales in comparison to Charles Veley.

“Charles Veley of San Francisco, California, USA, has, by age 40 years, 7 months, 26 days, traveled to 570 places, and is currently the #1 ranked traveler on earth.” One more point. Charles Veley was made rich by the Internet.

Computer Science; the greatest language on Earth.

15330 Days

February 25 is the 56th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. There are 309 days remaining, 310 in leap years. It is also my birthday and it has been 15,330 days since my birth. The day of my birth was the same day that Cassius Clay TKO’d Sonny Liston in 7 rounds for the heavyweight boxing title.

Internationally, February 25 is Kuwait’s national day and People Power Day, a special holiday in the Philippines.

Other birth’s that happened on February 25:

• 1398 - Xuande, Emperor of China (d. 1435)
• 1841 - Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born on February 25, 1841
• 1873 - Enrico Caruso, Italian tenor (d. 1921)
• 1888 - John Foster Dulles was born on February 25, 1888 (Dulles Airport)
• 1901 - Zeppo Marx, American actor (d. 1979)
• 1918 - Bobby Riggs, American tennis player (d. 1995)
• 1935 - Sally Jessy Raphaël, American talk show host
• 1943 - George Harrison, Lead guitarist of The Beatles (d. 2001)
• 1961 - Davey Allison, American race car driver (d. 1993)
• 1966 - Téa Leoni, American actress

And important events in history that happened on my birthday:

• 1570 - Pope Pius V excommunicates Queen Elizabeth I of England.
• 1643 Dutch U.S. colonists kill Algonquin-indians
• 1751 1st performing monkey exhibited in America, New York City (admission 1cent)
• 1791 1st Bank of U.S. chartered
• 1793 - George Washington holds the first Cabinet meeting as President of the United States.
• 1836 - Samuel Colt receives an American patent for the Colt revolver.
• 1837 - First US electric printing press patented by Thomas Davenport
• 1859 1st use of "insanity plea" to prove innocence
• 1862 Paper currency introduced in U.S. by President Abraham Lincoln
• 1901 - J.P. Morgan incorporates the United States Steel Corporation.
• 1910 Dali Lama flees Tibet from Chinese troop to British-Indies
• 1913 - The 16th Amendment to the United States Constitution, authorizing a graduated income tax, is ratified.
• 1925 - Glacier Bay National Monument (now Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve) is established in Alaska.
• 1932 Immigrant Adolf Hitler gets German citizenship
• 1940 1st televised (W2XBS, New York City) hockey game (Rangers vs. Canadians)
• 1945 U.S. aircraft carriers attack Tokyo
• 1956 - In his speech On the Personality Cult and its Consequences Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounces the actions of Joseph Stalin.
• 1954 - Gamal Abdul Nasser is made premier of Egypt.
• 1964 - Cassius Clay beats Sonny Liston in Miami Beach, Florida, and is crowned the heavyweight champion of the world.
• 1969 Beatles begin recording Abbey Road album
• 1986 - President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines flees the nation after 20 years of rule; Corazon Aquino becomes the first Filipino woman president.
• February 25, 1987 U.S. Supreme Court upholds affirmative action, 5-4
• 1991 - Gulf War: An Iraqi Scud missile hits an American military barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia killing 28 US Marines.
• 1994 - Mosque of Abraham massacre: In the Cave of the Patriarchs in the West Bank city of Hebron, Dr. Baruch Kappel Goldstein opens fire with an assault rifle, killing 29 Palestinian worshippers and injuring 125 more before being subdued and beaten to death by survivors. Subsequent rioting kills 26 more Palestinians and 9 Israelis.
• 2004 - On Ash Wednesday, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is released in movie theaters across the United States, grossing approximately $370 million domestically.
• 2005 - BTK suspect Dennis Rader arrested in Park City, Kansas.

Racism and Conflict Prevention

My daughter has never eaten at a McDonalds. She’s never even been in a McDonalds. No Mcgriddles, no Sponge Bob watches, no Apple Pies, nothing. I personally believe eating at McDonalds has a corollary. Racism. You learn to be a racist from your parents and you learn to eat at McDonalds the same way.

But she’s only four. More impressive is the fact that my hippie, moose-riding, former-commune-living uncle, who is over 50, has never eaten McDonalds. Now that’s impressive. And he’s not a racist either. I think I’m on to something here.

Now with 31,706 restaurants, McDonalds is the biggest toy distributor in the world. But what a mixed set of statistics this fast-food chain provides. Cities with a larger number of McDonald's restaurants are host to more murders per 100,000 people than those without.

How strange, as according to the "Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention", no nations have gone to war with each other since McDonald's opened up there. This theory’s most remarkable achievement has been in the Middle East with the opening of a kosher restaurant in Israel in 1993 and 18 branches in Egypt. (The McDonald's in Saudi Arabia closes five times a day for Muslim prayer.

The closest the theory has come to being challenged is the Falklands war in 1982. McDonald's has been operating in Britain since 1974, but did not open in Argentina until November 1986, when the country's return to democracy was more significant than the quality of its beef.

I guess the “Palestine Infidata” doesn’t count as war.

Trustafarians

I’m met quite a few trustafarian’s in my life. I met a Getty and a Mori (huge land and building owners in Japan) and a girl who inherited her fortune from the grandfather who invented that machine that makes those giant,round hay bales. I even met a heir to the Jello Gelatin fortune .

The Jello heir guy in particular pissed me off as the Jello business was sold off in 1923. That’s along time for multiple generations of trustafarians to be living off the tasty gelatin treat. Especially as the damn stuff is derived from cow bones.

So I’ve become somewhat accustomed to “those who have nothing to do”. Or even those who have the where-with-all and balls to create nonsense products. Things like Pet Rocks , and Silly Putty , and the attachment to a hockey stick that allows you to pick up dog poo.:

Attachment for Blade of Hockey Stick
Minnesota resident Martin Dehen has come up with a new use for the hockey stick – cleaning up yard waste. As the inventor notes, it's great for the nasty stuff, especially "rotten hornet-infested crab apples and dog waste.

"If the waste is to be flung by hand to a desired location such as a compost heap, the waste may crumble upon the head of one who throws the waste."

Nice.

But my newest hero’s are the people who have come up with this series of high-powered lasers:

The videos on this site show them doing important research…such as popping balloons. The inventors also have performed other important research and testing such as:

• Beam visible with smoke or fog in lighted areas
• Beam visible at night
• Beam visible in humid conditions
• Beam visible without smoke or fog in lighted areas
• Make holes in black trash bags
• Open cut healing power
• Beam visible in dry conditions in lighted areas
• Cut black electrical tape
• Ignite wooden or paper matches
• Pop dark colored balloons
• Melt Plastic

Just think what would happen if a truly malicious mind got hold of one of these evil toys:

Dr. Evil: You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads! Now evidently my cycloptic colleague informs me that that cannot be done. Ah, would you remind me what I pay you people for, honestly? Throw me a bone here! What do we have?

Number Two: Sea Bass.

Running for office

I was reading about an uproarious event which recently took place in Florida. Apparently, there is a chicken problem in the Sunshine State.

High Springs, Florida. “ After seeing High Springs firefighters toting rifles through a neighborhood and shooting at chickens last week, residents said they are infuriated.

The southwest sector of town between Southwest Fourth Avenue and Poe Springs Road has had a chicken problem for years. Many residents said they were upset not that the chickens were killed but the manner in which the situation was handled.

Residents said they were not notified that the shooting would happen, that they worried about the safety of their children and pets, and that firefighters ran through private property without permission.

When the shooting was over, residents said they were left to deal with injured chickens and a bloody mess.”

This reminded me of when my uncle stated his intent to run for mayor in Grand Marais, Minnesota. His stated intent was to run on a platform that would definitely have appealed to the rifle-toting firefighters in High Springs, Florida.

I’ve previously written about this certain hippie uncle as he was the one that taught me about the extreme sport of moose riding.

As I recall, his platform for mayor consisted of being able to effectively and humanely remove the “geese problem” from the cities litany of woes, although Grand Marais is probably only a township. But his platform and solution was certainly unique: to send the hockey team out on rollerblades and with their sticks. Being fast and aggressive, I’m sure they would’ve made short work of the Canadian geese that were menacing the township.

His running mate, an electrician, was chosen because he could easily explain “where all that electricity goes when the plug’s not in the wall”. An important set of knowledge indeed.

So if the bird-flu pandemic ever hits, you know who to call.

Lotto Millionaire!

I was reading the news the other day and saw a picture of some farmer in Iowa forking over a crisp $20 to buy some “Powerball tickets”. I began to wonder how many pigs he could have on his Iowa acreage if he won the $345,000,000 jackpot! And so I searched.

The largest single expense in growing a pig is the purchase of the piglet. An eight week old pig, weighing around 40 - 50 pounds, is approximately $80. Feed typically runs about $8 - $10 per 50 pound bag, and one bag will usually last two growing pigs about a week. You will also want to buy some straw or wood chips for your pig to sleep on. An estimate for growing a market pig (approximately 12 weeks) is $200.

Based on the cost of $200 per pig, that farmer could purchase 1,725,000 pigs to raise on his farm. But I doubt that he would remain an Iowa farmer given his newfound wealth. He’d probably opt out of farming and become a professional gambler or something. After winning the lotto with those odds, who could blame him.

That “game” the Iowa farmer was playing contained odds of 1-300,000,000 (300M). That same farmer has a better chance of being eaten by a shark while slopping his Iowa pigs as at winning that lottery. There is only 1-10,000,000(10M) chance of that happening as there are thirty attacks out of a population of about 300 million in the US.

By now, my ridicule of this lottery player may make you, incorrectly, think he is genetically defective or just plain stupid. In fact, it’s probably the opposite. By his very existence, that Iowa farmer is *very* lucky . “If you go back 10 generations (250 years) the chance of you being born at all is at most 1 divided by 6 x 10¹⁰⁰ or
1 in 60000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000000000000000

If you go back 1 million years or 40 000 generations, your chance of being born is at most 1 in 1.8 x 10403167 or 18 with 403,166 zeros after the 1.”

But now that this guys ancestors made it through the evolutionary hazards required to produce him, his odds of dying violently of the certain events are even better than his Powerball chance. A quiz for you. Which of these events are most likely to kill this potential Lotto-Millionaire?

1. A tornado.
2. A flood.
3. An asteroid.

Answer: An asteroid as we're more likely to perish from an asteroid strike (1 chance in 25,000) than we are from a flood (1 in 30,000) or a tornado (1 in 60,000).

This poor farmer, he’s also more likely to killed on the way home from buying his lotto ticket. His chances of dying from the following maladies are:

• Food poisoning: 1 in 3 million.
• Fireworks Accident: 1 in 1 million.
• Venomous Bite or Sting: 1 in 100,000
• Airplane Accident: 1 in 20,000
• Electrocution: 1 in 5,000
• Firearms Accident: 1 in 2,500.
• Fire: 1 in 800.
• Murder: 1 in 300.
• Car wreck: 1 in 100.

The sad thing is that even if this poor farmer from Iowa wins the lottery and makes it home, bad things are likely to happen to him and his family. Divorce, death, overdose, theft…it is truly sad but very likely.

Now I understand why this guy is playing the lottery…

Bob’s Museum

My first trip to Beijing was during a snowy winter in the early 1990’s. I always carried my rollerblades during my frequent business trips as I’ve found they offer the best speed and means of seeing a new city.

Rollerblader’s were less prevalent in those days and people would often stop me to ask questions or to talk. That particular winter day, I had a couple hours before my flight to explore a new city. It was cold and there was ice on the streets and snow in the open areas. I was in the center of Beijing, near Tianamen Square, and in this area there are four lanes of car traffic and very wide areas for the bicycle and pedestrian traffic on each side of the car lanes.

I started out and skated over to the Forbidden City where I had a local snap the picture above. And then I began my intended short skate.

After about five minutes of skating, and I was the only skater in the crowd of thousands, a bicyclist came up beside me. A local, he said “hi, my name is Bob”. We stopped along side of the multi-lane bicycle track as at the very least I was intrigued by a Chinese person named “Bob”. And then he completed the deal when he said “Do you want to see my museum?”

Given the situation, how could I possibly say no?

And so I went with Bob to his museum. As I remember, we took three lefts and a right. I guess I didn’t remember correctly as it went horribly wrong later. But I followed Bob to his museum. We ended up on a tree-lined street at a “pre-revolutionary” building. We passed through the façade and ended up in a beautiful courtyard. When we arrived, I took off my blades and a woman brought us tea as we entered a gorgeous building filled with modern art. Bob actually did have a museum.

I drank my tea and marveled at the beautiful art as Bob and I wandered around the three story structure. As the unexpectedly enthralling time came to an end, I strapped on my blades and began to search my memory for my path of return.

But this is where my plans when awry. I was carrying local currency and my passport but I had no clue as to the name of my hotel. And so I skated.

The skate was wonderful; I saw aspects of Beijing that I would never have normally seen, even with the omnipresent guide I normally possessed. But soon I ended up in places a rollerblader in the dead of winter should never end up.

I ended up on a very long dirt road packed with stopped traffic. The road ran along the old city wall. All along the side of the road and the old walled city, there were scads of people moving bricks. Moving bricks from one pile to another pile. And it was very cold. And snowy. And I was on a dirt road in stopped traffic. Adventure at its best, although I definitely didn’t feel as much.

As I was trying to skate along my cold, snowy, dirt road, all I could think about was why these poor people were moving these bricks from one pile to another. This was while there were all looking at me with an incredulous look in their eyes. I’m certain they were all thinking “what in the hell is that stupid Waiguoren doing skating out in the snow on a dirt road?”

Eventually I found a taxi rank and skated up. After I had waved my arms sufficiently enough for one of them to feel sorry for me, one of them came over and offered to take my money.

As I had no idea of the name of my hotel and as we couldn’t speak nor write any common languages, we rode around for quite awhile. After he had rung up a year’s salary in fare, we began to approach the center of Beijing. I got out of the taxi and skated around until I found a famous landmark. Specifically, the McDonald’s near Tianamen Square.

When I finally found my hotel I skated in looking disheveled, cold and scared. I got to my room and opened the door and I found all my clothes on the bed. Talk about disheveled.

Apparently whilst I was out on my adventure and missing my flight out of town, “they” decided that they should search my room, apparently to see if foul play had taken place. A nice touch and a fine ending to my first adventure in China.

I’ve been back to China and Beijing many times since but I have never brought my blades…

Opiate of the masses

Martin Scorsese once said that the cinema fulfills an “ancient quest for the common unconsciousness” and that it fills “a spiritual need that people have to share a common memory”. Kind of like Myspace. And religion.

The Japanese have a saying. “Born a Shinto, married a Christian and die as a Buddist”. The Christian part allows them to have a white wedding with all the trimmings. This adherence to no single deity is a wonderful and open minded aspect of Japanese society.

With all the recent Danish cartoon unrest, I began to wonder about the distribution of religion throughout our society. I wanted to understand the magnitude of the situation.

And so I searched:

Major Religions of the World – Ranked by the number of adherents

1. Christianity: 2.1 billion
2. Islam: 1.3 billion
3. Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist: 1.1 billion
4. Hinduism: 900 million
5. Chinese traditional religion: 394 million
6. Buddhism: 376 million
7. primal-indigenous: 300 million
8. African Traditional & Diasporic: 100 million
9. Sikhism: 23 million
10. Juche: 19 million
11. Spiritism: 15 million
12. Judaism: 14 million
13. Baha'i: 7 million
14. Jainism: 4.2 million
15. Shinto: 4 million
16. Cao Dai: 4 million
17. Zoroastrianism: 2.6 million
18. Tenrikyo: 2 million
19. Neo-Paganism: 1 million
20. Unitarian-Universalism: 800 thousand
21. Rastafarianism: 600 thousand
22. Scientology: 500 thousand

And there are a couple of interesting religions in this list that require further explanation:

Shinto-ism:

Shinto is an ancient Japanese religion. Starting about 500 BCE (or earlier) it was originally "an amorphous mix of nature worship, fertility cults, divination techniques, hero worship, and shamanism." Its name was derived from the Chinese words "shin tao" ("The Way of the Gods").

Shinto creation stories tell of the history and lives of the "Kami" (deities). Among them was a divine couple, who gave birth to the Japanese islands. Their children became the deities of the various Japanese clans. The Sun Goddess was one of their daughters. Her descendants unified the country. Her brother, Susano came down from heaven and roamed throughout the earth. He is famous for killing a great evil serpent.

Jainism definitely needs more global practitioners:

Jainism stresses the spiritual independence and equality of all life with a particular emphasis on non-violence.

Juche: Another idiosyncratic point I found in this list is that the “religion” of Juche (also known as Kimilsungism for its founder, Kim il Sung), and practiced primarily in North Korea, has these important and obviously disregarded tenants:

The people must have independence (Chajusong) in thought and politics, economic self-sufficiency, and self-reliance in defence.

Policy must reflect the will and aspirations of the masses and employ them fully in revolution and construction.

Zoroastrianism.

Zorastrianism is a religion founded in ancient times and was the dominant world religion at the time of Jesus. It had a major influence on other religions. It is still practiced world-wide, especially in Iran and India.

But the most fun point on this list is:

The Rasta-man has more followers than the Scientology!

Standing on the shoulders of giants

I am often humbled and encouraged, but always interested in and by historic figures. I amazed by the greatest personalities our society produces. People like Gandi and King. People like Fermi and Einstein and Turing. Still others like Pele and Gretsky and Jordan. Maybe even Bruce Lee.

All of these people are known great leaders and champions. But it is rare when you come across an unknown hero. A hero that affects all of us even today. A good example of such a rare individual is Dr. Hooke.

Last week, as reported by the BBC, a "lost" science manuscript from the 1600s was found in the cupboard of a house in Hampshire England. The hand-written document - penned by Dr Robert Hooke - contains the minutes of the Royal Society from 1661 to 1682.

Now being an American, the only Dr. Hook I previously knew of sang:

"Well we're big rock singers.

We got golden fingers.

And we're loved everywhere we go.

We sing about beauty,

And we sing about truth

At ten thousand dollars a show.

We take all kinds of pills

To give us all kind of thrills,

But the thrill we ain't never known

Is the thrill that'll getcha

When you get your picture

On the cover of the Rollin' Stone.”

Ignorance is truly bliss. But I still like that song. Little did I know, the famous Issac Newton quote:

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants"

appeared originally in a letter to Dr. Robert Hooke. The quote has been interpreted as a sarcastic remark directed against Dr. Hooke. He had accused Sir Isaac Newton of stealing his ideas about gravity.

It is encouraging to me to read that historic peer working relationships over the past four centuries have not improved from that which I experience every day at my work.

But what an impressive litany of discoveries and work this man produced:

• Hooke experimentally demonstrated the inverse-square law of gravity
• Coined the biological word "cell"
• so called because his observations of plant cells reminded him of monks' cells which were called "cellula".
• Helped pave the way for the steam engine
• Designed the sash window
• Designed the velocipede
• The Bicycle!
• Helped to rebuild London after the Great Fire of 1666
• Co-designer of London!
• He worked on designing the Royal Greenwich Observatory
• from which “Greenwich mean time” derives.
• Invented the Anchor Escapement
• The anchor escapement is a type of escapement, the mechanism in a clock that maintains the swinging of a pendulum for accurate timekeeping.

And the discovery of:

• Hooke's law of elasticity, which describes the linear variation of tension with extension in an elastic spring.
• How could we possibly do without rubber bands and springs?
• the first binary star
• the iris diaphragm in cameras
• the wheel-cutting engine
• the universal joint
• the punched paper record keeper
• the worm gear
• the optical telegraph
• the deep sea sampler
• the wind gauge

Hooke also transformed or improved all the important scientific instruments of his age:

• thermometers,
• barometers,
• reflecting and refracting telescopes,
• single lens and compound microscopes,
• quadrants,
• sextants,
• pendulums,
• watches,
• precision balances,
• vacuum pumps,
• micrometer eyepieces,
• dividing engines (for accurately calibrating quadrant and other scales).
• and he made the air pump that enabled Robert Boyle to develop his law of gases.

Dr Robert Hooke, who died in 1703, has been described as the unsung hero of science and "England's Leonardo". But he never made the cover of the Rolling Stone.