I decided to use ten minutes of my extra hour to post a few facts about turning back the clocks.

+As Will informed us back in March, it’s Daylight Saving time, not Daylight Savings.

+The idea of Daylight Saving Time can be traced back to a tongue-in-cheek letter Ben Franklin wrote to The Journal of Paris in 1784.

+The first country to actually implement DST was Germany, during World War I. The U.S. followed suit in 1918, recognizing DST and establishing the four time zones, which had been used by the railroad industry since 1883.

+After the 1973 energy crisis, the U.S. went on extended Daylight Saving Time for 1974-75. A Department of Transportation study found that observing DST in March and April saved 10,000 barrels of oil a day, prevented 2,000 traffic injuries and saved $28 million in traffic costs. In 1976, the U.S. returned to the previously observed schedule, after public opposition to late winter sunrises.

+In 2007, the DST period will start earlier (March 11) and end later (November 4). This is part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, and this is only a test. Based on results, Congress can choose to revert to the previous schedule, which was set in 1986.

It’s been a pretty scary week around here. And not just because the blog has been haunted by jack-o’-lanterns, vampires, and Hitler (oh my!). Here’s what else had us quaking in our boots:

• 47 zombies were liquified by a man wielding a gasoline-powered push-mower.
• Shrapnel went flying. (Thankfully, it didn’t damage any textbooks.)
• Explosions rocked the land.
• We saw “The Birds” re-enacted in the wild.
• Suffering from a hangover, we resorted to voodoo.
• Little children learned how to make shrunken heads.
• Little children learned how to make flamethrowers and guns.
• Little children played with disembodied eyes.
• A woman was attacked by microwaves.
• Several houses were haunted, and one struck back.
• Night creatures crawled and the dead started to walk in their masquerade.
• We were scourged, keelhauled, and buried alive. Also, spammed.

Don’t forget to send us your costume ideas for our contest (and remember to send a pic if you want to participate in the Halloween parade on Tuesday). Have a creepy, crawly, bone-chilling weekend…

According to our esteemed editor Neely, the topic of our upcoming cover story is “really huge, intimidating, and rather scary-sounding” — but no, it’s not part of our Halloweek festivities. It’s all about Big Ideas: string theory, deconstruction, postmodernism, the theory of relativity, and some exotic idea in economics that Mangesh is referring to as “the Black-Scholes equation.” And our goal is to make all of this hyper-intellectual stuff a lot less huge, intimidating, and scary-sounding. So — that said, what should we cover? What Big Ideas — field-changing, paradigm-shifting, big-word-using stuff — would you like us to make some sense of? Tell us in the comments, and if we like your suggestion, we’ll put your name in the magazine.

Apparently, helping the sick means not taking your med school cues from the movies. In fact, the Ririan Project has compiled a pretty great list of the Top 10 things you ought not to do, including peeing on jellyfish stings and sucking on snakebites. Of course, my favorite of the group is this one:

5. Slapping a Raw Steak on a Black Eye
In the movies, you always see someone put a raw steak over their black eye. While it may feel good, the grease from the steak might get into the eye, causing more inflammation. “The only medical merit this has is if it’s a cold steak,” says Flip Homansky, M.D., who’s seen his share of shiners in his work for the Nevada State Athletic Commission, which regulates Las Vegas’s boxing bouts. “The cold will decrease swelling, but there is no enzyme or anything else in a raw steak that will help otherwise.” The fact that the steak, compared with blocks of ice or ice cubes, can be formed to fit over the eye is another benefit, but a cheaper and less bacteria-prone solution is a bag of frozen peas, or crushed ice in a plastic bag wrapped in a towel. And remember, you will still end up with bruising.

Ugh! Somehow it had never occurred to me that meat grease could slide into your eye and cause an infection. In any case, I’ve never had to worry about such things. Being a vegetarian, I’ve only got slabs of tofu in my freezer, which I’m pretty certain no one wants pressed up against their face. Link via the ever-fantastic Neatorama

Check out this amazing photo from the Daily Mail. According to the site, this woman is from the ethnic minority group known as the Chin, who reside in Myanmar. Apparently, face tattooing was a preventive measure to stop young girls from being kidnapped and turned into concubines by neighboring tribes. In any case, this woman is the last survivor to bear such a tattoo, as the 200 year old custom has since died out. Link via Neatorama.

LiveScience, having already announced that vampires are a mathematical impossibility, is now telling us that zombies are (in some sense) real:

Kings of the b-movie industry, zombies are individuals who’ve either had their souls sucked from their bodies or been revived from the dead through black magic. Zombie culture stems from the voodoo religion of Haiti, where it is still believed that people can fall into mindless trances just like the walking dead we’ve seen on film (minus the missing limbs and snacking on human flesh). An ethnobotanist investigating the claims in Haiti found a toxic drug that could actually induce a zombie-style catatonic state.

The article also covers werewolves, ghosts, witches, demons, and several other creatures you’re likely to encounter on Tuesday.

And finally, our top choice, partially because we have a deep and abiding affection for Weber State and partially because we absolutely adore the idea of anatomy-centric Christmas carols:

My best teacher ever was Dr. Kent Van De Graaff. He taught human anatomy at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. He loved to teach, and he had such a passion for anatomy that he made you love it too.

Dr. Van De Graaff made a subject anatomy fun. For example, he made up a 4-5 page list of anatomy Christmas songs (my personal favorite being “Gary the Gastrocnemius” to be sung to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”) and led the class in singing them. When we were studying tissues, he played a game in class similar to 20 Questions called I Am a Tissue. He rewarded anyone who asked him a good question with a Damitol – a jelly bean to eat when life is no good. He also tried to make whatever we learning in class applicable to our lives right then. When we studied the brain, he made a list of brain facts and ways to keep your brain healthy.

I think Dr. Van De Graaff’s greatest attribute was his desire for students to succeed. He was always willing to help any student with a problem. I was in an English class after I had him, and one of my classmates told us that he was the reason she was an English major. She went to see him one day after class because she was struggling, and because of their conversation she changed her major to something she truly enjoyed. He was an amazing person, and it was a tragedy when he died last year.

- Janel Christensen

Janel, send us your contact info (and any recordings you may have of “Gary the Gastrocnemius”), and we’ll get your book on its way.

There’s a new book coming out that seems right up our alley and it’s all about how some of the more famous one-liners are actually erroneous. Written by Oxford Dictionary of Quotations editor, Elizabeth Knowles, What They Didn’t Say is due out next month from Oxford University Press.

You’ve heard the old “To fresh fields and pastures new”? But did you know the original lyric, from Milton’s poem of 1637, “Lycidas” is actually “To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new”?

Likewise, it turns out Napoleon never pleaded, “Not tonight, Josephine.” That comes from the title of a 1915 song and was later mistakenly attributed to the short Emperor.

And according to this AP article on the book:

Sherlock Holmes, for example, who is widely credited with saying: “Elementary, my dear Watson” to his sidekick, only managed “Elementary,” once, in creator Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1894 short story, “The Crooked Man.” The full phrase was coined 21 years later by the hero of P.G. Wodehouse’s “Psmith, Journalist.”

Oh, and guess what… Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake,” either. According to Wiki:

When Marie Antoinette actually heard about the bread shortage she wrote, “It is quite certain that in seeing the people who treat us so well despite their own misfortune, we are more obliged than ever to work hard for their happiness. The king seems to understand this truth; as for myself, I know that in my whole life (even if I live for a hundred years) I shall never forget the day of the coronation.”

Eh, not so quotable, is it?

Some of you might recall the Weekend Word Wrap from some moons ago on malapropisms. A malapropism, of course, is an eponym first and foremost as it takes its name from a person. Okay, in this case a fictitious person, Mrs. Malaprop, from Sheridan’s 1775 play, The Rivals, but a person nonetheless.

Most eponyms, however, are usually named after actual people, generally their surnames. Our word algorithm, for instance, comes from the word Algoritmi, which is the Latinization of the 9th century Persian Muslim mathematician, Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. (Good thing he was a mathematician and not a baseball player. “Now batting,…”)

The fields of science and medicine are full of eponyms like Petri dish, named for the bacteriologist Julius Richard Petri who invented it in 1877 and Galvanize, named after the Italian scientist Luigi Galvani.

One of my least favorite eponyms is named after Henry Shrapnel, the Englishman who designed the famous artillery shell. I’ve always thought it was one of the ugliest sounding words in our language.

A more pleasing eponym, at least to my ear, is jumbo, who was actually a 62-ton elephant owned by the Barnum & Bailey Circus in the late 1800s

As always, we’d love to hear some of your favorites (or least favorites). Meanwhile, good old Reader’s Digest has a quiz you can take to see how up on your eponyms you are. Check it out.

It seems that humans are rarely more ingenious than when they’re devising new ways to torture and kill one another, as detailed in yesterday’s post on ancient methods of execution. Except, that is, when they’re devising new ways of killing and torturing one another in the movies. Match as many of the following gory death scenes with the movie titles that correspond to them for a virtual high-five, and possibly a virtual talking-to from my mother, who thinks splatter flicks aren’t “edifying.” (Whatever, Mom.)

THE DEATH SCENE
1. 47 zombies are liquified by a man wielding a gasoline-powered push-mower.
2. A girl is magically turned into a cockroach, then trapped in a roach motel and crushed.
3. Various people are chewed up by a homicidal laundry-folding machine.
4. A gentleman has his head bitten off by a killer rabbit.
5. An accident-prone character blows up when he tries to ignite his fart.
6. A man ages hundreds of years in ten seconds.
7. Someone is fed into a wood chipper.
8. A lady of the evening has a live chainsaw dropped on her.
9. A clothes iron is pressed against a man’s chest, boiling his heart.
10. The gym teacher is bisected by the gym’s basketball hoop.
11. A nerd drinks from a radioactive water fountain.
12. A prominent Scientologist actor is propelled by a deactivated atomic bomb over a supply of burning fuel for a helicopter right as it explodes during a train crash.
13. Shot through the glasses by Tsarist troops.
14. A character is decapitated with a sword while speaking. The severed head flies through the air, lands several feet away, finishes the sentence and dies.

After the jump: the films
(more…)