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#18 One of the worst and most destructive lies in our time is that money brings happiness and fulfilment. People who believe this know no rich people
Those that don't think it does know no poor people or the struggle in time, money and stress that it costs to be poor.
Actual data shows there is a marked increase in happiness once you are earning over $100,000 per year. It drops off at about $500,000 per year. About 15% of the population is unhappy no matter what their income is, so there's not much help for those folks.
snooker tables have holes.
Carrambolage.
Well, I’ll be…
I learned something today.
Those already exist, they're called holidays with extended family...
Hippocrates described the electrical Mediterranean torpedo with the name narkē, which is to say, the same origin as “narcosis,” which is a description of its numbing effect. Those Ancient Greco-Roman naturalists who tried to imagine what was causing the effect tended to think it was a form of poison.
The conclusive connection between the discharge of these fish and electricity was not made until the 1740s with the development of Leyden jars (basic capacitors for storing static electricity).
European understanding of electricity in part derived from studies of these fish and their organs in the 17th century. Alessandro Volta’s first battery (the voltaic pile) was described by its inventor as an “artificial” replication of the natural organs of animal electricity found in such fish, and there were deep debates in the 18th century about whether electricity was essentially an animal phenomenon or a physical one.
Anyway. From what we can tell, by the time Europeans described the South American electrical eel, they seem to have known about its electrical nature — the first reports of them in European scientific circles are from the 1740s. Linnaeus categorized it as Gymnotus Electricus in 1766. We have not found a reference to what it was categorized as before this, or what natives may have called it.
For more detail and information, there is a very nice article on the history of “animal electricity” here: Chau H. Wu, “Electric Fish and the Discovery of Animal Electricity: The mystery of the electric fish motivated research into electricity and was instrumental in the emergence of electrophysiology,” American Scientist 72, no. 6 (1984), 598-607.