The guy had studied animal husbandry and he told my co-workers and me that if you inserted a foreign object (about the size of a quarter) up into the reproductive area of a hen at _just the right time_, the hen would often lay an egg with the foreign object trapped inside.[1]
Our business plan:
* get a bunch of hens
* have guys mail $500 + engagement rings to us.
* insert engagement ring into hen
* ship back ring-encased egg to the dudes.
* dudes ask girlfriends to cook an omelette...
I still wonder how anyone figured that out.
[1] There might have been surgery involved. Can't remember.
So it was clear that a foreign object planted at the right place and right time could induce the animal to form an egg around it. I'm just not sure if this is reliable enough to create a business around the idea.
Besides, slightly modified kinder eggs are sold in the US.
Also known as: "quite logical and sensible comparison everywhere else in the world".
>but the story itself is nonsense. The US didn’t specifically ban them, they simply fall under a (sensible) pre-existing law and no one gives enough of a crap to change it.
Which doesn't change the essence of the story, which is not that the Kinder eggs where purposefully banned themselves, but simply that Kinder eggs are banned (and in general, that they'd ban something like Kinder eggs and co).
US version: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinder_Joy
"Kinder Surprise eggs are legal in Canada and Mexico, but are illegal to import into the US. In January 2011, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) threatened a Manitoba resident with a $300 (Canadian dollars) fine for carrying one egg across the US border into Minnesota.[43] In June 2012, CBP held two Seattle men for two and a half hours after discovering six Kinder Surprise eggs in their car upon returning to the US from a trip to Vancouver. According to one of the men detained, a border guard quoted the potential fine as US $2,500 per egg.[44]"
Not putting inedible stuff in candy does make sense to me in the general case.
But frankly, so does basic gun control so what the fuck do I know.
I would also like to add I am of the personal view gun control is very much so unconstitutional. But I also don't think that wanting some basic gun control is a wrong thing. All that contradiction means is that we need to have a very careful discussion before drafting a very careful amendment.
It's pretty easy to permit the right to bare arms while still preventing the sale to anybody off the street. It won't fix everything, but it gets us a hell of the way there.
Being worried about a slippery slope is a concern, that is why I said careful amendment.
and also that hCG induces ovulation in frogs.
If injecting frogs with urine is cheaper than other methods of detecting signaling horomones.. well, there ya go.
Unrelated, but as for the origin of the latin term "vacca", it may come from vedic, with the meaning of "the animal that moos"
Edit: made my answer more to the point
Just mentioning this for other people who like looking up words. And yes it's obvious... unless you're one of those people who sometimes overthinks search terms.
the author actually followed some alchemical recipes which were thought to be nonsense. yet under the right conditions (using iron implements, bad control of temperatures, impure materials) they produced results that must have seemed miraculous at the time — fluorescent materials, elaborate crystalline structures, and so on.
openasocket says>"How on Earth does someone discover that? What possible series of events or hypotheses would lead someone to perform such an experiment?
Whoa! No one said that anyone "discovered that", or that "such an experiment" was performed. The article merely said that someone speculated that possibility. To further speculate on hearsay of mere speculation is not wise.
- Aerosmith, Sweet Emotion
Oh the odd connections between all these living things and their chemicals.
Hogben was the main statistician instrumental in this research on the African clawed frog.
The reason why clicked on this thread was because I was always intrigued by H. P. Lovecraft's horror towards fungi [3]. I always wonder if he was onto something. :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancelot_Hogben#Early_life
[2] Hogben, L. Chance and Choice by Cardpack and Chessboard, 1950.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/science/frogs-fungus-kore...
Then I read on about injecting frogs with urine and thought he was retelling an African urban legend. I was impressed with the tale being prefaced with a "factoid" which would be a correct use!
Then I realized it was actually true. But at that point my dismay in the incorrect use of "factoid" after all was completely dwarfed by my shock that injecting frogs with human urine really did determine pregnancy.
That dismay was misplaced. Factoid was used correctly (and can mean both real and fake information -- see my response above).
And X-oid doesn't imply "looks like X but isn't" in general. In most cases it means "in the family of X things" (as per the original etymology).
It's just that some word, like "humanoid" are more useful when referring to non-humans (else we could just say human). Whereas there are many types of trapezoids (for example), there are only one humanity. So our uses for humanoid would either be as a synonym for human (useless), or as meaning "human-like" which makes sense only to apply to non-humans (e.g. aliens, robots, etc).
Basically, things are "wrong" for a while, then they pick up steam, and they become right. I suppose "factoid" might have overcome the hurdle and become accepted, but the old stodgy rules are still worth knowing about if you have to write, e.g., an article in the NYTimes or something.
The Oxford dictionary sported the secondary definition of the literally since 1903 -- the use is much older. After over a century of common use and lexicographic registration, I don't think it fits into the prescriptivist vs descriptivist debate anymore (that would hold for more modern mistakes, not century-old established language -- do those people also argue that "awesome" e.g. is something that inspires dread, as per the original meaning of awe?).
"I could care less" is also "correct" according to your criterion.
Or you don't know what -oid means either.
Oid doesn't strictly mean "looking like but not being X". Some words ending in -oid can mean that, but generally just means "having the form of X, belonging to the class of X" etc. From the ancient Greek -oides.
Dictionary again:
-oid. a suffix meaning “resembling,” “like,” used in the formation of adjectives and nouns (and often implying an incomplete or imperfect resemblance to what is indicated by the preceding element)
Note the "often", not always.
And not at all mandatory at the original ancient Greek -oeides where -oid was adopted from, for math, zoology, medicine, etc. It means both "likeness" (so alike, but not X), and "form" (belonging to the family of things with X form).
Yes, now you do.
Before, e.g. in your comment, you confused what it "often" means (in some terms) to be what it must always mean (in every term).
It doesn't get its "looks but isn't" from sharing the same ending as "humanoid". The same way an arachnoid is still an arachnid.
-oid just means "having the form of" (from the ancient Greek, oeides, meaning "of the type"/"belonging to the class"/"having the form of").
Sometimes this implies "looking like, but not being the thing" (like in humanoid, else we'd just say "human"), but in other words it just means "belonging to that family".
Factoids are meant to be small interesting tidbits (facts).
Quite often what are presented as factoids are bogus (e.g. urban legends reproduced by journalists to fill "Did you know that?" style columns).
Dictionary covers both meanings:
1) an item of unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact.
2) a brief or trivial item of news or information.
But as you can see, the 1st meaning is not because of the "-oid" making such a meaning mandatory (else the world wouldn't have the second meaning, not to mention all the other words that end in -oid, but still don't imply a mere look-alike).
I'll get my hat...