Comments by "Philip B" (@philipb2134) on "TED-Ed" channel.

  1. Dr. Ikeda's discovery founded a company, Ajinomoto, still alive and kicking. I hadn't studied Japanese for nearly 30 years, but I understand it as meaning "the origin/basis of flavour".
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  2. 0:20 Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -Pablo Picasso
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  3.  @GojiGuru  Before domestication, dogs (/wolves) were obligate carnivores. Humans are omnivores; dogs are not..
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  4.  @LtZetarn  I'm quite confident that my spaghetti contains no MSG detectable by your average commercial analytical lab.
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  5. I have long been suffering from a vernacular disease. Time to up my wordrobe.
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  6.  @ayatipathak  ...and correlation is not causation.
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  7. +Johannes S "Competition in the money systems" is allowed. If you would rather your personal wealth shift into yen, or Australian dollars, or Swedish kronor: you can do that. If you want to go all-in and shift your liquid assets into bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency: you can do that too. One of the reasons you are able to communicate with so many people far beyond the limitations of how far a person can walk, or perhaps ride a horse, is that there has been an immense increase in economic activity, of social and technological development, which only can have happened if there were trust in common criteria of norms, and that includes monetary confidence..
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  8. I am using a Von Neumann machine to write this response - i.e., a (now commonplace) computer
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  9. Wise
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  10. Fleming was somewhat lax in maintaining cleanliness in his lab. That saved millions of lives. Why won't my gf let me save lives? /s
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  11. Many well are enthralled by the passage in Hamlet, "to be, or not to be.'". I found Hamlet's musing on the state of humanity more profound, "what a piece of work is man...".
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  12. +BlackenGames Picasso is not around to "defend his own thesis." Let me speculate as to what IMO likely he meant. Giving us correct answers is the easy part. Asking the right questions is what truly is difficult - and computers were nowhere near to that in his day [\understatement].
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  13. I had learned in a Marketing course that the 'three on a match' superstition was invented after WW1 by the Swedish Match Co. in order to boost sales.
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  14. +Cygwin Parallel developments do not always denote correlation, and correlation itself most certainly does not prove causation. The stock of gold is finite;. Since the end of WWII, world GDP has increased significantly faster than world supply of gold. If we were to revert to a gold standard, the necessary adjustment to match money supply to gold holdings would produce a recession of such severity that, in comparison, the 1930s would look like a rave party If moving to a gold standard were the motive, the Swiss or the Brits would have tried first; but almost every government would have had reason to act. And, BTW - note of historical accuracy: Qaddafi was killed by other Libyans.
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  15. Britain, Germany, and Poland were all part of the same Western culture which had been bound together by the Roman Catholic Church, and whose societies went through the Renaissance, the emergence of Protestantism and the Reformation, and the Enlightenment; not so for Russia. Apart from language and the post WWII Soviet domination, the Poles are essentially closer to (say) the Dutch or the Swiss, than to the Russians.
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  16. African elephants (Loxodonta africana) are listening to us. The pachyderms can tell certain human languages apart and even determine our gender, relative age, and whether we’re a threat http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/03/elephants-have-learned-understand-human
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  17. The Chinese Restaurant Syndrome might not be entirely a matter of racial prejudice: peope who ate at Chinese restaurants did so voluntarily. When I ws a kid, I looked forward to eating at Chinese restaurants as special treat, and my mom was glad to indulge me, since it was one of the few ways I would gladly eat vegetables. We did sometimes later feel an unpleasant sensation of tightening at the temples. That might have been due to the use of canned ingredients such as water chestnuts or bamboo shoots, not MSG - but it was real.
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  18.  @SoraJack  Let it sink in... if there were racial prejudice afoot: would persons complaining of such syndrome have eaten Chinese food in the first place?
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  19. 0:10 and 0:34 the animation shows Khrushchev by a Russian flag. That is an anachronism: he would have been flanked by the flag of the Soviet Union.
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  20. Might perhaps our digestive systems respond to produce rejecta manipulated to contain significant exploitable beneficial bioactive compounds? Our guts are superb and available bioreactors.
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  21. Try this one on / French: > il y eut fallu que j'eusse
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  22. Don't take the Bible for gospel.
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  23. It's not funny, neither is it divine. <c> Want to stop conversation at a dinner party? Ask what Dante's fist name was ( also works with Rembrandt).
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  24. 2:03 / Properly, a koan should be indecipherable when using normative tools of available logic. A koan should trigger an undue smile, and vice-versa.
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  25. I would ask Chomsky: who are you to tell me to question authority?
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  26. would be stellar if you passed.
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