"Safety First," misrepresented

[rayheinrich]

PTG! (Praise the Gods) Just imagining the 50 person life raft inflating inside the aircraft, I had to laugh, very good one. I have some saved around here, I wish I could find the one from my $90 inflatable kayak, as it had some totally unhelpful Chinese to English instructions that were pretty amusing.

Anyway, here's a kind of longer one from the abstract of a scientific paper.. It's not near as funny as the inflatable raft but it's one I saved from when I was looking up some psychology research papers and thought it was slightly amusing:

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NIH - National Library of Medicine

"The bizarreness effect: Evidence for the critical influence of retrieval processes"
Authors: Lisa Geraci, Mark A McDaniel, Tyler M Miller, Matthew L Hughes

Abstract:
The present experiment was designed to isolate the unique contributions of the retrieval context to the bizarreness effect. Participants studied common sentences in one room under one set of instructions, and bizarre sentences in another room under another set of instructions. At test, participants recalled the common and bizarre sentences either together or separately. The results showed that the bizarreness effect was only obtained when participants recalled the common and bizarre items together; no bizarreness advantage emerged when participants were required to recall the common and bizarre items separately. These results suggest that differential encoding processes are not necessary for explaining the bizarreness effect in memory. Rather, retrieval of the mixed-list context appears to be critical for obtaining the effect.
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Here's something I wrote to someone a while back. I'm pasting it in here for anyone whose interested. if you're interested. It's about the kayak, hurricanes, local history, and whatnot:

I've gone on numerous bay expeditions around here in the kayak and it's worked out well, for $90 it's really quite excellent. By the way: I live about three blocks from one of the bays. (Burnet Bay, named for David G. Burnet, first president of the Republic of Texas. Yes, Texas was its own sovereign country for about 10 years. Burnet had a house on Burnet Bay which is located about four long blocks from my house. There's a small historic site marker in someone's backyard.) Anyway, there are numerous small bays and we used to paddle around them as kids and later had a small sailboat and ranged farther down into Galveston Bay which is pretty effing giant. We're on part of the San Jacinto River delta. My house - I've lived here on and off since I was 3.5 years old - sits a full 24 ft above sea level. The largest hurricane surge so far was Hurricane Carla at 18 ft so we have some leeway. There's also a small forest between us and the bay so there's no surf action. I come from a family that loves the excitement of hurricanes, particularly my dad. There was a tremendous amount of wind and then the calm of the center of the hurricane started to pass over us. He timed the center of Carla and let us go out saying we had to be back in 30 minutes and gave us one of his watches to carry around. We rode bicycles around, looked at all the downed trees, some of them on people's houses, and had fun chasing fish in a few feet of storm surge water that covered our streets. My uncle and his kids - his house a long block from here and 18 feet above - actually were fishing out his bathroom window and caught a few fish.