Science has shown that laughing for ten minutes will increase blood flow, use 80 muscles, and burn up to 40 calories. Since laughing uses so many different muscles and gets the heart pumping, it is basically a mild aerobic workout. (more…)

Have you ever wondered what makes us laugh? What is it about comedy that makes us feel amused? I have asked myself and Google these questions and I have some interesting answers.

First off let’s define humor. At the time of this writing, wikipedia says this about humor: “Humor is the ability or quality of people, objects, or situations to evoke feelings of amusement in other people.” This doesn’t tell us what triggers the feelings of amusement. I have noticed that all jokes, puns and riddles have one thing in common; they all poke at some kind of pain. Everything thing that makes us laugh involves a painful act whether it be physical, emotional or mental. The more pain stacked up, the funnier it is - to a point. If it goes too
far, the comedy becomes a tragedy.

Good jokes are painful on many levels. All jokes are basically painful because after the punchline, the audience says in their head “I can’t believe I didn’t see that coming,” and laughs. A joke is a mental surprise. When a magician produces a bird, is it “magic” if the audience sees the bird coming? If the audience didn’t see it coming and is surprised, how is this different from a joke? If they saw it coming, the magician was not very good and no magic was performed.
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Many years ago, I found a website that gave complete instructions on how to build a traditional Mongolian yurt, often called a ger. Something about its construction spoke to me deeply. I bookmarked the site never knowing that years later I would end up building it and living in it.

The yurt was created by nomads in Asia over 2000 years ago and many Asians still live in these today. Within its walls lay very important lessons about nature and systems. The yurt is highly portable and is made of several components that act together to make the home structurally sound. Leave one piece out, and it topples like a house of cards.

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One day, people will wear a piece of jewelry and this jewelry will record all the video and audio from your entire day. This data will be stored instantly on web-based databases. Speech-to-text engines will make searching the audio a breeze. Video recognition will be quite good too.

People will pay for this and the secret rooms connected to the tubes.

Here’s one for the magicians in the crowd. Some trade humor so-to-speak. This is meant purely for fun. I have done a lot of these in the past.

You might be a bad magician if….
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