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Take a bow, Lumpy Q. Censoring:

My sincere apologies to the Réaumur and Rømer temperature scales – I have no choice but to unceremoniously dump them off my list of my five favourite scales. I understand that this is particularly painful for them, mirroring as it does the cruel way in which the international scientific community cast them by the wayside in favour of those upstarts, the Fahrenheit and Celsius and Kelvin scales. But I must do what I must.

The reason for this, of course, is that doing the rounds over the past few days has been the Schmidt Sting Pain Index: a scale of the relative painfulness of stings caused by the Hymenoptera order of insects (bees and wasps and ants and shit). It’s a classy piece of work, and I don’t know how I missed it the first time round. For one thing, it’s a fairly unique scale in that it applies in full to only one person in the world – its main creator, entomologist Justin O. Schmidt. It’s a scale of how badly the various insect stings hurt him, gleaned through long and agonising personal experience. While broadly generalisable to the rest of the human species, it’s really a one-man thing.

The second reason is that it is the best written scale ever. A brief excerpt:

• 1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
• 2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
• 2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine WC Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.

Glorious.

Give me my hour back, you bastards.

EDITED TO ADD: Whoa. Did anybody see what happened there? That’s right, in trying out Alex King’s Twitter Tools WordPress plugin, something went a bit wrong, and a new blog post got made from every single thing I’ve ever sent to Twitter. Some of them even had several identical posts made out of them. Eeeek. Watch out for that, if you’re thinking of using the plugin – the “Create a blog post from each of your tweets” option (which I didn’t mean to activate anyway) is retroactive. Aaaargh.

• Completely shattered after party and long night bus journey. Must fall asleep. Hmmmm. Might just watch one episode of Heroes first… #

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The only thing that could improve O’Brian’s majestic Aubrey-Maturin series: zombies.

The greater part of the sailors not that instant engaged in trimming the ship was standing in a circle about the mast. He followed the men’s gazes up and was stunned, although not in the least surprised, to see Stephen’s zombie capering about in the rigging.

“Mr. Pullings, my compliments to Dr. Maturin, and would he kindly retrieve his undead specimen before it does damage to the ship?”

“Sir, he’s trying to tempt it down.”

And indeed there Stephen stood on the far side of the circle of sailors, making some sort of noise that Aubrey assumed was meant to be soothing. It sounded distinctly like French.

Go read. (via Making Light)

People are weird. The internet is weird.

Inspired by an IM conversation the other day (which was itself inspired by the fact that I started absent-mindedly eating a Bird Eye chilli, and only realised that I’d been doing it when I noticed after a few minutes that it hurt to move my tongue), I present to you my Top Five Favourite Scales:

The Scoville Scale: measures how hot chillies are, based on the concentration of capsaicin, the chemical that makes them hot. It’s a killer scale, because it goes all the way up to about 16 million (which is pure capsaicin). The hottest chilli pepper in the world, the Naga Jolokia, only gets up to about a million at most – but that still makes it roughly half as potent as some standard issue pepper sprays, and as such it should probably be used with great care when, say, seasoning a curry. You should probably also wash your hands after cutting one of those, especially if you plan on touching your eyes or genitals in the near future. More common chillies are less pungent by a factor or two of ten: Thai Bird Eye chillies rate up to about 100,000 (and as such should not be mistakenly eaten while not paying sufficient attention to what you’re putting in your mouth; see above), while jalapeños only rate about 10,000. For more cooking-ingredient ouchiness scales, see the Pyruvate scale, which measures the pungency of onions (most onions rate about an 8, which makes this a less impressive scale, because the numbers are smaller).

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