Friday, July 19, 2013

Their Sneaky Ploy Worked!

I was doing some channel surfing earlier after watching some Netflix.

The Science Channel is always one of my first stops when surfing; I'm a sucker for a good astronomy / cosmology show.  (BTW, is it a law or something that Michio Kaku has to be on every single science show made these days?  Seems like it, but I digress.)

Anyway, when I arrived at the Science Channel, "Build It Bigger" was on.

I watched a couple of minutes of the construction of a huge hydroelectric dam being built in Turkey (the Deriner dam), then they were going to break for commercials.

But before the commercials, the show had a teaser question. "Which country on Earth has the most large dams?" and promised to provide the answer when they came back to the show from the commercials.

So I patiently sat through Progressive insurance commercial and others and then the show came back.

Did you know that China has more than half of the world's 48,000 large dams?  I didn't either.

Then it hit me.

I had totally fallen for it.

I sat through the two minutes of commercials just so I could find out which country in the world had the most dams.

Those sneaky Science Channel / Build It Bigger producers!  They KNEW that I would be compelled wait and learn that tidbit about dams.

I have long known that I'm a science geek - you don't work your way through the pain of engineering school without being one - but I still totally fell for that simple commercial ploy just to learn one more science-ish fact.

I'm such a dweeb.

But I guess there are worse things to be.