The weirdest thing you've learned how to do from a book or youtube video

[Donna]

When we moved to Saskatchewan I decided to try raising some chickens for food. I asked some of the farming neighbours wives if there were any books on the subject and they looked at me like I'd come from another planet - apparently one grows up knowing these things!

I eventually found a book that covered the raising and butchering of chickens.

Even after years of butchering chickens, I still needed to have the book open beside me so I could follow the step-by-step process. Sometimes the book would decide to close at some crucial point and I would end up having to hold it open with my elbows (because my hands were full of yuck).

After the kids all left for university, the chicken raising ended. And I was glad to see the end of it!

[baileyc]

Mental math.

I saw a book on the clearance rack at the local bookstore about speed mental math. It completely rewires the way your mind does mental math. The way that arithmetic is taught in American Grundschulen is straightforward, so that everyone can learn it. But the methods taught are surprisingly slow and too cumbersome to do mentally (no wonder we all favor calculators). The methods taught in the book are significantly more intuitive if you have good math sense, but would certainly be a problem for a slower child to learn.

Bailey C

[deutschfreundlich]

once I got a small book named "Combat Knife Throwing" from a survivalist publisher. It said you could learn to throw a knife that would not turn in the air. But with this method, you can never get any power into the throw. Other people who threw knives as a hobby told me it was impossible to throw a knife that way. So I concluded the book was a scam.

But, as I think about it, this is not the "weirdest" thing I have ever learned from a book. Once I bought a book that said you could learn to mentally manipulate a gland inside the brain called the amygdala, and that by doing that you could influence natural phenomena, like changing cloud patterns by staring at them. I know now the book was a total scam. The author made sure to say at the end of the book that all evidence of the research project of this had been destroyed.