Hooray! It's time for our weekly collaboration with the What Is It? Blog. Can you guess the purpose of this week's object?
Place your guess in the comment section. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Don't put any URL or web links, mmkay? Doing so will forfeit your entry.
The first correct answer (posted before the answer is revealed at the What is it? Blog), as well as the funniest yet ultimately incorrect guess will win a free T-Shirt from the Neatorama Shop.
For more clues, check out the What is it? Blog. Good luck!
Update 12/5/09 - the answer is:A Mongolian Flint Fire Striker, it's made from very high carbon tool steel, and throws a good hot spark. There is a compartment inside for holding flint or tinder. Congratulations to Bruno Cabral who got it right first and to Muppetmaker for the funny but wrong guess of Wizard of Oz scarecrow's man purse.
Comments (60)
You can ask the same things to the same people worded slightly different ways, and still get rather different results. For example, changing a question from asking did humans develop other animals to did animals and plants develop from other species can give a large difference, or explicitly including God in a question about a process will change the results compared to asking about the same thing without naming God.
People are kind of fickle when it comes to asking questions, even without all of the religious and political baggage that comes up in such surveys. A project researching how to teach basic physics once found, for basic homework questions, asking a person a question, then asking them "What answer would a smart student give?" caused some people to change their answer...