Who Invented Rock Paper Scissors and How to Win Consistently, The Corrupt Food Pyramid and Much More

Hand based games have been around seemingly as long as humans have been humaning. As to the exact genesis of Rock, Paper, Scissors, however, this appears to originate in hand games from China, supposedly going back about two thousand years, though primary documented evidence of this is scant. That said, the trail gets much more clear starting around the 17th century which saw some of these games having migrated over to Japan and explicit references to them in surviving text. One of those games, in turn, spread from Japan throughout the world in surprisingly recent times. We are, of course, referring to Rock, Paper, Scissors. As noted, in the early going, there were a myriad of these hand games using a series of hand gestures, sometimes even using various chants. As for the many three hand gesture variants, these are called sansukumi-ken. As an example of one variant of this, we have the Japanese “mushi-ken” which instead of using Rock, Paper, and Scissors, used hand gestures representing a frog, a slug, and a snake. The specific gestures were the thumb as the frog, which defeats the slug. The slug is represented by the pinky finger and defeats the snake. The snake is represented by the index finger and defeats the frog. If you're now wondering how a snake is beaten by a slug in the Japanese version, it's hypothesized that when the Japanese adopted the game from the Chinese, they simply misinterpreted the character for a certain poisonous centipede used in said Chinese version, with that then representing the slug in Japan because of it. 0:00 Who Invented Rock, Paper, Scissors and What's the Best Way to Win Consistently? 10:27 Who Invented Chewing Gum? 18:22 Who Invented the Food Pyramid and Why You'd Be Crazy to Follow It 27:40 Who Invented the Pencil Sharpener? 33:34 Who Invented the Hot Air Balloon? 44:14 Who Invented the Taser? 50:07 Who Invented Jeans? 58:20 Who Invented Nachos and Why are They Called That? 1:07:36 Who Invented Hawaiian Pizza?