“The Scots in general tend to be more intellectual than the English. Or better said, the English are usually not intellectual and almost all the Scots are.” --Borges, speaking about Carlyle's history.
In 1350, as Boccaccio was writing the Decameron, he met Petrarch, who at that time was the most famous writer in Italy and the foremost Italian representative of Renaissance humanism, the return to ancient values and ancient literature that in some measure unleashed the High Renaissance. Under Petrarch’s influence, Boccaccio became ashamed of the Decameron.
About 40% of those in the U.S. illegally came on visas they overstayed.
Two Belgian professors decided to run bacteriology and toxicology tests on the 10 most popular books in the Antwerp library. The results? All 10 had traces of cocaine, but only Fifty Shades of Grey tested positive for traces of the herpes virus.
An interesting study on the disparity of medical care realities. A study by Susan Diem and others of how CPR is portrayed on TV found that it was successful in 75% of the cases and that 67% of the TV patients went home. In reality, a 2010 study of more than 95,000 cases of CPR found that only 8% of patients survived for more than one month. Of these, only about 3% could lead a mostly normal life.
Who is....Inspector Clouseau?
The mystery novelist Martin Cruz Smith revealed that he has Parkinson's disease in a video on The New York Times website. He said he was diagnosed in 1995 but kept it secret. "I didn't want to be judged by that," he said. "Either I'm a good writer or I'm not. 'He's our pre-eminent Parkinson's writer.' Who needs that?"
On the difference between Li battery and NiMH:
Erik Spek, Chief Engineer at TÜV SÜD Canada: "With lithium-ion, there is a built-in fire triangle that we’re trying to overcome, and NiMH doesn’t have all three legs – fuel, heat, and oxygen. Lithium-ion has the fuel from the electrolyte (typically ethylene or propylene carbonate fluids that can be quite flammable), heat can be generated by a short circuit or other thermal event, and oxygen can be generated inside the cell, and is obviously present outside as well. You don’t have the fuel component in NiMH until much higher temperatures are achieved (the electrolyte is water based and does not act as a fuel). That’s the basic difference."
According to CBS News White House reporter Mark Knoller, the Cabinet met nineteen times in Obama’s first term.
According to CBS News White House reporter Mark Knoller, the Cabinet met nineteen times in Obama’s first term.
harry: verb tr., intr.: 1. To harass, attack, or annoy, especially repeatedly. 2. To raid or pillage.
ETYMOLOGY: From Old English hergian. Ultimately from the Indo-European root koro- (war, host, army) which also gave us harbor, harbinger, herald, harness, hurry, and harangue. Earliest documented use: 1330.
In 1967, the Beatles released a collection of songs in an album entitled Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band — which would go on to be voted the number-one album of all time by Rolling Stone magazine (a position it retains to this day); The Rolling Stones released two albums, Between the Buttons and Their Satanic Majesties Request; Jimi Hendrix did Are You Experienced?; and The Doors unveiled their debut album. The number-one, top-selling album of 1967 was:...........More of The Monkees.
The cap for the Penguins is at $64.3 million. So, were they healthy, the Penguins would have committed about 85.2 percent of their cap space to 12 players. Even now, they have 10 players taking up about 76.8 percent of their space. And what is sacrificed? Depth.
Jonathon Gruber, one of the ACA designers:
"The only way to end that discriminatory system is to bring everyone into the system and pay one fair price. That means that the genetic winners, the lottery winners who've been paying an artificially low price because of this discrimination now will have to pay more in return." So they are going to tax the genetic winners. That's a real improvement. Years ago these guys used to kill or sterilize the genetic lottery losers.Ethanol: Historically, the overwhelmingly majority of corn in the United States has been turned into livestock feed. Department of Agriculture data show that, this year, 43 percent of corn went to fuel and 45 percent went to livestock feed. The more corn that goes to ethanol, the more that needs to be planted to meet other demands. Using government satellite data — the best tool available — the AP identified a conservative estimate of 1.2 million acres of virgin land in Nebraska and the Dakotas alone that have been converted to fields of corn and soybeans since 2006, the last year before the ethanol mandate was passed. Before the government ethanol mandate, the Conservation Reserve Program grew every year for nearly a decade. In the first year after the ethanol mandate, more than 2 million acres set aside disappeared. Billions of pounds of fertilizer, some of which seeped into drinking water, contaminated rivers and worsened the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where marine life can't survive.
The Administration believes supporting corn ethanol is the best way to encourage the development of biofuels that will someday be cleaner and greener than today's. As a way to reduce global warming, they knew corn ethanol was a dubious proposition. Corn demands fertilizer, which is made using natural gas. What's worse, ethanol factories typically burn coal or gas, both of which release carbon dioxide. (From a Yahoo News article)
We are wrecking the land and water for an uneconomical fuel to pave the way for a technology that no one uses and does not exist.
There have been a total of 72 crashes involving Boeing 737 out of over 175 million flights. This statistic makes the Boeing 737 one of the safest planes ever made.
A take on changes in startup funding: "The cost of developing innovative technologies has dropped exponentially. What used to take millions of dollars of venture capital can now be done for tens of thousands of dollars very often, and you can solve big problems," says startup guru Vivek Wadhwa.
Counterfeiting coins is not a plan to get rich--how many bad dimes is enough?--but counterfeiting some coins is worth it, like a fake masterpiece painting. For example, the 1933 double eagle $20 coin can be worth millions to the right collector. A forger known only as “The Omega Man” has been known to produce near exact replicas of this coin. The coins are indistinguishable—except for a single mark; the Omega Man actually intentionally adds a trademark to the coin, a tiny omega symbol, visible only under a microscope. Flair? Pride? Arrogance? Without the mark, even coin experts can’t tell the difference.
These coins are becoming valuable in themselves.
Dr. Jeff Brenner in Camden, New Jersey was recently awarded one of this year's MacArthur Foundation grants, informally known as the “genius grants.” He found that 1% of the patients in Camden were responsible for 30% of hospitalization costs. By some estimates, 5 percent of patients account for more than 60 percent of all healthcare costs.
Golden oldie:
George Gilder writes: "Whether fueled by debt or seized by taxation, government spending in economic “stimulus” packages necessarily substitutes state power for knowledge and thus destroys information and slows economic growth." He believes there must be a reordering of the global economy and the only thing nimble enough to do this is capitalism, which embraces creative destruction.
AAAAAnnnnnddddd....Reminescent of Kennedy: a picture of Lord Byron, the man intertwined with the myth, who, according to Stott, "would be gazed at wonderingly, a freakish magnificence, as soon as he entered a room. Lady Liddell, panicking, yelled to her daughter, 'Don't look at him, he is dangerous to look at.'"
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