The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us. -Paul Valery, poet and philosopher (1871-1945)
According to the CDC, 34.6 percent of all men in America officially meet the criteria for being obese.
The Piketty-Saez study looked only at pretax cash market income. It did not take into account taxes. It left out noncash compensation such as employer-provided health insurance and pension contributions. It left out Social Security payments, Medicare and Medicaid benefits, and more than 100 other means-tested government programs. Realized capital gains were included, but not the first $500,000 from the sale of one’s home, which is tax-exempt. IRAs and 401(k)s were counted only when the money is taken out in retirement. Finally, the Piketty-Saez data are based on individual tax returns, which ignore, for any given household, the presence of multiple earners.
Alphitomancy means divination using cakes made of wheat or barley flour. The word comes from the Greek word meaning "barley," the suffix -mancy comes from the Greek term meaning "divination." Years ago it was also common in some cultures to test a subject for truthfulness by feeding him barley. If he got indigestion, that was an indication he was lying. So if you had gluten intolerance, you were in trouble.
According to the CDC, 34.6 percent of all men in America officially meet the criteria for being obese.
The Piketty-Saez study looked only at pretax cash market income. It did not take into account taxes. It left out noncash compensation such as employer-provided health insurance and pension contributions. It left out Social Security payments, Medicare and Medicaid benefits, and more than 100 other means-tested government programs. Realized capital gains were included, but not the first $500,000 from the sale of one’s home, which is tax-exempt. IRAs and 401(k)s were counted only when the money is taken out in retirement. Finally, the Piketty-Saez data are based on individual tax returns, which ignore, for any given household, the presence of multiple earners.
Alphitomancy means divination using cakes made of wheat or barley flour. The word comes from the Greek word meaning "barley," the suffix -mancy comes from the Greek term meaning "divination." Years ago it was also common in some cultures to test a subject for truthfulness by feeding him barley. If he got indigestion, that was an indication he was lying. So if you had gluten intolerance, you were in trouble.
Astronomers know a rare “triple alignment” of Jupiter and Saturn occurred in 7 B.C. when the planets approached each other closely three times between April and December.Even more striking conjunctions occurred in 3 B.C. and 2 B.C., this time between the two brightest planets Jupiter and Venus in the constellation Leo. The planets came as close as 12 arc-minutes of each other during these conjunctions, close enough to appear as a single very bright star. The first conjunction would have been visible in August of 3 B.C. in the eastern sky before dawn, which corresponds to the location described by the wise men in the gospel of Matthew.
Danger lurks everywhere. On October 17, 1814, a three-story-high vat of beer exploded inside a London brewery and unleashed a tidal wave of porter that killed eight people in the neighboring tenements.
Nearly 20 percent of all American families are on food stamps.
Robert L. Park says he is convinced “that many people choose scientific beliefs the same way they choose to be Methodists, or Democrats, or Chicago Cubs fans. They judge science by how well it agrees with the way they want the world to be.” A respected physicist, Park wonders: "Did we set people up for this? In our eagerness to share the excitement of discovery, have scientists conveyed the message that the universe is so strange that anything is possible?"
One third of the nation's welfare recipients live in California.
Researchers have discovered that characters in cartoons for children are 2.5 times more likely to die than characters in adult dramas.
Danger lurks everywhere. On October 17, 1814, a three-story-high vat of beer exploded inside a London brewery and unleashed a tidal wave of porter that killed eight people in the neighboring tenements.
Nearly 20 percent of all American families are on food stamps.
Robert L. Park says he is convinced “that many people choose scientific beliefs the same way they choose to be Methodists, or Democrats, or Chicago Cubs fans. They judge science by how well it agrees with the way they want the world to be.” A respected physicist, Park wonders: "Did we set people up for this? In our eagerness to share the excitement of discovery, have scientists conveyed the message that the universe is so strange that anything is possible?"
One third of the nation's welfare recipients live in California.
Researchers have discovered that characters in cartoons for children are 2.5 times more likely to die than characters in adult dramas.
Who is ....Joseph von Fraunhofer?
Ray Kurzweil writes that human beings have only a weak ability to process logic, but a very deep core capability of recognizing patterns. Deep Blue, the computer that defeated Garry Kasparov, the human world chess champion, in 1997 was capable of analyzing the logical implications of 200 million board positions (representing different move-countermove sequences) every second. Kasparov was asked how many positions he could analyze each second, and he said it was less than one. So how could he possibly compete with the computer? He had had learned about 100,000 board positions. 100,000 patterns. Similarly, Shakespeare composed his plays with 100,000 word senses (employing about 29,000 distinct words, but using most of them in multiple ways). This recognizing of patterns, Kurzweil believes, is the key to human intelligence--and the key to developing machine intelligence through reverse engineering.
John Holdren, who holds the title of assistant to the president for science and technology, said recently that man-made global warming might be preventing a new cyclical Ice Age.
In 1903, when President Theodore Roosevelt wanted to dig a canal across the Colombian state of Panama and the Colombian government stood in the way, the U.S. assisted Panama in rebelling against Columbia and becoming an independent country. He gave an astonishingly revealing speech (in Chile) in his defense, saying, 'I took the action I did in Panama because to have acted otherwise would have been both weak and wicked. I would have taken that action no matter what power had stood in the way. What I did was in the interest of all the world, and was particularly in the interests of Chile and of certain other South American countries. I was in accordance with the highest and strictest dictates of justice. If it were a matter to do over again, I would act precisely and exactly as I in very fact did act.'
In 1768, when British ex-military horseman Philip Astley combined his dazzling equestrian skills, or trick riding he used in combat, on fairgrounds with itinerant fairground performers or saltimbanques and the circus was born.
The average age when a man in America first gets married has reached an all-time high of 29.0 years.
In 1768, when British ex-military horseman Philip Astley combined his dazzling equestrian skills, or trick riding he used in combat, on fairgrounds with itinerant fairground performers or saltimbanques and the circus was born.
The average age when a man in America first gets married has reached an all-time high of 29.0 years.
The retina is the layer of the eye's wall that includes the photoreceptor cells -- the rods and cones -- that capture light energy and change it into the electrical language of the nervous system. The rod cells provide black-and-white vision and detect motion, and the cone cells send signals for color. A pigment called rhodopsin actually provides vision in the rods and is distorted with each stimulus. Night blindness is the failure of the rhodopsin to reconstruct and adapt to the bright change. Vitamin A is a component of rhodopsin and its deficiency causes night blindness. Cones work in a similar way, but instead of rhodopsin, they use three other visual pigments that are sensitive to different wavelengths of light, and interpret the hues of red, green, and blue that color our world. Mammals other than humans and our primate cousins have only two types of cones, which restricts the color palette available to them.
Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/05/frontiers-of-violence.html
At an astonishing 3,571 meters above sea level, the Sphinx observatory in the Swiss Alps is the highest-altitude built structure in Europe.
A historic moment or an historic moment? An is the form of the indefinite article that is used before a spoken vowel sound: it doesn’t matter how the written word in question is actually spelled. So, we say ‘an honour’, ‘an hour’, or ‘an heir’, for example, because the initial letter ‘h’ in all three words is not actually pronounced. By contrast we say ‘a hair’ or ‘a horse’ because, in these cases, the ‘h’ is pronounced. So it is "a historic moment."
The new EPA regulations issued while Barack Obama has been president are 43 times as long as the entire Bible.
Insecam, an on-line company, has access to more than 73,000 cameras all around the globe which includes more than 11,000 cameras in the United States, 6500 in Republic of Korea and almost 5000 in China. These include parking lots, storefronts, business alleyways and other security sites but also homes, living rooms and bedrooms. Even though the website states that it is trying to emphasize on an important security issue, it is clearly profiting from advertisements as well.
Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/05/frontiers-of-violence.html
At an astonishing 3,571 meters above sea level, the Sphinx observatory in the Swiss Alps is the highest-altitude built structure in Europe.
“A Nation of Victims:” The family has been demoted to what Charles Sykes has termed a “Therapeutic Family.” Having “adjusted itself to the new demands of the social contract with the Self,” wrote Sykes in “A Nation of Victims,” “the modern family has ceased to inculcate values.” Instead, it exists exclusively for the “self-expression and creativity” in its members.
Only 36 percent of the U.S. population can name all three branches of government.
Only 36 percent of the U.S. population can name all three branches of government.
Dr. Walter Block is a professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans. He write on libertarianism. “The non-aggression axiom is the lynchpin of the philosophy of libertarianism. It states, simply, that it shall be legal for anyone to do anything he wants, provided only that he not initiate (or threaten) violence against the person or legitimately owned property of another. That is, in the free society, one has the right to manufacture, buy or sell any good or service at any mutually agreeable terms. Thus, there would be no victimless crime prohibitions, price controls, government regulation of the economy, etc."
A historic moment or an historic moment? An is the form of the indefinite article that is used before a spoken vowel sound: it doesn’t matter how the written word in question is actually spelled. So, we say ‘an honour’, ‘an hour’, or ‘an heir’, for example, because the initial letter ‘h’ in all three words is not actually pronounced. By contrast we say ‘a hair’ or ‘a horse’ because, in these cases, the ‘h’ is pronounced. So it is "a historic moment."
The new EPA regulations issued while Barack Obama has been president are 43 times as long as the entire Bible.
Insecam, an on-line company, has access to more than 73,000 cameras all around the globe which includes more than 11,000 cameras in the United States, 6500 in Republic of Korea and almost 5000 in China. These include parking lots, storefronts, business alleyways and other security sites but also homes, living rooms and bedrooms. Even though the website states that it is trying to emphasize on an important security issue, it is clearly profiting from advertisements as well.
Roughly half a million Muslims live in Austria, representing about 6 percent of the total population.
Part of the antipathy towards zinfandel: It was the almost universally scorned blending grape that was the backbone of such headache-inducing abominations as Gallo Hearty Burgundy.
Joseph von Fraunhofer was a glass and lensmaker who made the finest lelescopic lenses of his age. (Early 1800s). But he also invented the spectroscope, a combination of a diffraction grating and a small telescope which precisely separated light into its constituent colors. He used the device to measure how light refracted through his lenses. In those days before electric light, Fraunhofer used the Sun as a bright light source. He found the continuous spectrum of the Sun, the colors of light we see when sunlight passes through a prism, were riddled with hundreds of dark gaps or “lines” The explanation came later in the 19th century from the labs of his fellow Germans Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff, who discovered the Fraunhofer lines were caused by light absorbed by chemical elements such as iron and calcium and sodium in the atmosphere of the Sun. The Sun– and the stars– are made of the same elements found on our planet.
Part of the antipathy towards zinfandel: It was the almost universally scorned blending grape that was the backbone of such headache-inducing abominations as Gallo Hearty Burgundy.
Joseph von Fraunhofer was a glass and lensmaker who made the finest lelescopic lenses of his age. (Early 1800s). But he also invented the spectroscope, a combination of a diffraction grating and a small telescope which precisely separated light into its constituent colors. He used the device to measure how light refracted through his lenses. In those days before electric light, Fraunhofer used the Sun as a bright light source. He found the continuous spectrum of the Sun, the colors of light we see when sunlight passes through a prism, were riddled with hundreds of dark gaps or “lines” The explanation came later in the 19th century from the labs of his fellow Germans Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff, who discovered the Fraunhofer lines were caused by light absorbed by chemical elements such as iron and calcium and sodium in the atmosphere of the Sun. The Sun– and the stars– are made of the same elements found on our planet.
Only 48 percent of Americans can immediately come up with $400 in emergency cash without borrowing it or selling something.
AAAaaaaaaannnnnddddddd..........a cartoon from Jim Grant:
AAAaaaaaaannnnnddddddd..........a cartoon from Jim Grant:
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