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The U.S. Military Today

2011-11-14T00:25:00.000-08:00

Many People know that the U.S. military is currently deployed in countless places around the world today. Few Americans know exactly how large the U.S. armed forces are and what the breakdown is of those who now serve. How many soldiers are in the U.S. military today? How many women serve? How old are they on average? Here is a quick look at some of the details. The U.S. armed forces are currently 86% male and 14% female. Current troop strength is 1,447,000. This is down from 2,065,000 in 1990. 53% of those serving are married. This is up from 40% in 1972. 45% of the enlisted are between the ages of 18-25. 21% are between the ages of 26-30. 13% are between ages 31-35. 11% are between 36-40. 10% are over 40 years old.
The decline in troop strength from over two million in 1990 to the current about 1.5 million is due in large part to the famous "Peace Dividend" that many Americans have been hearing about for about twenty years. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 it was thought that the United States did not need to maintain such a large military force any longer and so it was reduced in numbers during the Clinton administration in order to save money and help balance the U.S. budget. The move worked and without any real sacrifice to the quality of the fighting force. President Clinton left office in 2001 with not only a balanced fiscal budget but a surplus in fact.

How Fast Is The World's Population Growing?

2011-11-11T02:04:00.000-08:00

Unless you have been living under a rock someplace you already know that the world is in the midst of a population explosion. The number of human beings on this planet has increased alarmingly. So too are the worries from government officials all around the world about how much of a strain that is going to take on the planet's food and water resources, which are already strained in some areas. Just how quickly has the world's population increased? Here is a small chart that tracks the progress over the last two hundred years:

1805 - The World reaches 1 billion human inhabitants.

1927 - 2 billion reached.

1960 - 3 billion

1974 - 4 billion

1987 - 5 billion

1999 - 6 billion

2011 - 7 billion

Tons Of Trash From Japanese Tsunami Headed For U.S.

2011-11-01T04:30:00.000-07:00

The Earthquake and subsequent Tsunami that hit Fukushima, Japan on March 11th, 2011 was devastating in many ways. For Japan itself it resulted in 15,000 dead, over 130,000 forced from their homes, and countless billions in damage, which will take years to repair, and not the least of which is an ongoing Nuclear disaster involving multiple power plants. As it turns out there will also be consequences for the west coast of the United States as well.
A giant mountain of debris from the Tsunami was swept out to sea and with it went millions of tons of trash and garbage that is now floating on the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Included in the debris fields are the remains of thousands of homes that were destroyed along with countless numbers of cars, boats, furniture, tv's, refrigerators, bottles and corks, and other assorted junk. The stuff is now floating in the middle of the Pacific where ocean currents are slowly drifting it towards the west coast of the United States. Some of the debris fields are reported to be larger than the size of the state of Texas. The debris has been spotted in the Pacific by fishing boats that have reported back what they have encountered. It is now causing problems for U.S. Naval ships at sea also because it is forcing them out of their usual shipping lanes in order to steer around the floating garbage to avoid potential damage to vessels. Some of the skins of modern day Navy ships are only about 2 inches thick and are not designed to be crashing into giant fields of metal junk in the middle of the ocean. It would be potentially millions of dollars in damage otherwise so that must be avoided.
Some of the stuff is expected to hit the Hawaiian Islands by as early as January 2012 and possibly hit the west coast of the U.S. by 2013.

FDR And His Secret Train Car

2011-10-19T18:39:00.000-07:00

Not a lot of people know about it or have ever even heard about it. Underneath the Grand Central Terminal in New York City, just under the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel sits a long abandoned armored train car. It was built for the use of only one person, President Franklin Roosevelt.
It is something of a little known fact to many Americans today but back when FDR was President between 1933 - 1945 there were very few Americans then that knew about the fact that he suffered from Polio and he in fact was without the ability to walk or even stand on his own. His administration would go to great lengths to keep this fact a secret and did so in many ways. Often when FDR was seen standing with other officials to be photographed by the press he always had bulky leg braces on to keep him from collapsing in a heap to the floor. Very often there would be Secret Service agrents standing next to him on either side who would be holding on to the president to further prevent him from falling to the ground.
The most elaborate length that his government ever went to in order to prevent him from being seen unable to walk in public has got to be the construction of this rail car that now sits under the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. It was constructed with double wide doors that would be wide enough for his armored Pierce Arrow Limosine to be driven on board the car and then be able to drive off when they arrived in NYC without anyone ever having to witness FDR struggling to be removed from the car looking helpless. An elevator at the Hotel was even made extra wide in order to fit the whole car on to it and lift the President up to the ballroom of the Hotel where he would not be seen coming out of the car.
The train car was operated until FDR died in April of 1945. The car still remains there today at the Grand Central Terminal. The FDR museum is currently trying to raise the funds nessassery to have the train car moved and possibly in the future publicly displayed in some way as a piece of significant American history.

Space Junk In Earth Orbit Now Worse Than Ever

2011-10-07T03:44:00.000-07:00

Officials at NASA now say that the amount of "Space Junk" that is in Earth's orbit is now greater than ever before. They are currently tracking about 22,000 pieces of space debris that they categorize as "big objects," which are pieces of space junk that are larger than about one half of an inch, and countless thousands of smaller objects that are less than one half of an inch in size.
Since 1957 when the Russians launched the first satellite "Sputnik" mankind has been littering the orbit of the Earth with bits and pieces of debris from rocket launches and satellite launches. Much of the stuff over time falls back into Earth's atmosphere and is burned away but some debris achieves too high an orbit in space for that to happen and so it just circles around the Earth for years causing a hazard for space missions and expensive communications satellites. Even the International Space Station from time to time has to adjust its orbit in order to avoid a tracked piece of space junk from hitting it and causing devastating damage.
The amount of space debris increased greatly in 2007 when the Chinese government conducted an anti satellite weapons test. The Chinese launched a missile into orbit to destroy an old weather satellite. When the missile hit its target it shattered it into an estimated 150,000 new pieces of space debris.

Ground Zero Finally Rising from the Ashes

2011-09-10T23:23:00.000-07:00

It took until about 2006 for all the squabbling and fighting that went on between the various authorities and owners of the site known as "Ground Zero" to finally settle on a plan and move forward with it but now on the Tenth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks the site has largely taken shape.
The building known as One World Trade Center (formerly The Freedom Tower) is now, as of this writing, 80 stories high and can claim to be already the tallest building in New York City. The design that was settled upon comes from architect David Childs. The building starts off at the base as a square shape and as it rises morphs into an eight sided obelisk type structure and then resolves back to a square shape at the top of the building. It will in the end top off at 1776 feet ( The year the U.S. was Founded.)
The entire complex of Ground Zero takes up 16 acres and 8 of those were set aside for commemoration of the 9-11 attacks. The center pieces of the memorial will of course be the "Footprints" which are the two square shapes in the plaza where the two towers once stood. They take up both one acre each. These areas have both been converted into reflecting pools. A total of 26,000 gallons per minute of recycled water rises from the sides of these pools everyday and then spills over into the base of the pools and creates a waterfall as the water goes down. It is a beautiful effect which will be most stunning at night. The waterfalls are lighted from the inside with white light which gives it this illuminating beacon like glow against the darkness of the night.
Out of the 17,000 people that worked in the World Trade Center that day almost 14,000 made it out alive.There were a total of 2981 victims of the attack on 9-11. There was not a trace found of over 50% of them. It is believed that they were simply pulverized in the collapse of the buildings. The names of the victims have all been etched along the edges of the waterfalls. The names were not just placed in any which way. Individual names were etched deliberately next to the names of either friends, spouses, and co workers who were known to be friends. The names of the victims of the World Trade Center attack in 1993 were also added and grouped in a similar way.
The trees that are used in the plaza only came from the three places where the attacks happened. The New York City area, The D.C. area, and the area around the crash site of flight 93 in shanksville, Pennsylvania. In a little bit of a high tech move a computer chip has been placed in the dirt under each tree in order to monitor and ensure that they all get enough water and remain healthy in order to avoid having to constantly replace dying trees.

The President And His "Beast"

2011-08-18T03:06:00.000-07:00

One of the perks of becoming the Commander in Chief is that the gig comes with what must be the most "tricked out" ride on the planet. The Presidential limo has a couple of names already. The best known ones are probably "The Beast" and "Cadillac One." Here are some of the features included in the President's new tank/car:

Gas Tank - A special foam is added to the gas and mixed into the tank. What the foam does is that it prevents the gasoline from exploding even if the tank suffers a direct hit in an attack.

Doors - They are armour plated and eight inches thick. They are also the same weight as the cabin door on a Boeing 757 jetliner.

Driver Side Window - Can resist armour piercing bullets. The driver's window is the only window in the car that can be opened. It will only roll down about three inches though so that the driver can communicate with Secret Service Agents running along side the vehicle and or to do things like pay tolls.

Body Work - The skin of the car is made out of double thick steel and Titanium.

Tires - The wheels are made out of Kevlar. They are shred and puncture resistant.

Boot (the rear of the car) - It holds an oxygen supply and also a fire fighting system.

Accessories On Board - Night vision cameras, pump action rifles, and tear gas cannons. There is also a generous supply of the President's blood on board maintained in bottles in case the President suffers injury in an attack and requires blood.

Sometimes Even Presidents Don't Get Good Health Care

2011-08-01T23:10:00.000-07:00

You would think that a sitting President of the United States would get the finest health care all the time. While that is what they strive for it is not always the case. Consider the situation of the 20th President of the United States, James Garfield. On July 2nd, 1881 Garfield was shot twice by a disgruntled assassin. One of the bullets grazed his arm pit. The other shot was more of a direct hit. It was a shot to his mid section that ended up lodged between his spine and one of his lungs. Garfield managed to live for two and a half months after the shooting when on September 19, 1881 his heart stopped due to an infection that he had received related to the shooting. What was the reason some historians now speculate that he got an infection? Many now believe that it was due to his doctors constantly sticking their fingers deep inside the bullet hole he had in his stomach because they were fishing around in there trying to find the bullet. It is believed that this led to his infection. The bullet turns out to have been harmlessly lodged in a section of his body whereby if he had not suffered the complication of infection, which weakened his heart, he could have recovered.

Brief History About The Debt Cieling

2011-07-16T02:15:00.000-07:00

The debt ceiling in the United States has been around for a while. Since 1939 the debt ceiling has been raised a total of 84 times. 55 of those times it has been raised by a Republican President. The biggest offender? Ronald Reagan. Reagan raised the debt ceiling a total of 18 times during his 8 years in the White House. Which President skyrocketed the national debt the most? George W. Bush. He raised it a total of seven times in his eight years. When George W. Bush entered the office in 2001 the national debt stood at about 5.5 trillion dollars. When he left in 2009 he had raised it to 11.8 trillion dollars. That's a record increase by far for a single president.
Just in case you were wondering the budget submitted by Republican senator Paul Ryan, which would replace Medicare with "Block Grants" would raise the National debt ceiling 8 times if it were enacted. The progressive budget that was submitted by President Obama's Budget Committee, which was made up by both Republican and Democratic former politicians, would raise the debt ceiling not even once if it were enacted. It would pay down the national debt but it would take decades. By 2021 the progressive budget would be running surpluses in the annual federal budget all without any devastating cuts to either Social Security or Medicare.

The Most Profitable Sports In The U.S.

2011-07-08T23:31:00.000-07:00

There are a good many different sports that are practiced in The United States but only really a hand full that are profitable and popular. The biggest of them all in the U.S. is Football. Annual revenues for the NFL now exceed 9.5 billion dollars every year. The second most profitable is Baseball with annual revenues of about 7 billion dollars. After these two major sports you get a little bit of a trail off. In third place you have Basketball which takes in about 3.8 billion every year. Finally in fourth place you have Hockey which grosses about 2.7 billion a year.

The Most Nuclear Powered Countries On Earth

2011-06-22T23:11:00.000-07:00

In the wake of the nuclear disaster that took place and is taking place in Japan with its power plants after the earthquake and Sunami that hit there in March it might be an interesting question to ponder just how many nuclear reactors there are currently in the World and what countries they exist in. The current total is 438 that are active and producing energy today. The country with the most reactors by far is the U.S. with a current total of 104. The United States however has not licenced a new one in over thirty years. The second most nuclear country is France with 58. Third is Japan with 54. Russia has 32. South Korea has 20. India and the U.K. both currently have 19 each. Canada has 18. Germany has 17. The Ukraine has 15. China has 11 working reactors at this time but has an additional 23 under construction.

Nasa Rover "Spirit" Feared Dead On Mars

2011-05-28T00:09:00.000-07:00

Nasa this week has decided it will no longer make any attempts to contact it's long silent Martian rover known as "Spirit." The rover has failed to respond to radio communications and instructions from Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Control Center in Florida since March 22, 2010. Daily attempts since that date have been made to reach the rover via UHF radio signals and the only reply has been silence. On May 25, 2011 all attempts to revive the rover ceased. "Spirit" was launched in January of 2004 along with its sister rover "Opportunity" to explore the surface of Mars and radio back data and images in what was expected to be a three month mission. "Spirit" ended up lasting over 6 years and "Opportunity" is still going strong. "Spirit" is believed to have gotten stuck in some kind of a sand trap on the surface of Mars which limited it's ability to roam. It is further believed that it suffered damage to its internal electronics systems while trying to survive it's last Martian winter where it was exposed to temperatures of 55 degrees below zero for extended periods of time.

The Missing Girls Of India

2011-05-22T23:59:00.000-07:00

A crisis is evolving in India and it has gone on for decades. The preference for Indian families to have male children is becoming so epidemic that there is now a lack of females in the culture and society that is leading to problems. Some estimates are that over 8 million female children have become victims of infanticide in India since 1986. The reason for male preference in having children is economic in nature. Males are preferred due to the fact that when they grow up they often bring money into the families that they belong to. They also help retain property that is owned by their families. With females in India the opposite is true. They do not help a family gain wealth, in fact the family of the female must often present a huge dowry to the family of the male when a marriage takes place and also surrender property to their daughters new husband. Indian couples often believe that it is not worth it to have and raise a female child for these reasons. The use of Ultrasound techniques in India is widespread in order to determine the sex of the child before it is born. Often after the female child is born it is either killed or abandoned somewhere and left to die. There is now beginning the makings of a crisis in that adult males in India are now finding it harder to find suitable females to marry when the time comes. Some adult males now indicate that they have to look farther and farther beyond their home villages in order to find women of their own age that they can marry due to the shortage.

The Cost Of Bin Laden

2011-05-10T00:03:00.000-07:00

Now that the U.S. finally got it's man and dispatched the leader of Al Queda it might be a good time to try and figure out at what cost it all came to. So exactly how much money has the U.S. spent on the war on terror since 9-11-01? Lets start with both of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To date both conflicts have been estimated to have cost about 1.3 trillion so far. Some experts say that by the time we untangle ourselves from both of those messes it might be well over 2 trillion. If you count Homeland Security spending that figure to date is somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 billion dollars. Let us not forget the Annual Defense budget for the Pentagon. Before 9-11 the defense budget was at about 365 billion a year. This years defense budget is in excess of 700 billion a year. If you factor in other results of the war on terror that are not monetary such as longer waiting lines at the airports for security, invasions of privacy with scanners at airports and body searches that can be invasive and uncomfortable, the increased cost for an airline ticket in order to pay for the new security layers, the PTSD that many Americans have developed in the wake of the 9-11 attacks and the accompanying health issues and health bills than you can easily add up the total to be in excess of 3 trillion and more and the whole matter is far from over as we all know. That 3 trillion total by the way does not even include the 60 million dollar Black Hawk Helicopter that we lost during the raid on Bin Laden's house. Osama Bin Laden had said on several occasions that one of his goals was to economically damage the United States by forcing it to spend serious amounts of money in order to defend itself against Al Queda and its terror tactics. On that score Al Queda is doing well. 3 trillion dollars is currently about 20% of the total U.S. National debt as of this writing.

Facebook Facts And Figures

2011-03-20T23:28:00.000-07:00

Don't look now but the Internet website Facebook has taken over the known universe. Kudos to the new boy king Zuckerberg. In case you are not sure just how dominant and ubiquitous Facebeeok has become here are just a few facts about the site:

In 2010 Facebook signed up profile number 500,000,000. That is 1 out of every 13 people currently on this planet who are now also on Facebook.

48% of 18-34 year old's say that they check Facebook right after they wake up everyday.

72% of the U.S. web audience is now on Facebook.

57% of people questioned say that they now talk more on Facebook than they do in real life.

48% of Americans say that they find out news for the first time on Facebook.

750 million photos were uploaded to Facebook over last New Years eve.

Every 20 minutes on facebook there are:

1,000,000 links shared

1,484,000 event invites

1,323,000 tagged photos

1,851,000 status updates

1,972,000 friend requests accepted

2,716,000 photos uploaded

10,208,000 comments made.

The Failure Steve Jobs And Henry Ford Have In Common

2011-03-17T00:41:00.000-07:00

We all know that Steve Jobs and Henry Ford have a lot of success in common. They both created something that the world went crazy for that made them both uncounted millions. In Henry Fords case it was the car of course and in Steve Jobs case it was the earliest personal computer systems. In both cases they revolutionized the world for better or for worse.
One failure that they have in common is that they both tried to create a new version of their original invention that was named after one of their children and in both cases it was a failure. In Henry Fords case it was the "Edsel." It was first released in 1958 and it was named after his son Edsel Ford who had died in May 1943. The model lasted less than three years and after selling poorly finally disappeared from showrooms nationwide. One of the biggest complaints that some consumers had about the "Edsel" was that its front nose design to some people resembled a toilet bowl.
For Steve Jobs the failure first began in 1978 shortly after the birth of his daughter Lisa. He got the idea to name the new computer system he was building "The Lisa." It took about 4 years and it cost an estimated 50 million dollars to develop and it debuted in early 1983 at a cost of $10,000 a copy. After two years and only about 100,000 units sold and many revisions to the original design the project was largely abandoned and replaced with a new computer system called "The Mackintosh" which after it debuted sold over 70,000 units in three months and went on to be much more of a success.

What Is The Point Of Daylight Savings Time?

2011-03-12T02:30:00.000-08:00

It is springtime again as i write this article and it is time again for me to get up on a ladder and climb up to my big clock on the wall and turn it over one hour. Have you ever wondered why we bother to do this? Well as it turns out there is more than one reason. The biggest one that is usually given is that it saves energy. How does it do that you might ask? Well the government says that by increasing the number of daylight hours in a persons workday it saves energy because things like the street lights in the city don't have to come on as early and they don't have to stay on as long. People driving in their cars don't have to turn on their headlights as early and it saves them energy and money. It also helps with traffic safety. There are fewer auto accidents in the daylight hours than at night because drivers can see better so it actually saves lives as well. It also reduces crime. Criminals prefer committing crimes at night it seems so with fewer night time hours available to them they commit fewer crimes. Probably the biggest and best reason of all is that it provides the public with more daylight hours after work so they can go out and shop or go dine or engage in other after work activities so it is also actually good for certain industries like retail and restaurants. The original reason for daylight savings time was in order to provide farmers with more daylight hours to work their farms and grow more food and it still does this.

So How Do You Spell That Libyan Guy's Name?

2011-03-09T01:53:00.000-08:00

While the people of Libya struggle to remove a dictator that has ruled over their country for over 40 years the media in the United States struggles to figure out exactly how to spell his name properly. As it turns out there is no one correct way to do it but several hundred ways it seems. The problem is that there are no exact letters or equivalent sounds in English for spelling several parts of his name ergo you get the numerous variations. Here are just some of the many different spellings that I came across in researching this article on how to spell that guy's name, what's his face:

Muammar Qaddafi

Mo'ammar Gadhafi

Muammar Kaddafi

Moammar El-Kadhafi

Muammar Qadhafi

Moammer El-Kazzafi

Moamar Al-Gaddafi

Muammar Al-Qathafi

Moamer El-Kadhafi

Muammar Qadafi

Moamar Gaddafi

Mu'ammar Qadhadafi

Mu'ammar Al-Qadhafi

Muammar Quathafi

Muammar Al-Khaddfi

Mu'ammar Al-Qadhdhafi

Mu'amar Kadafi

Muammer Gheddafi

Muamar Khadafy

Muammar Ghaddafi

Mu'ammar Al-Qaddafi

Mohammer Q'udafi

POST SCRIPT: On October 20, 2011 Muammar Qaddafi was captured by rebels in Libya and brutally beaten, tortured, and finally shot at close range in the head. His death ended a 42 year reign as the leader of Libya.

Pentagon Testing New Super Tiny Spy Plane

2011-03-08T02:10:00.000-08:00

The next generation of UAV's (unmanned Aerial vehicles) is going to be smaller than ever before. The Pentagon is testing a UAV that will have the size and look of a Hummingbird hence the name "The Hummingbird Project." Instead of having unmanned spy planes that have wingspans of over 100 feet that can be shot out of the sky by potential enemies the Pentagon is thinking that shrinking these spy planes is a better idea. The Hummingbird UAV is only going to weigh about 19 grams. It will have a wingspan of only about 6 inches and it will be designed to look just like a little hummingbird flying in the sky. The smaller size will give it great advantages such as being able to fly into window openings of buildings and it will be a much harder target to shoot out of the sky because it will be much smaller than the current UAV's deployed. It will be able to fly upside down, from side to side, and also hover in the air. The company involved is called Aeroviornment who are working in partnership with the Defense Department. The biggest problem so far with Hummingbird is that it has only been able to stay in flight for about 11 minutes but this is an improvement over the 8 minutes it could only achieve last year in testing. If the project is further developed it can also have civilian surveillance uses in urban environments for law enforcement organizations it is believed.

It Was Machine Over Man In Jeopardy Computer Contest

2011-02-16T23:38:00.000-08:00

If you were watching Jeopardy this week you got to see perhaps a preview of what is to come for mankind and his inevitable decline into second place when it comes to the war between man and machine. The show this week featured the two best Jeopardy players in the games history, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, pitted against an IBM computer named "Watson" to see who could end up on top. By the end of the first day of the three day competition it was not a blowout yet. "Watson" had a lead but not an overwhelming one. On the second day "Watson" started to blow the humans away. The computer dominated game two from the start and never let up. By the end of day two the computer had a $30,000 lead over his human rivals. The second day was basically just "Watson" answering all the questions that Alex Trebek put out there while it left the humans in the dust, that's how dominant it was. On the third and final day "Watson" basically kept it up but stumbled a couple of times with wrong answers and that allowed Jennings and Rutter to beef up their totals a little bit but it was still not even close. The final winnings were "Watson" $77,147, Ken Jennings $24,000, and Brad Rutter $21,100. The beat down of the humans was so total that contestant Ken Jennings at one point in the third day scribbled on his computer screen a quote that read: "I for one welcome our new computer overlords." The funniest line that I heard about the show came from late night host Jimmy Kimmel who said of the competition that: "Watson" crushed both guys, gave both of them wedgies, and took away their girlfriends."

U.S. Population Breakdown

2011-02-13T22:47:00.000-08:00

The 2010 Census has been taken and the Bureau came up with an official number for the U.S. population of 309,745,538. Here is a closer look at how that number breaks down:

155.5 million Americans are male and 151.4 million are female.

102.5 million are minorities

27% of U.S. population is under 20 years of age.

13% are 65 or older.

Median age is 36.8 years.

U.S. consists of 4.5% of the entire World population.

There are twice as many females as males that are aged 85 or older.

The World's 10 Largest Armies

2011-02-11T00:41:00.000-08:00

In a dangerous world it is seen by many to be a necessity to have a large army if you are to protect your nation from foreign foes. Some countries take this much farther than others and have expanded their military forces way beyond what any rational observer would consider necessary. The largest army in the world today is the Chinese Army at over 2.3 million active troops. The U.S. is a distant second at 1.6 million. India is third at 1.3 million. Then you have North Korea at 1.1 million, Russia at 1 million, South Korea at 700,000, Pakistan at 620,000, Iran with 520,000, Turkey at 510,000 And last on the list of the top ten is Egypt with just under 470,000. Please note that this list only considered active army troops and did not count any Naval or Air Forces of the countries listed. Even if you were to count those additional forces including their reserves China would still have a big lead at just about 3.5 million total. The U.S. would be at about 2.5 million. Relative to population size however the U.S. army is much larger considering that the U.S. total population is at about 309 million while the Chinese population is north of 1.5 billion.

Gun Violence In The USA

2011-01-15T22:06:00.000-08:00

With the recent shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Griffiths, resulting in the deaths of 6 of her constituents, including a 9 year old girl named Christina Green, and the wounding of 13 more, the issue of gun control has come up again. I thought it might be interesting to share a few statistical facts about the number of gun violence victims in the United States in a given year. The following facts and figures come from the CDC (Center for Disease Control) and The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. The Brady Campaign is An organization which is named in honor Of James Brady who was the Press Secretary for President Ronald Reagan on the day of the assassination attempt on Reagan on March 30th, 1981. Mr. Brady was shot in the head on that day and suffered serious brain injuries. The following figures are compiled from statistics gathered over the last few years. The figures are only to do with gun violence and do not include various other types of violence leading to deaths such as knife attacks, beatings, bombings, poisonings or what have you:

More than 100,000 People are shot each year in America by various types of gun violence including murder, assaults, suicides, accidents, or some kind of a police action.

More than 66,000 survive gun violence every year.

More than 32,000 do not survive their gun attacks.

More than 17,000 people commit suicide every year using guns.

More than 12,000 people are murdered every year with guns.

More than 3000 children and teens die each year. Over 2000 of these the result of murder using guns.

More than 600 children and teens kill themselves every year with guns.

More than 600 total individuals are killed accidentally each year by guns.

More than 250 people are shot every day in the United States.

Almost 100 of these shooting victims die every day.

Almost 10 children and teens die every day from gun violence.

Dead Celebrities And Their Last Words

2011-01-09T21:21:00.000-08:00

Almost everybody is going to have a headstone one day and what you decide to have put on yours is going to say a lot about who and what you were. Some people have very serious sayings on theirs and some go a little bit more comical and shoot for a final laugh. Below listed are some famous dead celebrities and what they finally had put on their headstones in no particular order of importance or time frame:

Mel Blanc - (Voice Of many cartoon characters including Bugs Bunny) - "That's all Folks."

Frank Sinatra - (Singer, Actor) - "The Best is Yet To Come."

Will Bonney - (A.K.A. "Billy The Kid") - "The Boy Bandit King, He died as he lived."

Al Capone - (Gangster) - "My Jesus Mercy."

Bette Davis - (Actress) - "She did it the hard way."

Dean Martin - (Singer, Actor) - "Everybody loves somebody sometime."

Jayne Mansfield - (Actress) - "We live to love you more each day."

Jim Morrison - (Rock star, The Doors) - "True to his own spirit."

Will Rogers - (Humorist) - "I never met a man I didn't like."

Merv Griffin - (Talk Show Host) - "I will NOT be right back after these commercial messages."

John Ritter - (Actor "Three's Company") - " And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make."

Sir. Isaac Newton - (Scientist, Inventor) - "Nature and nature's laws lay hid at night: God said let Newton be and all was light."

Leaf Cutter Ants Display Intelligent Labor Skills

2011-01-07T03:04:00.000-08:00

It has been known for a long time that ants have a seriously evolved societal structure within their anthill colonies. Scientists have recently observed that they are also capable of dividing labor skills based on which members of the colony are most suitable for certain tasks. Scientists in Oregon have noticed that the younger leaf cutting ants are always the ones that use their sharp mandibles to cut leaves into smaller sections in order that they can be more easily carried away. They have observed that over time as the ants grow older and their mandibles grow more dull and less effective at cutting leaves they shift away from doing it and give that task over to younger ants while they take over the task of exclusively carrying away the cut leaves, which scientists call leaf disks. In case you are wondering A Leaf Cutter Ant Queen can live for about 14 years and deliver in excess of 150 million offspring in her lifetime.

Constitution Misread Aloud On The Floor Of The House

2011-01-07T02:34:00.000-08:00

January 6th was opening day for the 112th Congress in the U.S. House of Representatives. The new Republican leadership led by the permanently orange faced new Speaker of the House John Boehner of Ohio who again cried openly during the proceedings. Boehner cries so often that his new nickname is "The Weeper of the House." They began the Congress this time by reading the entire U.S. Constitution out loud on the floor of the House. Well that sounds good enough being the the Constitution is only about 5 or 6 pages if you include all 26 amendments. Right away there was some dispute about whether they should read some parts of it out loud like the amendment which prohibited alcohol. The Amendment no longer is valid because it was repealed. After some mild bickering they decided to read the entire thing as it is. The most embarrassing part of the whole proceeding has to be the fact that they skipped over some key paragraphs of the document because two of the pages got stuck together. No one noticed this for a while until it was finally pointed out and then they went back and read the parts that were skipped. An interesting and embarrassing start for the 112th Congress.

The Number Of MIllionaires Is Growing In The U.S.

2010-12-17T23:50:00.000-08:00

In what some people see as a positive development in the economy the number of millionaires in the U.S. is growing over the last several years. A millionaire is defined as a person or family who have assets in excess of 1 million dollars after you exclude the value of their primary residence. In other words, if they have more than 1 million dollars in assets after you subtract the value of their primary residence or home. In 2009 the number rose to 7.8 million. This was up from 6.7 million in 2008. The all time high in the U.S. was 9.2 million in 2007. The number of people who are considered "ultra rich" has risen too. The ultra rich are defined as individuals or families who have a net worth of over 5 million dollars after excluding the value of their primary residence. That number rose to 980,000 in 2009. This is up from 840,000 in 2008. Usually rich people are a little older as well. The average age of an individual with assets of over 1 million dollars in the U.S. is 62 years old. The Average age of the "ultra rich" is 67.

Your TV Will Soon Be 3-D

2010-12-09T01:30:00.000-08:00

Do you remember when the Movie "Avatar" came out? It was in 3-D and it made almost 3 billion dollars at the box office (2.8 billion more precisely) and it spawned about a thousand other movies that came right after it that had the 3-D feature and pretty much stunk? Well the same type of revolution is getting set to occur with television. The 3-D tv is here already. It is expected that by the end of 2010 there will be over 3.2 million 3-D tv sets that will have been sold in the USA. By 2014 the projection is that over 90 million will be sold that year. The price of the Tv's themselves will not be so much more than an ordinary 2-D HDTV set either. Some 3-D tv sets can even be found now priced at under $1000 for a 50 inch set. The problem right now however is this. There Ain't a whole lot of good stuff to watch on tv in 3-D yet. A lot of shows on tv are reality shows. Who needs 3-D for that? Comedy shows, a lot of channels with talk shows, a lot of channels with old tv shows from the past like "The Brady Bunch" or "Gilligan's Island." This kind of content does not call for a 3-D set. It is however fantastic for sports like the Superbowl or the World Series but these events are only once a year and unless your a real sports fanatic it does not have that much of an appeal.
Another big problem with 3-D tv is that you have to buy a lot of stuff to go with your 3-D tv in order to get it to work right. Of course there are the 3-D glasses. They will run about $150 a pair. If you have a lot of people in your family that can add up quick. You might have to get a new 3-D Blu Ray player if you want to watch movies in 3-D, which of course you will want to do because you just bought a 3-D tv, thats about another $250 or so. Some of these 3-D glasses will only work with certain 3-D tv's too so there will be that to worry about. They are only now introducing the very first sets of 3-D glasses that are universal so maybe that wont be as much of a problem as originally feared. 3-D is going to be a brave new world that will require the consumer to make brave new choices. The best advice here perhaps is to proceed with caution as you go and to wait for the 3-D revolution to shake out a little more and develop before you join in.

The Postal Service is Shrinking Fast

2010-11-30T02:19:00.000-08:00

The United States Postal Service is lobbying Congress hard to reduce its number of delivery days from the current six a week to five a week. The USPS wants to eliminate Saturday mail deliveries in order to reduce costs and cope with less revenue from the dwindling number of pieces of "Snail Mail" that the public sends out in the new age of E-mails and texting options. In the year 2000 the postal service handled a record number of pieces of mail. That year it was over 55.1 billion. In 2010 the projected number is set to be about 29.8 billion. The argument against the reduction in the weekly number of delivery days has to do with some of the things that the public receives through the mail that they cannot do without such as prescription drugs, Social Security checks, and getting their bills on time. Those in favor of the change argue that most people wont miss the reduced amounts of junk mail that may occur and that nowadays many people pay their bills online and can have their SSI checks directly transferred to their bank accounts and such. The Postal Service is expected to suffer a loss this year of over 8.5 billion dollars due to the reduced volume of mail and by reducing the delivery days to 5 instead of 6 it would go a good deal of the way towards reducing that operating loss. If Congress approves the change (which is required) the USPS will be able to cut its work force of over 600,000 employees by about 80,000.

NYPD Fighting Crime By Taking Fewer Shots

2010-11-12T18:16:00.000-08:00

If you are a cop in the NYPD you know that there is the possibility that at some point you may have to take a shot at a suspect in your career. Over the last several years, decades even, that likelihood has become less and less likely. In 2009 the NYPD set a record for the fewest shots that it has ever fired at suspects in it's history for a twelve month period since they started keeping records of it in 1971. In 09 The NYPD fired 296 total rounds from their guns which resulted in the killing of 12 suspects. This broke their previous record low of 352 rounds in 2004.
It has not always been this way. In the past the NYPD has had to use many more rounds in order to police the city streets. Back in 1971 they fired a total of 2113 rounds and ended up killing 93 total suspects. Since 1971 the trend has definitely been downward. In 1995 they fired 1728 total rounds. In 1997 1040. In 2000 that number dropped to 504. In 2005 it spiked up a bit and rose to 616. By 2008 it had dropped back down to 364 which was just an average of 1 bullet a day.
The reason the numbers trend downward over the years may have to do with less crime on the streets but may also have to do with policy changes in the department. Back in 1971 when the NYPD fired over 2000 shots police officers were in the habit of firing "Warning Shots" at suspects which is a policy that the NYPD no longer practices.

Complete History Of NYC MTA Fare Increases

2010-10-27T22:11:00.000-07:00

If you live in New York City you have not been able to escape the current debate about how much the MTA Bus and Subway fare is going to increase again this year. It seems like it goes up every year now and that this has become the new normal. If you might be interested in a brief recap of how many fare increases have occurred since the subway system first opened in 1904 then here is a complete list of them all:

Oct. 27, 1904 - Subway Opens, Fare: 5 Cents

7/1/48 - Fare: 10 cents

7/25/53 - Fare: 15 cents

7/15/66 - Fare: 20 cents

1/1/70 - Fare: 30 cents

1/1/72 - Fare: 35 cents

9/1/75 - Fare: 50 cents

6/29/80 - Fare: 60 cents

7/4/81 - Fare: 75 cents

1/1/84 - Fare: 90 cents

1/1/86 - Fare: $1

1/1/90 - Fare: $1.15

1/1/92 - Fare: $1.25

11/12/95 - Fare: $1.50

7/4/98 ---30 day metro card debuts. Cost $63

5/4/03 - Base fare rises to $2/30 day metro card cost $70

2/27/05 - 30 day metro card cost $76

3/2/08 -- 30 day metro card cost $81

3/25/09 - Base fare rises from $2 to $2.50/30 day metro card now $103

Superpower Nuclear Stockpiles In Steep Decline

2010-09-22T22:40:00.000-07:00

As far as the possibility of a nuclear war occurring goes there is good news and bad news. The bad news is it is still possible. The good news is that there are many fewer nukes that either side could throw at each other. The nuclear stockpiles are way down from their highs in the past.
The largest nuclear arsenal still belongs the the Russians. Currently they possess over 8000 warheads in their inventory. This is however way down from their high of over 40,000 in 1986. The United States is second on the list with a total of just over 5000 warheads. Similarly this figure is way down from the U.S. high of over 31,000 which was reached in 1967. After the two "Super Powers" you have 6 other countries who are known to possess nuclear capabilities. They are in order: France, with over 300 warheads. China with about 240 warheads. Britain with 225. Israel which has about 80. India similarly has about 80 as well. Then Pakistan with about 70 warheads in total.

The Tragedy Of The U.S.S. Indianapolis

2010-08-29T22:16:00.000-07:00

There are many great and famous stories about battles and courage that went on during World War Two. One of the lesser known tragedies occured on July 30th, 1945 in the waters of the Pacific Ocean. The USS Indianapolis was a nearly 10,000 ton heavy battle cruiser that just weeks prior to her sinking had just come out of a naval shipyard having been re-fitted and repaired after suffering damage doing battle with the Japanese. She has just delivered the Atomic Bomb to a B-25 bomber base in the Pacific (The actual bomb in fact the The Enola Gay would drop on Hiroshima on August 6th) and had turned around and started steaming for the Phillippines. On the night of July 30th at just a little bit past midnight a Japanese submarine launched two torpedoes straight for the middle of her hull. Once they exploded they set off a chain reaction with some of the munitions that were on board and the ensuing secondary explosions and fire nearly severed the ship in half. She had a crew of 1200 and within the first minutes of the attack the fire and explosions had killed about 300 on board. The captain ordered the ship to be abandoned at this point and nearly 900 men all jumped overboard and began swimming away from the burning wreck. The ship had completely sunk undernearth the waves in a little over ten minutes leaving all the crew bobbing on the waves in the middle of the night in total darkness. The distress flares that the crew had sent out just after the beginning of the attack were ignored by the U.S. Navy. They were thinking that it was perhaps some kind of Japanese trick to lure them in for an ambush as sea. As daylight rose the next morning an even more tragic turn for the worse takes place. The waters they were sunk in were shark infested and the first of the swarm of sharks that would soon appear was spotted by some of the crew for the first time. Because of the ignored distress flares nobody was coming to rescue them yet so they were stuck in the water for days. Finally on August 2nd, 1945 an overhead recon flight spotted the men in the ocean and a massive rescue operation was launched. In the four days between the sinking of the ship and the rescue launch out of the 900 men that jumped into the water after the Indianapolis was sunk less than 300 made it out of the water alive after the sharks were done with them.

More College Kids On Meds Than Ever Before

2010-08-22T11:34:00.000-07:00

According to a recent study conducted by the American Psychological Association there are now more college kids in the U.S. on Psychological medications than ever before in history. That might explain some of the weird behavior in college kids these days. There is a marked increase in depression and anxiety among the college crowd and they are taking more psychological medications to cope than ever. According to the study depression has increased by 40% over the last ten years. The study involved more than 3200 college kids who were followed between 1997 and 2009 and it discovered that 24% of them were on some kind of prescribed drug for Anxiety. Usually the students who were suffering the most were those who were labled in the study as "Socially Isolated."

Huge Piece Of Iceburg In Greenland Breaks Away

2010-08-15T03:52:00.000-07:00

If you are thinking that perhaps this summer has been a little bit hotter than the usual summer there is certainly tons of meteorological evidence to prove that you are right. This past July was the hottest ever recorded in New York City. Some people are pointing to global warming. Another rather large piece of evidence that this may be the case came out of Greenland this week. Researchers at the Canadian Ice Service were surprised to discover that a huge piece of ice over 4 times the size of Manhattan had broken off of The Petermann Glacier, which is one of the largest in Greenland. It is so big in fact that they are referring to it as an "Ice Island." There are two big concerns about the future of this seriously big piece of ice. The first is that if it drifts into the shipping lanes of the North Atlantic it may have a negative effect on commerce and may cause something of a further downturn in the economy. The second big concern has to do with what will happen if this "Ice Island" begins to melt and how much of an effect will that have on raising sea levels in the area and what kind of an effect will that have on residents who live near the shorelines in that region.

Poverty And Wealth On The Good Earth

2010-08-13T15:25:00.000-07:00

The gap between the rich and the poor in the world has always been a wide one. There has always been a universe of difference between the way the wealthy experience life and the way the poor do. Perhaps the gap between the two has never been wider in history than it is now. Consider some modern facts about the rich and the poor:

Over 1 billion people in the world do not have enough food currently to eat. That is larger than the population of the U.S. and Europe combined.

65% of the world's hungry live in only seven countries. India, China, Congo, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Ethiopia.

The world's billionaires have assets that exceed the combined incomes of 45% of the world's population while over a billion poor people are forced to survive on less than one dollar a day.

Every year 15 million children around the world die from malnutrition.

For the price of one missile a school full of children could be provided with enough food to eat for 5 years.

Top Ten Newspapers In The U.S.A.

2010-08-08T04:06:00.000-07:00

It does not come as a surprise to anyone to note that newspapers in the U.S. are going through a trying time. All kinds of competition from alternative forms of media have conspired to reduce the audiences of almost all of the nations printed media publications. They may be going down but they are not dead yet. In some cases they still command a significant audience in terms of size. Here now is a list of the top ten newspapers in the U.S. based on total daily circulation for the first six months of the year 2010. Circulation figures have been rounded up:

Wall Street Journal --2,092,000

USA Today ----------- 1,826,000

N.Y. Times ------------- 951,000

L.A. Times ------------- 616,000

Washington Post -------579,000

Daily News --------------535,000

N.Y. Post --------------- 525,000

Oakland Tribune ------- 517,000

Chicago Tribune ------- 516,000

Houston Chronicle ----- 494,000

The Chemical Risk When You Shop

2010-08-05T00:15:00.000-07:00

Few Americans are aware of the risk they take every time they go out and buy some bottled water. A chemical called Bisphenol is used to make the plastic that the bottles are made of. It can seep into the water contained inside and cause health issues for some. Bisphenol has been linked to certain cancers. The chemical as it turns out is also present in your grocery store receipts when you shop as well. According to a recent study it was discovered that over 40% of grocery store receipts contained significant amounts of Bisphenol. when you handle your receipts the chemical can rub off on your hands and can be absorbed by the body. Experts are not certain how much of the chemical rubs off and is absorbed through the skin when you come into contact with it and they are therefore not certain about how much of a risk is being run by the general population. Biphenol was found in receipts that were taken from Gas stations, Fast food restaurants, and other retailers in addition to just grocery stores.

New Anti - HIV Gel Ready For Africa

2010-08-01T00:33:00.000-07:00

A new Anti -HIV gel Is holding out the promise of being able to significantly reduce the spread of HIV on the African continent. It is an antiretroviral gel which contains Tenofovir, which has been proven to destroy HIV cells in the body. The biggest and most promising feature of the gel is that it's use can be completely controlled by women. It does not depend on the cooperation of males in any way in order to implement and achieve an effective result. Up until this point the hope of slowing down the spread of HIV in Africa has depended on mainly the use of condoms or abstinence. These are two options that all too often African men have been unwilling to practice. The new gel will be completely controlled and implemented by women and therefore will not require the cooperation of a male partner thereby taking men and their lack of cooperation totally out of the equation. In a recent study which was undertaken in South Africa the new HIV gel reduced the spread of the disease by almost 40% over almost a 3 year period in a study that involved nearly 1000 women. In another study where the gel was used both before and after intercourse the spread of HIV was reduced by almost 55%. It was also helpful in reducing the spread of Genital Herpes as well. While it is neither a cure nor a vaccine it is holding out the hope that the wild spread of the HIV virus in Africa can finally be put under some kind of control.

Former VP Dick Cheney Loses His Heartbeat

2010-07-28T01:53:00.000-07:00

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has been struggling with heart problems for many years. His latest treatment for his recurring condition has left him now in fact without a pulse. Recently he has been rushed to the hospital complaining of chest pains, which is something that has happened in the past many times. The way the doctors decided to treat his condition this time is with the use of a Ventricular Assist Device (VAD). What a VAD does is that it keeps blood flowing throughout the body without the need for a pumping action, which thereby eliminates a pulse. In the past VAD's were used as a temporary fix while heart patients waited for transplants but the technology has progressed to such a point that doctors are looking at the device as more of a permanent fix now. VAD's work so well in fact that they are eliminating the need for transplants all together in some patients.

Thomas Jefferson's Little Big Mistake

2010-07-25T13:31:00.000-07:00

There are some people who hold the image of Thomas Jefferson to be, if not perfect, than near perfect. Then there are the rest of us who believe that he was a great and important man who sometimes made mistakes. One of his smaller mistakes has recently come to light with the help of modern technology. It seems that in the original rough draft of the Declaration Of Independence he more than once made the mistake of referring to the American People as "subjects." Instead of "Citizens." Now if you know anything about the difference between a Democracy and a monarchy then you know that this is a serious no no. "Subjects" are always subject to the rule of a monarch. In a Democracy there are no subjects only citizens who have rights, and can vote, and have a say in how their government is run and are not subject to the desires of a king. It was a Freudian slip that Jefferson made and he sought to fix it. With the use of high resolution digital cameras the document was photographed and it was discovered that Jefferson himself probably was the one who erased the word "subject" in several places and wrote the word "citizens" over it in its place.

Forclosure Rates In U.S. Set To Reach Record HIgh

2010-07-15T12:36:00.000-07:00

Since the beginning of the worldwide economic downturn which began in September of 2008 the number of Americans who have been losing their homes has been increasing. 2010 may be the worst year yet. So far this year the U.S. is on pace to have over 1 million homes foreclosed upon by banks and other lending institutions which would be a new record. 2009 was the worst year so far. There were over 900,000 homes which went into foreclosure in that year. To give you an idea about where the foreclosure rate used to stand in more normal economic times in a typical year in the U.S. before the economic meltdown the number of American homes that would usually be foreclosed upon was about 100,000 a year, give or take.

The Trouble With Wind Power

2010-07-09T02:47:00.000-07:00

For many people the idea of a future where energy is generated from the wind through the use of wind turbines is a promising hope and maybe a saving grace for the environment and mankind. It would be great if it could work but consider some of the drawbacks: Some residents in the Midwest who currently live near wind farms that have been established to generate power have been complaining about the loud noise that emanates from the motors on the wind turbines. In order for a turbine to maximize it's potential for generating electrical power it has to have its propellers facing the wind. They have motors built into them to turn the entire head of the turbine into the wind to do this every time there is a change in the wind direction. When the motors kick in to turn the propellers they generate a piercing noise that can be heard from long distances and nearby residents often complain. Another complaint is the so called "Flashing" effect that occurs when a turbines propellers are turning and they are in the sunlight. They tend to block out the sun for a brief moment with their blades as they rotate and this repeated effect causes the sunset to flash in the windows of homeowners living nearby. It's kind of a flickering effect instead of a steady sunlight hitting your window in the late afternoon and evening hours. Many people simply do not like the aesthetics of having dozens of wind turbines spinning in a wind farm. Home owners close by feel that it can be a blight and reduce the values of their properties and are therefore opposed to them. Wind turbines only begin to generate electrical power when the wind is spinning the propellers of the turbines in excess of 10 m.p.h. Any less wind speed and no power is generated. Obviously they do not even spin when the wind is not blowing at all which poses a problem in terms of having a consistent, reliable source of power. When a wind turbine is installed in the ground it has to be supported by a base of cement in order to hold it's entire weight securely. You can't just stick it into the dirt because it would likely tip over due to the fact that the ground underneath it would shift. These slabs of concrete that must be built as a base for a wind turbine require earth movers in order to establish a hole in the ground deep enough before the concrete is poured in and allowed to dry. The large amounts of cement that have to be mixed and manufactured to put in wind turbines is also damaging to the environment due to the many steps involved in the process and the amount of energy required to produce concrete. It is a heavy industrial process which requires a lot of energy and generates a lot of heat and adds to the general global warming problem worldwide.

The Prettiest And Most Foolish Russian Spy

2010-07-04T19:28:00.000-07:00

If you are living in New York City these days you have not been able to escape the news of the F.B.I. sting of that group of Russian spies that have been uncovered operating both in the city and in New Jersey. Easily the most interesting of the group is the 28 year old Anna Chapman (real name Anya Kuschenko) who's cover was to pose as a party girl/real estate agent while she spied for Moscow. Not only is she the most stunning looking of the bunch she may also have been the most dim witted too. According to court documents filed by the justice department in the case, which describe the day to day operations of the F.B.I. sting, Chapman not only did not seem to have the first clue that she was being followed but engaged in some truly ponderous and stunningly foolish behavior for a secret agent. When she was contacted by the F.B.I., who were pretending to be Russian Intelligence, she was not even suspicious that the call to set up a meeting came from someone other than her usual contact. A person in fact that she had never seen or heard of before. Later that day when they met at a coffee shop in Manhattan she began complaining that her laptop was having connection problems and she handed it over to the agent and asked him to have it fixed. The laptop contained all the information the F.B.I. needed about all of her communications back to Moscow. After the meeting was over Chapman left and again failed to notice that she was being tailed by other agents. She went into a Verizon store where she bought a new cell phone and a couple of prepaid phone cards. On her way down the street she quickly discarded the receipt. The agents recovered it from the trash can and found out that she gave a fake Russian name in order to buy the phone (Irine Kutsov) and a fake address (99 Fake Street). Giving a fake Russian name may not be the most clever idea if you are a Russian spy trying to hide the fact that you are a Russian spy. The silliness of the fake address is truly like someone asking to be caught. Her careless behavior is even more surprising when you consider that she holds a Masters Degree in Economics, her former husband has described her as having an I.Q. of 160, and she is believed to be able to fluently speak four languages. President Obama has said that this spy case is not going to effect the "Restart" that the President wants in U.S./Russian relations. The President knows that if we make a big case out of this thing the Russians are going to start rounding up American spies in Moscow and that would make the whole matter so not worth it.

What's Old Is New Again In High Tech

2010-06-26T03:18:00.000-07:00

Well the day has finally arrived. The New Apple i-Phone 4 has just been released and the number of individuals that have camped out in front of the Apple i-Store in Midtown Manhattan can finally go in and get one. One of the biggest features of this new version of the I-Phone is that it can allow you to see the person that you are talking to live on a video camera when you call them to chat as long as they too have an i-phone 4. This technology sounds amazing and it has been impressing the heck out of a lot of people who are hearing about it for the first time. Few people seem to realize that this video phone capability goes all the way back to the World's Fair of 1964 when it was first debuted. Back at the fair (in a section of high tech displays known as "Futurama") The Video Phone was a lot bigger and bulkier than the slick I-Phones of today of course. It was basically a telephone with a TV like monitor attached to it. If the person you were calling had the same set up you could dial the number and when the call connected you would be able to see the other person on the other end of your call as long as they were standing in front of their monitor. For some reason the video phone back then did not take off and the idea died for many decades. Now 50 years later it is coming out again and the public seems to think it is state of the art technological advancement and they are jumping all over themselves to own one. It is the same kind of story that happened with the wireless remote control for televisions. The wireless remote debuted in the 1950's but again for some reason the public was not interested in it and it did not sell. Because of this rejection the American public opted to stick with their old style TV sets with the little knob tuners that they had to get up from their couches to turn in order to change the channel. The wireless remote control was again re-introduced in the 1980's and then it took off big. Now we have a generation of young people who don't even know what a TV with knobs on it even looks like. That kind of TV would probably look to them like what a cave man's eating utensils would have looked like to my generation back when I was a kid watching a TV with knob tuners on it.

Presidents And The Generals They Fire

2010-06-25T02:29:00.000-07:00

With the firing of General Stanley McChrystal from his position running the war in Afghanistan (and for demonstrating the monumental lapse in judgement of actually saying to a reporter what he actually thinks about the President and the Vice-President and several other members of his cabinet) one has to take note that it is not the first time in history that this kind of thing has occurred. A similar conflict happened between President Harry Truman and General Douglas MacArthur in 1951 during the Korean War. General MacArthur wanted two things from Truman. The first one was that he wanted the president to give him the green light to fight all the way up the Korean peninsula and actually take the war over the North Korean border and go right into China which would have greatly expanded the war. The second thing was that MacArthur wanted the president to authorize the use of nuclear weapons to settle the conflict. When Truman refused MacArthur took his complaints about the president to the press more than once and then he wrote an open letter to the U.S. Congress criticizing Truman. MacArthur even gave Truman the ultimate act of disrespect when he deliberately failed to salute the president when he came off his plane when Truman went to the war front in Korea to discuss matters directly with him. MacArthur got canned. It effectively ended his career as a military man. The same kind of thing occurred between General George McClellan and President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. McClellan was in charge of the Union Army when a disagreement occurred between him and the President about how to prosecute the war. McClellan was relieved of his command. In the weeks and months that followed McClellan referred to Lincoln both as an idiot and also as a well meaning buffoon. He even ran for president against Lincoln in the 1864 election but his candidacy never got any real traction and Lincoln was re-elected.

Sea Life In Pacific Indicating A More Polluted Ocean

2010-06-21T02:37:00.000-07:00

On April 18, 2010 an event occurred on the shores of Seattle, Washington that does not bode well for the long term well being of sea life in the Pacific Ocean. On that morning a 38 foot black and white whale appeared dead on the shores of one of Seattle's waterways. Scientists and researchers were of course curious to find out what had caused the whale to die so they undertook an autopsy. Inside the stomach of the whale they found a pair of sweat pants, a total of 20 plastic bags, several golf balls, several discarded dirty rags, and a couple of rolls of duct tape among several other items. It has been known for a long time that the Pacific Ocean is getting more and more polluted with this kind of waste material. There is a section of the ocean known as the "Pacific Gyre" where the water gyrates and swirls in a circle where there is all kinds of junk like empty plastic bottles, bottle caps, various assorted pieces of plastic, plastic toys, tooth brushes, floating pieces of wood of all sizes, even some furniture such as pieces of couches and chairs have been spotted. It was concluded that the dead whale died simply from consuming these various pieces of garbage that float on the surface of the Pacific and are now ubiquitous along that entire body of water.

Female Executives Around The World

2010-06-18T02:44:00.000-07:00

The number of female executives inhabiting a corporate board room varies widely around the world. The reasons it varies are sometimes cultural and sometimes a matter of law. In Norway 40% of the execs at major corporations are female nowadays. They have to be by law. In 2002 the Norwegian Parliament passed a law mandating this figure to their corporate world and gave them 6 years in which to comply. Its been a success. So much so that other European countries are following suit. Spain has introduced a similar law now and has given their corporations until 2015 to meet the same 40% figure for female employment. France is looking to do the same but has not put anything into law yet. These laws are in response to a long standing practice in corporations around the world to under represent women in board rooms. In some countries women make up the majority of the population yet have been almost totally shut out of the business hierarchy. In some parts of the world it is worse than in others. In the U.S. women make up about 15% of the corporate population. In the European Union they only currently make up less than 10%. In Asia it is the lowest at under 5%.

World Cup Far Outshines Super Bowl In Popularity Worldwide

2010-06-12T03:59:00.000-07:00

If you are a sports fan in America you would immediately believe the The Super Bowl is by far the biggest sports event that takes place on earth every year. That would be due to the fact that you would not have noticed the 800 pound gorilla in the room, known as the World Cup, that far surpasses it in terms of an overall worldwide audience. Soccer is by far the world's most popular sport hands down. There is not even any other sport that begins to get even close to its worldwide appeal. The last World Cup that was played gained an audience of over 700 million viewers around the World. To give you an idea of just how big that is the last Super bowl game that was played in early February achieved a record audience of over 100 million. Usually its rating is around 80 million or so. A particularly interesting World Series game would get you about 20 million or so viewers in a typical year. An NBA Finals game is usually well under 9 million.

The Oilest Country On Earth

2010-06-09T03:46:00.000-07:00

As far as oil consumption goes worldwide there is and has always been only one all time champion. The United States by far consumes most of the world's oil. The U.S. population makes up about 5% of the world population and consumes about 25% of the world's total oil usage every year. It is estimated that America on average consumes about 15 barrels of oil per person each year which is far and away the most by any country. If the entire world population consumed oil at the rate the U.S. does the remaining oil supply would not last much longer. A good way to put it would be like this: If the entire world were to consume oil at the rate that the nation of India consumes oil the remaining supply would last about 225 years. If it were to consume it at the rate China does it would last about 100 more years. If it consumed it at the rate Britain does it would last only 17 more years. If the whole world were to consume oil at the rate the U.S. presently does the world's remaining supply would last only 7 more years.

U.S. And Friends Reveal Nuclear Figures

2010-06-05T06:13:00.000-07:00

There is some good news and bad news if you are wanting to feel optimistic about the future of mankind. The bad news is that there are tons of nuclear warheads that are still possessed by the world's nuclear nations and a bunch of other unstable countries that either have or are trying to join the club. The good news is that the number of nukes is way down from its highs during the Cold War. The U.S. announced the total number of warheads that are currently in its nuclear arsenal to date. The number now is 5113 in total. This figure represents a serious decline from its high of 31,255 in 1967. The French and British also released their nuclear figures too. France lists its total number of nuclear warheads at 355. Most of them are bomber based and not based in missile silos or anything of that kind. They also report that they have about 4 nuclear subs. The British list their total at 225 and that their warhead stockpile is largely bomber based as well. An important thing to understand about nuclear warheads is that many of the ones in the U.S. stockpile are MIRV capable. MIRV is short for Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicle. What that means is that one missile that has MIRV capability may have as many as ten separate nuclear warheads in its missile head that can be each programmed to hit a separate target city. Its kind of like a gun with more than one bullet. Although it is just one gun each bullet inside the chamber can be shot at a different target. The U.S. nuclear arsenal that is land based in silos in the Midwest features this capability. It is also present in its submarine based nuclear force. So when The U.S. states that it has 5113 warheads it does not mean that it possesses 5113 nuclear missiles. It means that its missile force contains a total of 5113 warheads. That is to say 5113 nuclear bullets in all its guns.

Working Conditions In China Leading To Suicides

2010-06-03T04:35:00.000-07:00

If you think that you have a long, busy work week consider what a typical worker in China has to go through. It is not uncommon in that nation for a worker in a factory to be on the job for 18 hours a day seven days a week. There is no union activity allowed, no benefits offered, and they are paid well under $200 dollars a month and they can be fired at any whim by their employer with no legal recourse. In some cases wages are as low as 9 cents an hour in some factories. It can be enough to drive some Chinese employees to commit suicide. Consider a company called Foxxconn. It is a factory that employs over 300,000 people. They assemble products for American companies that do not want to hire and employ American workers in order to save money on labor costs and thereby increase their profit margins. Foxxconn factory puts together products like The I-Phone for Apple. They also assemble computers for Dell. On May 25th they suffered their ninth suicide of the year by an employee when a worker jumped out of a window rather than go back to work to do another grueling shift. The company and factory have been singled out and criticized in the past for stressful working conditions but the owner of the company has long denied that he runs a "sweatshop."

The Day They Burned The White House Down

2010-06-01T17:08:00.000-07:00

Many Americans believe that after the Revolutionary War was won in 1781 that hostilities ceased between Britain and The Colonies. It was not the case. The bad blood and fighting went on well into the 19th century. Probably its zenith occurred on August 24, 1814, during the War of 1812. There had been on going disputes between England and the United States involving land in the Northwest territory. There also continued the problem of British Impressment of U.S. sailors on the high seas. The British would seize U.S. vessels and sailors and get them to change sides and fight for them against the U.S. They would use threats usually. Most of the sailors refused. The British were stopping U.S. shipping which was interfering with commerce and damaging the economy by preventing goods from reaching the country. In retaliation for this the U.S. Army set fire to the city of York in Canada. That city is today known as Toronto. The British responded by heading straight for the capitol. They met only light resistance on their march to Washington because most of the U.S. Army was up further north around Toronto. Once they got into the city they went right for the White House and lit it up. They sent President Madison fleeing into the night as the building burned.

The World's Most Stolen Painter

2010-05-26T03:43:00.000-07:00

What is it about Pablo Picasso? One of the twentieth century's most famous and successful painters was not only a big hit with the patrons of the art world but he may be in fact an even bigger hit with art thieves. As it turns out his art works are by far the most sought after with people that like to steal art. Over the years more than 650 Picasso pieces have been targeted and stolen. That figure puts him far and away at the top of that list. A distant second is Mattise who's art pieces have been targeted about 130 times. It is no wonder really that Picasso is the most sought after considering that two of his works are on the top ten list of the most expensive paintings in the world. His "Dora Maar au Chat' is valued at over 95 million dollars. Another of his titled "Garcon a la Pipe" is over 100 million dollars. In case you are wondering the world's most valuable painting at this moment is a Jackson Pollack. His "No. 5" which he painted in 1948 was sold at auction just a few years ago for over 140 million dollars. Despite this fact Pollack's painting has never been stolen. This might be due to the fact that it's about 8 feet high and over 4 feet wide though.

U.S.- Mexico Crime Rate Comparison

2010-05-26T02:46:00.000-07:00

You would think right off the bat that surely crime in the United States is far lower on average than it would be in Mexico. At least that's what most Americans would be inclined to initially believe. As it turns out it depends on what category of crime you are looking at. The numbers fluctuate from year to year but on average they remain within a certain ballpark. If you were to look at total crimes committed in the United States per 100,000 inhabitants the number would be about 4000 per year. That is to say that about 4000 Americans out of every 100,000 are victims of some kind of crime each year in the U.S. In Mexico It is about 1500 per 100,000 which is much lower. If you were to look at murder rates you would find that in Mexico about 13 individuals out of every 100,000 are murdered each year. In the U.S. it is a little over 5 per 100,000 a year which is a much lower murder rate. If you looked at rape statistics you would find that 14 out of 100,000 Mexicans are victims of rape each year. In the U.S. it is about 33 per 100,000. There is also far more theft in the U.S. than in Mexico on average. About 120 Mexicans per 100,000 are victims of some kind of theft each year. In the U.S. it is over 2400 per 100,000. Auto theft is also more prevalent in The U.S. 430 per 100,000 vehicles are stolen here each year. In Mexico it is about 140 per 100,000. Armed robberies are about the same for each country. About 150 per 100,000 inhabitants each year. It is important to remember that maintaining statistics on crimes committed is a little bit of a shaky business. Some crimes such as rape and robbery are sometimes not reported to authorities and due to this fact the figures are imperfect. Despite that the stats do give a reliable idea about where things stand in a general way even if they are not exact.

The Constitution And The Right To Bear Arms

2010-05-12T02:44:00.000-07:00

If you were inclined to listen to organizations like The National Rifle Association you would think that every American were born with the right to own a gun from birth. They always sight the Second Amendment to the Constitution to push forth their claim and quote directly from the document itself and state: "...the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." This is usually the mantra that they recite. The problem with that little quote that they use is that they are only selectively showing you half of it. The entire Second Amendment (It's only one sentence folks) goes like this: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." In order to understand what the second amendment is getting at you have to understand what militia means. Militia means military. A militia, as defined by Webster's Comprehensive Dictionary is "A body of citizens enrolled and drilled in military organizations other than the regular military forces, and called out only in emergencies." Examples of organized militia include The National Guard, The Naval Reserve, and The Marine Corps Reserve. What the second Amendment basically states is that Citizen soldiers have the right to bear arms. That is citizens who are serving in the military in some capacity and not everyone and anyone like the N.R.A. is always misleading people to believe. Not store clerks, not waiters, not florists, not pizza shop owners, not teachers, not plumbers, not bus drivers, not executives or anyone else. I understand that this is a tough pill for gun lovers to take, especially the ones who will only allow their guns to be pried from their cold dead fingers. The Founding Fathers were never intending for Every American in civilian life to be walking around packing heat. To somehow claim that they were is an attempt to twist the meaning of their words and to insult their collective intelligence.

The Plot To Steal A Dead President

2010-05-10T02:56:00.000-07:00

The assassination of President Lincoln is a famous event in American history but an event that is far less known is the plot that occurred 11 years after his death to steal his body and hold it for ransom. The plan took place on election day, November 6th, 1876 and it involved a bunch of counterfeiters. A man named Ben Boyd had just been arrested, tried, and sentenced to ten years in prison for counterfeiting U.S. currency. His partner in crime Jim Kinelly found himself suddenly without a job so he hatched a plot to steal the former president's body and hold it for ransom. He planned on demanding $200,000 from the U.S. government for the return of Lincoln's remains plus he wanted his partner Ben Boyd pardoned. He and a couple of hired helpers got to the cemetery on election night and managed to file open the lock at the entrance of the tomb chamber and made their way in. Once they got inside they ran into a snag. The sealed coffin in which the President rested was made mostly of lead and weighed about 500 lbs in total and proved impossible for the would be body snatchers to just carry away. Another glitch was that the secret service had been alerted of the plot by an informant and they were already at the scene waiting to pounce. When they made their move somehow the grave robbers managed to escape anyway but not for long. The secret service already knew their names through their informant and caught up to them a few days later and arrested Kinelly and his cohorts and the plot was foiled.

Nuclear Testing In Nevada In The 1950's

2010-05-05T17:01:00.000-07:00

While many Americans are aware of the fact that there was nuclear testing going on in Nevada in the 1950's few knew or understood what the impacts might be for many decades down the road at the time nor how strange some of the testing proved to be. There were a total of 14 tests of nuclear weapons the first of which was conducted on January 27th, 1951. The test sight was about 60 miles or so from the famed city of Las Vegas. The explosions were even used at the time as an attraction to lure more people into the city to gamble and such. Some of the testing was done at night and when the bombs would go off they would light up the sky in the most amazing way. One of the nukes that was tested was buried in the desert. They were trying to see if you could use a nuclear weapon for purposes of excavating a large area of land quickly. Some of the craters left behind were over 1000 feet across and almost 300 feet deep. The one drawback to this plan was the lingering radiation that would be left behind for years which made the whole idea unworkable. Some of the testing had a bit of a circus atmosphere around it. There were even benches placed in the desert for military V.I.P.'s to sit on so they could watch the explosions and resulting mushroom clouds from about 8 miles away. It was almost like they were watching a movie or some other kind of entertainment and were totally unaware of the risks. It has been long suspected that the famous actor John Wayne may himself have died due to his exposure to these tests while filming some of his westerns. Wayne died of stomach cancer in 1979. Most people point to his filming a movie called "The Conqueror" in 1956 in Utah which was just downwind from the nuclear test sight in Nevada. There is some evidence to suggest that there might be something to it. Out of the 220 cast and crew members who worked on that film at the time 91 of them came down with cancer in the years following the shoot.

Should Your Child Still Have A Polio Shot?

2010-04-29T03:49:00.000-07:00

There was a time in the United States in the middle of the 20th century when the disease known as Poliomyelitis was a real fear. Polio is an infectious disease. It is a virus that usually enters the body through the throat and or the intestinal tract and spreads through person to person contact with oral and nasal secretions. In its mildest forms it would usually show flu like symptoms and probably lay you out for about the better part of 10 days after which one would recover. This is what occurred in most cases. In its most severe form it would lead to paralysis and death. This result would occur in about 1% of those afflicted. Perhaps its most famous victim was Franklin Roosevelt who acquired the disease about 10 years before he became president and lost his ability to walk. By 1949 the disease had reached it zenith in the U.S. with over 42,000 cases reported that year. With the introduction of the Polio vaccine by Doctor Jonas Salk in 1955 the occurrences of the illness declined quickly over time and was nearly wiped out in only one generation. By 1979 the number of annual cases in the U.S. has dwindled to only 8. From 1980 - 2006 there had been only 2 confirmed cases of the disease. It has for all practical purposes been wiped out in the United States. Yet despite this fact nearly every child born in America is still vaccinated against a disease that no longer poses a serious threat. Over 95% of new Born's are given the Polio vaccine today. Some have questioned why this is the case considering that Polio is all but gone from the American landscape. Some have suggested that the answer to the question is money. Depending on where you live a Polio vaccine shot can cost anywhere from $25 - $85 each and that 4 shots are "suggested" before the age of 6 for a new baby. Some have stated the belief that continuing to "recommend" to new parents that their babies be protected with these shots rakes in billions for the pharmaceutical industry annually. Usually when a war is won what happens next naturally is that you stop fighting. Polio has been beaten in the United States yet big pharma is still acting like we are in the middle of the Polio war and that there is no end in sight because it serves its economic interests to do so and say so. Of course whether a new parent decides to vaccinate their new child against this disease is a totally personal choice that should be left up to the parents and there is nothing wrong with preferring to be safe rather than sorry. To many it seems like a case of overkill to vaccinate over 95% of the children born in the U.S. against a disease that has shown only 2 confirmed cases since 1980.

The Trouble With Bottled Water

2010-04-01T03:34:00.000-07:00

There is no doubt about how convenient bottled water can be. The millions in sales each year is testament to the fact that the general public likes it and keeps buying it despite the fact that they can acquire the product virtually for free from their home faucets. There is however a price to pay for that convenience and the price in the view of some for society is too high. First of all there is the cost. A small bottle of water such as Aquafina or Dasani can cost in excess of $3 in New York City and contain the same amount of water in a typical glass which you could get out of your tap for literally pennies. The source of the water is often the same. The people that market and make bottled water are the same companies that make soda such as Coke And Pepsi and they go the great strides to portray the image of bottled water as pure as if it comes from a mountain stream. About 35% of the bottled water found in the U.S.A. comes from a municipal water supply which is the same place your tap water comes from. They just run it through a water purifier to enhance it a little more and make it fresher tasting. One of the strategies that the bottled water companies initially undertook to promote interest in their product was to scare the public into believing that their tap water was somehow polluted and unsafe to drink and that their pure product would be better for you and safer which is actually not the case considering that the water very often comes from the same place. Then there is the problem of the garbage that it is generating. All of those plastic bottles that people dispose of after they consume their bottled water ends up eventually in city landfills because while much of it is recycled these days not all of it is and the stuff ends up taking centuries to break down and when it does can sometimes, depending on the type of plastic the bottles are made of, emit dangerous chemicals over time such as Bisphenol (BPA) which has been linked in studies to an increased risk for the development of Breast cancer and Prostate cancer for those who are excessively exposed to the chemical.

Hispanics Gaining Big In U.S. Census

2010-03-26T03:23:00.000-07:00

Probably the best reason to undertake a census count, other than the fact that is mandated by the U.S. Constitution, is to get a good idea about what kind of changes take place in the population over time. One of the items that is always looked at in an effort to glean this kind of information is to look at the most popular surnames in the census and to determine what ethnicity's are growing in the country and what others are not. Here below is a list of the ten most common surnames taken from the U.S. Census of 2000, the number of people in the country with that surname, and then the rank of that particular surname in the U.S. Census from 1990 in order to indicate an increase or decrease over time. The largest increase has occured with Hispanics as the chart below indicates:

Smith----------- 2,376,206-------------------- 1 (1990 rank)

Johnson---------1,857,160-------------------- 2

Williams--------1,534,042---------------------3

Brown-----------1,380,145---------------------5

Jones----------- 1,362,755-------------------- 4

Miller----------- 1,127,893-------------------- 7

Davis----------- 1,072,335-------------------- 6

Garcia------------ 858,289--------------------18

Rodriguez-------- 804,240--------------------22

Wilson------------ 783,051---------------------8

The Neverending Impact Of Henrietta Lacks

2010-03-16T02:50:00.000-07:00

Her name is barely known by anyone yet her impact on the world has been incalculable. Henrietta Lacks was a 31 year old African American mother of 5 who died of cervical cancer on October 4th, 1951 at John's Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. During her 8 month long treatment human cells were removed from her body for purposes of research. The doctors at the hospital soon discovered that her cells not only were growing in their test tubes but were thriving and multiplying. This is a rare occurrence. Most cells that are collected do not continue to grow and replicate indefinitely. Her cells have been used in countless medical scientific research over the decades since her passing. They have been used to develop Dr. Jonas Salk's Polio vaccine, they have been used to test and develop various chemotherapy treatments for cancer patients, and also used to develop in-vitro fertilization techniques among countless other uses. Her cells are still alive and replicating today and continue to be of valuable use and service to the medical research community in order to develop new treatments and medications for the ill. The cell line that she donated is known as the HeLa cell line. Hela represents the first two letters of her first and last names. Her children and other descendants were totally left in the dark about her donation to medical science until about 1973 when a member of her family had a chance encounter with someone who happened to work in a medical lab and mentioned her name in discussion with relation to his work. Despite the countless good that has come from Henrietta Lacks and her contribution (and the countless billions that the pharmaceutical industry and medical community have gained by her) her family has not seen any benefit either economically or in terms of recognition of their mother and grandmother. Ironically some of her children live without health care today because they cannot afford it and some of her children are now in debt because of their medical bills.

U.S. Population Growth Since The Revolution

2010-03-04T02:13:00.000-08:00

It is true in the United States as much as it is true everywhere else in the world. The population is exploding in size. At the time of the U.S. revolution there were less than 3 million Americans who existed. It is estimated that by the year 2100 there will be well over 500 million. Here now is a list of the U.S. population growth since the American Revolution which demonstrates just how quickly populations rise:

1780 -- 2,780,400

1800 -- 5,308,483

1820 -- 9,638,453

1840 -- 17,069,453

1860 -- 31,443,321

1880 -- 50,189,209

1900 -- 76,212,168

1920 -- 106,021,537

1940 -- 132,164,569

1960 -- 179,323,175

1980 -- 226,545,805

2000 -- 281,421,906

2010 -- 309,162,581 (est.)

"Glassing" Becoming An Expensive Problem In U.K.

2010-02-06T05:08:00.000-08:00

The issue of violence in Britain at and around football matches in not a new phenomenon but the increase in the number of incidents over the years is now becoming an expensive issue for the National Health Service there. It is known as "Glassing" and it usually occurs in England in and around sporting matches, bars, and clubs. It is when an individual uses a glass as a weapon and attacks another individual by either throwing it or breaking it first and then using it to cut a victim usually after an argument has ensued about sports or British football.. The result is usually heavy blood loss, permanent scarring, and serious injury. In the U.K. over 87,000 incidents take place now every year. It is now costing The National Health Service over 4 Billion dollars a year to treat these injuries. The cost is becoming so high in fact that the Government is now moving to have all the glassware in British bars and Pubs replaced with glassware that is not breakable such as plastic or even paper cups in an attempt to both reduce the number of these incidents annually and also curb the ever rising costs associated with having to treat such injuries.

The Only Bad Flight In The History Of Concorde

2010-02-02T00:54:00.000-08:00

The Concorde was the worlds first super sonic jet plane. The joint effort of both the French and British governments it debuted in 1969 and proved to be a success from the start and a hit with the public. It maintained a perfect safety record for over 30 years until July 25th, 2000 when it suffered its only crash. It took place in Paris, France at Charles Degaulle Airport. Just ahead of it on the runway was a Continental DC-10 which was taking off and heading for Texas. As it lifted up somehow a small piece of metal about 4 inches long fell off during the stresses of takeoff and ended up on the runway. The Concorde being next to takeoff followed its usual procedure and sped up as it made its way down the runway to gather up enough speed to lift into the air. Investigators estimate that it was traveling at about a speed of 200 MPH when her left wheel came into contact with the metal strip left on the tarmac by the previous Continental Flight. The small piece of titanium shredded the tire causing small chunks of rubber to fly up into the air at speeds that were about equivalent to that of a bullet shot from a gun. One of the chunks of rubber flies up and strikes the Concorde on the left side of the jet under its wing where the fuel tanks for the plane are located. The rubber traveling at such a high speed impacts the tank which causes a shock wave that ignites a fire in the wing but the jet still manages to lift off and become airborne. Citizens in Paris witnessed the plane in flight over the city traveling with its left wing engulfed in flames trailing black smoke behind it. The jet remained in the air for about two minutes when it finally came crashing down directly upon a hotel called The Relais Bleu which was located about ten miles outside of Paris. One hundred passengers were killed along with a flight crew of nine and four others on the ground. Most of the passengers on this particular flight were German. They were tourists on their way to J.F.K. Airport in order to connect with a cruise ship that was headed for Ecuador. The Incident marred an otherwise flawless flight record for the Concorde that had been in tact since the inception of the plane 30 years before. After the crash all Concorde flights were grounded for a time. The fleet itself was finally retired in 2003 for economic reasons rather than safety ones. The planes were no longer cost effective to fly because they used excessive amounts of jet fuel that were too costly for their continued operation.

Russians Develop Their Own Stealth Fighter Jet

2010-01-30T03:08:00.000-08:00

It has been a technology that has been around for a while in the west but the Russians are finally catching up this week when they rolled out their own version of a fighter jet that is invisible to radar. The T-50 is the first fighter Aircraft that has been developed by the Russians since the fall of The Soviet Union and it is designed to compete with the U.S. Air Force and its F-117 and the newer F-22 Raptor. It is capable of hitting multiple targets at once both on land and in the air while remaining virtually invisible to radar. It has taken decades to develop in total secrecy and this week the first prototype was rolled out for a test flight. The flight lasted about an hour and all went according to plan with the jet. Some experts say that part of the reason the Russians have developed the plane is in the hopes of being able to sell it overseas in order to increase exports and generate revenue for the Russian State. The plane is still in its developmental stages and the final version of the jet probably wont be available until all the glitches have been worked out and it is put through its paces. That should maybe take about 2 or 3 more years.

Bill Gates Announces Trial Phases For Malaria Vaccine

2010-01-27T07:07:00.000-08:00

The fight against malaria worldwide was given a big boost in early 2009 when Bill Gates announced That through The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation they would be donating 168 million dollars to the Path Vaccine Initiative which does research to work on a solution to this disease. Malaria is a mosquito born malady that occurs when a mosquito bite leaves microscopic parasites under the skin of the victim. The first symptoms of the illness are fever and flu like chills. If left untreated it can kill. Worldwide 350-500 million people are infected with malaria and over 1 million die every year. Most of the victims are located in Sub-Saharan Africa. Bill Gates has said that the Path foundation is now in the third stage of trial phases for a vaccine. At the pace they are going a partially effective Malaria vaccine may be available in three years. A fully effective vaccine may take another five to ten years.

The Stabbing Of Martin Luther King Jr.

2010-01-19T08:07:00.000-08:00

It is well known by many that the great civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed on April 4th, 1968 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. What is less well known is that ten years earlier he had a close call and was stabbed and nearly killed in New York City. The event took place on September 20th, 1958 in Blumstein's Department Store in Harlem. Dr. King was attending a book signing for his first book titled "Strive Toward Freedom" and as he was signing books a middle aged black woman from Georgia named Izola Ware Curry came up to his table with a copy of his book for him to sign. As he was signing her book she asked him "Are you Martin Luther King?" As Dr. King was signing his name to the book he replied "Yes I Am." At that moment Curry produced a seven inch long letter opener and plunged it into his chest. Dr. King was rushed to a nearby hospital where surgery had to be performed in order to save his life. The doctors later told him that his aorta (the main artery to the heart) was nearly severed and that if he would have so much as sneezed he would have died. Izola Ware Curry was a vagrant who had a history of mental illness and Dr. King asked from his hospital bed that she not be arrested and jailed but that instead she be treated for her mental illness.

The Dirt Cookies Of Haiti

2010-01-13T22:00:00.000-08:00

The island nation of Haiti as everyone now knows is going through perhaps it greatest and most pressing crisis dealing with the effects of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake it suffered on January 12th, 2010. It is the latest problem that it has had to deal with but perhaps its longest lasting problem has been one of a lack of food for its people which has plagued the country in perpetuity. Half the people who live there are unemployed and with most now living below the poverty line many in Haiti have taken to making cookies out of dirt in order to fill their stomachs and just get through the day. The way the cookies are made is first with the use of dirt as its main ingredient. Vegetable shortening, salt, and on occasion when it is available sugar will be added to a mix of mostly dirt and water which is gathered from the nearby mountains and mixed into a large pot or vat. Once the "batter" is stirred to a thick enough consistency it is then literally spooned out and spread on the ground and formed into the shape of individual cookies that are about the same size as a music CD with a spoon and then left out in the sunlight to dry. Once dried they are then hard and solid and "ready" for consumption. The dirt cookies are especially popular with children in Haiti because they are cheap to buy but they offer almost no nutritional value. Many of the locals who consume them say that they do make them sick sometimes but that after a while they claim that their bodies get used to them and tolerate them better. Many of the Haitians who consume the cookies because they have no other food options consider them a necessary evil.

Hospital Drugs Finding Their Way Into NYC Water Supply

2010-01-13T00:29:00.000-08:00

If you are interested in finding an inexpensive blood pressure medication or birth control pill and you live in NYC you might try just drinking some tap water. Hospitals in the New York area are flushing so many medications down the toilet that a significant amount of the stuff is ending up in the city's water supply. State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's office has been conducting an investigation and he has said that there are medications showing up in the drinking water of the city that should not be there and may be dangerous. The problem according to his office is not serious yet but he is looking to take action now to prevent it from becoming a bigger problem in the future. Cuomo wants to conduct a crackdown on hospitals and nursing homes that flush left over medications down the toilets and sinks like anti-depressants, hormones, and sleeping pills. The meds are ending up in reservoirs upstate and in the drinking water supply which feeds the NYC and surrounding area which is populated by over 9 million people. The practice is legal and the hospitals are not breaking any laws but Cuomo has said that if it continues it will effect the purity of the city's water supply so he is putting pressure on hospitals in the city to not flush the stuff down the toilet anymore and instead find some other way to dispose of the drugs where in which they don't end up in the water supply. Once the stuff gets into the water there is no current technology that is capable of filtering it all out so not introducing the drugs to the water supply in the first place would solve the problem. The levels of medications in the drinking water presently are too low to cause any kinds of problems but if they continue to increase they could present a health hazard to the general public over time.

Police Now Using Airplanes To Catch Speeders

2010-01-03T03:12:00.000-08:00

In these economic hard times it is getting harder for local municipalities to maintain their current levels of services with their shrunken tax revenues and it is forcing some of them to think outside the box in terms of coming up with new ways of generating more money. The latest idea some have come up with is to track and catch speeders using airplanes that monitor traffic from the sky. The way it works is like this: They paint lines on the highways every quarter mile and with the use of stop watches pilots will monitor how long a specific vehicle takes to get from one line to another to determine if the car is speeding. If it is determined that a car is in fact speeding a description and location of the vehicle is then radioed down to ground units who will then locate and stop the car and then issue the ticket. They are not using helicopters but rather fixed winged Cessna airplanes which are much quieter than choppers when they fly. The state of Florida has seven craft dedicated to this purpose and is thinking of expanding. These methods have been credited in Florida with the issuing of over 45000 tickets last year about 38000 of which were speeding related. The rest had to do with stopping vehicles that were driving erratically and drunk driving. There are currently 19 states that have similar programs running including California and New Jersey and that number is likely to expand in the future.

The Controversy Over Horses And The Drug Premerin

2009-12-31T05:00:00.000-08:00

Modern medicine can be a great thing. The treatments that the Pharmaceutical industry comes up with no doubt help millions of people to feel better and cope with their ailments. If they can afford to buy the drugs at least anyway. The way some drugs are made can be called peculiar to say the least and is in fact cruel to animal life. Take a drug called Premerin for example. Premerin is a hormone therapy drug that is used to treat post menopausal women to reduce the severity of hot flashes. It is estimated that there are about 55 million women in the U.S. who suffer with this condition. It is also prescribed to prevent or lessen the effects of osteoporosis which is the weakening or thinning of a woman's bones as she ages. The drug is made out of horse urine. That is in fact where the name of the drug comes from. Premerin is short for Pregnant Mares Urine. There are even Premerin farms in which the horses that are located there are used specifically for the purpose of making this drug. The company that manufactures the drug is called Wyeth and it rakes in billions a year marketing it. The problems with the drug are that Premerin can increase the likelihood of heart attacks, stroke, blood clots, and breast cancer. That's what it can do to humans. What it does to horses is after the period of collecting the urine ends (it usually lasts until 6 months after a mare gives birth) the horses are sent to the slaughter house because they cannot be easily or quickly re-impregnated. The foals that they give birth to are quickly fattened up and then sent to slaughter. There are some now who question the need for the continuing existence of Premerin farms and the use of horses in any way to make the drug in light of the fact that there exist many F.D.A. approved synthetic alternatives to Premerin that do not involve the use of any animals in order to manufacture such as Estradiol and Cenestin.

First Solar Powered Plane Takes Off

2009-12-27T23:36:00.000-08:00

There might be some hope yet for this planet if we can figure out a way to fly around without burning tons of jet fuel and there is a man in Switzerland working on the problem. Bertrand Piccard and his solar powered plane called the "Solar Impulse" took off for its first flight on December 3rd, 2009. Almost 106 years to the day of The Wright Brothers initial flight at Kitty Hawk Piccard Started up the four battery powered engines on his plane and sped down the runway and actually managed to achieve flight. It lasted for less than 30 seconds and did not rise higher off the ground than one meter but before you start laughing and dismiss it just remember that the Wright Brothers first flight lasted about half as long as that and didn't even travel the wingspan of a modern 747 jet plane. There are plans for more ambitious flights in the future. Piccard is setting his sights on making a 36 hour day night flight for next summer.

How Phone Companies Rake In Profits With Texting

2009-12-27T23:05:00.000-08:00

Be careful how much talking you do in this free country because you might talk yourself out of house and home if you prefer to do most of your talking on a cell instead of face to face. If you have a cell phone and can use it to send text messages and you are on a per-text plan with your phone company you may already have some idea of this, especially if you have got teens in the house. The profits that the phone companies make are huge. On some plans they can charge about 20 cents per text to either send or receive a message. The actual cost to them to send a text is less than half a penny. The reason its so cheap to the phone company is because the amount of information that is being transmitted is very small. To give you an example to compare it to a 1 minute phone call on a cell phone uses up the same amount of a network as 600 text messages. All the major carriers all do the same thing at the same time it seems including raising prices. When one company raises its prices the rest usually follow suit within weeks or months of each other. This has been referred to as lock step price increasing. Phone companies now charge about 4 times what they did less than 4 years ago. Unlimited plans are without a doubt the best way to go but you are going to take a beating on those as well considering how little it costs the phone company to provide you with the service.

Training The Afghan Army Will Be All Up Hill For U.S.

2009-12-23T03:23:00.000-08:00

If you are one of those people who believes President Obama when he says that the U.S. is going to get out of Afghanistan in a year and a half you must have to do some serious wishful thinking in order to get yourself there. Consider the fact that the whole plan for an early withdrawal depends on how quickly the U.S. can raise and train the new Afghan Army. The latest plan is to increase the number from the current level of about 95,000 to about 400,000 in little more than a year. Consider some of the problems however. The U.S. is attempting to attract new recruits by raising the pay of the average Afghan soldier to about $250 a month. Even with the increase that is about $50 less a month than the average Taliban fighter gets. Out of the current Afghan force only 1 out of every 9 members is capable of reading or writing. They are basically a force of illiterate soldiers and the new recruits that are being attracted are no better. A little less than 20% test positive for drugs. The training that these new recruits are getting now is being cut from 10 weeks to 8 weeks in order to accommodate the time line for leaving in 18 months by trying to train as many soldiers as possible as quickly as possible. There are also problems with retention. Usually these newly trained soldiers return to their villages after one year and never return back to the force. The drop out rate is about 20%. There is also a big problem with corruption in Afghanistan. Many Afghan soldiers and police are often accused of demanding bribes from villagers. It is also estimated that of the current 95,000 that make up the Afghan force that about 25% of those don't really exist. Local Afghan commanders often make up names of soldiers and place them on paper to be counted in order to meet recruitment goals for which they collect additional fees and salaries. President Hamid Karzai has said himself that it is going to cost about 10 Billion dollars a year to keep and maintain this Afghan force at this size for about 20 years. Due to the fact that the Afghan government has no money the bill is going to have to be footed by the United States. With all this it seems pretty hopeful to believe that the U.S. can extricate itself from Afghanistan in a mere 18 months.

Why The Yankees Won't Repeat As World Champions in 2010

2009-12-21T03:40:00.000-08:00

If you are a Yankee fan like I am you should savor the victory of a championship season as long as possible because it will likely not happen again next year. If you know anything about baseball you know that championships are won in the General managers office. The moves that a teams GM makes in the off season are the moves that count above all in determining who the champion will be the following season. I offer as the latest example of this the three great acquisitions that the Yankees made last off season when they spent the better part of a half billion dollars to acquire First baseman Mark Texiera, and pitchers C.C. Sabathia and A.J. Burnett who all proved to be pivotal to their championship season. This off season the Yankees are getting out maneuvered in every direction. The first big blow that I heard about to the Yankees chances of a repeat was when the Boston Red Sox acquired pitcher John Lacky from the L.A. Angels. If there is one thing that is true about Lacky it is that he owns the Yankees. He has almost never had any kind of trouble shutting them down when he pitches against them. If you team him up with another Yankees killer named Josh Beckett, who is currently the ace of the Red Sox staff, what you got in my opinion is a One -Two pitching punch that the Yankees are not going to know how to deal with either in the regular season or the post season next year.
That isn't even the worst of it either. The Philadelphia Phillies have acquired probably the biggest Yankee killer out there right now in Pitcher Roy "Doc" Halladay. Not only does Halladay own the Yankees now but he has owned them his entire career. If by some miracle the Yankees could get past the pitching combo of Beckett and Lacky from the red Sox and move into a World Series where they end up having to face the Phillies I can't really see what they would be able to do in a situation where they would have to face Halladay probably three times in a seven game series. All I can say is as a Yankee fan that I am going to enjoy the moment as long as I can because I really can't see how they repeat next year if they have to deal with either of these teams in their new configurations. All the Yankees have to counter with is Sabathia, who is a quality ace, A.J. Burnett, who is good but shaky especially in big situations, Pettitte who is still good but at the end of his career, and then Joba Chamberlain who has proved nothing as a starting pitcher. Both The Red Sox And the Phillies effectively dealt with and corrected the weaknesses that they had in dealing with the Yankees last year. Now both teams look like they are ready to knock the Yanks out of the box.

Predator Drones Hacked By Insurgents In Iraq and Afghanistan

2009-12-17T22:51:00.000-08:00

If you have ever wondered why The U.S. despite the fact that it has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to prosecute both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan still has not really got that much to show for it in terms of progress in either "theater" this next story might help shed some light on it. The insurgents in both countries have figured out a way to hack into the Predator Drones computer systems in order to evade their attacks and also monitor some U.S. military operations. The Predator is basically an unmanned slow flying attack plane. It is computer driven and it searches for and bombs selected locations using G.P.S. satellite systems to fix in on its targets. They usually cost about 4.5 million a copy and the newest generation will cost over 10 million each. The insurgents in both Iraq and Afghanistan have figured out that they can tap into the predators on board computer systems by using an inexpensive software program called Skygrabber which anyone can buy off the shelf for about $25. It takes advantage of an unprotected communications link that sends out video feeds that were not encrypted. It can keep the insurgents one step ahead of the "surprise attacks" and help them evade them or minimize their effects. The predator is considered the future of Air warfare but it has had problems and this latest one is not even the least of it. The biggest problem it has as a system is that it keeps crashing. It has been reported that over 1/3 of the predator drones that have been deployed have been lost due to system malfunctions which have led to crashes.

The Real Unemployment Rate

2009-12-17T02:36:00.000-08:00

So exactly how many people are unemployed these days in the United states? Well if you go by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (B.L.S.) they are currently putting the number officially at 10.2%. There is a little catch about this though. The catch has to do with the way they count people as "officially unemployed." For example if you are not currently looking for a job because you are totally discouraged by the current state of the job market then you are not counted as "officially unemployed" because you are technically not looking. The B.L.S. calls this not being "officially in the labor market." Another kind of accounting trick that it uses is to count under employed individuals as employed. For example, if you lost your full time job due to an industry down sizing and the only thing you could find in the meantime is part time work say working in a Home Depot a few hours a week the B.L.S. counts you as "Officially Employed" even though you would not be making enough money to live on. They only count people that they consider are "actively looking." If you do not currently have a job and you looked in a classified section this week for a job then you are considered "officially unemployed" because you have looked for a job but have not found one. If you take away all the accounting tricks so to speak and count all the people in the country who are really unemployed then the unemployment rate would not look like the 10.2% that the B.L.S. puts it at currently but more like 17.5% which is almost 1 in 5 people in the whole country. Oh by the way, 1 in 5 people was about the same rate of unemployment during the Great Depression. It was roughly about 75-80% employed and 20-25% unemployed at that time give or take.

Holiday Suicide Rate Increases Are Largely A Myth

2009-12-13T23:35:00.000-08:00

It has been believed by a large portion of the population for a long time. That the onset of the holiday season also brings with it an increase in the number of suicides that occur in the general population. That people's feelings of loneliness and despair are exacerbated by the holiday cheer and this leads to greater levels of depression. This was actually studied as a phenomenon decades ago and it was found to be largely untrue. That if anything the holiday season actually served to dampen down the number of suicides and serves to lower the numbers from their more normal levels. The study was undertaken by The National Center for Health in the 1970's and what it discovered was that on a typical day there were 34 suicides reported for every 1 million people in the U.S. population. For the holiday of Thanksgiving that number dropped to 26 suicides per 1 million. For Christmas it was at 30 per 1 million. It did however record an increase for New Year's Day. For that holiday the number would rise to 41 per 1 million. Researchers attributed this to the fact that New Year's day signified the end of the holiday season and that would bring on depressed feelings among some in the general population and lead to that kind of a spike. New Year's day aside however the rest of the holiday season actually does serve to bring on feelings of hope and optimism and good cheer and does help a good many people to perk up and chase away the blues at least for as long as the holiday season goes on.

First Decade Of The Century The Warmest Ever Recorded

2009-12-09T04:29:00.000-08:00

Is it getting warmer in here or is it just me? Well according to the United Nation's weather Agency the first decade of this century is going to go down as the warmest ever since records began being kept starting in 1850. They also state that by the end of the century we are likely at this pace to increase the temperature on this planet by 2 degrees. There have been temperature spikes all over the world. This year Alaska experienced it's 2nd warmest July on record, New York City just experienced it's 5th warmest Month of November on record and Australia it's 3rd warmest year ever. Scientists also warn that the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are reaching new highs as well. In 2010 they expect to record a new CO2 high of 390 Parts per million. Fifty years ago the level was recorded at 315 ppm. This year on it's own is the 5th warmest year ever recorded so far. According to NASA the 5 warmest years ever recorded are in order: 2005, 1998, 2007, 2006, 2009.

"Lucy In The Sky" Girl Died This Year

2009-12-06T05:38:00.000-08:00

If you are a Beatles fan or even if you are not you may be familiar with it. "Lucy in The Sky With Diamonds" is a song that appears on the Beatles most renowned album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts club band." It came out in 1967 at the height of the Psychedelic rock craze of the late 1960's. The inspiration for the song came from a 3 year old girl named Lucy Vodden who was a friend of John's young son Julian at school. If you don't know the story it goes like this: Julian came home from school one day with a painting he had done and was eager to show it to his father. John looked at it and said "It's beautiful Julian, what do you call it?" Then Julian said "It's a picture of my friend Lucy from school flying through the sky with diamonds on." John immediately got sparked with an idea and went off and wrote the song. The inspiration for the song has been quite happy over the decades to remain out of the spotlight about it and has kept a low profile and never really sought any attention. Her name was Lucy O'Donnell until 1996 when she married her childhood sweetheart and became Lucy Vodden. She only admitted to being the inspiration for the song in a BBC interview in 2007 for the first time. She also expressed a little bit of an embarrassment about the song and the drug references that are always attached to it. The song was banned on British radio when it came out because the BBC claimed it was about LSD. The Beatles denied this at first but Paul McCartney in 2004 basically admitted that the drug reference was "...Pretty obvious." Lucy Vodden for the last several years of her life had been living with the disease known as Lupus. It is a tissue disease that attacks the body's cells and causes inflammation and can often be debilitating and painful during particularly severe flare ups. In late September while on vacation with her husband she developed a complicating infection and was rushed to the hospital. She died on September 22, 2009 at the age of 46. Julian Lennon has announced that he will release a song in December with all the proceeds going to support the work of the Lupus Foundation.

Poker And The Presidents

2009-12-02T23:29:00.000-08:00

There are some who have noticed a similarity between the game of poker and the presidency. That both of these "games" involve high stakes in some cases, a little bit of luck, the ability to successfully bluff your opponent, having the confidence to double down when you feel you have the advantage, knowing when to hold em and knowing when to fold em, and finally when you have done all that you can to just let the chips fall where they may. Some of our nations Commander's in Chief have been known to be better at the game than others. President Obama is known to engage in a hand of poker from time to time and did so often it is reported when he was in the Senate with many of his fellow Senators. He has sometimes used it as a way of breaking the ice with new colleagues and people he meets. Those who have engaged in the game with him state that he loves to play but just for fun. He is averse to playing for high stakes or making very large wagers and just likes to use the game as a way to relax with some friends and extend his political contacts and play for small pots so that there is no real pressure. Some other former presidents who fall into this category are Presidents Teddy Roosevelt, F.D.R., and Harry Truman. There are some former presidents who have had more of an interest in the high stakes nature of the game and were willing to take some chances to make some real money. President Eisenhower got interested in the game early in life and was already a high stakes poker player by the time he got to West Point as a young cadet. He was successful enough at it that he won himself enough money to buy his girlfriend Mamie Dowd an engagement ring when they were courting and paid for all of his uniforms at the academy. The best presidential poker player by far however was Richard Nixon. While in the Navy during World War 2 Nixon actually won a total of over $8000. It was enough money for him to finance his first run for Congress after he left the service, which he won.

Smart Bullets Coming Soon To An Army Near You

2009-11-27T03:35:00.000-08:00

There is nothing like having an advantage over an enemy in war and smart bullets may be the ultimate advantage. The military is working on gaining such an edge with new technologies that will give future armies the ability to fight with smart bullets. Also known as EXACTO (Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordinance) They are bullets that when fired will be able to sense air currents and zero in on moving targets by adjusting their positions in mid flight to stay on course to hit a target. Some types will be laser guided. What this will mean is that soldiers will be able to fire their weapons without having to visually sight their targets before firing. They will be able to stay physically out of harms way and shoot from around corners and from behind hills and buildings and the smart bullets will still be able to hit their targets. The technology is not unlike the current Predator drones that the military is utilizing now in Afghanistan which are completely computer driven and unmanned and are assigned a target and then use GPS technology to fly to and zero in on a target and strike it. Some of these technologies have small computers inside which are able to send and receive data to constantly update their information especially if they are fired at moving targets and need to adjust in order to hit them. Some of the research is being conducted at the University of Florida in Gainesville and is being funded by Military contractor Lockheed Martin.

Search For Original Darwin Notebook Goes On

2009-11-24T05:44:00.000-08:00

November 24th, 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of the release of Charles Robert Darwin's controversial book about evolution "On The Origin Of Species." It first appeared on this date in 1859 and has been at the center of a controversy about creationism and evolution ever since. When Darwin first set out as a young man of 22 on his trip to the Galapagos Islands on board the H.M.S. Beagle in 1831 he took with him and ended up filling up a total of 15 notebooks worth of information and observations that he made while there about the wildlife forms in nature that he observed. What he wrote in these books changed the way human beings viewed the world. All 15 books were maintained at Darwin' s home named Down House in a section of southern England known as Kent. In the 1960's the books which were all on display there were microfilmed. By the early 1980's someone had noticed that one of the books about The Galapagos Islands was missing. It is suspected that someone stole it. The maintainers of Down House would not mind having it back and have been asking the public for some help in finding it. They say the book is notebook sized, square, bound in a red leather cover, and has a gold clasp. On the cover in Darwin's own handwriting are the words Galapagos and Lima.

Senator Robert Byrd Nears 57th Year In Congress

2009-11-19T05:27:00.000-08:00

We all know that nothing lasts forever but West Virginia Democratic Senator Robert Byrd is sure making a real run at trying to dis-prove it. On November 18th, 2009 he served his 20,744th day in Congress which broke the record for longest service. He has now attended over 18,500 Senate roll calls. Has been elected to the Senate 9 times since 1958 and that was after he had served 6 years in the House Of Representatives beginning in 1953. He has now served under 11 presidents. There have been only 44 to date. Born on November 20, 1917 with the original name of Cornelius Calvin Sale Jr. His mother died one year later a victim of the Flu Pandemic of 1918. He was handed over as a child to an aunt and uncle who renamed him Robert Carlyle Byrd and raised him. He has been a democrat all his life but that is not to say that he has been liberal all that time, far from it. He especially seemed conflicted about the issue of race at times in his life. He joined the KKK in 1942 at the age of 24 and held two titles. One was Klegle, which is a recruiter, and the other was as an Exalted Cyclops which was a title he was elected to by the other members. A fierce southern racist by this time he wrote in 1944 "...I shall never fight in the armed forces with a negro by my side..." during World War Two. He quit the KKK in 1952 citing a dis-interest in the cause just before his election to the House for the first time. In 1965 he voted against the Voting Rights Act (which banned discriminatory practices against blacks with regard to voting) but voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (which banned discriminatory practices with regard to housing among other things based on race, religion, etc.) He supported The War In Vietnam in the 1960's but opposed the War In Iraq in 2003. Needless to say his health in recent years has been a bit concerning. Frequent trips to the hospital (the latest in May 2009 for what was described as "An Infection") have caused many to wonder about his fitness for service. He has at times appeared sluggish and confused on the floor of the Senate and has often been brought to the Senate floor in a wheelchair so that he could attend votes. On November 20, 2009 he will turn 92. On January 3, 2010 he is set to complete his 57th consecutive year of service.

Postscript -- Robert Byrd Died on June 28th, 2010 at age 92.

The Rise And Fall Of The Berlin Wall

2009-11-09T13:53:00.000-08:00

On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall the event is being marked everywhere it seems. It was a watershed moment which was overdue. The first signs of the wall were seen on August 15th, 1961. It was at first a simple barbed wire fence that was erected on the orders of Soviet General Secretary Nikita Kruschev as a response to the increasing number of East Germans who were fleeing to West Germany and causing embarrassment to the Soviets internationally. During the construction anything that was in the path of the wall was removed including houses, A church, and a cemetery. Over the years the wall grew to become a double wall actually. It was two parallel walls that ran side by side with a "no mans land" or "Death Zone" in between them. The final length of the wall was 155 kilometers which is about 100 miles. The space in between the two walls was fitted with all kinds of traps designed to prevent anyone from successfully making it across. The ground was fitted with spike strips that would pierce a persons feet or shoes if he walked or ran on them. This area was nicknamed "Stalin's Lawn." The dirt in the "Death Zone" was constantly raked and kept soft in order that a person's footprints would be left behind if anyone had been there. The Wall itself had alarm systems that would quickly alert the armed guards in their watchtowers of anyone trying to get across. There were 186 total watchtowers that had 6 guards each posted. The guards had orders to shoot to kill. There were even barriers to prevent motor vehicles from getting through. At certain points the zone was guarded by dogs and minefields that were triggered by trip wires that would also in certain sections set off auto-fire devices or "spring guns" that would shoot out shrapnel in all directions. The wall itself had doors every so many feet that the guards used to inspect the wall both from the inside and outside for maintenance purposes. These doors each had two separate locks that required two separate keys from two different guards in order to open them. It is estimated that several hundred individuals lost their lives between 1961 and 1989 trying to breech the wall. Over 10,000 were caught and prosecuted by the East Germans for attempting to flee. The wall was finally taken down by a protest that grew out of control on November 9th, 1989. Protesters began hacking at the wall with sledge hammers and picks and knocking pieces of the wall off. Almost immediately President Ronald Reagan was given the bulk of the credit for causing this to happen. He gave a somewhat famous speech in 1987 in which he urged then Soviet General Secretary Mikail Gorbachev to "...Tear Down This Wall." While he is rightly deserving of some of the credit he is not however deserving of all of it. More credit in fact belongs to Gorbachev who deliberately did nothing to squelch the rising protest which led to the collapse of the wall. He could have easily stopped it but chose not to. The end of the Berlin Wall opened up the possibility for East Germany and West Germany to be united again as one country. That is exactly what happened almost one year later on October 3rd, 1990.

Winningest Teams In Sports History

2009-11-06T23:40:00.000-08:00

In sports it is as Vince Lombardi once said: "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." With the Yankees winning their latest title the other day it got me to wondering just who are the most successful teams in the history of their own sports. As it turns out the list contains the teams that you would figure it would contain. As far as baseball goes The Yankees are by far at the top of the list. With their win against the Phillies they captured their 27th title in the history of the team on November 4th, 2009. They are now officially 27 for 40 in terms of the number of World Series wins relative to the total number of Appearances in the fall classic. They have won the most by far but they have lost the most by far as well with 13 total World Series defeats. An interesting thing to note here is that by the time The Yankees won their first World Series in 1923 The Boston Red Sox had already won 5 including the first one in 1903.
In Hockey for the most part The Montreal Canadiens have been to their sport what the Yankees are to baseball but not so much lately. The Canadiens have won a total of 24 titles in 34 appearances between the years of 1916 to 1993. They have won nothing since.
Basketball has what turns out to be the most competitive rivalry going in sports. It is between the Boston Celtics and the L.A. Lakers respectively. The Celtics have won a total of 17 NBA titles in 20 appearances in the finals over the years. The Lakers, with their win last year raised their total to 15 titles in 28 appearances. With both teams still being very competitive this one is still going strong so stay tuned.
As far as Football goes it's a little complicated. If you go by the total number of Super Bowl wins then it would be The Pittsburgh Steelers with 6 including the one they won this year. If you go by the total number of NFL titles including before the Super Bowl existed then it would be The Green Bay Packers with 12 total titles. They have won 9 NFL titles and 3 Super Bowls. They have however only won once since 1967.

USAF Eyes Pilot less Planes For Future Dogfights

2009-11-02T14:54:00.000-08:00

The U. S. Air Force fighter pilot might be going the way of the dinosaur in the near future due to the technological advancements that keep coming along. It has been obvious for a long time now that technology can in fact fly a jet fighter in a superior way to a human and do it without the hindrances and drawbacks that humans bring to any endeavour they embark upon. Probably the biggest and most limiting drawback has been that fighter pilots are not capable of tolerating the massive G - forces (Gravity forces) that are experienced while flying high performance fighter planes and this causes them to lose control of an aircraft and often leads to crashes. Human fighter pilots can usually tolerate about 5 G' s or so depending on the individual provided that they are wearing a G- Suit which is an outfit that is worn over their uniform that is designed to keep them from passing out and losing control of an aircraft in mid flight due to excessive exposure to G - forces. Sometimes G-forces during flight can exceed 9 G's. Without human pilots the jet fighters will be able to fly much faster and maneuver much more sharply in potential future dog fights with any enemy. The Pentagon is therefore looking to get the pilots out of the picture totally and replace them with computers that will not be susceptible to this issue. They are called U.A.V.'s (Unmanned Areal Vehicles) and they are the future of the Air Force. By using technologies like Satellite links and G.P.S. (Global Positioning Systems) unmanned aircraft will be able to fly anywhere in the world without the involvement of humans in the process. They will also be able to identify enemy targets and launch attacks without any people being directly involved as well. It may become total Robo-warfare. Probably the best known of these systems already exists and is in service. It is called Global Hawk. It is a pilot less aircraft, It does not even have windows on the front of the plane, it has a wingspan of about 120 feet, and flies totally on its own. Once all the data is entered into its on board computer systems it is sent off on its way to complete a mission it has been assigned. It is currently serving in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The airline industry in the civilian sector has had this technology available to it for a while now. It is in fact capable of replacing airline pilots with this kind of system. Planes can now be flown without pilots by using their auto pilot features. They could fire all of their human pilots and replace them with this technology. They have not done so because the general public has expressed a fear and a discomfort with the idea of flying in pilot less planes. The ability however is there to do it and safely too.

Most Stressful Cities In The U.S.A.

2009-10-26T23:41:00.000-07:00

Everyone knows that modern life involves exposure to tons and tons of stress every day and from every direction it seems. Depending on where you live you may be suffering through more of it than you need to. A list has just appeared of the 10 most stressful cities in the United States to live in. The list was compiled by Forbes magazine and it considered such things as unemployment rates, loss of property values, population density, air quality, and even the price of gas. Here they are from one to ten:

1. Chicago

2. New York

3. Detroit

4. Los Angeles

5. San Francisco

6. San Diego

7. Cleveland

8. Salt Lake City

9. Providence, R.I.

10. Philadelphia

Sudan Woman On Trial For Wearing Pants

2009-10-14T04:10:00.000-07:00

If you think the U.S. is getting more and more uptight and individual liberties are under attack more than ever you should get a load of what goes on in places like The Sudan In Africa. A 27 year old woman was arrested last July and charged with public indecency for wearing pants in a club. Her name is Ludna Hussein and when she was arrested she was charged with violating article 152 of the Sudanese criminal code of 1991 which says that no woman is allowed to wear "...clothing causing harassment to public sentiment..." for which the maximum penalty is 40 lashes and the loss of her reputation. The Sudan is a predominantly Muslim country and it is possible there for any man to simply accuse any woman in public of violating public decency standards by doing something like just wearing pants, or having her wrists exposed or her head exposed. Women wearing pants is very frowned upon there evidently and is punishable by law. During her trial her lawyers were not allowed to present any evidence or fight the case and the judge favored with the police in the matter and convicted her. He had the decency however to spare her from the 40 lashes at least. Hussein has filed an appeal in the case. As a reaction to the trial there has begun the first signs of something of a women's movement in Sudan to get this law overturned and declared unconstitutional.

Beatles Set To Become Biggest Selling Band Of Last Ten Years

2009-09-24T03:46:00.000-07:00

Well we all knew that The Beatles were huge but who ever expected that they would still be the biggest selling band around even 40 years after they broke up. They are set up to do just that. Since the year 2000 only one act (Eminem) has sold more music than the Fab Four and most music industry people predict that by this Christmas they will over take him. As of early September Eminem has sold about 32 million CD's since the turn of the century and the Beatles are close behind at about 28.2 million. On September 9th the Beatles record label EMI released brand new remastered versions of 14 of the bands best albums which is expected to increase sales and spark new interest in the band. On top of that you had on the same day the release of the "Beatles: Rock Band" interactive video game. With the game you can pick your favorite instrument and rock on with the Fabs to 45 of their best songs spanning the length of their entire career. Most music experts figure that by the end of the year they will be the biggest selling band of the last ten years. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

"Tonight Show" Ratings Falling Post Leno

2009-09-11T13:34:00.000-07:00

There was a time when "The Tonight Show" and its ratings were number one in late night but not so much anymore. Since Conan O'Brien took over the late night hosting gig on the show at the end of May it has lost almost 2 million viewers. This of course is great news for David letterman who has been out stripping "The Tonight Show" in the ratings for a while now. As of the week ending on September 4th "Late Night" has garnered a larger audience for the 9th week in a row. It averaged 3.42 million viewers that week compared to the 2.89 That "The Tonight Show" got. While Conan O'Brien has managed to increase the number of younger viewers who watch the show (ratings are up about 26% among 18-24 year old's) the overall number of viewers keeps dropping. The biggest winner in all this may be ABC's "Nightline" which manages to acquire a larger audience than both "The Tonight Show" and "Latenight" on a regular basis and has moved into the number one spot. Some viewers have expressed that they find Conan O'Brien a little too high strung and his comedy a little too low brow as compared to Jay Leno.

Cash For Clunkers A Boom For Foreign Cars

2009-08-29T19:24:00.000-07:00

The "Cash for Clunkers" program is now over. The government spent almost all of the 3 billion dollars it had allotted for the program and it seems that the people who benefited the most were foreign car makers. As it turned out the American public ran to the dealerships to trade in their American cars and exchange them for foreign ones. The list of the top five cars that were traded in during the program were: 1. Ford Explorer 4WD, 2. Ford F-150, 3. Jeep Grand Cherokee, 4. Ford Explorer 2WD, 5. Dodge Caravan.
The list of the top 5 cars that were purchased during the campaign are: 1. Toyota Corolla, 2. Honda Civic, 3. Toyota Camry, 4. Ford Focus, 5. Hyundai Elantra. Basically the American public threw out its American "clunkers" and replaced them with brand new foreign cars that were in most cases far more fuel efficient and more reliable overall.

U.S. Traffic Deaths Set To Hit Modern Low This Year

2009-08-27T11:53:00.000-07:00

It seems that in The United States fewer and fewer people are dying in auto accidents this year. The country is on pace to have the lowest casualty total since 1961 in fact. In the first three months of 2009 the total number of motorists who had died in auto accidents was 7689. If that rate continues it would put the years total at 30,756. To give you an idea of how low that is in 2007 the total number was 37,621. In 2008 this figure was even lower than that by almost 10%. The decline has been attributed in large part to the recession. There is less economic activity going on and therefore fewer cars on the roads and therefore fewer accidents and fewer casualties. Another factor adding to the reduced volume of traffic has been the rising price of gas which has forced many motorists to due less driving simply as an economic necessity.

Smoking On The Rise Worldwide But Down In The West

2009-07-21T20:01:00.000-07:00

There is good news and bad news as far as smoking goes these days. The good news is that smoking in the U.S. is at its lowest rate since records have been kept to track it as a statistic. It's currently at about 24%. The trend is the same in other western countries as well and it is mostly due to the ever rising taxes that western governments are placing on cigarettes in order to make the habit less and less affordable to the masses in an attempt to get people to give it up. The latest example of this came from President Obama who earlier in the year signed a law raising the federal cigarette tax on a pack of smokes from 32 cents to $1. The bad news is that smoking in all other parts of the world is rising sharply. It has been estimated that tobacco companies worldwide produce over 5 trillion cigarettes each year. That is over 800 cigarettes for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Here now is a list of the world's top ten countries for smokers and the percentages of their populations that currently engage in the habit: 1. Russia 48.5%. 2. Britain 35.7%. 3. Turkey 35.5%. 4. China 31.8%. 5. France 31.7%. 6. Germany 31.6%. 7. Japan 29.4%. 8. Malaysia 28.8%. 9. Ireland 26.3% 10. Italy 26.1%. (The U.S. ranked 15th on the list at 23.9%) These rankings come from the World Health Organization.

Michael Jackson Poised To Top Highest Earning Dead Celebrity List

2009-06-30T09:29:00.000-07:00

Most people struggle in life to make enough money to live on but if you are a successful celebrity you know nothing of such struggles and if you are a dead celebrity the same holds true. Most observers agree that with Michael Jackson's passing an economic window of opportunity will open for his estate to grow over time exponentially. Michael Jackson was a big spender. Anyone who saw the Special hosted by Martin Bashir (who now is a co-host on Nightline) where in which he went on a shopping spree with the "King of Pop" and watched him drop over 6 million dollars in less than an hour on items like an oversized chess board game and alike can easily understand why he was estimated to be about 500 million dollars in debt. Jackson and his out of control spending habits were the biggest reason for that. Now that he is not around to spend money like crazy his estate will be in a position to just take in money and most observers agree that his estate's debt can likely be wiped out in less than ten years and function in the black every year after that. It is believed that he will someday take over the top spot on the list of highest earning dead celebrities and surpass people like John Lennon and Elvis who have been dead and earning millions for years. The current list of the top ten celebrity money earners goes like this according to the Forbes list: 1. Kurt Cobain - 50 million per year. -- 2. Elvis Presley - 42 million. 3. Charles Schulz (creator of "Peanuts" comic strip) - 35 million. 4. John Lennon - 24 million. 5. Albert Einstein - 20 million. 6. Andy Warhol - 19 million. 7. Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) - 10 million. 8. Ray Charles - 10 million. 9. Marilyn Monroe - 8 million. 10. Johnny Cash - 8 million. Most of this revenue is due to licencing agreements, book and record sales.

Russian Birth Rates In Steep Decline

2009-06-22T12:36:00.000-07:00

The Russian government in addition to the many other problems it has been having to deal with over the years has a new one that recently has come to light. The birth rates are falling fast and that kind of a situation just won't do for a superpower wannabe. The current population of Russia is just over 142,000,000 people. Compare that to the 305,000,000 that make up the United States. There are estimates that by the year 2050 at the current rate of decline that the population of Russia may fall below 110,000,000. The biggest reason most experts believe has to do with Russian men and the fact that they just do not take care of themselves very well. Alchoholism in Russia is rampant and in addition to that Russian men have begun to take on the habit of smoking in larger numbers than ever. The result of this is not only lower birth rates but the average life expectancy of a Russian male now is only 58 years. Compare that to the 76 that you can expect if you are an American male or Western European male. The Russian government has been so alarmed by the trend that they have begun offering couples who marry and have more than one child cash rewards for doing so in order to promote large families and higher birth rates. If you start a family and you have more than one child you can receive a cash reward of about $1,150. That is about what the average Russian earns in a month give or take.

The Worlds Nations Spent Record Amount On Arms in 08

2009-06-17T05:03:00.000-07:00

You would think that with the worldwide economic downturn it would leave the worlds most powerful nations in a bind in terms of increasing their spending on arms but the opposite is in fact the case. In 2008 the world's nations spent a total of 1.46 trillion dollars on weapons which is an all time high. At the top of the list of course by far is the United States. The U.S. spent a total of 607 billion dollars last year on war related spending. A distant second on the list was China at 85 billion. Third was France at 65.7 billion. Fourth the U.K. at 65.3 billion. Russia was Fifth at 58.6 billion. Germany sixth at 46.8 billion. Japan seventh at 46.3 billion. Eighth was Italy at 40.6 billion. Ninth Saudi Arabia at 38.2 billion. Last on the top ten list was India at 30 billion.

A-Rod Tell All Book Not Selling

2009-06-12T22:24:00.000-07:00

Anybody who follows baseball can tell you that Alex Rodriguez is the king of controversy. It does not seem to be helping Selena Roberts out very much nor the publishers of her tell all book on the Yankee slugger. The book is called "A-Rod: The Many Lives Of Alex Rodriguez" and was released in early May to coincide with the return of the Yankee Third baseman to his team following an early season injury. 150,000 copies of the book were published in advance in anticipation that there would be a demand for it. The first week it was out the book sold about 11,000 copies which was good enough to place it at number 9 on the New York times best seller list for that week. Since then the book has not sold very well at all. By the end of May it had only sold a total of 16,000 copies.

British Accents Selling More Products On T.V.

2009-05-30T04:37:00.000-07:00

There are a bunch of them on the airwaves right now already. People with British accents selling things on television and radio all day and night. There is a woman with a british accent selling a diet pill called Banital, for example. There is another one hocking for the FHM mortgage company. The U.S. window factory has a guy talking in a really bad British accent trying to get you to buy windows and patio doors. There is a commercial for Glad trash bags running with an authoratative British voice over. Probably the best and most well known of them is a guy called Anthony Sullivan who can be seen on the air selling all kinds of things from mops to vacuum cleaners and light bulbs that dont break when you drop them. He is the guy who is always offering to double the offer if you just pay shipping and handling. You might be wondering like i was why it is that half the people on t.v. all of a sudden who are trying to sell you things have British accents. Well as it turns out some advertising company did some research and it discovered that most Americans tended to trust people with British accents more than they trust anyone else. They tended to believe that they were more intelligent and less likely to be deceptive than their fellow Americans. So the advertisers of the world not ever being willing to miss a trick are now employing British accented people to sell their wares on t.v. more and more in order to capitalize on this in order to increase their sales in the midst of the current economic recession.