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The place where the world comes together in honesty and mirth.
Windmills Tilted, Scared Cows Butchered, Lies Skewered on the Lance of Reality ... or something to that effect.


Friday, April 14, 2017

The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of
Carolina Naturally
Today also happens to be International Moment of Laughter Day ...!
 
Carolina Naturally is read in 210 countries around the world daily.   
   
Aw, Nuts ... !
Today is - National Pecan Day 

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Today in History

1471 The Earl of Warwick, who fought on both sides in the War of the Roses, is killed at the Battle of Barnet with the defeat of the Lancastrians.
1543 Bartolome Ferrelo returns to Spain after discovering a large bay in the New World (San Francisco).
1775 The first abolitionist society in United States is organized in Philadelphia.
1793 A royalist rebellion in Santo Domingo is crushed by French republican troops.
1828 The first edition of Noah Webster’s dictionary is published.
1860 The first Pony Express rider arrives in San Francisco with mail originating in St. Joseph, Missouri.
1865
Five days after General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, President Abraham Lincoln is shot at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln succumbs to his wounds the following day.
1894 Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope is shown to the public for the first time.
1900 The World Exposition opens in Paris.
1912 The passenger liner Titanic–deemed unsinkable–strikes an iceberg on her maiden voyage and begins to sink. The ship will go under the next day with a loss of 1,500 lives.
1931 King Alfonso XIII of Spain is overthrown.
1945 American B-29 bombers damage the Imperial Palace during firebombing raid over Tokyo.
1953 The Viet Minh invade Laos with 40,00 troops in their war against French colonial forces.
1959 The Taft Memorial Bell Tower is dedicated in Washington, D.C.
1961 The first live broadcast is televised from the Soviet Union.
1969 The first major league baseball game in Montreal, Canada is played.
1981 America’s first space shuttle, Columbia, returns to Earth.

Malala Yousafzai made an honorary Canadian citizen

Ikigai

A Reason for Being ... and Secret to Living to 100 Years of Age?
What is the reason that you get up in the morning?That question may be the answer to the age old quest of living longer, according to this interesting article by Neil Pasricha  in the Toronto Star:
A National Geographic study shows that some of the happiest and longest living people in the world are from Okinawa, Japan. Their average lifespan is seven years longer than ours in North America. They have more 100-year-olds than anywhere else in the world. And you know what they call retirement?
They don’t.
They don’t even have a word for retirement. Literally nothing in their language describes the concept of stopping work completely.
Instead, they have a word called ikigai (pronounced like “icky guy”), which roughly translates to “the reason you get out of bed in the morning.” It’s the thing that drives you the most.
Dan Buettner touched on this in his 2009 TED talk about people who live to be 100 year old or even older:
"They have vocabulary for sense of purporse, ikigai ... You know the two most dangerous years in your life are the year you're born, because of infant mortality, and the year you retire. These people know their sense of purpose, and they activate in their life, that's worth about seven years of extra life expectancy."
So, what is your ikigai?

A 1957 Guide to San Francisco

San Francisco has a rich history, and has been famous for many things: the Gold Rush, the 1906 earthquake, and the 1967 "Summer of Love" which is being celebrated this year for its 50th anniversary. Now the city is famous for its unaffordable housing costs. However, to reveal San Francisco's longest-running claim to fame, we go back ten years before the hippie invasion, to 1957, when Herb Caen’s Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area was published. The tourist guide has plenty to say about the city and recommendations for what to do when you visit.
…Caen invites tourists to spend an evening at Finocchios, “the far-famed or ill-famed place—depending on your point of view—where ‘female impersonators’ go through their paces, alarmingly disguised in garish wigs, overflowing gowns, and comic-opera false bosoms, all designed to make your visiting maiden aunt from Anamosa, Ia., gasp in delighted disbelief (‘You mean they’re actually men?’). Some of the talent is quite good, and the productions show more imagination than you might expect. Finocchio, incidentally, means ‘fairy’ in Italian.”
And with that, Herb Caen introduces his readers to San Francisco’s nascent LGBTQ community, which, far more than the hippies, would come to define their city. After all, the struggle for civil rights has always been more compelling than the mere desire to let one’s freak flag fly, however much fun that might be.
Read the entire article at Collectors Weekly.

An Unplanned Meltdown at America’s First Nuclear Power Reactor

In 1951, the U.S. government built the country's first breeder reactor, an experiment to show the country that nuclear power could be used for a peaceful purpose- generating electricity. And it worked, as far as generating power goes, but it was an experiment. As such, the scientists who operated Experimental Breeder Reactor No. 1 in Idaho fiddled with the equipment in 1955 to figure out why the reactor did not respond to coolant flow "in the most stable way." That led to a meltdown of the nuclear core, but the effects were not what we'd expect today after seeing all those movies. Engineer Ray Haroldsen was in his office, and did not know about the meltdown until a technician told him.   
Since the reactor was nearing the end of its useful life, the scientists decided to conduct an experiment that was riskier than they’d normally have tolerated. They decided to turn the coolant off while slowly turning the power up, in the hopes of determining what made the reactor act the way it did. They knew there was a risk the core could be destroyed, but they planned to proceed slowly and back off at the first sign of danger.
The experiment ended more quickly than they thought it would. The power produced by the reactor started rising and rapidly went off the scales. Haroldsen’s boss yelled to the technician to shut the reactor down.
Haroldsen tells the story of what happened that day, and the fallout (so to speak), in a video at Atlas Obscura. 

27 Facts about Clowns


Time for some clowning around! John Green is back with another episode of the mental_floss List Show! This one addresses our constant need for comic relief, which led to an infestation of clowns. He has the history of clowns, the different kinds of clowns, and how familiar clown tropes were developed. Now if he can just explain why clowns are so terrifying, we'd all be smarter.

2,000 People Reveal The Most Embarrassing Things They've Done During Sex

people reveal the most embarrassing sex moments

Rest Easy, Guys

Hackers Can Guess Your Cell Phone Security PIN Just by Watching the Phone's Tilt As You Type

Think your cell phone's security PIN is secure? Here's a new worry: hackers can guess your mobile phone's security PIN with astonishing accuracy just by watching how the phone tilts when you type them in.
"Most smart phones, tablets, and other wearables are now equipped with a multitude of sensors, from the well-known GPS, camera and microphone to instruments such as the gyroscope, proximity, NFC, and rotation sensors and accelerometer," Maryam Mehrnezhad of Newcastle University said, "But because mobile apps and websites don’t need to ask permission to access most of them, malicious programs can covertly ‘listen in’ on your sensor data and use it to discover a wide range of sensitive information about you such as phone call timing, physical activities and even your touch actions, PINs and passwords."
By analyzing the movement and tilt of the phone using data collected by the phone's various internal sensors, the security team was able to crack the four-digit PIN with an astounding 70% accuracy on the first guess, and 100% by the fifth.

Taxpayers Paying Hundreds of Millions for Unneeded and Inferior Charter Schools

How Big Pharma's Profit Machine Has Evolved

United Incident Shows Why We Need To Re-Regulate Corporations

United Incident Shows Why We Need To Re-Regulate Corporations

First Muslim woman judge in US found dead in Hudson River

The body of the first ever Muslim woman judge in the United States washed ashore Wednesday on the Manhattan side of the Hudson River, the New York Post reports.

NC wingnut: Abraham Lincoln was a ‘tyrant’ like Hitler for ending slavery

A North Carolina wingnut said in a Facebook post that Abraham Lincoln was a “tyrant” as bad as German dictator Adolf Hitler.
*** 
We, the sane people of NC wish to express our apologies for this mentally deficient dipshit - the warped and diseased fantasy-world he exists in is rapidly disappearing ... just not rapidly enough.

Astronomers piece together first image of black hole

US sued over plan to kill native cougars and bears in Colorado

US government sued over 'outrageous' plan to kill native cougars and bears in Colorado

Houdini Dog Escapes Hospital

His name is General, and he's a Great Pyrenees. He escaped from the Aquia-Garrisonville Animal Hospital in Stafford, Virginia, Monday morning by opening the latch to his kennel and then three other doors to get outside! His movements were caught on surveillance cameras.
It's a good thing General wasn't in need of medical care; he was being boarded while his family was out of town. The dog was found later that day in a yard near the animal hospital. His owner, Travis Campbell, was surprised at the scope of the caper, but knew General was a smart dog.

Animal Pictures