Welcome to ...

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, September 23, 2011

Who recession hurt the most

Gen X, Gen Y, and Boomers make compelling cases that each suffered the most.  
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U.S. youth joblessness

Employment among 16- to 29-year-old Americans plummets to levels not seen since World War II.
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Health care career options

You don't need to enroll in medical school for any of these seven positions.  
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Pollution From Cars Can Trigger a Heart Attack

smog and heart attack photo  
Photo: Simone Ramella / cc
While the sight of a hazy, smog filled cloud looming over the cityscape is certainly enough to break the heart of any would-be outdoorsman, it turns out that breathing in that pollution just might do so -- quite literally. According to a recently published study from the British Medical Journal, the inhalation of vehicle emissions can actually increase the likelihood of a heart attack, even up to six hours after exposure.

Particles faster than light

New findings from the world’s largest physics lab may call into question Einstein’s trusted theory.
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The True Story Of Captain Kidd

William Kidd (c. 1645-1701) was a Scottish sailor remembered for his trial and execution for piracy after returning from a voyage to the Indian Ocean. Some modern historians deem his piratical reputation unjust, as there is evidence that Kidd acted only as a privateer.

Kidd's fame springs largely from the sensational circumstances of his questioning before the English Parliament and the ensuing trial. His actual depredations on the high seas, whether piratical or not, were both less destructive and less lucrative than those of many other contemporary pirates and privateers.

How H.G. Wells' World Became Real

H.G> Wells
Explore how late-19th- and early-20th-century fiction, as envisioned by Wells, became 21st-century reality.

Words That Are Difficult To Translate Into English

Mamihlapinatapai is Yagan, an indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago off the southernmost tip of the South American mainland, across the Strait of Magellan. The word is difficult to translate into English. Its meaning is 'a wordless, yet meaningful look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that they both desire but which neither one wants to start.'

Another word is kyoikumama. It's Japanese and means 'a mother who relentlessly pushes her children toward academic achievement.' Here are some words that are almost impossible to translate into English.

It's a Blond World

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Culinary DeLites

Make perfect mac 'n' cheese

Along with great ingredients, how you cook your pasta is the key to one famous recipe.
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Ziggy

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Manage your life

Dialing for better deals

Get the best negotiator in your house to pick up the phone and lower some of your bills.  
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Health Insurance Costs To Rise Again Next Year

Employee health care benefit costs are expected to increase 5.4% next year, according to an annual survey released by Mercer.

The Advantage of Dyslexia

Dyslexia is considered a handicap by many people, but learning disabilities specialists Brock and Fernette Eide argue that dyslexic children actually have an edge in life.
Here's why they think that dyslexia is actually an advantage:
Wired: What are the major strengths of having a dyslexic brain?
Brock: We outline four major strength profiles in the book, and fundamentally each of these profiles reflects a different but related way in which dyslexic brains are especially good at putting together big pictures, or seeing larger context, or imagining how processes will play out over time.
Some dyslexic individuals are especially good at spatial reasoning. Putting together three-dimensional spatial perspectives is easy for them. They may work in design, 3-D art, architecture, be engineers, builders, inventors, organic chemists or be exceptionally good at bagging your groceries.
Interconnected reasoning is another kind of strength. These connections can be relationships of likeness — analogies for example — or causal relationships, or the ability to shift perspective and view an object or event from multiple perspectives, or the ability to see the “gist” or big-picture context surrounding an event or idea. Many dyslexics work in highly interdisciplinary fields or fields that require combining perspectives and techniques gained from different disciplines or backgrounds. Or they’re multiple specialists, or their work history is unusually varied. Often these individuals draw the comment that they can see connections that other people haven’t seen before.
Most dyslexics tend to remember facts as experiences, examples or stories, rather than abstractions. We call this pattern narrative reasoning, which we consider the third strength. These kids have a very strong ability to learn from experience. It’s very common for their families to describe these kids as the family elephant. They’ll be the go-to person when someone wants to remember who gave what to sister for her birthday two years ago. They might be the family historian, but they can’t remember the times tables or which direction the three goes.
These individuals excel in fields where telling and understanding stories are important, like sales, counseling, trial law or even teaching. In addition, a large number of professional writers are dyslexic. For example, Philip Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, recently wrote a wonderful piece for The New York Times about his new memoir, My Dyslexia. He shows the kind of profoundly clear and vivid memory of personal experiences even from very early in his life that we commonly see in dyslexic individuals.
The fourth ability we outline is the ability to reason well in dynamic settings when the facts are incomplete or changing. People strong in this area often work in the business field, in financial markets or in scientific fields that reconstruct past events, like geologists or paleontologists. These people are comfortable working with processes that are constantly changing, and in making predictions.
Wired's Danielle Venton interviewed the authors of The Dyslexic Advantage: here.

The Psychiatrist's Office


Patient: "I have this terrible problem, Doctor. I think I'm a dog. I walk around on all fours, I keep barking in the middle of the night, and I eat dog food."

Psychiatrist: "Very interesting. Lie down on the couch, please."

Patient: "I'm not allowed on the couch."

A Whale of a Tale

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How legends are started ...

The Ichthyosaur: 200 Years Later

Happy Discovery Day Ichthyosaur: 200 Years Later
Mary Anning (1799–1847) is known in many circles as the greatest fossil hunter of all time; 200 years ago she introduced the world to her discovery of the bizarre ichthyosaur.  

Heavy rains yield big dinosaur fossil find in Maryland

Scientists say they have excavated Maryland's largest dinosaur fossil find in five years, a football-sized bone weighing between two and three pounds.

B.C.

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Young Bonobo Shows Signs of Autism

Young Bonobo Shows Signs of Autism
The autistic-like behaviors of the animal add to a growing list of similarities between humans and their recent primate ancestors.

Tree-Going Goats Threaten Oil Supply

Tree-Going Goats Threaten Oil Supply
Argan oil gave Moroccan families a boost in wealth, but the goats bought with the extra income are now eating the Argan trees.  

Bear Wanders into California Home

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Twelve-year-old Kara Jackson isn't Goldilocks -- but she did have an encounter with a bear.

One Female Guppy is Enough to Invade an Ecosystem

How many fish does it take for guppies to invasively breed its way into dominating an ecosystem?
Biologists at the University of St. Andrews and the University of the West Indies did the experiment and came up with the startling number: just 1 female guppy.
Dr. Deacon explained, “Usually only one or a few fish are released. We know that the vast majority of species introduced to a new habitat in this way are unable to survive, let alone establish a population, which left us with a huge question mark.”
To try to solve the mystery, the researchers conducted a simple experiment, in which single wild female guppies were placed into outdoor tanks. After two years, they discovered that almost all of the tanks contained populations of guppies, each founded by just one female.
Dr. Deacon explained how the finding might explain the guppy’s success as an invasive species, “Sperm storage is an excellent adaptation for living in constantly changing habitats, and it might also explain the guppies’ global success. Female guppies can store sperm in their reproductive tracts for many months after mating, and this enables single fish to establish populations, even when no males are present.

Rare American crocodile found in Florida

http://www.thatsfloriduh.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/American-Crocodile-300x206.jpgAlligators are a common sight in parts of Florida, but residents of a gated community were shocked to spot one of the animal's reptilian cousins: An endangered American crocodile.

The Purpose Of Bird-Egg Coloration

Want to see an enduring source of scientific dispute and perplexity? Go to your refrigerator, open a carton of eggs, and look at their speckles. Bird-egg coloration has been studied for more than a century. In a review in the Journal of Avian Biology, biologists Golo Maurer and Phillip Cassey present no fewer than seven possible explanations for eggshell color. Each focuses on how colors might shape an embryo's fate by modulating sunlight hitting its shell.

Their ideas stand in contrast with most earlier explanations, the fates of which were shaped by a late-19th century debate between biologist Alfred Russel Wallace and little-known naturalist Alexander M'Aldowie. According to M’Aldowie, eggshell pigment shielded embryos from harmful radiation. According to Wallace, they provided camouflage from predators.

Animal Pictures

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Thursday, September 22, 2011

The Daily Drift

The Daily Drift
Today's horoscope says:
Today is not a great day for major moves.
Try to avoid signing any contracts, finalizing any commitments or even making any big purchases.
Give it a few more days to settle, and you might find some problems with the deal -- or better yet, you might find a better deal elsewhere.
Patience pays off for you in more ways than one right now.
There's no need to be too hasty, especially if someone is pressuring you to stop wasting their time -- it's your time you should be most concerned about.

Some of our readers today have been in: 
Morini, Morini, Comoros
London, England, United Kingdom
Newbury, England, United Kingdom
Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Puchong, Selangor, Malaysia
Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands
Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
Kuala Lumpur, Wilayah Persekutuan, Malaysia
Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Paderborn, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Berne, Bern, Switzerland
Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia
Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Red Deer, Alberta, Canada
Gdynia, Pomorskie, Poland
Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Curitiba, Parana, Brazil
Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia


as well as Slovakia, Malta, Bulgaria, Israel, Finland, Austria, Norway, Georgia, Mexico, Peru, Kuwait, Serbia, Bangladesh, Latvia, Greece, Scotland, Hong Kong, Denmark, Wales, Iran, Singapore, Poland, Taiwan, Sweden, Afghanistan, Belgium, Tibet, Croatia, Pakistan, Romania, Paraguay, Sudan, Vietnam, Argentina, Cambodia, Egypt, France, Estonia, Puerto Rico, Maldives, Qatar, Brazil, New Zealand, United Arab Emirates, Slovenia, China, Iraq, Ecuador, Nigeria, Colombia, Chile, Honduras, Paupa New Guinea, Moldova, Venezuela, Germany, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Ireland, Czech Republic, Vietnam, Norway, Finland

and in cities across the United States such as Baton Rouge, Fond Du Lac, Montpelier, Clyde and more.

Today is:
Today is Thursday, September 22, the 265th day of 2011.
There are 100 days left in the year.


Today's unusual holidays or celebrations are:
Elephant Appreciation Day
Hobbit Day
and
National White Chocolate Day.
  
Don't forget to visit our sister blog!

Non Sequitur

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Thorough Thursday

Friday marks the end of summer and the start of a rare event that affects the whole world.  
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Arms decision alters views

The move not to sell Taiwan new fighter jets is impacting how allies in East Asia see America.  
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The truth be told

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When to repair or replace

Consider these tips before tossing an item in the trash — it can end up saving you big bucks.  
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'Hobbit house' for £3000

A 'hobbit' house
A man has built a home reminiscent of a hobbit house from the 'Lord of the Rings' on a tiny budget. 
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Leave it to the Irish


As a six-ton satellite gets ready for its final dive into Earth's atmosphere later this week, NASA says they're still not sure where it's going to land.

Falling to Earth

New images of falling satelliteUARS

An amateur astronomer has recorded images of the out-of-control UARS satellite as it tumbles in space ahead of its expected burn-up on Friday.

Awesome Pictures

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Italian Couple Bring in Lawyers to Kick Their 41-Year-Old Out of the House

A lot of parents suffer from the Empty Nest Syndrome, but an elderly couple in Italy have the opposite problem: their "mammone" or mommy's boy refuses to leave home.
Now, they're taking legal action to kick their 41-year-old man child out of the house:
"He has a good job but he continues to live at home and wants his clothes washed and ironed and his meals cooked for him. He never wants to leave." The couple took their case to the association after reading that it had experience in dealing with dozens of similar cases.
Young Italians are renowned for their reluctance to leave home, with a study released last year showing that 48% of offspring between the ages of 18 and 39 still live under their parents' roofs.
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And I Quote

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Not a bad idea at that ...

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Nine toxic co-workers

Your career might suffer if you get too chummy with one of these folks in the office.  
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Economy sends stocks down

The Dow's 391-point drop is likely to heighten worries about the fragile U.S. economy.  
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Tom the Dancing Bug

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Poll: 1 Out of 5 Americans Expect to be Millionaires

We all hope to be rich one day, but Americans - who are very optimistic people - *expect* to be rich. Heck, according to a new poll, 1 out of 5 Americans expect to be millionaires in just a few years:
Even with a turbulent economy, 20% of Americans expect to become millionaires in the next decade.
But the majority –- 62% -- still believe it’s “very unlikely” that they’ll reach the threshold by 2020, according to a new poll from the Associated Press and CNBC. Just 8% of U.K. residents believe they’re on the millionaire track.
And last year, only 5% of Americans reached the million-dollar mark -– which two in ten believe is the minimum amount of money for a comfortable retirement.

A Good One

The economy is so bad … if the bank returns your check marked “Insufficient Funds,” you call them and ask if they meant you or them.

NYPD used obscure, 19th-century “anti-mask” law to arrest Anonymous Wall St. protesters

At the Twitter-driven "Occupy Wall Street" protest, New York police "charged demonstrators with violating an obscure, 150-year-old state statute that bans masked gatherings."

Cops charged in man's death

Manuel Ramos faces a murder charge in the beating of a mentally ill homeless man. 
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Car bomb cause of Michigan blast

The three are “very fortunate” to survive after the car exploded along a tree-lined street, officials say
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TSA humiliates Black woman, demands to pat down her Afro

A Dallas resident of African-American descent says she was humiliated at an airport in Atlanta, when TSA agents patted down her hair.
Isis Brantley was headed down an escalator at Hartsfield-Jackson International airport in Atlanta, after she was screened a the initial security checkpoint, when she says two TSA agents came after her asking to check her hair for explosives. Brantley says the agents began patting down her large afro in public as she waited on a train platform.

Do you get drunker flying?

Plane (Fotolia)
We separate the fact from the fiction in eight commonly-held beliefs about air travel.  
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Ziggy

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