Rosetta Books

For those of you with little children or grandchildren, Rosetta has been adding books to its online library HERE. They are free full color copies of the original children's books and very interesting to see and read.
Maybe grandpa can get out his iPad and read a nighttime story from the original book, with pictures. You might call it high tech retro.

Staying Awake Too Long

Rats that are continuously kept awake, die after two weeks and that is less time than it takes them to starve to death.

Human theory is when you finally run out of body fat, protein, and carbohydrates, your body runs out of energy and stops functioning. However, fat people would only be able to survive that long if they had enough vital water-soluble B vitamins in their system to help metabolize fat stores. So it is possible that a person could die of starvation and still be fat.

The longest recorded starvation was by the Irish hunger-striker Kieran Doherty in 1981, who died after fasting for 73 days.

With a supply of vitamins and water, people have been known to survive over a year without eating.

With vitamins but without water, survival time is sharply reduced. A human can be expected to survive for weeks without food, but a thirsty person deprived of water might only last a matter of days. Without water, the volume of blood in your body drops, and with it your blood pressure. Blood becomes thicker and stickier, making it harder to pump around the body, so your heart rate increases to compensate. Even in a cool environment, you wouldn't last for more than a week without water. Hmmm, a week without bacon might possibly kill a person, also.

Tennessee Bumper Sticker

Did You Know

Sixty million rolls of toilet paper are flushed away in Europe every day. The average American uses 57 sheets a day, six times the global average. Although usage in the US has remained stable, third world countries are catching up. China usage has increased 11% in the last ten years.

Environmentalists are concerned and someone actually calculated that TP usage equals 27,000 trees being flushed down the, um, drain. We can't go back to corn cobs or we will deprive cattle of food or fuel for the new eco cars.  So, if we use less toilet tissue, are we being green, or . . .

Populations by Country

We keep hearing about other countries and their relative size. Joe Dougherty, a freind of mine sent me the following and it sure gives a good perspective of where we fit. It is a bit out of date, as we have over 300 million now, but the others have also grown proportionately.

Breakthrough Nanotechnology

North Carolina State University has developed a computer chip that can store enough data to hold an entire library's worth of information on a single chip. The new chip stems from a breakthrough in the use nanoscale magnets, and represents a significant advance in computer-memory technology.

Magnetic nanodots that store one bit of information on each nanodot, allows storing over one billion pages of information in a chip that is one square inch. The nanodots can be made as small as six nanometers in diameter. Where did I put my glasses?

How to Find Stuff on a Web Page

You are looking for a specific name on a web page that is way too long and has too much information. Here is a trick. Hold down the "ctrl' (control) key on the lower left or right of your keyboard and hit the "f" key. Then type in the word or name that you are looking for. Your browser will find the word and highlight it for you (look at the very top or very bottom of the page to see it). Just one more cool trick to make your web travels easier.

Mother's Day is May 9. Don't forget to do something special for the person who spent her life doing special things for you.

Mother's Day

Mother's Day is celebrated on various days in many parts of the world, most commonly in May, but also in February, march, and April in some places. In the United States it was nationally recognized as a holiday (on the second Sunday in May) in 1914 after a multi-year campaign by Anna Jarvis (she died in 1905 and her daughter Anna Marie carried on the campaign). We use the singular (mother's) as opposed to the plural (mothers') to commemorate family mothers vs. all the mothers in the world.


As the US holiday was adopted by other countries and cultures, the date was changed to fit already existing celebrations honoring motherhood, like Mothering Sunday in the UK, or the Orthodox celebration of Jesus in the temple in Greece. In some countries it was changed to dates that were significant to the majority religion, such as the Virgin Mary day in Catholic countries, or the birthday of the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad in Islamic countries. Bolivia uses the date of a certain battle where women participated. Many Arab countries celebrate on March 21, the day of the vernal Equinox.

Traditionally carnations represent Mother's Day. Many religious services copied the custom of giving away carnations or wearing a carnation on Mother's Day. Florists promoted wearing a red carnation if your mother was living, or a white one if she was dead and this has remained popular.

Interesting iPhone App

True - For mothers-to-be, there is an iPhone application that sends ovulation alerts to your phone. It sends a series of 18 text messages (3 per menstrual cycle) that let you know when you are most likely to be fertile and provide helpful fertility advice. The name is 'booty caller'.

Stealing From Prisoners

True - Couldn't resist sharing this one. Seems Dutch prisoners have it better than some others. Who would expect that criminals would try to break into a prison? Thieves broke into a Dutch prison to steal the inmates’ televisions.

Twice in the last six weeks, burglars broke into a minimum-security prison and stole TVs from cells while prisoners were away for the weekend, a spokesman for the justice ministry said on April 21, 2010. Hmmm. . . TVs and 'away for the weekend'.

How Long Can You Hold Your Breath

Most people find it hard to hold their breath for more than a minute, but Stephane Mifsud held his breath for 11 minutes and 35 seconds last year, setting a new world record for stationary breath-holding, or "static apnoea".

Competitors float face down in a chilled pool to induce the mammalian diving reflex. When your face is submerged in cold water, outer blood vessels constrict, directing blood away from the extremities and towards the heart and brain. Your heart rate slows, reducing the rate at which oxygen is pumped around the body. With training, experienced breath-holders can drop their heart rate by twice that of non-divers upon immersion in cold water.

Hyperventilation before a prolonged breath-hold is also vital. This is because the brain monitors the amount of carbon dioxide in the blood to decide when to trigger the gasp reflex. Of course, having large lungs is a natural advantage.

Queen Elizabeth and Stamps

The world’s first adhesive postage stamps were issued by Great Britain in 1840, as the “Penny Black” depicting Queen Victoria. It began designating British stamps by the depiction of the country’s sovereign. Great Britain is the only country allowed by international postal regulations to omit a text name of the issuing country.

In 1966 Arnold Machin sculpted a bust of Queen Elizabeth for the Royal Mail. It has been in continuous use since then, and has been reproduced some 320 billion times.  Three copies of the original bust were known to exist, but recently a fourth one was discovered at the Machin family home.

Google TV

Later this month, May 2010, Google is expected to announce Google TV. It will begin with a box using its android operating system (like windows, but open source) to be attached to your cable box or TV and allow internet activities via remote control. It could even replace your cable box. Wow, if we could do other things during commercials, can you imagine how much we could get done. I vote for split screen. Hmmm. . . the possibilities are endless.