How Come

The oldest reference for "how come" in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is an entry in Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms published in 1848. The OED calls "how come" an American coinage, but the entry in Bartlett's indicates it originated in England: "Doubtless an English phrase, brought over by the original settlers." "How come" is believed to be a shortened from "how did it come about that," or "how comes it, then"  It makes sense, but has somehow been lost in current usage and many people do not really know what it means, but use it anyway. That phrase bugs me. How come people say how come instead of why?

Bacon Flavor Envelopes

It is time to show your good taste, but don't over lick the bacon flavored glue on the envelopes designed in classic bacon style. Lick, Lick, Yum, Yum!

Great Britain

Do you know the difference between Great Britain and the United Kingdom? This video explains it all. LINK  Very fast talker, but interesting way to get the facts.

What's in a Name

Despite popular belief, the way that the buttons look a bit like the seeds of a berry has nothing to do with the name Blackberry device. The name was purely a marketing decision.

RIM wanted a name that would be distinctive, memorable, fun, and that would work well internationally and appeal to a wide range of customers. RIM decided to go with a connotative word for the brand name rather than a descriptive or invented word.

Employment Numbers

People actually employed per US dept of statistics:

Jun 2007 - 153, 072,000
Aug 2008 - 154,853,000
jul 2009 - 139,817,000
dec 2009 - 137,960,000
jul 2010  -139,860,000
dec 2010 - 139,206,000

Dental Devices

If you think going to the dentist is tough these days, check out these devices for pulling teeth. They were used until the early 1800s.

Pelicans are instruments for extracting teeth and it is generally accepted that they are so named because of the similarity of the claw to the beak of a bird although it appears in different shapes and with variable features. They was used to remove a tooth from the row sideways and with considerable force. The claw went over the tooth and the bolster pressed against the vestibular alveolar bone. To function well two strong and healthy teeth were needed for the bolster to react against. Ouch, more gas please!

Anesthesia

Nitrous oxide was discovered in 1772, but for decades the gas was considered no more than a party toy. People knew that inhaling a little of it would make you laugh (hence the name “laughing gas”), and that inhaling a little more of it would knock you unconscious.

In 1844, Horace Wells, a dentist in Connecticut, had an idea after witnessing a nitrous mishap at a party. A friend of Wells took some gas and fell and suffered a deep gash in his leg, but he didn’t feel a thing.

To test his theory, Wells arranged an experiment with himself as the guinea pig. He knocked himself out by inhaling a large does of nitrous oxide, and then had a dentist extract a bad tooth from his mouth. When Wells came to, his tooth had been successfully pulled.

After further experiments, Wells was jailed while high on chloroform and he committed suicide. In 1864 the American Dental Association formally recognized him for his discovery.

Speaking of Sleep

Dolphins and whales do not sleep for the first month of their life.

Giraffes. the tallest land-living animal, sleep only 4 to 6 hours a day.

Cats along with mice, pigs, and cheetahs can sleep for 12 hours per day.

Rats, gerbils and lions can sleep for 13 hours a day.

Squirrels sleep about 14 hours a day.

A human baby of age 1-12 months can sleep 16 hours a day (in between feedings and diaper changes).

The Lemur sleeps for 16 hours a day.

Owl Monkeys will sleep 17 hours a day.

Armadillos and tigers go to sleep for about 18-19 hours a day.

Brown Bats  sleep for 20 hours a day and Koalas sleep up to 22 hours a day.  I'm tired just thinking about this stuff.

Printing Skin

The range of uses for three-dimensional printers is increasing all the time, but now scientists have 3D "bioprinters" that print out skin, cartilage, bone, and other body parts. 3D printers print by depositing material line by line and then vertically layer by layer. They have been used to make sculptures and more.

Professor James Yoo, from the Institute of Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science his group is developing a system that will allow them to print skin directly onto burn wounds. Their research is funded by the US Department of Defense.

The bioprinter has a built-in laser scanner that scans the wound and determines its depth and area. The scan is converted into three-dimensional digital images that enable the device to calculate how many layers of skin cells need to be printed on the wound to restore it to its original configuration. The system has successfully printed skin patches 10 cm (almost 4 inches) square on a pig.

Day of the Geese

Antzar Eguna, is a Spanish tradition in which a greased goose is suspended over water and young men jump from boats and attempt to rip off the head of the goose. This competition serves as a way for young men to prove their strength and eligibility to females. The winner also gets to keep the goose. Although this tradition was once practiced all over Spain with live geese,  it is now only held during the San Antolin festival in Lekeitio, with a dead goose.

Happy Friday

The secret of happiness is freedom. The secret to freedom is courage.

I have the courage and freedom to celebrate a Happy Friday!

Google Art

If you like ancient masterpieces, Google has a real treat for you. Google staff have been photographing art from various galleries around the world the pictures are available for free on the web. It is called the Google Art Project and it is spectacular. You can zoom in on pictures to great detail. It is like going to a museum with a magnifying glass. It is worth a look and a good link to share with children going to school. Here is the LINK.

Art in Sweden Subway

Here is a site of pictures that show the Swedish subway. A beautiful blend of natural and new. LINK

Worlds Fastest Computer

The fastest computer in the world belongs to the Chinese. The Tianjin National Supercomputer Center's Tianhe-1A system benchmarked a performance of 2.67 petaflops (A petaflop is 1,125,899,906,842,624 calculations per second - a thousand trillion or quadrillion), surpassing the U.S. Department of Energy's Cray XT5 Jaguar system at a slow 1.75 petaflops. IBM is building two mega machines, a 10 petaflops and a 20 petaflops system, both to be running in 2012. We are approaching the Singularity faster than predicted.

A human brain's probable processing power is around 100 teraflops (100 trillion calculations per second), according to Hans Morvec, principal research scientist at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. We do have one edge over computers, they have not been able to build a computer that fast as small as our brain. . .  yet.

Less than forty years ago, we were wondering when the computer would be able to do a million operations a second. Less than three years ago we hailed the fastest computer for running teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second).

BTW, IBM's Watson, of Jeopardy fame, runs at a miserably slow speed of 80 teraflops.