NATO

This week in In 1949, representatives of 12 nations gathered in Washington to sign the North Atlantic Treaty, creating the NATO alliance. (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) It now has 28 members.

NATO, headed by Admiral James Stavridis, US Navy, with operations led by Canadian Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard, officially took over aerial and naval operations in Libya. The North Atlantic Council, has approved the alliance's operations for up to three months.

Maple Bacon Coffee

Here is something you do not see everyday, maple and bacon flavored coffee. it's only ten bucks a pound. I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds like a goodie. The site says: "The delicious flavors of sweet maple syrup and the aroma of crisp country bacon combine in this coffee brew to produce a taste you'll jump out of bed for!" Mmmm!

Facebook Statistics

It is amazing how Facebook has been growing by over a hundred million users each year for the past few years. Of course, along with that fame comes click scams and apps that steal your friend list with their email and phone numbers, ripe for the plucking. It is much more fun than scary, so enjoy, just be sure to review your security settings and do not click on anything that seems to good to be true. Here is a LINK to how people are scammed by Facebook applications and ads. Here is another LINK that shows the amazing growth from 2004, when it began to now. See ya on Facebook. . .

Happy Friday

The dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.

My dreams and hopes always lead me to the reality of a Happy Friday!

Laughter

What a better way to start April Fools day than with a discussion of laughter. It's true - laughter has many healthy benefits for us and that's no joke. For instance, Laughing for just 15 minutes a day burns enough calories to lose up to 5lbs of fat over a year. A big belly laugh uses about the same energy as walking more than half a mile, according to the US study in the International Journal of Obesity.

Laughing makes the heart beat faster and works many different muscles.

Researchers measured the number of calories expended by 45 adults as they watched different TV programs, including nature and comedy shows. Bouts of laughter when watching a funny show used up to 20% more energy than at rest.

Work already suggests that laughter is good for the heart and immune system, and appears to help ease pain. Dr Shevach Friedler, even found humor increased the chance that fertility treatment would be a success in patients seeking IVF. He said, "Laughter has a physiological effect as well as a psychological one. It is an intuitive human trait. We do not learn it. It's in our genes. If we retain this in our genes then probably it has beneficial effects." OK, go play a prank today and have a good belly laugh, it is good for your heart and soul. Be careful about that fertility thing. .

Speed

We have become so accustomed to speed for our internet play time that we get upset when things slow down. All Internet Service Providers (ISP) do not measure their speed equally.

ISPs are the big name companies, like Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, etc., that offer you service and provide an on-ramp to the internet and email from your phone or wireless access for your laptop, or iPad. They tout claims of 3G (3rd generation cellular wireless), 4G (4th generation), etc., but the claims are not truly living up to the legal descriptions of those services. For instance, the original ITU-R requirements of data rates approximately up to 1 Gbits ( 1 gigabit = a billion bits per second) for 4G systems. Average phone users get speeds of about 1Mbps (1 thousandth of a Gbits) and the minimum is 400Mbps.

Bottom line, don't believe any of the hype. All providers these days are good enough, unless your are a power user and download large amounts of data or play games with users around the world. Be happy that, for the most part, we no longer have to rely on dial-up service for our home PCs.

Here is a site where you can test your speed. LINK  It takes about 30 seconds and you can see how your home system compares to others. Below are my results with Verizon FIOS.

Google's internal studies show that introducing a delay of 100 to 400 milliseconds (thousandth of a second) when displaying search results led users to conduct up to 0.6 percent fewer searches.

Google Transparency

Here is a new feature from Google. It tells how many government requests it gets from around the world to remove content from services, or provide information about users of  services and products, or shut down sites. It shows by country for six month increments. Sensitive government requests are not shown, due to national security concerns. Not surprisingly, the US seems to top the list for numbers of requests. LINK   Personally, I am tired of the 'transparency' word. What ever happened to plain old 'truth' and 'honesty'.

LifeSavers

I'll bet most of you believe that life savers got the name because the candy resembles the life savers on boats, but that is not true. LifeSavers got their name because of their serendipitous resemblance to miniature donuts. If one of these delectable confections was accidentally inhaled and/or lodged in the throat, the hole in the middle would allow air to enter and exit the lungs, thus circumventing suffocation. They would, in fact, "save your life."

The candy was invented in 1912 by a chocolate maker named Clarence Crane. Stores typically cut back on their chocolate orders during the summer because the candy would melt on the way to the store. Clarence decided to make a different kind of candy that would be easier to transport during the hot weather. He found a druggist with a pill-making machine that he could use. When the machine malfunctioned and punched a hole in the center of each mint (the original flavor), Clarence realized that he had a revolutionary product on his hands.

Video Cameras

In 1956, Ray Dolby, Charles Ginsberg, and Charles Anderson invented a video camera (records electronic images) that was the first machine to record both image and sound. The machines sold for $75,000 each and only sold to large TV networks until the 80's. The first commercial color video camera to utilize a completely solid-state image sensor called a charge-coupled-device (CCD) was developed by Sony in 1980.

Now we make homemade movies with an HD Video camera or hand-held camcorder (videocamera recorder) that can easily fit in any pant pocket.

Tally Ho

A few hundred years ago, as the Englishmen were out on a hunt, they would yell out "Tallio, hoix, hark, forward". Which came from a long French phrase not worth spelling out. The cry is meant to encourage the hunting dogs and get them moving, kind of like saying giddyup to a horse. Mercifully, it has been abbreviated to simply "Tally-ho."

Spam a Lot

Have you ever wondered how much spammers make and how many spam emails are sent out? UC San Diego and the International Computer Science Institute wondered too, so they hijacked a botnet to find out. The team intentionally infected eight computers with a middleman virus, software they found that was relaying instructions between a botmaster computer and the network of computers it had secretly turned into spam-sending zombies. That is how many viruses work.

They changed the orders for their own research. Instead of sending people to the botmaster’s website, spam ads instead funneled them to a site built by the team. It looked like an authentic Internet pharmacy, but didn't take orders, it just gave an error message. The team used the info to calculate an estimate of how much money the spammer grossed per day.

Interesting statistics from the spam experiment -  23.8% of messages were actually delivered, of those, .0127% of people responded, and 2.66% went to the site to buy something for an average price $100. In all, they infected just 550 PCs which each sent out an average number of 1.7 million emails per day. The average daily take was about $7,000. Annual take $2.55 million.

Considering that spammers infect much higher numbers of PCs and some mail out many more than 1.7 million messages, and they do it 7 days a week, it begins to quickly add up. If you just did five times that amount, it comes to $12.8 million a year. Not too bad for a few lines of code and letting all the others do your mailing.

What's in a Name

When George Lucas was mixing the American Graffiti soundtrack, he numbered the reels of film starting with an R and numbered the dialog starting with a D. Sound designer Walter Murch asked George for Reel 2, Dialog 2 by saying "R2D2". George liked the way that sounded so much he integrated that into one of his other projects, Star Wars.

Denny's Made Up Name

My buddy, John Chapman sent this LINK to me. Seems Denny's has come up with Baconalia to describe a bunch of new dishes containing bacon, including bacon meatloaf, bacon maple sundae, and more. They call it a bacon love-fest. Mmmm, time for breakfast.

Happy Friday

You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.

I plan to plop down in my favorite chair, have a good belly laugh, and prepare to have a Happy Friday!