What's in a Name, Jacuzzi

The seven Jacuzzi brothers emigrated from Italy to California in the early 1900s. In California, they began developing innovations for the big new craze: the airplane. Their biggest hit was the creation of the first plane with an enclosed cabin, which the US Postal Service bought to deliver mail.

According to legend, their mother was worried about her sons’ safety and eventually convinced the brothers to change jobs. They started concentrating on hydraulic pumps for irrigation and hospital use. In the late 1940s, Candido Jacuzzi’s young son Kenneth started suffering from arthritis. He received hydrotherapy at a hospital, but his father decided his son needed to have access to it at home as well. He filed a patent for his invention, but it wasn’t until another relative, Roy joined the business years later that they started selling their Jacuzzi tubs to the public. Well, that is just about the hot and cold of it.

Smarter Pills

The Food and Drug Administration has just approved a device that is integrated into pills and let’s doctors know when patients take their medicine and when they don’t.

The device, made by Proteus Digital Health, is a silicon chip about the size of a sand particle. With no battery and no sensor, it is powered by the body itself. The chip contains small amounts of copper and magnesium. After being ingested the chip will interact with digestive juices to produce a voltage that can be read from the surface of the skin through a detector patch, which then sends a signal via mobile phone to inform the doctor that the pill has been taken.

Sensors on the chip also detect heart rate and can estimate the patient’s amount of physical activity. It will allow doctors to better assess if a person is responding to a given dose, or if that dose needs to be adjusted.

It has been in clinical trials since 2009, but currently the FDA has only approved the chip for placebo pills, which were used in trials showing the chip to be safe and highly accurate. Proteus hopes to gain approval to use the digestible chip with other medicines. Andrew Thompson, chief executive of Proteus, says the chip has already been tested with treatments for tuberculosis, mental health, heart failure, hypertension, and diabetes.

The company is currently working with makers of metformin, a drug used to treat type 2 diabetes and the most commonly prescribed drug in the world. The company also plans on adding a wireless glucose meter to their device so that dosage amount and frequency can be correlated with changes in blood glucose levels.

To Bee or Not to Bee

It is not exactly clear where the word derives from, but “bee” as in “spelling bee” means a gathering or get together.  One early case referred to a “spinning bee”, where people would gather to protest purchasing goods from Britain due to the high taxes on those items. Other gatherings that were commonly labeled with “bee” were: apple bee, logging bee, quilting bee, barn bee, hanging bee, sewing bee, and corn husking bee. 

Any competition or work gathering, with a specific task in mind, tended to get the “bee” label added on the end.  With many of these bees being tedious work events, it was also customary to serve refreshments and provide entertainment at the end of the task.

Wordology, Aluminum

Aluminum is the older term, while aluminium was created later by the British to make it sound more like the other elements. Here is a timeline:

1808: Sir Humphrey Davy isolates the metal for the first time. He calls it alumium
1812: Sir Humphrey decides to change the spelling of his element: he renames it to aluminum (the term adopted in the United States)
1812: British scientists dislike the new name and change it to aluminium to match the other classic sounding elements, such as Magnesium, Helium, Potassium, etc.

That's my symposium on aluminum. - Incidentally, the Greek symposium was originally a drinking party and forum for men of good family to debate, plot, boast, or simply to revel with others.

Happy Friday

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present.

I do not dwell in the past or dream of the future, I am concentrating on having a Happy Friday!

Soft Drink Facts

Soft Drink refers to nearly all beverages that do not contain significant amounts of alcohol as hard drinks do.

The term soft drink is typically used mostly for flavored carbonated beverages and that is because of advertising. Flavored carbonated beverage makers were having a difficult time creating national advertisements due what people call their product varies from place to place.

In parts of the United States and Canada, flavored carbonated beverages are referred to as “pop”; in other parts “soda”; in yet other parts “coke”; and there are a variety of other names commonly used as well. In England these drinks are called fizzy drinks and in Ireland called minerals.

Since beverage makers can’t refer to their product in the generic sense in national or international advertisements due to the varied terms, they have chosen the term soft drink to be more or less a universal term for flavored carbonated beverages.

First US Government Building

This should come as no surprise. Construction started with the laying of the cornerstone in the first building to be used solely as a US Government building. The U.S. Mint in Philadelphia was built in 1792.

Bird Poop

Today I learned why bird poop is usually white vs. other animal and human poop. Birds do not urinate. While their kidneys extract nitrogenous waste it is not expelled in the urea as ours (and many other animals) does. It is excreted in the form of uric acid, which has low solubility and, when combined with other waste comes out like white paste. Other colors from various fruits, etc., do not change as they pass through the system, so they come out the color of the fruit ingested. Some vegans seem to pass green due to the excess green vegetables and iron in the body.

In order to fly efficiently, birds, especially smaller birds need to eliminate waste often. A budgie may excrete 40 to 50 times in a day, whereas a macaw may only go 15 or 20 times.”

Since birds only have one opening, it is used for sex, waste elimination, and dropping eggs.

The word poop comes from the Middle English word poupen or or latin puppis, and it originally meant fart it acquired its current meaning around 1900.

Flush Tax

You pee, you poo, you pay. A while back, the Maryland Legislature took a step towards protecting the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries when it passed what has become known as “the flush tax.”

The bill established the Chesapeake and Atlantic Coastal Bays Restoration Fund to be supported by a $2.50 a month fee on sewer bills and an equivalent $30 annual fee on septic system owners. These funds are collected by the County and turned over to the State which distributes the funds to utilities to upgrade waste-water treatment plants to reduce nitrogen discharge which causes algae blooms that harm other aquatic life.

The revenues from septic tank users are used to upgrade or replace failing septic systems and to provide financial assistance to farmers to help plant cover crops to prevent nutrient runoff from agricultural land. This is the government equivalent of the pay toilet. The government has now completed the cycle where what we eat and drink is taxed when it goes in and now it is taxed when it comes out.

Wordology, Taser

Few people, including police know that Taser stands for Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle.

"Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle; or, Daring Adventures in Elephant Land" was a young adult novel published in 1911. It was one of a series of more than a hundred books about Tom Swift, with the most recent series in 2007.

In the novel, Swift's invention of the electric rifle, which fires bolts of electricity can be calibrated to different levels of range, intensity and lethality. It can shoot through solid walls without leaving a hole, and is powerful enough to kill a rampaging whale. With the electric rifle, Tom and friends bring down elephants, rhinoceroses, and buffalo, while he saves their lives several times in pitched battle with the red pygmies.

In one book, written in 1912, Tom develops a telephone that can actually send pictures.

The Taser was really invented by Jack Cover, completed in 1974, and marketed by Taser International.

What's in a Name, Crash Blossoms

What's in a Name, Crash Blossoms - Crash Blossoms are ambiguous headlines that usually convey more than one meaning and make you want to scratch your head. Here are a few examples.

"Chinese cooking fat heads for Holland"
"Analysis: China currency move nails hard landing risk coffin"
"Doctor Testifies in Horse Suit"
"American Ships Head to Libya"
"Don't help old, blind council tells parking officers"
"McDonald's fries the holy grail for potato farmers"
"Dog helps lightning strike Redruth mayor."
"Virginia Beach man accused of decapitating son to stay in hospital"
"Kids Make Nutritious Snacks"
"Miners Refuse to Work After Death"
"Teacher Strikes Idle Kids"
"US President Wins on Budget, but More Lies Ahead"

Gummi Bears

The sweet treats were invented in the 1920′s by German Hans Riegel Sr. when he started the Haribo company. Not only do they produce Gummi Bears, and all other chewy candy under the Haribo name, but the company also makes all Trolli brands of gummy candy, like gummi worms.

English and the Internet

According to the translation firm Smartling, native English speakers only represented 3% of the total Internet population in 2011. Yet, 56% of online pages are English-only.

Many would not spend time on a Japanese website without understanding Japanese if Google Translate didn’t exist. Conversely, many would not spend time on an English website without an online translator.

Happy Friday

If you seek happiness for yourself you will never find it. Only when you seek happiness for others will it come to you.

If you are happy after reading this, we will both have a Happy Friday!