Earth Day Predictions

April 22, 2014 we celebrate Earth Day again. I thought it might be interesting to review some of the predictions from past Earth Days.

On the first Earth Day in 1970, here are some profound predictions that were made. “We have about five more years at the outside to do something.” Kenneth Watt, ecologist

"Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine." North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” George Wald, Harvard Biologist

"Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years." Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich

By 1995 "... somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct." Sen. Gaylord Nelson

"By 1975 some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s." Paul Ehrlich

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Earth Day 2013 - NOAA State of the Climate Report - "All of those things indicate that the climate system as a whole is continuing to warm up – and warm up faster as we go along.” Climatologist

“It’s hard to read the report and not be led to the conclusion that the task of reducing carbon emissions is now more urgent than ever.” another Climatologist

"Sea level rising an average of 3.2mm per year" (0.125984 inches).

"The climate system is not quite so simple as people thought." Danish environmental analyst Bjorn Lomborg

At least these folks are consistent with their predictions, in spite of a few facts, such as the earth is not over-populated, with very few countries producing enough children to replace themselves. In addition, we are not running out of resources. History has proven that Punxsutawney Phil has been more accurate in his predictions than the "human expert climate predictors."

Google Compare

Here is another great feature of Google that might help improve your health and decrease your waistline. Google has a nutrition comparison feature that allows you to compare two types of food for nutritional values.

If you want to compare the calories, nutrients, and other values of apples and oranges, type in "compare apples oranges" without the quotes. You will see photos and a chart revealing calories, sodium, vitamins, minerals, etc. It also lists other normal results, like web sites, etc. I also tried "compare banana potato" and found there is only twelve calories difference between them. Very interesting and useful tool.

Top Ten Fruit Savers

Keep broccoli, and celery, and lettuce their crispest by wrapping them in tin foil before storing them in the refrigerator. Celery will stay crisp for four weeks or more, lettuce heads up to six weeks, and broccoli up to seven weeks.

To store carrots, cut off the greens and place them in a plastic bag before sticking them in your crisper drawer. Carrots will keep for up to two weeks. BTW - Carrots do not improve your eyesight and will not help you see better at night.

Cherries should be refrigerated in a plastic bag, but not washed until ready to eat, because moisture hastens mold where stems meets the fruit.

In warm weather, avocados will ripen fast, but don’t store avocados in the refrigerator unless they are cut, otherwise the cold will turn them black inside. To keep them at their most palatable state, spritz a bit of lemon or lime juice, or another acidic agent, and place in an air-tight container or tightly covered clear plastic wrap.

Apples  are a year-round delight, but some the most flavorful kinds (e.g. Gala, Ginger Gold, Pink Lady) make their appearance during the summer. During the warmer months, apples should be stored in the fridge, while in the fall; they can be stored on the counter. When storing apples in the fridge, drape a damp paper towel over the container of apples instead of a top. Do not put them in a drawer or air-tight container. Both the cold temperature and the moisture will help them stay their freshest for up to several weeks.

What's a summer BBQ without some grilled corn? When storing corn, keep the husks on, but cut away the shank (this part of the grain is a magnet for worms). Put your corn in a plastic bag and place it in your refrigerator's crisper. The corn will remain at its freshest for two days. While the corn will start to dry out after day two, but will still remain edible.

Melons will keeps for about 10 days in the cold temperature, but are most flavorful at room temperature. Take your melon out of the fridge and allow it to warm for about 30 minutes before serving.

Peaches and nectarines should be bought firm, but stored at room temperature once you have them home. Do not put them in the fridge before they are ripe, as chilling them before that will result in fruit that is mealy and flavorless. They should keep for a few days before they begin to lose their flavor.

What's in a Name, Paisley

The distinctive paisley pattern is originally from India or Persia, and has been in use in the Middle East and Asia since around 200 AD. When its European popularity boomed and imports could not keep up with the demand, various cities produced their own, including the town of Paisley in Scotland.

Twelve Patent Facts

On March 19, 1474, Venice passed the world’s earliest known law to grant and protect patents.
Around 50,000 patent applications were made from UK inventors in 2013. That is about one new British invention every 10 minutes.
The Japanese submit more than 470,000 a year.
US patents during 2013 464,573.
The second patent in England was for a monopoly on representing an image of the King.
The musical fly swatter was patented in the US in 1994. It played one tune when turned on and another when it hit something.
IBM has gained more patents than any other company in the US for the past 21 years.
US patent number 5528943, issued in 1996, was for a pregnant female crash test dummy.
Thomas Edison accumulated 2,332 patents worldwide for his inventions.
In 1998, the European patent office reported that the patent visitors most often wanted to see was one for sardine-flavored ice-cream. This was because nobody believed it until they saw it.
Abraham Lincoln was the only US president to hold a patent. It was for a device to lift boats over sandbanks.
There are 52,438 US patents for measuring and testing.

Eight Eyebrow Facts

Eyebrows are tufts of hair that follow the shape of the ridge of the brow in mammals. They are very small and personal, but (mostly women) annually spend billions to pluck, tweeze, paint, scarify, shape, tattoo, pierce, puff, and generally do many unnatural things to this unique part of the human body. They are profoundly expressive of mood.

• The function of our brows is to keep moisture out of our eyes when it is raining or when we sweat. That arched shape helps divert liquid to the side of our faces.
• According to the Bosley hair transplant company, the average person has about 250 hairs per eyebrow.
• The average lifespan of an eyebrow is four months.
• A study done by MIT found that people had more trouble correctly identifying the faces of people they knew when they were presented with images of them missing their eyebrows and concluded that brows may be more important for facial recognition than eyes.
• Brows help us signal emotions, as the pitch of your voice rises, so do your eyebrows and vice versa.
• When you make an expression without thinking, eyebrows move in a way that is symmetrical to each other. Conversely, when you make what’s called an ‘intended’ expression, like suspicion and curiosity, your brows will furrow asymmetrically.
• Man is the only species that has eyebrows against bare skin.
• Every culture and time period has had a different way of shaping their brows: In Florence during the Renaissance, people shaved their eyebrows off completely, while the colonial elite in 18th-century America preferred to beef their brows up using grey mouse skin. 

Free Friday Advice

Happy Friday

"There must be a day or two in a man’s life when he is the precise age for something important."

I find that important day each week when I celebrate a Happy Friday.

Perky Coffee

To perk up your morning cup of Joe, toss a dash of salt into the uncooked grounds to reduce bitterness. We are all aware of the health benefits of cinnamon; toss some cinnamon into the uncooked grounds to add a subtle flavor that is also good for you.

Eight More Egg Facts

We all know dinosaurs laid eggs. Ostriches and turkeys also lay eggs, but the ones we eat most often are chicken eggs.
Eggs take about 24 to 26 hours to form inside a hen.
An average hen can lay 250 to 270 eggs per year.
In China, approximately 390 billion eggs are produced a year, while the US produces about 75 billion eggs a year.
An egg shell is made of calcium carbonate and makes up 9-12 percent of an egg's total weight. It contains pores that allow oxygen in and carbon dioxide and moisture out.
The blood sometimes seen in an egg comes from the rupture of small blood vessels in the yolk. It does not indicate the egg is unsafe to eat.
An average person on Earth consumes 173 eggs a year (less than one chicken lays).
The world record for eating hard-boiled eggs is 65 in 6min 40sec, by Sonya Thomas in 2003. She would have eaten more but they ran out of eggs.
Here is the big answer to the big question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. The egg came first, because dinosaurs laid eggs before chickens evolved.

Virus vs. Bacteria

Viruses and bacteria are very different and they can both be either beneficial or harmful. A virus is both living and non-living, and is incapable of reproducing on its own, while bacteria are complete, living organisms that can self-replicate. Bacteria are usually much larger, come in a wider variety of shapes, and serve in more beneficial roles than a virus.

Infections and illnesses can be viral or bacterial. We often hear the terms, and we might even have a vague idea of what they mean, but a complete understanding of the difference between the two can help you treat the illnesses they cause.

Viruses are tiny, microscopic things that exist in two different states. When they are floating in the air or lying on a table waiting for someone to come by and inhale them, they are non-living and inert. Once they are absorbed into a living host, they activate. A virus cannot replicate on its own, and requires a host cell to attach itself to in order to multiply. Some microbiologists classify viruses as microorganisms, while others don't because they are "nonliving" and describe viruses as microscopic infective agents.

After contacting a host cell, a virus will insert genetic material into the host and take over that host's functions. The infected cell continues to reproduce, but it reproduces more viral protein and genetic material instead of its usual products. It is this process that earns viruses the classification of "parasite".

However, a virus can also be useful, because a virus will naturally attach itself to a healthy living cell, a virus can be used as a delivery system when genetic material needs to be transferred to a human body. Injecting a virus with genetic material then releasing it into the body can result in the delivery and replication of cells. This type of gene therapy is still experimental, but showing progress. Some types of viruses can also target and destroy some types of bacteria, like E. coli.

Bacteria are tiny, living organisms that are not classified as either plant or animal. As such, they don’t rely on hosts in order to reproduce, and can exist, grow, and multiply outside of a living body. Few know that many bacteria not only coexist with us all the time, but help us do an array of useful things, like make vitamins, break down garbage, and maintain our atmosphere.

Bacteria consist of a single cell and have been found living in temperatures above the boiling point and in freezing cold. They consume everything from sugar and starch to sunlight, sulfur, and iron. There is a species of bacteria that can withstand blasts of radiation 1,000 times greater than would kill a human being. A gram of soil typically contains about 40 million bacterial cells. A milliliter of fresh water usually holds about one million bacterial cells.

A single bacterium contains more than a virus and can reproduce on its own. That means a cell wall, genetic material, and an appendage to propel itself. It’s different from plant and animal cells, however, as there’s no nucleus to contain the genetic material.

When magnified, a virus appears round. Bacteria can be a number of different shapes, including the ball-shaped, rod-shaped, and spiral. Within each general group of shape types, there is a wide variety that separates bacteria even further.

Because of their simplicity, a virus can be 10,000 times smaller than a bacterium. Examples of both can be found just about anywhere on Earth, in any environment.

Determining whether an illness is caused by bacteria or a virus determines how it is treated. Bacteria are vulnerable to antibiotics, while anti-viral agents are required to kill a virus, and vaccinations can help prevent them from infecting a body.

Bone Fusion

Babies are born with 300 or more bones and adults have 206, because the bones have fused together. The bones that fuse (in general order of fusion) are those of the: Skull, Elbow, Hip, Ankle, Knee, Wrist, and Shoulder. Some of a baby's bones are made entirely of cartilage. Other bones in a baby are partly made of cartilage. This cartilage is soft and flexible. During childhood growing, the cartilage grows and is slowly replaced by bone, with help from calcium. It may take until between ages of 18 to 25 for all bones to completely fuse.

What's in a Name, Digitalis

The first known heart medicine was discovered in an English garden. In 1799, physician John Ferriar noted the effect of dried leaves of the common plant, digitalis purpurea, on heart action. The scientific name means "finger-like" and refers to the ease with which a flower of digitalis purpurea can be fitted over a human fingertip. The term digitalis is also used for drug preparations that contain cardiac glycosides, particularly one called digoxin, extracted from various plants of this genus. Digoxin was approved for heart failure in 1998. Also, a group of medicines extracted from foxglove plants are called Digitalin.

Once the usefulness of digitalis in regulating the human pulse was understood, it was employed for a variety of purposes, including the treatment of epilepsy and other seizure disorders, but is now considered to be inappropriate treatment. The most common prescription form of this medication is called digoxin. Digitoxin is another form of digitalis.

Robot Reporting

I love all things tech and I love writing. This program (or app or algorithm) stokes both of my passions. Robots are now writing mainstream media articles. Three minutes after one of the earthquakes hit Southern California a few weeks ago, an article was ready for publication, before reporters were awake or aware of the happenings.

The author was quakebot, a program created two years ago, that reacts to input from devices that report seismic activity. It is called a 'bot', because it reacts to outside stimulus without human intervention. The algorithm adds text to fill in between the 'facts' to create a readable story, suitable for publishing. In this case, it extracted the relevant data from the US Geological Service report, plugged it into a pre-written template, and sent it for publication in the LA Times.

Here is the actual article created: "A shallow magnitude 4.7 earthquake was reported Monday morning five miles from Westwood, California, according to the US Geological Survey. The temblor occurred at 6:25 a.m. Pacific time at a depth of 5.0 miles. According to the USGS, the epicenter was six miles from Beverly Hills, California, seven miles from Universal City, California, seven miles from Santa Monica, California and 348 miles from Sacramento, California. In the past ten days, there have been no earthquakes magnitude 3.0 and greater centered nearby. This information comes from the USGS Earthquake Notification Service and this post was created by an algorithm written by the author."

There are many other examples of 'bot' reporters and one company even  has some that scan entire books and publish indexes of words, by topic, and sells the results, in the form of books, on Amazon. Wow, honest reporting without humans twisting the story to fit the politics. There is hope.