National Vodka and Golf Lovers Day

Celebrated since at least 2009, National Vodka Day on October 4, 2015 has been mentioned by Wine Enthusiast Magazine and has also been noted in news websites such as CBS. The versatile beverage accounts for about 20 to 25 per cent of spirits sold today in North America, making it the most popular libation.

Totally unrelated, but celebrated on the same day, October 4 in 2015 is National Golf Lovers Day. National Golf Lovers Day, also referred to as National Golf Day. Since 1952, the PGA has held a charitable event each year for National Golf Day, which is held on varying days within the year. We can celebrate a tipple and tip-in on the same day (and watch football).

Malarkey

We do not hear this word much these days, but it certainly was versatile. Here are some synonyms: balderdash, baloney, bilge, blah-blah, blarney, blather, blatherskite, blither, bosh, bull [slang], bunk, bunkum, claptrap, codswallop [British], crapola [slang], crock, drivel, drool, fiddle-faddle, fiddlesticks, flapdoodle, folderol, folly, foolishness, garbage, guff, hogwash, hokeypokey, hokum, hoodoo, hooey, horsefeathers [slang], humbuggery, jazz, nonsense, muck, nuts, piffle, poppycock, rot, rubbish, senselessness, silliness, slush, stupidity, taradiddle, tommyrot, tosh, trash, trumpery, twaddle. That certainly is a bunch of malarkey. Hope I did not miss any.

Unique Honda Commercial

This is a unique commercial that I might actually watch without changing stations or muting. It is about all the products Honda makes and is done with paper folding.

Here is a video of how they put it together. It was done without animation, just people and paper. A fun two minutes LINK.

Cisco Internet Predictions 2015

Each year Cisco gets its best and brightest minds together to make some predictions. The following are for the 2015 predictions.

Annual global IP (internet) traffic will surpass the zettabyte (1000 exabytes) threshold in 2016, and the two zettabyte threshold in 2019.

Global IP traffic has increased more than fivefold in the past 5 years, and will increase nearly threefold over the next 5 years. Overall, IP traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23 percent to 2019.

Content delivery networks will carry 62% of Internet traffic by 2019, up from 39 percent in 2014.

Over half of all IP traffic will originate with non-PC devices by 2019, up from 40 percent in 2014.

Personal computer-originated traffic will grow at a CAGR of just 9 percent, while TVs, tablets, smartphones, and machine-to-machine (M2M) modules will have traffic growth rates of 17 percent, 65 percent, 62 percent, and 71 percent, respectively.

By 2019, Wi-Fi and mobile devices will account for 66 percent of IP traffic and wired devices will account for just 33 percent.

Global Internet traffic in 2019 will be equivalent to 64 times the volume of the entire global Internet in 2005.

The number of devices connected to IP networks will be three times the global population in 2019.

By 2019, global fixed broadband speeds will reach 43 Mbps, up from 20 Mbps in 2014.

It would take an individual over 5 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks each month in 2019. Every second, nearly a million minutes of video content will cross the network by 2019.

Population Density

If everyone lived as densely as they do in Manhattan, the whole human race could fit in New Zealand. If everyone lived as densely as they do in Manilla, the human race could fit in Tunisia. If everyone lived as densely as they do in Canada, we would need fourteen globes to fit the human race.

Zipf's Law

During 1949, the American linguist George Zipf noticed something odd about how often people use words in a given language. He found that a small number of words are used all the time, while the vast majority are used rarely. He ranked the words in order of popularity and a striking pattern emerged. The number one ranked word was always used twice as often as the second rank word, and three times as often as the third rank, and on, into the thousands with the same frequency.

In American English text, "the" is the most frequently occurring word, and accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences (69,971 out of slightly over 1 million). The second-place word "of" accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36,411 occurrences), followed by "and" (28,852). Only 135 vocabulary items are needed to account for half the most common words used. The Zipf principle also holds true for other languages.

He did not claim to have originated it. The French stenographer Jean-Baptiste Estoup and German physicist Felix Auerbach called this a rank vs. frequency rule, and found that it could also be used to describe corporation sizes, income rankings, ranks of number of people watching the same TV channel, popularity of opening chess moves, etc.

Later dubbed Zipf's law, the rank vs. frequency rule also works if you apply it to the sizes of cities. The city with the largest population in any country is generally twice as large as the next-biggest, and so on. Zipf's law for cities has held true for every country in the world, for the past century.

It almost streamlines the Pareto Principle, which describes the 80/20 rule, such as 20% of the actions represent 80% of the consequences. Twenty percent of the customers represent eighty percent of the profits, etc. I presume 80% of you enjoy most of this stuff and 20% tolerate it, with hopes of enjoying some part.

Chinese Glass Suspension Bridge

China's first high-altitude suspension bridge made of GLASS opened in Hunan.

The 984 foot (300-meter) long bridge spans the gap between two cliffs at the Shiniuzhai National Geological Park in Pingjiang County. It's 590 feet (180 meters) to the ground below. The glass floor panels are 24mm (about .9 inch) thick and 25 times stronger than normal glass. Click the link to see pictures.  LINK

Moms and Dads

A word extremely similar to “mom” occurs in almost every language on Earth and they are surprisingly similar across nearly all of the most commonly spoken languages. For example, if you wanted to address your mother in Dutch you would say “moeder”, in Germany “mutter”, in Italy “madre”. Here are a few more:
Chinese: Mãma
Hindi: Mam
Afrikaans: Ma
Swahili: Mama
French: Mère, Maman
Irish: Máthair
Italian: Madre, Mamma
Norwegian: Madre
Spanish: Madre, Mamá, Mami
Ukrainian: Mati
Romanian: Mama, Maica
Russian: Mat'
Welsh: Mam
Yiddish: Muter

The word “Papa” is present in several languages including Russian, Hindi, Spanish and English, while slight variations appear in German (Papi), Icelandic (Pabbi), Swedish (Pappa) and a number of other languages. In Turkish, Greek, Swahili, Malay and several other languages the word for dad is “Baba” or a variation of it.

It has been observed that babies, regardless of where in the world they are born, naturally learn to make the same few sounds as they begin to learn to speak. It has also been noted that during the babbling stage, babies will create what is known as “protowords” by combining combinations of consonants and vowels. These protowords are consistent across different cultures. The words babies make in this early babbling stage tend to use the softer contestants like B, P and M, often leading to the creation of otherwise non-words like baba, papa, and mama by the children.

It is theorized that since these are often the first sounds babies are able to make consistently, parents tended to use them to refer to themselves, which explains why words like “mama”, “papa,” “dada”, “tata” and “baba” are present in so many languages as a way of addressing parents.

These sounds are usually less complex to say than parent’s real names. Popular belief among many is the gibberish phrase da-da may have transposed to the use of the word Dad. Aroana tadi, Aztec tahtil, ta, Basque aita (father) and aitatxo (dad) and  aitaita  (grandfather),  Czech, Irish and Latin daid, German Vati, Greek tata, Inca tayta, Inuit ataatak, Hungarian atya, Polish tatus, Quechua tayta, Rumanian tata,  Russian dyadya, Sanskrit Tatah, Sumerian ada, Tagalog tatay, Turkish ata, Welsh tad.

Old English fæder, Proto-Germanic fader, Old Saxon fadar, Old Frisian feder, Dutch vader, Old Norse faðir, Old High German fatar, German vater, Greek pater, Latin pater, Old Persian pita. Seems children are very intelligent. They teach us to use the names they give us.

Free Friday Thought

Happy Friday

Listen hard, speak soft, and laugh with reckless abandon.

This is always my motto, especially for enjoying a Happy Friday!

Johnny Appleseed Day

On Saturday Sep 26 we celebrate the guy who introduced apple trees to large parts of Pennsylvania, Ontario, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and West Virginia. He became an American legend while still alive, due to his kind, generous ways, his leadership in conservation, and the symbolic importance he attributed to apples.

National Drink Beer Day

It is celebrated on Monday, September 28, 2015. Not to be confused with National Beer Day an unofficial holiday in the United States celebrated every year on April 7, celebrating the day in 1933, the first day in 13 years, that people could legally buy, sell, and drink beer.

The best way to celebrate Drink Beer Day is to gather a group of friends for a beer tasting at home or at your favorite pub. Be sure to check for promotions and giveaways that might be going on in your area.

What's in a Name, Starbucks

Seems appropriate when talking about coffee to add this tidbit from Starbucks. “The name, inspired by Moby Dick evoked the romance of the high seas and the seafaring tradition of the early coffee traders. Our mission to inspire and nurture the human spirit.”

During 1971, when Starbucks was first coming to be, it was searching for a way to capture the seafaring history of coffee and Seattle’s strong seaport roots. The owners read old marine books. They found a 16th century Norse woodcut of a twin-tailed mermaid, or Siren. There was something about her – a seductive mystery mixed with a nautical theme that was exactly what the founders were looking for. The logo was designed around her, and their long relationship with the Siren began. Lofty goals, a mermaid, and coffee are all good ways to start a Friday.

Stumptown

Stumptown is one of several nicknames for Portland, Oregon. In the mid-19th century, the city's growth led residents to clear much land of trees quickly, but the tree stumps were not immediately removed. In some areas, there were so many stumps that people would jump from stump to stump in order to avoid the muddy, unpaved roads.

The nickname is used in the names of several local businesses, including Stumptown Coffee Roasters, an independent coffee roaster and retailer located in Portland; StumpTown Kilts, a maker of men's and women's modern kilts; Stumptown (comics), a creator-owned detective fiction comic book series set in Portland.

Portland-based Stumptown Coffee offers its cold-brew coffee on nitro at Stumptown Cafes and wholesale to businesses that it distributes to. It looks like a beer, has the creamy mouth feel of a stout, and is available at the bar.

Austin, Texas-based Cuvee Coffee Roastery’s Black and Blue has a cold-brewed coffee that mimics the frothiness of a Guinness the same way they do it in Dublin: with nitrogen. It is the first to make the coffee available in widget cans. When opened, these cans agitate their contents and produce a creamy texture in much the same way a can of Guinness does.