Oct 9, 2015
Selfie Mania
Taking selfies
has killed more people so far during 2015 than shark attacks (12
to 8). The majority have actually been tourists trying to take
pictures of themselves in unfamiliar places. There has also been a
noticeable increased incidence of pedestrian accidents due to
people looking down at their phone screens while attempting to
walk. I presume there is some overlap with those who also had
difficulty walking while chewing gum.
Condom Facts
For most of their history, condoms have
been used both as a method of birth control, and as a protective
measure against sexually transmitted diseases. Condoms have been
made from a variety of materials. Prior to the 19th century,
chemically treated linen and animal intestine or bladder were
used. The oldest condoms ever excavated were found in a cesspit
located in the grounds of Dudley Castle and were made from animal
membrane, the condoms dated back to as early as 1640s. Condoms
during the Renaissance were made out of intestines and bladder.
Cleaned and prepared intestine for use in glove making had been
sold commercially since at least the 13th century.
The story of the Earl of Condom, a knighted personal physician to England’s King Charles II in the mid-1600’s, who was requested to produce a method to protect the King from syphilis is completely false.
The story of the Earl of Condom, a knighted personal physician to England’s King Charles II in the mid-1600’s, who was requested to produce a method to protect the King from syphilis is completely false.
Oct 2, 2015
Happy Friday
Contentment may be the bread, but happiness is the wine of life.
I love to break bread, pour happiness, and share with friends on a Happy Friday!
I love to break bread, pour happiness, and share with friends on a Happy Friday!
World Smile Day
Today, October 2, 2015 we celebrate World
Smile Day. It is always celebrated on the first Friday in
October. Show the world a big smile and use #WorldSmileDay to
post on social media.
The idea of World Smile Day was initiated by Harvey Ball, a commercial artist from Worcester, Massachusetts. He created the Smiley Face in 1963. The World’s first World Smile Day was held in the year 1999 and has been held annually since.
After Harvey died in 2001, the “Harvey Ball World Smile Foundation” was created to honor his name and memory. The slogan of the Smile Foundation is “improving this world, one smile at a time.” The Foundation continues as the official sponsor of World Smile Day each year. Likely no coincidence this year it happens on a Happy Friday. Harvey wants us to have a ball.
The idea of World Smile Day was initiated by Harvey Ball, a commercial artist from Worcester, Massachusetts. He created the Smiley Face in 1963. The World’s first World Smile Day was held in the year 1999 and has been held annually since.
After Harvey died in 2001, the “Harvey Ball World Smile Foundation” was created to honor his name and memory. The slogan of the Smile Foundation is “improving this world, one smile at a time.” The Foundation continues as the official sponsor of World Smile Day each year. Likely no coincidence this year it happens on a Happy Friday. Harvey wants us to have a ball.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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