There is a statue in England that stands over 26 feet tall and
is made from over 100,000 knives. It is titled the Knife Angel.
The sculpture was constructed at the Shropshire-based British
Ironworks Centre to raise awareness about knife crime in the
United Kingdom. It is claimed to be Britain's biggest monument
against violence and aggression ever created.
The sculptor, Alfie
Bradley, spent two years designing and building the sculpture
which features police and personal donated knives, many of which
were used in violent crimes all over England and Wales. Families
affected by knife crime, police officers, politicians,
celebrities, community leaders, and ex-gang members welded their
own knives on the sculpture as a symbolical gesture.
Families of those lost to knife violence can engrave a message
onto one of the sculpture’s thousands of blades. The sculptor
hopes to get it placed in Trafalgar square in London to raise
awareness of violence and aggression and as a national tribute
to victims of knife crime.
Inflammable and flammable are two words that are frequently
misinterpreted. Some people mistake the words as having opposite
meanings. In reality, flammable and inflammable mean exactly the
same thing—capable of burning.
Inflammable precedes
the word flammable and has always meant 'tends to catch fire
easily'.
The US National Fire
Protection Association urged Americans during the 1920s to start
using the word flammable to avoid confusion, because they
thought people may mistake inflammable as meaning not being able
to burn. Flammable has since become the preferred alternative on
warning labels.
Incidentally, non-flammable
is the opposite, meaning not flammable.
LTE is an acronym for Long Term Evolution, basically a term,
along with 4G (fourth generation) for phone signal speeds. Open
Signal's latest report on the status of LTE networks indicates
that the United States ranks fourth in overall LTE availability,
with 86.5% of people able to access an LTE signal.
However, LTE service in the States is slower than fifty eight
other countries worldwide. The report ranking the United States
fifty-ninth of seventy seven countries in terms of average
downstream speeds at around 15 Mbps. Most other studies also
indicate that United States citizens pay more money for 4G LTE
wireless broadband than most other developed countries. So, it
is more available, more costly, and less speed. Seems like,
in the US greed beats speed.
Lieutenant-Colonel
John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming "Mad Jack" Churchill, of
the British Army is regarded as one the greatest warriors of
all time. Prior to his service in WW2, Churchill
was the archery champion of Great Britain and represented
his country in the world championships.
During World War II he recorded what is
thought to be the last confirmed bow and arrow kill in modern
warfare, killing a Nazi NCO in France in 1940. The archery
shot signaled the rest of his men to launch an attack on the
Nazi patrol.
To signal the start of a raid on a German
garrison in Norway in 1941, Churchill leapt out his position
playing “March of the Cameron Men” on the bagpipes before
tossing a grenade at the enemy position and getting into the
fight.
He fought throughout the entirety of World
War II armed with a longbow, arrows, and a Scottish
broadsword. In July 1943, he led his commando unit from their
landing site in Sicily with his broadsword hanging from his
belt, his longbow and arrows around his neck, and his bagpipes
under his arm. After infiltrating the town, he took 42 men
prisoner, including a mortar squad.
When the war was over, Churchill remarked,
“If it wasn’t for those damn Yanks, we could have kept the war
going another 10 years.
Two things all the experts agree on for a succulent burger are
simple; good meat and do not mess with it while cooking.
1: Start with meat that is not too lean, 80/20 is good. A juicy
burger needs fat content to be juicy. Lean meat is, by
definition lean and that means less fat. Less fat means drier
burger.
2: Do not press the burger. Let it cook. Pressing the meat
presses the juices out and they stay on the grill or in the pan,
not in the meat.
Everything else, like salt, pepper, other condiments, trimmings,
toppings are all a matter of taste. Bottom line, beauty and
taste are individual preferences, but juiciness is in the
meat.
Attitude is a practiced
art.
Practice a positive
attitude especially on a Happy Friday!
It is happening to all of us again this weekend. That silly time
old and futile political tradition of trying to control time.
Australia changed October 1. Europe and others began changing
clocks Oct 27, 28, and 29. For most of the US, Sunday Nov 5, 2am
is the time to set your clock back. Fiji and Tonga set theirs
ahead one hour.
The biannual time
change was originally implemented to save energy. Yet dozens of
studies around the world have found that changing the clocks has
either minuscule or non-existent effects on energy use. In
addition, current research suggests the time change can be
harmful to our health and cost us money.
Following the 1973 oil
embargo, the US Congress extended the DST period to 10 months in
1974 and 8 months in 1975, in an effort to save energy. After
the energy crisis was over in 1976, the DST schedule in the US
was revised several times. From 1987 to 2006, the country
observed DST for about 7 months each year.
Arizona does not
observe daylight saving, but some Indian tribes within the state
do. In fact, if driving a route from the Arizona state border
through both Navajo and Hopi areas to the other side, a person
can end up changing clocks 7 times. For example: Tuba City
(Navajo) and Moenkopi (Hopi) are only a few miles apart, but
they have a 1-hour time difference during the summer. Jeddito
(Navajo), in the middle of Hopi Nation territory, is 1 hour
ahead of the surrounding areas during summer.
If a baby is born at 11
p.m. in California and another baby is born at 2 a.m. in New
York, they have different birthdays even though they were born
simultaneously.
The extra flap of skin and fatty tissue that is under the
chin of a female rabbit is called a dewlap. The dewlap tends to
appear when female rabbits have reached the age when they can
begin to reproduce. The dewlap provides a place where the female
can pull out her own fur and use it to line her nest. The nest
is where she will sleep as well as produce and raise her
offspring.
Psycho is a genre-defining movie, regarded as one of the finest
psychological horror films of all time. The film broke new
ground in several ways.
It was also the first
film to show a toilet flushing on screen. The censors objected
to it and tried have the toilet scene removed, but Hitchcock
objected. They eventually gave up trying to fix the film and let
the toilet flush be shown. Interesting that the offending flush takes place about forty
seconds before a character is brutally stabbed to death in a
shower while completely naked.
Incidentally, Alfred
Hitchcock staged the shower murder scene in such a way
the censors could not find a specific shot that broke
the censor's rules.
Before streaming and YouTube, stickers, such as 'Explicit
Content' were considered a death sentence for certain albums as
they effectively prevented them from being sold by large chains
of stores that wanted to project a family friendly image. One
store went a bit far and put an
'explicit lyrics' sticker on an all instrumental album.
Albums could be slapped
with an explicit lyrics sticker for containing a single
objectionable lyric. Frank Zappa holds the dubious honor of
being the only artist known to have received a parental warning
sticker for explicit lyrics on an entirely instrumental album.
The Jazz from Hell
album contains no lyrics. It does contain a track titled G-Spot
Tornado. This was enough for the Fred Meyer chain of stores to
put an explicit lyrics warning label on the album even though
the entire album is lyric-less. It appears that some doth
protest too much.
According to 2012 US Census data, 74 percent of people living in
Pennsylvania were born there. In addition, just 63 percent of
New Yorkers, 61 percent of Texans,
and 54 percent of
Californians, were born in the state in which they
currently resided.
Captcha comes from "Completely Automated Public Turing test to
tell Computers and Humans Apart". It is used by web sites to
distinguish human web users from robot spammers.
Recently, in just minutes, an artificially intelligent machine
cracked ond of those jumbled text sequences. The smart machine
can be trained in a matter of minutes using just a few hundred
example characters, researchers said. It works with multiple
different styles of captcha and can also be re-purposed to
identify handwritten digits, recognize text in photos of
real-world scenarios, and detect non-text objects in images.
That is because the company designed the system to mimic the way
the brain identifies objects after seeing just a few examples
and recognize them in strange new configurations.
Text-based captchas as above work, because unlike humans,
computers struggle to recognize the distorted and partially
hidden characters that make them up. Though many current
machine-learning systems that can solve them exist, they must be
trained on millions of images to work.
Many websites have
moved away from text-based captchas, and are using image-based
tests and data on mouse movements, or cookies to analyze whether
users are human or machine. Some captchas are also difficult for
humans to accurately decipher on first try.
You
cannot hide true happiness any more than you can turn off
sunlight.
Every day let your happiness shine through, especially on a
Happy Friday!
It is football time of the year and I dug up some interesting
statics that go far beyond the typical yards gained, passes
thrown, etc.
The average NFL game
lasts about 3 hours and 11 minutes, but has about 11 minutes of
actual game play. The 60-minute game clock in football can run
when the ball is not in play. That means much of game time is
spent standing around, walking, huddling up before each play
begins, etc.
The 11 minutes of
action was calculated a few years ago by the Wall Street
Journal. It actually averages out to between 11 and 14 minutes
of play. (Counting from the snap of the football to when the
play is whistled dead.)
An average game has
more than 20 breaks containing over 100 commercials.
Its analysis found that an average NFL broadcast spent more time
on replays (17 minutes) than live play. The majority of time (75
minutes) was spent watching players, coaches, and referees
essentially wandering around the field.
An average play in the
NFL lasts just four seconds and NFL teams average between 64
and120 plays per game.
If you take the
highest paid star, Matthew Stafford, Detroit Lions and his 2017
salary of $27,000,000 and divide it by game minutes played per
season of 16 games - 6 * 11= 176 minutes, $27 million divided by
176 minutes comes out to $153, 409.09 per minute of play - not
bad. (Of course this presumes no playoff games for them, which
is usually a safe assumption for the Lions.)
The hundreds of
millions paid by advertisers to networks and the hundreds of
millions paid by viewers to networks and the hundreds of
millions paid to teams and players cannot be calculated
according to minutes played as we and they are also paying for
the rest of the twaddle, not just the game.
Incidentally,
Baseball: Per a 2013 WSJ study, Baseball games feature 17
minutes and 58 seconds of action.
Basketball: Since the clock only runs when the ball is in
play, there is exactly 48 minutes of play time.
Soccer: Per the Soccerbythenumbers.com website 2011
study, between 57 and 65 minutes of ball-in-play action is
seen on average in the major European pro leagues per game.
Hockey: Average play time is 60 minutes.
