Did
you know there is only one state in the United States that has a
non rectangular shaped flag? The flag starts wider on the left, getting narrower
on the right side. Instead of a straight edge on the right, it
has two points. It is
red, white, and blue, with five red-and-white stripes on the
right side.
The left side has a
dark blue triangle, in the center of which is a red-and-white
circle surrounded by 17 white stars. The 13 stars surrounding the circle pay
homage to the original 13 colonies, and the four stars to the
right of it bring the number up to 17, representing Ohio’s
admission to the Union as the 17th state. The large
blue triangle represents Ohio's hills and valleys, and the
stripes represent roads and waterways. The circle in the center
evokes the “O” for Ohio, in addition to slightly resembling a
buckeye seed (since Ohio is “the Buckeye State”).
You can smile to be happy and you can be
happy to smile.
I practice vice and versa,
especially on a Happy Friday.
Never one to miss an opportunity, this week Amazon added a special
area on its site to sell Shark Tank items. More than 70 products that
successfully received funding from Sharks during seasons 1-9 are
now available. This collaboration coincides with the premiere of
Shark Tank season 10. Reminds me of the “as seen on TV” items in
stores. LINK
The
Aldi name is a syllabic abbreviation for Albrecht Diskont
(Discount)
Aldi is two different companies: Aldi Nord and Aldi Sud, or
North and South. During the 1960s, Theo and Karl Albrecht could
not agree on whether or not they were going to allow their
stores to sell cigarettes. They came up with an interesting
solution; instead of compromising they divided the company in
half.
There is a line that
runs across Germany known as the "Aldi equator" and Theo took
the north while Karl took the south. You can tell the difference
by looking at the logo: Nord's logo is a basic blue and white,
Sud's logo is orange and blue. The southern Aldi is a bit
fancier. When it came time to expand to the rest of the world,
other countries were also divided. Stores in areas like the UK,
Ireland, and Australia are all Aldi Sud, while Aldi Nord took
France and Poland.
There is only one
country where Aldi Nord and Aldi Sud share pieces of the grocery
store pie, and that is in the US. Aldi Sud, with its blue and
orange logo does business as Aldi, and Aldi Nord uses another
name, Trader Joe's.
This year, 2018 Aldi and Kohl's announced Kohl's will sublet
space to Aldi in limited stores in the US.
Texas is larger than any country in Europe which is not
Russia.
Russia makes up 40% of the total area of Europe,
The population of China is significantly larger than the
combined populations of South America (385,7 mil), North America
(529 mil) and Australia (31.26mil).
The Pacific Ocean covers a larger area than all land masses of
Earth combined.
The average depth of oceans water is about 3.8 kilometers (2.4
miles). Maximum depths can exceed 10 kilometers (6.2 miles).
Washington Monument may be more famous, but things are bigger in
Texas. The San Jacinto Monument of La Porte, Texas is 15-feet
taller than the monument in DC and is the tallest stone column
structure and war monument in the world. It is 9.6 feet (2.9 m)
taller than the next tallest, the Juche Tower in North Korea.
Amarillo, Texas is home to 90% of the entire world’s helium
reserves.
Texas is home to the largest bat colony in the world, Bracken
Cave has over 20 million bats. The city of Austin is also home
to the largest urban bat colony on the continent.
Dallas Cowboys may be America’s team, but they have not played
football in the city of Dallas since 1971.
Salvino D’Armate an Italian likely invented wearable
eyeglasses towards the end of the 13th century. The earliest
differed from modern eyeglasses, because they did not have the
arms hooking behind the ears, and the lenses were only for
hyperopia (farsightedness). Lenses for myopia (nearsightedness)
were invented during the 15th century. Of course people did not
know how silly they looked, because mirrors were not invented
until 1835 by German chemist Justus von Liebig.
Incidentally, Benjamin
Franklin invented bifocals, not glasses as many wrongly believe.
Also, Leonardo da Vinci during 1508 produced the first known
sketches that suggested the optics of the human eye could be
altered by placing the cornea directly in contact with water as
with contact lenses.
During 1971 the first commercial microprocessor
was 1,000 times bigger than today’s when it was released.
During 2007, the state-of-the-art for Intel was 3.3 million
transistors per square millimeter. Now in 2018, 100 Million
Transistors are in each square millimeter.
Intel has just announced the first microchip that contains more
than two billion transistors - tiny switches that together
perform the calculations in computers.
As of 2017, the largest transistor count in a commercially
available single-chip processor is 19.2 billion— AMD's
Ryzen-based Epyc. In other types of ICs, such as
field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), Intel's (previously
Altera) Stratix 10 has the largest transistor count, containing
over 30 billion transistors
Intel has just announced the first microchip that contains more
than two billion transistors. The chip, known as Tukwila, marks
a milestone in chip density technology.
Meanwhile software
bloat diminishes the amazing hardware changes and common laptop
computers still lag as they did a number of years ago. Just as
with TVs, hardware is progressing faster than our ability to
take advantage of it.
Intel's latest chips, based on Kaby Lake,
are made using a 14-nanometer process, and the company is now
moving to 10-nm with its upcoming Cannonlake chip, which was
shown in a PC at CES 2017.
14 nm – 2014 still
using in 2018
10 nm – 2017 (now 2019)
7 nm – 2018 (7nm pilot plant set in 2017 to determine how to
make in volume)
5 nm – 2020
Incidentally, to offer
perspective, nano means one-billionth, so one nanometer (nm) is
one-billionth of a meter (3.2 feet). There are 25,400,000
nanometers in one inch. A strand of human DNA is 2.5 nanometers
in diameter. A human hair is approximately 80,000 - 100,000
nanometers wide.
A carat is a unit of
weight for diamonds, other gemstones, and pearls. One carat
equals 200 milligrams (0.200 grams).
A caret is a
proofreader's mark showing where something needs to be inserted
in a document. It shaped like a tiny pitched roof ^.
A karat is a
measure of purity when referring to gold. You may have seen
different types of jewelry referred to as 14-karat gold or
18-karat gold. Pure gold is known as 24-karat gold. Gold is a
fairly soft metal, so it is not often used to make jewelry.
Jewelry made of pure gold can be easily bent and scratched, so
gold is often mixed with other metals, such as copper or silver,
to form an alloy that can be used to make jewelry. A karat is
equal to 1/24 pure gold, so an 18-karat gold ring would be made
with 18 parts gold and 6 parts of another metal.
The orange vegetable carrot, that grows down into the ground is completely
unrelated.
To pull out all the stops means to make a
great effort to achieve something. The origin came from organs.
Organ consoles have knobs that are called ‘stops’. Without them
the organist can play at a much higher volume, so ‘pulling out
all the stops’ would let the organist achieve maximum volume.
With all of the stops pushed in, there is no air movement, so
there is no sound. Strategically pulling out stops allows the
organist to influence the quality of the sound. Pulling out all
of the stops activates all of the pipe sets, so it results in a
very full sound, and maximum volume.
Speaking of pulling out all the stops, watch this robot twerk.
One minute diversion to get your heart pumping. LINK
A while back, a friend of mine Marilyn asked
about the very high college coach salaries and are they worth
it.
A head football coach
is more impactful on the success of that team than virtually any
other coaching position in sports. Some of their duties include:
recruiting his players,
calculating what their future growth and maturity rates are,
assemble a huge staff of talented assistants, deal with young
people going through many emotional challenges, put together
winning offensive and defensive schemes, and deal with the
administration alumni and press. The monetary effect of
producing packed stadium, alumni contributions, and huge
television contracts are all a function of winning.
Regarding whether they
are worth it, we must consider college sports as a business,
which it is. For instance, USA Today reported Texas A&M’s athletic revenues
totaled $192 million, the most of any school in the nation. Its
coach is receiving 7.5 million dollars a year. From a business
standpoint, it appears to be appropriate. When looked upon in
the larger landscape of the success of an athletics program,
coaches can be seen as the centerpiece
Ticket sales,
advertising deals, merchandise sales, licensing agreements all
increase by millions of dollars each year when the football
program is winning and playing at a top level. Lucrative deals
and extensions with Nike, Adidas, or Under Armour heavily depend
upon the success of football.
This, of course does
not answer the question of whether colleges should be in the
business of sports vs. providing education.
A few examples of
contracts below:
Alabama head coach Nick
Saban signed a three-year contract extension in May that will
pay the five-time national champion $11.125 million in 2017,
according to USA Today. The deal, which is worth $65 million
over eight years, made Saban the highest paid college coach
across all sports. Record at Alabama: 119-19 in 11 seasons -
National championships: 5 total (2003 at LSU; 2009, 2011, 2012,
2015 at Alabama)
Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh made $7 million in 2017. Record
at Michigan: 20-6 in three seasons
Ohio State head coach Urban Meyer made $6 million in 2017.
Record at Ohio State: 61-6 in six seasons - National
championships: 1 at Ohio State (3 total)
Penn State coach James Franklin signed a contract extension that
guarantees him $34.7 million through 2022, bringing his annual
base salary to $5.78 million (up from $4.6 million) with up to
$1 million in incentives. Record at Penn State: 25-15 in four
seasons
Florida State head coach Jimbo Fisher made $5.3 million in 2017
and will make
$75 million over 10 years at Texas A&M. His record at
Florida State: 78-17 in eight seasons. National championships: 1
Clemson coach Dabo Swinney inked a new deal that runs through
2021 and brings his average annual salary up to $5.125 million.
Record at Clemson: 89-28 - National championships: 1
New Texas Longhorns coach Tom Herman signed a five-year deal
worth $5 million per year, according to the Dallas Morning News.
Texas A&M coach Kevin Sumlin made $5 million in 2017. Record
at Texas A&M: 44-21 in six seasons
Auburn coach Gus Malzahn signed a four-year extension in 2016
that will pay him $4.725 million per year. Record at Auburn:
35-18 in five seasons
Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz
signed a contract extension in 2016 that brought his base salary
up to $4.5 million annually.
If you
want to watch a show, but do not know where to find it, you
can search the word “watch” followed by the name of the show
in Google and it will show you all the sites and service from
which it is available.
Smile and everyone
becomes your mirror.
I always smile and
collect smiles back, especially on a Happy Friday!
The sock and buskin are the two masks, usually
seen together that symbolize the world of theater/drama or
comedians and actors. They represent the ancient symbols of comedy
and tragedy.
In Greek theater, actors in tragic roles wore a boot called a
buskin that elevated them above the other actors. The actors
with comedic roles wore a thin soled shoe called a sock.
Interesting to know that street buskers, although entertainers,
get their name from a different source, busk
from Italian buscare to
procure, gain, or from Spanish buscar
to look for. The term is not related to the buskin mask above.
LINK
