Nov 12, 2009

Target

Check out Target's Black Friday sales for $3 toasters, coffee pots, crock pots, and sandwich makers. Digital picture frames for $29. HDTV LCD 1080p 40 inch $449.  Wow, it is really pushing for traffic this year.

Picnic Truck

Who couldn't use one of these for the ultimate tailgater. It has a BBQ grill, a beer tap, an ice box, a 42″ HDTV and a kick butt sound system.  Toyota is at it again.

Nov 6, 2009

Fun With Words

Here is a fun sight for those who like anagrams, crossword puzzles, or just word games. Type in a word and you get a definition, words found within the word, anagrams, words beginning and ending with the word, words beginning with the same letters, etc. Handy reference site to put in your bookmarks.

Here is another site, Ninja - a dictionary for your iphone.

Bus Stop

Here is a unique bus stop. It is in England. Seems the woman did not like the looks of the stop in front of her house, so she decorated it herself.

Quotable

Men do not make beds when they get up for the same reason they do not tie their shoes when they take them off, to make it is easy to get back into.

Nov 5, 2009

Healthcare Bill

I just finished reading the healthcare bill, HR3962 or the Affordable Health Care for America Act.

Have attached a link to my 19 page summary for those who might be interested in a snapshot view that you won't get from TV or the newspaper.

Click on the link below. It is best viewed in full screen mode. Comments welcome.


Shubnell_latest_healthcare_bill_summary

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

Most people think that a coin toss is completely random and the odds of it landing on heads or tails is equal.  Recently, a three-person team of Stanford and UC-Santa Cruz researchers produced a study that challenges conventional wisdom.

The researchers concluded that a coin is more likely to land facing the same side on which it started. If tails is facing up when the coin is on your thumb, it is more likely to land tails up.

They used a high-speed camera that photographed people flipping coins and found that from 51 to 60 percent of the time, depending on the flipping motion of the individual, it landed on the side that was facing up when the flip began.

Most people count how a coin lands, but do not check how it started and that has led to some common misconceptions. It is also not how high a coin is flipped or other variables, such as wind speed, air temperature, phase of the moon, or size or the weight of the coin. Knowing how it starts slightly increases the odds in your favor.

The researchers used the camera to show that coins flipped from a thumb don't just rotate around their axis, but they also spin like a Frisbee and that is caused by the motion of the thumb. They found that there is always bias and some people have more bias than others due to the way they flip, but the bias is always toward the side facing up before the flip.

The landing surface also has an influence, like a hard surface changes the equation. Bottom line call it as you see it and always for a soft surface, like grass. I wonder how many coins they spent paying for this 'scientific research'?

Quotable

Did you ever stop to think that worrying works? 90% of the things you worry about never happen.

Jack Benny

Jack Benny was born Benjamin Kubelsky in Chicago on Valentine’s Day, 1894. His parents lived in nearby Waukegan. Jack worked there as a violinist in the pit band of a local Vaudeville house and that was his beginning in show business.

He toured working with a female pianist in an act known as "Salisbury and Kubelsky - From Grand Opera to Ragtime", but when concert violinist Jan Kubelik’s lawyer objected to the comedic violin-playing and similarities in name, Benjamin changed his name to Ben Benny.


With a new partner, “Benny and Woods” continued, but when World War I broke out, Benny enlisted, working in a Navy-sponsored revue touring the Midwest. After the war, Benny went back to vaudeville, doing a monologue as “Ben K. Benny, Fiddleology and Fun.”

Although he changed the spelling to “Bennie,” Ben Bernie, an entertainer (also a violinist-bandleader who did monologues), had been doing a similar act longer, so his lawyer contacted young Kubelsky objecting to the similar names. This time, Benjamin changed his stage name for the last time to Jack Benny.