May 19, 2010

Bacon Roses

Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? It would if it was bacon.

Famous Drummers

This is for the oldies in the bunch. In the summer of 1969, the New York Post Office received a letter with no address other than "The World's Greatest Drummer."

With no return address, the sorter wasn't sure what to do. Fortunately, a former drummer worked in that post office. He found Gene Krupa's address and forwarded the letter to him.

Krupa read the envelope and thought, "This isn't for me" and forwarded it to Max Roach. Roach thought, "Somebody must have made a mistake" and forwarded it to Buddy Rich, renown for his incredible ego. Grinning from ear to ear, he ripped open the envelope and it began, "Dear Ringo. . ."

Lost Cursor

Have you ever been looking at a page on the screen and forgot where the cursor was. Here is a trick, hit the CTRL (Control) key on the right or left bottom row of your keyboard and a big circle shows up where the cursor is. If it doesn't work, go to the control panel, click on mouse, then mouse pointer options, then click on the box that says "show location of pointer when I press the CTRL key'.

May 16, 2010

Top Nine Uses for Coffee Filters


Clean windows and mirrors, because they are lint-free and leave windows sparkling.

Cover bowls or dishes when cooking in the microwave.

If you break the cork when opening a wine bottle, filter the wine through a coffee filter.

Coffee filters make convenient wrappers for messy foods, like tacos.

Keep in the bathroom for razor nick fixers or strips for waxed eyebrows.

Prevent a popsicle from dripping, poke a hole as needed in a coffee filter.

Put a few in a plate to soak up grease from fried bacon, french fries, chicken fingers, etc.

Line a plant pot with a coffee filter to prevent the soil from going through the drainage holes.

Place chopped ingredients in a coffee filter on a kitchen scale to weigh.

How Many Emails

Did you know that everyday 247 billion emails are sent. By 2013 it will reach 507 billion emails sent every day. Gee, I hope my Friday Thoughts don't get lost in the pile.

How Much Weight Can You Lift

In the heaviest dead lift recorded, British weightlifter Andy Bolton lifted 457.5 kilograms (1,008 pounds) from the floor to his thigh.

What is the maximum weight a human could ever lift? Todd Schroeder at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles thinks we are already close to the maximum. "If you look over time at the records for maximal lifts, they have crept up but are starting to plateau," he says. "Today's weightlifters, including those that use steroids, are near the limit of human potential."

It is the muscles that set the limit. When something does give way, it is usually the muscle fibers that tear, often near the tendon. It is control of the muscles that gives weightlifters their advantage. The body has natural inhibitory mechanisms designed to keep us from hurting ourselves by trying to lift too much. These work by controlling how many muscle fibers are activated at any one time. Weightlifters learn to suppress these signals, enabling them to use a larger fraction of the muscle's potential in lifting.

The key to success is training and genetics plays a role. Short limbs favor strength and some people have more muscle fibers than others.

Rosetta Books


For those of you with little children or grandchildren, Rosetta has been adding books to its online library HERE. They are free full color copies of the original children's books and very interesting to see and read.
Maybe grandpa can get out his iPad and read a nighttime story from the original book, with pictures. You might call it high tech retro.

Staying Awake Too Long

Rats that are continuously kept awake, die after two weeks and that is less time than it takes them to starve to death.

Human theory is when you finally run out of body fat, protein, and carbohydrates, your body runs out of energy and stops functioning. However, fat people would only be able to survive that long if they had enough vital water-soluble B vitamins in their system to help metabolize fat stores. So it is possible that a person could die of starvation and still be fat.

The longest recorded starvation was by the Irish hunger-striker Kieran Doherty in 1981, who died after fasting for 73 days.

With a supply of vitamins and water, people have been known to survive over a year without eating.

With vitamins but without water, survival time is sharply reduced. A human can be expected to survive for weeks without food, but a thirsty person deprived of water might only last a matter of days. Without water, the volume of blood in your body drops, and with it your blood pressure. Blood becomes thicker and stickier, making it harder to pump around the body, so your heart rate increases to compensate. Even in a cool environment, you wouldn't last for more than a week without water. Hmmm, a week without bacon might possibly kill a person, also.

May 11, 2010

Tennessee Bumper Sticker

Did You Know

Sixty million rolls of toilet paper are flushed away in Europe every day. The average American uses 57 sheets a day, six times the global average. Although usage in the US has remained stable, third world countries are catching up. China usage has increased 11% in the last ten years.

Environmentalists are concerned and someone actually calculated that TP usage equals 27,000 trees being flushed down the, um, drain. We can't go back to corn cobs or we will deprive cattle of food or fuel for the new eco cars.  So, if we use less toilet tissue, are we being green, or . . .

Populations by Country

We keep hearing about other countries and their relative size. Joe Dougherty, a freind of mine sent me the following and it sure gives a good perspective of where we fit. It is a bit out of date, as we have over 300 million now, but the others have also grown proportionately.

Breakthrough Nanotechnology

North Carolina State University has developed a computer chip that can store enough data to hold an entire library's worth of information on a single chip. The new chip stems from a breakthrough in the use nanoscale magnets, and represents a significant advance in computer-memory technology.

Magnetic nanodots that store one bit of information on each nanodot, allows storing over one billion pages of information in a chip that is one square inch. The nanodots can be made as small as six nanometers in diameter. Where did I put my glasses?