What's in a Name, Adidas

Adolph 'Adi' Dassler and his brother Rudolph owned their own shoe company in Germany during the 1920s and 30s. Their products were so popular, many of the German competitors in the 1928 Olympics wore Dassler Brothers shoes.

During WWII the brothers had a falling out. Both joined the Nazi party, but Rudolph was more fanatical and went off to fight, leaving Adi to make shoes for the military. After the war ended, Rudolph left and formed his own company, Puma. Adi then renamed the original company after himself, and Adidas was born.

New GE Bulb

First we get the hundred dollar bulb, now we get an over-engineered bulb that requires built in cooling. GE just announced a new LED light bulb replacement for the 100 watt incandescent that uses pulses of air to keep cool. The design comes just as the 100 watt incandescent bulb phase-out is this year, 2012. 

If common bulbs cost a hundred dollars, need to be cooled, or contain mercury they have other deficiencies beside cost. This would be the same as building an iPad that cost five thousand dollars and needs continuous water cooling. GE and Philips must be designing these bulbs in Washington DC. Thomas Edison is likely crying in his grave at the politicians who caused this.

Chicken Fried Bacon Creator

The creator of chicken fried bacon, Frank Sodolak has passed away. Thirty years ago Frank Sodolak borrowed a few hundred dollars and made his idea a reality in a small restaurant (Sodolak's Original Country Inn" in Snook Texas, population about 500. It is about 80 miles from Houston. His bacon delight has been featured in Maxim Magazine, Discovery Channel, Travel Channel and more. Some call it Sodalak's saturated succulence.

“People hear about chicken fried bacon and they're like huh? But when they eat it, they're like Wow!" explains son Curtis Sodolak.

"He left us a mini-empire, and we have to keep it going, and that's my promise to him, and who knows, maybe one day, I'll pass it on to my kids," said his son, Curtis.

PS - Even Emeril has come up with a Pecan-Praline candied bacon. Seems everyone wants in on the act. Not sure why. Bacon does not need toppings to be good.

Wordology

The word gymnasium comes from the Greek gymnazein, which means 'to exercise naked'.

How Not to Spill Coffee

Rouslan Krechetnikov is a mechanical engineer at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and he spends most of his time working on fluid dynamics, the flow of air on a plane’s wings, the stability of a rocket, and other weighty problems. None of that has brought him as much attention as his newest paper in the journal Physical Review E: “Walking with coffee: Why does it spill?”

Krechetnikov and a graduate student, Hans Mayer, decided to divert from weightier subjects last year after a scientific conference, where they had watched fellow researchers stumble to their tables, trying not to get coffee all over themselves and the floor.

“The project was certainly fun. We just wanted to satisfy our curiosity and, given the results, to share what we learned with the scientific community through peer-reviewed literature,” Krechetnikov wrote.

They set up a simple experiment, watching a person walk in a straight line, mug in hand. They had their test subject look at the coffee cup. They had their test subject look at the floor ahead. They shot video of it all, recording how the coffee oscillated and how long it took to spill.

The results. Don’t rush. You may think the coffee will spill less if you get it to the table more quickly, but the opposite is true. Slow down and the sloshing will too. Watch the cup, not the floor. You will spill less.

The abstract concludes: “The studied problem represents an example of the interplay between the complex motion of a cup, due to the biomechanics of a walking individual, and the low-viscosity-liquid dynamics in it.” Isn't science wonderful?

Happy Friday

The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.

I always forgive, and never forget to have a Happy Friday!

French Fry Calorie Fact

A single McDonald's french fry has 5 calories A single Pringle has twice as many calories, 10.

What's in a Name, Tanqueray

When he was a young boy, Charles Tanqueray’s path through life seemed pretty clear. He was the product of three straight generations of Bedfordshire clergymen, so it was assumed he would take up the cloth himself.

He decided to do something different and began distilling gin in 1830 in a little plant in London’s Bloomsbury district. By 1847, he was shipping his gin to colonies around the British Empire, where many plantation owners and troops had developed a taste for Tanqueray and tonic.

Ten Interesting Names

Did you know the Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons has a name? It’s Jeff Albertson. Creator Matt Groening says, “I was out of the room when [the writers] named him. In my mind, ‘Louis Lane’ was his name, and he was obsessed and tormented by Lois Lane.”

2. Barbie’s full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts. (Ken’s last name is Carson.)

3. Cap’n Crunch’s full name is Captain Horatio Magellan Crunch

4. Snuffleupagus has a first name - Aloysius.

5. In the Peanuts comic strip, Peppermint Patty’s real name is Patricia Reichardt.

6. The Wizard of Oz' full name is, Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkel Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs. Frank Baum’s Dorothy And the Wizard in Oz relates,
“It was a dreadfully long name to weigh down a poor innocent child, and one of the hardest lessons I ever learned was to remember my own name. When I grew up I just called myself O.Z., because the other initials were P-I-N-H-E-A-D; and that spelled ‘pinhead,’ which was a reflection on my intelligence.”

7. Mr. Clean's first name is ”Veritably.” The name came from a “Give Mr. Clean a First Name” promotion in 1962.

8. In a deleted scene in the 2006 Curious George movie, The Man With the Yellow Hat’s name was revealed as Ted Shackleford. The original scene was deleted.

9. The real name of Monopoly mascot Rich Uncle Pennybags is Milburn Pennybags.

10. The policeman in Monopoly is Officer Edgar Mallory.

Numbers and Letters

If you spell out numbers individually, (one, two, three, etc.) you will need to reach a thousand before you find the letter A.

Madame Curie Facts

Marie Curie (1867-1934) was an expert in physics, chemistry and radioactivity. She was also the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and then was awarded a second.

Marie Salomea Sklodowska was born in Warsaw Poland. Her father was a math and physics teacher and atheist. Her mother was a teacher, operated a boarding school, and was Catholic. Four-year-old Marie taught herself how to read Russian and French and was known to help her four brothers and sisters with their math homework. It was also at age four that she began demonstrate her incredible memory.

As a teenager, Marie was anxious to attend college, but her family couldn’t afford it so she spent five grueling years earning money as a governess. In 1891 she headed for the Sorbonne in Paris. There, she met future husband Pierre Curie. While there, she discovered the radioactive elements radium and polonium (She named it after her native Poland). Later, she became the first woman professor at the Sorbonne.

In her thirties, Marie worked closely with her husband, and together they devised the science of radioactivity (she named the term radioactivity), for which they were awarded a Nobel Prize in physics. They had two children Irene and Eve. After Pierre’s death in 1906, Marie continued her work, winning her second Nobel, in chemistry at age 44.

It has been determined that Marie contracted aplastic anemia from all of her time spent with radiation which, at that point, had no dangers associated with it. She died from it in 1934.

Bacon Fat

Almost half of bacon fat is monounsaturated, just like what is found in olive oil. It can actually lower your bad cholesterol.