May 29, 2015

Happy Friday

Don't hold on to life. Grab the reins and ride it like crazy.

I always have a great ride, especially on a Happy Friday!

Pinch Bum Day, Oak Apple Day, Shick Shack Day

Monarchists would wear oak leaves on May 29 for Oak Apple Day, also known as Pinch-Bum Day. It is called 'Oak Apple Day' in memory of the time when the king hid in an oak tree following the Battle of Worcester.

"Parliament had ordered the 29 of May, the King’s birthday, to be for ever kept as a day of thanksgiving for our redemption from tyranny and the King’s return to his Government, he entering London that day." The official holiday was abolished in 1859, but continues to be fondly celebrated in many parts of the commonwealth.

In parts of England where oak-apples are known as shick-shacks, the day is also known as Shick-Shack Day.

It is traditional for monarchists to decorate the house with oak branches or wear a sprig of oak on 29th May. The oak is the national tree of England. It is also traditional to drink beer, dance, and eat plum pudding. (An oak apple is also known as an oak gall. It is caused by the larvae of a cynipid wasp. The gall look like an apple.)

Those who do not participate can have their bum pinched. Since few recognize or celebrate this holiday, have some fun by finding your favorite person and pinch their bum today - men and women can participate.

Incidentally, Everest, the world's tallest mountain was conquered at 11:30 a.m. on 29 May 1953. Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa of Nepal, become the first explorers to reach the summit of Mount Everest, which at 29,028 feet above sea level is the highest point on earth.

Obscura Day

May 30 is Obscura Day and the day to celebrate the hidden wonders of the world. There are more than 150 events in 39 states and 25 countries, all on a single day, and all designed to celebrate the world's most curious and awe-inspiring places. Be careful, you could get lost for hours at the Atlas Obscura site. LINK

Types of Potato Chips

The United Kingdom and Ireland, crisps are potato chips which are eaten cold, while chips are similar to french fries and are served hot. Americans, Canadians, Australians, Indians, New Zealanders, many Europeans, and those in the West Indies use chips. Many other countries also call them chips. People in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland call them Kartoffelchips. The Japanese call them chippu.

In Ireland, the word Tayto is synonymous with potato chips after the Tayto brand and can be used to describe all varieties of chips, including those not produced by Tayto. In fact, the word has become a genericized trademark.

Seasonings have come into vogue around the world and now potato chips have such flavorings as dill pickle, ketchup, barbecue, salt and vinegar, sour cream and onion, and ranch dressing. There are wasabi chips, poutine, maple bacon, Jamaican jerk chicken, cheddar and lemon-lime, Greek feta and olive, Ballpark hot dog, and barbeque baby back ribs, among others.

In Germany they have red paprika and ready salted along with sour cream and onion, cheese, oriental, chakalaka, currywurst, red and white with tomato ketchup and mayonnaise. The Japanese have pizza-flavored chips along with nori and shiyo, consommé, wasabi, soy sauce and butter, garlic, plum, barbecue, pizza, mayonnaise, and black pepper. Chili, scallop with butter, teriyaki, takoyaki and yakitorie.

There are prawn cocktail, Worcester sauce, roast chicken, steak and onion, smoky bacon, lamb and mint, ham and mustard, barbecue rib, tomato ketchup, sausage and ketchup, pickled onion, Branston pickle, and Marmite.

You can also find Thai sweet chili, roast pork and creamy mustard sauce, lime and Thai spices, chicken with Italian herbs, sea salt and cracked black pepper, turkey and bacon, caramelized onion and sweet balsamic vinegar, stilton and cranberry, mango chili, and American Cheeseburger, English roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.

If you like them hot, you can find Mexican limes with chili, salsa with mesquite, Buffalo mozzarella tomato and basil, mature cheddar with Adnams broadside beer, Soulmate cheeses and onion, crawtator, Cajun dill, voodoo, and Creole onion.

Affronts and Aspersions

An affront is an insult, indignity, or something offensive. As a verb, it means to insult or offend. Affront comes from comes from French affronter "to face, to brave, to confront". It can be used in a sentence as, "These laws are an affront to our free speech."

Aspersion comes from aspergere "to sprinkle on, spatter" based on ad- "(up) to, on" and sparger "to strew, scatter." An aspersion means a spattering or sprinkling, especially of holy water. It also means that which bespatters or besmirches someone's character, slander, defamation of character. People usually use the term 'cast aspersions', as in spatter someone with metaphorical mud.

Incidentally, Asperger's syndrome is named for Hans Asperger and totally unrelated to the word or word root above.

Carbon Dioxide Facts

Carbon Dioxide gets a bad rap from the press, but it is natural and essential to life. CO2 is a colorless, odorless, non-toxic gas and it is not a pollutant. Trying to control CO2 by regulation is trying to regulate and control nature. Without CO2, plants die off and without plant life the earth's biological food chain would be terminally broken.

Plants require carbon dioxide to conduct photosynthesis. Greenhouses enrich their atmospheres with additional CO2 to sustain and increase plant growth. Plants can grow as much as 50 percent faster in concentrations of 1,000 ppm CO2 when compared with ambient conditions. If carbon dioxide is increasing so much around the globe, it would be logical that plants and trees would be growing faster than they previously did, but they are not.

CO2 is reduced by photosynthesis of plants. A photosynthesis-related drop (by a factor less than two) in carbon dioxide concentration in a greenhouse compartment would kill green plants, or completely stop their growth. Increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations result in fewer stomata developing on plants, which leads to reduced water usage and increased water-use efficiency.

Deforestation for agriculture is just replacing one type of vegetation with another. Both trees and plants reduce CO2.

Photosynthesis by phytoplankton consumes dissolved CO2 in the upper ocean and promotes the absorption of CO2 from the atmosphere. Photosynthesis uses carbon dioxide and water to produce sugars from which other organic compounds can be constructed, and oxygen is produced as a by-product. Sea urchins convert carbon dioxide into raw material for their shells.

Carbon dioxide dissolves in the ocean to form carbonic acid (H2CO3), bicarbonate (HCO3) and carbonate (CO32). There is about fifty times as much carbon dissolved in the sea water of the oceans as exists in the atmosphere. The oceans act as an enormous carbon sink, and take up about 30% of the total released into the atmosphere.

In medicine, up to 5% carbon dioxide (130 times atmospheric concentration) is added to oxygen for stimulation of breathing after apnea and to stabilize the O2/CO2 balance in blood.

Liquid and solid carbon dioxide are important refrigerants, especially in the food industry, where they are employed during the transportation and storage of frozen foods. Solid carbon dioxide, dry ice is used for small shipments where refrigeration equipment is not practical.

Carbon dioxide is used in enhanced oil recovery where it is injected into or adjacent to producing oil wells, when it becomes miscible (mixed) with the oil. It acts as both a pressurizing agent and, when dissolved into the underground crude oil, significantly reduces its viscosity, and changes surface chemistry enabling the oil to flow faster.

Carbon dioxide is used to keep the pH level from rising in swimming pools.

Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide fluctuate slightly with the change of the seasons. Concentrations of carbon dioxide fall during the Northern Hemisphere spring and summer as plants consume it, and rise during the northern autumn and winter as plants go dormant or die.

Up to 40% of the gas emitted by some volcanoes during eruptions is carbon dioxide.

Various proxies and modeling suggests larger variations in past times. 500 million years ago CO2 levels were likely 10 times higher than now.

Take a deep breath, exhale and out comes carbon dioxide. All the carbon in our body comes either directly or indirectly from plants, which recently took it out of the air. When we breathe out, all the carbon dioxide we exhale has already been accounted for. We are simply returning to the air the same carbon that was there to begin with, so humans are carbon neutral.

Incidentally, during 2009, energy-related CO2 emissions in the US had their largest absolute and percentage decline, seven percent (which followed a three percent drop in 2008), since the start of US Energy Information Administration comprehensive record of annual energy data that began in 1949.

Tylenol vs. Advil vs. Aleve

Here is a handy chart which shows the best uses for these common pain killers. I think Aspirin is a bit under reported in the chart.

Origins of Apple Words

Steve Jobs came back from working on a commune-type All-One Farm in Oregon and announced to his partners that he had a name for their company, Apple Computer.

Jef Raskin, an Apple employee who first started the project, picked "Macintosh" because the McIntosh was his favorite apple. The spelling was changed to avoid copyright infringement. Steve Jobs said the product was "insanely great".

The slogan, Think Different, was dreamed up by an art director, Craig Tanimoto.

TBWA ad agency came up with the 'i' prefix to infer internet. It also connoted individual, imaginative, and more.

App Store was pure Jobs and meant both applications and a contraction of Apple.

Free Friday Smile


May 25, 2015

Happy Friday

Life has no meaning, only living has meaning.

Living is doing something, like celebrating a Happy Friday!

National Tap Dance Day

 In 1989, a joint U.S. Senate/House resolution declared "National Tap Dance Day" to be May 25, the anniversary of Bill Robinson's (Mr. Bojangles) birth.

Names and Initials

You may have wondered about some famous person's initials.

  • E. E. Cummings - The famous poet's initials stood for Edward Estlin Cummings
  • E.B. White - Writer and author of English Language Sytle Guide, Elwyn Brooks White
  • H.P. Lovecraft - Horror author, Howard Phillips Lovecraft
  • H.G. Wells - "war of the worlds", "time machine", etc., Herbert George Wells
  • J.K. Rowling - The "K" in J.K. Rowling is not her name. Joanne Rowling does not have a middle name, but her publishers wanted to add another initial to her name for her book. She settled on Kathleen, the name of her favorite grandmother.
  • J.R.R. Tolkien - "Hobbit", lord of rings series, etc., John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

Moon and Earth Names

Translations of the Bible into English was one of the earliest recorded uses of the name Earth – "God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good."

It is called ‘terra’ in Portuguese, ‘dünya’ in Turkish and ‘aarde’ in Dutch. The common thread in all languages is that they were all derived from the same meaning in their origins, which is ‘ground’ or ‘soil’.

The modern English word and name for our planet Earth goes back at least 1,000 years. Just as the English language evolved from ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (English-German) with the migration of certain Germanic tribes from the continent to Britain in the fifth century AD, the word ‘Earth’ came from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘erda’ and its Germanic equivalent ‘erde’ which means ground or soil. In Old English, the word became ‘eor(th)e’ or 'ertha '.

The Moon did have other names, including the name of an ancient deity, Luna, the Roman Goddess of the Moon. The word Luna is still associated with the Moon. For instance, Luna is the root of words like lunar.

When humanity first learned of other moons orbiting the planets in our solar system, one of the primary reasons they were given names was to differentiate them from the Moon, which is still the official name of our moon in English. The word “moon” can be traced back to Old English, where it is said to have derived from the Proto-Germanic word “menon”, which in turn derived from the Proto-Indo-European “menses”, meaning “month, moon”.

With few exceptions, the Moon has long been associated with women, fertility, and a whole host of other female attributes. In most cases, menstrual cycles more or less coincide with the phases of the Moon. It should then come as no surprise that across many languages, the words for “moon”, “month”, and the name for a woman’s menstrual cycle often has the same root word.

Potatoes Business

The potato is the world’s fourth largest food crop, following rice, wheat, and corn/maize. The Inca Indians in Peru were the first to cultivate potatoes around 8,000 BC to 5,000 BC. They first came to the US in 1621.

Did you know there is a National Potato Council, Potato Association of America, World Potato Congress, US Potato Board, US Potato Promotion Board, among others. In addition, Michigan has Mich. Potato Industry Commission, Mich. Seed Potato Assoc., and Potato Growers of Mich. There are more than 100 varieties of potatoes in the US. There are many more types of potato chips from around the world. Next week I will list a few of them.

Michigan supplies over a third of all potato chips in the US. Its annual Winter Potato Conference is one of the biggest in the country. It is overshadowed by the  Potato Expo, the largest conference and trade show for the potato industry held in North America.

Potatoes contain many of the essential nutrients that the dietary guidelines recommend Americans increase in their diet. Potatoes eaten with the skin provide nearly half of the Daily Value for vitamin C and are one of the best sources of potassium (more than a banana), iodine, iron, other trace minerals, and fiber. One medium-sized potato has 100 calories and provides complex carbohydrates needed to fuel our brains. Potatoes contain no fat.

Researchers at Queen Mary, University of London noted that a small "bag of ready-salted crisps" contains less salt than a serving of "Special K, All-Bran, Golden Grahams, Cheerios, Shreddies, and every brand of cornflakes on sale in the UK."