Nov 17, 2017

There is a statue in England that stands over 26 feet tall and is made from over 100,000 knives. It is titled the Knife Angel. The sculpture was constructed at the Shropshire-based British Ironworks Centre to raise awareness about knife crime in the United Kingdom. It is claimed to be Britain's biggest monument against violence and aggression ever created.


The sculptor, Alfie Bradley, spent two years designing and building the sculpture which features police and personal donated knives, many of which were used in violent crimes all over England and Wales. Families affected by knife crime, police officers, politicians, celebrities, community leaders, and ex-gang members welded their own knives on the sculpture as a symbolical gesture.

Families of those lost to knife violence can engrave a message onto one of the sculpture’s thousands of blades. The sculptor hopes to get it placed in Trafalgar square in London to raise awareness of violence and aggression and as a national tribute to victims of knife crime.

Inflammable vs. Flammable

Inflammable and flammable are two words that are frequently misinterpreted. Some people mistake the words as having opposite meanings. In reality, flammable and inflammable mean exactly the same thing—capable of burning.
Inflammable precedes the word flammable and has always meant 'tends to catch fire easily'.

The US National Fire Protection Association urged Americans during the 1920s to start using the word flammable to avoid confusion, because they thought people may mistake inflammable as meaning not being able to burn. Flammable has since become the preferred alternative on warning labels.


Incidentally, non-flammable is the opposite, meaning not flammable.

US Phone LTE Speeds

 LTE is an acronym for Long Term Evolution, basically a term, along with 4G (fourth generation) for phone signal speeds. Open Signal's latest report on the status of LTE networks indicates that the United States ranks fourth in overall LTE availability, with 86.5% of people able to access an LTE signal.

However, LTE service in the States is slower than fifty eight other countries worldwide. The report ranking the United States fifty-ninth of seventy seven countries in terms of average downstream speeds at around 15 Mbps. Most other studies also indicate that United States citizens pay more money for 4G LTE wireless broadband than most other developed countries. So, it is more available, more costly, and less speed. Seems like, in the US greed beats speed.

Jack Churchill

Lieutenant-Colonel John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming "Mad Jack" Churchill, of the British Army is regarded as one the greatest warriors of all time. Prior to his service in WW2, Churchill was the archery champion of Great Britain and represented his country in the world championships.
During World War II he recorded what is thought to be the last confirmed bow and arrow kill in modern warfare, killing a Nazi NCO in France in 1940. The archery shot signaled the rest of his men to launch an attack on the Nazi patrol.
To signal the start of a raid on a German garrison in Norway in 1941, Churchill leapt out his position playing “March of the Cameron Men” on the bagpipes before tossing a grenade at the enemy position and getting into the fight.
He fought throughout the entirety of World War II armed with a longbow, arrows, and a Scottish broadsword. In July 1943, he led his commando unit from their landing site in Sicily with his broadsword hanging from his belt, his longbow and arrows around his neck, and his bagpipes under his arm. After infiltrating the town, he took 42 men prisoner, including a mortar squad.

When the war was over, Churchill remarked, “If it wasn’t for those damn Yanks, we could have kept the war going another 10 years.

Hamburger 101

Two things all the experts agree on for a succulent burger are simple; good meat and do not mess with it while cooking.

1: Start with meat that is not too lean, 80/20 is good. A juicy burger needs fat content to be juicy. Lean meat is, by definition lean and that means less fat. Less fat means drier burger.


2: Do not press the burger. Let it cook. Pressing the meat presses the juices out and they stay on the grill or in the pan, not in the meat.

Everything else, like salt, pepper, other condiments, trimmings, toppings are all a matter of taste. Bottom line, beauty and taste are individual preferences, but juiciness is in the meat.

Nov 3, 2017

Happy Friday

Attitude is a practiced art.

Practice a positive attitude especially on a Happy Friday!

Daylight Saving

It is happening to all of us again this weekend. That silly time old and futile political tradition of trying to control time. Australia changed October 1. Europe and others began changing clocks Oct 27, 28, and 29. For most of the US, Sunday Nov 5, 2am is the time to set your clock back. Fiji and Tonga set theirs ahead one hour.

The biannual time change was originally implemented to save energy. Yet dozens of studies around the world have found that changing the clocks has either minuscule or non-existent effects on energy use. In addition, current research suggests the time change can be harmful to our health and cost us money.
Following the 1973 oil embargo, the US Congress extended the DST period to 10 months in 1974 and 8 months in 1975, in an effort to save energy. After the energy crisis was over in 1976, the DST schedule in the US was revised several times. From 1987 to 2006, the country observed DST for about 7 months each year.

Arizona does not observe daylight saving, but some Indian tribes within the state do. In fact, if driving a route from the Arizona state border through both Navajo and Hopi areas to the other side, a person can end up changing clocks 7 times. For example: Tuba City (Navajo) and Moenkopi (Hopi) are only a few miles apart, but they have a 1-hour time difference during the summer. Jeddito (Navajo), in the middle of Hopi Nation territory, is 1 hour ahead of the surrounding areas during summer.


If a baby is born at 11 p.m. in California and another baby is born at 2 a.m. in New York, they have different birthdays even though they were born simultaneously.

Wordology, Dewlap

The extra flap of skin and fatty tissue that is under the chin of a female rabbit is called a dewlap. The dewlap tends to appear when female rabbits have reached the age when they can begin to reproduce. The dewlap provides a place where the female can pull out her own fur and use it to line her nest. The nest is where she will sleep as well as produce and raise her offspring.

Psycho Censors

Psycho is a genre-defining movie, regarded as one of the finest psychological horror films of all time. The film broke new ground in several ways.
It was also the first film to show a toilet flushing on screen. The censors objected to it and tried have the toilet scene removed, but Hitchcock objected. They eventually gave up trying to fix the film and let the toilet flush be shown. Interesting that the offending flush takes place about forty seconds before a character is brutally stabbed to death in a shower while completely naked.

Incidentally, Alfred Hitchcock staged the shower murder scene in such a way the censors could not find a specific shot that broke the censor's rules.

Zappa Censored

Before streaming and YouTube, stickers, such as 'Explicit Content' were considered a death sentence for certain albums as they effectively prevented them from being sold by large chains of stores that wanted to project a family friendly image. One store went a bit far and put an 'explicit lyrics' sticker on an all instrumental album.

Albums could be slapped with an explicit lyrics sticker for containing a single objectionable lyric. Frank Zappa holds the dubious honor of being the only artist known to have received a parental warning sticker for explicit lyrics on an entirely instrumental album.

The Jazz from Hell album contains no lyrics. It does contain a track titled G-Spot Tornado. This was enough for the Fred Meyer chain of stores to put an explicit lyrics warning label on the album even though the entire album is lyric-less. It appears that some doth protest too much.

Moving Out

According to 2012 US Census data, 74 percent of people living in Pennsylvania were born there. In addition, just 63 percent of New Yorkers, 61 percent of Texans, and 54 percent of Californians, were born in the state in which they currently resided.

Captcha This

Captcha comes from "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". It is used by web sites to distinguish human web users from robot spammers.

Recently, in just minutes, an artificially intelligent machine cracked ond of those jumbled text sequences. The smart machine can be trained in a matter of minutes using just a few hundred example characters, researchers said. It works with multiple different styles of captcha and can also be re-purposed to identify handwritten digits, recognize text in photos of real-world scenarios, and detect non-text objects in images. That is because the company designed the system to mimic the way the brain identifies objects after seeing just a few examples and recognize them in strange new configurations.


Text-based captchas as above work, because unlike humans, computers struggle to recognize the distorted and partially hidden characters that make them up. Though many current machine-learning systems that can solve them exist, they must be trained on millions of images to work.

Many websites have moved away from text-based captchas, and are using image-based tests and data on mouse movements, or cookies to analyze whether users are human or machine. Some captchas are also difficult for humans to accurately decipher on first try.

Oct 27, 2017

Happy Friday

You cannot hide true happiness any more than you can turn off sunlight.

Every day let your happiness shine through, especially on a Happy Friday!

Football Statistics

It is football time of the year and I dug up some interesting statics that go far beyond the typical yards gained, passes thrown, etc.
The average NFL game lasts about 3 hours and 11 minutes, but has about 11 minutes of actual game play. The 60-minute game clock in football can run when the ball is not in play. That means much of game time is spent standing around, walking, huddling up before each play begins, etc.
The 11 minutes of action was calculated a few years ago by the Wall Street Journal. It actually averages out to between 11 and 14 minutes of play. (Counting from the snap of the football to when the play is whistled dead.)


An average game has more than 20 breaks containing over 100 commercials.

Its analysis found that an average NFL broadcast spent more time on replays (17 minutes) than live play. The majority of time (75 minutes) was spent watching players, coaches, and referees essentially wandering around the field.
An average play in the NFL lasts just four seconds and NFL teams average between 64 and120 plays per game.
If you take the highest paid star, Matthew Stafford, Detroit Lions and his 2017 salary of $27,000,000 and divide it by game minutes played per season of 16 games - 6 * 11= 176 minutes, $27 million divided by 176 minutes comes out to $153, 409.09 per minute of play - not bad. (Of course this presumes no playoff games for them, which is usually a safe assumption for the Lions.)
The hundreds of millions paid by advertisers to networks and the hundreds of millions paid by viewers to networks and the hundreds of millions paid to teams and players cannot be calculated according to minutes played as we and they are also paying for the rest of the twaddle, not just the game.


Incidentally,
Baseball: Per a 2013 WSJ study, Baseball games feature 17 minutes and 58 seconds of action.
Basketball: Since the clock only runs when the ball is in play, there is exactly 48 minutes of play time.
Soccer: Per the Soccerbythenumbers.com website 2011 study, between 57 and 65 minutes of ball-in-play action is seen on average in the major European pro leagues per game.
Hockey: Average play time is 60 minutes.