An article at the BBC explores
why so many Americans live in mobile homes. "Not everyone who lives in a trailer park is poor." My father lived in one in Texas for many years .
The
WildCat is an impressive robot developed by the U.S. Defense Department. Video at the link.
The "
choking game" is "an activity popular among 9- to 16-year-old kids in which
they strangle
themselves or each other — sometimes at parties or sleepovers — to get a
high. The most common reported age of death is 13, Alex’s age. Many
kids like Alex — smart kids who do well in school and have loving
families — regard the Choking Game as a legal and safe alternative to
drugs; one popular nickname for this is the Good Kids’ High."
The Atlantic explains
how close New York City is to a food crisis, if supplies from outside the city are disrupted by natural or manmade events: "
New Yorkers rely chiefly on food from across the country, or the other
side of the world. And to complicate matters, in recent decades the big
companies that run these systems... keep
much smaller inventories than in years past, sized to
meet immediate demand under stable conditions—a strategy known as
"just-in-time."
Some medical facilities in the U.S. are now
permitting patients to be visited by their pets. "In the end, officials
decided that the benefits — comfort and reduced stress for patients —
were more substantial than the risks.
The
Ancient History Encyclopedia has TMI for right now, but it is a good link to bookmark for reference and future browsing. Its content is exactly what the name suggests.
The
World Memory Championships are a remarkable test of human abilities. Components of the competition include:
1. Names and faces: recall as many as possible in 15 minutes
2. Binary numbers: remember as many binary figures, which are
made up of 0 and 1, in half an hour
3. One hour numbers: to memorise as many random digits in complete rows
of 40 in one hour
4. Abstract images: recall the sequence of abstract images in as many
rows as possible in 15 minutes
5. Speed numbers: remember random digits, in rows of 40, as
quickly as possible in five minutes
6. Historic/future dates: recall as many years as possible and
link them correctly to given fictional events in five minutes
7. One hour cards: remember as many separate decks of 52 playing
cards as possible in one hour
8. Random words: recount as many random words, such as dog,
vase, spoon, in 15 minutes
9. Spoken numbers: memorise as many single digits spoken aloud
in one second intervals as possible
10. Speed cards: recall as single pack of 52 playing cards in
the shortest possible time.
Additional details are available in an article in
The Telegraph.
The Sahara desert is experiencing a "
catastrophic collapse of its wildlife." "
Of 14 species historically found in the Sahara, four are now extinct, and the rest are heading that way.... the region has lost the Bubal hartebeest (which is entirely extinct), the scimitar horned ornyx (extinct in the wild), the African wild dog and the African lion, while the dama gazelle, addax, leopard and the Saharan cheetah have been eliminated from 90 percent or more of their range."
The earth has
vast resources of fresh water - underneath the oceans. "The volume of this water resource is
a hundred times greater than the
amount we've extracted from the Earth's sub-surface in the past century
since 1900."
Some people think the
U.S. and Canada should merge into one country. "Such a merger makes perfect sense. No two countries on Earth are as socially and economically integrated as the U.S. and Canada... Truth be told, the merger of the U.S. and Canada is already well under
way. As many as one in 10 Canadians (more than 3 million people) live
full- or part-time in the U.S., and an estimated 1 million Americans live in Canada."
An op-ed piece at Salon argues that
referring to every soldier as a "hero" cheapens the term.
FlirOne infrared cameras attach to a cellphone and can be utilized in a variety of ways to
do your own home inspection looking for heat and water leaks.
The "
jetway Jesus phenomenon" is a term flight attendants use to refer to passengers who get rides through airports in wheelchairs, then miraculously get up and walk.
Was Vincent Van Gogh murdered? "And, anyway, what kind of a person, no matter how unbalanced, tries to
kill himself with a shot to the midsection? And then, rather than finish
himself off with a second shot, staggers a mile back to his room in
agonizing pain from a bullet in his belly?"
Photos of
vinyl hoarders and their hoards.
The
first house in the United States to have electric lights was in Appleton, Wisconsin. The homeowner operated a mill and set up a hydroelectric plant for the house.
A
previously-unknown Shakespearean First Folio has been discovered in a French Jesuit library.
During WWI,
tanks were designated "male" or "female." The latter had machine guns.
"The former leader of a Christian ministry that promised to cure people
"trapped in homosexuality" has
revealed that he has married his gay
partner."
"The two drugs have been declared equivalently miraculous. Tested side by side in six major trials, both prevent blindness in a common old-age affliction. Biologically, they are cousins. They’re even made by the same company.
But one holds a clear price advantage.
Avastin costs about $50 per injection.Lucentis costs about $2,000 per injection. Doctors choose the more expensive drug more than half a million times every year, a choice that costs the Medicare program, the largest single customer, an extra $1 billion or more annually... Doctors and drugmakers profit when more-costly treatments are adopted... “Lucentis is Avastin — it’s the same damn molecule with a few cosmetic changes..."
The National Library of Norway is in the process of digitizing its entire holdings. "If you happen to be in Norway, as measured by your IP address,
you will be able to access all 20th-century works, even those still under copyright. Non-copyrighted works from all time periods will be available
for download. "
ELI5 explanation of
why oil (and gasoline) prices have been plummeting
*********************************
The title of this linkdump is one of the penultimate lines from
The Court of Tartary, a fantasy by
T.P. Caravan first published in 1963. In the story, a professor of English literature "awakens" to find his mind is entrapped in the body of a cow, and the herd seems to be destined to the slaughterhouse.
"Edward Harrison Dunbar, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., L.L.D., member of the Modern Language Association and authority on eighteenth century literature, was not prepared for the situation in which he found himself: it had never been mentioned by any of the writers of the Age of Reason....
And even as he ran he wondered if he couldn't prove that Edward Young was the true author of the third book of
Gulliver's Travels,
because he knew that if he stopped thinking scholarly thoughts about the eighteenth century he would have to admit that he had turned into an animal. So as he ran he considered the evidence turned up by the publication of the Tickell papers and the discovery of Swift's old laundry lists and
Night Thoughts
and the graveyard poets and Gray's
Elegy
and the lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea, and he had to admit that he was an animal....
There was no point in approaching his difficulty through the scientific method: he knew no science. There was no help for him in metaphysics: he had cleared his mind of Kant. Nor could the classics aid him: he had read Ovid, of course, and the
Golden Ass,
but he didn't see how they bore on his problem. And
—
he hated to admit it
—
nobody in the eighteenth century seemed to have wondered what would happen to a scholar who woke up and found himself a cow. All right. That left only his own experience to fall back on. But, being a professor, he had never had any experiences..."
He decides to use his hoof to draw a triangle in the dust. Then... if I've piqued your curiosity, you can read the full story in ten minutes
fulltext online at Scribd.
************************************
The photographs (found
here,
here, and
here) embedded above in this weekend linkdump are of
Prince's Island Park, located in the Bow River as it passes through Calgary. The backside of the island
abuts the community of Eau Claire, but its nicest feature is that the front of the island faces the delightful community of
Sunnyside, a suburb of Calgary characterized by an uncommonly large number of intellectually sophisticated residents.
