A smoke alarm for deaf people

I have to admit I hadn't thought about this, but an audio-based alarm is of no use to a deaf homeowner. There may be some that flash lights, as is done to replace ringing phones. But this alarm will awaken a sleeping deaf person - it sprays wasabi into the air. It's still in the development stage, but the inventors claim "...Prototypes of a new silent smoke alarm that sprayed canned wasabi extract into a room succeeded in waking 13 out of 14 test subjects within 2 minutes. One subject who is actually deaf awoke a mere 10 seconds after the wasabi essence was sprayed..." Credit to Neatorama.

The Angel Oak

Saw this impressive photo today and decided it deserved a blog entry rather than a small image on the right sidebar. It's a 1500-year-old live oak located on St. John's Island, South Carolina. For more information, go to this Wiki article. To get a perspective on its size and see a gallery of photos, go to the tree's home page (!) here.

If this interests you, Wiki has a list of famous trees, (hundreds of them, from all over the world, plus historical and fictional trees) from whence you can spend all day exploring.

If you hit the FIRE button at a gas station...

... here's what happens. Very impressive. I didn't know that.

Honey, do you hear a buzzing sound??

SAN MARINO, Calif. (AP) - The situation at the Stathatos house on Virginia Road is getting sticky. So many bees live in the walls of the stately Tudor home that honey drips out of the walls, discoloring the wallpaper in the dining room. The bees had been good tenants, peacefully coexisting for years with the home's human residents, Helen and Jerry Stathatos. But lately the house has become a hive of activity, with bees buzzing around an upstairs bedroom, said Dustin Mackey, a bee removal expert with Bee Specialist. Mackey made a house call in late February to vacuum the busy insects from a window frame and seal the floor in the bedroom.

"You walk into the house and it smells sweet," Mackey said. "I felt like I was in a jar of honey."

Mackey said Jerry Stathatos said the bee problem had been going on for at least 20 years, but living in an apiary never bothered the family. Mackey said Stathatos decided against removing the bees because it might require them to pull down several interior walls, where "thousands, maybe millions" of bees have taken up residence.

Video of the 17-month old baby reading

Well, she got "cat balls" (??) wrong, but the rest is truly remarkable.

Barack Obama's mother

"Kansas was merely a way station in her childhood, wheeling westward in the slipstream of her furniture-salesman father. In Hawaii, she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the world’s poor... She became a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development on setting up a village credit program, then a Ford Foundation program officer in Jakarta specializing in women’s work. Later, she was a consultant in Pakistan, then joined Indonesia’s oldest bank to work on what is described as the world’s largest sustainable microfinance program, creating services like credit and savings for the poor..."

Above extracted from a NYT article this past week.

But the most interesting fact? Her first name was Stanley -- how cool is that?

Speaking of names...

An analysis of the name "Hillary" from the blog at Baby Name Wizard website (about which, see the post below this one). Here's a discussion of the graph above:

"In the late 1980s, Hillary was a fashionable contemporary name for girls. Two spellings (Hillary, Hilary) were equally popular, both ranking around #250 in national popularity. Then Bill Clinton hit the campaign trail, and see what happened. If you contemplate that graph, you'll see three separate phenomena. First, Hillary Clinton's new national visibility gave her name a huge boost. Second, once she actually became first lady her name plummeted. And third, she took such complete ownership of the name that the single-L spelling became irrelevant. All of Hilary Swank's Oscars and Hilary Duff's omnipresence haven't made a dent...and that was before Ms. Clinton started running a presidential campaign on a first-name-only basis. This is now Hillary Clinton's name, like it or lump it."

Baby Name Wizard's Name Voyager is FASCINATING

Go to this link (you need to have Java on). The screen will fill with a multilayered (blue boys, pink girls) image of all the names assigned to babies in the United States for the last 100 years. At the upper left is a blinking black cursor. Click on the cursor and start typing a name (or just a random letter); the image will show all names starting with that letter (I used "B" in the example above). As you continue to type a name, the image continues to evolve until finally if you type the complete name, you see the demographics of how its popularity has changed. The scale on the right tells you how many babies got that name each year, and if you move your cursor over the image itself, it tells you the rank of the name for a given year.

After you try your own name and that of your family members and friends, try exploring. I discovered that "Bill" has almost disappeared (and William also!?), as have Mary and George. Jesus and Mohammed have risen; Monica spiked and then fell out of favor. Look at the biphasic pattern for "I" and "O" and the lonely peak of "P." Q, X, and Z are hot.

Endlessly interesting. Send it to your friends.

Saying goodbye to winter

This past winter in Wisconsin has been unusually severe, with record-setting snowfall and cold temps. Madison has recorded 92 inches of snow (normal is 35 inches for the season). The top photo shows our driveway with snow piled waist-high at the sides before the final two storms. Technically the "season" isn't over yet (last year a 5" snowfall one day in April), but temps in the 40s this week have melted enough snow to expose emerging crocuses, and prompted the creation of the snowman in the bottom picture.

Harper's Index #5

Avg number of shopping carts stolen from American supermarkets each hour: 39
Ratio of the number of plastic flamingos to number of real ones in the US : 700:1
Number of Americans injured by jewelry per year: 43,000
Amount of writing Florida state colleges require students to complete before their junior year, in words: 24,000
Ratio of homebuyers in Orange Co., CA named Smith to those named Nguyen: 1:2
Tons of trash generated by the Rio Earth Summit in June, per day: 7
Estimated percent of all hats sold in the US each year that are baseball caps: 70
Chance a defendant tried in a criminal case in Japan will be found guilty: 99 in 100
Rank of the US, among the 12 largest democracies, in voter turnout: 11
Number of wisdom teeth extracted from Americans last year: 9,337,000
Ratio of Americans employed by government to those employed by manufacturers: 1:1
Ratio of the amount the Ford Motor Company spent in 1993 on health care to the amount it spent on steel: 1:1
Percentage of Mexican-Americans who say there are too many immigrants in the US: 75
Rank of basketball among sports contributing to fatalities among players: 1
Number of times a WV man accidentally shot himself in the foot while cleaning his three guns: 3
Weight in pounds of a hairball removed from an Alexandria, IN, manhole: 200
Number of new clerical workers hired each day by US physicians to do paperwork: 68
Chance that a dollar spent on health care goes for administrative costs: 1 in 4
Percent of TV viewers who wouldn't give up watching TV in exchange for any amount of money: 25
Percent of Super Bowl viewers who do not live in the United States: 89
Average length of a professional football player's career, in years: 3.2
Chances that a Russian lives in an area in which air pollution exceeds safety standards by five times: 3 in 4
Trees used to produce the mail-order catalogues sent to US households each year: 14,000,000
Percentage of all US domestic mail that consists of personal letters: 4.5
Number of years since there has been no dog in the White House: 79
Number of beds at Mass. General Hospital, per billing-department employee: 3.5
Number of classified manuals used by the Department of Energy to specify what is to be classified: 850
Hourly wage the Resolution Trust Corporation paid contract workers to photocopy documents: $35
Number of body parts suitable for piercing, according to a NYC jewelry store: 30
Number of women scalped by hay balers in New York State since 1976: 4
Average speed of Heinz ketchup, from the mouth of an upended bottle, in miles per year: 25
Chances that a visit to a psychiatrist will end with a drug prescription: 1 in 2
Number of the world's 187 countries that do not have Most Favored Nation trading status with the United States: 12
Percent of American vegetarians who eat red meat once a week: 10
Chance an American does not know which president appears on the $1 bill: 1 in 5
Average number of steps an American adult takes each day: 9,000
Ratio of rats to people in Washington, D.C.: 2:1
Number of nuclear reactors it would take to supply the energy consumed by United States refrigerators: 25

Oh, the irony...

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Man attacked by bear (Warning: graphic images)

When other blondes think you're stupid

The WineRack

I'll refrain from editorializing and just describe it. A sports bra that can be filled with 750 cc of wine (or another comestible) and worn under one's blouse/sweater etc. When you get thirsty, you access the beverage by sucking on a concealed drinking tube. Handy for sporting events, concerts, movies, and other venues where one's beverage is not available. A secondary benefit is the enhancement of the bustline (which would, during the course of an evening, gradually decrease). For men, the manufacturers offer the equivalent in the form of a Beerbelly, shown here without concealing garments...