01 October 2009
Don't count your fish until they're in the boat
This ~35 pound salmon had even been netted, and then...
Apparently this isn't a rare occurrence around Vancouver. A similar but longer video is here.
Found at The Presurfer.
30 September 2009
Untethered space walk
"At about 100 meters from the cargo bay of the space shuttle Challenger, Bruce McCandless II was farther out than anyone had ever been before..."
Click to enlarge.
Photo credit NASA, via APOD.
Slovenia: 90% tax on executive bonuses
LJUBLJANA, Sept 23 (Reuters) - Slovenia's Parliament on Wednesday voted to raise the tax rate on top wages to 90 percent in firms that receive state aid or state guarantees, imposing one of the highest tax rates in the world...*The average monthly net wage in the country amounted to 922 euros in July.
It will apply to managers' wages that exceed 12,500 euros ($18,470) per month* and to bonuses that exceed 25,000 euros per year. The new rate gained support by all parliamentary groups and was imposed by a vast majority of votes...
'The new tax will have a small influence on the budget as it only applies to a limited number of companies but it still sends an important signal to people in such strained times,' Borut Hocevar, an editor at daily Zurnal24, told Reuters...
A rotating dining room - built by the Emperor Nero!
Remains of the fabled dining hall have been discovered on the city's Palatine Hill, where emperors traditionally built their most lavish palaces.
The hall is said to have had a revolving wooden floor which allowed guests to survey a ceiling painted with stars and equipped with panels from which flower petals and perfume would shower onto the tables below...
The Roman historian Suetonius described the unique revolving room in his Lives of the Caesars, written about 60 years after Nero's death.
"The chief banqueting room was circular and revolved perpetually, night and day, in imitation of the motion of the celestial bodies," he wrote.
The BBC has a video which explains that the rotation of the room was powered by water.
Photo credit: EPA
29 September 2009
Covers of old paperback novels
Selections from a large gallery at Golden Age Comic Book Stories, where there appears to be much to explore...
Something to keep in mind during cold and flu season...
CLINTON — When Sally Harpold bought cold medicine for her family back in March, she never dreamed that four months later she would end up in handcuffs...
Harpold is a grandmother of triplets who bought one box of Zyrtec-D cold medicine for her husband at a Rockville pharmacy. Less than seven days later, she bought a box of Mucinex-D cold medicine for her adult daughter at a Clinton pharmacy, thereby purchasing 3.6 grams total of pseudoephedrine in a week’s time...
Those two purchases put her in violation of Indiana law 35-48-4-14.7, which restricts the sale of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, or PSE, products to no more than 3.0 grams within any seven-day period...
When the police came knocking at the door of Harpold’s Parke County residence on July 30, she was arrested on a Vermillion County warrant for a class-C misdemeanor, which carries a sentence of up to 60 days in jail and up to a $500 fine. But through a deferral program offered by Vermillion County Prosecutor Nina Alexander, the charge could be wiped from Harpold’s record by mid-September [this story was dated Sept 3]...
While the law was written with the intent of stopping people from purchasing large quantities of drugs to make methamphetamine, the law does not say the purchase must be made with the intent to make meth...
Just as with any law, the public has the responsibility to know what is legal and what is not, and ignorance of the law is no excuse, the prosecutor said...
Harpold, who is employed at the Rockville Correctional Facility for women, feels her reputation has been damaged by the arrest, and that she has been wrongly labeled as someone who makes meth.
Her police mug shot ran on the front page of her local newspaper, she wrote, in a letter to the Tribune-Star, “with an article entitled, ‘17 Arrested in Drug Sweep.’”
The morning she was arrested, Harpold and her husband were awakened by police officers banging on the front door of their home at Midway along U.S. 36. She was allowed to get dressed, and was then taken in handcuffs to the Clinton Police Department, where she was questioned about her cold medicine purchases. She was later booked into jail, and her husband had to pay $300 bail to get her released.
Sesquioxidizing
Sesquioxidizing is not in any official scrabble dictionary, but should be, even if only for its magically positioned q, x and z. The word lives on the web, it can be found in "The Archive of Endangered, Special, or Fun Words", with the text: 'the word is derived from the word "sesquioxide", and thus not found in the dictionary directly'.
Using sesquioxidizing and otherwise TWL06 words only, on a day that things go your way and with the rack DGIQSXZ one can get 2015 points [upper image]... the bigger SOWPODS dictionary makes a difference. Words like 'jabberwock(s)', 'talaq', 'leylandi(i)', 'highfaluting' and 'acidulent', none of which are in the TWL06, allow a 2044 points move with the rack DGQSZXI [lower image].
Scrabble enthusiasts will know what TWL and SOWPODS are; others won't care. More info at Scrabulizer, via Metafilter.
Medical Horrors
A magazine from 1932. Found at MagazineArt.org, which looks to be a fascinating site to explore. Via (exclamation mark).
WTF is now TFW
The Wisconsin Tourism Federation has changed its name to the Tourism Federation of Wisconsin after being informed of the conventional interpretation of its former acronym.
Several people at the BoingBoing discussion thread have already pointed out that changing it to FTW ("For The Win") would have been better.
Via Fark.
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