16 Sweet Moments of March Madness
Ohio 6-Year-Old Has Higher IQ Than Einstein
Ohio 6-Year-Old Has Higher IQ Than Einstein: "When you were a kid, you probably heard the one about Einstein failing math. It turns out that didn't really happen. Being a genius, the young Einstein completely dominated all math classes.Another child who will never have to worry about arithmetic is Pranav Veera. That's because the 6-year-old from Ohio has an IQ of 176, 16 points higher than the man who gave us the theory of relativity. The first-grader's one-in-a-million score can be attributed partially to his photographic memory -- the youngster can tell you what day of the week any date fell upon back to the year 2000."
BallDroppings
Turn your sound up. Draw lines on the black screen to bounce the balls. Enjoy the music."
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Coke, Johnson & Johnson, Harley Show Brand Strength
Coke, Johnson & Johnson, Harley Show Brand Strength: "Coca-Cola (KO) and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) have maintained the #1 and #2 spots on a list of top companies with the most “Brand Power” in the US, according to Corebrand, which released its 2008 Corporate Branding Index (pdf) this week. These highly regarded brands also held the same slots in the 2007 rankings.
After Coca-Cola and J&J, Harley-Davidson moved up one place to #3, replacing Hershey Foods, which is now #4, Corebrand said. Campbell Soup moved up one spot to #5, replacing Hallmark, which is now #6. UPS remained unchanged in 7th place, while Colgate- Palmolive moved up one spot to #8, replacing FedEx (now #9).
Out of the top 10, CoreBrand reports that only Kellogg Company (#10) has shown significant growth, rising from #15 in 2007 and from #21 in 2005.
Notable within the top 20, BMW is now in 12th place and is rising fast. It was #16 in 2007 and #28 in 2005. Bayer, which moved into #17 from #27 in 2007 and #45 in 2005, is also moving quickly."
After Coca-Cola and J&J, Harley-Davidson moved up one place to #3, replacing Hershey Foods, which is now #4, Corebrand said. Campbell Soup moved up one spot to #5, replacing Hallmark, which is now #6. UPS remained unchanged in 7th place, while Colgate- Palmolive moved up one spot to #8, replacing FedEx (now #9).
Out of the top 10, CoreBrand reports that only Kellogg Company (#10) has shown significant growth, rising from #15 in 2007 and from #21 in 2005.
Notable within the top 20, BMW is now in 12th place and is rising fast. It was #16 in 2007 and #28 in 2005. Bayer, which moved into #17 from #27 in 2007 and #45 in 2005, is also moving quickly."
Why money messes with your mind
Why money messes with your mind: "Dough, wonga, greenbacks, cash. Just words, you might say, but they carry an eerie psychological force. Chew them over for a few moments, and you will become a different person. Simply thinking about words associated with money seems to makes us more self-reliant and less inclined to help others. And it gets weirder: just handling cash can take the sting out of social rejection and even diminish physical pain.This is all the stranger when you consider what money is supposed to be. For economists, it is nothing more than a tool of exchange that makes economic life more efficient. Just as an axe allows us to chop down trees, money allows us to have markets that, traditional economists tell us, dispassionately set the price of anything from a loaf of bread to a painting by Picasso. Yet money stirs up more passion, stress and envy than any axe or hammer ever could. We just can't seem to deal with it rationally... but why?"
Man tries to pay bill with spider drawing
Man tries to pay bill with spider drawing: "Below is the complete email conversation that Adelaide man David Thorne claims he had with a utility company chasing payment of an overdue bill.
From: Jane Gilles
Date: Wednesday 8 Oct 2008 12.19pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Overdue account
Dear David,
Our records indicate that your account is overdue by the amount of $233.95. If you have already made this payment please contact us within the next 7 days to confirm payment has been applied to your account and is no longer outstanding.
Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles
From: David Thorne
Date: Wednesday 8 Oct 2008 12.37pm
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Overdue account
Dear Jane,
I do not have any money so am sending you this drawing I did of a spider instead. I value the drawing at $233.95 so trust that this settles the matter.
Regards, David."
From: Jane Gilles
Date: Wednesday 8 Oct 2008 12.19pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Overdue account
Dear David,
Our records indicate that your account is overdue by the amount of $233.95. If you have already made this payment please contact us within the next 7 days to confirm payment has been applied to your account and is no longer outstanding.
Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles
From: David Thorne
Date: Wednesday 8 Oct 2008 12.37pm
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Overdue account
Dear Jane,
I do not have any money so am sending you this drawing I did of a spider instead. I value the drawing at $233.95 so trust that this settles the matter.
Regards, David."
Giant worm found in Cornwall
Giant worm found in Cornwall : "Aquarists at the Blue Reef Aquarium in Newquay have discovered the identity of a mysterious killer that had been devastating their coral reef display over recent months.Staff had been puzzled by violent attacks on their fragile living reefs – in some cases the corals had been literally cut in half.
After staking out the display for several weeks, aquarists decided as a last resort to take it apart rock by rock.
Halfway through the process the terrifying perpetrator was finally revealed - a monstrous four-foot-long giant reef worm."
Google Earth reveals fish trap made from rocks 1,000 years ago
Google Earth reveals fish trap made from rocks 1,000 years ago : "For a millennium it has lain undisturbed beneath the waves a stone's throw from one of Britain's best-loved beaches.
But now modern technology has revealed this ancient fish trap, used at the time of the Norman Conquest."
iPhone OS 3.0 Preview Presentation
iPhone OS 3.0 Preview Presentation: "On March 17, Apple unveiled details about
iPhone OS 3.0 software and released the new
iPhone Software Development Kit for developers."
Man posed as dead brother for 20 years
Man posed as dead brother for 20 years: "A 67-year-old man has been fined $1,000 for impersonating his dead brother during a traffic stop.
George Smith pleaded guilty to fraudulently impersonating someone else to avoid arrest, and misleading police by falsely identifying himself.
He was pulled over on Jan. 21, 2008, and gave a police officer his vehicle registration and insurance papers with his real name."
George Smith pleaded guilty to fraudulently impersonating someone else to avoid arrest, and misleading police by falsely identifying himself.
He was pulled over on Jan. 21, 2008, and gave a police officer his vehicle registration and insurance papers with his real name."
But he claimed he was his brother James, and had picked up his brother's car from a body shop as a favour.
When the officer did a driver's licence check for George Smith and saw the photo resembled the driver, he became suspicious.
Smith swore at the officer upon being questioned and claimed he was being unfairly hassled.
A subsequent investigation revealed that James Smith died in 1988, and his George Smith's driver's licence has been suspended since 1984.
When confronted, Smith said he'd been using his brother's name for the last 20 years.
The 10 Biggest Intellectual Fights Of All time
The 10 Biggest Intellectual Fights Of All time | Online Courses: "In our modern, scientific world it is sometimes easy to forget that human progress often comes attached to some spectacular intellectual clashes between different ways of looking at things and differing interpretations of what is seen. There have been some notable intellectual mind-fights over the millennia, the following are ten such fights, the outcome of which changed the world into what we know of it today."
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
How to Stop Fights - Break Up a Bar Fight
How to Stop Fights - Break Up a Bar Fight - Esquire: "Just in time for the year's most drunken mess of a holiday, a top L.A. bouncer turned online safety guru offers a step-by-step guide to drink in peace when the bar gets rowdy. Note: The author does not encourage fighting, but, you know, just in case..."
50 Songs Every Man Should Be Listening To
Best New Songs - Top Songs of 2009 - Esquire:
Esquire's Annual Guide to Music
"When it comes to music, consider us your friend. Not the pretentious friend who nods in approval instead of to the beat. Not the myopic friend who judges everything against Pavement. We're the friend with minimal hang-ups, the friend who can appreciate Lil Wayne as much as Blitzen Trapper. Because we — Esquire's editors and music correspondent Andy Langer — just want to be surprised. We want to have a new favorite song. And most of all, we want to share new (and sort of new) songs we like. This list is those songs. So as not to annoy you, we waited till we had fifty."
Monday, March 16, 2009
Physicists Closer To Discovering 'God Particle
Physicists Closer To Discovering 'God Particle': "The U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced on Friday that physicists have come closer to finding the elusive 'God Particle,' which could one day explain why particles have mass, the American Free Press reported.
The American research institute had previously claimed it was moving ahead of its European rival in the race to discover one of the biggest prizes in physics, the elusive Higgs Boson particle.
Fermilab reported that its researchers have managed to shrink the territory where they expect the so-called “God Particle” to be found.
British physicist Peter Higgs set out to answer the question that baffled physicists: how do particles acquire mass?"
8 Brilliant Scientific Screw-ups
8 Brilliant Scientific Screw-ups: "Hard work and dedication have their time and place, but the values of failure and ineptitude have gone unappreciated for far too long. They say that patience is a virtue, but the following eight inventions prove that laziness, slovenliness, clumsiness and pure stupidity can be virtues, too."
Sunday, March 15, 2009
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Time
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Time - DISCOVER Magazine
1 “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so,” joked Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Scientists aren’t laughing, though. Some speculative new physics theories suggest that time emerges from a more fundamental—and timeless—reality.
2 Try explaining that when you get to work late. The average U.S. city commuter loses 38 hours a year to traffic delays.
3 Wonder why you have to set your clock ahead in March? Daylight Saving Time began as a joke by Benjamin Franklin, who proposed waking people earlier on bright summer mornings so they might work more during the day and thus save candles. It was introduced in the U.K. in 1917 and then spread around the world.
4 Green days. The Department of Energy estimates that electricity demand drops by 0.5 percent during Daylight Saving Time, saving the equivalent of nearly 3 million barrels of oil.
5 By observing how quickly bank tellers made change, pedestrians walked, and postal clerks spoke, psychologists determined that the three fastest-paced U.S. cities are Boston, Buffalo, and New York.
6 The three slowest? Shreveport, Sacramento, and L.A.
7 One second used to be defined as 1/86,400 the length of a day. However, Earth’s rotation isn’t perfectly reliable. Tidal friction from the sun and moon slows our planet and increases the length of a day by 3 milliseconds per century.
8 This means that in the time of the dinosaurs, the day was just 23 hours long.
9 Weather also changes the day. During El Niño events, strong winds can slow Earth’s rotation by a fraction of a millisecond every 24 hours.
10 Modern technology can do better. In 1972 a network of atomic clocks in more than 50 countries was made the final authority on time, so accurate that it takes 31.7 million years to lose about one second.
11 To keep this time in sync with Earth’s slowing rotation, a “leap second” must be added every few years, most recently this past New Year’s Eve.
12 The world’s most accurate clock, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado, measures vibrations of a single atom of mercury. In a billion years it will not lose one second.
13 Until the 1800s, every village lived in its own little time zone, with clocks synchronized to the local solar noon.
14 This caused havoc with the advent of trains and timetables. For a while watches were made that could tell both local time and “railway time.”
15 On November 18, 1883, American railway companies forced the national adoption of standardized time zones.
16 Thinking about how railway time required clocks in different places to be synchronized may have inspired Einstein to develop his theory of relativity, which unifies space and time.
17 Einstein showed that gravity makes time run more slowly. Thus airplane passengers, flying where Earth’s pull is weaker, age a few extra nanoseconds each flight.
18 According to quantum theory, the shortest moment of time that can exist is known as Planck time, or 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 second.
19 Time has not been around forever. Most scientists believe it was created along with the rest of the universe in the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.
20 There may be an end of time. Three Spanish scientists posit that the observed acceleration of the expanding cosmos is an illusion caused by the slowing of time. According to their math, time may eventually stop, at which point everything will come to a standstill.
Old age begins at 27 as mental powers start to decline
Old age begins at 27 as mental powers start to decline, scientists find: "Researchers have found that peoples' mental abilities peak at 22 before beginning to deteriorate just five years later.Professor Timothy Salthouse said the results suggested that therapies designed to prevent or reverse age-related conditions may need to start earlier, long before people become pensioners."
"Results converge on a conclusion that some aspects of age-related cognitive decline begin in healthy, educated adults when they are in their 20s and 30s," he said.
The study of 2,000 men and women lasted over seven years. The respondents, aged between 18-60, were asked to solve visual puzzles, recall words and story details and spot patterns in letters and symbolsWorld's Wealthiest Individuals...
World's Wealthiest Individuals...: "Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates regained the title of world’s richest person on Forbes magazine’s annual ranking of billionaires worldwide, as the global recession slashed the size of the list by 30 percent.
The number of billionaires fell to 793 from 1,125 last year. It was the first time since 2003 that the number of people on the list decreased, and the biggest drop since the magazine began the ranking 23 years ago.
The total net worth of the list fell to $2.4 trillion from $4.4 trillion last year, with the average billionaire worth $3 billion, down from $3.9 billion. The three wealthiest -- Gates, Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Chairman Warren Buffett and Mexican telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim Helu -- lost a combined $68 billion in the past year."
Social networks 'are new e-mail'
Social networks 'are new e-mail': "'We are all in the process of creating e-mail 2.0,' David Sacks, founder of business social network Yammer said.Tens of millions of people are using social networks to stay in touch.
The growth in such services is being heralded as the start of the real-time, pervasive web.
'New communication'
Mr Sacks said: 'What people want to do on social network these days is post status updates. We think it's all people want to do.'"
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