- Sales of antacids increase by as much as 20% the day after the Superbowl.
- Fossilized bird droppings are one of the chief exports of Nauru, an island nation in the Western Pacific.
- The country of Andorra has a zero percent unemployment rate.
- It takes about 63,000 trees to make the newsprint for the average Sunday edition of The New York Times.
- In 2001, the five most valuable brand names in order were Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, GE, and Nokia.
- It cost the soft drink industry $100 million a year for thefts committed involving vending machines.
- The American Automobile association was formed in 1905 for the sole purpose of warning motorists of police speed traps.
- Ray Kroc bought McDonalds for $2.7 million in 1961 from the McDonald brothers.
- The largest cereal company in the world is Quaker Oats, located in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, USA.
- American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first class.
- Bill Bowerman, the co-founder of the shoe company Nike, got his first shoe idea after staring at a waffle iron. This gave him the idea of using squared spikes to make the shoes lighter.
- Close to fifty percent of Internet shoppers spend over five hours a week online.
- David McConnell started the California Perfume Company (CPC) in 1886. Today the company is known as Avon, which he named after his favorite playwright William Shakespeare, and Stratford on Avon.
- Every year, kids in North America spend close to half a billion dollars on chewing gum.
- Frosted Flakes mascot “Tony the Tiger” has a wife, son (Tony Jr.) and daughter (Antoinette) that were used in early advertising commercials.
- In 1897, Bayer, who is the makers of Aspirin, once marketed the drug heroin.
- In the 1930′s, Pepsi-Cola had an advertising campaign starring two cartoon cops called “Pepsi & Pete.”
- In the late 1960′s, Mountain Dew bottles featured a hillbilly on them. These are now collector items worth five to ten dollars.
- It would take approximately twenty-four trees that are on average six to eight inches in diameter to produce one ton of newsprint for the Sunday edition of the New York Times.
- Retail sales for soft drinks in the United States in 2001 were more than sixty billion dollars.
- The first product to ever be scanned with a bar code was Wrigley’s gum on June 26,1974.
- The United States and Canada are the world’s largest producers of paper and paper products.
- There is a Nike commercial that was shot in Kenya with Samburu tribesman speaking in their native language Maa. The slogan “Just Do It” appears when the tribesman is talking. In reality he was saying, “I don’t want these. Give me big shoes.”
- There is now an ATM at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, which has a winter population of two hundred people.
- Tags: American Automobile association, Andorra, antacids, Aspirin, McMurdo Station, Pepsi-Cola, Wrigley's gum
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as a winner of the Writing Competition organized by the British Council in Istanbul, Turkey, so I have won a book prize and I have donated my voucher to my Turkish Friend who lives in Turkey as I have 2 friends and one I feel certain does live in Turkey but with the other when I was in Istanbul 2 years ago he was not in Istanbul Turkey but was somewhere else so thus my donation to my friend who is resident in Turkey.
So the Royal Wedding is drawing near and the Government encourages us all to have Street Parties as we are not to be invited to Westminster Abbey to attend the wedding ceremony but are held as outsiders or the poor, the under class, the downtrodden, the elderly or in the case of this writer . The Professional Class though I see no snub in a reference to myself as belonging to the Professional Class though as a Class, we are sadly diminished. Good Friday is a religious day in Catholic Countries but in Protestant England it is largely kept as a Bank Holiday and everyone is on a Sunday service bus service or public transport and the shops are half open and half closed. So I shall tune in on my Radio at 3 pm for the BBC Religious Music on Radio 3. Good Friday celebrated!
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Invisibility has been on humanity's wish list at least since Egyptian times. With recent advances in optics and computing however, this elusive goal is no longer purely imaginary.
Last spring, Susumu Tachi, an engineering professor at the University of Tokyo, demonstrated a crude invisibility cloak. Through the clever application of some dirt-cheap technology, the Japanese inventor has brought personal invisibility a step closer to reality.
Tachi's cloak - a shiny raincoat that serves as a movie screen, showing imagery from a video camera positioned behind the wearer - is more gimmick than practical prototype. Nonetheless, from the right angle and under controlled circumstances, it does make a sort of ghost of the wearer. And, unlike traditional camouflage, it's most effective when either the wearer or the background is moving (but not both). You don't need a university lab to check it out: Stick a webcam on your back and hold your laptop in front of you, screen facing out. Your friends will see right through you. It's a great party trick.
Such pathetic parlor trick demonstrations aren't going to fool anyone for more than a fraction of a second. Where is Harry Potter's cloak, wrapped around the student wizard as he wanders the halls of Hogwarts undetected? What about James Bond's disappearing Aston-Martin in Die Another Day? The extraterrestrial camouflage suit in the 1987 movie Predator? Wonder Woman's see-through Atlantean jet? It's not difficult to imagine a better system than Tachi's. In fact, invisibility that would satisfy any wizard - not to mention any spy, thief, or soldier - is closer than you might think.
US Defense Department press releases citing "adaptive," "advanced," and "active" camouflage suggest that the government is working on devices like this. If so, it's keeping them under wraps. However, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has published a preliminary design for an invisible vehicle, and battalions of armchair engineers have weighed in with gusto on newsgroups and blogs. As it happens, most of the schemes that have been advanced overlook the complexities of the problem. Invisibility isn't a simple matter of sensors that read the light beams on one side of an object and LEDs or LCDs that reproduce those beams on the other. In fact, such a system would work about as well as the laptop party trick with the webcam's lens removed: Objects right up against the sensors would produce blurry images on the display, but a few centimeters away they'd disintegrate into a featureless gray haze.
An invisibility cloak, if it's going to dupe anyone who might see it, needs to represent the scene behind its wearer accurately from any angle. Moreover, since any number of people might be looking through it at any given moment, it has to reproduce the background from all angles at once. That is, it has to project a separate image of its surroundings for every possible perspective.
Impossible? Not really, just difficult. Rather than one video camera, we'll need at least six stereoscopic pairs (facing forward, backward, right, left, upward, and downward) - enough to capture the surroundings in all directions. The cameras will transmit images to a dense array of display elements, each capable of aiming thousands of light beams on their own individual trajectories. And what imagery will these elements project? A virtual scene derived from the cameras' views, making it possible to synthesize various perspectives. Of course, keeping this scene updated and projected realistically onto the cloak's display fabric will require fancy software and a serious wearable computer.
Many of the technical hurdles have already been overcome. Off-the-shelf miniature color cameras can serve as suitable light sensors. As for the display, to remain unseen at a Potteresque distance of, say, 2 meters, the resolution need not be much finer than the granularity of human vision at that distance (about 289 pixels per square centimeter). LEDs this size are readily available. Likewise, color isn't a problem - 16-bit displays are common and ought to suffice.
But it will take more than off-the-shelf parts to make the cloak's image bright enough to blend in with the daytime sky. If the effect is to work in all lighting conditions, the display must be able to reproduce anything from the faintest flicker of color perceptible to the human eye (1 milliwatt per square meter) to the glow of the open sky (150 watts per square meter). Actually, the problem is worse than that: According to Rich Gossweiler at HP Labs, the sun is 230,000 times more intense than the sky surrounding it. If we want the cloak to be able to pass in front of the sun without looking hazy or casting shadows, we'll need to make it equally bright. Of course, this would put severe demands on the display technology - LEDs just ain't that brilliant - and it would increase battery size or shrink battery life accordingly. So let's ignore the sun and take our chances. An average TV screen looks blank in full daylight, so we'll need something brighter, more along the lines of a traffic light.
Another problem is response time. Like a TV screen, the cloak's display must be able to update faster than the eye's ability to perceive flickering. It has to register motion in real time without the blurring, ghosting, smearing, and judder that plague today's low-end monitors. A laptop LCD screen isn't going to cut it. A lattice of superbright LED microarrays probably will.
The real challenge however is turning the video images into a realistic picture. The view from a pair of cameras strapped to your body is different from the perspective of an observer even a short distance away. The observer can see things the cameras can't, thanks to parallax - the way the angles change with the distance.
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Searching for Scientific Utopia:
The Future of Scientific Advances, Biology, Chemistry, Physics & Inventions.
By Mian Shaan Ali Choudhry (Principal of Shaan Science Academy) - August 2009.
Take cellphones for example. We've had the technology to make them since the 1960s, but they weren't really affordable or mass produced until the late 1990s. Now our cellphones come with a host of extra gadgets like a video camera, games, GPS, texting, internet access, music, radio and more.
But we have yet to invent a more powerful / longer lasting battery. Or maybe an alternative way to recharge the battery. Quite a few companies have come out with solar adapters for cell phones which people can either carry with them or leave in their car. Or better yet, a cell phone with its own solar cells.
Next lets discuss housing. We are still using the same building technology we've been using for hundreds of years. Wood, brick, mortar and cement. Depending on the building we also use steel and glass... and glass is a very good insulator. When it comes to housing it is all about insulation.
So what we need is a new kind of insulation, or we need to think backwards and build using more stone (which is a great insulator).
Food wise we now have genetically modified foods, although the growing trend is towards natural organic foods (without pesticides) that are grown in greenhouses and controlled environments. Which brings us back to building technology again. We need to be mass producing more greenhouses, especially in regions which have a shortage of locally grown food.
The world also has a growing shortage of fresh / clean water. So what we need is a way to cheaply distill / filter salt water and make water that is safe to drink. This technology could also be used to recycle water. After that its just a matter of transporting water to locations that need it.
On top of this it would be nice to have more technology to conserve water. How about really tiny dishwashers? I think there is a market for a dishwasher about the size of a microwave, one that fits easily on the kitchen counter.That covers food and water, but what about health care? Think of all the advances we've had in the last hundred years of medicine. Its safe to assume we will make a good portion more advances in the next 20 years.
Lets take AIDS medicine for example. Anti-retrovial medicine has reached a point where AIDS/HIV is basically cured, but the medicine is quite expensive. Over time however the price of those medicines should come down. Part of the problem is not scientific, but just plain greed. The American pharmaceutical industry is more worried about their stock value and trillion dollar profits than actually treating people.
Outside of medicine new techniques and procedures for curing ailments, surgeries and such are continuing to make improvements. The sad fact however is that many Americans lean towards the quick fix, when in reality what they really need is more exercise and proper diet. Not much can be done to prevent health problems if people don't take care of themselves in the first place.
Extending life span is also within our reach as tests on a variety of hormones like HGH (Human Growth Hormone) show promising signs of maintaining a person's youthful appearance and increases our recuperative abilities. We may soon find a combination of hormones or a drug which allows humans to live significantly longer.
Failing that we now have robotic hearts, robotic limbs and robotic technology is quickly becoming a global industry. Leading the way is Japan where they are already experimenting with robotic soldiers (Mechs), robotic massage parlours and robots for essentially every menial task. Imagine 20 years from now walking into a McDonalds that is 100% automated, voice activated and serves up the food faster than a human could ever do. (Which leaves us humans doing all the jobs which require creative, managerial or maintenance skills.)
One of the biggest changes we will likely see will be in the automotive industry. Hydrogen cars are coming and within 10-15 years gasoline and diesel cars will be obsolete.
Along with that we can expect cars to get more complicated as GPS, computers, auto-pilot technology and other fancy bits become more common.
60 years ago the fastest road-legal car in the world was the Jaguar XK120. The 120 in the name was for its top speed of 120 mph (193 km/h). In 2009 the fastest road-legal car is the Gumpert Apollo Sport... The Ascari A10, Koenigsegg CCX TGW, Pagani Zonda F Roadster, Caterham Seven R500 and the Bugatti Veyron are arguably just as fast around a race track and collectively have top speeds of approx. 400 km/h (250 mph). What this tells us is that the top speed of road-legal cars has more than doubled in the last 60 years. So in the next 20 years we might expect a road-legal car to have a top speed of 677 km/h (421 mph).
A Russian company is currently working on a plane that is expected to replace the ol' British Concorde planes (only 20 were ever built, cruising speed of Mach 2.02 and they were retired from service in 2003). The TU-244 being built by Russian company Tupolev has a set goal of Mach 3 and will be set for launch in 2015.
For aerospace there is also the matter of the NASA space shuttle which will be retired in 2010, after 31 years of ferrying astronauts back and forth from Earth's orbit. To replace the space shuttle NASA (and international partners from 15 other nations) are planning to a Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) capable of performing the same tasks the space shuttle did, but also of landing on the moon and traveling to Mars as part of Project Constellation.
As of August 2009 we have two functioning robots on Mars: the Spirit rover and the Opportunity rover. By 2012 there will be 4 more missions by the United States, Canada, Russia and China to collect soil samples and send back info to earth. Because Mars' and Earth's orbits are different the optimal launch windows to Mars are every 780 days. NASA has plans to begin terraforming Mars by 2030 and manned colony missions by 2040. Russia and China have made similar claims, but all three are subject to budgetary restraints rather than technology.
In recent years there has also been a significant rise in space tourism and many independent companies building their own smaller space shuttles with plans to ferry people into orbit, give them a tour of a couple hours, and then return back to earth. The technology is there and its certainly profitable, but it doesn't really serve a logical purpose beyond helping to expand scientific research in the field of aerospace.
Conclusions? We are so close to having all the food, water, shelter, medicine, transportation, robots and clean energy we could ever want. With some time and investment we could be living in a technological utopia.
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The Right to Water
By www.Shaan-Ali.blogspot.com - 2008.
Some might think water is an environmental issue, and it is, but it is much more of a health issue. Human life, indeed all life, is impossible without water.
In North America we take water for granted. In addition to drinking, we also cook, clean, bottle and sell water like a commodity. Twenty years ago the idea of selling bottled water was considered silly. Many of us still consider it silly, but people still seem to buy it anyway.
Part of the reason is nobody seems to TRUST tap water lately. The bottled water companies have propogated the myth that tap water is somehow dangerous, despite the fact we use it for cooking our spaghetti, making Kool-Aid and even Coca-Cola/Pepsi/etc. You'd think the Soda Pop companies would at least boil the water, but nope they don't. Its just regular tap water mixed with sugar, caffeine and Vanilla flavour. (On a side note we wish they would bring back Vanilla Coke, that stuff was better than the regular Coke.)
They have also managed to convince people that bottled water somehow tastes better. It doesn't. Water is tasteless. The only time it might taste different if its been sitting in the sun too long and becomes stagnant.
Fact: Over 1.1 billion people on the Earth don't have access to safe drinking water.
So in response to the water companies a worldwide movement has been growing to declare water a human right. The idea is simple: People need water to survive, therefore water should be FREE and provided to citizens of the world by their individual governments.
Numerous human rights institutions and several countries, such as the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, have declared water a right, and there's currently a motion before the United Nations calling for all countries to agree to make water a human right. The World Health Organization (WHO), the U.N.'s specialized agency for health, is also advocating for countries to accept water as a human right.
The United Nations expects countries to take the necessary steps to ensure that people can enjoy sufficient, safe, accessible and affordable/free water, without discrimination. Governments are also expected to take reasonable steps to avoid a contaminated water supply and to ensure that citizens are treated equally with their access to water.
Fact: Selling clean water is a $425 billion US / year industry, making it second only to the oil industry.
Countries in South America, Africa and Asia are the most effected by greedy companies trying to/succeeding in commodifying water. Most of the countries are actually owned by American or European stockholders, and because the companies are trying to please their stockholders they aim to sell the water for the most possible profitable, which means people who are poor can't afford clean water, will become ill from drinking contaminated water and possibly die.
Fact: Over 70% of the Earth is covered with water, but less than 1% is safe drinking water.
There's also been numerous documentaries about water, including "Flow: For Love of Water" in 2008 which also features Bolivia's water crisis, in addition to showing how water is becoming a problem around the world and even in the United States.
And Hollywood is not the only group that has historically has been concerned about water. Religious groups have long proclaimed the sacredness of water, not just for baptism in Christianity or bathing in Islam, but just in general sacred due to its life giving properties. A land without water is a land without life.
Conflict over water is another growing concern, especially in parts of Africa and the Middle East where water scarcity is becoming such a problem that groups and even countries are now going to war over resources: Food, water, oil. They're all part of the bigger problems of overpopulation, climate change and scarcity.
India, China and the United States are the largest users of freshwater resources. India uses 645.84 cubic kilometers/year, China 549.76 cubic kilometers/year, USA 477 cubic kilometers/year. Together the three countries use more freshwater than the rest of the world combined. A cubic kilometer of water weighs one billion metric tonnes or 2.205 trillion pounds.
In the USA and similar western countries we waste a lot of water for washing dishes, taking showers, etc. because here freshwater is plentiful and we're not worried about running out because our population is low enough that its currently sustainable. In China and India however they use so much water because of overpopulation and a growing infrastructure/economy that requires water for chemical processes and growing everyday needs.
In countries where water is scarce however they use every drop of freshwater they can find, and they certainly don't waste it giving the dog a bath or swimming in it, hence the lack of using water for sanitation. Its simply too precious to be deliberately polluted and discarded.
And trying to sell water as a commodity to be wasted on the rich... well, that's just greedy and disrespectful to your fellow human beings, and it will be no surprise when people go to war over it.
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