Your favorite pillow holds an entire ecosystem of disgusting bugs and potentially deadly fungi, a new study suggests.
The typical pillow contains more than a million fungal spores, researchers found. That’s several thousand spores for every little gram of material.
There’s more.
Other studies have shown pillows and other bedding harbor dust mites, microscopic spider-like creatures that feed on flakes of human skin
Try not to remember this story the next time you stay in a hotel or motel.
From a report in The New York Times:
Generally, men and women in the Northeast marry later than those in the Midwest, West or South. In New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts, for example, the median age of first marriage is about 29 for men and 26 or 27 for women, about four years later than in Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Utah. And tracking the red state-blue state divide, those in California, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin follow the Northeast patterns, not those of their region.
…Generally, the study found, states in the Northeast and the West had a higher percentage of unmarried-partner households than those in the South, In Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, unmarried couples made up more than 7 percent of all coupled households, about the twice the proportion of such households in Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi.
On teenage births, the same differences become clear. In New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, about 5 percent of babies are born to teenage mothers, while in Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, South Carolina, Texas and Wyoming, 10 percent or more of all births are to teenage mothers.
Lots of interesting things in the Science Times today.
Pluto may not be a planet.
Despite the movies, you should not drown in quicksand (unless the tide comes in).
Elk may get wasting disease because they slobber and lick each other too much.
Some experts say maybe we shouldn’t live on the coast.
Bicycle saddles may cause erectile dysfunction for serious male riders. (Justly for some I might add, given their arrogance and rudeness on public streets.)
Do not play dead if a bear seems to be attacking you in a predatory way. (As opposed to when their attack is defensive; perhaps you can ask the bear for a time out to inquire about their motives.)
Next to the day, the week is the most important calendric unit in our life. And yet, there is no astronomical significance to the week. Nothing cosmic happens in the heavens in seven days. How, then, did the week come to assume such importance?
The first thing to understand is that a week is not necessarily seven days. In pre-literate societies weeks of 4 to 10 days were observed; those weeks were typically the interval from one market day to the next. Four to 10 days gave farmers enough time to accumulate and transport goods to sell. (The one week that was almost always avoided was the 7-day week — it was considered unlucky!) The 7-day week was introduced in Rome (where ides, nones, and calends were the vogue) in the first century A.D. by Persian astrology fanatics, not by Christians or Jews. The idea was that there would be a day for the five known planets, plus the sun and the moon, making seven; this was an ancient West Asian idea. However, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire in the time of Constantine (c. 325 A.D.), the familiar Hebrew-Christian week of 7 days, beginning on Sunday, became conflated with the pagan week and took its place in the Julian calendar. Thereafter, it seemed to Christians that the week Rome now observed was seamless with the 7-day week of the Bible — even though its pagan roots were obvious in the names of the days: Saturn’s day, Sun’s day, Moon’s day. The other days take their equally pagan names in English from a detour into Norse mythology: Tiw’s day, Woden’s day, Thor’s day, and Fria’s day.
The amazing thing is that today the 7-day week, which is widely viewed as being Judeo-Christian, even Bible-based, holds sway for civil purposes over the entire world, including countries where Judaism and Christianity are anathema. Chinese, Arabs, Indians, Africans, Japanese, and a hundred others sit down at the U.N. to the tune of a 7-day week, in perfect peace (at least calendrically!). So dear is this succession of 7 days that when the calendar changed from Julian to Gregorian the week was preserved, though not the days of the month: in 1752, in England, Sept. 14 followed Sept. 2 — but Thursday followed Wednesday, as always. Eleven days disappeared from the calendar — but not from the week!
Source: Seven Day Week, via the United States Naval Observatory
In case you want to synchronize your calendars, the equinox is Thursday at 22:23 Universal Time. That’s the fall equinox in the northern hemisphere; spring in the southern.
Subtract 4 hours for Eastern Daylight Time, 5 for Central, 6 for Mountain and 7 for Pacific.
Or, in other words, fall begins at 4:23 PM Mountain Daylight Time on Thursday, September 22.
… but just in case.
Someone asked me today what was the difference between straw and hay.
Straw is used for animal bedding. It’s the chaff from grains like wheat.
Hay is used for food. It’s grass. A prominent type is alfalfa.
There will be a pop quiz later.
The New York Times has an article that includes a shopping list.
The flag flies at half mast for ten days for the death of a chief justice.
See the applicable law here.
From the Wall Street Journal, a fascinating report on Scrabble and the national championship.
RENO, Nev. — The best play of the 2005 National Scrabble Championship didn’t occur during yesterday’s beautiful five-game final match between a Thai student and an American mortgage underwriter.
Nope, for my money it happened on Tuesday, during the 25th round of the 28-game affair, in the second division in the six-division, 700-person field, in a game that had no effect on who’d be crowned king of the Scrabble world.
Rita Norr of Danbury Conn., the only woman ever to win a national championship, in 1987, played the word MATERIAL. In one go, Andrew Golding, an IT professional from Verdun, Quebec, placed RE in front of it and IZE at the end to make REMATERIALIZE. The R landed on a triple-word-score square, and the word totaled 93 points. Rita later tacked on a D: REMATERIALIZED. A 14-letter word. There are 15 rows on a Scrabble board.
After the game, world filtered around the giant playing room. A crowd gathered around the table; 14-letter words don’t happen very often. Photos were taken — of the board, not the players …
Some additional remarks:
… To the people in this tournament, though, Scrabble is a strategy game in which the playing pieces happen to be letters. The purpose of the game is similar to that of other games, physical or mental: to use all of the pieces to their fullest potential to exploit the intricacies of the playing field.
… Scrabble’s secret is that it’s a math game: board geometry, strategic decision making, probability and chance. But nearly every player loves the language part, too, the aesthetics of the letters and letter combinations, the quirky definitions, the sheer breadth and beauty of English.
From a report in Friday’s New York Times — M.R.I. Scanners’ Strong Magnets Are Cited in a Rash of Accidents:
The pictures and stories are the stuff of slapstick: wheelchairs, gurneys and even floor polishers jammed deep inside M.R.I. scanners whose powerful magnets grabbed them from the hands of careless hospital workers.
The police officer whose pistol flew out of his holster and shot a wall as it hit the magnet. The sprinkler repairman whose acetylene tank was yanked inside, breaking its valve and starting a fire that razed the building.
But the bigger picture is anything but funny, medical safety experts say. As the number of magnetic resonance imaging scanners in the country has soared from a handful in 1980 to about 10,000 today, and as magnets have quadrupled in power, careless accidents have become more frequent. Some have caused serious injuries and even death.
…
The most notorious accident was the death of 6-year-old Michael Colombini in 2001 at the Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, N.Y. He was sedated in a scanner after a brain operation when his oxygen supply failed. An anesthesiologist ran for an oxygen tank and failed to notice that the one he found in the hall outside was made of steel. As he returned, the tank shot out of his hands, hitting Michael in the head.
Bad to the Last Drop from The New York Times (excerpts).
In 2004, Americans, on average, drank 24 gallons of bottled water, making it second only to carbonated soft drinks in popularity. Furthermore, consumption of bottled water is growing more quickly than that of soft drinks and has more than doubled in the past decade. This year, Americans will spend around $9.8 billion on bottled water, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation.
Ounce for ounce, it costs more than gasoline, even at today’s high gasoline prices; depending on the brand, it costs 250 to 10,000 times more than tap water. Globally, bottled water is now a $46 billion industry. Why has it become so popular?
It cannot be the taste, since most people cannot tell the difference in a blind tasting. …
Nor is there any health or nutritional benefit to drinking bottled water over tap water….but tap water is more stringently monitored and tightly regulated than bottled water. …
But despite its association with purity and cleanliness, bottled water is bad for the environment. It is shipped at vast expense from one part of the world to another, is then kept refrigerated before sale, and causes huge numbers of plastic bottles to go into landfills.
To put it another way, out of 168 nations in a Harvard University study last year, 163 had some form of paid maternity leave, leaving the United States in the company of Lesotho, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.
AP via The Arizona Daily Star
or is Amazon sending its “free shipping” packages by mule train? According to their package tracking, a shipment ordered July 6 that left Denver July 12 still hasn’t shown up. Another left Cincinnati even earlier and it’s not here either.
Tucked into a massive appropriations bill approved without fanfare late last year by Congress is the requirement that every one of the estimated 1.8 million federal employees in the executive branch receive “educational and training” materials about the charter on Constitution Day, a holiday celebrating the Sept. 17, 1787, signing that is so obscure that it, unlike Arbor Day, is left off many calendars.
That’s not all: The law requires every school that receives federal funds — including universities — to show students a program on the Constitution, though it does not specify a particular one. The demand has proved unpopular with educators, who say that they don’t like the federal government telling them what to teach and that it doesn’t make the best educational sense to teach something as important as the Constitution out of context.
“We already cover the Constitution up, down and around,” said August Frattali, principal of Rachel Carson Middle School in Fairfax County. But, he chuckled, “I’m going to follow the mandates. I don’t want to get fired.”
Congress appears poised to extend U.S. daylight-saving time for two months, starting it earlier, on the first Sunday in March, and ending it later, on the last Sunday of November. …
Assuming the president signs the bill, the measure would take effect immediately, extending the current daylight-saving time by one month this fall.
Daylight-saving time, by requiring everyone to shift their clocks forward one hour, extends the hours of available daylight deeper into the evenings. Polls show that daylight-saving time is popular. And it has been a hallmark of summer nights, allowing families and businesses to extend their activities later — with less need for artificial light. Currently, daylight-saving time begins at 2 a.m. on the first Sunday of April and ends at 2 a.m. on the last Sunday of October.
Wall Street Journal via Pittsbugh Post-Gazette
Pokernomics.com — Freakonomics’ Steven Levitt Explores the World of Online Poker.
Rich Garcia is proud of his two-second record.
That’s how long the test subject, a Kirtland Air Force Research Laboratory spokesman, lasted when an ultraviolet beam boiled the water molecules in the top 1/64th layer of his skin.
It’s not the top time – that’s more like three seconds – but it was a good record for withstanding the pain of a new nonlethal weapon being developed by his lab, the Department of Defense, Raytheon and Sandia National Laboratories, Garcia said.
“It’s excruciating,” Garcia said. “For a moment you feel heat; then it gets unbearably hot. I did it four times. The first time, I jumped out of the beam almost immediately, but then I thought to myself, `You wimp. It doesn’t damage the skin.’ So on the second, third and fourth time, I lasted a little longer. The fourth was my record: two seconds. Nobody made it past three.”
The weapon, cryptically called the Active Denial System, beams ultraviolet waves at a target, penetrating only the top layer of skin, which conveniently houses most of the body’s pain receptors, said Steve Scott, a Sandia engineer.
“It’s been described to me as wrapping your body around a hot light bulb,” Scott said. “The reaction is very similar to the involuntary response you have when you touch a hot object. You want to get out of the beam fast.”
It leaves no permanent skin damage, and the pain goes away almost immediately after the subject steps out of the beam, Scott said.
The year 2005 passes the mid-way mark today at 1PM (noon if you’re not on daylight time). Today is the 183rd day of the year.
There’s been a lot of chatter about Steve Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford since he delivered it a couple of weeks ago. NewMexiKen finally got around to reading it today. It really is rather remarkable and I suggest you find a few minutes to read what he had to say.
The study, among the findings presented last week at the first Alzheimer’s Assn. International Conference on Prevention of Dementia, examined lifestyle factors of more than 100 pairs of identical twins. All of the pairs included one twin who had developed dementia and one who hadn’t. Because identical twins are genetically indistinguishable, the study involved only risk factors that could be modified to help protect against dementia.
Twins who had severe periodontal disease before they were 35 years old had a fivefold increase in risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, the researchers found.
Don’t get dizzy, but stare at it for several seconds. Intriguing.
Dip into a sweet, cold bowl of homemade ice cream after a long day of hiking or on a hot day at the beach. Fill the bottom of this durable, lightweight Lexan® plastic ball with ice and rock salt, add ice cream ingredients to the top and just shake, pass or roll the ball around your campsite. In 20 minutes, scoop out about a pint of soft serve. Ice cream recipes included. Parental supervision required. Imported.
Sometimes NewMexiKen realizes just how very primitive our society can be. To illustrate by contrast, most of the orphanages in China are in actuality Social Welfare Institutes — half orphanage, half old folks’ home. The elderly are able to visit the babies to interact; to cuddle and play.
The emotional rewards for both age groups must be incalcuable.
Here, so far as I know, we want to isolate people when they are institutionalized.
(Thanks to Jen for the information.)
bzzzpeek.com lets you sample onomatopoeia from around the world. Fascinating.
Thanks to Veronica for the link.
[B]ut whether it’s a two-seater or a 747, any airplane is able to glide successfully sans power. Even the heaviest jetliners glide routinely during so-called idle thrust descents, and believe it or not, the glide ratio of a large jet — altitude lost to horizontal distance traveled — is usually better than that of your average private model (the one caveat being that it must accomplish this descent at a considerably higher speed).
Ask the pilot from Salon.
