Category: Informative

The U.S. Postal Service has a page showing its recent and upcoming stamps. I liked these two, the so-called “forever” stamp (always good no matter how much postage goes up) and the triangular Jamestown commemorative to be issued on the 400th anniversary of the founding, May 11, 2007. Click either for a larger version.

The forever stamp will cost 41¢, the same as a regular stamp. What a deal! If I buy 10,000 of them and first-class postage goes up another 2¢, I would make an easy $200. That’s almost five percent!

(In other words, the Postal Service has found a good way to borrow your money and pay you a nominal interest rate, assuming a 5% increase in postage every couple of years.)

Which reminds me, I love The New Yorker and intend to renew, but you know it ticks me off that they want me to renew now — and pay now — for a renewal that doesn’t even begin for four months. Why doesn’t Condé Nast just ask me for a loan?

“Yet spiders kill at an astonishing pace. One Dutch researcher estimates that there are some five trillion spiders in the Netherlands alone, each of which consumes about a tenth of a gram of meat a day. Were their victims people instead of insects, they would need only three days to eat all sixteen and a half million Dutchmen.”

From “Spider Woman,” by Burkhard Bilger in The New Yorker.

Additional item worth noting: “Tucson — perhaps the spider-bite capital of the United States . . .”

On the trip from Tucson to Albuquerque this afternoon, NewMexiKen passed the Budweiser Clydesdales. No, they weren’t pulling that antique beer wagon down I-10. They were in three very fancy tractor-trailers, with an additional pickup truck-horse trailer (for the donkey ? ), and a van. The trucks were beautiful, with the horses securely inside, out of sight.

In 15 minutes a lot of fascinating (and odd and mysterious) things can happen. Here are some.

Thanks to Emily for the link.

On a scale of one to ten, Saddam Hussein’s execution doesn’t rate a number with NewMexiKen.

3,000 American soldiers for this?

What is the telephone tax refund?

The telephone tax refund is a one-time payment available on your 2006 federal income tax return, designed to refund previously collected federal excise taxes on long-distance or bundled services. It is available to anyone who paid such taxes on landline, wireless, or Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service.

Why is the government refunding these taxes?

Several recent federal court decisions have held that the tax does not apply to long-distance service as it is billed today. The IRS is following these decisions and refunding the portion of the tax charged on long-distance calls. The IRS is also refunding taxes collected on telephone service under plans that do not differentiate between long distance and local calls including bundled service.

The telephone tax continues to apply to local-only service, and the IRS is not refunding taxes charged on local-only service.

The IRS will refund to you the taxes on long-distance or bundled service billed to you for the period after Feb. 28, 2003 and before Aug. 1, 2006. Taxpayers should request this refund when they file their 2006 tax returns.

Who is eligible to request the telephone tax refund?

In general, any individual, business or nonprofit organization that paid the tax for long distance or bundled service billed after Feb. 28, 2003 and before Aug. 1, 2006 is eligible to request the refund.

Internal Revenue Service

“Individual taxpayers can take a standard amount from $30 to $60 based on the number of exemptions claimed on their tax return.”

“The flag shall be flown at half-staff 30 days from the death of the President or a former President . . . .”

Flag at Half Staff: The Law

Someone this evening suggested an iguana as a pet, so I did a little reading: “Iguanas need love, just like a dog or a cat would. They are not creatures happy to be stuck in a cage, fed, cleaned and ignored. They need contact, interaction, and yeah, love.”

More from Green Iguana Society:

7. Do you have time for your iguana?
Not just time to feed it, clean it and give it water. Do you have time to talk to your iguana, pet your iguana, play with him/her? They need it! They can’t be stuck in a cage and ignored!

8. Are you empathetic?
Will you do your best to put yourself in your iguana’s shoes? Can you comprehend that an iguana is trying hard to be a part of your world, despite the massive differences? If your iguana is grouchy about something, can you put yourself in his/her place and try to understand what the problem is?

9. Are you consistent?
Iguanas need routines, stability, regular feedings, regular potty times, regular play times, etc. Do you have the sort of lifestyle in which you can do that? Are you even willing to?

Geez, I didn’t even know an iguana wore shoes. They can grow to six feet long and live for 20 years. A buffalo might be less trouble.

At last count this item by David Pogue had drawn 387 comments.

OK, this one’s driving me crazy. This brain-teaser is ripping around the Internet, plus I actually overheard it THREE TIMES in airport conversations on a recent trip to Canada.

Here’s how I found it presented at http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=34 8452:

“Imagine a plane is sitting on a massive conveyor belt, as wide and as long as a runway. The conveyer belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction. Can the plane take off?

“I say no, because the plane will not move relative [to] the ground and air, and thus, very little air will flow over the wings. However, other people are convinced that since the wheels of a plane are free spinning, and not powered by the engines, and the engines provide thrust against the air, that somehow that makes a difference and air will flow over the wing.”

The guy behind me at the airport told his buddy that, in fact, the plane WOULD take off, and his buddy seemed to agree. Do we have any physicists in the audience?

‘Tis better to give than to receive. Charity Navigator is a well-regarded web site to consult before entrusting your gift to a charitable institution.

Charity Navigator, America’s premier independent charity evaluator, works to advance a more efficient and responsive philanthropic marketplace by evaluating the financial health of America’s largest charities.

We offer the following list as a quick reference guide to the highest and lowest-rated charity in each cause that we evaluate. In providing this list, our goal is to help you navigate the crowded charitable marketplace and make intelligent giving decisions.

Highest and Lowest Rated Charities

[Special Note: This is post number 10,000 for NewMexiKen.

Since I began in August 2003, some posts were drafted but never published, and several were published but have since been deleted (those with nothing but broken links, for example). So, net, there are just 9,557 “live” posts at this moment.

Nonetheless, as far as the database is concerned, and as far as I am concerned, this is post 10,000.]

Poor Annette, she checked her name at How Many of Me and she doesn’t exist.

Here’s some background:

Q: How accurate is this program?

A: More accurate than a Magic 8-ball. Less accurate than distributing and collecting 300 million surveys.

Q: No, really. How accurate?

A: Well, it’s hard to say. In order to determine how accurate this program is, we would need a program that was completely accurate for comparison purposes. If we had a program that was completely accurate, we’d use that program instead of this one. At that point, discovering how accurate this program is would no longer be worth the effort. Therefore, we can fairly confidently say that it is impossible to determine how accurate this program is. (Confused? We’re just warming up.)

In our completely non-expert opinion, we say that the program gives a decent ballpark estimate, but it shouldn’t be used for anything more than that.

There’s more at Accuracy of HowManyofMe.com.

Some members of my family don’t exist either.

How many people have your name?

According to the site, there are just 21 of me — and I’m related to two of them!

The estimated resident population of the United States reached 300 million about 5:45 this morning (Mountain Time).

The population has doubled in 57 years (1949).

Doubling again, it would be 600 million in 2063.

A chance to listen to Richard Feynman:

A set of four priceless archival recordings from the University of Auckland (New Zealand) of the outstanding Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman – arguably the greatest science lecturer ever. Although the recording is of modest technical quality the exceptional personal style and unique delivery shine through.

Via Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal.

“Everything you know about British and Irish ancestry is wrong. Our ancestors were Basques, not Celts. The Celts were not wiped out by the Anglo-Saxons, in fact neither had much impact on the genetic stock of these islands.”

So claims Stephen Oppenheimer based on genetic (DNA) research. An excerpt:

Everyone has heard of Celts, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings. And most of us are familiar with the idea that the English are descended from Anglo-Saxons, who invaded eastern England after the Romans left, while most of the people in the rest of the British Isles derive from indigenous Celtic ancestors with a sprinkling of Viking blood around the fringes.

Yet there is no agreement among historians or archaeologists on the meaning of the words “Celtic” or “Anglo-Saxon.” What is more, new evidence from genetic analysis — indicates that the Anglo-Saxons and Celts, to the extent that they can be defined genetically, were both small immigrant minorities. Neither group had much more impact on the British Isles gene pool than the Vikings, the Normans or, indeed, immigrants of the past 50 years.

The genetic evidence shows that three quarters of our ancestors came to this corner of Europe as hunter-gatherers, between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, after the melting of the ice caps but before the land broke away from the mainland and divided into islands.

According to Oppenheimer, being the furthest west (furthest from Europe), only 12% of Irish have genetic material resulting from any immigration since the original hunter-gatherer settlement after the ice age.

MacArthur Fellows 2006

This chart of events of the past five years from Ben Schott is pretty interesting. [.pdf file]

Did you know that the size of the booster rocket tanks that flank the Space Shuttle at take-off were determined by the width of a Horse’s Rear End?

And we think we’re so modern.

Saturday at Valles Caldera, horse riding seemed inviting despite the fact that I’ve only ridden once in my life and that horse rolled onto its back as I scrambled to escape.

And then there’s this at Freakonomics Blog: “Each year in the United States, an estimated 30 million persons ride horses. The rate of serious injury per number of riding hours is estimated to be higher for horseback riders than for motorcyclists and automobile racers.”

Follow the link. It’s interesting.

What an interesting idea via Lifehacker.

NewMexiKen’s neighbor collects water from the canales (known elsewhere as gutters) to use to water his plants. I find that pretty impressive. I mostly use the water from my roof to splash down and wash top soil into the street.

Learn a language the way the U.S. Foreign Service Institute teaches it — and free.

“These courses were developed by the United States government and are in the public domain.

“This site is dedicated to making these language courses freely available in an electronic format. It is an independent effort to foster the learning of worldwide languages.”

From The Writer’s Almanac:

It was on this day in 1977 that Voyager 2 was launched by NASA to explore the planets of our solar system. It was the first of two spacecraft to serve that purpose, though it’s a mystery why Voyager 2 was launched before Voyager 1. Both Voyagers went on to take the first up-close photographs of the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Just before the Voyagers took off, a committee of scientists, led by Carl Sagan, decided to include a message from Earth on each Voyager in case extraterrestrials ever found them. At the time, the Cold War was at its height, and some members of the committee considered that these spacecraft and their contents might be the last traces of the human race left in the universe after a nuclear war.

So the Voyagers were each equipped with a gold-plated phonograph containing a variety of earthly sounds, including a heartbeat, a mother’s kiss, wind, rain, surf, a chimpanzee, footsteps, laughter, the music of Bach, Mozart, and the Chuck Berry song “Johnny B. Goode.” There were also images of humans, the sun, the planets, the Taj Mahal, the Sydney Opera House, and greetings in fifty-five languages, including ancient Sumerian. Carl Sagan said, “The launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”

Today, the Voyagers have traveled farther from earth than any other human-made objects in history. Both have gone well beyond Pluto, the farthest planet from the sun. Voyager 2, which launched on this day in 1977, is currently headed toward Sirius, the brightest star in the sky.