Category: Informative

This is kind of cool.

Here’s the background.

Some years ago NewMexiKen made several overseas trips with a diplomatic passport. In all my comings and goings I had my bags searched only one time. Arriving from Europe at Dulles International, I wasn’t sure whether one of my bags was on the plane or had come ahead. Further, someone was picking me up and I knew they’d be cruising the airport, around and around. By the time I’d finally located my bags, I was visibly anxious. Sure enough, my luggage was searched by a very determined customs agent. (I was, of course, totally innocent of any wrongdoing.)

The article linked-to above says the TSA employees get only four days training and three days of field practice before being assigned to face watching duty. That doesn’t seem like anywhere near enough, but I do believe experienced personnel can become very good at spotting the nervous and otherwise pre-occupied traveler.

I also believe an experienced perp can learn to be dispassionate about anything.

“It has the ring of an urban legend and seems too bizarre to be true. But the claim that taking a shower during a lightning storm can electrocute you is no old wives’ tale, experts say.”

Read about it from The New York Times.

NewMexiKen learned this week that emergency personnel (police, fire, EMT) search a victim’s cell phone contacts for the “ICE” contact — In Case of Emergency.

So, right now when you’re thinking about it, get your cell phone and, even if your emergency contact is already listed, enter their number again under the name ICE.

Besides, ICE (short for Iceman) always was a better nickname than Maverick or Goose.

Making electricity is generally about creating a source of heat and steam, and using that steam to turn giant turbines and generate power. Less than 3 percent of our electric power is generated from oil. Besides the 20 percent contribution from nuclear power, 50 percent of our electricity comes from burning coal, 18 percent from burning natural gas and (in a heat-free method that is often the cheapest) 6.5 percent by harnessing the energy of water moving through dams. Wind and solar power make up less than one-half of 1 percent of what we use on a typical day.

Source: Atomic Balm?, an article in The New York Times Magazine about the possible renaissance of nuclear power.

They’re not sure about the remaining 2%, I guess. Maybe it’s from batteries.

“Black smoke rose over the city” of Haifa on Sunday morning, after Hezbollah militants fired at least 50 rockets into Israel. Meanwhile, Israeli bombs were “sending a thick column of white and black smoke skyward” over Beirut, Lebanon. And in California, firefighters watched as “plumes of gray, white and black smoke floated across the horizon.” What makes some smoke white and other smoke black?

The Explainer explains.

Often you can tell if fire fighters have reached a fire. Once they begin to put water on a fire the smoke will usually get lighter (as a result of the cooler fire and the steam I assume).

With Daniel Yergin’s The Prize still on NewMexiKen’s mind, I did a little research. These are the countries that produced more than 2 million barrels of oil a day in 2004. Surprised at any? (A barrel is 42 gallons.)

1. Saudi Arabia 10.37 Million
2. Russia 9.27 Million
3. United States 8.69 Million
4. Iran 4.09 Million
5. Mexico 3.83 Million
6. China 3.62 Million
7. Norway 3.18 Million
8. Canada 3.14 Million
9. Venezuela 2.86 Million
10. United Arab Emirates 2.76 Million
11. Kuwait 2.51 Million
12. Nigeria 2.51 Million
13. United Kingdom 2.08 Million
14. Iraq 2.03 Million

How Fireworks Work

2006 is half over at 1 PM Sunday (noon if you aren’t on daylight savings time).

How those New Year’s Resolutions working out so far?

“Millions of Americans will celebrate July 4 by watching a fireworks show. How do they choreograph those midair pyrotechnics?”

Here’s how from Slate.

And here’s How to Photograph Fireworks.

Five billion searchable names — that’s billion, as in “gabillion” — are now online, thanks to Salt Lake City’s Ancestry.com. For three days, you can search the whole magilla without paying a cent. After that, it’s $155 a year.

It’s a huge opportunity, especially since Ancestry just finished adding complete census records from 1790 to 1930, and it’s the only place you can search those records in detail online. Mercy! Think of it — from 1790. That’s just after the Revolutionary War.

Ancestry says it took workers a combined 6.6 million hours of labor to pull off this staggering feat. They had to scan images of census documents, figure out the handwriting, then catalog each record — by hand. On a keyboard. 540 million names. Oy.

Read more at New West Network.

Or check it out at Ancestry.com.

Subscribe to the RSS feed for The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci and get one page a day to read.

• It’s feels like a swamp here at Casa NewMexiKen this morning. Used to afternoon humidity in the single digits, this morning’s 23% is oppressive.
• I see Sak’s has re-established its petite department after an ill-considered dropping of it several months ago. No word yet from Neiman’s or Bloomingdale’s, but a small victory nonetheless.
• Apple is negotiating to sell movies on iTunes for $9.99. There may be a deal by fall.
• IBM and Georgia Tech have developed a chip that operates at 500 gigahertz (250 times faster than the one on my iMac). One problem, it only gets that speed at 451 degrees below zero. (It’s still much faster than anything common today, even at room temperature.)
• Say what you will about soccer, and NewMexiKen has mixed feelings, it is the most photogenic of sports.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Update: The humidity dropped to 19% during the time I finished this post (and 9% by noon).

You’ve probably been wondering about this:

Turtle— Spends most of its life in the water. Turtles tend to have webbed feet for swimming. Sea turtles (Cheloniidae family) are especially adapted for an aquatic life, with long feet that form flippers and a streamlined body shape. They rarely leave the ocean, except when the females come ashore to lay their eggs. Other turtles live in fresh water, like ponds and lakes. They swim, but they also climb out onto banks, logs, or rocks to bask in the sun. In cold weather, they may burrow into the mud, where they go into torpor until spring brings warm weather again.

Tortoise— A land-dweller that eats low-growing shrubs, grasses, and even cactus. Tortoises do not have webbed feet. Their feet are round and stumpy for walking on land. Tortoises that live in hot, dry habitats use their strong legs to dig burrows. Then, when it’s too hot in the sun, they slip underground.

Terrapin— Spends its time both on land and in water, but it always lives near water, along rivers, ponds, and lakes. Terrapins are often found in brackish, swampy areas. The word terrapin comes from an Indian word meaning “a little turtle.”

San Diego Zoo

From Mark Morford, Nine Things to be Happy About. They include Bush (at 31 percent), bird flu, iPod mania, Stephen Colbert, big hairy dogs and the best CD of the year.

A very interesting column from Patrick Smith discusses “What if my seatmate tries to open the cabin door at 37,000 feet?” This is well-worth the very short ad before access, especially for anyone who flies.

During flight none of these doors can be opened, for the simple reason that cabin pressure won’t allow it. Think of an aircraft door as a drain plug, fixed in place by the interior pressure. With very few exceptions, aircraft doors open inward. Some retract upward into the ceiling; others swing outward or downward against the fuselage; but they all open inward first, and not even the most musclebound human will overcome the hundreds of pounds of pressure holding them shut. At a typical cruising altitude, as many as 8 pounds of pressure are pushing against every square inch of interior fuselage. That’s 1,152 pounds of weight against each square foot of door. Flying at low altitudes, where cabin-pressure levels are lower, even a differential of 2 pounds per square inch is still more than anyone can displace — even after six cups of coffee and the frustration that comes with sitting behind a shrieking infant for five hours.

“One of the worst fires in a decade hit Brooklyn on Tuesday. Hundreds of firefighters responded to what began as an eight-alarm blaze and had progressed to 10 alarms by the evening. (The fire had shrunk to two alarms on Wednesday morning.) How does that alarm system work, anyway?”

Answers at Slate.

The People Who Shape Our World according to Time. How many can you identify?

Artists & Entertainers
This diverse galaxy of influential stars has won fans and spawned imitators around the globe

J.J. Abrams
George Clooney
Dixie Chicks
Ellen DeGeneres
Nicolas Ghesquiere
Wayne Gould
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Arianna Huffington
Ang Lee
Renzo Piano
Rain
Rachael Ray
Jeff Skoll
Kiki Smith
Will Smith
Zadie Smith
Howard Stern
Meryl Streep
Reese Witherspoon
Rob Pardo
Daddy Yankee
Tyra Banks
Dane Cook
Matt Drudge
Stephen Colbert

Scientists & Thinkers
Whether by harnessing the power of the Internet or probing the mysteries of the mind, they have come up with the big ideas of our time

Mike Brown
Kelly Brownell
Nancy Cox
Richard Davidson
Kerry Emanuel
Jim Hansen
Zahi Hawass
Bill James
John Jones
Ma Jun
Jim Yong Kim
Steven Levitt
Jacques Rossouw
Andrew von Eschenbach
Jimmy Wales
Geoffrey West

Leaders & Revolutionaries
Dictators, democrats, holy men (and a TV host)—these are the people with the clout and power to change our world

Muqtada al-Sadr
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf
Hugo Chavez
George W. Bush
John McCain
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Ayman al-Zawahiri
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Pope Benedict
Condoleezza Rice
Wen Jiabao
Ehud Olmert
Pervez Musharraf
John Roberts
Ismail Haniya
Angela Merkel
Jigme Singye Wangchuk
Archbishop Peter Akinola
Junichiro Koizumi
Oprah Winfrey
Bill & Melinda Gates

Heroes & Icons
Meet some global icons—actors, politicians, athletes, entertainers and others—who are using their influence to do the right thing

Bono
Michelle Wie
Wynton Marsalis
Angelina Jolie
Bill Clinton & George H.W. Bush
Steve Nash
Orhan Pamuk
Elie Wiesel
Jan Egeland
Joey Cheek
Chen Guangcheng
Ian Fishback
Wafa Sultan
Pernessa Seele
Ralph Lauren
Mukhtaran Bibi
Paul Simon
Al Gore
Katie Couric

Builders & Titans
Innovation, grand plans, style and substance—that’s what it takes to be influential in the world of business

Vikram Akula
Tom Anderson & Chris DeWolfe
Franz Beckenbauer
The Flickr Founders
Sean Combs
Jamie Dimon
Brian France
Tom Freston
Huang Guangyu
Omid Kordestani
Eddie Lampert
Patricia Russo
Sheikh Mohammed
Anne Mulcahy
Nandan Nilekani
Jim Sinegal
Steve Wynn
The Skype Guys
Dieter Zetsche

Malcolm Gladwell wonders about our ability to make eyewitness identifications. An excerpt:

In Blink, I mentioned the research of Jonathan Schooler on lineups: he’s showed that merely requiring people to write down a physical description of the suspect before viewing the lineup radical impairs their ability to pick out the correct person.

But the Duke case is an example of another, even more problematic aspect of eyewitness identifications, and that is that we aren’t particular good at making them across races.

Videos via Lifehacker. These are in Japanese but you can get the idea, AND THEY ARE REALLY, REALLY GOOD IDEAS. Really.

How to fold a T-shirt

Keep your BandAid on all day

Peel a potato in one step