Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Wire

In total, more than 1 in 6 American households are living without wireline service, an eightfold increase over six years...

...The old school telephone is still a big deal for telecommunications companies.
For instance, AT&T reported yesterday that total first quarter wireline revenues were $15.0 billion, down 3.2 percent from a year earlier.  Wireless revenues, which include equipment sales, were up 10.2 percent year over year to $15.3 billion.

The ramifications of the wireless phenomena are huge for government officials.  As the numbers of cell phone numbers grow, tracking people down becomes more difficult for law enforcement and other government officials.

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Thursday, August 25, 2011

Truth in Advertising

Doug Hepburn
So very simply, if you have the strength of a pre-pubescent girl, then “conditioning” in its traditional sense is not for you, regardless of your age or sex. The increase in athletic ability gained from just getting stronger will do more for you than any amount of conditioning during that same time period. Furthermore, if you are an underweight kid, your conditioning” should be drinking a gallon of milk after your squats every day. If you’re a pathetically weak, fat, soccer mom or dad, then your “conditioning” should be squatting, and then quit forcing crap down your throat the other 23 hours a day.

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Monday, August 22, 2011

Zinc



Zinc is involved in numerous aspects of cellular metabolism. It is required for the catalytic activity of approximately 100 enzymes and it plays a role in immune function, protein synthesis, wound healin, DNA synthesis, and cell division. Zinc also supports normal growth and development during pregnancy, childhood, and adolescence and is required for proper sense of taste and smell. A daily intake of zinc is required to maintain a steady state because the body has no specialized zinc storage system.

S. 

Zinc makes up about 75 ppm (0.0075%) of the Earth's crust, making it the 24th most abundant element...







Zinc is too large and heavy to form in stars using the silicon burning process. The stable form of zinc is created in supernovas...

Zinc ores were used to make the zinc–copper alloy brass many centuries prior to the discovery of zinc as a separate element...Knowledge of how to produce brass spread to Ancient Greece by the 7th century BC but few varieties were made...







...impure zinc was known from antiquity to exist in the remnants in melting ovens, but it was usually discarded, as it was thought to be worthless...



Zinc mines at Zawar, near Udaipur in India, have been active since the Mauryan period in the late 1st millennium BC.




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Demand is Up!



Rebecca Badeaux hugs Hatton, an 11-week-old Lab her family is fostering for the TSA's Canine Breeding and Development Center. Researchers are trying to identify personality traits in dogs that would make them excel at explosives detection. The training is held at Lackland Air Base in San Antonio. The number of bomb-sniffing dogs needed since 9/11 has soared. 

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TSOs or ANY other citizen has the power of arrest and can detain if certain criteria are met. The criteria varies by state.

What a TSO can not do is arrest you under the authority of the TSA. So in that regards they are not equal to a cop because the[y] do not have Governmental authority of arrest.

If any TSO attempts an arrest by stating they are a Federal Officer, they can be charged with impersonating a LEO especially now that the uniform and badges look like LEO uniforms.


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Saturday, August 20, 2011

Movies, Presidential Collections



The Conan franchise didn't succeed in spite of its tie to Depression-era Texas. It succeeded because of it. Its beginnings in Howard's tough, weird environment let it build, and then continually renovate, an awesome story around a strain of American neurosis — the idea that civil society is about to collapse, and then it's just you and the road and your sword. That's a fantasy that tends to spring up in hard times, obviously, when cultural decline is combined with a suspicion of collective action. It's probably unrealistic to hope that the new Conan will justify itself in terms of the debt-ceiling deal. But either way, Howard's sullen killing machine, with his "gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth," will keep winding his bizarre path through American history. Case in point: President Barack Obama collects the comic books.

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Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Clepsydras and the measurement of time

The original idea was simple enough. At first, it was merely that of a vessel of water, having a small hole in the bottom, so that the liquid dripped out drop by drop. As the level within the jar was lowered, it showed the time upon a scale. Thus, if the hole were so small and the vessel were so large that it would require twenty-four hours for the water to drip away at an absolutely steady rate, it may be seen that the side of the vessel might easily have been marked with twenty-four divisions to indicate the hours...
...The most interesting human fact, however, about the clepsydra is that it involved an entirely different conception of the marking of time. Now it was not so much a question of when as of how long. A good sun-dial set in a proper position would always indicate three o'clock when it was three o'clock, but the clepsydra might do no such thing. It would merely show how many hours had elapsed since last it was filled, and the steady drip, drip, drip of the escaping water could--and did--lower the surface quite as evenly at one time of day as at another.

Emphasis mine. 

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