Gives you a greater appreciation for how effective it is for birds to migrate south for the winter. I mean it's instinctive, do they even really know what winter is? They've never experienced it.

Maybe to a bird "winter" is "the best food is over there", or "the best mating opportunities are over tgere" . Like many of us, driven by our hunger for food and sex. But without the whole need for permanent shelter thing.

Lots of time for sightseeing. ;)

Sure. As long as there are sights to see from that particular road. No detours allowed.

How annoying would it be to plan and travel that route, only to encounter unseasonably warm or cold temperatures?

I mean, if you stay in one place, they are par for the course, but if you're setting aside a year of travel just for 70 degree weather, every deviation would be highlighted.

Yes, it's a trip which can only be planned in retrospect.

A Smithsonian article, The Great New England Vampire Panic, about people in rural New England blaming Vampires for deaths from "consumption", actually caused by savage tuberculosis outbreaks.

Things are not so different today, they just worship Tom Brady now.

I'll bet they do it just to annoy us. :p:

This ranking, and re-ranking, of history's biggest killing sprees, adjusting the ranking by the number killed as a percentage of the worlds population at the time.
The Asians sure were good at it.

Told ya so...

I don't know if the stats are correct, but it fits all my preconceived ideas !

:rolleyes:

The chart itself does not prove causation, even though I know damn well it's a major factor. It's labeled as share going to the unions, and with union membership in decline that's to be expected. What it doesn't show is all the non-union workers who benefited from the unions keeping wages following productivity and inflation, by being carried along.

The modern robber barons knew this, they'd watched it happen for 80 or so years. Then when the workers got fat and complacent, they jumped at the chance to beat the unions down, telling workers they were going to move production down south, or overseas. Telling them there was no reason to pay dues when they were going to do just as well without it.

It wasn't only the workers who got fat and complacent, so did the union big shots. All union officials from the local shop steward to the president of the UAW, IBEW, el al, are elected. That makes them politicians, and we know what how that works. The ones at the top are making big money, living high on the hog. Some are great, some are not, but Joe-average sees shit going on that irks him, and he may not move to Canada like he threatened when Congress irked him, but he may just quit the union.

1947 was a banner year.

Someone came up with the brilliant idea of a law, and naming it:
"Right to Work"
and many poor slobs... ummmm, workers bought into it.

Truth in advertising would have named it "Right to Work for Less Pay"

.

These might come in handy some time.

Hmm... what they call "TS" and "TRS" are more commonly referred to as "quarter-inch" and "stereo quarter-inch." I work with that particular plug a lot and I've never heard it called by that acronym.

And MIDI looks like S-VIDEO to me

Here are the video ports

http://cellar.org/2015/videoports.jpg

Ya damn whippersnappers and your slang, disrespecting the King's English. Why if TS, TRS, and MIDI, were good enough for Jesus, then by golly they're good enough for me. :crone:

http://cellar.org/2015/milestraveled.jpg

source

Fred was really honkin', wonder how many tickets he got. :haha:


This be the skeleton of the internet, the interstate of electrons and moonbeams, which move your love notes long distances in a flash.

http://cellar.org/2015/internet-1.jpg

This periodic table was assembled by a MIT grad student, showing the country where each element was discovered.

http://cellar.org/2015/periodictable.jpg

Hmmmm.... I thought Mme. Curie discovered Radium and a couple of other elements in Poland.

First, I despise graphs/charts that display % of apples and oranges, even when done by the NY Times.

Today's NYT article starts out with maps of the states (apples) showing %'s of un-insured (oranges).
The geographic size of various states over-shadows the percentage value. :eyebrow:

But eventually the authors get to the core of the matter - politics :rolleyes:


We Mapped the Uninsured. You'll Notice a Pattern
NY Times - QUOCTRUNG BUI and MARGOT SANGER-KATZ - OCT. 30, 2015

They may be basing it on this guy's earlier discovery of radioactive rays in general, which were what inspired Marie Curie to look into radioactivity and isolate the different elements which might be causing it. I agree that radium and polonium were pretty clearly identified by her work, not his, though she and her husband did it in France, not Poland.

Yes Clod, you're right.

I just read the Wiki article on Mme. Curie, and her/their work was done in Paris.
As a woman, she had a very hard road to travel.

Good thing they call it "insured" and not "covered" because as I've recently learned - in 2016 I'll have to spend $6000 out of pocket before anything is actually "covered" by my new insurance. Even better - its only costs twice as much as I was paying a couple years ago.

Poland wouldn't let her get an education. Naming Polonium was a political statement, the first and only element named as such.


Classic, Bloomberg explains why it's so hard to get good numbers.

http://cellar.org/2015/whitemiddleclassdeaths.png

Massive increase in deaths of white middle-aged Americans: drugs, alcohol, suicides.

Me and my generation are hurt, broken and tired. I know I feel it.

We've had our asses kicked over and over.

UT’s link is something of a lay-man’s version of the original article by Case & Deaton of Princeton.
This author, Paul Starr, included a moralist argument that went beyond the original authors.

But then Starr rejected that argument:
Case and Deaton were more cautious in their discussion:
They first discussed time-correlations of pain-reducing drugs in society,
and secondly the increased rates of suicide among this population.

Attachment 54026

But then they added this paragraph:
Even before reading the original article, I had wondered about AIDS and HIV in this cohort of men.
It was in the mid-1980’s that effective HIV therapy (HAART) was introduced,
and reduced the incidence and mortality rates of AIDS significantly.

This seems an attractive idea to me because any long term, effective, therapy
is difficult to maintain, and compliance correlates with education/income/gender.

.

The recession hitting people living on credit, and women using the internet have become more adept at making it look like an accident/suicide.

In case you Brits would like to dig up the plague, these are the pits where tens of thousands of victims are buried.
The interactive map is here.

Pew Research just came out with a survey about technology ownership.

Lots of obvious data: MP3 players are on the way out, rich people have more devices than poor people, and college educated whites have the most computers. Some surprising data: women are bigger gamers than men, at least on consoles.
Attachment 54042

No wonder the gamergaters are so panicked.

It says they are percentages, but the numbers don't add to 100, several of the categories more than 100.:3eye:

also Hispanics are the largest ethnic group, so most gamers are chicas?

color me skeptical:confused:

No no, this is adults who own a game console. That just means that there are more single moms who have one in the house compared to single dads.

37 percent of men own a console (and 63 percent don't, but they didn't talk about the 63 percent)

The birth and life of the Wah Wah pedal.

Attachment 54113

from Vox

A very interesting read. Probably some urban legend-type stuff involved, but a good little read.

8 Acts Of Rock Star Debauchery That Would Destroy You

It's at Cracked, so, brace yourself.

Sample:

Talking about 'Starship', the airliner that everyone who was anyone partied and debauched on (it had a bar, fireplace, and a built-in organ):

I'm shocked, I tells ya, shocked.:eek:

Don't have a source for this, no idea how they determined a state's favorite brand, and I can't make out Florida, but good for a giggle.

Florida is Bank of America. I think must have something to do with overall profit levels in that particular state. American Airlines' central hub for the whole country is DFW, but there's no way they're anyone's "favorite company" choice.

This was created by Creative Strategies, but I can't find out how.

As the following graph shows, the actual value of the US dollar in 2013 was only 5 cents:

https://truthinmediablog.files.wordp...013-large1.png

Does anybody know what it is now? I couldn't find any graphs for this year.

Now it's worth nothing, so send me yours.

The fed didn't kill anything; the graph is actually showing us the slow result of inflation - but that too is pretty much irrelevant. We have abundance now. And in 1913 life was miserable, short, and painful compared to what it is today. That's really all you need to know.

We continue to use this horrible currency and we continue to be relatively fucking rich. Why are these anti-fed people complaining.

Because the Fed, as lax as they are, still won't allow the big bucks to get away with all they want to. Not enough to be too big to fail, they want to be too big to be restrained.

Not really a graph or chart. But a correlation.

So you like bitter flavors, do you, you antisocial jerk?

Emphasis mine

I believe it, in fact would extend it to spicy hot as well. :p:

The government, specifically the Bureau of Labor Statistics has used the Census Bureau, to conduct the American Time Use Survey, since 2003. They've come up with graphs of a number of activities, 8 of which can be found here.

This is 2 of them.

Does masturbating count as 'household activity'?

I think that cums under leisure.

Hear hear. I knew a woman that put jabenero pepper sauce on the tacos she ate every night. Every night. So much that her lips would chap. This coincided with an increasingly angry and unforgiving demeanor. I wondered at the time if there was a correlation. Very interesting.

I wonder if the converse holds true. Do people with a sweet tooth have a sweet demeanor?

Of course I do ! :rolleyes:

What you have to make to get into the 1% in each state, and the ratio between the average income of the 99%, vs the average income of the 1%, in each state.

The second (blue) map is much more informative.

Colorado is NA - maybe due to MJ-startup's sucking up all the cash of the 1%-ers,
by the 5%-ers but not being able to put it in thru the banking system

Oooooooops !

That's Wyoming, not Colorado !

Nevermind ! :blush: :blush: :blush:

Attachment 54274

From here.