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An Iranian bear was adopted by Polish troops in World War II. Named Voytek, the bear was enlisted as a soldier in order to be transferred to Italy with his unit.
“He was just like a dog – nobody was scared of him,” said Polish veteran Augustyn Karolewski, who still lives near the site of the camp.
“He liked a cigarette, he liked a bottle of beer – he drank a bottle of beer like any man.”
Voytek even helped load ammunition and supplies at the Battle of Monte Cassino. After the war, Voytek spent the rest of his days in Scotland at the Edinburgh Zoo. Now a campaign has been launched to build a permanent memorial for the “the Soldier Bear” in Scotland. Link -via Fark
Bonus: Link to Voytek’s story. Link to more pictures of Voytek
(image credit: Imperial War Museum)
I love the Super Punch-Out game on the SNES! It was my favorite game, hands down! Maybe that’s why I got such a big kick ot of rackeboy blog’s compilation of artwork inspired by the game: Link
When Fox News featured a story about sex and digital nudity in the video game Mass Effect for Microsoft’s X-Box, "psychology specialist" (what does that mean?) Cooper Lawrence – despite not having played the game – warned of the dangers of video game objectifying women.
The result? Gamers worldwide – despite not having read her book – are spamming her Amazon page with bad reviews! (However, Amazon wasn’t amused – they’ve deleted these reviews.)
Kotaku has the whole story – Thanks Marie!
- Keighley Sets Mass Effect Record Straight … Or Tries To
- Quack Gets Amazon Book Rating Spammed
Marine Lance Corporal Joshua Bleill’s legs were blown off while on patrol in Iraq. Now, thanks to new prosthetics outfitted with Bluetooth technology, he can walk again:
Bleill, 30, is one of two Iraq war veterans, both double leg amputees, to use the Bluetooth prosthetics. Computer chips in each leg send signals to motors in the artificial joints so the knees and ankles move in a coordinated fashion.
Bleill’s set of prosthetics have Bluetooth receivers strapped to the ankle area. The Bluetooth device on each leg tells the other leg what it’s doing, how it’s moving, whether walking, standing or climbing steps, for example.
"They mimic each other, so for stride length, for amount of force coming up, going uphill, downhill and such, they can vary speed and then to stop them again," Bleill told CNN from Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he’s undergoing rehab.
Link – Thanks Mr. Lonka!
Slice – a “weblog about America’s favorite crusty, saucy, cheesy meal; pizza” – has put together a list of different styles of pizza offered around the United States.
What’s your favorite?
Maybe dolphins cavorting around is nothing new to those of you with season passes to Sea World, but this Iowa girl is pretty entertained.
The history of computing spans thousands of years – from the primitive notched bones found in Africa, to the invention of abacus in 2400 BC, to Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine in 1883, to the rise of the popularity of Personal Computers (PCs) in the 1970s. For the most part, this timeline is marked by devices that bear little or no resemblance to present-day machines both in form and capabilities.
We’ve had many posts on Neatorama about the newest and greatest in computers and technology. But for this article, let’s go back – way back – and take a look at the wonderful world of early computing.
The Lebombo bone is a 35,000-year-old baboon fibula discovered in a cave in the Lebombo mountains in Swaziland. The bone has a series of 29 notches that were deliberately cut to help ancient bushmen calculate numbers and perhaps also measure the passage of time. It is considered the oldest known mathematical artifact.
Ishango bone (Photo: AfricaMaat)
The unusual groupings of the notches on the Ishango bone (see above), discovered in what was then the Belgian Congo, suggested that it was some sort of a stone age calculation tool. The 20,000-year-old bone revealed that early civilization had mastered arithmetic series and even the concept of prime numbers.
Today, abacus is mostly synonymous with the Chinese suanpan version, but in actuality it had been used in Babylon as early as 2400 BC. The abacus was also found in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Even the Aztecs had their own version.
The Roman pocket abacus was the first portable calculating device, presumably invented to help tax collectors do math while on the go!
In 1900, a Greek sponge diver spotted a shipwreck off the coast of the tiny island of Antikythera. Little did he know that amongst the jewelry and statues recovered from the wreck, the most precious item would be a lump of green rock with gears sticking out of it.
The "rock" turned out to be the earliest example of analog computer: an intricate mechanism with more than 30 gears and writings that scientists thought was used to calculate the motion of the sun and the moon against a background of fixed stars.
The Antikythera Mechanism, as the device was named, was dated from around 100 BC. It would take about another 1,000 years for the appearance of similar levels of technical sophistication in the West. Who built the machine and why the technology was lost remained a mystery.
In 1614, Scottish mathematician John Napier proposed a radical idea called logarithm that made calculations by hand much easier and quicker. (That wasn’t his only contribution to math: Napier was a big proponent of the decimal point, which wasn’t much in use until he came around.)
He also created a device, called Napier’s bones, that let people perform multiplications by doing a series of additions (which was a lot easier to do) and divisions as a series of subtraction. It could even do square and cube roots! This invention may seem trivial to you and me, but it
was a significant advancement in computing at the time.
In 1623, Wilhelm Schickard of the University of Tübingen, Württemberg (now part of Germany), invented the first mechanical calculator. Schickard’s contemporaries called the machine the Speeding Clock or the Calculating Clock.
Schickard’s calculator, which was built 20 years before Blaise Pascal and Gottfried Leibniz’s machines, could add and subtract six-digit numbers (with a bell as an overflow alarm!). This invention was used by his friend, astronomer Johannes Kepler, to calculate astronomical tables, which was a big leap for astronomy at the time. For this, Wilhelm Schickard was considered by some to be the "Father of Computer Age."
Wilhelm Schickard died of the Bubonic Plague in 1635, thirteen years after inventing the world’s first mechanical calculator. The prototype and plans for the calculator was lost to history until the 20th century, when the machine’s design was discovered among Kepler’s papers.
In 1960, mathematician Bruno Von Freytag constructed a working model of Schickard Calculator from the plans. (Image: Institut für Astronomie und Astrophysik, Universität Tübingen)
The second mechanical calculator, called the Pascaline or the Arithmetique, was invented in 1645 by Blaise Pascal. Pascal started working on his calculator when he was just 19 years old, out of boredom. He created a device to help his father, a tax collector, to crunch numbers.
In 1649, Pascal received a Royal Privilege giving him the exclusive right to make and sell calculating machines in France. However, because of the complexity of his machine and its limitation (the Pascaline could only add and subtract, and frequently jammed), he managed to sell just a little over a dozen.
Blaise Pascal’s Pascaline (Photo: WU Wien)
The basic mechanism of the Pascaline is a series of gears – when the first gear with ten teeth made one rotation (one to ten), it shifts a second gear until it rotated ten times (one hundred). The second gear shifted a third one (thousands) and so on. This mechanism is still in use today in car odometers, electricity meters and at the gas pumps.
Eleven years after Pascal’s death, German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 
was inspired by a steps-counting machine (pedometer) he saw to build his own calculator.
Leibniz’s design used a special type of gear called the Stepped Drum or Leibniz wheel, a cylinder with nine bar-shaped teeth along its length. He named his machine the Staffelwalze or the Stepped Reckoner.
The machine was a marked improvement from Pascal’s design and could add, subtract, multiply, divide, and even evaluate square roots by a series of additions. (Photo: calculmecanique)
Leibniz’ Stepped Reckoner (Photo: KerryR)
Despite his genius, Leibniz was so out of favor (he picked a fight with Sir Isaac Newton on who invented calculus) that when he died, his grave went unmarked for 50 years!
In 1801, straw hat maker and inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard created a punch-card controlled loom that enabled one person to produce fabric in a fraction of the time it would take a traditional silk weaver to make.
The pattern of holes in the card determined which weaving rods could pass through. This, in turn, made the pattern on the fabric.
When he unveiled his invention at an industrial exposition in Paris, traditional silk weavers took to the street to protest the threat to their livelihood.
Jacquard Loom (Photo: Computer Desktop Encyclopedia)
Since the invention of Schickard’s calculator, it took nearly 200 years for calculators to become commercially successful.
In 1820, Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar, a French mathematician, created the first commercially successful mechanical calculator. The machine, which used stepped cylinder invented by Leibniz, was called the Arithmometer. It could add, subtract, multiply (and with some user intervention, divide) and was the calculator of choice for nearly a hundred years. (Photo: Popular-science Museum, The Hague, Netherlands)
In the early 1800s, numerical tables, such as for polynomial functions, were routinely calculated by humans. They were actually called "computers" (meaning "one that computes"). Understandably, this process was filled with human errors.
In 1822, an eccentric British mathematician and inventor named Charles Babbage proposed a machine called the Difference Engine to calculate a series of mathematical values automatically.
Babbage started to build his first engine, which was composed of around 25,000 parts, weighed 15 tons (13,600 kg) and stood 8 feet (2.4 m) high. It was never completed, and Babbage left to pursue another idea, a more complex Analytical Engine, which could be programmed using punch cards – an idea far beyond his time.
Part of Babbage’s first Difference Engine, assembled by his son after
his death using parts found in his workshop. (Photo: Andrew Dunn [wikipedia])
Babbage’s Difference Engine was considered one of the first mechanical computers. Despite of its unwieldy design, his plan called for a basic architecture very similar to that of a modern computer.
Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2, with Doron Swade of
The Science Museum who oversaw its construction.
(Photo: Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library)
In 1985, The Science Museum in London started a project to build an actual Difference Engine (actually an updated version that Babbage designed in 1849) and a printer (also designed by the guy). The calculation section of the Engine alone consisted of 4,000 parts (this more sophisticated design called for a third of the parts required for the first version of the Engine) and weighed 2,600 kg (5,700 lb). It was completed and working in November 1991. Impressively, the machine was accurate to 31 decimal places!
Interesting fact: one of the reasons that Babbage never completed his Difference Engine was that he couldn’t help but to continuously tinker with and improve the design (he came up with the idea for the Analytical Engine even before he could build the Difference Engine). This was probably the first recorded instance of feature creep.
In 1847, self-taught British mathematician George Boole invented a branch of algebra that dealt with logic. In Boole’s system, logic operations can be boiled down to three steps: union (OR), intersection (AND), and complementation (NOT). Boole’s idea was brilliant – but at the time, it was criticized and completely ignored by his contemporaries.
It was not until almost 100 years later that in 1938, engineer Claude Shannon realized that Boolean algebra could be applied to two-valued electrical switching circuits. Shannon’s work, and by extension, that of George Boole, became the foundation of modern day digital circuit design and was the basis for all digital electronics.
In 1941, despite financial hardship and isolation from computer scientists from other Western countries, German computer pioneer Konrad Zuse created the world’s first programmable computer, the Z3, from spare telephone parts.
The Z3 uses 2,000 relays (an electric switch) and was used to design aircrafts. Zuse’s request to create an electronic successor for the machine was denied by Germany as "strategically unimportant." The original Z3 was destroyed in air raid of Berlin, so Zuse built a fully-functioning replica later in the 1960s.
Konrad Zuse’s Z3 Computer (photo: Computer History Museum)
Neat facts: Zuse also created the world’s first high-level programming language, called Plankalkül, and founded the first computer startup company in 1946.
During World War II, Nazi Germany used an electro-mechanical cipher machine called Enigma to encrypt and decrypt coded messages. It used rotors to substitute letters (for example, an "E" might be coded as "T"). The genius of the Enigma was that the machine used polyalphabetic cipher, where the rotation of the rotors allowed each subsequent letters to be encoded in a different manner. (For example, "EEE" might be become "TIF").
Enigma Machine at the Imperial War Museum, London (Photo: Karsten Sperling) and its rotors (Photo: ilord.com). More Enigma photos at wltp.com/enigma
Obviously, the Allies were very interested in breaking the Nazi codes. Before the war, Polish cryptographer Marian Rejewski had devised a machine called the Bomba kryptologiczna (or simply "Bomba" or "bomb") to break Enigma. The machine was clunky and cumbersome, not to mention loud like a bomb (hence the name), but it worked!
In 1939, Britain intelligence set up the Government Code and Cypher School under the codename "ULTRA" at Bletchley Park (then known as Station X), 50 miles north of London. Bletchley Park workers included a motley group of mathematicians, computer scientists, and even crossword experts and chess champions. Amongst them was Alan Turing, who later became known as the father of modern computer science.
To break enigma codes, Turing, along with mathematician Gordon Welchman, devised the "Bombe," an electromechanical machine based on Rejewski’s earlier design. The Bombe allowed the Allies to routinely decode the bulk of enemy’s encrypted communication.
Turing and Welchman’s Bombe (Photo: La bombe de Turing)
Although Enigma was used by the field units, Nazi high command used a more secure system called the Lorenz SZ 40/42 cipher machines. The Allies nicknamed these machines "Fish" and their cipher traffic as "Tunny."
A team headed by Tommy Flowers designed and built a special-purpose vacuum tube-based computer called Colossus to decrypt Tunny traffic. An operator would feed cipher text on a 5-bit paper tape, which the machine would read at an impressively fast (imagine a paper tape speeding along) 5,000 characters per second. A total of 11 Collosi were built for the war effort.
Colossus Mark II (Photo: Public Record Office, London)
After the war, Churchill ordered Bletchley Park to be closed and all of the Colossus computers destroyed into "pieces no bigger than a man’s hand" and its blueprints burned. Indeed, the project was so secret that the contributions of Flowers and his colleagues weren’t recognized for many years after the war.
In 1994, a team led by computer scientist Tony Sale (L) began rebuilding the Colossus. (Photo: MaltaGC [wikipedia])
When he was working on his doctoral thesis in physics, Howard H. Aiken ran into a problem – he needed numbers for his theory of space-charge conduction in vacuum tubes, but the problem was too complex for calculators of the day. The solution was obvious: build a bigger calculator!
In 1943, Aiken and IBM created what is now considered the first universal calculator: a 51 ft (16 m) long, 8 ft (2.4 m) tall and 2 feet (0.6 m) deep machine weighing about 10,000 pounds (4,500 kg) called the Harvard Mark I. At the time, the machine was unbelievably fast: it could do 3 calculations per second!
Harvard Mark I in action. (Photo: Computer History Museum)
Harvard Mark I was built out of relays, switches, clutches, and rotating shafts. It has over 765,000 parts, 3,300 relays, 175,000 connections and over 500 miles (800 km) of wire. A physicist named Jeremy Bernstein once visited Aiken’s work and remarked that the machine made noise "like a roomful of ladies knitting."
Harvard Mark I (Photo: IBM Archives)
The ENIAC in the Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory. (L: Glen Beck, R: Frances Holberton) Credit: K. Kempf "Historical Monograph: Electronic Computers Within the Ordnance Corps," U.S. Army Photo.
The birth of the world’s first electronic digital computer was ushered … by war. In 1943, on the eve of World War II, the US military realized
that they needed help calculating artillery firing tables, a compilation of ballistic weapon settings. So, they contacted John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania to develop ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator and Calculator, nicknamed "Eny").
Completed in 1946, ENIAC was a behemoth of a computer: it measured 8.5 feet by 3 feet by 80 feet (2.6 m x 0.9 m x 26 m), covered an area of 680 sq. feet (167 m2) and weighed 27 tons. The complex machine contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 1,500 relays, 6,000 manual switches, and over 5 million hand-soldered joints. The machine was so power-hungry – it required 150 kilowatts of electricity – that it was rumored that when ENIAC was turned on, Philadelphia suffered brownouts! (Well, not really, but it made for a good story.)
When they were building the machine, Mauchly and Eckert knew that mice would be a problem, so they put samples of all the wires that were available at the time inside a cage with a bunch of mice to see which wire insulation the critters didn’t like! They only used wires that passed the "mouse test."
Two women operating the ENIAC’s main control panel (L: Betty Jennings, R: Frances Bilas) Credit: U.S. Army Photo.
At the time, the ENIAC was definitely fast: it could calculate 5,000 additions, 357 multiplications or 38 divisions in one second – a thousand time faster than any other calculating machines of the time.
World War II ended before the ENIAC was completed. Nevertheless, the military continued to support the project (the first ENIAC calculations were for a hydrogen bomb project).
The invention of ENIAC was a watershed moment in computing history. It was the computer that proved electronic digital computing was possible. Indeed, many computer scientists regard that there are two epochs in computer history: Before ENIAC and After ENIAC. We owe the birth of the first modern electronic computer to war spending!
Note: Though Colossus was constructed before ENIAC, it wasn’t "Turing complete" (Colossus has a specialized function and couldn’t be used for general calculations like ENIAC). Also, the existence of Colossus was kept secret until the 1970s, well after the birth of ENIAC. The Zuse Z3, on the other hand, was Turing complete but it wasn’t electronic.
In an ensuing legal battle to break ENIAC’s patent, another machine called
the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (or ABC) was deemed by the courts as the first computer. Most computer scientists, however, didn’t consider this legal decision as scientifically correct: ABC wasn’t programmable and wasn’t Turing complete, so they still considered ENIAC to be the first true computer.
On September 9, 1945, U.S. Navy officer Grace Hopper found the first computer "bug": a moth stuck between the relays on the Harvard Mark II (successor to the Mark I above) She noted it on her log as the "first actual case of bug being found." Though the term "bug" had meant a computer error beforehand, it became a popular term after this incident.
Hopper went on to create the first compiler for a computer programming language (the A-0 System for the UNIVAC in 1952) and worked on the development of COBOL, one of the earliest high-level programming languages that allowed programmers to use words instead of machine codes. To acknowledge her contributions, the U.S. Navy named a ship after her (it’s a guided missile destroyer, by the way).
Even if you’ve never heard of Grace Hopper before reading this article, chances are you’ve heard one of her famous quotes: "It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."
I’ll be the first to admit that this post – long as it is – doesn’t give a complete picture of the development of early computers. We haven’t talked about the contributions of Nikola Tesla (he invented the electromechanical AND gate), Vannevar Bush (who brought analog computing to new heights with his differential analyzer and who pioneered the concept of memex, a theoretical idea similar to the World Wide Web) the invention of vacuum tubes, and so on.
After ENIAC, there was an explosive growth in computer science. In 1947, three Bell Lab engineers – William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, sparked a revolution in computing by inventing the transistor. Computers went commercial as mainframes, and later, became "personal" as they become smaller and faster.
One thing is for sure: we’re living in the golden age of computer. Computing power continually becomes faster and faster, and we’re finding new ways to use computers in our daily lives.
Previously on Neatorama: The Wonderful World of Early Photography
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Sibling rivalries are as old as time. We all know about Cain and Abel, but what about Jesus and his brothers? Or the falling out between Jimmy and Billy Carter? Here are 6 of the most interesting examples of mismatched siblings throughout history: Jesus and Who?
In fact, according to Catholic theology, Jesus’ mother, Mary, never had sexual intercourse and never bore a child other than the Messiah, so adelphoi couldn’t have been his brothers. Other lines of thought tell it a little differently, claiming that the Gospel writers used adelphoi literally and that Mary was a virgin until after the birth of Jesus. We don’t want to take sides, but if these four guys really were Jesus’ brothers, they got the seriously short end of the sibling stick. Imagine – not only is your brother God Almighty, he’s also the most famous man in history. Meanwhile scholars are arguing about whether you ever even existed. Charlotte Brontë and her Five Siblings
John and Tom Fogarty: Bad Blood Rising
Then in 1964, they landed a recording contract with Fantasy Records in nearby Berkeley, Renamed the Golliwogs, the band floundered until John suddenly emerged as both a towering talent and a control freak. As lead singer, lead guitarist, lead composer, lead lyricist, lead arranger, and lead (if not sole) band manager, he could do everything but spell. John turned the group, now called Creedence Clearwater Revival into an "overnight" sensation, cranking out top-10 singles ("Proud Mary," "Bad Moon Rising," "Down on the Corner") and No. 1 albums. Brother Tom? In 1971 he quit in disgust. Worse yet, he couldn’t catch a break. He passed away in 1990 as a result of AIDS, a condition contracted from a blood transfusion. Jimmy and Billy Carter: Not Like Two Peanuts in a Shell
Twelve years younger than brother Jimmy, Billy Carter found himself cast in the role of crown prince in the late 1970s. A beer-for-breakfast kind of guy who proudly wore a "Redneck Power" T-shirt, Billy sometimes embraced the role of buffoon and sometimes tried to shake the stigma. His bid to become mayor of Plains, Georgia, close on the heels of his brother’s 1976 presidential victory, failed. He also failed as manager of the family peanut warehouse. His PR makeover wasn’t helped by the fact that he regularly greeted reporters while perched on a stack of beer cases in his service station. It also wasn’t helped by his business initiatives: Billy once tried to cash in on celebrity, promoting a brand beer named for him. His biggest misadventure, however, came when he accepted money from the Libyan government in return for his supposed influence with his brother. Dubbed "Billygate," the episode prompted a congressional investigation and embarrassed Jimmy as his 1980 bid for reelection approached. Billy Carter died at 51 in 1988. Rajiv and Sanjay Gandhi: Who Gets Mom’s Job?
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had two son’s: Rajiv and Sanjay. The elder, Rajiv, didn’t want to follow in the political footsteps of his family (including Grandfather Jawaharial Nehru, founding prime minister of independent India). So, he became and airline pilot. Sanjay, on the other hand was groomed by Mom to succeed her as leader of the Indian National Congress Party. Willful and aggressive, Sanjay pushed for his Mother’s 1975 declaration of state of emergency – an unconstitutional abuse of power. After Sanjay’s death in a 1980 plane crash, though, Rajiv agreed, reluctantly, to run for the Lok Sabha when a suicide bomber – linked to Tamil separatists in southern India – killed him. Today his wife, Sonia, is active in Congress Party politics and continues the political legacy. Bill and Roger Clinton: Little Rock
When Bill was Arkansas governor, Roger Clinton pleaded guilty to distributing cocaine and served 15 months in prison. When Bill was U.S. president, his half brother, 10 years younger, was supposedly a rock singer. After Bill left the White House, a congressional investigation in 2001 showed that much of Roger’s considerable income during his brother’s two terms had come from mysterious sources. His "musical gigs" overseas brought him big money from foreign governments, payments that suggest he was playing something other than rock and roll. (Clinton bashers say it was influence.) He also accepted money from organized crime figure Rosario Gambino, apparently in exchange for seeking leniency from a parole board. Hey, take "the work" when you can get it. Since Bill’s White House departure, rockin’ Roger’s music career has fizzled. (Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais) |
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From mental_floss’ book Forbidden Knowledge: A Wickedly Smart Guide to History’s Naughtiest Bits, published in Neatorama with permission. Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ extremely entertaining website and blog!
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Blue Tea blog has a neat round-up of unusual origamis (lots of neat pictures, too!). We’ve featured a number of the artists here on Neatorama, but it’s neat to rediscover their work again and again while browsing the Net.
This dragon origami is from a photo gallery of MIT’s Student Origami Competition at Badass Origami
After watching Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift, Farmer John was inspired to try his hand at drifting. Unfortunately, he only has a horse and cart … but apparently, that’s not a problem!
Link (embedded YouTube)
Wilma Flintstone was the first animated character that was portrayed as pregnant.
Remember Choppy the two faced pig? He’s got a friend: Cyclops.
Born in Huimen village, Menla County, China, the piglet was unable to take milk from its mother, forcing farmer Yang Qiaofen to feed it using the mouths it had on either side of its head.
As well as the extra mandibular equipment, the puzzling porcine was blessed with an extra eye in the middle of its forehead, earning it the nickname "Cyclops". [...]
While it is able to feed – "both mouths can drink at the same time," noted a surprised Yang, who is feeding it on powdered milk – it is unable to stand properly.
The name "Acme" brings to mind the miserable products bought by Wile E. Coyote in vain attempts to catch the Road Runner, but this is something quite different: Last year, a company called Acme Portable unveiled a very cool-looking portable computer (bulkier than a laptop… it looks more like a suitcase computer) that comes with 3 17" LCD
monitors!
No word whether this helps catch the elusive Road Runner: Link – via Slashgear
The California Supreme Court has just ruled that employers can fire workers using marijuana, even if they got it legally prescribed to them under the state’s medicinal marijuana law.
At the center of the case was Gary Ross’s claim that his 2001 firing was illegal. Ross, 45, was fired from his job at a network server center in Sacramento in 2001 just a week after being hired.
The employer, RagingWire, discovered Ross used marijuana to treat an old back injury. In a statement to News10, RagingWire defended the firing because Ross knew he could be called in to work at any time.
Here’s the majority ruling:
In the ruling issued Thursday morning, the majority ruling said, "Plaintiff’s position might have merit if the Compassionate Use Act gave
marijuana the same status as any legal prescription drug. But the act’s effect is not
so broad. No state law could completely legalize marijuana for medical purposes because the drug remains illegal under federal law."While Ross claimed his firing violated California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act, the ruling states, "The FEHA does not require employers to accommodate the use of illegal drugs."
The court said while the Compassionate Use Act allows medical marijuana users to avoid prosecution under state law, "… we have no reason to conclude the voters intended to speak so broadly, and in a context so far removed from the criminal law, as to require employers to accommodate marijuana use."
"We thus conclude plaintiff cannot state a cause of action for wrongful termination in violation of public policy," wrote the justices.
What do you think? Do you agree with the Court’s ruling? Link
Marijuana’s making the news tonight… Thrillist reports that the world’s first marijuana vending machine is in Los Angeles:
AVMs are 24/7 machines housed in standalone rooms, abutting two dispensaries and protected by round-the-clock security guards — like ATMs for people combating psychological withdrawal with a physical one. After cinching up your doctor’s consultation, hit an AVM location to get your prescription approved, fingerprint taken, and a prepaid credit card loaded with your profile: dosage (3.5 or 7 grams, up to 1oz a week) and strain preference (choice of five, including OG Cush and Granddaddy
Purple, the mildly hallucinogenic forebear to Prince). Then day or night, all you do is hit a machine and walk away with enough vacuum-sealed, plastic-encapsulated cheeba to adequately treat your illness …
Link – Thanks Tiffany!
Well now, medical marijuana … schmedial marijuana. We all know that the real medicinal plant, according to Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (published 1861), is the tomato!
THE TOMATO MEDICINAL.–To many persons there is something unpleasant, not to say offensive, in the flavour of this excellent fruit. It has, however, long been used for culinary purposes in various countries of Europe. Dr. Bennett, a professor of some celebrity, considers it an invaluable article of diet, and ascribes to it very important medicinal properties. He declares:–1. That the tomato is one of the most powerful deobstruents of the materia medica; and that, in all those affections of the liver and other organs where calomel is indicated, it is probably the most effective and least harmful remedial agent known in the profession. 2. That a chemical extract can be obtained from it, which will altogether supersede the use of calomel in the cure of diseases. 3. That he has successfully treated diarrhoea with this article alone. 4. That when used as an article of diet, it is almost a sovereign remedy for dyspepsia and indigestion.
"In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."
– Laurence J. Peter, "hierarchiologist" (1919 – 1990), Peter Principle
Quick: how many hours are there in a day? If you answer twenty four, you’re not Senator Mobina Jaffer:
Liberal Senator Mobina Jaffer is under investigation by the Law Society of British Columbia for allegedly overbilling one of her legal clients, including charging for 30 hours of work in a single day, CBC News has learned. [...]
Jaffer has been called before the law society to account for more than $6 million in legal bills charged to her former client, a Catholic missionary order known as the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. [...]
The Oblates, whose B.C. headquarters are based in New Westminster, fired Jaffer and her son, Azool Jaffer-Jeraj, three years ago after receiving bills of $6.7 million. They had hired the Jaffers to defend them against dozens of claims of abuse in residential schools.
The Oblates also sued the Jaffers, saying they billed "for more hours than there are in the day."
CBC News has obtained forensic accounting reports filed during the lawsuit showing that Jaffer, on one occasion, billed 30 hours on a single day. Twenty-seven of those hours were for "finalizing accounts" — which means preparing bills.
Her total bill for that one day was more than $13,000. The total tab for billing alone came to $52,000, according to the reports.
Link – via Super Punch
This YouTube clip starts with these simple words …
December 21, 2007: A slightly suspicious Stewart Douglas leaves Salt Lake City on a 3 week vacation to the Dominican Republic.
Slightly suspicious because he was well aware of our cubicle prank tradition.
His departing words … "What are you gonna do, drywall me in?"
Find out what Stewart’s officemates did to his cubicle: Link (embedded YouTube, fun starts at 1:35)
Our pal and Neatorama blogger GeekAlerts just got a shipment of … Star Trek ties! Ooh, I’m jealous. Well, okay, maybe not, but still very chic in a geeky way: Link
Fed up with jet noise and government bureaucracy, homeowners Michael Hall and Michaelene Buddy decided to take their protest straight to the top – of their roof, that is:
Mark Twain once said: "When angry, count to four, when very angry swear." Michael Hall said he tried the counting. He even counted past four to 20 – the number of times he said he called the Federal Aviation Administration’s noise-complaint hotline. But each call, he said, was met with the same response – an automated message telling him the complaint mailbox was full and could no longer accept new calls.
Since the FAA’s new departure headings out of Philadelphia International Airport went into effect last month as part of a massive restructuring of the airspace over the congested corridor from New York through Philadelphia, Hall said the noise level at his home on Fairmount Avenue near Ladomus Circle has been unbearable.
"I’m p—– off," he said. "I have to sleep with earplugs at night in my own house."
Hall, who has owned his home for 10 years, and his live-in girlfriend, Michaelene Buddy, brainstormed ways to get their complaints heard.
They finally resorted to the one true expression of anger and frustration – profanity.
Two weeks ago, on the black flat-topped roof of their one-story ranch home, it took the pair about an hour and about a gallon of the roof sealant to paint the incendiary three-word sentence, along with "No Fly Zone" and a symbol for "no planes."
Link (Photo: Fox 29, and yes, it was cleaned up) – Thanks Mr. Lonka!
Watch this clip of Rafael Mendez playing the The Flight of the Bumblebee on the trumpet and weep! And just in case that’s not cool enough, Mendez followed up with an excerpt from The Mexican Hat Dance, played entirely in one breath.
He’s simply amazing: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] (fun starts at around 1:07 and 3:50) – Thanks Christophe, great find!
The New Testament mentions brothers (adelphoi in Greek) of Jesus and even names them. Yet, many Christians teach that Jesus was an only
Maria and Elizabeth Brontë couldn’t help being eclipsed by younger sister Charlotte; after all, they died in girlhood in the 1820s. Sister Emily, second youngest, was the family’s only poetic genius and wrote Wuthering Heights (1847). Seen in retrospect as one of the finest novels in English, it was panned in its own time and she produced no more. Youngest sister Anne’s novels, Agnes Grey (1847) and especially, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), were popular, if literarily undistinguished. Branwell, the one brother, drank too much, smoked too much opium, and died a failure in 1848. Emily and Anne died the next year. All of which leaves Charlotte the only Bronte to achieve popular, critical and lasting success with her novels, especially Jane Eyre (1847). In the end, she was the longest-lived of the TB-plagued Bronte siblings, surviving until age 39. She was also the only one to marry (the show-off). 
In 1959, Tom Fogarty, two school chums, and Tom’s little brother, John, formed a band. Playing in the Fogarty garage in El Cerrito, California, they called themselves Tommy Fogarty & the Blue Velvets. 
Like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton brought his own sibling of ill repute to the national spotlight. 
