Human Body Speeds

     Electricity travels through a copper wire at 96 percent of the speed of light, but what about nerve impulses and other stuff in our body? 

     Let's say you're camping and step out of your tent barefoot at night and step on something that feels like a snake. How fast do the nerve impulses travel that cause you to yank up your leg? When you swallow food how fast does it travel on the way to your stomach? How many ounces per second do you pee? 

     You know you're dying to know the answers to these questions and more. Find out at Our Bodies' Velocities, By the Numbers HERE.

Apple iPad Woes

 

     My wife recently purchased an older Apple iPad (a 2018 model) from the Apple store. It wasn't in stock and had to be ordered and it arrived 5 days later. We picked it up at the store two days ago. 

     When we got it home it would not connect to our Wi-Fi and we kept getting a "weak security" message. It was telling us that the Wi-Fi network we’re using wasn't secure and that our connection is not as robust as the latest up to date standard. It has something to do with enhanced security on Apple devices. 

     Youtube offered a couple of fixes that didn't work so the next morning I called our ISP (the phone company) and the service rep told me our router was fine and it did not need to be updated or, as some of the fixes suggested, reconfigured (which is not for the faint of heart). 

     The next call was to Apple to talk to a service tech who walked me through a gamut of tests, but nothing worked. He suggested the problem was with the iPad and take it back to the store. 

     At the store the tech tested it and it immediately found the store's Wi-Fi, so obviously there was nothing wrong with the iPad. He suggested downloading iTunes on my laptop and doing an update from version 14.4 to 14.6 through the laptop since the iPad would not connect to the Wi-Fi. He added that the update might help. If that failed then he suggested resetting the router, not by shutting it off and turning it back on, but by poking a paperclip in the little hole on the back. He advised that would mean our phones, wireless printers and laptops would be disconnected. 

     After arrival back home, not being real tech savvy and not wanting to go through all that rigmarole, I called the phone company again and asked a tech rep about the possibility of replacing the router with a newer model. 

     The difference this time is that I got a tech rep who immediately understood the problem and the lady knew exactly what she was doing! It took about 10-15 minutes for her to set me up with second wireless network connection to which I could connect the iPad and the problem was solved. 

     Plaudits to one very sharp service technician working at CenturyLink, the third largest landline telephone company in the United States, who had this very simple (and painless) solution!

For Christians

     Connect Us is a Christian site offering uplifting prayers for a wide variety of situations, inspiring bible verses on subjects ranging from A to Z, 3-minute commentaries, coloring pages for kids, great sermons by great preachers and much more.

MyFutureRadar

     On My Future Radar you can see the future, or at least what the weather forecast models think the future will be. Data is displayed using Rapid Refresh and NAM forecast models to provide simulated future radar imagery. 

     Rapid Refresh is the continental-scale National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) hourly-updated assimilation/modeling system. The Rapid Refresh model is run hourly and is useful for short term forecasting. 

     The North American Mesoscale forecast system (NAM) models provide simulated future radar imagery and is one of the major weather models run by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) for producing weather forecasts. NAM uses dozens of weather parameters from temperature and precipitation to lightning and turbulent kinetic energy to generate multiple grids of weather forecasts over the North American continent and forecasts are generated using additional numerical weather models. NAM is run 4 times a day and typically has data from the present to 2.5 days in the future.

Time and Date

  timeanddate.com is an interesting site that is the world's number one site on, well...time and date. World clocks, time zone information, calendars, weather, the sun and moon, timers, calculators and more are available. They also have a section On This Date In History. For example, where I live it's 6:30am, foggy and 63 degrees. In Riyadh it's 1:30pm, hazy and 102 degrees. VISIT SITE

High Fructose Corn Syrup Consumption and Pedestrians Killed

     High fructose corn syrup is a sweetener which is processed from corn. Similar to regular table sugar (sucrose), it’s composed of both fructose and glucose. It became a popular sweetener in the late 1970s when the price of regular sugar was high, while corn prices were low due to government subsidies It’s used to sweeten processed foods and soft drinks — primarily in the United States. Naturally, there are those who hate the stuff because: 

 

1. It adds an unnatural amount of fructose to your diet which can cause health issues if eaten in excessive amounts. 

2. It increases your risk of fatty liver disease. One study in men and women with excess weight showed that drinking sucrose-sweetened soda for 6 months significantly increased liver fat, compared to drinking milk, diet soda, or water. 

3. It increases your risk of obesity and weight gain. One study had healthy adults drink beverages containing either glucose or fructose. When comparing the two groups, the fructose drink did not stimulate regions of the brain that control appetite to the same extent as the glucose drink. 

4. Excessive intake is linked to diabetes. In healthy people, insulin increases in response to the consumption of carbs, transporting them out of the bloodstream and into cells. However, regularly consuming excess fructose can make your body resistant to insulin’s effects. This decreases your body’s ability to control blood sugar levels. 

5. It can increase the risk of other serious diseases. Many serious diseases have been linked to the over consumption of fructose: obesity, diabetes, heart disease, gout and cancer. 

6. It contains no essential nutrients. High fructose corn syrup is “empty” calories. Avoiding high-fructose corn syrup and added sugar in general may be one of the most effective ways to improve your health and lower your risk of disease. 

 

     Now there is another reason to avoid the consumption of high fructose corn syrup...there is a correlation between its consumption and pedestrians killed by getting hit by a car, pickup or van! 

 

     As can be seen from this chart based on data between 2000 and 2009, the correlation coefficient is 0.98. Correlation can be described as a mutual relationship or connection between two or more things. Note that the number of pedestrians killed per capita closely follows the consumption of corn syrup per capita.

    The correlation coefficient has no rule for determining what size of correlation is considered strong, moderate or weak and its interpretation depends, in part, on the topic of study. When we are studying things that are difficult to measure, such as the contents of someone's mental life. When we are studying things that are more easily countable, we expect higher correlations. For example, it's generally considered that correlations above 0.75 are relatively strong; correlations between 0.45 and 0.75 are moderate and those below 0.45 are considered weak. 

     As is very clear from the chart, the correlation coefficient of 0.98 means that there is a direct connection between the consumption of high fructose corn syrup and the number of pedestrians killed by getting run over by a vehicle. 

     Here's a little secret...this statistical information is phony because it's a spurious correlation! In statistics a spurious correlation is a relationship in which two or more events or variables are not causally related to each other, yet it may be wrongly inferred that they are, due to either coincidence or the presence of an unseen factor. Biases and conditions alone may create statistical errors, errors from interpretation, false reporting, wrong assumptions, improper samples, false relationships and even bad math. Bottom line: you can prove or disprove just about anything.

Just A Thought

 

Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, a Lady With Insight

     Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum (1905 – March 6, 1982) was a writer and philosopher. Born and educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926 where she became known for her fiction and for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. She is better known by her pen name Ayn Rand. 

     She had a play that opened on Broadway in 1935. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead. In 1957, Rand published her best-known work, the novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own periodicals and releasing several collections of essays until her death in 1982. 

     Atlas Shrugged has been decribed as "an apocalyptic vision of the last stages of conflict between two classes of humanity—the looters and the non-looters. The looters are proponents of high taxation, big labor, government ownership, government spending, government planning, regulation, and redistribution."

     This quote from Atlas Shrugged is even more true today than it was when she wrote it in 1957:

 

Lake Erie Shipwrecks

     The Great Lakes have about 8,000 shipwrecks and about 2,000 are in Lake Erie placing it among the highest concentration of wrecks in the world. Only about 375 of Lake Erie’s wrecks (schooners, freighters, steamships, tugs and fishing boats) have been found and because of the cold, fresh water, many of them are perfectly preserved. 

     Lake Erie used to be a boat super highway for passengers and goods alike and there are about 12 wrecks within 2 miles of Cleveland. One of the oddest wrecks is an intact schooner off the shore of Euclid, Ohio which carried gravestones. 

     In the eastern section of Lake Erie you can sometimes see 100 feet down without a light. In the central and western basin you can see only 10 to 15 feet. Regardless, the water is cold, down to 40 degrees in the deepest waters, even in August. 

     Ships in shallow water generally were blown apart by dynamite, so they didn’t harm other ships. Some of these wrecks are now just a pile of boards while others are undisturbed. It’s illegal to remove anything from the wrecks. 

Underwater Archaeologists May Have Discovered the Oldest Shipwreck in Lake Erie...read more 

Lake Erie Shipwrecks Home

Mark Twain On Congress

     King Solomon said it in Ecclesiastes 1:9 which reads, "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." Some things never change...speaking of Congress in his day, Mark Twain wrote the following gems. 

 

* Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can. 

* (Congressmen are) the smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes. 

* Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. 

* Congressman is the trivialist distinction for a full grown man. 

* All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity. 

* It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress. 

* It is the foreign element that commits our crimes. There is no native criminal class except Congress. 

*...I never can think of Judas Iscariot without losing my temper. To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature, Congressman.