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If you want to talk about some podcast goodness, look no further than this week my friends. Josh and I hit on two very cool subjects. Tuesday’s “Deja Vu” show taught us, among other things, that there are no less than 40 hypotheses about just what deja vu is. Also – apparently 20 to 30 percent of folks never experience it, which kind of surprised me. I thought it happened to everyone until we did our research.
Yesterday’s show on the number of dead bodies left on Mt. Everest was just as fascinating and macabre as I hoped it would be. Fact of the day – 120 dead bodies still lay at rest on Everest in varying states of decay. A gruesome sad reminder of just how extreme conditions are there.
Check these shows out if you haven’t already and allow me to now plug a very exciting new offering from the SYSK team…
All you need to make a smoke bomb is some saltpetre (potassium nitrate), sugar, baking soda and powdered dye. Here are the instructions: Just don’t try making it next to your new car: [[[See #18]]]
It’s Friday, and you know what that means: fan mail! SYMHC listener Kendra wrote to us about Lady Jane Grey, specifically, whether Lady Jane really had a nine-day reign.
Jane Grey (1537-1554) was named after Jane Seymour, who gave birth to Henry VIII’s long-awaited male heir, Edward. When she was nine years old, she went to live at court to study under Queen Catherine Parr. Lady Jane was noted for her acute intelligence and steadfast devotion to her Protestant faith. While at court, she became acquainted with the duke of Northumberland and lord chamberlain, John Dudley. The lord chamberlain, like Jane and the reigning monarch — Edward VI — was Protestant. With Edward so sick, it was a very real possibility that Henry VIII’s daughter Mary Tudor, a Catholic, would become queen.
CNET journalist Jessica Dolcourt reports that Android phone owners may soon have something to cheer about: support for Flash 10 mobile. Dolcourt says that a company called Bsquare has dropped hints about Flash support in a coy statement. Bsquare says it will partner with an international cell phone carrier. Dolcourt’s best guess is that the carrier is T-Mobile, the company that supports the HTC-G1 — the first (and currently only) Android phone.
That’s about all the information we have right now on the offering. We don’t know when Bsquare will port Flash 10 to the Android platform. Nor do we know when Adobe (the company responsible for Flash) will offer its own solution for the Android platform.
Last year, Adobe announced it would bring Flash to smartphones running on Windows Mobile, Android and Symbian (sorry iPhone owners, you’re out of luck this time). But since that announcement we’ve not heard much else from Adobe regarding smartphone Flash support.
Shut ‘em Down: Unused PCs Waste $2.8 Billion
by Sarah Dowdey | March 27, 2009
So yesterday I wrote about Earth Hour and the effort to get unnecessary lights shut off at night — especially those glittering away in office towers. Today I’ll keep to the same vein, but turn my attention to another power suck draining the wallets of many companies: PCs left on all night.
According to 1E, a software and services company, U.S. companies waste $2.8 billion a year and emit 20 million tons of carbon dioxide powering unused PCs. These whopping sums are a result of 50 percent of U.S. workers who use PCs at their job neglecting to shut off their computers at the end of the day.
Why not hit the power switch at night? While some people share their computers or access their network remotely, many mistake the automatic sleep function to mean “off.” Other folks, though, actually operate under the orders of their company or IT department — something that seems counterintuitive considering that $2.8 billion a year.
How much is a trillion dollars? It’s hard to grasp a number that big. In this link, the author tries to help you visualize $1 trillion by looking at stacks of $100 bills: What does one TRILLION dollars look like? Here are some other ways to think about a trillion dollars: 1) If you assume [...]
It’s Fan Friday, and today I wanted to discuss a topic suggested by loyal podcast listener Paul. An artist himself, Paul wanted us to address an art history subject. His suggestion of the Nazi “Degenerate Art” show immediately piqued my interest. Candace and I have done a podcast on the Nazi propaganda machine, but we didn’t go into this particular aspect of it. Plus, the subject of Nazi art theory is especially timely: Next month, a collection of Adolf Hitler‘s paintings (including his first self-portrait) will go up for auction, reports Telegraph.
As Hitler himself was an artist, and (as we mentioned in the podcast) the Nazis actually tried to ban jazz music in Germany, it should come as no surprise that they had certain ideas about art. They attacked almost all schools of modern art, including Expressionism, Art Deco, Cubism, Purism, De Stijl and Dada, which Candace covered in a recent post.
Josh and Chuck’s First Public Appearance!
by Charles W. Bryant | March 27, 2009
Josh and I were asked to serve as guest judges tomorrow night for a “sad song writing contest” here in Atlanta. I know it’s not exactly “The Tonight Show,” but the invitation came from a fan of the show and we’re both pretty psyched about it. We’ll be giving away some HSW swag as well so if you live in Atlanta and want to witness some performers singing their sad songs and rub elbows with us, come on down.
We’ll be at Kavarna in the heart of Oakhurst Village, which is a cool little coffee shop/restaurant/bar type of place – the show starts at 8 p.m. on Saturday night.
Be there or be square, SYSK Nation!
NASA Continues Fight Against Bone Mass Loss in Space
by Robert Lamb | March 27, 2009
As you probably know, one of the problems with humans entering into weightless environments is that we’ve spent a heck of a lot of time evolving to do just fine WITH the force of gravity holding us down. Take that away from us and a host of things start to go haywire in our gravity-based bodies. Chief among these is bone mass loss. Quite simply, if you don’t use it, you lose it — and at an incredible pace.
In fact, visitors to the International Space Station lose up to 10 times more bone mass each month than most postmenopausal women do on Earth do in the same time frame.* NASA has tried to address this issue in the past by having astronauts use treadmills, but according to a recent Science Daily article, the agency figured out a promising way to improve on the measure.
Is it possible to build a mathematical equation for love?
by Marshall Brain | March 27, 2009
Is it possible to build a mathematical equation for love? At first glance that might seem like a ridiculous question. Love seems to be soaked in emotion, and emotion is notoriously fickle. Plus there’s the whole process of “falling in love”, where it is acknowledged that many people become completely irrational. See How Love Works [...]
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