Monthly Archives: March 2010

The Watering Hole: March 6 – Aspirin

Posted on by

Aspirin was trademarked by Bayer in 1899 on this very date, but that is not the beginning of the story.  It seems that acetylsalicylic acid has been used as a pain reliever for at least 5000 years from extracts derived from willows.

Acetylsalicylic acid (Aspirin) is a hormone that takes part in plant development and growth. As a medicine, it has roles that are still being discovered. It is actually almost as effective as statins in inhibiting hardening of the arteries.

This is our open thread. Please feel free to offer your own comments on this or any other topic.

Profile This!

Posted on by

News is coming out that at least 13 suspects in an assassination carried out in Dubai were using fake passports from, get this, Britian, Ireland, France and Germany.

Put this together with the shoe bomber, the “Froot of the Boom” underwear bomber and the kamakazi white male small business owner, and I am sure Faux Gnus will somehow point out that profiling based on looks, name, and national origin will make us all safer.

UPDATE:

The man who shot two officers at the Pentagon was 6′ tall, white, wearing a jacket, dress shirt and pants. Should we now profile all tall white dudes with libertarian leanings?

The Watering Hole: March 5 – Escapes

Posted on by

In 1872 on this date, the Westinghouse Railway Air Brake was patented.

While not the first application of a failure tolerant mechanism as were applied to the Elevator.

In a more recent issue, it  seems that Toyota could have absorbed some blame and  resolved issues on a more timely basis. Allowing an issue brew for for ten years does not exactly establish a positive  corporate image.

I can not really complain, I was cursed with both the Corvair and the Vega.

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy….

Posted on by

“Christian Hate Group…..”

That’s how the headline started. Christian Hate Group…

How did His followers come to that? Man or Son of God, he taught love. And now, people use his name to spread hate.

Christian Hate Group. That those words would be together was inconcievable when I was a child. That they fit together now is not shocking, but saddening.

But the ugly truth is: when people wrap themselves in a flag and a religion, they become very, very dangerous.

Your thoughts are welcome.

The Watering Hole: March 4, Your President and Me.

Posted on by

I am in the process of reducing smoking again and I am down to 1 cigarette a day. I never smoked a single cigarette during my pregnancies, but was looking forward for ten months until I could light up again. Crazy? Yes.

But then, that’s what I share with Barack Obama. Not the pregnancies, silly, but the habit.

So how is it? Have you ever smoked? Are you smoking? How often have you tried to quit?

This is our open thread, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts on this or on anythings else.

The Watering Hole: March 3 – “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

Posted on by

In 1969, NASA had a sole objective – to deliver on a goal JFK set on May 25, 1961, as part of a special address to a joint session of Congress declaring a national goal for “landing a man on the Moon” by the end of the decade and “returning him safely to Earth”.

The odds of a successful program were less than 1 in a million. After JFK was assassinated, the program took on a warlike footing in his honor. It might be said that Lee Harvey Oswald insured the success of man’s first lunar landing.

It was March 1969 and the trans-lunar package had yet to be tested. With a bit over nine months to go for the final deadline, NASA launched Apollo IX, which achieved the first in-space test of the docking and rendezvous systems.

Apollo X provided the first real dry run of the entire system in May of that year. The only missing element was an actual lunar touch-down.  That mission did bring us the image, since memorialized in “Earth Rise”.

Finally, with Apollo XI, it all came together when on July 20, 1969, the first human boot prints were left on the moon.

Update: I left the following paragraph out of the original post, sorry:

Next came Apollo XII. Another flawless mission. All at once, it seemed that going to the moon was like riding a bike – once you got it down, you would never lose the knack.

But then during July 1970, the entire world was focused on a failed mission, as Apollo XIII flirted with seemingly certain disaster which brings us to the quote, the theme of this post, a mission tagged as “a successful failure”.

This is our open thread. Please feel free to offer your own comments on this or any other topic.

Rachel Maddow eviscerates Republicans for their disgusting and shameless hypocrisy

Posted on by

There are lies, damned liars, and then there are Republicans named Chuck Grassley, Lamar Alexander, John McCain, Orrin Hatch, and on and on and on…and oh yeah — the Washington Post.  Should we anticipate a correction?

At this point, you’re a guy on a loud speaker, scolding us to keep our voices down; you’re the speed-eating hotdog kid, telling us to go vegan; you’re a family-values, chastity-lecturing, lecher.  You’re hypocrites.  You are not making serious arguments, and you do not believe what you’re saying.  It’s dis-proven by your record.  In the case of Orrin Hatch, you are flat-out lying about the history of the tactic that Democrats are going to use to pass health reform.

…

For the Washington Post to print something like this is bizarre.  For these established, supposedly mainstream Senators to try to get away with this is an insult to everyone they’re addressing and to the media in particular.  And for us all to just let this slide and call it “politics,” is to surrender to cynicism profoundly.

SMACK!!!

Keep up the good work, Rachel!

The Watering Hole: March 2 – The World’s Most Useless Invention

Posted on by

In assembling some book cases and other shelved furniture, the pocket hole offers a strong and simple joint.

The joint itself is self-clamping, only needing a guide bar for alignment and when augmented with carpenter’s glue is as strong or stronger then a mortise joint. What would improve this self-clamping joint? Nothing other then a pocket joint clamp:

What really takes the cake is that this device is useless for center shelving.

This is our open thread. Please feel free to offer your own comments on this or any other topic.