LQNet
Summary of news topics
News
* Eating one chocolate chip can give you enough energy to walk 150 feet.
* Some have said that chocolate can cure hangovers.
* Almost 40% of all cocoa beans come from the Ivory Coast.
* The country that eats the most chocolate per person is Switzerland. The U.S. is 15th.
* Chocolate is a health food! There have been studies showing that chocolate helps with memory, attention, reaction time, and other activities. It is also believed to help during pregnancy. (No surprise there!). And it contains antioxidants.
News
* All the coffee in the world is grown within 1000 miles of the equator, an area known as the "bean belt". 80% of it is produced on family farms of just 12 acres of less.
* A 16-ounce coffee at Starbucks contains the caffeine equivalent of 9.5 cans of Coke.
* The only US state that grows coffee in Hawaii.
* 80 countries produce coffee but the biggest producer is Brazil, who provides 33% of all coffee.
* About 1.6 billion cups of coffee are consumed each day worldwide.
* The Netherlands drinks the most coffee per person. After that comes Finland and Sweden. The U.S. is 16th.
* Musicians Bach and Mozart were coffee-freaks. They drank a lot of it.
News
"If you torture the data long enough, it will confess."
That old conundrum of correlation vs. causation is back again. CNBC had an article that was picked up by several local news outlets, Diet Drinks Linked with Heart Disease, Death. Except, when you read the article, that's not really what it's saying.
The findings, being presented at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology, don't suggest that the drinks themselves are killers. But women who toss back too many diet sodas may be trying to make up for unhealthy habits, experts say.
Oh, so there is a CORRELATION between Diet Drinks and other unhealthy habits. Maybe there is also a correlation between unhealthy habits and the television shows people watch, or the kind of cars they drive.
The women who drank the most drinks were also more likely to smoke, to be overweight, to have diabetes and to have high blood pressure.
Wow, are they saying that the diet drinks caused the smoking, the weight, and/or diabetes?
The news media loves a sensational headline. But in this story the facts to back it up are laughable at best. Statistics are an abused science.
Tech
Entertainment
Tech
Tech
Tech
Amazon has releases it's waited for TV box. It's called Amazon Fire TV and it only costs $99.00.
It has access to Amazon Streaming Video, Netflix, Hulu Plus and more.
It has voice activation and can include a game console. If you are an Amazon Prime member, you can watch your Prime Video on your TV.
News
What is fascinating is that there were no traffic rules. The only vehicle travelling in a straight line is the cable car. The fact that this was four days before the earthquake and fire makes it poignant as well as historical.
It is estimated that 3,000 people died. Over 80% of San Francisco was destroyed. This film shows a world that disappeared just days later.
News
British Pathé, the U.K. newsreel archive company, has uploaded its entire 100-year collection of 85,000 historic films in high resolution to YouTube. The collection has film from 1896 to 1976.
Some of the older films include the New York Fire Brigade 1893 and actual footage from the Battle of the Somme
Tech
Tech
Automation has created as many jobs as it has eliminated, so far. But there is a growing concern that robots and computers will take away more jobs than they replace. Certainly, the new jobs involved in managing automation are better paying than many of the jobs being replaced, but they also require more skill.
Clerical work was taken over by computers some time ago. Many paper-handlers have had to learn new jobs. But this has also created new jobs in tech support and programming. The bean-counters use Excel instead of ledger paper. They have become proficient in several software apps. People have learned new skills to keep themselves valuable.
Assembly line work used to be considered tedious and de-humanizing. But then it started to pay well, especially in the automotive industry. It was ripe for take over by robots and it has displaced workers. Robots are even doing jobs in the military. And this is expected to increase. The goal is to replace infantry troops with robots. And how will that change warfare? Is there even a reason to have soldiers (robots) shooting at each other, or is cyberwar where we are going. Why shoot at an armed robot when I can mess with its software and make it harmless?
The possibilities are beyond the technology. The social, political and economic issues are just starting to be discovered.
* Moving things with large muscles.
* Finely manipulating things with small muscles.
* Using our hands, mouths, brains, eyes, and ears to ensure that ongoing processes and procedures happen the way that they are supposed to.
* Engaging in social reciprocity and negotiation to keep us all pulling in the same direction.
* Thinking up new things – activities that produce outcomes that are necessary, convenient, or luxurious – for us to do.
Machines have largely taken over the first two skills. And I don't ever think machines will replace the fifth item. Creativity and new ideas don't exist in machines, at least none that I have ever seen. In spite of their speed of calculation, they are really not smart, not in the sense that a creative person is smart.
Societies adapt to disruptive changes. Sometimes, like our present, the changes are happening very fast the the societal norms are playing catch-up. But we have started to anticipate rapid change. I don't see robots taking over and leaving us to starve. We will adapt and not let that happen. The key word is "ADAPT", something a machine can't do without human intervention.
Link ID: 09062014-132
Environment
The predictions of the last several decades, of dooom and gloom because we are not good guardians of mother earth, have all failed to come true. Let's list a few:
What happened to Nuclear Winter?
In the 1970's and even into the 1980's, there were dire predictions that pollution in the air would block out the sun and bring record cold. Growing seasons would be terribly shortened and food would become scarce. As the cold continued, energy consumption would skyrocket, and since fossils fuels were running out, they told us, we were doomed to freeze to death in the dark.
Now, of course, this same airbourne polution is heating the earth. It is trapping the earth's heat and we are heating up. The scary story continues that the polar ice caps will melt and flood all the coastlines.
What about the longer growing seasons that will result from more heat? And warmer nighttime temperatures? Oh, they never mention that. It is all doom and gloom all the time. No matter what the situation, we are all doomed.
What do the environmentalists gain from all this scary talk? Well, it reduces the drive toward innovation and modernity. It allows governmental bodies to control areas of private life that were unimaginable just a short time ago. They are the pied pipers that we need to follow.
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