Category: Need to Know

Panem et Circenses

On By Norbert HauptIn Commentaries, Need to KnowLeave a comment

University Salaries
[click for credit: Best of PHD Comics]
This graph says it all. Our society has its priorities completely and hopelessly messed up. We are doomed. No society with priorities like this has a chance to really compete on the global market place.

“Panem et circenses” is what the average Roman said when the emperor asked the people what they wanted. “Bread and circuses” or “bread and games” was their answer.

We do just that now. We pay millions of dollars to grown men that play kids games on television, we pay their coaches three times what we pay our university  presidents and 12 times what we pay our tenured professors, and we are happy with that.

Judge Judy on television makes $123,000 a day, or about $45 million a year. The Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court makes $217,400 a year. Associate Justices make $208,100 a year. Therefore, Judge Judy makes over $43 million a year more than the nine Supreme Court Justices combined.

Panem et circenses!

Maps They Didn’t Teach You at School

On By Norbert HauptIn Need to Know, Today I Learned3 Comments

I found this collection of maps that I ended up quite some time perusing. Many are amusing but not to be taken too seriously. Others are right on and actually very informative.

Check out particularly:

Maps of countries not using the metric system:

map1

Countries where homosexuality is a crime:

map2

And finally, the upside down map. It is completely arbitrary that somehow, in history, somebody decided to have north on top. Had they decided that south should be on top, this is what our world would look like. China is suddenly “the middle empire.” Wherever we are on the map, our outlook changes completely.

map3

Our Tax Dollars at Work

On By Norbert HauptIn Economy, Need to Know, Political2 Comments

It’s tax day. Most Americans do not think of April 15 as a happy day.

taxdollars
nationalpriorities.org

The chart above shows where our tax dollars actually go. Note that Social Security and Medicare taxes are not included here. This just deals with the federal income taxes.

I am surprised how big a chunk the military and veterans benefits together make up. I am also surprised how large the healthcare slice is. Healthcare should be paid by the individuals and their insurance companies and funded by premiums. Why are we spending tax dollars on this?

I am also surprised how small the portions for science and education are. Really?

This chart shows in stark figures where our nation’s priorities lie – pun intended – I got this from nationalpriorities.org.

A nation’s values come alive when you examine what a nation spends its money on. Ours spends it on military, healthcare and interest on debt.

We are NOT spending it on education and science.

This will catch up with us, it’s just a matter of time.

Efficiency of a Freight Train

On By Norbert HauptIn Energy, Need to Know4 Comments

Last month I took a long road trip across the California and Arizona deserts and I must have seen several dozen freight trains along the way. Huge locomotives, coupled together in groups of four or five, pulled seemingly endless chains of wagons with containers. The amount of freight making its way across our country day and night is staggering.

freight train by Eric Rench
Freight Train – Photo by Eric Rench

As I researched the rail roads, I learned that a freight train is extremely efficient in terms of moving cargo. A train can move one ton of cargo 450 miles using one gallon of fuel.

For contrast, on that road trip, I drove a cargo van, which weighs empty about 5,500 pounds or just over two tons. It drove about 17 miles per gallon of gas. So I moved two tons for 17 miles which would mean using that vehicle, I could move a ton of cargo 34 miles with a gallon of gas.

Freight trains are 15 times more efficient than small vans.

The Unbroken Line of My Ancestry

On By Norbert HauptIn Nature, Need to KnowLeave a comment

I am here today because of an unbroken line of ancestors that reaches from the earliest mammals all the way to me today. More specifically, and astonishingly, I am alive today because:

  • None of my ancestors ever decided not to have any children.
  • None of my maternal ancestors ever miscarried or aborted any of my ancestors.
  • Every one of my ancestors lived long enough to grow to adulthood and procreate before getting killed by disease, war, accidents or old age.
  • Each sexual intercourse of all my ancestors resulted in a sperm actually reaching the egg, and the exact sperm that reached the egg was critical for me to be here today. Of those millions of generations of ancestors, any one different sperm, and I would not be I today – and I would probably not exist.
  • If any of the sperms just in the last 100,000 generations of hominid ancestors I have had carried an X instead of a Y chromosome, or the other way around, I would not be here today. The exact order in which it happened was necessary to make me possible.
  • All the possible permutations of what could have happened count in the trillions, yet only this one permutation actually occurred, that is me today.

This line of thinking caused me to think back to the earliest primate we know about, the purgatorius that lived about 65 million years ago.

purgatoriusThe purgatorius is believed to be the earliest example of a primate or a proto-primate. It was a small rat-like mammal, about five to fifteen inches long and lived in borrows underground about 65 million years ago. When the dinosaurs became rapidly extinct around that time, a niche opened up for mammals. Some scientists speculate that the purgatorius, due to its primate-like teeth, may be the most distant ancestor of all primates. Over time more advanced primates evolved from the purgatorius: monkeys, apes, and eventually, 63 million years later, some hominids started walking upright in East Africa.

So there was a rat-like primate that looked like a rodent, which burrowed in mountains of dinosaur dung for beetles and worms 65 million years ago that had a litter of babies, at least one of which survived to have its own litter, and so on, and some twenty million generations later here I am…

…typing this up.

Movie Review: The Wolf of Wall Street – Take Two

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Need to KnowLeave a comment

I reviewed the movie The Wolf of Wall Street yesterday, and today I came across this scathing open letter to the makers of this movie, from a Los Angeles writer by the name of Christina McDowell. This letter is a must-read for anyone that has just watched the movie.

prousalis

Christina’s father, shown with her on the picture during better days, was another wolf who actually knew Jordan Belfort (of the movie). During her father’s slide down, he stole her identity, took out credit cards in her name and drove her into debt.

Now he has surfaced in Albania. “They always land on their feet,” Christina says.

Amazing Pictures of Mail Theft in Progress

On By Norbert HauptIn Bad Product, Commentaries, Need to KnowLeave a comment

Theft

Check out these pictures of a mail theft in progress.

The amazing thing is, as the poster writes after the last picture:

Total time was about 2 minutes.  I called the police, they said call the post office, post office told me to call the postal inspection services, they told me that someone may call me back. Bottom line is they don’t care, so if you don’t want your mail stolen, don’t use those boxes.

This is a great example of our government and its efficiency at work for us.

Penn and Teller on Vaccinations

On By Norbert HauptIn Need to Know, ScienceLeave a comment

There are still people arguing about the validity of vaccinations. First they claim that vaccinations cause autism, which has been refuted by science many times. Where humanity has made much progress in improving child mortality rates around the world, we seem to be going backwards in the United States and we are allowing resurgences of diseases that were once just about eradicated.

Here Penn and Teller make a powerful argument in just one minute.

How I Think about Charity and Non-Profits

On By Norbert HauptIn Commentaries, Economy, Misleading Statistics, Need to Know, Sustainability1 Comment

Over the decades, when I had something to give away to charity, I would always just call Goodwill. They’d come with a big truck and haul my stuff away. In the decades before the Internet – and therefore Craigslist – when the kids grew out of their bicycles, that was the easiest way to get “rid of them” and contribute to a good cause.

Then, just recently, I saw a Facebook post to this page:

Charities
[click to enlarge]
Checking just the Goodwill section alone, this had me think that by giving to Goodwill, I have made a terrible mistake for many years, all my life, really.

Then I went to do some fact checking and found almost dozens of references to this chart being a scam, among them this site, which debunks the claims made by the above poster.

Specifically, for Goodwill, it states that:

Claim: CEO and owner Mark Curran profits $2.3 million a year. Goodwill is a very catchy name for his business. You donate to his business and then he sells the items for PROFIT. He pays nothing for his products and pays his workers minimum wage! Nice guy. $0.00 goes to help anyone! Stop giving to this man.
Facts: This claim is completely false. According to the Goodwill website: “82 percent of Goodwill’s revenues go directly into employment and training programs for people with disabilities and other barriers to employment!” Jim Gibbons is the CEO of Goodwill Industries International and his most recent compensation was reported to be $729,310. Goodwill has refuted some of these claims here.
Program Expenses:  92%

This made me feel better, and I have come to the conclusion that the only thing right about the chart above is that it is important to “Think Before You Donate.” Clearly, it’s paramount that we check out the organizations we donate money to, so we know what we are actually doing.

Finally, watching the TED talk in the video below was one of the most valuable 18-minute investment of time I have made in a long time. Even though I work with the government sector and non-profits every day, my conceptions of non-profits and charities, and the results they achieve, were completely wrong. This speech by Dan Pallotta, a fundraiser and charity expert, will change the way you think and feel about non-profits, their role in out society and their impact.

 

To get a higher resolution of this video, go to TED talks directly by clicking here.

Nerves of Steel or Death Wish?

On By Norbert HauptIn Crack-Ups, Need to Know, TravelsLeave a comment

Here is a little bit of insanity, a little bit of death wish, and a lot of admiration from me. I hope nobody that I know or care for ever does this.

Nuclear Explosions Around the World 1944 – 1998

On By Norbert HauptIn Commentaries, Environmental Protection, Need to Know, Political, Science, Sustainability, Technology5 Comments

I had no idea there were 2053 nuclear explosions around the world between 1944 and 1998. I had always thought of the two deadly ones in 1945 in Japan. And I knew that the Russians and the Americans were doing their nuclear testing, but I didn’t realize the scale of it. I cannot imagine the environmental devastation and pollution scars that this has brought on our world. I live only five hours from Las Vegas. That spot of desert must be aglow at night for the next five million years.

The Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions. I watched it all the way through and I am now truly shaken and astonished. This all went on while I was happily growing up, raising a family, and growing older.

Social Media for Donuts

On By Norbert HauptIn Crack-Ups, Need to Know2 Comments

Twitter – I am eating a donut

Facebook – I like donuts, I see you like donuts, too

Google+ – I am a Google employee who eats donuts

Instagram – Here are vintage photos of my donuts

YouTube – Watch me eating a donut

Reddit – Look at the donut I found in the dumpster

LinkedIn – Look how many donuts I can eat

Pinterest – Nothing but donut recipes and pictures

WordPress – I am writing stories about donuts

Amazon – Read all about my donuts

The Voice of Siri – Voiceover Actress Susan Bennett

On By Norbert HauptIn Cool People, Need to KnowLeave a comment

voice-of-siriThis is the Georgia voiceover actress Susan Bennett who was recently revealed as the voice of Siri. The video in this article is quite interesting, as it shows how this came about. She herself actually didn’t know until friends of her recognized her voice and told her about it.

For My Poker Friends: Shuffling 52 Cards

On By Norbert HauptIn Crack-Ups, Need to Know, Science6 Comments

My memory is going, so I decided to learn how to memorize a deck of 52 cards. Alright, I am just starting. Don’t test me yet.

This exercise had me think about how many combinations there could be of arranging 52 cards.  In other words, how many unique shuffle results are there.

As it turns out, I have 52 choices of the first card in the deck. Then, for the second card, I have only 51 choices left, and for the third card I have 50. And so on. The number of choices is 52 * 52  *50 *…you get the idea. In mathematical terms, this is called  52! (pronounced 52 factorial) and is  basically multiplying 52 times one number less, all the way down to one.

It turns out that factorials truly get huge very quickly. They are not easy to calculate, even with a computer. This is the result:

80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000

52! is truly a giant number, bigger than astronomical. It is an 8 with 67 digits behind it. I tried to think of ways to explain how big a number this is, and then I found a blog entry that does it very well:

Start by picking your favorite spot on the equator.  You’re going to walk around the world along the equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step every billion years.   The equatorial circumference of the Earth is 40,075,017 meters. Make sure to pack a deck of playing cards, so you can get in a few trillion hands of solitaire between steps.

After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean.  Now do the same thing again:  walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe. The Pacific Ocean contains 707.6 million cubic kilometers of water. Continue until the ocean is empty.

When it is, take one sheet of paper and place it flat on the ground.  Now, fill the ocean back up and start the entire process all over again, adding a sheet of paper to the stack each time you’ve emptied the ocean.

Do this until the stack of paper reaches from the Earth to the Sun.  Take a glance at the timer, you will see that the three left-most digits haven’t even changed.  You still have 8.063e67 more seconds to go.   1 Astronomical Unit, the distance from the Earth to the Sun, is defined as 149,597,870.691 kilometers. So, take the stack of papers down and do it all over again.  One thousand times more.  Unfortunately, that still won’t do it.  There are still more than 5.385e67 seconds remaining.  You’re just about a third of the way done.

I found this to be an excellent way of describing how much time in seconds 52! is.

Here is another way to look at it:

Suppose everybody in the world shuffled packs of cards at the rate of one per second, it would take

600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

years to get all the combinations! The age of the earth is only 4,500,000,000 years.

This means, of course, that in the entire history of the world, in all the card games ever played everywhere, we haven’t even shuffled a microscopically small percentage of the available combinations. Not only that, even if the earth continues to exist for billions of years more, with humans playing poker, the vast majority of the combinations have never been shuffled and will never ever be shuffled in the future.

Now back to memorizing a deck of cards!