Statistics And Other Lies
Teen Sits In All 5,200 Seats At Baseball Stadium
YORK, Pa. -- A high school student warmed all 5,200 seats in a new minor league baseball stadium before its inaugural game.
It took Todd McCormick about three hours to sit in each seat of Sovereign Bank Stadium, the new home of the York Revolution, on Friday. That's about 29 seats per minute. McCormick, 17, of Springfield Township, started at 11:50 a.m. in Row N in right field. He finished around 3 p.m., two hours before gates opened for the game against the Newark Bears.
Napoleon's Sword Sold For $6.4 Million
FONTAINEBLEAU, France - A gold-encrusted sword Napoleon wore into battle in Italy 200 years ago was sold Sunday for more than $6.4 million, an auction house said.
The last of Napoleon's swords in private hands, it has an estimated value of far less — about $1.6 million, according to the Osenat auction house managing the sale.
Despite Common Belief, Intertnet Actually Hurts Pornography Industry
The Internet was supposed to be a tremendous boon for the pornography industry, creating a global market of images and videos accessible from the privacy of a home computer. For a time it worked, with wider distribution and social acceptance driving a steady increase in sales.
But now the established pornography business is in decline — and the Internet is being held responsible.
The Length Of Your Fingers Can Predict SAT Performance, Scientists Say
A quick look at the lengths of children's index and ring fingers can be used to predict how well students will perform on SATs, new research claims.
Kids with longer ring fingers compared to index fingers are likely to have higher math scores than literacy or verbal scores on the college entrance exam, while children with the reverse finger-length ratio are likely to have higher reading and writing, or verbal, scores versus math scores.
World's 10 Best Paid Bloggers
Ever wondered who makes most money blogging online? Well, I did some Googling and here are the results.
1. Markus Frind. Markus is the owner of PlentyOfFish and he makes over 3 million dollars. How do we know? He told so.
2. Kato Leonard. Kato makes over a million dollars, if you believe USA Today. I do.
Stay-at-home mom's work worth $138,095 a year
NEW YORK (Reuters) - If the typical stay-at-home mother in the United States were paid for her work as a housekeeper, cook and psychologist among other roles, she would earn $138,095 a year, according to research released on Wednesday.
This reflected a 3 percent raise from last year's $134,121, according to Salary.com Inc, Waltham, Massachusetts-based compensation experts.
The 10 jobs listed as comprising a mother's work were housekeeper, cook, day care center teacher, laundry machine operator, van driver, facilities manager, janitor, computer operator, chief executive officer and psychologist, it said.
Mathematicians Discover A Formula For Perfect Beer Foam
CHICAGO (Reuters) - A mathematical formula can now predict how the frothy head on a beer changes over time, a finding that may have a wide range of commercial uses beyond pulling the perfect pint, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.
The formula explains how the tiny bubbles that make up foam grow -- an explanation that could lead to the development of products such as metal shrink wrap.
The possibilities include "the heat treatment of metals or even controlling (the) head on a pint of beer," Robert MacPherson of Princeton University in New Jersey and David Srolovitz of Yeshiva University in New York report in the journal Nature.
US Servers Consume As Much Electricity As 4 Million Houselolds
The findings of the study, commissioned by AMD, were presented in a keynote address at the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit in New York, by Randy Allen, corporate vice president, Server and Workstation Division of the chipmaker.
The study, authored by Professor Jonathan Koomey, staff scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories and consulting professor, Stanford University, found that in 2006, in the US alone, data centers and their associated infrastructure consumed five million kW of energy, the equivalent of five 1,000 MW power plants.
The cost of US data centers is a large 37.5% chunk of the US$7.2 billion annual spend on global data centers.
Scientists Discover That Scientists Shouldn't Marry
Several years ago, Satoshi Kanazawa, then a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, analyzed a biographical database of 280 great scientists--mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and biologists. When he calculated the age of each scientist at the peak of his career--the sample was predominantly male--Kanazawa noted an interesting trend.
After a crest during the third decade of life, scientific productivity--as evidenced by major discoveries and publications--fell off dramatically with age. When he looked at the marital history of the sample, he found that the decline in productivity was less severe among men who had never been married. As a group, unmarried scientists continued to achieve well into their late 50s, and their rates of decline were slower.
Minnesota Man Wins $25,000 Lottery Two Days in Row
MAPLEWOOD, Minn. -- An airline pilot from Maplewood won a $25,000 lottery jackpot -- two days in a row. Raymond Snouffer Jr. matched the winning numbers 11-14-23-26-31 to win Saturday's Northstar Cash drawing with odds of about 170,000 to 1, Minnesota Lottery officials said.
On Sunday, Snouffer stuck with 11 and switched to 3-7-19-28 -- and won again. Lottery officials said such a sequence was so farfetched that the odds against it were "virtually incalculable."
[Via - SFGate]
