Make Firefox faster

Learn how to make the best web browser even faster. And if you're still using Internet Explorer: 1) shame on you, and 2) download Firefox.

Our infrastructure really sucks

This past summer I learned that the United States has 76,000 structurally deficient bridges. Not only do our bridges suck, but everything that makes up our infrastructure sucks. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, we get a grade of D on our infrastructure report card. The worst aspects are drinking water, inland waterways, levees, roads, and wastewater, all scoring a D-. Our best? Solid waste! C+.

Synesthesia

Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which a person, upon hearing or seeing a word or number, or listening to a song, perceives it as inherently colored, having a personality, or occupying space.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock was a painter and a leader in the Abstract Expressionist movement. He is known for his "drip and splash" manner in which he put a canvas on the floor and used sticks, towels, or knives to create the painting.

Pollock was born on this day in 1912.

Bud Dwyer

Bud Dwyer was a Pennsylvania politician who committed suicide on TV after he was found guilty of corruption.

Check the video of his suicide.

Prosopagnosia

Prosopagnosia is a disorder of face perception where the ability to recognize faces is impaired, but not the ability to recognize other objects. This is also called "face blindness."

Gigapan

A gigapan is a robotic platform that attaches to a digital camera and computer software. Simply put: it makes you take panoramic pictures that you can zoom in on and the quality will still be high.

See a pic of Barack Obama at the Inauguration.

Presidents not swearing in on the Bible

Much has been made in the lunatic fringe of the right-wing, otherwise known as Fox News, about President Obama not using a Bible as he retook the Oath of Office. Besides the fact that the president really didn't have to be sworn in again (the Constitution states that the president-elect takes office at noon, not at the ceremony), three other people took the Oath without using a Bible.

John Quincy Adams used a constitutional law book (Gasp!), Teddy Roosevelt didn't place his hand on anything (He's an atheist!), and Lyndon Johnson may have used a prayer book as he was sworn in on Air Force One - they couldn't find a Bible on the plane (I knew Kennedy didn't read the Holy Book! He got his orders from the Pope!).

Stone

A stone is a British unit of measurement that is equal to 14 pounds. It is usually used when measuring someone's body weight.

See pics of a guy losing 29 stone by exercise and having to end up remove 30 pounds of excess skin.

Denmark

For the past three decades, Denmark has consistently ranked at the top of the list of the world's happiest countries.


Watch CBS Videos Online

They Also Ran

The First State Bank in Norton (Kansas) has a picture gallery of all the men who have run for President of the United States and lost. It started in 1965 when local banker William Walter Rouse read Irving Stone's book "They Also Ran," about presidential campaign losers. Today, John McCain's picture was hung. But it may also be the last since the bank said that it's running out of walls.

First inaugural video

The first motion picture of a presidential inauguration was in 1901, as William McKinley was being sworn in for the second time.

Largest empire

The largest empire in world history based on percentage of the world population is the Achaemenid Persian Empire. It had 46% (70-80 million out of 152 million) of the world's people in the 4th century BC.

Eddie Slovik

Eddie Slovik was a private during WWII and is the only American soldier to be executed for cowardice since the Philippine–American War (1899-1902).

On October 8, 1944, after six weeks of deserting his detachment to stay safe with a Canadian military police unit, Slovik told his company commander that he was "too scared" to serve in a rifle company and asked to take part in the rear area unit. The captain offered the soldier to tear up the note and all would be forgiven but Slovik refused. The next day he approached his lieutenant colonel with the same plea and the same scenario played out. Slovik was taken into custody after that.

After the divisional judge advocate offered the frightened private another chance for amends, and after another rebuff, Eddie Slovik was charged with desertion to avoid hazardous duty and court martialed on November 11, 1944.

A month later Slovik wrote to General Dwight Eisenhower, begging for clemency. Because desertion was so prevalent at the time, the general did not accept and warranted the execution. Slovik was executed by firing squad on January 31, 1945, near Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, France. He was 24 years old.

Ready.gov

Ready.gov is a government preparedness website that informs citizens how to brace for a disaster. Its blog, whose last post was four months ago, gets hardly any attention, and its video blog, whose last post was two months ago, is pathetic. Its Twitter account currently has 477 followers; Simon Owens nearly has that many.

What a great way to try to educate us on how to protect ourselves and our families yet no one ever hears anything about this website.

Somnolent

Somnolent means "drowsy or sleepy."

Earthworms

An earthworm has a series of five aortic chambers that look like five hearts but actually act like one.

Watch a video of an earthworm's "hearts" in action.

Condi's State Department

The State Department needs to increase its hiring of employees by 46% in order to get fully staffed for its responsibilities. Prospective Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be bringing in someone for Deputy SoS for Management and Resources; that person will be looking to increase funding for the diplomatic core. Who did Condi have? No one. The position went unfilled for the entire Bush tenure.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Effects of knuckle cracking

I guess everybody pretty much knows that knuckle cracking doesn't produce arthritis, but what long-term effects may this habit have?

Soft tissue damage to the joint capsule and decreased grip strength. So don't crack your knuckles.

Indonesians

Indonesians don't know how to swim. This is because the Javanese, the main ethnic group there, were never seafarers. Even though the island was a major stop on trading routes, the Javanese were more preoccupied with their rice farming. This lead to them never knowing how to swim and drowning after ferries sink.

Bush hid the facts

If you're using Windows: 1) Shame on you. 2) Open up Notepad and type in the phrase "Bush hid the facts" without quotation marks. Don't hit Enter, just save the file and close Notepad. Open the file again. OH MY GOD, BUSH AND MICROSOFT ARE TRYING TO SUPPRESS FREE SPEECH AND THEY'RE IN IT TOGETHER!

While I do hate Microsoft, I loathe conspiracy theorists even more. The garbled text you see is a result of a bug in Microsoft (surprise, surprise). It occurs with any phrase which has the order 4-3-3-5 in terms of characters and spaces. The phrase "Bill fed the goats" also elicits the same response. And even though it's true that "Bush hid the truth" doesn't fetch the same garble, "Brad ate the trees" doesn't, either.

This little bug was discovered in 2004 and conspiracy nuts ate it up, spreading it on the Internet like wildfire.

Solution: Save the file as ANSI rather than Unicode, then relax.

Epic of Gilgamesh

The Epic of Gilgamesh is perhaps the oldest story in the world. It is an epic poem that originated in Mesopotamia around the 7th century BC. The most fascinating thing about the story is its striking similarities between its own great flood and Noah's Flood.

And how did I come about with this discovery?

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Yahweh or No Way - Roland Burris

Colbert at Christmas
Colbert Christmas DVD

Green Screen
Bill O'Reilly Interview

World Famous Bushman

The World Famous Bushman is a guy who hides behind branches and startles people as they walk by. He lives in San Francisco.

Mice

Mice can fit through a hole the size of a ballpoint pen (1/4 inch in diameter).

Max Feingold

In 1923 Max Feingold, Wisconsin Democratic senator Russ Feingold's grandfather, bought the first Chevy truck made in the Janesville, WI plant.

Saddam's favorite movie

Saddam Hussein's favorite movie was The Godfather.

Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas

The Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas, or AORBS, is the "nation's premiere fraternity of A-list Santas." They actually think they're important enough to make the act of switching leaders a big deal, by comparing their power structure to Nazi Germany and 1984.

If you haven't already, you have to listen to Act Three of This American Life to be truly entertained.

Medici

The Medici family (13th to 17th centuries) is considered the "godfathers of the Renaissance." The family gave the world three popes (Leo X, Clement VII, and Leo XI), several rulers of Florence, and members of the French and English royalty. They brought art and humanism to Florence and was one of the families to pave the way for the Italian Renaissance. Some estimated that the Medici family was, at least for a time, the wealthiest in Europe.

KDKA

KDKA, a Pittsburgh-based radio station, was the first commercial radio station in the world. On November 2, 1920 at 6 PM, four men started broadcasting the presidential election results (Harding vs. Cox) in a shack atop a building in East Pittsburgh. Thus, radio broadcasting would be changed forever.

FDA

Thanks to import rates of 80% for the drugs we consume, 20% for food, and most of the medical devices, the Food and Drug Administration will need, at the current pace, 13 years to inspect all drug plants, 27 years to inspect all foreign device plants, and 1,900 years to inspect all food plants.

Evolution

Yesterday I wrote about why we have eyebrows. In explaining how early humans hunted or were being hunted, and how eyebrows aided them by diverting the sweat from their foreheads, I concluded that "nature has a way of selecting the humans who have eyebrows over the ones who don't." Which got me thinking: how does evolution, or nature as it is also often called, exactly work? As with my posts that took a deeper look at the story of Jesus (parts 1 and 2), I'll try not to rely on sources that are biased. Thank you, How Stuff Works.

There are three basic parts to evolution:

An organism's DNA can change (mutation). Mutations change the organism's offspring either immediately or several generations down the line.

There are either beneficial, harmful, or neutral mutations. If the modification is harmful then the chances of the offspring surviving decrease. If the change is beneficial then the offspring will likely do better than its ancestors. The process of gathering the good and bad mutations is called natural selection.

As natural selection occurs, new species arise. In Earth's history of a few billion years, new species, including bacteria and humans, have been formed from natural selection.
I won't bore you with all the details of reproduction and mutations; you can read all of that in the HSW article I linked above.

Three questions about this theory emerge:

1. How does evolution add information to a genome to create progressively more complicated organisms?
2. How is evolution able to bring about drastic changes so quickly?
3. How could the first living cell arise spontaneously to get evolution started?

Let's explore these.

1. How a genome is created is not yet fully explained by evolution. For example, how are new chromosomes created and how can a strand of DNA be lengthened?

One area of research as to how this can be answered focuses on transposons, or transposable elements, or jumping genes. This is a gene that has the ability to move or copy itself from one chromosome to another.

Another reason entails polyploidy. This is a process in which the total number of chromosomes can double, or a single chromosome can clone itself. Polyploidy illustrates why some plants can have a hundred chromosomes.

2. According to current fossil evidence, we evolved from a species known as Homo erectus, which appeared 2 million years ago. Its skull was about 800 or 900 cubic centimeters (CCs). Modern human brains are 1,500 CCs. So in 2 million years evolution doubled the size of the human brain. It also added 50 billion neurons (our brains right now have about 100 billion neurons). That could bring up one of these scenarios: 250,000 new neurons were added every generation; 2.5 billion new neurons every 100,000 years; 500,000 years ago there was a burst of approximately 20 closely-spaced generations that supplemented the Homo erectus brain with 2.5 billion neurons per generation; one day, 50 billion new neurons were added.

Since none of these seem realistic, and because we don't see children being born with 250,000 new neurons, the current theory of evolution still has some questions to answer. (Although, you can read this article about how minute changes in an amino acid in one gene can a have a huge impact on the speech process of humans. So small alterations in genes do have big consequences.)

3. Life obviously had to come from somewhere. Evolution states that it came spontaneously out of the inert chemicals of the earth.

Cells are very complex. They have to contain, at a bare minimum, a long list of prerequisites. Maybe the first living cells encompassed something other than DNA. At any rate, only two things can help explain life on earth: spontaneous creation in which random chemical processes created the first cell, or God created the first cell.

DNA was discovered about 50 years ago so it'll probably be a long time if we'll see any progress made in this field. Newton was the source for centuries before Einstein developed relativity. Let's just wait and see.