Sunday, May 22, 2016
Laughing til it Hurt!
Every Mom can relate to this scenario. Read the entire message. I dare you not to laugh out loud.
From StumbleUpon -
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1JhMev/:1GHP2NVT2:h154ZrzH/hellogiggles.com/guy-panic-texts-wife-son-pukes
From StumbleUpon -
Guy panic-texts his wife after their son pukes everywhere, internet cannot get enough
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1JhMev/:1GHP2NVT2:h154ZrzH/hellogiggles.com/guy-panic-texts-wife-son-pukes
Saturday, May 21, 2016
Redemption
Excerpts from The Huffington Post Highline -
Meet the Ungers
Merle Unger escaped from jail for the first time in 1967, when he was an 18-year-old dropout with an interest in petty crime. People in his native Greencastle, Pennsylvania, saw him as a harmless character—a scrawny kid who figured out how to tie his bedsheets together and climb out of the nearby jail at night so he could see his girlfriend and play bingo at the Catholic church before climbing back into his cell in time for roll call. He did this until a sheriff’s deputy went to play bingo, saw Unger sitting there and was like, wait a minute.
Whenever jail officials increased security, Unger found another route out. A local radio station started a Merle Unger Fan Club. His public defender made T-shirts that said, “Merle, baby, where are you?”
In 1975, after more escapes and arrests, he found himself locked up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, fixating on a skylight in the lunchroom, 45 feet up. Early one morning he tied a piece of rope to a 5- or 10-pound dumbbell and wrapped the other end of the rope around his neck. He piled up some tables, put a small step ladder on top of the pile, climbed atop a beam, pulled up the ladder, set it up again, reached higher, hurled the dumbbell through the skylight’s glass, and climbed through the broken window into the December cold, wearing a short-sleeved shirt. “I mean, I’m not proud of that,” Unger told me last month. “I just wanted my freedom.”
~~~~~~~~~~
In the middle of all this, in the ’80s, Unger happened to meet a woman. A fellow inmate in Florida had put a personal ad in Mother Earth magazine, and he got so many responses that he sold the extras to other prisoners for a dollar apiece. Unger bought a few, sent letters and a woman from Illinois came to visit. They ended up getting married in 1988 and had two children, both conceived in prison. He says his life changed when he held his infant son for the first time: “I didn’t want to commit no crimes anymore.”
In Unger’s telling, this is the moment he developed an obsessive interest in the American legal system. Another friend worked in the prison’s law library and told him about a case in which a federal inmate earned his freedom by challenging the constitutionality of the jury instructions in his trial. Unger spent hours studying the case. It was all he could talk about. And the more he read, the more he thought he might have a shot at winning a new trial on the murder charge if he came back to Maryland to fight it.
~~~~~~~~~~
Unger v. State doesn’t say that these prisoners should be freed, only that they can ask to be retried. In practice, though, there’s a strong incentive to settle cases where the defendant has a clean prison record. Re-trying a case that’s 30 or 40 years old can be tricky: the witnesses have moved away, the detectives are dead and the case file is skeletal, or missing, or destroyed. Since the decision came down, 142 of 231 prisoners have negotiated their freedom, almost all of them getting probation. One was acquitted at a new trial. Another eight have died behind bars before they could get a hearing. There are still about 70 prisoners with open cases, which means that even more may yet go free.
http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/meet-the-ungers/
Meet the Ungers
Merle Unger escaped from jail for the first time in 1967, when he was an 18-year-old dropout with an interest in petty crime. People in his native Greencastle, Pennsylvania, saw him as a harmless character—a scrawny kid who figured out how to tie his bedsheets together and climb out of the nearby jail at night so he could see his girlfriend and play bingo at the Catholic church before climbing back into his cell in time for roll call. He did this until a sheriff’s deputy went to play bingo, saw Unger sitting there and was like, wait a minute.
Whenever jail officials increased security, Unger found another route out. A local radio station started a Merle Unger Fan Club. His public defender made T-shirts that said, “Merle, baby, where are you?”
In 1975, after more escapes and arrests, he found himself locked up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, fixating on a skylight in the lunchroom, 45 feet up. Early one morning he tied a piece of rope to a 5- or 10-pound dumbbell and wrapped the other end of the rope around his neck. He piled up some tables, put a small step ladder on top of the pile, climbed atop a beam, pulled up the ladder, set it up again, reached higher, hurled the dumbbell through the skylight’s glass, and climbed through the broken window into the December cold, wearing a short-sleeved shirt. “I mean, I’m not proud of that,” Unger told me last month. “I just wanted my freedom.”
~~~~~~~~~~
In the middle of all this, in the ’80s, Unger happened to meet a woman. A fellow inmate in Florida had put a personal ad in Mother Earth magazine, and he got so many responses that he sold the extras to other prisoners for a dollar apiece. Unger bought a few, sent letters and a woman from Illinois came to visit. They ended up getting married in 1988 and had two children, both conceived in prison. He says his life changed when he held his infant son for the first time: “I didn’t want to commit no crimes anymore.”
In Unger’s telling, this is the moment he developed an obsessive interest in the American legal system. Another friend worked in the prison’s law library and told him about a case in which a federal inmate earned his freedom by challenging the constitutionality of the jury instructions in his trial. Unger spent hours studying the case. It was all he could talk about. And the more he read, the more he thought he might have a shot at winning a new trial on the murder charge if he came back to Maryland to fight it.
~~~~~~~~~~
Unger v. State doesn’t say that these prisoners should be freed, only that they can ask to be retried. In practice, though, there’s a strong incentive to settle cases where the defendant has a clean prison record. Re-trying a case that’s 30 or 40 years old can be tricky: the witnesses have moved away, the detectives are dead and the case file is skeletal, or missing, or destroyed. Since the decision came down, 142 of 231 prisoners have negotiated their freedom, almost all of them getting probation. One was acquitted at a new trial. Another eight have died behind bars before they could get a hearing. There are still about 70 prisoners with open cases, which means that even more may yet go free.
http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/meet-the-ungers/
Friday, May 20, 2016
Otto – Self-Driving Trucks
Now the downside -
http://2paragraphs.com/2016/05/self-driving-trucks-threaten-3-5-million-american-jobs/
Quiet Discontent
An excerpt from the New York Times -
No Sound, No Fury, No Marriage
My marriage had long ago turned into the cliché of roommate-ness, and that it could suffer such a change without any emotional upheaval was revealing. In fact, the silence said it all.
The words I don’t say to my neighbors, the words that get held on my tongue, are: I wish you had heard a fight. I wish our voices had been loud enough to carry across the valley. He and I may have free speech, but we’re not so good at frank speech.
Shakespeare had it right: “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart, concealing it, will break.” I never spoke of the anger in my heart, the mounting resentments and hurts, and neither did he. I never demanded attention or care, and neither did he. And that’s why we broke.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/fashion/marriage-breakups-separation.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share&_r=0
No Sound, No Fury, No Marriage
My marriage had long ago turned into the cliché of roommate-ness, and that it could suffer such a change without any emotional upheaval was revealing. In fact, the silence said it all.
The words I don’t say to my neighbors, the words that get held on my tongue, are: I wish you had heard a fight. I wish our voices had been loud enough to carry across the valley. He and I may have free speech, but we’re not so good at frank speech.
Shakespeare had it right: “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart, concealing it, will break.” I never spoke of the anger in my heart, the mounting resentments and hurts, and neither did he. I never demanded attention or care, and neither did he. And that’s why we broke.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/fashion/marriage-breakups-separation.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share&_r=0
Deja Vu
Valedictorian barred from high school graduation because he has a beard
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/valedictorian-barred-high-school-graduation-article-1.2643541
H/T Tiff
 |
| Amite High School Class of 2016 valedictorian Andrew Jones was not allowed to participate in his own graduation because of his beard. (WLTX 19 NEWS) |
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/valedictorian-barred-high-school-graduation-article-1.2643541
H/T Tiff
Thursday, May 19, 2016
Wood Hotline
There’s a Hotline for People With Knotty Wood Questions
Inside Wisconsin's Forest Products Laboratory, where experiments are conducted on all things wood.
By David Jester
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/theres-a-hotline-for-people-with-knotty-wood-questions?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura&utm_campaign=f2e9493ee3-Newsletter_5_19_20165_17_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_62ba9246c0-f2e9493ee3-59905913&ct=t(Newsletter_5_19_20165_17_2016)&mc_cid=f2e9493ee3&mc_eid=866176a63f
Inside Wisconsin's Forest Products Laboratory, where experiments are conducted on all things wood.
By David Jester
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/theres-a-hotline-for-people-with-knotty-wood-questions?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura&utm_campaign=f2e9493ee3-Newsletter_5_19_20165_17_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_62ba9246c0-f2e9493ee3-59905913&ct=t(Newsletter_5_19_20165_17_2016)&mc_cid=f2e9493ee3&mc_eid=866176a63f
Fake Trees
An excerpt from Atlas Obscura -
All over the world, there are trees that quietly carry our phone messages. They come in variety of species: palm, cypress, fir, elm, pine, cacti. Perhaps you have passed by one of these alien trees before, or spotted them sticking high above the natural treeline. From top to bottom, nothing about these trees is natural.
Despite telecommunications and utility companies' best efforts, cell phone tower trees are notoriously unattractive. The architecture of these fake trees is also not the least bit convincing. For example, the pine cell towers have metal “trunks” that lack the pliability of natural trees, and support a small tuft of branches and fake foliage that attempts to cover up the hardware underneath.
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/take-a-look-at-americas-least-convincing-cell-phone-tower-trees?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura&utm_campaign=f2e9493ee3-Newsletter_5_19_20165_17_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_62ba9246c0-f2e9493ee3-59905913&ct=t(Newsletter_5_19_20165_17_2016)&mc_cid=f2e9493ee3&mc_eid=866176a63f
 | ||
A pine cell tower tree built by one of the leading companies
in the cell tower concealment business in Tuscon, Arizona.
(Photo: Bill Morrow/CC BY 2.0)
|
All over the world, there are trees that quietly carry our phone messages. They come in variety of species: palm, cypress, fir, elm, pine, cacti. Perhaps you have passed by one of these alien trees before, or spotted them sticking high above the natural treeline. From top to bottom, nothing about these trees is natural.
Despite telecommunications and utility companies' best efforts, cell phone tower trees are notoriously unattractive. The architecture of these fake trees is also not the least bit convincing. For example, the pine cell towers have metal “trunks” that lack the pliability of natural trees, and support a small tuft of branches and fake foliage that attempts to cover up the hardware underneath.
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/take-a-look-at-americas-least-convincing-cell-phone-tower-trees?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura&utm_campaign=f2e9493ee3-Newsletter_5_19_20165_17_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_62ba9246c0-f2e9493ee3-59905913&ct=t(Newsletter_5_19_20165_17_2016)&mc_cid=f2e9493ee3&mc_eid=866176a63f
Combat Juggling?
From Now I Know -
Combat juggling was created by a well-known juggler (to the extent that there is such a thing) named Jason Garfield. Garfield, per Wikipedia, "is regarded as one of the most controversial members of the juggling community" (yes, really) because he "despises the concept of 'artistic juggling,' promoting the idea that juggling should also be regarded as a form of sport." Combat juggling, which adds competition and athleticism to something typically reserved for clowns and magicians, probably fits that bill. And while it still seems like a joke, it's become increasingly popular since. As VICE reported, the sport matured enough that, in 2011, ESPN3 ended up airing a combat juggling competition, and YouTube is littered with videos of people dueling while juggling with sometimes hilarious results. (Yes, sometimes, someone gets hit in the head and no, the rules don't allow you to bludgeon your opponent.)
http://nowiknow.com/combat-juggling/
Combat juggling was created by a well-known juggler (to the extent that there is such a thing) named Jason Garfield. Garfield, per Wikipedia, "is regarded as one of the most controversial members of the juggling community" (yes, really) because he "despises the concept of 'artistic juggling,' promoting the idea that juggling should also be regarded as a form of sport." Combat juggling, which adds competition and athleticism to something typically reserved for clowns and magicians, probably fits that bill. And while it still seems like a joke, it's become increasingly popular since. As VICE reported, the sport matured enough that, in 2011, ESPN3 ended up airing a combat juggling competition, and YouTube is littered with videos of people dueling while juggling with sometimes hilarious results. (Yes, sometimes, someone gets hit in the head and no, the rules don't allow you to bludgeon your opponent.)
http://nowiknow.com/combat-juggling/
Epic Rant
No, not Kanye.
http://www.christies.com/features/Neal-Cassady-long-lost-letter-to-Jack-Kerouac-comes-to-auction-7393-1.aspx?sid=554654ea10defb39638b510d&wpsrc=newsletter_tis
http://www.christies.com/features/Neal-Cassady-long-lost-letter-to-Jack-Kerouac-comes-to-auction-7393-1.aspx?sid=554654ea10defb39638b510d&wpsrc=newsletter_tis
Mom's Voice is Magical
From CNN -
Study: Mom's voice works like a charm on your brain
Less than one second. That's how long it takes children to recognize their mother's voice. And that voice lights a child's brain up like a Christmas tree.
A new study from Stanford University School of Medicine studied how children reacted to mom's voice compared to a woman they didn't know. Kids were not only more engaged by mom's voice than a stranger's, scientists found, but this response was noted beyond just auditory areas of the brain.
Parts of the brain related to emotion, reward processing, facial recognition and social functioning are also amped by hearing from mom. In short, a child's ability to communicate socially is in a large way affected by how he or she reacts to mom's voice.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/18/health/mom-voice-study-trnd/index.html
Study: Mom's voice works like a charm on your brain
Less than one second. That's how long it takes children to recognize their mother's voice. And that voice lights a child's brain up like a Christmas tree.
A new study from Stanford University School of Medicine studied how children reacted to mom's voice compared to a woman they didn't know. Kids were not only more engaged by mom's voice than a stranger's, scientists found, but this response was noted beyond just auditory areas of the brain.
Parts of the brain related to emotion, reward processing, facial recognition and social functioning are also amped by hearing from mom. In short, a child's ability to communicate socially is in a large way affected by how he or she reacts to mom's voice.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/18/health/mom-voice-study-trnd/index.html
Sticky Glue for Cars
From Mashable -
Google's self-driving cars haven't hit many things since they first took to the roads in 2015, but its collision avoidance technology isn't perfect. Now, it appears Google is working on some safety provisions in case one of their vehicles hits a pedestrian.
Google's self-driving cars haven't hit many things since they first took to the roads in 2015, but its collision avoidance technology isn't perfect. Now, it appears Google is working on some safety provisions in case one of their vehicles hits a pedestrian.
Google has patented a unique solution that puts a glue-like adhesive on the front end of the self-driving car. The patent, first seen by The Mercury News, describes the sticky covering as a way to catch pedestrians in case of a collision in order to minimize harm.
http://mashable.com/2016/05/19/google-car-stick-glue-adhesive/#rudNsLH.Agq5
Tuesday, May 17, 2016
Geez Louise!
An excerpt from the Vox -
The TSA is hard to evaluate largely because it's attempting to solve a non-problem. Despite some very notable cases, airplane hijackings and bombings are quite rare. There aren't that many attempts, and there are even fewer successes. That makes it hard to judge if the TSA is working properly — if no one tries to do a liquid-based attack, then we don't know if the 3-ounce liquid rule prevents such attacks.
So Homeland Security officials looking to evaluate the agency had a clever idea: They pretended to be terrorists, and tried to smuggle guns and bombs onto planes 70 different times. And 67 of those times, the Red Team succeeded. Their weapons and bombs were not confiscated, despite the TSA's lengthy screening process. That's a success rate of more than 95 percent.
http://www.vox.com/2016/5/17/11687014/tsa-against-airport-security
Quote
"Faced with the prospect of voting for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Mary Anne Noland of Richmond chose, instead, to pass into the eternal love of God on Sunday, May 15, 2016, at the age of 68." [Richmond Times-Dispatch]
Relationships in the Digital Age
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/are-you-sure-you-want-to-unsubscribe-from-this-relationship?mbid=nl_160517_Daily&CNDID=27124505&spMailingID=8934576&spUserID=MTE0MzE0NDEyNDUyS0&spJobID=921695380&spReportId=OTIxNjk1MzgwS0
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