Categories
Books Government History

Donald Rumsfeld’s resume

220px-Rumsfeld1Regardless of your opinion of Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, he has a very impressive resume.

Attended Princeton on a Navy ROTC scholarship.
Navy pilot and flight instructor
Two and a half terms in Congress
Nixon’s cabinet
Ambassador to NATO
Secretary of Defense under Ford
CEO of a several of Fortune 500 companies

Gleaned from Bob Woodward’s book “State of Denial

http://www.defenselink.mil/bios/rumsfeld.html

wikipedia entry

Categories
Everyday Things History Humanities

“Close, but no cigar” origin

I was wondering about the origin of some of these sayings we use everyday. And the fact that, at least in the US, they are universally known. For example this jewel, “Close, but no cigar” I suspected had some origin at a carnival, but this site traces when the phrase was actually recorded in print or media. Seems we can thank screen writers for this one, which would make it’s ubiquity understandable.

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/close-but-no-cigar.html

Here’s another site that discusses word origins.

http://www.word-detective.com/

Categories
Everyday Things Science SOI Blog

Vast empty space in the microverse!

UPDATE: see this post for an update

I stumbled on this page one day that shows a scale model of an atom. It demonstrates the vast amount of empty space between the proton the electron that spins around it. By making the electron one pixel in size, that makes the proton 1,000 pixels wide and the space between it 50,000,000 pixels wide. If your monitor displays 72 pixels to the inch, then that works out to eleven miles – making it possibly the widest web page you’ll ever see!

See it for yourself!

http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/atom/

electron.gif

Categories
History Uncategorized

Restaurants appear to be a modern enterprise.

While dining out last night my 5 year old son asked where the first restaurant was, which made me wonder about where the restaurant concept originated. From what I’ve gleaned, it appears to have originated in France around the late 1700s, which makes since since ‘restaurant’ is French word. The Wikipedia entry also credits 13th century China.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restaurant

Categories
Internet Media

Sesame Street’s Bert poses with Osama bin Laden

Okay, this isn’t a new item, but I saw someone’s avatar of “Evil Bert” that reminded me of this story. As a running joke, a San Francisco artist attempted to prove the muppet Bert was “evil” by inserting him into photographs with notorious people and infamous historical scenes. One of these doctored photos ended up in a Pro bin Laden poster in Bangladesh.

Bert in osama poster

The story detailed
http://www.snopes.com/rumors/bert.htm

Categories
History Sports

Morten Anderson, oldest player in NFL

This past weekend, I was able to watch my Atlanta Falcons play on television. There was old Morten Anderson at 46, the oldest player in the NFL, kicking it with the best of them. In fact he was playing in the NFL before many of his teammates were born. He’s stated he want to break the record for being the oldest player in the NFL, he’ll have to make it to Dec 2008 to accomplish that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morten_Andersen

Categories
History

Protection of Past Presidents

The Secret Service protects current presidents and past presidents and their families. This protection was offered until their death. But in 1997, the law was changed to only protect them for 10 years after office.

Gleaned from The Sentinel DVD bonus features

Official info
http://www.ustreas.gov/usss/protection.shtml

Categories
Everyday Things Internet

What’s all the bump about?

For some of these items you may just say, “Well, of course, you didn’t know that!?” Anyway, I just now realized what it means when I see “bump” or “bumpity bump” in a forum post. It’s a simple technique to get a discussion thread posted to the top of the list. Extensive description at the ever-loving Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_%28internet%29

Also lead to the discovery of what a “backronym” is.

Categories
Everyday Things History

Why did we stop using ‘Thou’?

I sometimes wonder why somethings become archaic, why does something else become the norm? Here’s an interesting discussion on the reasons why we started using “you” as opposed to “thou.” Still not a definitive conclusion, but compelling none the least.

http://www.quaker.org/thee-thou.html

Categories
Books

Well, I could read 1,000 books.

According to author David Vise, 1,000 books are published each week in the United States. Seems to make Books-a-Million’s name not sound so extravagant a claim. Boy, that’s a lot of paper!

The Google Story