Cool stories not worthy of full threads thread

Is "www" in Hebrew equal to 666?

We’ve gotten several emails asking is it true "www" is "666" in the Hebrew language.

YES. . . and. . . NO.

NOTE: "www" is the acronym for world wide web and is normally used as the prefix, or first node of the Internet domain names, such as www.av1611.org
FIRST. . . The YES.
How to get 666 from www?

The Hebrew and Greek alphabet does not have separate characters or alphabets for numbers and letters. Letters are also used as numbers. So each letter is a numerical value.

The Hebrew equivalent of our "w" is the letter "vav" or "waw". The numerical value of vav is 6. So the English "www" transliterated into Hebrew is "vav vav vav", which numerically is 666.

hebrewy.gif


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Why the World Wide Web (www) is NOT 666: the Mark of the Beast
666 is total of the numerical values in the letters of the antichrist's name - The World Wide Web is not a name.
666 is total of the numerical values of the letters in the antichrist's name - The actual total of "www" is 18 — not 666.
666 is the number of a man, the antichrist, or the beast - The World Wide Web is not a man.
The mark of the beast controls the ability to buy or sell - The World Wide Web currently does not
The mark of the beast goes in the right hand or forehead - The World Wide Web does not.
The mark is symbolic of the antichrist or beast - The World Wide Web is not
The mark is received only after worshiping the beast - The World Wide Web is not worship
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http://www.av1611.org/666/www_666.html
 
Too jealous, seeing green...

Professor Publishes 10-year-old’s New Molecule

When Kenneth Boehr instructed his fifth grade class at Border Star Montessori School in Kansas City, Mo. to build molecules with modeling kits, he didn’t expect one of his students to make a scientific discovery.

But that’s what happened when Clara Lazen, 10, randomly arranged a unique combination of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon atoms. The result was a molecule that Boehr had never seen before.

So he emailed longtime friend and HSU Chemistry Professor Robert Zoellner, a computational chemist who uses computer software to mathematically model the properties of molecules.

“Ken sent me a picture of the molecule on my cell phone and usually I can tell right away if it’s real,” Zoellner says. This time, he couldn’t.

So he plugged the arrangement into Chemical Abstracts, an online database searchable through the HSU Library that contains chemistry-related literature published since 1904.

Only one paper came up, Zoellner says. It was for a molecule with the same formula but a different arrangement of atoms than Lazen’s.

Zoellner dug a little deeper and determined that not only was Lazen’s molecule unique, it had the potential to store energy. It contains the same combination of atoms as nitroglycerin, a powerful explosive. If a synthetic chemist succeeded at creating the molecule—dubbed tetranitratoxycarbon for short—it could store energy, create a large explosion, or do something in between, Zoellner says: “Who knows?”

Zoellner submitted a research paper on his findings to the January issue of Computational and Theoretical Chemistry. Both Lazen and Boehr are listed as co-authors.
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The myth of the eight-hour sleep

We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night - but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.

In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.

It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.

Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general public the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists.

In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks.

His book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern - in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.


Roger Ekirch says this 1595 engraving by Jan Saenredam is evidence of activity at night
Much like the experience of Wehr's subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.

"It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge," Ekirch says.

During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.

And these hours weren't entirely solitary - people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex.

A doctor's manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day's labour but "after the first sleep", when "they have more enjoyment" and "do it better".

Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society.

By the 1920s the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness.

...
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783
 
New evidence suggests Stone Age hunters from Europe discovered America

New archaeological evidence suggests that America was first discovered by Stone Age people from Europe – 10,000 years before the Siberian-originating ancestors of the American Indians set foot in the New World.

A remarkable series of several dozen European-style stone tools, dating back between 19,000 and 26,000 years, have been discovered at six locations along the US east coast. Three of the sites are on the Delmarva Peninsular in Maryland, discovered by archaeologist Dr Darrin Lowery of the University of Delaware. One is in Pennsylvania and another in Virginia. A sixth was discovered by scallop-dredging fishermen on the seabed 60 miles from the Virginian coast on what, in prehistoric times, would have been dry land.

The new discoveries are among the most important archaeological breakthroughs for several decades - and are set to add substantially to our understanding of humanity's spread around the globe.

The similarity between other later east coast US and European Stone Age stone tool technologies has been noted before. But all the US European-style tools, unearthed before the discovery or dating of the recently found or dated US east coast sites, were from around 15,000 years ago - long after Stone Age Europeans (the Solutrean cultures of France and Iberia) had ceased making such artefacts. Most archaeologists had therefore rejected any possibility of a connection. But the newly-discovered and recently-dated early Maryland and other US east coast Stone Age tools are from between 26,000 and 19,000 years ago - and are therefore contemporary with the virtually identical western European material.

What’s more, chemical analysis carried out last year on a European-style stone knife found in Virginia back in 1971 revealed that it was made of French-originating flint.

Professor Dennis Stanford, of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, and Professor Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter, the two leading archaeologists who have analysed all the evidence, are proposing that Stone Age people from Western Europe migrated to North America at the height of the Ice Age by travelling (over the ice surface and/or by boat) along the edge of the frozen northern part of the Atlantic. They are presenting their detailed evidence in a new book - Across Atlantic Ice – published this month.

...
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...s-from-europe-discovered-america-7447152.html
 
Wasn't "19,000 to 26,000 years ago" roughly the same time as the Siberian people came from the East, not 10,000 years before it?
 
I'm not well versed on that topic, but I think the fact that any Western Europeans made it there at all around those dates is pretty damned amazing.
 
I know of Dr. Amen. My mother was into him for awhile & I read one of his books. I was willing to go get SPECT imaging (IIRC in California) just to take a vacation but sadly my mom changed her mind.

My mother was into a lot of questionably valid stuff (including plenty of mainstream stuff, thanks to her I was on 20+ psychoactive medications before the age of 21) but the brain scanning seemed fascinating to me & more legit than most.

I also think biofeedback is interesting. As brain scanning technology improves & gets cheaper I may try to get into it as a form of self-improvement (mostly mood/focus improvement).
 
I have no idea whether to believe it, but I kicked my caffeine habit just to be safe. :)

----

Nanotrees harvest the sun's energy to turn water into hydrogen fuel

(PhysOrg.com) -- University of California, San Diego electrical engineers are building a forest of tiny nanowire trees in order to cleanly capture solar energy without using fossil fuels and harvest it for hydrogen fuel generation. Reporting in the journal Nanoscale, the team said nanowires, which are made from abundant natural materials like silicon and zinc oxide, also offer a cheap way to deliver hydrogen fuel on a mass scale.

...
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http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-nanotrees-harvest-sun-energy-hydrogen.html
 
Why Interacting with a Woman Can Leave Men "Cognitively Impaired"
In one experiment, just telling a man he would be observed by a female was enough to hurt his psychological performance.

...

Researchers have begun to explore the cognitive impairment that men experience before and after interacting with women. A 2009 study demonstrated that after a short interaction with an attractive woman, men experienced a decline in mental performance. A more recent study suggests that this cognitive impairment takes hold even w hen men simply anticipate interacting with a woman who they know very little about.

Sanne Nauts and her colleagues at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands ran two experiments using men and women university students as participants. They first collected a baseline measure of cognitive performance by having the students complete a Stroop test. Developed in 1935 by the psychologist John Ridley Stroop, the test is a common way of assessing our ability to process competing information. The test involves showing people a series of words describing different colors that are printed in different colored inks. For example, the word “blue” might be printed in green ink and the word “red” printed in blue ink. Participants are asked to name, as quickly as they can, the color of the ink that the words are written in. The test is cognitively demanding because our brains can’t help but process the meaning of the word along with the color of the ink. When people are mentally tired, they tend to complete the task at a slower rate.

After completing the Stroop Test, participants in Nauts’ study were asked to take part in another supposedly unrelated task. They were asked to read out loud a number of Dutch words while sitting in front of a webcam. The experimenters told them that during this “lip reading task” an observer would watch them over the webcam. The observer was given either a common male or female name. Participants were led to believe that this person would see them over the web cam, but they would not be able to interact with the person. No pictures or other identifying information were provided about the observer—all the participants knew was his or her name. After the lip reading task, the participants took another Stroop test. Women’s performance on the second test did not differ, regardless of the gender of their observer. However men who thought a woman was observing them ended up performing worse on the second Stroop test. This cognitive impairment occurred even though the men had not interacted with the female observer.

In a second study, Nauts and her colleagues again began the experiment by having each participant complete the Stroop test. Then each participant was led to believe they would soon be taking part in the same “lip reading” task similar to the first study. Half were told that a man would observe them and the other half were led to believe that a woman would observe them. In reality, participants never engaged in the task. After being told about it, they completed another Stroop test to measure their current level of cognitive functioning.

Once again, women’s performance on the test did not differ, regardless of whether they were expecting a man or woman to observe them. But men who had been told a woman would observe them ended up doing much worse on the second Stroop task. Thus, simply anticipating the opposite sex interaction was enough to interfere with men’s cognitive functioning.

...
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http://www.scientificamerican.com/a...ing-with-woman-leave-man-cognitively-impaired
 
Tennessee lawmakers have passed a resolution calling on quarterback Peyton Manning to sign with the Tennessee Titans.

The measure, sponsored by Republican Rep. Jeremy Faison of Cosby, cites Manning's exploits with the University of Tennessee and with the NFL's Indianapolis Colts.

Fellow lawmakers rushed to the well of the chamber to sign on to the resolution before it was passed on a voice vote on Thursday.

The resolution was passed a day after the four-time NFL MVP met with team officials in Nashville.
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http://www.newschannel5.com/story/17170236/tenn-house-votes-for-manning-to-join-titans

Finally, something both sides can agree on.
 
New species of humans may have been apparently discovered.... :)

http://news.yahoo.com/mysterious-chinese-fossils-may-human-species-150805074.html

Mysterious fossils of what may be a previously unknown type of human have been uncovered in caves in China, ones that possess a highly unusual mix of bygone and modern human features, scientists reveal.

Surprisingly, the fossils are only between 11,500 and 14,500 years old. That means they would have shared the landscape with modern humans when China's earliest farmers were first appearing.

"These new fossils might be of a previously unknown species, one that survived until the very end of the ice age around 11,000 years ago," said researcher Darren Curnoe, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

"Alternatively, they might represent a very early and previously unknown migration of modern humans out of Africa, a population who may not have contributed genetically to living people," Curnoe added.
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By 2037, health insurance will swallow your entire paycheck

health%20insurance%20costs.jpg


Richard A. Young and Jennifer E. DeVoe project that, even if the health reform law does succeed in bringing down health-care costs, we’re still on track for insurance premiums to surpass average household income by 2037:

If health insurance premiums and national wages continue to grow at recent rates and the US health system makes no major structural changes, the average cost of a family health insurance premium will equal 50% of the household income by the year 2021, and surpass the average household income by the year 2033. If out-of-pocket costs are added to the premium costs, the 50% threshold is crossed by 2018 and exceeds household income by 2030.

Without major structural changes in the US health care system, the employee contribution to a family premium plus out-of-pocket costs will comprise one half of the household income by 2031 and total income by 2042. Rising health-care costs remain at the core of this unsustainable rise in insurance premiums.

To be fair, Young and DeVoe’s projections do not take into account the most recent year of health spending data, which showed health-care costs growing at the same pace as the rest of the economy, not faster. There’s a lot of debate over whether that slowdown is the start of a long-term trend, or a short-term side effect of the recession. But even if overall health-care costs are growing slower, that doesn’t necessarily translate to lower insurance premiums: In recent years, employers have shifted an increasing chunk of health insurance bills to their employees.

See their full paper in this month’s Annals of Family Medicine here.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...tire-paycheck/2012/03/13/gIQARVjq9R_blog.html

Dean Baker said:
The Post's Wonkblog had an interesting post about a new study showing that the cost of health insurance for a typical family will be equal to the median family income by 2037, if current trends continue. Unfortunately, the post inaccurately reported that the comparison was with average family income.

Given the growth of inequality in the last three decades this makes a big difference. According to the Census Bureau, median household income in 2010 was 49,445, whereas average income was $67,530. Perhaps more importantly, average income by definition grows in step with the economy whereas median income has been growing slowly as a result of upward redistribution. (The confusion actually is in a chart in the original paper, so Wonkblog can be forgiven for not catching it.)

The story is still an important one, if not quite as dramatic as reported. The vast majority of people in the United States will soon be unable to afford health care if nothing is done to contain costs. This is the second most predictable crisis in history, after the housing bubble, and almost no one is talking about it.

My favorite solution is to take advantage of trade -- every other health care system in the world is more efficient than ours. Unfortunately, the political debate in the United States is dominated by Neanderthal protectionists, at least when it comes to trade measures that could lower the income of doctors and other powerful special interest groups.
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http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs...ts-and-household-income-median-versus-average
 
If anyone wants to make threads out of these, feel free. I'm just not in the mood to write an adequate opening post for the occasion most of the time.
 
Well I appreciate your using my thread for them (I'm also too lazy to make full threads much of the time).
 
Damn shame this is a bottom-of-the-page post.... :(

http://news.yahoo.com/warp-speed-pl...03NTIzLTExZTEtOGY0Zi0xZDhlZDEyY2JiZWQ-;_ylv=3

Planets in tight orbits around stars that get ejected from our galaxy may actually themselves be tossed out of the Milky Way at blisteringly fast speeds of up to 30 million miles per hour, or a fraction of the speed of light, a new study finds.

"These warp-speed planets would be some of the fastest objects in the galaxy, aside from photons and particles like cosmic rays," said Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. "In terms of large, solid objects, they would be the fastest. It would take them 10 seconds or so to cross the diameter of the Earth."
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Cool. :)
 
30 million miles per hour, or a fraction of the speed of light
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Well, duh, every speed is a fraction of the speed of light, what the hell are they trying to say with this? :rolleyes:
 
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