From “List of confidence tricks” (Wikipedia: 3 July 2009):
Get-rich-quick schemes
Get-rich-quick schemes are extremely varied. For example, fake franchises, real estate “sure things”, get-rich-quick books, wealth-building seminars, self-help gurus, sure-fire inventions, useless products, chain letters, fortune tellers, quack doctors, miracle pharmaceuticals, Nigerian money scams, charms and talismans are all used to separate the mark from his [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, law, science, security | No Comments »
photo credit: State Library of New South Wales collection
From Peter Stark’s “As Freezing Persons Recollect the Snow–First Chill–Then Stupor–Then the Letting Go” (Outside: January 1997):
There is no precise core temperature at which the human body perishes from cold. At Dachau’s cold-water immersion baths, Nazi doctors calculated death to arrive at around 77 degrees Fahrenheit. [...]
Posted on June 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: education, science | No Comments »
From Joel Hruska’s “The Beast unveiled: inside a Google server” (Ars Technica: 2 April 2009):
Each Google server is hooked to an independent 12V battery to keep the units running in the event of a power outage. Data centers themselves are built and housed in shipping containers (we’ve seen Sun pushing this trend as well), a [...]
Posted on April 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, science, technology | No Comments »
From Nicholas Carr’s “Google lifts its skirts” (Rough Type: 2 April 2009):
I was particularly surprised to learn that Google rented all its data-center space until 2005, when it built its first center. That implies that The Dalles, Oregon, plant (shown in the photo above) was the company’s first official data smelter. Each of Google’s containers [...]
Posted on April 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From Anna Gosline’s “Death special: How does it feel to die?” (New Scientist: 13 October 2007):
Death comes in many guises, but one way or another it is usually a lack of oxygen to the brain that delivers the coup de grâce. Whether as a result of a heart attack, drowning or suffocation, for example, people [...]
Posted on December 8th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, science, weird | No Comments »
From Sam Anderson’s “A History of Hooch“, a review of Iain Gately’s Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol (6 July 2008):
Elizabethan England had a pub for every 187 people. (By 2004, the country was down to one for every 529 people.) The Pilgrims’ Mayflower was actually “a claret ship from the Bordeaux wine [...]
Posted on November 27th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history | No Comments »
From Sam Anderson’s “A History of Hooch“, a review of Iain Gately’s Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol (6 July 2008):
Elizabethan England had a pub for every 187 people. (By 2004, the country was down to one for every 529 people.) The Pilgrims’ Mayflower was actually “a claret ship from the Bordeaux wine [...]
Posted on August 11th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history | No Comments »
From Charles Glass’ “The New Piracy: Charles Glass on the High Seas” (London Review of Books: 18 December 2003):
Ninety-five per cent of the world’s cargo travels by sea. Without the merchant marine, the free market would collapse and take Wall Street’s dream of a global economy with it. Yet no one, apart from ship owners, their [...]
Posted on April 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, law, security | No Comments »
From the email archives:
On Sunday 30 May 2004 11:32 pm, Jerry Hubbard wrote:
> How is everyone? Hope the storms did not harm anyone.
My basement flooded twice, my tenant’s kitchen had water streaming in through the window frame, our backyard fence was blown down, the umbrella on our deck was blown off the deck into the [...]
Posted on November 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, true stories | Comments Off
From Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s “The Water Rush” (Oxford American):
On the tables in front of us are pink “trial†judging sheets. Across the top run a series of boxes for water numbers, and down the side is the set of criteria we’ll be using. Arthur goes through the criteria one by one, and explains what to look [...]
Posted on June 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book | Comments Off
From Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s “The Water Rush” (Oxford American):
Europeans drink water for what’s in it, for its minerality, while Americans tend to drink water for what’s not in it.
Related posts
Why did Thomas Jefferson bring a stuffed moose to France?
How the settlers changed America’s ecology, radically
A homogenized religion for America in the 21st century
Why the US toppled [...]
Posted on June 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, politics | Comments Off
From Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s “The Water Rush” (Oxford American):
Anywhere else, the four and a half acres of muddy, flat grass cross-hatched by asphalt paths and crowned by a green-pink-and-white gazebo would be the town park. Here in Berkeley Springs[, West Virginia], population 663, “the country’s first spa,†it is a state park. It is, in fact, [...]
Posted on June 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, history, politics | Comments Off
From Technology Review’s “Big Brother Logs On“:
Consider the benefits of the “computer-aided drowning detection and prevention” system that Boulogne, France-based Poseidon Technologies has installed in nine swimming pools in France, England, the Netherlands and Canada. In these systems, a collection of overhead and in-pool cameras relentlessly monitors pool activity. The video signals feed into a [...]
Posted on May 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From “Happiness: The Chinese zombie ships of West Africa“:
We’re in the big African Queen inflatable, cruising alongside an anchored trawler. It’s more rust than metal – the ship is rotting away. The foredeck is covered in broken machinery. The fish deck is littered with frayed cables, and the mast lies horizontally, hanging over the starboard [...]
Posted on April 2nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, weird, writing ideas | Comments Off
From SmartWater Technology:
SmartWater Security Systems are forensic coding systems which can be applied in several ways:
SmartWater Tracer
An aqueous based solution with a unique forensic code.
SmartWater Tracer uniquely codes your property, whilst being virtually invisible to the naked eye, glows under UV light and is practically impossible to remove entirely. Tracer is used in commercial businesses, [...]
Posted on April 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: science, security, writing ideas | Comments Off
"larboard": the left side of a boat; AKA "port"
Related posts
The importance of booze to the Pilgrims
Recognizing futility
More on Google’s server farms
Modern piracy on the high seas
How it feels to drown, get decapitated, get electrocuted, and more
Posted on May 22nd, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: word of the day | Comments Off
