It appears that not only horses are thoroughbreds

There was an interesting case of a young women who blew through a stop sign at 60 mph and when she was stopped by police and questioned, volunteered an interesting defense.

A woman seen speeding through a stop sign at 60 mph (97 kph) told officers they shouldn’t arrest her because she’s a “very clean, thoroughbred, white girl,” police said.

Her eyes glassy and bloodshot, Lauren Elizabeth Cutshaw was slurring her words and a Breathalyzer showed her blood-alcohol level at 0.18 percent, according to police in Bluffton, South Carolina.

Cutshaw, 32, told the arresting officer she shouldn’t be jailed because she was a cheerleader, a dancer and a sorority girl who graduated from a “high accredited university.”
[Read more…]

The British have a genius for making things complicated

Starting with their weird units for length (inches, feet, yards, furlongs), mass (ounces, pounds, stones, etc.), volume (fluid ounces, gallons), and their now mercifully extinct old currency (pounds, shillings, pence, three-pence, half-pence, farthing), where the conversions never seem to involve a simple factor of ten, the British seem to have, whenever given the chance, opted for a more complicated system when simple ones based on the factor ten stared them in the face. Note that the single word ‘pound’ could refer to a force, a mass, or money. Unfortunately they imposed these systems on their colonies and we had to suffer through them as students. Most countries have taken the sensible step of switching to the metric system, with the US being a notable holdout.
[Read more…]

People do not necessarily ‘suffer’ from diseases

Actor and strong science advocate Alan Alda recently revealed that he has had Parkinson’s disease for the last three years.

The 82-year-old told the CBS This Morning show he was diagnosed three-and-a-half years ago but had only decided to speak about it now.

“The reason I want to talk about it in public is… I’ve had a full life since then,” he said.

“You still have things you can do,” he went on, revealing he was “taking boxing lessons three times a week.”

Parkinson’s is a progressive condition in which the brain becomes damaged. It can lead to tremors, difficulty moving, speech changes and eventually memory problems.

[Read more…]

How airports make money

I had not realized that London’s Heathrow airport was a fully privately owned, profit-seeking enterprise. This video explains what it costs to run the airport, how the company covers the costs, and how the need to make a profit changes the way that the airport is structured and the kinds of flights and destinations that are available, compared to airports that are run by governments.

The US has not privatized its major airports and efforts to do so with smaller ones have not been a success.

Korean must be a very compact language

I do not speak Korean but was intrigued by this tweet from Donald Trump containing a note sent to him by North Korea’s Kim Jong Un that contain the original Korean and its English translation. The Korean version takes up so much less space, only about 50% of the English.

How the Thai boys and coach were rescued

During the time when the boys and their coach were being rescued from their long stay in the caves, there was not much information about how the rescue was carried out. More details have now emerged of how they survived their ordeal in the cave and how the rescue endeavor that was much more harrowing and difficult than I had imagined. It was sad that a navy seal died in the rescue attempt.
[Read more…]