Apparently,

[rbkwp]

here are roughly eight million residents of New York City. According to a 2010 article in the New York Times, 70% of them rent. That’s about 5.5 million people, each of whom could be moving to a new place once their current lease runs out. Yet despite the incredible number of both apartments and renters, in general, the process of renting an apartment in New York City (and particularly in Manhattan) occurs over a short period of time. Typically, a renter starts his or her search only a few weeks before moving, checks out a dozen or so places over a day or two, and upon finding something suitable, quickly readies an application and bank checks to cover fees. (This AskMetafilter comment does a good job encapsulating the often hectic and confusing process.) The whole system — to use the term loosely — is a frenetic ordeal which hardly seems like it could be worse.

But until about seventy years ago, it was. Because almost everyone moved at the same time.

Sometime in the 1600s or early 1700s, New York City developed an odd tradition. Leases, across the city, expired at 9:00 AM on the first day of May. The origins of this tradition are unclear. Wikipedia cites to two different sources, one of which references the English celebration of May Day (explained here), another which claims that the Dutch settlers originally came to Manhattan on May 1st, and the tradition is borne out of that. In any event, the cartoon above, from 1856, encapsulates the madness — thousands upon thousands of people taking to the streets, with all their stuff, moving from one apartment to another, all on the same day. Davy Crockett observed the phenomenon in 1834, as retold by Futility Closet:

By the time we returned down Broadway, it seemed to me that the city was flying before some awful calamity. ‘Why,’ said I, ‘Colonel, what under heaven is the matter? Everyone appears to be pitching out their furniture, and packing it off.’ He laughed, and said this was the general ‘moving day.’ Such a sight nobody ever saw unless it was in this same city. It seemed a kind of frolic, as if they were changing houses just for fun. Every street was crowded with carts, drays, and people. So the world goes. It would take a good deal to get me out of my log-house; but here, I understand, many persons ‘move’ every year.

All in all, this “moving day” was a terrible idea.

Being an informal one, and a custom at that, it should have been an easy one to change. And it wasn’t universal. That is, not everyone’s lease ended on May 1, so it should have been pretty easy for landlords or renters to demand a different date if given that one by the other. But the tradition persisted, to the point that in 1912, Harper’s Weekly imagined a world with automated, flying “moving stations,” as seen here. Moving Day was entrenched in a city which to a person, with few exceptions, hated it.

It quite literally took a world war to end the practice. When the United States mobilized its citizens in World War II, it created a shortage of able-bodied men stateside, making it nearly impossible to find someone to help you move on “moving day.” Tenants stayed on past their leases and the practice of relocating on that date began to erode. And then, in 1945, the end of the war dealt “moving day” a death blow. As the New York Times reported in October of that year, troops returning from abroad created a major housing shortage in the city, which “turned ‘moving day’ into a myth.”

 

[rbkwp]

Apparently,

The Off-Color Golden Arches

If you take a drive up West State Route 89A in the Arizona city of Sedona, you'll come across a lot of familiar signs along the way. There's a Walgreens, a Starbucks, a Safeway, a Wells Fargo, and a McDonalds all within a few minutes of one another -- the brands may change, but those are the types of chains you'll see in almost any American city. But what makes this particular stretch of American highway different is the backdrop. Sedona is well-known for its outcroppings of red sandstone, an example of which can be seen above. These rocks seem to glow in the sunset -- here's a gallery via Google Images -- making Sedona something of a tourist attraction. Below is what you may see if you're standing in the middle of the road on Route 89A there, and if you look around, you'll see a lot of more of that red sandstone peeking out.

But there's something else unique in that picture. If you look at the image above very closely -- focusing on the far left, about a third of the way up from the bottom -- you'll see something you won't see anywhere else: a blue McDonald's logo.

McDonald's logo is the parabolic M seen here and, almost always, in the golden yellow color of a poorly-made french fry. It's known as the "Golden Arches," a moniker which has been used so often, it has become a nickname for McDonald's itself. The color isn't something that is typically left to individual franchisees to adjust at their pleasure; rather, as any brand marketer will tell you, even a slight deviation from the approved yellow-on-red shade would likely result in rebuke. And yet, there it is, a teal M against a beige backdrop. Here's a closer view.

The deviation from normal is because of strict local signage ordinances aimed to prevent the scenic backdrop from taking a back seat to the retail landscape. (Let's be honest: the yellow and red color scheme of the regular McDonald's logo would be a garish addition to the skyline.) The Santa Barbara Independent put it bluntly: "Leaders wanted no vulgar, ticky-tacky, pseudo-gold conflicting with the warm glow from Mother Nature’s buttes, mesas, and towering cathedral-like mountains."

McDonald's seemed to agree (but not as vociferously), or, at least, tolerate the local ordinance without much objection. Instead, the fast food giant and the local officials got together to create a new solution. Per one report, the commercial area "had mostly teal and red signage during the mid-1990s, so the community development director at the time suggested the restaurant adopt a similar look." McDonald's agreed.

The sign has become a tourism draw within a tourism draw -- there are a surprisingly high number of social media posts featuring people posing next to the teal M. (Here's an example.) McDonald's themselves even advertised the novelty of the off-brand Arches. It's a pretty special sight to see if you're into off-brand logos. And yet, sometimes the teal arches fans overstate the logo's significance. The establishment is often referred to as the only non-yellow-logoed Mickey D's, but that's not quite true -- there's a black-arched one in California and one with white arches in France. Like the Sedona one, local laws are the cause for the atypical signs.

 

[rbkwp]

apparently
i ghedt majorly F'd up with what days is whata s well
they seem to go so bloody quick??? duh

When the Day After Friday is Friday
Today is not Friday -- it's Tuesday. Even if you didn't know that, you could have figured it out simply by remembering that yesterday was Monday. That's, generally, how the weekly calendar works: once you learn the days of the week, in order, that order tends not to change. But for every rule, even a simple one as that one, there is often an exception.

The table was set for the calendar glitch in April of 1867. The United States agreed to purchase Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million (by check, as seen below) -- that's a bit shy of $125 million in today's dollars.

Six months later, America took possession of Alaska and began the process of incorporating the new region into the nation as a whole. The "Department of Alaska," as the area was known from 1867 until 1884, officially became part of the United States on Friday, October 18, 1867.

For the few people who lived in Alaska, this changeover was probably mostly seamless. But the calendar was an exception. Their new nation, the United States, used the Gregorian calendar. But their old nation, Russia used the Julian one. So when Alaska switched countries, it also switched calendars. That required a shift from October 6, 1867 (under the Julian calendar) to October 19, 1867 (in the Gregorian system). But as far as the days of the week were concerned, that should have been fine -- October 6th on the Julian calendar was a Friday, and October 19th on the Gregorian was a Saturday. Yes, Alaska was going to lose twelve days in a sense, but it wouldn't lose the weekend.

That required another glitch -- one involving time zones. When Alaska was a Russian territory, the International Date Line ran between Alaska and Canada, putting Russia-controlled Alaska on the same day as its then-parent nation. This meant Alaska was often on a different day altogether than its new owner, the United States. That couldn't continue once Alaska changed hands. The easy solution was to shift Alaska's time zone so that it was on the American side of the Date Line. In effect, when Alaska shifted to America, the Date Line shifted, too -- it now runs between Alaska and Russia.

But that wasn't the only effect of the time zone shift. Alaska ended up losing one of the 12 days it gained, moving to October 18th instead of the 19th. And it also lost a day of the week in the process. Instead of going from Friday (the 6th) to Saturday (the 19th), it went from Friday to Friday. It's probably the only example of a place having two Fridays in a row -- and the only time that Friday didn't lead into the weekend.

 

[rbkwp]

How Is Christmas Celebrated in Japan?

apparently

In Japan, the “Kentucky for Christmas” ad campaign has made eating
Christmas dinner at KFC a popular tradition.

Since the 1970s, the Japanese have associated Christmas with celebrations
centered around a portly, white-haired guy with facial hair, and families
gathered around the table with a taste for poultry. The similarities to the
American holiday end there, however. In Japan, thanks to a wildly
successful KFC marketing campaign that began in 1974, many look forward to
a bucket of fried chicken cooked up by Colonel Sanders. Although only about
1% of the Japanese population identifies as Christian, many look forward to
KFC’s "Finger Lickin’ Good" chicken for Christmas dinner, taking part
in a national tradition that was entirely inspired by the marketing
catchphrase Kurisumasu ni wa Kentakkii, or "Kentucky for Christmas."

 

[rbkwp]

Apparently,

mmmmm BBQ Chicken woof!!!


The Kitchen Utensil that Woofed

Pictured above are a slew of rotisserie chicken being cooked. The "chicken" part is the bird, the "rotisserie" part is the method of cooking. The chicken are put onto a stick called a "spit" which is then slowly rotated over a heat source. The idea is to keep the meat moist as it cooks; because the bird is constantly rotating it, effectively, self-bastes. The word "rotisserie" dates back to 1450 -- it's of French origin -- but the method of roasting meat by rotating it over a fire is something humans have employed for more than two thousand years.

Today, we have motors powered by electricity -- that's what turns our meat. But what about the rotisseries of, say, the 1500s? Who turned the spit?

These guys:

Yes, that's a drawing of a dog. Specifically, it's a "turnspit dog," a breed of dog which may be similar to the Welsh Corgi. We're not sure, exactly, because there are no turnspit dogs alive today. But for a while, they were all the rage. Not as pets, though -- as kitchen helpers.

Cooking chicken or any other meat on a spit is a slow, tedious process which requires a regular, smooth rotation. People can turn the spit by hand and, in early days of rotisserie cooking, that's exactly what happened. But that wasn't going to happen forever because let's face it, whoever had to turn the spit had a terrible, terrible job. Enter something akin to a large hamster wheel -- and a dog to power it. Just look at the image below, and you'll see the dog in a wheel, top-center.

And just about everyone had one. Turnspit dogs, as NPR recounts, were "an essential part of every large kitchen in Britain in the 16th century" and were specially bred to operate these spit-powering wheels. When you wanted to cook dinner, you'd put your meat on the spit and connect it to the relevant gear. Then you'd get your dog, put him in the wheel, and some time later to check on it to see how the meat was cooking -- and how the dog was moving. Turning the wheel was hard work, and many houses and places of business had a second dog, one who could take over when the first one tired out.

If this seems inhumane, that's probably because it is. By today's standards, you'd never see a household domesticated animals as a source of power -- dogs are supposed to be pets, not some sort of niche Ron Pompei informercial product. But the people of the day didn't see it that way. Rather, the author of Amazing Dogs, a Cabinet of Canine Curiosities, Jan Bondeson, told NPR, "turnspit dogs were viewed as kitchen utensils, as pieces of machinery rather than as dogs."

Ultimately, new innovations -- steam power, most notably -- caused the need for the turnspit dog to wane. As demand for the dogs went away, so did the need to breed more of them. That's why the picture of the turnspit dog, above, is an illustration; the breed is now extinct.

 

[BUSTERHYMAN]

Just in from CNN Apparently towels are the biggest cause of dry skin.

 

[rbkwp]

Which Animal Species Nurses the Longest?

apparently
us humans are such cry babies duh


Orangutans are known to nurse for up to 8 years; growing orangutans rely on
breast milk when other food is scarce.

Scientists already knew that orangutans typically nurse their offspring for
six or seven years. However, new research, published in May 2017 in the
journal Science Advances, extends the timeline of that nursing behavior for
at least another year. Evidence from the barium levels in apes’ molars
indicates that orangutan mothers continue to supplement a young
orangutan’s solid food diet for many years. Most primates typically
supply milk for a set period of time, then decrease milk production when
the youngster moves on to solid food. The new dental analysis, however,
shows that after infancy, the barium levels spiked about once a year,
presumably during seasons when fruits and insects were less plentiful

 

[rbkwp]

How Bird Poop Shaped Our Maps
Imagine the Americas of the 1850s. Westward expansion has led to a population boom or vice versa -- either way, the country is growing in leaps and bounds. More people requires more food, and more food requires more land. That’s the one thing the United States had at the time -- Kansas, Nebraska, and other modern-day grain belt states were just starting to be settled by the ancestors of former European colonists.

But to get crops growing, that land needed more than a rake and a hoe. The land needed fertilizer, and that wasn’t so easy to come by. Artificial fertilizer wasn’t very effective, and natural fertilizer wasn’t very abundant. And specifically, there was a focus on "guano” -- that is, bird and bat poop, and in the immediate case, the droppings of waterfowl.

Guano, as Wikipedia explains, "is a highly effective fertilizer due to its exceptionally high content of nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium." In other words, it helps makes plants grow, and if you’re a farmer, you want it for your fields. In the Americas of the 1850s, there wasn’t enough of it to go around -- the country simply had too many people and too much land for the native seafowl population to, um, support. So the U.S. had to look for other sources. The most immediate avenue was to import it -- Peru had more bird excrement than it could possibly use -- but a UK trading firm got to that market first. As Mental Floss explains, “In 1842, Antony Gibbs and Sons—a U.K. trading company—entered Peru’s bird scat game. By 1848, they’d built a worldwide monopoly: as one common jingle declared, ‘Mr. Gibbs made his dibs selling the turds of foreign birds.’”

So America came up with another solution. If we couldn’t harvest it locally, and we couldn’t buy it from abroad, we’d conquer it. There are lots of little rocks and other spots of land throughout the oceans; while many of those places are uninhabited by people, they make for rather convenient toilets for passing birds. And birds had been using islands this way for centuries. These places were literal gold mines, except filled with meters-high mountains of something a lot more white than gold. And America wanted that “white gold,” as guano was actually referred to at the time.

In 1858, Congress passed a bill -- the “Guano Islands Act” -- explicitly making this possible. The act, signed into law by President Franklin Pierce, states in relevant part the following:Whenever any citizen of the United States discovers a deposit of guano on any island, rock, or key, not within the lawful jurisdiction of any other Government, and not occupied by the citizens of any other Government, and takes peaceable possession thereof, and occupies the same, such island, rock, or key may, at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States.In other words: if an American finds a pile of bird poop on some unclaimed island somewhere, the President can claim that island on behalf of America.

The United States ended up more than 100 islands (using the term "islands" loosely) under the Act, with Midway Atoll among the most significant. Most of those claims were uncontroversial -- there aren't a lot of reasons for someone wanting to challenge America for control over a pile of poop, especially not now that we have more readily available alternative options.

 

[rbkwp]

How Is Global Warming Affecting Antarctica?

apparently

In Antarctica, moss is growing 4 or 5 times faster than it did before 1950,
turning some of the continent green.

Rising temperatures in the Antarctic region are turning parts of the frozen
continent green. Since 1950, temperatures in the Antarctic Peninsula, the
northernmost part of the continent's mainland, have gone up by about one
degree Fahrenheit (half a degree Celsius) each decade, much faster than the
global average. Consequently, the growth rate of moss on the peninsula has
risen dramatically, increasing four to five times since the 1950s.
Researchers have studied three sites along a 621-mile (1,000-km) stretch of
the peninsula, comparing samples collected over a 150-year period.

 

[rbkwp]

1/2 awake/sleeop,jar 1/2 full etc/whatevere..12 midnight NZT BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

The Return of the President

Pictured above is Zachary Taylor, a forgettable American President. He served only 16 months in office -- so far, that's the third least of the 45 -- and historians generally see his term as one that accomplished very little. In fact, the most interesting thing about his life in office was probably his death -- and his return more than 140 years later.

On the 4th of July, 1850, Taylor was in attendance at the future site of the Washington Monument in an effort to raise funds for the monument's construction. Like any good fundraiser, there was a lot of good food to eat, and Taylor indulged himself; per the History Channel, he "gulped down a large quantity of cherries and iced milk and then returned to the White House, where he quenched his thirst with several glasses of water." Other accounts differ slightly, but the basic, agreed-upon point is that he ate a lot of fruit and drank a lot of milk. That turned out to be a mistake: nausea, dehydration, and the works ensued.

And five days later, he was dead.

What killed him is unclear, but the generally accepted explanations involve a mix of bacteria, bad sewage practices, and (by today's standards) questionable medical care. First, the bacteria -- it's surmised that the milk or water contained a pathogen. (At the time, Washington, D.C. had an open sewage system; tainted water and extreme stomach ailments were hardly rare.) Combine that with doctors who probably didn't know what they were doing -- antibiotics weren't a thing yet anyway, but the physicians methods, which included bloodletting, probably made things worse -- and Taylor didn't stand much of a chance.

Again, that's the generally accepted story. But there's also the tin-foil hat conspiracy theory. Taylor was a member of the Whig party, formed in 1834 to stand against then-President Andrew Jackson. As Jackson's term came to a close, slavery became the major issue of the day -- and the Whigs were a party divided. Taylor, despite being a slaveowner, wished to stem the tide of the country's greatest evil, but that wasn't a position held by the entire party. For example, Millard Fillmore, Taylor's vice president, saw slavery as a state issue and not a federal one (despite disapproving of the practice). This divide led some to believe that Taylor was assassinated -- poisoned -- by slavery supporters in the South who wanted Fillmore to be in charge.

In most cases, such a theory would be dismissed as quackery. But for some reason, rumors of foul play sustained for more than a century. In the 1980s, a former University of Florida professor named Clara Rising led the charge to do the unthinkable -- she asked Taylor's descendants for permission to exhume his remains, so that it could be tested for toxins. And, surprisingly, Taylor's family agreed.

Testing began at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in June of 1991. The findings were as conclusive as they could be; as the New York Times summarized in a headline "Verdict In: 12th President Was Not Assassinated." The tests found no traces of arsenic, the most likely toxin to be used in such a plot (and one that would last nearly a century and a half). Of course, that wasn't enough for Rising and other conspiracy theorists -- she would later tell the Orlando Sentinel "I still think he was poisoned."

Despite her on-going claims, Taylor's remains were again laid to rest shortly after the findings.

 

[rbkwp]

What Was the Inspiration for the World’s First Webcam?

and here i was thinking it was first used in Trumps pussy grabbing bus escapde/or him taking a shower in the university he never attended

The world’s first live webcam was set up to monitor the contents of a
coffeemaker at Cambridge University.
Webcams are now an integral part of the Internet, used for live-streaming
everything from online gaming and sports events to the constant monitoring
of baby zoo animals. However, the first live webcam broadcast was more
mundane. It was set up in the early 1990s by computer scientists at the
University of Cambridge, and it monitored the only coffeemaker in the the
seven-story Computer Laboratory, located in the Trojan Room. Since
researchers worked in different labs on different floors, they wanted to be
able to see if there was coffee in the pot before making the trek down to
get a cup. In 1993, the Trojan Room coffee pot webcam was put online for
the entire world to see, earning it a revered status in tech history right
up there with Guglielmo Marconi's first static-filled radio transmission.

 

[rbkwp]

apparently
there is


The Counterfeit Money Which is Intentionally Worthless

The bill pictured above is India's 50 rupee note. As of this writing, it's worth about $0.75 US, but as India's per capita GDP is about 3% of the United States's, 50 rupees can be a significant amount of money, especially for the nation's poor.

Unfortunately, 50 rupees can also be the cost of doing business in India. As the World Bank notes, "in India, petty corruption is pervasive – people often face situations where they are asked to pay bribes for public services that should be provided free." If your income is only about 8,000 rupees a month, forking over fifty for things you're already entitled can add up, and quickly. What's a poor Indian to do?

Fake it, with one of these:

That's a "zero rupee note" -- it's not legal tender, and even if it were, it's worth (as it says pretty clearly) nothing. But that's the point.

In 2007, an anti-corruption non-governmental organization called 5th Pillar started distributing the zero rupee note -- for free -- to citizens across the country, and particularly those with low incomes. In the first run of the program, 5th Pillar gave out about 25,000 such notes throughout the city of Chennai. The instructions were simple: if an official asked for a bribe (or, more likely, hinted at it), the consumer was to hand over a zero rupee note instead. The aim wasn't to fool the bribe-demanding official into thinking he had been paid off, though. Rather, as India Times reported, "the idea of the note was to tell people that they no longer needed to be afraid of those in power, and to make them realize that they had nothing to lose -- and that for the first time, they were not alone in the fight." (The obverse side of the zero rupee note, seen below, makes it clear that the note wasn't intended to be passed off as a real 50 rupee bill.)

And the initiative was a huge success, in one sense: the program has expanded rapidly. As of 2013, per the Economist, 5th Pillar had distributed more than 2.5 million of the notes, empowering would-be victims to quietly fight back. The organization began printing the notes in five languages commonly spoken in the country and has seen interest from other nations as well.

That said, whether it will make in-roads against the pervasive bribery culture is still to be seen.

 

[rbkwp]

Apparently,

There's No Place Like 0,0

The flag on the map pictured above is in the middle of nowhere, colloquially speaking. But in another sense, that flag is in the middle of right here, no matter who you are or where you are. How so? Because it's the middle of the Earth, at least by latitude and longitude. It's at 0° north, 0° east -- where the Prime Meridian and the Equator cross.

And it's also home to Null Island is a one-meter square island. And you've probably been there -- or, at least, your phone has.

To understand why, we first have to address the idea of "geocoding." Geocoding, basically, is the process of taking a point on the Earth and describing it by a pair of numbers -- the latitude and longitude. Latitudes north of the Equator are positive while those south are represented with a negative number; longitudes east of the Prime Meridian are positive, those west are negative. If you enter coordinates 40.6892494, -74.0445004 into Google or Google Maps, for example, you'll be brought to the Statue of Liberty. (On a map. You won't be teleported.)

Sometimes, though, something goes wrong in the geocoding process. The reasons for these errors can be as simple as a typo or so complex that you probably need to be a cartographer to understand it. Regardless, mistakes happen and as a result, geocoding data is sometimes omitted from a data set. And missing data can throw off a computer -- at times, systems don't know whether to represent that missing data with nothing or with a zero. Imagine, for example, that you take a picture with your phone, but the phone doesn't know where you are. It will tag that photo with null values for both latitude and longitude -- which is fine until another computer tries to read that data. A properly-designed piece of software will read the null data as "I don't know," but an improperly made one see it as "0,0." And that error will lead it to place the photo about 1,000 miles off the shore of Africa.

That's a glitch, and a pretty common -- you may have experienced it momentarily in a variety of different apps, especially early versions of ones involving geolocation, such as Waze or Pokemon Go. But it can be more serious, too. In 2012, Wisconsin's voter rolls were missing a lot of location data -- while people were registered to vote, their addresses weren't properly recorded. Instead, as a county clerk told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, "We had many, many voters who showed up (on the computer map) on the coast of Africa and we had to drag them back to the state of Wisconsin and put them where they belonged."

But more accurately, these voters were living on Null Island. Okay, Null Island doesn't really exist -- except for in map-making software. The concept of Null Island was created, at least -- in or around 2001. As the Library of Congressnotes, the history of this fictitious land isn't well documented, but its purpose is generally agreed upon: "Null Island was intended to help analysts flag errors in a process known as 'geocoding.'" By putting a name to this mysterious place off the African coast, the cartography community made it easier to identify and discuss the error.

Again, though, there's no such thing as Null Island. That point and it's immediate surroundings aren't entirely empty, though; there's a weather buoy, seen here, moored on the spot.

 

[rbkwp]

Apparently,

China's Extremely Personal Loans
In many places, college can be expensive. And the price of an education is often redoubled because many college students are forgoing a full-time salary in order to spend time studying. Loans are pretty common and, in the United States at least, they can get out of control. According to CBS News, the average college debt for those who borrowed money for college and graduated in 2016 was more than $30,000. In all, per the Federal Reserve (via USA Today), American student loan debt totals north of $1.3 trillion (trillion!) dollars.

Students needing money isn't a problem limited to the United States, either. In China, it's also an issue, and students are looking for creative ways to finance their education and get some money for other expenses as well. Unfortunately, a dark, illegal side of the lending world has stepped in to fill that gap.

The big problem with loaning money to students is that, typically, they lack collateral. If the student defaults on the debt, the lender has no recourse. (With, say, a mortgage, there is collateral -- if you default on that, the bank takes your house and sells it. If you default on a student loan, it's not like the lender can take your diploma and auction it off.) But some Chinese loan sharks have found an alternative way to ensure payment: blackmail. The Washington Post explains:

Preying on young women who need money for college and other expenses, Internet lenders in China are reportedly offering them high-interest loans in exchange for nude photos of themselves, enticing victims with promises of extra cash and then blackmailing those who fail to pay by threatening to publish the pictures or send them to their families. The photos must show each girl holding an ID card.To be clear, these aren't reputable Chinese banks making the loans -- the lenders are more like mobsters than they are day-traders. The offers -- which can net a borrower as much as 5x the normal, non-nude loan amount -- are taking place on peer-to-peer lending sites like one called Jiedaibao, which the Guardiandescribes as "a platform where individuals - often friends and acquaintances – can lend or borrow money, striking their own arrangements." According to People's Daily Online, loans can be as much as 15,000 yuan -- about $2,500 -- and interest rates can be as much as 30% per week (!).

Per the Guardian, the company which operates Jiedaibao was open to working with officials to prevent such actions, but that was a change from previous policy -- per the Post, a Chinese publication had previously "quoted an unnamed Jiedaibao representative as stating that the company had no control over any collateral demands made by a lender as part of 'a private trade deal.'" And stopping this practice may be difficult regardless. The Post spoke with a lawyer named Fu Jian who had helped some students with loan complaints, who told the paper that "the use of nude photos as collateral was not illegal unless they were published, and that many lending platforms have 'a large number of middlemen in different cities to seduce students to borrow money.'" And to make matters worse, "China has no institution that oversees online lending."

 

[rbkwp]

and
so sath all of us, appaently???

Our new society
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, New Zealand society is changing before our eyes. Despite being the last land mass to be inhabited by humans, we are now one of the most ethnically diverse.

And despite priding ourselves on our egalitarian society, the gap between rich and poor is growing faster in Aotearoa than in almost any other country in the OECD. This is a picture of who we are.


https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/our-new-society/

 

[rbkwp]

Apparently,

How Long Would It Take to Count to a Million?
At one number per second -- with no breaks, at all, for any reason -- it would take 11 days, 13 hours, 46 minutes, and 40 seconds to count from one to 1,000,000. You could probably do the first few hundred at a quicker pace but any gains made up would be eventually lost -- it takes at least a second to say aloud, for example, the number 429,627. ("Four hundred twenty-nine thousand, six hundred and twenty-seven" is a mouthful.) And over the course of your 11-plus days, you'll certainly have to eat, sleep, use the restroom, etc. In other words: that one number per second benchmark isn't all that realistic.

So, how long would it really take to count to a million? Out loud, for good measure?

Thanks to a guy named Jeremy Harper, we don't have to guess. In fact: we got to watch.

In June of 2007, the Internet was still in a somewhat nascent stage. Weird things being streamed, live, had a good chance of getting a lot of attention. (In some sense, that's still true.) Harper decided to put that to the test, and at the time, raise money for a small non-profit which helped people with disabilities. Harper's very simple stunt: he was going to count to a million and let anyone and everyone watch along the way. He assumed it would take him the rest of the summer and, as he told a local Fox affiliate, "probably the beginning of football season, too." His boss approved a leave of absence from his job.

Just moments after noon on June 18th, he got started. Harper locked himself in his Birmingham, Alabama apartment, turned on the webcams, and got to work. He started with the number 1, then 2, then 3, and... well, you get the idea. Taking prolonged breaks only to eat and sleep -- he often even counted while on the can, albeit with the door closed -- Harper got about 16 hours of counting in each day. The cameras never stopped streaming as he endeavored to reach seven digits -- he even had a camera trained on his bed, allowing fans, well-wishers, and the unabashedly curious the chance to watch him as he slept. (No, he didn't count in his sleep.) Along the way, Harper encouraged viewers to donate via his now-defunct website, MillionCount.com, an archived version of which can be found at that link.

And 89 days later -- at 7:25 in the evening on September 14, 2007 -- he reached his goal. One million.

You can watch the final moments here, starting at 999,976 and ending at, of course, 1,000,000. And then he celebrated -- by doing the chicken dance.

(The Internet is a weird place.)

Oh, Harper raised more than $10,000 for the non-profit -- about a penny per number counted, but not bad for about three months of work.

 

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Has the US Presidential Plane Always Been Called Air Force One?


apparently

The first U.S. presidential plane was dubbed “The Sacred Cow”; it flew
FDR to the Yalta Conference in 1945.

In January 1943, Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first U.S. president to
travel in an airplane while in office. Roosevelt flew aboard the Boeing 314
Dixie Clipper en route to the Casablanca Conference in Morocco. The
three-leg trip aboard the Dixie Clipper covered 5,500 miles (8,851 km) and
was preferable to sea travel at the time, given the far-reaching threat of
German submarines. However, the first official presidential plane was a
reconfigured Douglas C-54 Skymaster, nicknamed the Sacred Cow. The plane
was fitted with an elevator to lift Roosevelt and his wheelchair into the
aircraft.

 

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apparently

The People Who Can't Take Socks For Granted

There's a good chance you're probably wearing socks right now -- particularly if it's cold or wet outside -- and there's also a very good chance that, until you read these words, you hadn't thought about your socks since you put them on your feet this morning. If you had to make a list of things you take for granted, socks wouldn't make the list -- because you take them for granted so much that you'd have forgotten about them even then.

And yet, socks are important -- especially if you're out in those cold, wet, and often unsanitary conditions. Prolonged exposure to such an environment can result in a malady known as "trench foot," where the outer layer of the absorbs water, leading to swelling, blistering, and ultimately infection and tissue death. Per Wikipedia, treatment is possible albeit painful; left untreated, trench foot "usually results in gangrene, which may require amputation." The condition gets its name from the trench warfare of World War I; while those soldiers typically had socks, they didn't know to dry them out before putting them back on.

Today, in developed nations at least, trench foot and other immersion foot syndromes are rare -- in large part because we have access to enough socks where we always have a dry (and typically clean) pair to wear. The exception, in the U.S. and Canada at least, is the homeless population. As the Huffington Postpoints out, "many homeless people walk all day just to eat," and "without [socks], feet become infected and blistered to the point where people limp or can no longer walk." And feet don't need to hit trench foot-levels of infectedness in order to be painful and, often debilitating.

In other words: socks are really important if you're homeless. But there's a catch-22 here. When we think about making donations to homeless shelters, "gently used" clothing is often the standard we're after. Items which have holes or have been through the wash a few too many times don't make the cut. While we may outgrow some clothes or simply not want to wear some articles anymore -- fashions change! -- that's typically not true for socks. Indeed, some of us wear our socks until (and at times past) the point where they're no longer viable as socks at all. And therefore, we rarely donate socks to homeless shelters.

As a result, per Recycle Nation, a publication of the recycling industry, "socks are [among] the most requested item in shelters across the country." This is underscored by community organizations throughout the country (here's one example) which are always on the lookout for more socks for their local homeless population. And in some areas, business sectors, professional organizations, andstudent groups alike organize sock drives to help get the word out about this surprisingly critical, but relatively easily obtainable, need.

The good news is that you can help, too -- just buy some socks and donate them to a homeless shelter.


Today's Now I Know is sponsored by Bombas -- makers of great socks. And they're also makers of great outcomes for today's homeless population. For every pair of socks you purchase from Bombas, they'll donate a pair to a homeless shelter in the United States.

They've donated more than three million socks to date and the sky's the limit. You can learn more about Bombas and their first million socks donated here and buy some/give some yourself here.

Bonus fact: The Wizard of Oz -- the 1939 movie -- starts off with a tornado hitting Dorothy's home in Kansas. Putting a tornado into a movie at the time wasn't trivial but the effect was critical to the story's success. How'd they do it? Per the Washington Post, special effects director Arnold Gillespie took, essentially, a giant sock (35 feet long), filled it with a metal rod and shook it, and "the tornado appeared to snake and wiggle its way across the stage." He then shot dirt at the sock using compressed air to create the rest of the effect.

 

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apparently


Why Farmers Treat Cows Like People

Pictured above is a cow. That particular breed of cow is a Holstein-Friesian, the breed of cow which is responsible for most of the milk produced in the United States, the UK, and other places as well. (Of the 9 million dairy cows in the U.S.,according to the Holstein Association USA, 90% are Holsteins.) And maybe, the cow above has a name -- Bessie, Elsie, Daisy, Gladys, Madam Moo Moo, it really doesn't matter. Any name will do.

To see why, we need to peruse a 2009 paper out of Newcastle University in England, co-authored by professors Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of the college's agricultural school. Their study, available here, explored the relationship between stock managers -- the farm employees typically in charge fo the day-to-day operations of a milk cow herd -- and the cattle for which they're responsible. Cows, after all, aren't machines that one can just turn on and off; they may have feelings, emotions, and moods. Drs. Douglas and Rowlinson wanted to better understand how stock managers perceived their herds, so they sent surveys to a bit more than 500 of these employees across the United Kingdom.

Along the way, the researchers asked a somewhat strange question: they wanted to know if the stock managers named their cows. Not "Cow 24801" or some ID number either, but something more personal. The result, per National Geographic, was that about half -- 46% -- of stock managers said that, yes, they had Bessies and Daisy, not just cows. The reasons why, we don't know, but the result -- well, it was a smart move.

The researchers noticed a trend -- regardless of farm size or herd size, herds of named cows, on average, produced more milk than their unnamed counterparts elsewhere. Scientific American summarizes just how big: "Dairy farmers who reported calling their cows by name got 2,105 gallons (7,938 liters) out of their cows, compared with 2,029 gallons (7,680 liters) per 10-month lactation cycle." That's almost a 5% uptick, which isn't a ton, but it adds up.

The researchers aren't quite sure why this happens, but they have their guesses -- they think giving a cow a name (and using it) is a proxy for kindness. Dr. Douglastold NBC News that "if you call a cow by name, it indicates that perhaps you talk to her more, perhaps you consider her more of an individual, perhaps you have more of a one-to-one relationship." Cows which are treated more like people, they surmise, are less stressed and more likely to produce more milk.

And that's not all. The duo also thinks that the benefits of a strong farmer-cow relationship can go beyond milk production. While the study didn't address this second point with any academic rigor, Douglas noted that farmers who had a strong personal connection with their individual cows may be better able to avoid cow-related injuries, as happy cows who know their milker are less likely to strike. Douglas's most important data point? Herself. She told NBC News: "Personally, I have had a black eye and broken ribs from milking."

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Bonus fact: If you visited the White House about a century ago -- from 1910 to 1913 -- you would have been greeted by a cow. Then-President William Howard Taft had a pet cow which grazed freely on the White House lawn. And yes, the cow had a name -- Pauline Wayne. Miss Wayne, as she was sometimes called, was, to date, the last Presidential cow; none of Taft's successors have wanted a pet bovine. (Wayne was not, however, the only Presidential cow; she had a predecessor in the Taft administration named Mooley Wooly, but the Mooley wasn't able to produce enough milk for the First Family's liking.)

 

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Apparently there was a time when the world was young, the world had just begun and I was happy.