Great Idea or Not?

Ingenious or Absurd? I honestly have no idea...

Friday Links

A Computer that plays Jeopardy: http://money.cnn.com/2009/06/26/technology/ibm_jeopardy_watson_computer/?postversion=2009062616

AMAZING Photos of American Mass Consumption: http://matadorchange.com/intolerable-beauty-chris-jordan-photographs-american-mass-consumption/

Health Insurance Insider: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/opinion/27kristof.html?_r=1&em

Fantasy Football Insurance???

Millions of dollars are wagered in fantasy football every year.

Last year when Tom Brady went down in the first week of the season those that spent an early draft pick on him were almost assured of finishing in the bottom half of there leagues and earning no money.

An insurance company in Long Island is offering a way to protect your players.

The idea is simple, you have to select a player off of a list of the 50 players they currently offer the policy on, pay the insurance –- roughly 10 percent of your entry fee -– and if that player misses two-thirds of the season with an injury, your policy pays off to cover your entry fee of the league.

This idea may seem ludicrous to many people but there are fantasy football leagues with entry fees that stretch into the tens of thousands of dollars, so the ability to provide some protection can be a welcome opportunity.

The policies are underwritten by Lloyd’s of London and the firm has sold close to 400 policies already and they expect business to pick up over the next week as the NFL season gets closer.


From: http://www.cnbc.com/id/32551187

NFL Ownership

The Green Bay Packers are unlike any other team in professional sports...

112,015 people own the team.

Since 1923, the Packers have been a publicly owned, non-profit corporation governed by a stockholder-elected board of directors and a seven-member executive committee.

Currently, 112,015 stockholders own 4,750,934 shares in the Packers, stocks for which they are given no seating entitlements and for which they earn no dividends.

The public ownership of the Packers is one of the key reasons the team has never moved from a city of little over 100,000 to a larger market.

Amazing Tricks

The Telegraph newspaper in London recently did a story on a bike rider who uses the city to perform his acrobatic tricks. The video is lengthy but well worth it.

The Greatest Athletic Achievement

In 1936, the 11th Olympics were held in Berlin, Germany.

It is said that the Berlin Olympic Stadium was the house that Hitler built, but over the course of one week in August of 1936, American Jesse Owens stole the show.

On a simple athletic level, Owens' performance in Berlin was impressive enough. He won four of the most important events at the games, equaling the world record in the 100 meters (despite a muddy track), setting an Olympic record in the long jump that would stand for 24 years, and posting world records in the 200 meters and in the 4x100 meter relay.

The feat is monumental considering Owens was competing in the capital of a nation in which he was legally considered something less than human, winning event after event with Adolf Hitler watching from his box.

Owens was also representing a nation in which he was a second-class citizen.

As the German papers were calling him and his fellow African-American Olympians "black auxiliaries," American newspaper reporters described them as "our Ethiopian troops" and their collective triumphs as "a darktown parade."

The New York Times called Owens "The Dark Streak from Ohio State." The novelist Thomas Wolfe wrote that he cheered for Owens even though Owens was "black as tar."

By dominating the Berlin Games, which had been designed as a showcase for Nazism, Owens struck a blow against the racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic government of Germany. With his brilliance on the track, handsome appearance and grace in victory, Owens seemed to embody the Greek athletic ideal the Germans had suggested was theirs.

In Berlin, Owens was in every way extraordinary.

Seventy-three years later, he remains the champion of champions.

By Jeremy Schapp of ESPN
http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/trackandfield/columns/story?id=4396363

Setting the Record Straight

The White House is trying to dispel some of the rumors surrounding health care by launching a new web site:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/settingtherecord

The website is designed to:

"Set the record straight and expose the special interests and partisan attack groups who deliberately spread these rumors and lies in a desperate attempt to preserve the status quo."

Post It Notes

Here is a video that a student created at Savannah College of Art and Design for his senior project.

The student wrote "every time when I am busy, I feel that I am not fighting with my works, I am fighting with those post-it notes and deadline." The post it notes on the wall are manipulated using a technique know as pixel-like stop motion.




Here is a video he put together depicting how this unbelievable project was put together.



6,000+ post it notes = quite a production

Yankees

I'm a Red Sox fan, but you have to give the Yankees credit for the event they recently held at 3am in the Bronx:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=reilly_rick&id=4391631&sportCat=mlb

Great work by the organization and the players to give those kids a day they will never forget.

The Future of Re-Charging

The future of cell phone recharging may be a future without cords.

Nokia, is in the early stages of developing a cell phone that recharges itself by harvesting ambient radio waves from the air, and turning that energy into enough usable power to keep the phone from running out of juice.

The system is designed to pick up all the bits and pieces of the radio waves wasted in the atmosphere to create electrical current.

Harvesting ambient electromagnetic energy will most likely never be able to offer enough electricity to power a house or office, but Nokia is making a big bet that it just might be enough to keep a cell phone alive and kicking.

From: http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/143945

All You Can Fly??

JetBlue Airways will offer an "all-you-can-jet" pass for $599 in which passengers can book an unlimited amount of flights within a one-month span.

Pass holders can fly to any of JetBlue's 56 destinations between Sept. 8 and Oct. 8, with no seat limitations or blackout dates.

Airline equities analyst Bob McAdoo, of Avondale Partners, said he "has never seen a promotion like this before."

Still, with JetBlue flights already slashed as low as $100, customers might have to fly 6 or 7 times in a month before they break even.

"This is a way to get people to pay attention, with publicity that doesn't cost the company much," McAdoo said. "They're doing this at a time when there are probably a lot of seats available anyway."

From: http://money.cnn.com/2009/08/12/news/companies/jetblue_unlimited_flight_pass/index.htm?postversion=2009081217

What are the odds?

Edward Williams is the definition of lucky after winning the lottery for a second time in a year.

Williams, 47, of Wichita, Kansas won $75,000 in September playing a $10 scratch ticket.

Then on Wednesday, he defied the odds again when matched all the numbers in the Super Kansas Cash drawing to win a jackpot worth nearly $900,000.

From: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/08/09/2009-08-09_lottery_winner_edward_.html

Health Care Irony

If you want to understand the struggle over health care reform, you need only to look at the case of Kenny Gladney.

At a health care rally in St. Louis, Mr. Gladney was protesting President Obama's health care reform when the event turned violent.

Gladney was involved in the altercation and had to go to the emergency room where he was treated and released.

Here's the kicker...

Kenny Gladney is unemployed and uninsured!

Yes, you heard that right, Kenny Gladney is uninsured and he is protesting against meaningful health care reform, the irony is painful.

Kenny is now asking for donations to cover his health care costs associated with the injuries he sustained while violently protesting against health care reform!!!

Time Well Spent?

The New York Times has put together an interactive graphic illustrating how we spend our time. By making different selections on the top right corner of the page you can adjust the graph by age, race, education level, and many other factors. You can also click inside any of the activities on the graph and see a detailed breakdown.

It is an amazing look at our society...

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/07/31/business/20080801-metrics-graphic.html

Shaw

George Bernand Shaw (1856 – 1950) was an Irish playwright who wrote more than 60 plays and also became an accomplished public speaker working to reduce the exploitation of the working class.

He is the only person EVER to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize (1925) and an Oscar (1938), for his contributions to literature and for his work on the film Pygmalion.

Here are a collection of some of his greatest quotes:

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful, than a life spent doing nothing"

"Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve."

"Lack of money is the root of all evil"

"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it"

"We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it, than to consume wealth without producing it"

"He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career."

And what I think might be the greatest quote of all time...

"We learn from history that man can never learn anything from history"

Turkmenistan

From Rachel Maddow at MSNBC:

Turkmenistan shares a final syllable with so many of its neighbors, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan.

But frankly, it makes it easy from this distance to sometimes confuse Turkmenistan with some of the other very lovely stans.

To do so, I'm telling you honestly, would be a mistake because Turkmenistan has national politics unto itself.

Turkmenistan's leaders have a real flair for the grandiose. The first president to serve the newly independent nation was Saparmurat Niyazov.

He came to power in 1991. He erected a golden statue of himself in the capital that rotates 360 degrees every 24 hours so as to always follow the sun.

He renamed the days of the week and the months of the year after himself and his family members.

And when he had to give up smoking, so did every single government minister in the entire country.

Not to be outdone, Niyazov's successor, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, not only has a more difficult to pronounce name, he also refuses to be outshone by his predecessor in the art of stage craft.

At the opening of a new cancer hospital in Turkmenistan, the president eschewed the whole cutting a ribbon at the new facility thing. That would be what they do in normal countries.

Instead, he decided to personally cut the first patient.

Mr. Berdimuhamedow, who is a trained dentist, literally, personally, performed the hospital's first surgery.

He removed a benign tumor from behind some poor patient's ear. Now, that is government-run health care.

A Trillion

Trillion has become the new billion. Here is a decent depiction of the amount of money we are really talking about...

Google's Expensive Lucky Button

Would you believe that the "I'm feeling lucky" button costs Google $110 million per year...

Google cofounder Sergey Brin told public radio's Marketplace that around one percent of all Google searches go through the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.

Because the button takes users directly to the top search result, Google doesn't get to show search ads on one percent of all its searches.

That costs the company around $110 million in annual revenue. Quite the expensive button.

From: http://gawker.com/tech/google/im-feeling-lucky-button-costs-google-110-million-per-year-324927.php

Debt

Ever wonder about how quickly the National Debt goes up?

Click below to find out....