Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Gotta see this one. Great cast! Dude is back.
“…a typical rider will come into the Tour de France carrying around seven percent body fat – a slim woman is around 20 percent – which drops to about four by the end of three-week endurance race.”
“If a stage has three big climbs, we’d expect riders to burn off anything between 8,000 to 10,000 calories per day.”
I’m going to have to ride a lot further than 25kms to burn this number of calories and get my body fat down to 7%. BikeRadar’s interesting article on nutrition on the Tour is here <link>
Montana drinks the most. Utah is at the opposite end of the scale. There’s a surprise. The original image is here <link>
“Treat offsides as more encouraging than corners.”
This surprising conclusion of “The Fink Tank” from The Times goes against every football fan’s desire to cheer a corner and groan an offside. Daniel Finkelstein writes that, “…the teams that get the most corners only won 40.5% of the time. While there is a 42% chance of winning the match if you have been caught offside the most.”
The best indicator is shots on target. Teams that got more shots on target won 66% of the time.
Next time you’re watching your team at the stadium or on Sky, count shots on target and cheer offsides.
I’ve written previously about how hard it is to be original. So I can safely copy this lovely piece of prose. Thanks noquedanblogs <link>.
Thanks Martin Klasch. <link>
The daily stat from Harvard Business Publications throws up some thought provoking numbers and juxtapositions. This week I’ve learned that – the US exports lots of chicken feet to China; nearly one third of people who purchased homes in the US in the past five year have “under water” mortgages; and that if I had a spare $700 billion I could pay for the UN’s programs to fight hunger and poverty in Africa for 10 years.
Here’s the detail:
In the first half of 2008, China imported 420,000 tons of poultry–133,000 tons more than for the same period in 2006. and that the U.S. exported a whopping 300,000 tons to China, supplying the lion’s share of the country’s imports over this 6-month period. Most of it chicken feet which make up more than half of the country’s poultry imports.
Sixteen percent of U.S. homeowners are “under water”: they owe more in mortgages than their homes are worth. This compares with 6% the year before and 4% in 2006. For those who purchased their homes in the last 5 years, the numbers are even worse — 29% owe more than the current value of their homes.
What $700billion could do if it weren’t bailing out the US financial system:
- Pay a year’s wages for 22 million Americans (average weekly pay in August was $612)
- Fund Germany’s national budget for 18 months (Germany’s projected 2009 budget is €288 billion)
- Pay for the UN’s programs to fight hunger and poverty in Africa for 10 years
- Fly to the moon 4 times (NASA’s Apollo program cost about $164 billion in today’s dollars)
I wonder how many chicken feet I get for $700 billion? And would $700 billion put all those mortgages above water?
Man has lived beside the Mediterranean since the 4th Millennium BC. The first mosquito was no doubt sitting in the marshy backwaters waiting for him and her; and the first tourist was already on their way.
Then it was bite, slap, hit.
For six thousand years man has been exerting effective natural selection on Mediterranean mosquitoes with only the fastest and sharpest living to bite another day. This means that today on the beaches of North East Tuscany you can be bitten and never even see your attacker. ARGH!
Bite. Slap. Miss.
Separate to our recent discussion on the beach in North East Tuscany, researchers at the California Institute of Technology have been studying why it is so hard to swat a fly. They say…
“At the mere hint of a threat, the insects adjust their preflight stance to flee in the opposite direction, ensuring a clean getaway, they said in a finding that helps explain why flies so easily evade swipes from their human foes.”
Full story here <link>
I’m prepared to bet that the mosquitoes in Tuscany are at least as clever.
British Airway’s cost cutting has certainly reached the smallest room on the plane. It wasn’t as shiny as the loo paper of my youth (circa Burnside High School in the mid-70s) but what BA supplied on the flights between London and Seattle this week certainly wasn’t Andrex. I expect the people who travelled closer to the pilot had a softer landing.
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Flickr Photos
The displaced Kiwi 