And other stuff

• "Relieve itching from chicken pox, poison ivy, poison oak, or pain from sunburn. Pour two cups Cheerios in a blender and blend into a fine powder on medium-high speed. Put the powdered Cheerios into a warm bath and soak in the oats for thirty minutes. It's a soothing oatmeal bath.
  
  
  
• Make "Cheerios Chicken." Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a jelly-roll pan (15.5 inches by 10.5 inches by 1 inch) with aluminum foil. Mix two cups finely crushed Cheerios (from the yellow box), one-quarter teaspoon pepper, one teaspoon parsley flakes, one-quarter teaspoon garlic powder, one-quarter teaspoon dried oregano leaves, and one-half teaspoon salt. Dip four chicken-breast halves (skinned and boned) into one-quarter cup milk, then roll in cereal mix until well coated. Place chicken in pan and drizzle with two tablespoons melted margarine. Bake until done, about twenty to twenty-five minutes. (Above 3,500 feet elevation, bake about thirty minutes.) Makes four servings."

Labels: Answers, Books, General, Products, Reference, Tutorials

A little is dangerous, a lot is too much

Aspirin

The inventor of this modern miracle drug saw no use for it. Luckily, aspirin's formula was rediscovered nearly fifty years later and the rest is history. But, did you know that aspirin was included as part of the Treaty of Versailles?

Band-Aids

I'm stuck on Band-Aid 'cause Band-Aid's stuck on me. Millions of these little adhesive strip have been sold over the years. Yet, their existence may never have been if it weren't for Listerine.

The Brassiere

Mary Phelps Jacob is widely credited with inventing this article of clothing way back in 1913. Did she really invent this garment? Better yet, did you know that it could possibly kill you? Check out the real answers.

Labels: Answers, General, Humor

And more

"docstoc is a user generated community where you can find and share professional documents. Find free legal documents and free business documents. Upload your documents for all the world to share."

• Differences between a Will and a Trust
  
• Employment Agreement
  
• Cohabitation Agreement
  
• Real Estate Purchase Contract
  
• On Target Marketing Plan Book
  
• Interactive W-9 from EchoSign
  
• Promissory Note
  
• Excel Formulas Help
  
• Venture Capital Firms in California (full contact info)
  
• How to Write a Mission Statement
  
• LLC Company Agreement
  
• Rental Agreement
  
• Last Will And Testament

Labels: Answers, Free Stuff, Reference

The world around

• Imperial pints are 20 fl. oz., not 16--making them smaller than their US counterparts.
  
  
• Imperial fl. oz. weigh approximately an ounce; US ones do not.
  
  
• One pint (pt) -- 16 ounces
  
  
• One fluid pint (fld Pt) -- 16 fluid ounces (fld Oz)
  
  
• One liter of water weights one kilogram and fits in a cube with 10cm in each dimension

" German-made Measuring Cup includes the measurements for liters, milliliters, grams, cups, and ounces all-in-one. Separate measuring sections for Cereal, Rice, Sugar and Flour are offered and a convenient pouring spout. Removable rubber base keeps the measuring cup from sliding during use. This is a handy, multi-use baking aid when you are elbow deep in your Oma's German Recipe."

"Grains, Scruple (20 grains), Minim (20 scruples), Drachm/Dram (60 minims; 1/8 or 1/16 oz), Gill (5 Brit oz), Bucket (4 Brit gallons), Firkins (9 Brit gallons), Bag (3 bushels), Seam (8 bushels), or Butt (2-4 barrels or 2 hogsheads). Since fresh water on ships was stored in a butt, and people congregated and gossiped there, the term scuttlebutt now refers to gossip, not just the fountain!"

Also:
Euros to Lira



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Labels: Answers

Figure the vigorish

• Auto Calculators
  
  
• Bond Calculators
  
  
• Budget Calculators
  
  
• College Calculators
  
  
• Credit Card Calculators
  
  
• Home Calculators
  
  
• Insurance - Disability Calculators
  
  
• Insurance - Health Calculators
  
  
• Insurance - Life Calculators
  
  
• Life Expectancy Calculators
  
  
• Choose-to-Save - Life Expectancy
  
  
• Mutual Fund Calculators
  
  
• Paycheck Planning Calculators
  
  
• Retiree Health
  
  
• Retirement Calculators
  
  
• Roth IRA Calculators
  
  
• Savings Calculators
  
  
• Social Security Calculators
  
  
• Social Security Administration - Estimate Your Potential Benefit
  
  
• Stock Calculators
  
  
• Tax Calculators

Labels: Answers, General

Wha'd I say

Churchill, Winston S.

..."man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on."

• American Heritage Collegiate Dictionary
  
• Brewer's Phrase & Fable
  
• Bulfinch's Mythology
  
• Cambridge History
  
• Columbia Encyclopedia
  
• Columbia Gazetteer
  
• Dickinson, E.
  
• Einstein's Relativity
  
• Eliot, T.S.
  
• Farmer's Cookbook
  
• Fowler's King's English
  
• Gray's Anatomy
  
• Lawrence, D.H.
  
• Mencken's Language
  
• Oxford Shakespeare
  
• Presidential Inaugurals
  
• Roget's Thesaurus
  
• Strunk's Style
  
• The King James Bible
  

Also see:
Project Gutenberg

Quotes:
Yahoo Reference

Google Quotations



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Labels: Answers, Books

They say it isn't so

Everyone must drink at least eight glasses of water a day

This advice is thought to have originated in 1945 from the Nutrition Council in the US, which suggested people needed to consume 2.5 litres of water a day. But the water contained in food, particularly fruit and vegetables, as well as in milk, juice, coffee and soft drinks, also counts towards the total.

Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight

Generations of parents have warned their children not to read in poor light, telling them that it could somehow damage their sight. Though dim lighting can cause stress in the eye, the important thing to remember, say the researchers, is that the effects are not permanent. "Suboptimal lighting can create a sensation of having difficulty in focusing. It also decreases the rate of blinking and leads to discomfort from drying. The important counterpoint is that these effects do not persist."

Labels: Answers

Ease of use

Say you're walking down the street in a strange town, and you'd like to find a Starbucks.
(OK the question might be how not to find a Starbucks.)

Dial (1-800) GOOG-411, on your obnoxious cell phone. Speak your location and what you are looking for and you'll be connected to the harassed barista of your choice. There is no charge for the service.

It also works from a real phone. It also finds other businesses than just coffee pushers.


Goog411



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Labels: Answers, Free Stuff, Help, Search

So very SAD

SAD

A wistful feeling comes over us in late autumn, as the last remaining leaves drop, morning frosts cover the ground, and the sun sets earlier each day. Hot cider and the warmth of a favorite old coat may be all you need to face the coming winter with good cheer, but for many people, fall melancholy deepens to winter depression.

Winter depression is still a mystery to scientists who study it. Many things, including brain chemicals, ions in the air, and genetics seem to be involved. But researchers agree that people who suffer from winter depression -- also known as "seasonal affective disorder," a term that produces the cute acronym SAD -- have one thing in common. They're particularly sensitive to light, or the lack of it.

"Research shows that bright light visual stimulation (light which enters the eyes), can change the timing of the body clock and its timing of sleep or awakening signals to the body. Thus, bright light therapy has been used to treat the range of disorders caused by a mis-timed body clock including shift work, jet lag, sleep onset and early morning insomnia mentioned above as well as winter depression (Seasonal Affective Disorder, SAD)."

"Probably the greatest use of bright light therapy is for the treatment of winter depression, especially in very northern countries which have little sunlight in the winter months. These sufferers appear to have delayed body clocks and benefit most from morning light therapy.

At present, the blue LED glasses are still experimental devices. They are not yet commercially available. The Flinders University owns the intellectual property rights and a provisional patent. A commercial partner to manufacture and market the devices under license is still being sought."

Labels: Answers, General, Products

IRS worthy or not

• Benevolence International Foundation, Inc.
  Palos Hills, Illinois
  
  
• Global Relief Foundation, Inc.
  Bridgeview, Illinois
  
  
• Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development
  Richardson, Texas
  
  
• Rabbi Meir Kahana Memorial Fund
  Cedarhurst, New York

Labels: Answers, General, Search

My barista can take your electrician

Labels: Answers

Hospital scorecard

Labels: Answers

Where'd it go?

Keeping Found Things Found™

"What is KFTF?

The classic problem of information retrieval, simply put, is to help people find the relatively small number of things they are looking for (books, articles, web pages, CDs, etc.) from a very large set of possibilities. This classic problem has been studied in many variations and has been addressed through a rich diversity of information retrieval tools and techniques.

A follow-on problem also exists which has received relatively less study: Once found, how are things organized for re-access and re-use later on? What can be done to avoid the need to repeat the process by which the information was found in the first place? (If, indeed, it is possible to repeat this process.) We refer to this as the problem of Keeping Found Things Found™ or KFTF."

Labels: Answers, General, Help

Who's living in your neighborhood?

ZIPSkinny displays US Census data for any selected Zip code .

You can find out how old your neighbors are and how much money they make.

Find out how many graduated from high school and how many are single.

Here's part of the information available about someone's vacation home.



ZIPSkinny.com



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Labels: Answers, General, Search

Visual concepts

"This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on.

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so.

The series is a work in progress, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned.

Building Blocks, 2007
16 feet tall x 32 feet wide in eighteen square panels, each sized 62x62".

Depicts nine million wooden ABC blocks, equal to the number of American children with no health insurance coverage in 2007.

Labels: Answers, Art

Methods tested

Labels: Answers

Time to die

Labels: Answers, World

Pint's a pound

A more extensive currency conversion tool can be found at:
The Full Universal Currency Converter®

For other conversions see:
Convert Anything

None of them verify that a pint's a pound the world around.
How much does a gallon weigh?



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Labels: Answers

From a Crabby Lady

"Sometimes when you're stuck on a problem using an Office program, you need help and you need it NOW (not unlike the "I need it NOW!" urgency for a very nearby public restroom for your recently trained 2-year-old). You just want to be able to type a word or a phrase into search and have your answer immediately returned in the form of a simple, short article that explains it all.

Other times you might like to watch someone show you how it's done, although it isn't always possible to wander the hallways and look for an unsuspecting coworker to enlighten you.

Office Online offers a multitude of ways to get "show me now!" help as well as other types of assistance. Today I'll cover six of them."

Labels: Answers, Help

Four pecks to a bushel

"Convert is an easy to use unit conversion program that will convert the most popular units of distance, temperature, volume, time, speed, mass, power, density, pressure, energy and many others, including the ability to create custom conversions!"

Also see Josh Madison's Chinese restaurant get well card.

OnlineConversion.com does more conversions online.
(A Hogshead is 63 Gallons)

Export911 has conversions and calculators.

Also:
Convert between bits/bytes/kilobits/kilobytes/megabits/megabytes/gigabits/gigabytes

Labels: Answers, General

Cooperation

Three great locations for looking up answers are:

WOPR.com Woody Leonard is the author of dozens of books about Microsoft Office. The WOPR site has a forum where questions are asked and answered.
(Go to the Lounge)

TechRepublic is part of CNET networks. There is an active forum and also discussions, white papers and downloads.
(Go to Forums)

Google Groups searches all of the public news groups for answers. When you are looking at a page of results, it is usually more productive to examine hits that have two or more responses. One entry is, most often, just a question.
(deja.com takes you directly to the Groups archive)

For a search of the links that I have collected, enter you question here:
Search. You'll also find lists of tutorials and just plain interesting sites.

Also:
Blog Topics



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Labels: Answers

Low pay by state

Since 1997, the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $5.15. The new Congress plans to introduce legislation raising the minimum wage to $7.25-an increase that is long overdue.

This minimum wage increase would boost earnings for 13 million American workers-9.8 percent of the United States workforce.

Six million families with children-46 percent of the total low wage-earning families with children-currently receive all of their earnings from minimum wage jobs.

Raising the minimum wage will increase annual earnings to $15,000 from $10,700.

Without this increase, a family of three supported by one minimum wage earner will live roughly $5,400 below the federal poverty line.

At the 350 largest public companies, the average CEO total direct compensation was $11.6 million in 2005. At this rate of compensation, it takes the average CEO only one hour and 55 minutes to earn the annual pay of a minimum wage worker.

Labels: Answers, History

Times

Here is a location that will give you times for sun and moon, rise and set,
Civil Twilight, Nautical Twilight. and Astronomical Twilight anywhere in the world.

SunriseSunset.com



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Labels: Answers, Calendars

True Believers

Snared by a cybercult queen

SEAN ROBINSON: The News Tribune

"Shaini Goodwin lies like a lover, and people pay to listen.

Her whispers promise the irresistible: peace, wealth and forgiven credit card debt".

National Economic Security and Reformation Act

NESARA initiates PEACE IMMEDIATELY and

1. Provides forgiveness of credit card, mortgage, and other bank debt as remedy for bank and government frauds;
   
2. Abolishes the IRS; creates flat rate non-essential "new items only" sales tax revenue for government;
   
3. Initiates U.S. Treasury Bank System, which absorbs the Federal Reserve, and new precious metals backed U.S. Treasury currency;
   
4. Restores Constitutional Law;
   
5. Requires resignations of current administration to be replaced by Constitutionally acceptable NESARA President and Vice President Designates until new elections within 120 days;
   
6. Requires the President Designate to declare "Peace" enabling international banking improvements to proceed smoothly; ends U.S. aggressive military actions immediately, and many more improvements.

Quatloos.com

Quatloos.com is a public educational website covering a wide variety of financial scams and frauds, including wacky "prime bank" frauds, exotic foreign currency scams, offshore investment frauds, tax scams, "Pure Trust" structures and more.

ScamBusters.org

Internet ScamBusters Helps You Protect Yourself From Clever Scams -- Online and Offline

MuseumofHoaxes.com

The Museum of Hoaxes was established in 1997 in order to promote knowledge about the phenomenon of hoaxes.

Snopes.com

In a strict folkloric sense, no. Urban legends are a specific type of folklore, and many of the items discussed on this site do not fall under the folkloric definition of "urban legend." We are following the more expansive popular (if inaccurate) use of "urban legend" as a term that embraces not only urban legends but also common fallacies, misinformation, old wives' tales, strange news stories, rumors, celebrity gossip, and similar items.

CSICOP.org

The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal encourages the critical investigation of paranormal and fringe-science claims from a responsible, scientific point of view and disseminates factual information about the results of such inquiries to the scientific community and the public.

Urban Legends

Internet hoaxes, email rumors and urban legends

VMyths.com

Learn about computer virus myths, hoaxes, urban legends, hysteria, and the implications if you believe in them. You can also search a list of computer virus hoaxes & virus hysteria

Symantec.com

Symantec Security Response uncovers hoaxes on a regular basis. These hoaxes usually arrive in the form of an email. Please disregard the hoax emails - they contain bogus warnings usually intent only on frightening or misleading users.

McAfee.com

There are a lot of viruses out there. But some aren't really out there at all. Virus hoaxes are more than mere annoyances, as they may lead some users to routinely ignore all virus warning messages, leaving them vulnerable to a genuine, destructive virus.

About.com – Hoax Encyclopedia

Virus hoaxes, scams, and chain letters abound in email. Before forwarding that dire sounding warning or too good to be true promise, check the validity of it here. Chances are, it's a hoax.

TrendMicro.com

Hoaxes

PurPortal.com

That story that your misguided (yet sweet) friend just sent to you and forty other people sounds true... Put it to the test here.

InfoPlease.com

The Hoax Files

Labels: Answers

See what they mean

" Welcome to Nolo's Legal Glossary, your life-raft in the sea of legal jargon. Do you need to know the meaning of sprinkling trust, toxic tort or some equally puzzling legal term? Look it up here. Our glossary contains plain-English definitions for hundreds of legal terms, from the common to the bizarre."

Toxic tort

A personal injury caused by exposure to a toxic substance, such as asbestos or hazardous waste. Victims can sue for medical expenses, lost wages and pain and suffering.

Willful tort

A harmful act that is committed in an intentional and conscious way. For example, if your neighbor builds an ugly new fence and you intentionally run it down with your truck, that's a willful tort. But accidentally backing into the fence as you pull out of your driveway is not willful, though it's still a tort.

Labels: Answers

Advice from the past

"Take a step back in time as I share words of wisdom from my collection of about 1,000 classic advice books in a quest to solve modern-day dilemmas.

The books span from 1822 to 1978 and cover the age-old topics of dating, love, living together, marriage, health, beauty, puberty, sex, etiquette, housekeeping, home economics, and home repairs. I've spent years scouting out used bookstores and thrift shops to locate these treasures of self help. "

Labels: Answers

Nerd Conversation Nibblets

• Barbie's measurements if she were life size: 39-23-33.
  
  
• The dollar symbol ($) is a U combined with an S (U.S.)
  
  
• Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
  
  
• The Statue of Liberty's tablet is two feet thick.
  
  
• There are two credit cards for every person in the United States.
  
  
• Hacky-sack was invented in Turkey.
  
  
• Cat's urine glows under a blacklight.
  
  

Labels: Answers

Neither

Interestingly enough, although Georgia celebrates Washington's Birthday, the Governor is accorded the right to designate when state holidays occur. In Georgia, Washington's Birthday is recognized the day after Christmas.

There is an urban legend that when the Uniform Monday Holiday Act was implemented in 1971, President Richard Nixon issued a proclamation calling for a Presidents' Day on the third Monday to honor all U.S. presidents.

Each February both the Law Library at the Library of Congress and the Nixon Library field an upsurge in calls on this question. No evidence of this exists in Nixon's official papers.

Labels: Answers

Info Tools

Google, the largest search database on the planet, currently has around eight billion web pages indexed. That's a lot of information. But it's nothing compared to what else is out there.
Google can only index the visible web, or searchable web. But the invisible web, or deep web, is estimated to be 500 times bigger than the searchable web. The invisible web comprises databases and results of specialty search engines that the popular search engines simply are not able to index.

1. Clusty - A metasearch engine that combines the results of several top search engines.
   
   
2. Intute - A searchable database of trusted sites, reviewed and monitored by subject specialists.
   
   
3. INFOMINE - A virtual library of Internet resources relevant to university students and faculty. Built by librarians from the University of California, California State University, the University of Detroit-Mercy, and Wake Forest University.
   
   
4. Librarians' Internet Index - A search engine listing sites deemed trustworthy by actual human librarians, not just a Googlebot.

• Deep Web Search Engines
  
• Art
  
• Books Online
  
• Business
  
• Consumer
  
• Economic and Job Data
  
• Finance and Investing
  
• General Research
  
• Government Data
  
• International
  
• Law and Politics
  
• Library of Congress
  
• Medical and Health
  
• Science
  
• Transportation

Labels: Answers, Search

Burn the tree

If you want to find out the real background story on any number of water cooler questions, try:
StraightDope.com.

For instance:
Who has the power to arrest the president?

And:
Why is it dangerous to burn wrapping paper?

The fire is the wrong place for other holiday detritus as well - der Tannenbaum, for example.

My assistant Una had an Uncle Bob, a manly man who felt throwing the Christmas tree away was a waste of good firewood. So he tossed it in the fireplace - gave him a nice warm glow.

Unfortunately

what was glowing was the roof, presumably ignited by embers.

Fortunately

the fire was small and anybody with a hose could have put it out.

Unfortunately

the hose was frozen solid and the fire department had trouble getting the nearest hydrant to work.

Fortunately

the firefighters were able to throw a ladder up against the house and put out the fire with a chemical extinguisher. They then hacked off a small hunk of charred roof with axes, peered into the crawl space, and declared the fire out.

Unfortunately,

having by now found an operational hydrant, the firemen declared they needed to hose down the roof "as policy," sending a torrent of water through the hole and collapsing the living room ceiling.

Really unfortunately,

the house that all this happened in belonged not to Uncle Bob but his in-laws. Bob bought them an RV and matters were pronounced square, but it was a lesson he won't soon forget, and neither should you.

Labels: Answers