Trivia & Miscellaneous

[Daniel E.]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Frederick_Rohwedder

In 1933 American bakeries for the first time produced more sliced than unsliced bread loaves.

 

[Daniel E.]

Buried lakes of liquid water discovered on Mars


Mars is a freezing desert today, but billions of years ago, water flowed on the surface.

 

[Daniel E.]

Controlling Tobacco [in the US] - A Timeline

1963 – Smoking rates begin to decline shortly before the release in 1964 of the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee report linking cigarettes and lung cancer

1963 to the present day – Total per capita adult consumption of cigarettes has gone down 70%

1971 – Cigarette ads are banned from radio and television

1988 – New Surgeon General's report classifies, for the first time, smoking as an addiction

1998 – The Masters Settlement Agreement (MSA) awards billions of dollars to state governments as compensation from the tobacco companies for costs associated with smoking-related illnesses

Source: The Challenges of Seniors who Smoke

 

[Daniel E.]

A spooky story for Halloween month:

We shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour, which works out to be about 1.5 pounds of skin per year, or 105 pounds of skin by the time you reach age 70! In brief, our skin is actually food to various fungi, bacteria, parasites and worms.

https://www.meadvilletribune.com/archives/you-do-shed-your-skin-and-its-good-for-you/article_125ee27f-31bf-58c2-892b-d155258174ac.html

 

[Daniel E.]

9 Restaurant Chains That Closed Hundreds of Locations This Summer

 

[Daniel E.]

How to watch Mars make its closest approach to Earth until 2035
By Sophie Lewis
October 6, 2020 / 12:33 PM / CBS News

Two full moons aren't the only spectacular celestial events of October. This week, Mars is making its closest approach to Earth until 2035 - and to see it, all skywatchers need to do is look up.

Mars will shine bright all month long, but there are two rare days to watch out for: October 6, when Mars makes its close approach, and October 13, when the red planet is in opposition...

If you happen to miss this year's close approach, the next one will be December 8, 2022. However, NASA said it will [be] 15 years before Mars looks this amazing again, due to the planets' slightly tilted elliptical orbits and gravitational tugging.

"The Red Planet comes close enough for exceptional viewing only once or twice every 15 or 17 years," the space agency said. The next time Mars is closer to Earth than it is right now will be in 2035...

 

[Daniel E.]

Looking outside with the naked eye, I wasn't impressed since Mars still looks like a dot

 

[David Baxter PhD]

Looking outside with the naked eye, I wasn't impressed since Mars still looks like a dot

It is still just a dot. But now it has aspirations of becoming something bigger. Close anonymous associates have said Mars figures if Trump can do it, he can do it.

It's worth noting that Mars has already done a much better job of managing COVID-19 than Trump has, and even better than New Zealand, although the New Zealand PM is clearly much better looking than either Trump or Mars:

 

[Daniel E.]

 

[Daniel E.]

 

[Daniel E.]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rax_Roast_Beef

Rax Roast Beef is a regional U.S. fast food restaurant chain specializing in roast beef sandwiches. The company is based in Ironton, Ohio. Once a major player in the fast food industry, Rax has extensively scaled down its operations since its peak in the 1980s. Its closest rival in terms of menu offerings is Arby's...

At its peak in the 1980s, the Rax chain had grown to 504 locations in 38 states along with two restaurants in Guatemala, and two restaurants in Canada. The Canadian locations were in Lethbridge and Red Deer, Alberta. During this time, Rax began diversifying its core roast beef sales by adding baked potatoes, pizza and a dinner bar with pasta, Chinese-style food, taco bar, an "Endless Salad Bar", and a dessert bar. Rax began to transform its restaurants from basic restaurant architecture into designs containing wood elements and solariums, with the intention of becoming the "champagne of fast food". This transformation drove away its core working class customers, blurred its core business, and caused profits to plunge for Rax as others took advantage of Rax's techniques and improved on them, as Wendy's did.

 

[David Baxter PhD]

Eatons and Sears, among other businesses, made the same errors here in the 80s and 90s. They are both long gone now.

The lesson? Make sure you know your customer demographic and work hard to keep them happy. You don't grow your business by abandoning your customers and hoping you can upgrade to richer, "classier" customers. The old ones will get angry and be happy to leave for somewhere else that appreciates them, and the new ones won't even bother to show up because your history isn't classy enough for them.

 

[Daniel E.]

How to Do the 'Cat Smile' and Make Cats Fall in Love With You

It’s possible there’s something about the slow blinking itself that is soothing for a feline. Since it’s thought that cats perceive long direct eye contact from others as threatening, for instance, the slow blink sequence may have evolved as a strategy for cats to know that the situation isn’t meant to be tense.

 

[Daniel E.]

Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record
October 8, 2020

When Nathan Klein started graduate school two years ago, his advisers proposed a modest plan: to work together on one of the most famous, long-standing problems in theoretical computer science.

Even if they didn't manage to solve it, they figured, Klein would learn a lot in the process. He went along with the idea. "I didn't know to be intimidated," he said. "I was just a first-year grad student - I don't know what's going on."

Now, in a paper posted online in July, Klein and his advisers at the University of Washington, Anna Karlin and Shayan Oveis Gharan, have finally achieved a goal computer scientists have pursued for nearly half a century: a better way to find approximate solutions to the traveling salesperson problem.

This optimization problem, which seeks the shortest (or least expensive) round trip through a collection of cities, has applications ranging from DNA sequencing to ride-sharing logistics. Over the decades, it has inspired many of the most fundamental advances in computer science, helping to illuminate the power of techniques such as linear programming. But researchers have yet to fully explore its possibilities — and not for want of trying...

While the improvement the researchers established is vanishingly small, computer scientists hope this breakthrough will inspire rapid further progress...

 

[Daniel E.]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Miss

In the 1950s, the company [Swiss Miss] sold its original hot cocoa product as an onboard beverage to airline passengers. Only after the drink became popular did it sell products in grocery stores.

 

[gooblax]

Now I want some "pudding". Except that's not what we call pudding. That's flavoured custard, like YoGo.

 

[Daniel E.]

Looked up the Health Star Rating System in Australia and later found this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_paradox

The Australian Paradox is a term coined in 2011 to describe what its proponents say are diverging trends in sugar consumption and obesity rates in Australia. The term was first used in a 2011 study published in Nutrients by Professor Jennie Brand-Miller, in which she and co-author Dr Alan Barclay reported that, in Australia, "a substantial decline in refined sugars intake occurred over the same timeframe that obesity has increased."

...Independent analyses by Australian researchers...also concluded that Australians consumed less added sugars in the years 2011-12 than they did in 1995.

 

[David Baxter PhD]

I bet it's the vegemite.

 

[Daniel E.]

And, of course, their bodies have evolved to convert sugars to protein to help them heal from daily animal attacks :lol:

 

[David Baxter PhD]

But that may be backfiring. The magpies are still attacking and getting stronger with the added protein from their victims. Same with sharks and baby-eating dingoes.