Posts Tagged ‘home’
Building a nuclear reactor in your kitchen might upset the neighbors
A Swedish man has been arrested after attempting to split atoms in his kitchen, claiming that he was only doing it as a “hobby”.
Richard Handl said that he had the radioactive elements radium, americium and uranium in his apartment in southern Sweden when police showed up and arrested him on charges of unauthorised possession of nuclear material.
Handl, 31, said he had tried for months to set up a nuclear reactor at home and kept a blog about his experiments, describing how he created a small meltdown on his stove.
Only later did he realise it might not be legal and sent a question to Sweden’s Radiation Authority, which answered by sending the police.
“I have always been interested in physics and chemistry,” Handl said, adding he just wanted to “see if it’s possible to split atoms at home”…
Although he says police didn’t detect dangerous levels of radiation in his apartment, he now acknowledges the project wasn’t such a good idea.
“From now on, I will stick to theory,” he said.
Har.
Now, suppose – just suppose – he was doing this in, say, Phoenix?
Having trouble making your mortgage payment? Try this.
We’re looking for houses to paint. In fact, paint is an understatement. We’re looking for homes to turn into billboards. In exchange, we’ll pay your mortgage every month for as long as your house remains painted
Here are a few things we’re looking for. You must own your home. It cannot be rented or leased. We’ll paint the entire outside of the house, minus the roof, the windows and any awnings. Painting will take approximately 3 – 5 days. Your house must remain painted for at least three months and may be extended up to a year. If, for any reason, you decide to cancel after three months or if we cancel the agreement with you, we’ll repaint your house back to the original colors.
If you’re prepared for the bright colors and stares from neighbors just complete the submission form below. We review every submission. If your home meets our criteria, an Adzookie team member will contact you.
I thought about this for a couple of minutes. Our house wouldn’t work for these folks. It doesn’t face the right way – not enough exposure. But, at the front of our compound we have a three-car garage. Three reasonably flat steel doors facing the road. Might work out, eh?
… My wife would kill me.
What do Pandas eat when they don’t feel like going out?
Probably should have had someone bring takeout home.
Ship tormented by Israeli Raid, Mavi Marmara, is back in Turkey
Thousands of people gathered along the shores of Istanbul on Sunday afternoon to welcome home the Mavi Marmara, the ship that was raided by Israel as it led a flotilla aimed at breaking the blockade of Gaza.
Nine people were killed in the raid last May, which drew international condemnation and helped lead to the easing of restrictions on Gaza. The raid also created a diplomatic standoff between Turkey and Israel.
Groups waving Palestinian and Turkish flags and chanting anti-Israel slogans stood by the ship, which had been confiscated by Israel. On its return on Sunday, it was decorated with posters of the dead passengers.
“Welcome to your soil,” said Ahmet Dogan, father of Furkan Dogan, a 19-year-old Turkish-American citizen who was killed in the raid. “Dear Mavi Marmara, hold your head high, you’ve done your duty, acted as the shield for the innocent…”
Turkey, which had long been a close ally of Israel, has demanded an apology and compensation for the deaths of the activists killed in the raid and recalled its ambassador. Israel has refused to apologize…as usual.
The Obama government, like every preceding government for the past 60 years, babbled a few criticisms of the Israelis – and returned to doing nothing for the dispossessed victims of Israeli expansionism.
Resident who fought back against gang wins in court
A vigilante resident who was sued after firing a catapult at local troublemakers has been vindicated by a judge.
Bruce Harwood, 38, claimed he was forced to take matters into his own hands after the gang of teenagers waged a campaign of “constant bombardment” against him and his neighbours in a Grade II listed Georgian townhouse.
He told how the youngsters urinated on his front door, hurled eggs at his windows, screamed, shouted and vandalised his gates.
When the police allegedly failed to act, Mr Harwood, an electrician, decided to try and “scare them away” himself.
He fired several metal ball-bearings at his tormenters from a catapult, injuring three of them and causing nasty swellings to their groins and legs.
The injured trio then sued him for damages, demanding a total of £3,600 compensation for their injuries after he pleaded guilty to actual bodily harm.
But Judge Gareth Hawkesworth threw out the claims at Cambridge Crown Court, ruling that the teenagers “brought this very much upon themselves.”
Mr Harwood…claimed the police were frequently called but rarely bothered to turn up and never made any arrests.
Golly – do you believe that could happen, that coppers might be so preoccupied with a donut break that they wouldn’t respond to a citizen’s call for help?
“When you have 15 or 20 hoodies screaming and shouting I had to figure some way of getting them out. I was scared they’d get into the building,” he said after the hearing…
Not that I’m complaining about my own local policing. We’re pretty fortunate in having an honest, aggressive Sheriff here in Santa Fe county, recent years.
Of course, with the infinite wisdom of lazy-ass voters, term limits prevented him from running for re-election when a third term would have been a walkover. His assistant will takeover the office, soon, and we hope he will maintain the same standards.
Yes, I tire of lazy whiners who fear the results of democracy.
Grandmother misdiagnosed, sent home to die!
A New York grandmother who spent two years in in-home hospice care and on morphine is suing a hospital for misdiagnosing her with cancer, a lawsuit says.
Ramona Jimenez, 85, of Long Island says she was wrongly diagnosed with stomach and lung cancer at Brookhaven Memorial Hospital, bluntly told she had two months to live and sent home to in-home hospice care…
After two years, during which she became addicted to the morphine, Jimenez’s family finally took her for tests at Stony Brook University Hospital where doctors told the astounded family they found no evidence of any cancer.
“This is everyone’s nightmare,” said Andrew Siben, who is preparing a multimillion-dollar malpractice lawsuit for Jimenez against Brookhaven.
“This is a classic case of misdiagnosis … a calamity of errors. This woman’s whole life has completely fallen apart…”
In November 2008, Jimenez went to Brookhaven with a bad stomach ache, was tested and told she had “stomach and lung cancer and had just two months to live,” Siben said…
“When I started taking all the drugs, I went out of my mind,” Jimenez said. “They gave me a lot of morphine. I couldn’t remember who I was.”
Last May the family took her for tests at Stony Brook.
“They looked at Brookhaven’s pictures and couldn’t see any cancer either,” Jimenez’s daughter Brunelda Morua said.
“When they told me I didn’t have cancer, it was like a miracle. They took me off the drugs, except the morphine,” said Jimenez, who is now on a treatment to wean her from the painkiller. “My mind cleared up.”
Brookhaven is silent about the whole affair. They deserve the worst – given that another hospital reviewed Brookhaven’s own X-rays, etc, and found nothing.
Another great reason to get a second opinion right off the bat – when you get negative medical news.
Bears and the State of Housing
Of all the uncertainties in our halting economic recovery, the housing market may be the most confusing of all…
I can’t claim to clear up all the uncertainty. But I do want to suggest a framework for figuring out whether you lean bearish or less bearish: do you believe that housing is a luxury good and that societies spend more on it as they get richer? Or do you think it’s more like food, clothing and other staples that account for an ever smaller share of consumer spending over time..?
There is a third stream which has had even more influence – ignored in this article: Flippers and others investing in housing for a quick buck.
The difference between these two views ends up being huge, and it’s become the subject of an intriguing debate…
No one doubts that prices rose roughly with incomes from 1970 to 2000. The issue is whether that period was an exception. Housing bears like Barry Ritholtz, an investment researcher and popular blogger, say it was. The government was adding new tax breaks for homeownership, and interest rates were falling. These trends won’t repeat themselves, the bears say.
As evidence, they can point to a historical data series collected by Mr. Case’s longtime collaborator, Robert Shiller. It suggests that house prices rose no faster than inflation for much of the last century.
The pattern makes some intuitive sense, too. As people become richer, they spend a shrinking share of their income on the basics. Think of it this way: someone who gets a big raise doesn’t usually spend it on groceries. You can see how shelter seems as if it might also qualify as a staple and, like food, would account for a shrinking share of consumer spending over time. In that case, house prices should rise at about the same rate as general inflation and well below incomes.
Here’s the scary thing, at least for homeowners: if this view is correct, house prices may still be overvalued by something like 30 percent. That’s roughly the gap between average household income growth and inflation over the last generation…
The second, less bearish group of economists doesn’t buy this. This group includes Mr. Case, Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics and Tom Lawler, a Virginia economist who forecast the end of the housing boom before many others did. They say they believe that house prices rise nearly as fast, if not quite as fast, as incomes, and that real estate is no longer in a bubble…
Real music in the house!
Around a northern Georgia home sporadically illuminated by fireflies and distant lightning, music rises as darkness falls. A couple dozen smiling guests, glasses of sweet tea or white wine in their hands, settle onto sofas or lean against doorposts.
It’s time for the magic to begin.
This is a house concert, a growing phenomenon in which musicians perform in private living rooms for a small but attentive paying audience.
The connection between performer and patron is almost palpable…
Audience members “are here for the music,” Ladd said. “They’re not here to find a date or to cruise around the bar and talk.”
And artists appreciate not having to compete with billiard games or blaring televisions.
“There’s this intimacy to it where, as a storyteller and an acoustic musician, the subtleties of that kind of craft can come across,” Jonathan Byrd said. “When you’re in a really big place with a lot of people, it’s harder to get the subtlety of acoustic music, the dynamic range of it.”
That intimacy is just as valuable to a big-voiced R&B singer like Kira Small. She and husband-bassist Bryan Beller have been performing at house concerts for about a year, most recently in Bill and Teri Hooson’s tightly packed living room in Covington, Georgia.
“We just love being able to connect with everybody this closely,” said Small, standing barefoot behind her electronic keyboard not 10 feet from the first row of seats…
Concert hosts usually ask guests to make a $15 to $30 donation; they don’t call it an admission charge because that would make the venture a business and raise zoning issues, said Fran Snyder, who runs ConcertsInYourHome.com, one of several sites that help match performers with home venues.
RTFA. This has always been part of the history of performing arts – and especially music.
I did a lot of this decades ago when I was performing. Always a favorite way to connect my music with people.
Of course, in our uptight society, the people who believe in governing behavior above all else will try to find some way to make it illegal.
Books in home increase children’s education level
Whether rich or poor, residents of the United States or China, illiterate or college graduates, parents who have books in the home increase the level of education their children will attain, according to a 20-year study led by Mariah Evans, University of Nevada, Reno associate professor of sociology and resource economics.
For years, educators have thought the strongest predictor of attaining high levels of education was having parents who were highly educated. But, strikingly, this massive study showed that the difference between being raised in a bookless home compared to being raised in a home with a 500-book library has as great an effect on the level of education a child will attain as having parents who are barely literate…compared to having parents who have a university education… Both factors, having a 500-book library or having university-educated parents, propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average.
Being a sociologist, Evans was particularly interested to find that children of lesser-educated parents benefit the most from having books in the home. She has been looking for ways to help Nevada’s rural communities, in terms of economic development and education.
“What kinds of investments should we be making to help these kids get ahead?” she asked. “The results of this study indicate that getting some books into their homes is an inexpensive way that we can help these children succeed.”
Evans said, “Even a little bit goes a long way,” in terms of the number of books in a home. Having as few as 20 books in the home still has a significant impact on propelling a child to a higher level of education, and the more books you add, the greater the benefit…
The researchers were struck by the strong effect having books in the home had on children’s educational attainment even above and beyond such factors as education level of the parents, the country’s GDP, the father’s occupation or the political system of the country.
Having books in the home is twice as important as the father’s education level, and more important than whether a child was reared in China or the United States. Surprisingly, the difference in educational attainment for children born in the United States and children born in China was just 2 years, less than two-thirds the effect that having 500 or more books in the home had on children.
I presume the benefit was from having access to the books. It certainly was an advantage for me and my sister.
Though both of us were taught to read before entering kindergarten, though both took those long Saturday roundtrip walks to the Carnegie Library in our community – our parents had belonged to a couple of book clubs for all their lives together. It took me years – enjoyable years I might add – to catch up to both of them reading through our home library.
School used laptop webcams to spy on students
A federal class action claims a suburban school district has been spying on students and families through the “indiscriminant use of and ability to remotely activate the webcams incorporated into each laptop issued to students,” without the knowledge or consent of students or parents. The plaintiffs say they learned that Big Brother was in their home when an assistant principal told their son that the school district knew he “was engaged in improper behavior in his home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in minor plaintiff’s personal laptop issued by the school district.”
The families say the Lower Merion School District issued Webcam-equipped personal laptop computers to each of its approximately 1,800 high school students: in Harriton High School in Rosemont, and Lower Merion High School in Ardmore. The schools issued the computers as part of a “one-to-one” laptop computer initiative lauded by Superintendent Christopher McGinley as an effort that “enhances opportunities for ongoing collaboration, and ensures that all students have 24/7 access to school based resources and the ability to seamlessly work on projects and research at school and at home.”
But the parents and students say that, without their knowledge, the access went both ways. Nowhere in any “written documentation accompanying the laptop,” or in any “documentation appearing on any Web site or handed out to students or parents concerning the use of the laptop,” was any reference made “to the fact that the school district has the ability to remotely activate the embedded webcam at any time the school district wished to intercept images from that webcam of anyone or anything appearing in front of the camera,” the complaint states…
The school district in fact has the ability to remotely activate the webcam contained in a student’s personal laptop computer issued by the school district at any time it chose and to view and capture whatever images were in front of the webcam, all without the knowledge, permission or authorization of any persons then and there using the laptop computer.
Defendants include the Lower Merion School District [info@lmsd.org], the Board of Directors [capitalcomments@lmsd.org] of the Lower Merion School District, and Superintendent McGinley [mcginleyc@lmsd.org].
What a flock of bureaucratic creeps! It’s damning enough of our social and political culture that the Bill of Rights probably wouldn’t get through Congress, today. But, you would think that preservation of your boring little sinecure, some cardboard closet for administrative ditto machines, would suggest liberty and privacy are overriding concerns when considering a policy as abhorrent as this?
Fire the whole lot. Hold an election. Replace these reactionary dunces with someone who cares about the American Constitution.
Thanks, Cinaedh
