Eideard

Black Friday sales increased 6.6 percent to the largest amount ever as many U.S. consumers unleashed pent-up demand and bought for themselves.

Shoppers spent $11.4 billion yesterday, ShopperTrak said in a statement today. Foot traffic rose 5.1 percent, according to the Chicago-based research firm…

The brisk turnout came as retailers from Gap to Wal-Mart Stores to Toys “R” Us opened their doors earlier than ever.

Many shoppers were rookies who had never before participated in the busiest shopping day of the year, dubbed Black Friday because many retailers are said to become profitable then. As many as 152 million people were expected to shop at stores and websites on Black Friday, up 10 percent from last year, according to the National Retail Federation…

Black Friday arrived with consumer sentiment at levels previously reached during recessions, as a record share of households said this is a bad time to spend, according to the Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index. The measure has reached minus 50 or less in nine of the past 10 weeks, an unprecedented performance in its 26-year history.

Even with low confidence, shoppers paid more for goods and unleashed some pent-up demand, said Craig Johnson, president of consulting firm Customer Growth Partners, which is based in New Canaan, Connecticut…

Chains such as Macy’s, Target Corp. and Kohl’s Corp., which all opened at midnight, may have taken revenue from competitors like J.C. Penney that didn’t open until 4 a.m., according Ken Perkins, president of Swampscott, Massachusetts-based Retail Metrics…

The move to turn Black Friday into more than just one day also grew on the Web as online retailers, such as Amazon.com Inc., began advertising “Black Friday” deals well before yesterday. Online sales gained 39 percent on Thanksgiving and 24 percent on Black Friday, according to IBM’s Coremetrics.

Black Friday may illustrate a gap between what consumers tell pollsters and how they actually behave — a trend that has prevailed for much of this year, said Retail Metrics’ Perkins…“A solid Black Friday suggests the rest of the season should be pretty good,” Perkins said. “Those who have jobs have been willing to spend.”

Americans who have jobs have returned to saving in the course of the year. After a couple decades of relying on plastic to close the gap between the quest-for-scarce-goods and declining real income we reached negative savings numbers at the beginning of the recession. Over the course of this year, that number returned to halfway normal – around 5%.

My hopes – not ideological guesswork – is that folks return to increasing those savings amounts once the holiday season is past. We have a ways to go to return to a more traditional 10%. Meanwhile, China’s new middle class sticks to a savings rate around 40%. They even show up to buy a new car with cash instead of credit! You can guess what Wall Street whizbangs think of that?

Actors pose with gym equipment on what the Guinness World Records bills as the world’s largest 3D painting, at Canary Wharf in London November this week. British artist Joe Hill’s creation measures in excess of 1120 square meters, or 12,000 square feet. Guinness says it breaks records for the longest and largest surface area 3D painting.

I love this stuff.

 
Diego Forlan grabbed two goals as Uruguay thrashed Paraguay 3-0 in Buenos Aires to secure a record 15th Copa America title.

The striker, who plays for Spanish club Atletico Madrid, struck in each half to become Uruguay’s joint highest scorer in history after Liverpool forward Luis Suarez had broken the deadlock after only 11 minutes.

It marked Uruguay’s first Copa America triumph since 1995 and they can now boast one more title than hosts Argentina, who they beat in the quarterfinal…

Eleven minutes into the match Luis Suarez found the net and edged past Argentina striker Sergio Aguero as the tournament’s top scorer with four goals.

Four minutes before halftime, Egidio Arevalo Rios robbed Nestor Ortigoza of possession and teed up Diego Forlan who made no mistake with a powerful drive.

Paraguay tried to force the pace in the second half and hit the crossbar after Nelson Valdez’s shot was tipped onto the woodwork by Uruguay goalkeeper Nestor Muslera.

But Paraguay’s threat faded after that and they were thankful to another fine save from Villar to prevent Sebastian Eguren putting the game beyond doubt.

That feat was left to Forlan who completed a fine breakaway move in the dying seconds as he finished smartly following Suarez’s precise header and pulled level with Hector Scarone as Uruguay’s all time leading goalscorer on 31.

Now, Uruguay has broken their tie with Argentina for the most victories in this hemispheric competition. Forlan’s final goal was the icing on the cake – pretty much expected with Paraguay throwing players forward in an attempt to get a minimum face-saving goal. But, still an admirable, controlled and skillful goal.

A Rubik’s Cube has been sitting on Joe Ridgeway’s shelf since he was a child, but it wasn’t until he was studying at Rowan University that he fully embraced its challenge.

Before long, he was determined to memorize faster ways to crack the puzzle. Then, he decided he wanted to go faster.

In a project that started in a Rowan course, Ridgeway and Zachary Grady, both senior electrical and computer engineering (ECE) majors, have built a robot that solves the cube in 15 seconds.

The Rubik’s Cube-Solving Robot, a year in the making, has earned the duo more than 17,000 hits on YouTube and a congratulatory note from Erno Rubik himself. And though it’s not yet official, they are confident, based on their research, that the robot is the fastest of its kind…

The robot wastes little time – after 17 moves, it twirls the descrambled cube in a modest celebration.

Ridgeway, 21, and Grady, 22, made the machine from scratch, they said, working under the guidance of Mease and ECE chair Shreekanth Mandayam and with mechanical-engineering help from graduate student Karl Dyer.

Mandayam said he was initially thrown off by the project and was surprised by the public reaction.

“I just absolutely could not believe the amount of interest it has gotten, the amount of hits that we have gotten,” he said.

RTFA. Interesting in more ways than you might think.

Bravo to Ridgeway and Grady.

Kanchana Kaetkaew, 39, allowed her husband, Boonthawee Siangwong, to place the writhing poisonous arachnid on her tongue, where it stayed for two minutes and three seconds before she spat it out.

Her proud husband – known as Thailand’s “Centipede King” – looked on as Miss Kaetkaew, dressed in a white dress covered with more of the stinging creatures, made her record attempt in front of a crowd at a shopping centre in Pattaya, a city on the Gulf of Thailand known for its nightlife and cabaret.

Miss Kaetkaew remains ambitious for more records and, for her next stunt, she is planning to live in a glass compound for 33 days and nights in the company of 5,000 scorpions.

If successful, she will beat her 2002 record of 32 days in a glass house with 3,400 scorpions.

I can hardly wait.

Uh.. thanks, anyway.

Canada had its warmest year on record in 2010, according to the country’s environmental agency, with the biggest impact seen in the Arctic region.

The national average temperature for the year was 3 degrees Celsius above normal, based on preliminary data, according to a report put on Environment Canada’s website on Monday. That made it the warmest year since nationwide records began in 1948.

Most areas of the northern territory of Nunavut and of northern Quebec were at least 4 degrees above normal, while the Arctic tundra region was 4.3 degrees above normal. Along with the Arctic tundra, the Arctic mountains and fiords, the northeastern forest and Atlantic regions also had the warmest year on record.

Scientists link the higher temperatures in the Arctic to the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming. Global warming is gradually melting the Arctic ice cap, raising the possibility of increased shipping and mining in the environmentally sensitive region…

The previous warmest year was 1998, which was 2.5 degrees above normal, according to the data. Annual temperatures have been above normal since 1997.

“Although any one year’s temperature anomaly isn’t proof of any long-term trend, having a year this much warmer than any previous year is significant,” Environment Canada spokesman Mark Johnson said in an e-mailed statement.

Don’t worry. Anyone with snow on the ground outside of the GWN this winter will ignore what’s happened to anyone else, anywhere else. Especially if they are invested psychologically or fiscally in Big Oil politics.

Britain’s annual raspberry to slimming gurus and lettuce-based diets drew gasps as the record for demolishing a saucer-sized meat pie was demolished by an awesome 12 seconds.

Crumbs flew yesterday in the traditional setting of Harry’s Bar, opposite Wigan’s most popular multi-storey car park, as a middle-aged civil servant stormed to victory over the biggest bunch of rivals yet fielded.

Neil Collier, 42, took only 23.91 seconds to down the steaming slab of carbohydrate and snatch the coveted title of world pie-eating champion from 37-year-old Barry Rigby.

“He just seemed to open his throat and down it went,” said organiser Tony Callaghan, whose antics have boosted Northern pastry, meat and gravy for 19 years. “He’s from Bolton, mind, which is a crying shame for a Wiganer to have to say, but he’s certainly learned how to eat pies somewhere. Probably in Wigan…”

Next year’s championship is already heading for a place in history through the probable introduction of fifth and sixth officials, ahead of the international football authorities. Coining a new word, just to add to his satisfactory day at Harry’s, which he owns and runs, Callaghan said: “We intend to be particularly scrutineerinous of both competitors and pie meat. Adlington maybe, but our pies will only ever be sourced from the finest herds of beef-yielding cows that graze the majestic plains of the north-west of England.”

The previous record was 35.86 seconds, and other landmarks have included the brief and immediately discontinued use of vegetarian pies in 2007.

Fans of proper football worldwide will rejoice in the continuing saga of this aspect of food culture central to enjoyment of our favorite sport.

Mammoth fossils turned up by earthmover

An Ice Age fossil site recently discovered in Snowmass Village, Colorado, is providing a trio of U.S. Geological Survey scientists with a laboratory to study more than 100,000 years of vegetation and climate records in Colorado.

The USGS team is studying about 22 feet of fossil-bearing sediments from the…excavation, which appear to encompass more than 100,000 years of prehistoric time…

“A vegetation and climate record that covers this much time at such a high altitude—about 8800 feet—is unprecedented in Colorado to our knowledge,” said Jeff Pigati, a USGS geologist on the team.

Sediments that contain the fossils appear to have been deposited in a small lake or marsh that formed when a stream was dammed by a glacial moraine, or accumulation of glacier debris, at least 130,000 years ago…

The Ziegler Reservoir megafauna site was discovered while crews were enlarging the reservoir, which provides water to Snowmass Village and, to some extent, the nearby ski area for making snow…

Thanks to a bulldozer operator who knew enough to apply the brakes, notify folks what he’d unearthed.

She caught whooping cough – her infant son died
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

California health officials say a tenth baby has died of whooping cough in the state’s worst epidemic in 55 years.

The 6-week-old baby died last week after being treated at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego…

More than 5,270 cases of the highly-contagious illness have been reported in California this year. The previous record was set in 1955 when there were 4,949 cases reported.

All of the babies who have died were too young to be fully immunized against the disease, according to health officials.

Whooping cough is a highly contagious, cyclical illness that peaks in number of infections every five years. The last peak occurred in 2005 when California reported 3,182 cases, with 574 hospitalizations and seven deaths…

Jonathan Fielding, the county’s health director, urges parents and caretakers to get vaccinations to avoid any more deaths…

What the anti-vaccination nutballs don’t get is that those who may be outside the effective zones of infection also need to be vaccinated to inhibit transmitting the disease to the most vulnerable. This is something that’s been accepted medical practice since the days of Jenner – when the sum of peer review determined which disease vectors needed to be inhibited by any means. Vaccination happens to be just one of those that is most effective.

Individuals, whether caregivers or parents who refuse vaccination, decide to be Good Germans. They don’t set out to harm anyone else by their self-important act of “freedom”. Neither does the fool who drinks and drives. Both classes of egregious behavior serve in practice to put others in danger.

Health officials say most kids are once again susceptible to the disease by middle school.

A booster dose of the vaccine is recommended for people between the ages of 11 and 18, as well as for people who have contact with infants.

They risked their lives to capture on film hundreds of blinding flashes, rising fireballs and mushroom clouds.

The blast from one detonation hurled a man and his camera into a ditch. When he got up, a second wave knocked him down again.

Then there was radiation.

While many of the scientists who made atom bombs during the cold war became famous, the men who filmed what happened when those bombs were detonated made up a secret corps.

Their existence and the nature of their work has emerged from the shadows only since the federal government began a concerted effort to declassify their films about a dozen years ago. In all, the atomic moviemakers fashioned 6,500 secret films, according to federal officials.

Today, the result is a surge in fiery images on television and movie screens, as well as growing public knowledge about the atomic filmmakers…

Two new atomic documentaries, “Countdown to Zero” and “Nuclear Tipping Point,” feature archival images of the blasts. Both argue that the threat of atomic terrorism is on the rise and call for the strengthening of nuclear safeguards and, ultimately, the elimination of global arsenals.

As for the atomic cameramen, there aren’t that many left. “Quite a few have died from cancer,” George Yoshitake, 82, one of the survivors, said of his peers in an interview. “No doubt it was related to the testing.”

Long, reflective and cautionary tale. The sort of history the Pentagon, Congress and the corporations they pimp for would rather remain hidden.

I was around nuclear manufacturing early enough to remember annual updates to advisories which announced that “last year’s” safety levels had been found to be unsafe. Again and again.