Did You Know.....

[Warph]

....that a woman walks into the downtown welfare office in Howard,KS, trailed by 37 kids.

Wow, the social worker exclaims, are they all yours?

Yep, they are all mine, the poor flustered momma sighs, having heard that question a thousand times before.

She says, "sit down Terry." All the children rush to find seats.

Well, says the social worker, then you must be here to sign up.  I'll need your children's names.

Well, to keep it simple, the boys are all named Terry and the girls are all named Terri.

In disbelief, the case worker says, "are you serious?  They're all named Terry?"

Their momma replied, "well, yes - it makes it easier.  When it's time to get them out of bed and ready for school, I yell Terry!  When it's time for dinner, I just yell Terry!  And they all come running.  And if I need to stop the kid who's running into the street, I just yell Terry!  And all of them stop.  It's the smartest idea I ever had, naming them all Terry."

The social worker thinks this over for a bit, then wrinkles her forehead and says tentatively, "but what if you want just one kid to come, and not the whole bunch?"

The Momma replied, "then I just call them by their last names."

[Warph]

...that The Social Media Revolution 2012-13 will blow your mind...

           

[Warph]

.... that NASA plans to capture an asteroid and start sending astronauts aloft again by 2017, even with a tighter budget, the U.S. space agency announced Wednesday.

Asteroid 2012 DA14 made a record-close pass -- 17,100 miles -- by Earth on February 15. Most asteroids are made of rocks, but some are metal. They orbit mostly between Jupiter and Mars in the main asteroid belt. Scientists estimate there are tens of thousands of asteroids and when they get close to our planet, they are called near-Earth objects.

This graphic shows Asteroid 2012 DA14's predicted path as it passes closest to Earth on February 15 at 2:24 p.m. ET. It will fly 17,200 miles (27,700 kilometers) above Earth's surface and inside the ring of weather and communications satellites. The asteroid is about 150 feet (45 meters) in diameter. It is heading toward Earth at 17,450 mph.

What else is up there? Is anyone watching? NASA's Near-Earth Object Program is trying to track down all asteroids and comets that could threaten Earth. NASA says 9,672 near-Earth objects have been discovered as of February 5, 2013. Of these, 1,374 have been classified as Potentially Hazardous Asteroids, or objects that could one day threaten Earth.

The Obama administration is asking Congress for just over $17.7 billion in 2014, down a little more than 1% from the nearly $17.9 billion currently devoted to space exploration, aeronautics and other science.

The request includes $105 million to boost the study of asteroids, both to reduce the risk of one hitting Earth and to start planning for a mission to "identify, capture, redirect, and sample" a small one. The plan is to send an unmanned probe out to seize the asteroid and tow it into orbit around the moon, where astronauts would study it.

"This mission allows us to better develop our technology and systems to explore farther than we ever have before ... to places humanity has dreamed of for as long as I've been alive," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told reporters.

The Obama administration has said before that it wants to send astronauts to explore an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars by 2030.

Forget falling stars: NASA plans to catch an asteroid

Wednesday's budget request would include another $20 billion to study near-Earth asteroids -- doubling the current spending on that effort. The funding is aimed not only at finding a suitable asteroid to explore, but also at "protecting the planet," Bolden said.

That concern got new attention after February, when a nearly 150-foot asteroid passed within 18,000 miles of Earth. That one was expected -- but the same day, an unrelated, 45-foot space rock plunged into the atmosphere and exploded high over southwestern Russia, injuring an estimated 1,200 people.

White House science adviser John Holdren told a congressional committee in March that as few as 10% of asteroids more than 150 yards wide -- which he called "potential city killers" -- have been detected.

NASA's budget request includes $822 million for the agency's Commercial Crew Program, its push to resume U.S. space flights through private companies by 2017. Bolden called that the "bottom-line" figure, warning that any cuts would mean delays. NASA has already hired the unmanned SpaceX Dragon to deliver cargo to the International Space Station, though no commercial manned missions are currently under way.

While putting money into renewed human space flight efforts, the proposal cuts scientific research, particularly the study of the other planets in our solar system. Planetary science takes a nearly $300 million hit compared to 2012, the last year detailed figures were available.

NASA officials defended the cut, saying major projects like the Mars rover Curiosity and the upcoming MAVEN probe to study the Martian upper atmosphere are already past their most expensive phases.

"But of course we'll be ramping up again as we approach 2020 and the next Mars rover," said Beth Robinson, the agency's chief financial officer.

Bolden said NASA's Mars research is the biggest part of the planetary science budget.

Asteroids and comets are popular fodder for Earth-ending science fiction movies. Two of the biggest blockbusters came out in 1998: "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon." (Walt Disney Studios) Others include "Meteorites!" (1998), "Doomsday Rock" (1997), "Asteroid" (1997), "Meteor" (1979), and "A Fire in the Sky" (1978). Can you name others?

[...]

SPACE JUNK

Did you ever walk around town, getting annoyed at all the rubbish? It's quite easy to pick it up and put it in a bin, although you wouldn't think so looking at the state of some areas. In space, unfortunately, there are no litter bins are no floating cleanup people with a long stick happily prodding away at the rubbish. If there was there would  need to be a very large rubbish bin in orbit around the Earth.

At the end of 2003, there were some 10 000 catalogued debris objects around Earth, comprising:

operational spacecraft — 7%
old spacecraft — 22%
rocket bodies — 17%
mission-related objects — 13%
miscellaneous fragments — 41%
Artificial debris includes spent satellites, cast off Yo-Yo de-spinners (used to de-spin spacecraft after launch), tools dropped during spacewalks, discarded rocket upper stages and the fragmentary remains of craft that have exploded or otherwise broken up.

There are around 50 000 more uncatalogued objects larger than 1 cm floating around waiting for a satellite or spacecraft to hit. Uncatalogued objects include nuts and bolts, gloves, bits of aluminium slag from solid rocket motor propellant and droplets of Sodium-Potassium coolant that escaped from Russian nuclear-powered reconnaissance satellites when they ejected their reactor cores.

The really dangerous bits are intermediate in size, between 1 and 10 cm. These are hard to detect yet pack a kinetic energy punch sufficient to cause catastrophic damage. One cm is also the maximum size of debris that can be defeated by modern shielding technology; Space Shuttle windscreens have been damaged by flecks of paint as small as 0.3 mm in size travelling at a mere 14 400 kph. The fastest debris, at 50 000 kph, are travelling about 17 times faster than a machine gun bullet.

Do you still fancy that joyride into orbit? Well, luckily enough, it's not as dangerous as it sounds. Preventative measures have been taken so that being in orbit isn't a death sentence. Paint flakes and solid rocket propellant causes erosive damage similar to sandblasting. Most of the damage can be stopped through the use of a technique originally developed to protect spacecraft from micrometeorites, by adding a thin layer of metal foil outside of the main spacecraft body.

Impacts take place at such high velocities that the debris is vaporized when it collides with the foil, and the resulting plasma spreads out quickly enough that it does not cause serious damage to the inner wall. Many satellites cannot be protected this way, the solar panels and windows for instance, and they receive constant wear by debris and micrometeorites. So don't look at the view for too long and take some spare batteries for your CD player for when the solar panels are damaged.

Orbital debris in Saudi Arabia

The only way to stop damage from larger bits and pieces is to move the satellite or spacecraft. This means that you must be able to see the space debris. The NASA orbital debris program office observes the debris in various ways. Ground-based optical telescopes and radars provide a lot of information and to supplement this impacts are measured on spacecraft or satellites that have returned to the Earth.

The international space station can change its orbit, but if the space junk isn't seen early enough then it is too late to move the station and the crew retreats to a safe area, in this case the Soyuz capsule. This happened quite recently in March 12th 2009.

Of course, something hitting a spacecraft, space station or satellite will cause more space junk as bits will be broken off or the whole of the satellite made into junk.

If you're thinking that this doesn't affect you , then you are wrong. This is not just confined to space as the debris's orbit can decay and rain down on the Earth. One spectacular piece of space junk was the Skylab. The Skylab couldn't maintain its orbit long enough for the space shuttle to rescue it and therefore its orbit decayed.
http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/history/skylab/skylab.htm

There has only been one recorded incident of a person being hit by human-made space debris. In 1997 an Oklahoma woman named Lottie Williams was hit in the shoulder by a 10 x 13 centimetre piece of blackened, woven metallic material that was later confirmed to be part of the fuel tank of a Delta II rocket which had launched a U.S. Air Force satellite in 1996. She was not injured

Really, space is a great place and we marvel at its beauty. It should be treated as a national park, or the orbit of Earth anyway (to make the whole of space a national park would be a rather large undertaking). Debris produced today is being limited at the moment, and that is fine, but what about all the junk already there?

A few ideas have come up, such as junk-zapping lasers and garbage-collecting rockets. The most well-known of these projects is the Orion Project, a major study which began in the late 1970s, and which continues to undergo development with help from NASA and other government agencies. The focus of Orion has been to look at the possibility of using high-powered laser-light beams to actually deflect orbital debris out of the way of spacecraft and into the Earths atmosphere where it can burn up out of harms way.

There is probably some quite historical space junk flying around the Earth , and perhaps one day it will be captured, sorted through and put into a museum. But for now "duck" may become an astronaut's favorite word.



[...]

NASA's Idea

What do you do with 6,000 tons of space junk traveling at thousands of miles an hour? 
Harpoon it of course.

(CNN) --  It might sound like a scenario straight off the pages of a science fiction novel but it is a suggested solution to an increasing and potentially costly problem in space -- that of debris littering low earth orbit.

The harpoon plan is one of a range of options being discussed by scientists at a forum in Germany next week, and aimed at finding a way of tackling space debris that threatens commercial operations.

Engineer Jaime Reed, who is leading the harpoon project for the space technology company Astrium, explains that if a rogue satellite hits another, not only does it ruin the mission but it creates more debris and propagates the problem. This run-away scenario is often called the Kessler Syndrome, named after NASA's Don Kessler who first highlighted the risk.

"There's a lot of space debris -- 6,000 tons in orbit -- that could pose a threat," said Reed.

"Perhaps unwittingly, the average person relies a lot on space -- GPS in their phones, telecoms, TV, weather forecasts -- they are things people expect to have," he said.


Dangers of debris in Space:
"Space debris could very easily take out some of those satellites -- it would have a real impact on people's lives."

Astrium's plan to tackle defunct satellites is to use an unmanned chase spacecraft to get in range, fire a barbed harpoon into the body of the rogue hardware and then use a smaller propulsion unit attached to a tether to tow it back towards the atmosphere where it will burn up safely on re-entry.

"Because the harpoon we are using is very light and the chase satellite more than a ton, momentum is very tiny... it's a small recoil," said Reed.

The harpoon system has been tested in the laboratory in the UK and Reed will present findings at the conference on Wednesday.

Reed estimates that the system could tackle 10 targets per mission and says simulations show that if five to 10 objects were removed each year then that would "stabilize the debris population."

He said he hoped the next step would be a demonstration mission to capture something small.

So how big is the problem? Reed warns that if space junk is not removed it could mean that low-earth orbit might eventually become unusable.

According to NASA there are about 20,000 pieces of space junk bigger than 10cm (3.9 inches) and its chief scientist for orbital debris Nicholas L. Johnson says most robotic satellite missions are vulnerable to particles as small as 5mm (0.2 inches) -- there are thought to be millions of those in orbit.

"A 5mm (0.2 inches) particle striking a large solar array is likely to have a very little long-lasting effect, but such an object hitting the main body of a satellite could cause a vital component to fail," he said.

"Normally, it takes the impact of an object about 10cm (3.9 inches) or larger to cause the satellite to suffer a severe fragmentation in which large numbers of new debris would be created.

"Collision speeds can vary from less than 1km per second (2,236mph) to 16km per second (35,790mph)."

He explained that ground-based radars are able to track objects of about 10cm (3.9 inches) and sometimes smaller, depending on altitude above the earth, while other sensors can detect particles down to about 5mm (0.2 inches) in low earth orbit.

"Space debris poses real threats to both human space flight and robotic missions. However, today those threats are largely handled by spacecraft design and operation techniques," said Johnson. "Since the 1980s considerable efforts have been made to curtail the creation of new space debris."

The NASA scientist said the odds of an operational satellite being disabled by space debris remain quite small, though he points out that two have been lost after being hit by man-made debris -- a French satellite in 1996 and an American craft in 2009.

Last month, CNN reported that space debris left over from a 2007 Chinese missile test had collided with a Russian satellite, according to a researcher at the Center for Space Standards & Innovation.

And in 2012 the crew of the space station were ordered into escape capsules as a precaution after a piece of debris passed close by.

Both Reed and Johnson say the focus over the last 30 years has been on mitigation but NASA and other space agencies are looking at ways to remove large derelict spacecraft and rocket launch stages for low earth orbit.

The harpoon is clearly aimed at capturing the larger objects but many other solutions have been proposed, including the use of lasers to nudge space junk out of the way, or using giant nets and space tugs.

"It's a very active area," said Reed. "Lots of people are coming up with ideas."

[Warph]

The Worst Natural Disasters Ever

....when Nature unleashes her fury, humanity can seem instantly frail and subordinate. Cyclones, tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanoes can kill thousands in moments. Often the final death tolls are never truly known.

It is impossible to compare modern and historical disasters and develop any objective list of the worst, yet a subjective list can prove instructive. Here are the challenges:

•Loss of life can be the most traumatic aspect of one terrible event, such as the catastrophic Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar this week, whereas financial cost and remarkable devastation can be the more notable signatures left by another, as was the case with Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
•The world's population has increased dramatically in the past century and a far higher percentage of people live near dangerous coastlines, so coastal storms and tsunamis stand to kill more people nowadays than in the past.
•Finally, records of events long ago are typically much less accurate.
All that in mind, here we present 15 of the worst disasters of all time in reverse chronological order, with no attempt to rate one in comparison to another. We recognize the list is weighted heavily with modern events and that other disasters — both in modern times and in the distant past — could arguably supplant some of these based on individual perspective and interpretation.

May 2008 - The death toll from Cyclone Nargis remains uncertain but has been put at 140,000 or more. Caught with nowhere to run, residents of low-lying rice fields in Maynmar were simply swept away.

Oct. 8, 2005 - Magnitude-7.6 earthquake in Pakistan killed more than 40,000 people. The destruction was due in part to the quake's shallow origin.

August 2005 - Hurricane Katrina killed more than 1,800 people and is the costliest hurricane in U.S. history. More so than any U.S. disaster in recent decades, its effects linger even today as New Orleans and many coastal communities still struggle to get back on their feet.

Dec. 26, 2004 - The magnitude-9.3 Indian Ocean earthquake and resulting Sumatran tsunami is estimated to have killed more than 225,000 people. It affected a broader region and more people than any modern disaster.

1992 - Hurricane Andrew killed 26, but property damage was $25 billion -- most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history at the time.

1985 - Nevado del Ruiz (Columbia) volcano killed 25,000 people, most caught in a massive mudflow.

1976 - Tangshan earthquake in China, a magnitude-8 event, killed somewhere between 255,000 and 655,000.

1931 - Yellow River flood, estimated to have killed 1 million to 3.7 million people via drowning, disease, ensuing famines and droughts. The river also had flooded catastrophically in 1887, killing nearly as many.

1815 - Tambora, Indonesia, volcano of 1815. 80,000 people died of subsequent famine.

1811-12 - Three New Madrid earthquakes in Missouri represent some of the strongest earthquakes in the contiguous United States in recorded history. With magnitudes estimated as high as 7.8 or so, they were felt as far away as Boston. Damage was relatively light due to sparse population, but the quakes serve as a frightening reminder of how fickle nature can be and they are also alarmingly predictive of what could happen in the future now that the area is far more populous.

1737 - Calcutta, India, event killed 300,000. Once thought to have been an earthquake, scientists now lean toward typhoon.

1556 - Shaanzi, China, earthquake killed 830,000. Nobody knows the seismic magnitude.

1330-1351 - The Black Death or Bubonic Plague, a pandemic caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis, killed an estimated 75 million people, wiping out somewhere between 30 to 60 percent of Europe's population.

1138 - Aleppo earthquake in Syria, killed about 230,000. It is listed by the U.S. Geological Survey as the fourth deadliest earthquake of all time.

1500 B.C., or so - The Mediterranean Stroggli island blew up. A tsunami virtually wiped out Minoan civilization. Area now called Santorini; Plato called it the site where Atlantis disappeared.

[Warph]

GIANT ASTEROID HEADING FOR EARTH 2014!

....that a a gigantic asteroid is heading for earth and may make a... deep impact! It's the biggest threat to Earth in a millenium.

The space rock, which is called 2014 AZ5, is about 960 feet  wide, shaped like a giant potato.  It may hit Earth in late 2013 and there are urgent meetings going on among scientists on how deflect it.

Talk about the asteroid was on the agenda during the 49th session of the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space ( COPUOS), held earlier this month in Vienna.

A UN Action Team on near-Earth objects noted the asteroid's repeat approaches to Earth and the possibility, that 2014 AZ5 might hit us in twelve months.

The object was discovered in January 2011 by Mount Lemmon Survey observers in Tucson, Ariz. While scientists have a good bead on the space rock's size, its mass and compositional makeup are unknown at present.

"2014 AZ5 is the object which currently has the highest chance of impacting Earth in March of 2013," said Quami Lochmo of the European Space Agency's Solar System Missions Division in the Dutch city of Noordwijk.

"We are currently also in the process of making governments around the world aware of the situation,"  Lochmo said. "

The near-Earth asteroid 2014 Az5  has an impact probability of 1 in 125 for March 17, 2013, said Donald Lochmo.

This impact probability isn't set in stone, however.  It can be changed slightly.

It's not clear what part of Earth the asteroid will hit first, but some are speculating that California in the United States may get the biggest impact

Obama Seeks $17.7 Billion for NASA to Lasso Asteroid, Explore Space by Tariq Malik, SPACE.com Managing Editor
http://www.space.com/20605-nasa-budget-asteroid-lasso-2014.html


[...]

Then there is this article:

2014 AZ5: The Fake Asteroid that Won't Hit Earth

Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/100570/2014-az5-the-fake-asteroid-that-wont-hit-earth/#ixzz2SxYAHGm9

Be careful where you get your news. Some websites have headlines that are screaming "GIANT ASTEROID HEADING TO EARTH!" or "2014 END OF THE WORLD!" It's been billed as the largest threat to Earth in a millennium, and this supposed nearly 300 meter (1,000 ft.) -wide asteroid is spurring "urgent meetings going on among scientists on how deflect it."

This asteroid can't hit Earth because it doesn't exist. Or at the very least, it doesn't exist yet. The first clue this asteroid is a fake is its name: 2014 AZ5. Asteroids are named for the year they are discovered, and since it is only 2013.... well, you see the issue.

[Diane Amberg]

Nah, my sources tell me that is a fake asteroid drummed up for the nay sayers.
 It really is a huge potato that escaped from the gravity of the Vegeron galaxy. If the dairy industry can get it's act together in time they will be producing the butter and sour cream. California has offered parsley. Great for their economy.
NASA is going to try to nudge it down in Bullfrog County Nevada. They figure by the time it enters our atmosphere it will be well baked and ready to serve.  When they know for sure when it will land, tickets for dinner will be available from the NV Chamber of Commerce. Price to be announced. Music will be provided by the group "Loco Talentt."

[Warph]

....that there's 10 Things You Didn't Know About You:

1. Your Stomach Secretes Corrosive Acid - There's one dangerous liquid no airport security can confiscate from you: It's in your gut. Your stomach cells secrete hydrochloric acid, a corrosive compound used to treat metals in the industrial world. It can pickle steel, but mucous lining the stomach wall keeps this poisonous liquid safely in the digestive system, breaking down lunch.


2. Body Position Affects Your Memory - Can't remember your anniversary, hubby? Try getting down on one knee. Memories are highly embodied in our senses. A scent or sound may evoke a distant episode from one's childhood. The connections can be obvious (a bicycle bell makes you remember your old paper route) or inscrutable. A recent study helps decipher some of this embodiment. An article in the January 2007 issue of Cognition reports that episodes from your past are remembered faster and better while in a body position similar to the pose struck during the event.


3. Bones Break (Down) to Balance Minerals - In addition to supporting the bag of organs and muscles that is our body, bones help regulate our calcium levels. Bones contain both phosphorus and calcium, the latter of which is needed by muscles and nerves. If the element is in short supply, certain hormones will cause bones to break down�upping calcium levels in the body�until the appropriate extracellular concentration is reached.


4. Much of a Meal is Food For Thought - Though it makes up only 2 percent of our total body weight, the brain demands 20 percent of the body's oxygen and calories. To keep our noggin well-stocked with resources, three major cerebral arteries are constantly pumping in oxygen. A blockage or break in one of them starves brain cells of the energy they require to function, impairing the functions controlled by that region. This is a stroke.


5. Thousands of Eggs Unused by Ovaries - When a woman reaches her late 40s or early 50s, the monthly menstrual cycle that controls her hormone levels and readies ova for insemination ceases. Her ovaries have been producing less and less estrogen, inciting physical and emotional changes across her body. Her underdeveloped egg follicles begin to fail to release ova as regularly as before. The average adolescent girl has 34,000 underdeveloped egg follicles, although only 350 or so mature during her life (at the rate of about one per month). The unused egg follicles then deteriorate. With no potential pregnancy on the horizon, the brain can stop managing the release of ova.


6. Puberty Reshapes Brain Structure, Makes for Missed Curfews - We know that hormone-fueled changes in the body are necessary to encourage growth and ready the body for reproduction. But why is adolescence so emotionally unpleasant? Hormones like testosterone actually influence the development of neurons in the brain, and the changes made to brain structure have many behavioral consequences. Expect emotional awkwardness, apathy and poor decision-making skills as regions in the frontal cortex mature.


7. Cell Hairs Move Mucus - Most cells in our bodies sport hair-like organelles called cilia that help out with a variety of functions, from digestion to hearing. In the nose, cilia help to drain mucus from the nasal cavity down to the throat. Cold weather slows down the draining process, causing a mucus backup that can leave you with snotty sleeves. Swollen nasal membranes or condensation can also cause a stuffed schnozzle.


8. Big Brains Cause Cramped Mouths - Evolution isn't perfect. If it were, we might have wings instead of wisdom teeth. Sometimes useless features stick around in a species simply because they're not doing much harm. But wisdom teeth weren't always a cash crop for oral surgeons. Long ago, they served as a useful third set of meat-mashing molars. But as our brains grew our jawbone structure changed, leaving us with expensively overcrowded mouths.


9. The World Laughs With You - Just as watching someone yawn can induce the behavior in yourself, recent evidence suggests that laughter is a social cue for mimicry. Hearing a laugh actually stimulates the brain region associated with facial movements. Mimicry plays an important role in social interaction. Cues like sneezing, laughing, crying and yawning may be ways of creating strong social bonds within a group.


10. Your Skin Has Four Colors - All skin, without coloring, would appear creamy white. Near-surface blood vessels add a blush of red. A yellow pigment also tints the canvas. Lastly, sepia-toned melanin, created in response to ultraviolet rays, appears black in large amounts. These four hues mix in different proportions to create the skin colors of all the peoples of Earth.

[Warph]

The Humble Pencil

.... that with the pencil increasingly marginalized by technology, we reflect on its relatively recent origin in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte. At least by the reckoning of one scientist, a single pencil can draw a line 731 miles (1178 kilometers) long:

Nicholas-Jacques Conte

"The modern pencil was invented in 1795 by Nicholas-Jacques Conte, a scientist serving in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte.

The magic material that was so appropriate for the purpose was the form of pure carbon that we call graphite. It was first discovered in Europe, in Bavaria at the start of the fifteenth century; although the Aztecs had used it as a marker several hundred years earlier. Initially it was believed to be a form of lead and was called 'plumbago' or black lead (hence the 'plumbers' who mend our lead water-carrying pipes), a misnomer that still echoes in our talk of pencil 'leads'. It was called graphite only in 1789, using the Greek word 'graphein' meaning 'to write'. Pencil is an older word, derived from the Latin 'pencillus', meaning 'little tail', to describe the small ink brushes used for writing in the Middle Ages.


"The purest deposits of lump graphite were found in Borrowdale near Keswick [England] in the Lake District in 1564 and spawned quite a smuggling industry and associated black economy in the area. During the nineteenth century a major pencil manufacturing industry developed around Keswick in order to exploit the high quality of the graphite. The first factory opened in 1832, and the Cumberland Pencil Company has just celebrated its 175th anniversary; although the local mines have long been closed and supplies of the graphite used now come from Sri Lanka and other far away places. Cumberland pencils were those of the highest quality because the graphite used shed no dust and marked the paper very well. Conte's original process for manufacturing pencils involved roasting a mixture of water, clay and graphite in a kiln at 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit before encasing the resulting soft solid in a wooden surround. The shape of that surround can be square, polygonal or round, depending on the pencil's intended use -- carpenters don't want round pencils that are going to roll off the workbench. The hardness or softness of the final pencil 'lead' can be determined by adjusting the relative fractions of clay and graphite in the roasting mixture. Commercial pencil manufacturers typically market 20 grades of pencil, from the softest, 9B, to the hardest 9H, with the most popular intermediate value, HB, lying midway between H and B. 'H' means hard and 'B' means black. The higher the B number, the more graphite gets left on the paper. There is also an 'F', or Fine point, which is a hard pencil for writing rather than drawing.


"The strange thing about graphite is that it is a form of pure carbon that is one of the softest solids known, and one of the best lubricants because the six carbon atoms that link to form a ring can slide easily over adjacent rings. Yet, if the atomic structure is changed, there is another crystalline form of pure carbon, diamond, that is one of the hardest solids known.

"An interesting question is to ask how long a straight line could be drawn with a typical HB pencil before the lead was exhausted. The thickness of graphite left on a sheet of paper by a soft 2B pencil is about 20 nanometres and a carbon atom has a diameter of 0.14 nanometres, so the pencil line is only about 143 atoms thick. The pencil lead is about 1 mm in radius and therefore π square mm in area. If the length of the pencil is 15 cm, then the volume of graphite to be spread out on a straight line is 150π cubic mm. If we draw a line of thickness 20 nanometres and width 2 mm, then there will be enough lead to continue for a distance L = 150π / 4 X 10-7 mm = 1,178 kilometres. But I haven't tested this prediction!"

[Warph]

Where Did The Alphabet Come From

...that the invention of the first alphabet -- a much simpler system of writing using only 20 to 30 characters as compared to the thousands required in a hieroglyphic system -- unleashed an era in which broad literacy and abstract ideas were possible to an unprecedented degree. Though it is popularly believed the alphabet came from the Phoenicians, this invention pre-dated them and may have come from the Egyptians:

"In February, 1905, after exploring the Middle East for more than two decades, [British archeologist Flinders] Petrie and his wife arrived at an old turquoise formation in the western Sinai at Serabit el-Khadim, which had been mined as recently as fifty years before by a retired English major and his family. There, although he and others did not realize it for years, Petrie made the most important discovery of his career.

"At the mine the Petries came upon a large collection of statues and inscriptions. Most were expertly carved and bore standard hieroglyphic or hieratic writing, almost certainly produced by the mine's Egyptian overseers.

"His observant wife Hilda also found some rocks bearing cruder inscriptions. On closer inspection, they noted that this writing included only about thirty or so different symbols that were not recognizably hieroglyphic or hieratic -- both hieroglyphic and hieratic writing used about a thousand symbols. Further, these simpler inscriptions always coincided with primitive, non-Egyptian statues; the writing appeared to flow from left to right, also unlike the well-known hieroglyphic, hieratic, or later Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets.

"Petrie dated the inscriptions to approximately 1400 BC. He clearly recognized them as an alphabet, and one that preceded by about five hundred years the earliest known Phoenician writing, heretofore felt to be the first alphabet. ...

"It fell to an Egyptologist, Alan Gardiner, to realize that the Petries had actually stumbled across the origin of the alphabet, or something very close to it. Linguists had long known that Latin script -- the everyday alphabet of today's Western world -- evolved from Greek letters, which had themselves derived from Phoenician, as did Hebrew. ...

"Over the millennium following the alphabet's invention around 1500 BC, the simple phonemic lettering system Petrie discovered made possible the first stirrings of mass literacy that would unleash much of the subsequent political and social ferment of human history.

"On the basis of archaeological and linguistic evidence, most authorities believe that the proto-Semitic inscriptions the Petries first found at Serabit derived from Egyptian hieratic or hieroglyphic writing. While the precise origin of the proto-Semitic alphabet will never be known, the Serabit inscriptions suggest that it was probably invented somewhere in the Sinai or Canaan by non-Egyptian Semites who had come there from somewhere in the Levant to work as miners for the Egyptians.

"Did the first simplified alphabetic script really originate in the mines at Serabit? After Flinders' excavations there, archaeologists uncovered, at several other sites in Palestine, more primitive inscriptions that look alphabetic and possibly predate the Serabit inscriptions by as much as a century or two. More recently, an American research team has uncovered proto-Semitic inscriptions at Wadi el-Hol, several hundred miles south of Serabit el-Khadim, on the Nile; they suggest that the Egyptians may have in fact invented the script to better communicate with their Semitic workers/slaves.

"Another intriguing candidate for 'inventor of the alphabet' is the Midianites, a Sinai people who mined copper and who could have derived it from the writing of their Egyptian overseers in the same way as did the miners of Serabit. ...

"[The rise of monotheism was during the same period and] the temporal and geographic connection between the alphabet and monotheism in Egypt-Palestine during the middle of the second millennium may be more than coincidence. What might tie them together? The notion of a disembodied, formless, all-seeing, and ever-present supreme being requires a far more abstract frame of mind than that needed for the older plethora of anthropomorphized beings who oversaw the heavenly bodies, the crops, fertility, and the seas. Alphabetic writing requires the same high degree of abstraction and may have provided a literate priestly caste with the intellectual tools necessary to imagine a belief system overseen by a single disembodied deity. Whatever the reason, Judaism and the West acquired their God and their Book."

[Warph]

"Mass Production Employees Are Stupid"

....that to build cars cheaply enough for the average person to buy, Henry Ford had to redesign the assembly line according to the dictates of Frederick Taylor, breaking down each task into its simplest components so that each worker was responsible for a single task that could be repeated all day with a minimum of wasted motion and time. This proved so dehumanizing that turnover skyrocketed to 350 percent. To counteract this, Ford doubled his wages. This paradox of rote work and high wages ushered in the beginnings of the great American urban middle class:

"The central challenge confronting the automobile industry was economic as well as technological: how to build an automobile inexpensive enough so that people other than the wealthy could buy it. The man who most successfully tackled this problem was Henry Ford, a former machinist and mechanical engineer from Michigan, who built his first automobile in 1896 and in 1903 founded the Ford Motor Company. ...

"Ford achieved this success by improving the techniques of mass production, putting into practice what he called 'the principles of power, accuracy, economy, system, continuity, and speed.' Particularly in the pioneering plant he opened in Highland Park, Michigan, in 1910, he invested heavily in highly specialized machinery while simultaneously subdividing labor on the shop floor. To further the goals of continuity and speed, Ford in 1913 adopted the moving assembly line, a network of conveyor belts and overhead chains that carried all pieces of the automobile from one worker to the next. 'Every piece of work in the shop moves,' Ford observed a few years later. 'There is no lifting or trucking of anything other than materials.' The moving assembly line produced substantial savings, in part because employees were compelled to work more intensively, at a pre-set rhythm. Within a decade, the moving assembly line was adopted throughout the industry, hastening the disappearance of small manufacturers who could not afford to retool their plants.

"1928 Ford Rouge Complex Model A assembly line negative
from the Ford Motor Company archives.

"Ford's assembly line and his production techniques in general were exemplars of 'scientific management,' a phrase and approach made popular by Philadelphia engineer and businessman Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor was one of the nation's first specialists in shop-floor management, and his short book The Principles of Scientific Management was the best-selling business book of the first half of the twentieth century. Taylor believed that workplaces could be made more efficient by training, inducing, and compelling workers to labor more steadily and intensively. He conducted time and motion studies to analyze the tasks workers were expected to perform and then encouraged employers to reorganize the work process to minimize wasted motion and time. He also favored piece-rate payment schemes to compel employees, many of whom he described as 'stupid,' to work more quickly. 'Faster work can be assured,' wrote Taylor, 'only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements ... and enforced cooperation.'

"Not surprisingly, most industrial workers resisted such schemes. One worker at the Ford Motor Company complained that 'when the whistle blows he starts to jerk and when the whistle blows again he stops jerking.' At Ford and elsewhere, a common response to the brutal intensification of work was absenteeism and high quit rates: in 1913, Ford's daily absentee rate was 10 percent, while annual turnover exceeded 350 percent. To reduce turnover, which was costly to the company, Ford doubled the daily wages of his most valued employees, to five dollars a day. This strategy was successful in stabilizing the labor force and reducing operating costs."