"So who was the frugal genius who decided to stuff an animal’s meat into its own intestine? In other words, who invented sausage? The answer is not so simple. If we consider the meaning of the word “sausage,” it would lead us to the Latin word salsus, which means ‘to prepare by salting.’ As Latin is primarily associated with the Roman Empire, it is not a far stretch of the imagination to guess that the Romans graced us with sausage among their many legacies. But unfortunately, no credit can go to the Romans. The first men to make a sausages would do so by stuffing cooked intestines into animal stomachs, but they would do it thousands of years before the Romans.
These first sausages date back to the Sumerian culture in Mesopotamia, which is modern-day Iraq. This would have all happened around 3000 BC. Residents of China also get credit for being a close 2nd around 580BC. There is even a play by a Greek author entitled “The Sausage,” which was created around 550BC. Unfortunately, the brave soul who invented sausage by deciding to stuff meat scraps in an intestine is lost to history, so we can only wonder what his inspiration was. We like to believe that he or she was the first to really mix it up on leftover night."===http://www.ponderweasel.com/who-invented-sausage/
"The global average temperature over land and ocean surfaces for January to October 2014 was the highest on record, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It said October was the hottest since records began in 1880.
NOAA said the combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for the January-October period was 0.68°C (1.22°F) above the 20th century average of 14.1°C (57.4°F). For October, it was 0.74°C (1.33°F) above the 20th century average of 14.0°C (57.1°F).
The high October temperature was driven by warmth across the globe over both the land and ocean surfaces and was fairly evenly distributed between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. The Southern Hemisphere had its hottest October on record and the Northern Hemisphere its third warmest.
October marked the third consecutive month and fifth of the past six with a record high global temperature for its respective month (July was fourth highest).
The Tokyo Climate Center, which is a WMO Regional Climate Centre, also reported that October was the hottest on record. The record was also confirmed by data from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies."===http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...075729.htm
"The red supergiant star Betelgeuse is getting ready to go supernova, and when it does Earth will have a front-row seat. The explosion will be so bright that Earth will briefly seem to have two suns in the sky.
The star is located in the Orion constellation, about 640 light-years away from Earth. It's one of the brightest and biggest stars in our galactic neighborhood - if you dropped it in our Solar System, it would extend all the way out to Jupiter, leaving Earth completely engulfed. In stellar terms, it's predicted to explode in the very near future. Of course, the conversion from stellar to human terms is pretty extreme, as Betelgeuse is predicted to explode anytime in the next million years.
But still, whether the explosion occurs in 2011 or 1002011 (give or take 640 years for the light to reach Earth), it's going to make for one of the most unforgettable light shows in our planet's history. For a few weeks, the supernova will be so bright that there will appear to be two stars in the sky, and night will be indistinguishable from day for much of that time. So don't count on getting a lot of sleep when Betelgeuse explodes, because the only sensible thing for the world to do will be to throw a weeks-long global supernova party.
Physicist Brad Carter explains what Earth (and hopefully humanity) can look forward to:
"This is the final hurrah for the star. It goes bang, it explodes, it lights up - we'll have incredible brightness for a brief period of time for a couple of weeks and then over the coming months it begins to fade and then eventually it will be very hard to see at all."=====http://io9.com/5738542/earth-may-soon-have-a-second-sun
"Apparently, Ernest Hemingway was lunching at Luchow’s with a number of writers and claimed that he could write a short story that was only six words long. Of course, the other writers balked. Hemingway told each of them to put ten dollars in the middle of the table; if he was wrong, he said, he’d match it. If he was right, he would keep the entire pot. He quickly wrote six words down on a napkin and passed it around; Papa won the bet. The words were “FOR SALE, BABY SHOES, NEVER WORN.” A beginning, a middle and an end!
The six word story was also mentioned by author Arthur C. Clarke in a letter dated 11 Oct. 1991:
“My favourite is Hemingway’s—he’s supposed to have won a $10 bet (no small sum in the ’20s) from his fellow writers. They paid up without a word. . . .
Here it is. I still can’t think of it without crying—FOR SALE. BABY SHOES. NEVER WORN.”
Quote Investigator suggests possible sources for the story may be early advertisements from 1906 onwards; newspaper stories, the first from 1910; or even an essay on creative writing by William R. Kane from 1917.
Whatever the truth of the matter, this short story does succeed in telling a moving tale in just six simple words, and the anecdote about its origin does little to change Hemingway‘s position as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Here’s how Mr. Hemingway described the author’s role in his Nobel Prize winning speech in 1954:
“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
“For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.”====http://dangerousminds.net/comments/ernes...hort_story
Here's a list of shortest short stories submitted to Wired by famous people:
A walking irony. The art of posing as someone who is NOT posing. Yet another foray of the 20 somethings into the multidimensional realm of the countercultural.
"Whether you put milk in your cup before or after the hot water is a constant argument among British people. Science may say milk first, but many would strongly disagree..."
EXCERPT: On 12 November 1942, the mathematician Alan Turing arrived in New York, bound for Washington DC and the headquarters of the US Secret Service, an organisation now known as the CIA. More than 500 American ships had been sunk by German U-boats since the US began sending supplies across the Atlantic to Europe in 1941 and naval authorities were growing impatient with Britain’s reluctance to share more than cursory details of progress at decrypting messages sent by the German high command and encoded by the Enigma machine.
Officially, Turing was meant to disclose everything he and his team at Bletchley Park knew about the workings of Enigma. In reality, he was under strict instructions from MI6 to act as its official liar and keep the Americans in the dark as much as possible. It was a strange role for a Cambridge mathematician with a fondness for crossword puzzles, but Turing’s wartime work had landed him in the midst of a game of high-stakes diplomacy.
Unknown to the Americans, Britain had been deciphering messages to and from the German U-boat fleet since the summer of 1940. Within weeks of arriving at Bletchley Park, Turing had invented an electromechanical machine called the Bombe that could break any Enigma-coded message.
[...] MI6 was especially wary of letting its American allies into the loop, fearing not only that the information would leak but that Britain would receive little of value in return. With the US Navy and US Army operating almost entirely independently, often plotting against each other, British intelligence was convinced the information would be used unwisely.
Turing’s role in Washington was to liaise with the leading American cryptanalysts and convince them that Britain was struggling to match their expertise while taking note of the machines they were developing, in particular a speech encryption system being developed for private conversations between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. Judging by the minutes of the meetings, it’s a role he played perfectly, in a stark contrast to his common portrayal on screen as someone incapable of judging the nuances of social situations.
“He absolutely hated it because he had to play dumb while being grilled by these mathematicians,” Moore says. “He had to pretend to be wowed by the progress the Americans were making even though they were light years behind the British at that point. But he had them convinced.”
Turing’s own reports from Washington are filled with disdain for what he saw as America’s overreliance on technology rather than thought. “I am persuaded that one cannot very well trust these people where a matter of judgment in cryptography is concerned,” he wrote. “It astonished me to find that they make these elaborate calculations before they had really grasped the main principles. [But] I think we can make quite a lot of use of their machinery.”...
EXCERPT: [....] Specific areas of the brain process facial information. Damage to those areas gives rise to prosopagnosia or “face blindness”: an inability or difficulty with recognising faces. While brain damage-induced prosopagnosia is rare, prosopagnosia itself is not. Studies suggest around 2% of the population could have some form of prosopagnosia. These “developmental” prosopagnosics seem to be born without the ability to recognise faces and don’t acquire it, relying instead on all manner of cues, from gait to hairstyles, to tell people apart.....
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