How Long is a Moment?

A “moment,”  is actually a medieval unit of time and is equal to 90 seconds.

Source: karenswhimsy.com

Why Using Shampoo is Like Pouring Your Money Down the Drain?

Shampoos Are a Waste of Money!

You are just a targeted consumer segment. You are made to believe these are life needs .
You then spend a fortune of time and money on products that are effectively undoing the damage caused by shampoo.

It’s the dirty little secret many shampoo companies don’t want you to know.  

When you wash your hair with certain traditional shampoos, you may actually be stripping your hair and scalp of their natural oils.  

Many shampoos usually rely on sodium laurel sulfate or other damaging detergents for cleansing.  

While these generate a thick lather to clean hair, they can also create dryness, frizziness, dullness, and color fade.

Too much shampooing, it’s argued, strips hair of its natural oils and can leave it dry and damaged. 

Why? 
It's because shampoo stimulates even more sebum production by the scalp, acting like an insidious drug that creates a greater need for its use. 

Simply rinsing hair with water or using a baking soda solution for shampoo , it’s said, will get your hair clean, make it shinier, balance your scalp’s oil production, save you money, and help out the environment. 

The seductive scent of commercial shampoos — what we’ve come to understand as the smell of “clean” is too well brainwashed to consumers that they feel unclean without using it.

What is Amelioration?

Amelioration 

- words that move up in the world. Their meanings change with time, becoming more positive—a process linguists call amelioration. Here are some ameliorated words that were a pinch more negative back in the day.

1. Amaze: Make crazy; confuse with terror (1200s; 1770s)

2. Amuse: Cheat, delude, or deceive (1400s)

3. Awesome: Terrifying (1670s)

4. Boy: A servant, knave, or commoner (1250s)

5. Brave: Uncivilized or savage; showy (1400s)

6. Careful: Mournful, woeful; full of anxiousness (1100s)

7. Comical: Epileptic (~1100s)

8. Cool: Calmly Audacious (1825)

9. Courage: Temper (1300s)

10. Croon: To groan or lament (1400s)

11. Dizzy: Stupid (~1100s)

12. Eager: Fierce or angry; sour, harsh, or bitter (1200s)

13. Fond: Foolish, silly (1350s)

14. Fun: Cheat, trick, or hoax (1680s)

15. Glorious: Boastful (1400s)

16. Knight: A male servant; boy (~1000s)

17. Meticulous: Fearful, timid, and full of dread (1530s)

18. Mischievous: Disastrous (1300s)

19. Nice: Stupid or ignorant; careless or clumsy (1200s)

20. Pragmatic: Meddlesome; tastelessly busy (1600s)

21. Pretty: Deceitful, tricky, or sly (~1200s)

22. Sophisticated: Unnatural; contaminated (1600s)

23. Sustainable: Bearable (1610s)

24. Ravishing: Extremely hungry (1350s)

Why the military combatants and the Boy Scouts campers needs superglue?

Superglue, though medically not advised can perfectly bond your skin. 

Remember that little accident when your child suddenly squeezed a punctured superglue barrel in his hand?
You can learn from that superglue characteristic to your advantage.

If you incised your skin and you have troubles clipping the lipped flesh wound back together,the superglue can be your first aid rescue, until a proper medical assistance is available.

Superglue sticks even on wet surfaces.
In wounds, you just have to be careful not to put its gel into the open flesh .

So that's why combatans and campers must carry a superglue everytime, in case of accidents, to prevent profuse bleeding.

Of course it is not a proper medical procedure but at least you can ease the open wound a bit until a doctor arrives or until you get the patient
to the hospital.

Why it's easy for a girl to charm her way to get what he want's from a man?

Did you know that after a conversation with an attractive woman, men…

13.07.2013 BY JOHN BENNETT 

Why is the reading of your rights when apprehended by the police called the Miranda Warning?

Who Was "Miranda" of the Miranda Warning?

(This is a re blog )

Stacy Conradt

Ernesto Miranda

Even if you’ve never had your own brush with the law, you no doubt know the Miranda warning. Somehow, maybe through the mass quantity of Law and Order and CSI-type shows, those words have seeped into our brains:

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.”

Those words are the result of the Miranda v. Arizona Supreme Court trial of 1966. Three years before, an 18-year-old Phoenix woman reported to police that she was kidnapped, taken to the desert and raped. The woman was able to provide details about the car her kidnapper drove; those details took police to Ernesto Miranda. Though the woman couldn’t identify him in a lineup, police took him into custody and performed an interrogation anyway. The grilling resulted in a Miranda-signed confession.

Miranda later said he was forced into confessing because he was never made aware of his constitutional right to say nothing. His case wound up in front of the Supreme Court in 1966; they ruled that nothing Miranda "confessed" to could be used to try him because he was improperly educated on his rights. Almost immediately following the trial, the Miranda warning became a mandatory part of arrests.

That decision wasn’t popular with everyone. Even President Nixon was a vocal denouncer of rights-reading - he felt informing criminals of their rights would make police less effective and predicted that crime would skyrocket.

And what became of Miranda? The case was retried without the confession in 1967, but it turned out the jury didn’t need one to convict. Miranda was sentenced to up to 20 years in prison but got out in 1972. For a while, he made a living signing Miranda cards (small cards with the required saying printed on them) and selling them for $1.50. He had been out of prison for less than four years when he was killed in a bar fight in Phoenix in 1976 at the age of 36.

How did the Expression OK Originated?

What's the Real Origin of "OK"?

(the following is a re blog from Mental Floss)

"OK" is the all-purpose American expression that became an all-purpose English expression that became an all-purpose expression in dozens of other languages. It can be an enthusiastic cheer (A parking spot! OK!), an unenthusiastic "meh" (How was the movie? It was…OK.), a way to draw attention to a topic shift (OK. Here's the next thing we need to do), or a number of other really useful things. It's amazing that we ever got along without it at all. But we did. Until 1839.

There may be more stories about the origin of "OK" than there are uses for it: it comes from the Haitian port "Aux Cayes," from Louisiana French au quai, from a Puerto Rican rum labeled "Aux Quais," from German alles korrekt or Ober-Kommando, from Chocktaw okeh, from Scots och aye, from Wolof waw kay, from Greek olla kalla, from Latin omnes korrecta. Other stories attribute it to bakers stamping their initials on biscuits, or shipbuilders marking wood for "outer keel," or Civil War soldiers carrying signs for "zero killed."

The truth about OK, as Allan Metcalf, the author of OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word, puts it, is that it was "born as a lame joke perpetrated by a newspaper editor in 1839." This is not just Metcalf's opinion or a half remembered story he once heard, as most OK stories are. His book is based in the thorough scholarship of Allen Walker Read, a Columbia professor who for years scoured historical sources for evidence about OK, and published his findings in a series of journal articles in 1963 to 1964.

IT STARTED WITH A JOKE

OK, here's the story. On Saturday, March 23, 1839, the editor of the Boston Morning Postpublished a humorous article about a satirical organization called the "Anti-Bell Ringing Society " in which he wrote:

The "Chairman of the Committee on Charity Lecture Bells," is one of the deputation, and perhaps if he should return to Boston, via Providence, he of the Journal, and his train-band, would have his "contribution box," et ceteras, o.k.—all correct—and cause the corks to fly, like sparks, upward.

It wasn't as strange as it might seem for the author to coin OK as an abbreviation for "all correct." There was a fashion then for playful abbreviations like i.s.b.d (it shall be done), r.t.b.s (remains to be seen), and s.p. (small potatoes). They were the early ancestors of OMG, LOL, and tl;dr. A twist on the trend was to base the abbreviations on alternate spellings or misspellings, so "no go" was k.g. (know go) and "all right" was o.w. (oll write). So it wasn't so surprising for someone come up with o.k. for oll korrect. What is surprising is that it ended up sticking around for so long while the other abbreviations faded away.

THEN IT GOT LUCKY

OK got lucky by hitting the contentious presidential election jackpot. During the 1840 election the "oll korrect" OK merged with Martin van Buren's nickname, Old Kinderhook, when some van Buren supporters formed the O.K. Club. After the club got into a few tussles with Harrison supporters, OK got mixed up with slandering and sloganeering. It meant out of kash, out of karacter, orful katastrophe, orfully confused, all kwarrelling or any other apt phrase a pundit could come up with. It also got mixed up with the popular pastime of making fun of van Buren's predecessor, Andrew Jackson, for his poor spelling. One paper published a half-serious claim that OK originated with Jackson using it as a mark for "all correct" (ole kurrek) on papers he had inspected.

OK was the "misunderestimated," "refudiated," and "binders full of women" of its day, and it may have ended up with the same transitory fate if not for the fact that at the very same time, the telegraph was coming into use, and OK was there, a handy abbreviation, ready to be of service. By the 1870s it had become the standard way for telegraph operators to acknowledge receiving a transmission, and it was well on its way to becoming the greatest American word.

But, as Metcalf says, its ultimate success may have depended on "the almost universal amnesia about the true origins of OK that took place early in the twentieth century. With the source of OK forgotten, each ethnic group and tribe could claim the honor of having ushered it into being from an expression in their native language." By forgetting where OK came from, we made it belong to us all.

Why Do Sea Shells Sound Like the Sea?

Why Do Shells Sound Like the Ocean?

(This is a re blog )

IMAGE CREDIT: 

THINKSTOCK

 "Why do you hear the ocean when you put a seashell up to your ear?"

All right, first things first: no matter how much it may sound like the rolling waves, it's not actually the ocean you're hearing in a shell.

Now that we've got that out of the way, what exactly is it that you're hearing? In a word, noise; the ambient noise that's being produced all around and inside you, which you normally don't hear or pay attention to because it's too quiet.

To amplify this noise so you can hear it clearly, you need a resonator. Want to make one on the cheap? Form an O shape with your mouth and flick your finger against your throat or cheek. You should hear a note. Make a smaller or larger O, or change the shape of your mouth, and you'll get different notes. Sort of like this. What you're doing here is letting your mouth fulfill its potential as a Helmholtz resonator, where sound is produced by air vibrating in a cavity with one opening. Different pitches can be coaxed out by changing the shape of the resonating cavity.

The seashell you're listening to—the inside of which has many hard, curved surfaces great for reflecting sound—is essentially doing the same thing you just did with your mouth. The ambient noise mentioned before—the air moving past and within the shell, the blood flowing through your head, the conversation going on in the next room—is resonating inside the cavity of the shell, being amplified and becoming clear enough for us to notice. Just like the various shapes we make with our mouths will produce different pitches, different sizes and shapes of shell sound different because different resonant chambers will amplify different frequencies.

The fact that all shells sound just a little bit like the ocean is purely coincidental. Holding any sort of Helmholtz resonator to your ear will produce a similar effect, whether that object is associated with the ocean or not. Put an empty glass over your ear or even cup your hand over it, and the sound you hear will be just about the same.

Why are Batteries A,AA,AAA,C and D only ?

Why Aren't There B Batteries?

(The following is just a re blog )

Matt Soniak

filed under: Big Questions

IMAGE CREDIT: 

GETTY IMAGES

Reader Donna wrote in wondering why there are AA, AAA, C and D batteries, but no B. Well, there used to be, but they’re not really needed anymore.

Around the time of World War I, American battery manufacturers, the War Industries Board, and a few government agencies got together to develop some nationally uniform specifications for the size of battery cells, their arrangement in batteries, their minimum performance criteria, and other standards.

In 1924, industry and government representatives met again to figure out a naming system for all those cells and batteries they had just standardized. They decided to base it around the alphabet, dubbing the smallest cells and single-cell batteries “A” and went from there to B, C and D. There was also a "No. 6" battery that was larger than the others and pretty commonly used, so it was grandfathered in without a name change.

As battery technology changed and improved and new sizes of batteries were made, they were added to the naming system. When smaller batteries came along, they were designated AA and AAA. These newer batteries were the right size for the growing consumer electronics industry, so they caught on. C and D batteries also found a niche in medium- and high-drain applications. The mid-size A and B batteries simply didn’t have a market and more or less disappeared in the U.S..

While you typically won’t see either A or B batteries on American store shelves, they’re still out there in the wild. A batteries were used in early-model laptop battery packs and some hobby battery packs. B batteries are still sometimes used in Europe for lanterns and bicycle lamps. According to Energizer, though, their popularity is dwindling there, too, and they might be completely discontinued.