Factory waste produces enough energy for 750 Homes

This comes from an old story but it is more relevant today than ever! The photo is a typical rotary furnace sold today so you can get an idea of how it works.

“Frank Angelo of Jonesboro, Arkansas was about to be fined $10,000 a day for burning 200 tons of bark, chips, sawdust, and shavings a week … leftovers from the chicken coops that he manufactures. So, Angelo invented a 70-ton rotary furnace from an abandoned railroad car, an afterburner, and recycled conveyor belts and pipes. The furnace is now generating up to 20 million Btu’s an hour … enough energy to power 750 Jonesboro homes. A by-product of Frank’s invention—activated carbon—is sold as a filter to remove cancer—causing agents from air and water.” - Source

Pig Spleens Used to Forecast Weather

A bizarre claim seeming to bolster the ancient use of animal entrails to tell the future. ‘Haruspicy is the inspection of the entrails of sacrificed animals, especially the livers of sacrificed sheep.’

“Paul Smokov, 84, raising cattle on a 1,750-acre ranch north of the town Steel, North Dakota, forecasts the weather by peering at two of brown, glistening, foot-long spleens on his kitchen counter. If the spleen is wide and then narrows, it means winter will come early with a mild spring; if it is narrow and then widens, it usually means harsh weather in the spring; if it is pretty uniform in thickness, it indicates no drastic changes, Smokov said. “The spleens are 85 percent correct, according to my figures, and those guys (the weathermen) aren’t any better,” the farmer said. Smokov’s Ukrainian parents brought their knowledge of pig spleen forecasting with them when they went to the United States a century ago. “It’s folklore and a dying art,” said Janice Stillman, editor of the Old Farmer’s Almanac in Dew Hampshire.” - Source

Holiday Humor - Fark Headline Contest

“No site has better headlines than Fark. Now they’re holding a Headline of the Year contest. It’s in four parts, one for each quarter of the year: Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, and Round 4. Just a few examples:

• Newspaper publisher complains that Americans can no longer express themselves without swearing. Can you believe that sh*t?
• Palm Beach County prosecutor survives shark attack while surfing. Was let go due to professional courtesy
• West Virginia governor appoints wife, son and cousin to powerful state positions. Surprisingly, that’s three different people
• Billy Graham’s wife Ruth has left him to be with Jesus. Evangelist always suspected their gardener was up to no good
• Bear attack victim had ‘tender heart,’ according to friends, family, bear
• Man who beat his girlfriend with a flashlight charged with assault. Flashlight charged with battery
• Old-school vinyl records are still hanging on to a…still hanging on to a…still hanging on to a…still hanging on to a
• What do you do if you’re a Chilean supermarket cashier and not allowed to take a bathroom break? Depends
• Deaf-mute couple having trouble getting divorced. The paperwork was a cinch but the hearing didn’t go so well
• Gatorade inventor Dr. Robert Cade, 80, has died. Remains will be cremated, and then the ashes will be dumped over some coach’s head.”

Source

Ron Paul as the Strange Attractor

I always liked the quote, ‘Public opinion is but the average stupidity of mankind.’ It certainly seems to be the case when I read articles saying Hillary and Bush are the two most admired people.

In physics there is an interesting effect termed the ’strange attractor’.

One definition is ‘a point in the ideal multidimensional phase space that is used to describe a system toward which the system tends to evolve regardless of the starting conditions of the system.’

This can be further simplified as ‘an attractor for which the approach to its final point in phase space is chaotic.’

In the case of Ron Paul, he seems to be serving as a political strange attractor, pulling in people from all walks of life who value freedom, minimal government and non-intervention strategies when dealing with other countries. Personally, I like the return to the constitution platform and to a republic form of government as designed by the founders and which served us so well for over 150 years.

These are part one and part two of a 30-minute TV special that will be broadcast throughout Iowa the weekend of Dec. 22-23. Part One and Part Two

Let’s face it, the United States grew from those who escaped the Old World and became a great nation but as a democracy, it is aging like an old Phoenix about ready to immolate itself if we don’t take drastic steps to change the way we do business with the world at large and with our own people.

There are two kinds of change, phase implementation or crash implementation. I have never been a fan of crash implementations where you just rip out the old and throw in the new, then debug it on the fly. A typical Microsoft approach resulting in endless patches that try to fix massive problems in a kludged up system. So too with an overly complex government.

Better to phase in changes by removing what doesn’t work and designing, even copying methods that do work and modifying them to meet our needs. To me, it seems obvious that, if we don’t change radically, we will eventually crash and burn, forcing a crash implementation and hoping it’s not the proverbial ‘bombed back to the stone age.’