� Lloyd Groff Copeman: The Patent Man � Dig Michigan!
Topic: Miscellaneous
9:45 pm EST, Dec 8, 2007
Lloyd's biggest money-maker was the rubber ice cube tray. One day while collecting sap for maple syrup in the woods, he noticed that slush flaked off his rubber boots easily. He designed and patented a rubber tray. Sales from this invention earned Copeman half a million dollars. (That is about $10 million today.)
Hmm... I guess he is to blame for the rubber things taking up all the college kids space in the little dorm refrigerators...
Craig Leipold's sale of the National Hockey League's Predators to a Nashville coalition of local business operators was officially completed on Friday.
The local ownership group paid out $193 million US for the team and will immediately take over the day-to-day operation of the Predators and their home arena, the Sommet Center.
"On behalf of the ownership group, we are thrilled to complete the sale," said David Freeman, chairman of Predators Holdings LLC. "We look forward to contributing to the Predators' success on and off the ice and solidifying the franchise's future in Nashville."
The NHL's Board of Governors officially approved the sale last Thursday. Freeman will serve as the group's lead, as he had in negotiations, and will also act as chairman and governor, while William "Boots" Del Biaggio and Herb Fritch will serve as an alternate governor.
Predators Holdings LLC includes local executives in finance, health care and private business. Members include: Freeman, Del Biaggio, Fritch, Christopher Cigarran, Thomas Cigarran, Joel and Holly Dobberpuhl, DeWitt Thompson V, John Thompson and Warren Woo.
"Our immediate next steps will be to provide necessary direction to the team's staff while assessing opportunities to grow the Predators' fan base and development," added Freeman.
Hell Yea! See you at the Red Wings game on Monday!
Businesses have email, teenagers have MySpace, video lovers have YouTube. If you're a hacker, though, your "net" is Internet Relay Chat -- sort of a techie version of IM that allows many anonymous users to talk to each other simultaneously.
Hackers favor IRC because it allows them to protect their identities and cover their tracks. But a new search engine startup called IRSeek is now calling those features into question.
According to a report, IRSeek is attempting to build an IRC search engine, which would enable users to find topics of interest or do a recursive search through old chats.
In order to build the search engine, though, IRSeek is indexing more than 6 million IRC conversations a day, effectively "listening" to more than 2,000 channels across 10 networks, the report says. IRSeek's Website doesn't confirm these numbers, but it does show what the organization is doing with IRC search.
This could all be bad news for hackers, who don't want their conversations indexed or searchable by nickname. While they could partially beat the system by simply changing their nicknames frequently, hackers may eventually feel that IRSeek threatens their anonymity, and ultimately, their privacy.
— Tim Wilson, Site Editor, Dark Reading
This has happened for years already, no big news...
It's hard to know what to make of Leslie Hall as she gyrates in her trademark skin-tight, gold jumpsuit, sporting a bouffant coiffure and a deadpan expression.
The 26-year-old Iowan has created her own niche online as a ferocious rapper, talented producer and dedicated sweater curator. Her Napoleon Dynamite-esque, rhinestone-bedazzled online empire has attracted a loyal cult following.
"The internet is awesome. It's beautiful," Hall says. "My last song was a megabomb hit. I put my beats in your face, and people love it. --
OMFG! This is so bad I just had to pass the torture on... The fed needs to use this instead of water boarding...
Just wanted to let everyone know that next week the Micro Trak 300 from Byonics will be going to space on the KySat Space Express Mission.
KySat Space Express is a rapid turn around, suborbital access to space experiment. The Space Express mission was designed to help test subsystems and processes being developed for future orbital KySat missions. A primary goal of the KySat Consortium is to facilitate inexpensive and rapid access to space for small payloads. The Space Express mission will launch from the White Sands Missile Range on a Lunar Rocket and Rover Shadow 1B launch system.
Here is some brief information regarding the Space Express Mission: Overview: - Total of 4 mins mission time (roughly 2 mins up and 2 mins down) - Expected 47 G's of acceleration at launch - Rocket will burn for 2.1 seconds reaching roughly 1.5 km (5000 ft) - Payload will separate from rocket at 2.1 seconds and coast to a final altitude of roughly 140 km (90 mi) (KySat1 will orbit around 400-600 km (250-375mi) )
- KySat Space Express Payload weighs less than 1 pound
Telemetry Gathered: - 2 Temperature Sensors (one at nose cone end of the payload, other at tail end of the payload) - 2 Axis Acceleration (axis of thrust, and left and right if thrust is vertical) - Pressure Sensor (should see 0 psi in space) - Mission Time
All Telemetry will be sent over amateur ham radio band (VHF: 144.39 MHz) to ground station similar to what will be using for the "playground station" for tracking KySat1.
The launch is scheduled for Wednesday Dec 5 1:30 pm.
You can learn more about KySat at the following link: www.kysat.com
You can learn more information about the Space Express mission at this link: http://www.kysat.com/?165
If anyone has any questions please don't hesitate to ask.
Thanks
Tyler KI4YLJ
Tyler J Doering Graduate Research Assistant Tyler.Doering@gmail.com (859) 630-0470
Electrical & Computer Engineering University of Kentucky 571 FP Anderson Tower Lexington, KY 40506
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed / Stein has lost it?
Topic: Miscellaneous
7:56 am EST, Nov 28, 2007
It’s a movie that Ferris Bueller would take the day off to go see. What freedom-loving student wouldn’t be outraged to discover that his high school science teacher is teaching a theory as indisputable fact, and that university professors unmercifully crush any fellow scientists who dare question the prevailing system of belief? This isn’t the latest Hollywood comedy; it’s a disturbing new documentary that will shock anyone who thinks all scientists are free to follow the evidence wherever it may lead.
Produced by Premise Media, Expelled, which will be in theaters February, 2008, is being marketed by Motive Entertainment, the company that has spearheaded significant Hollywood blockbusters, including The Passion of the Christ, Polar Express and The Chronicles of Narnia. Rocky Mountain Pictures, an established distribution company, which has enjoyed numerous box-office successes, will distribute the film.
Ben Stein, the lovable, monotone teacher from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Wonder Years is on a journey to answer one of the biggest questions ever asked: Were we designed or are we simply the end result of an ancient mud puddle struck by lightning? Stein, who is also a lawyer, an economist, a former presidential speechwriter, author and social commentator, is stunned by what he finds on his journey. He discovers an elitist scientific establishment that has traded in its skepticism for dogma. But even worse, along the way, Stein uncovers a long line of biologists, astronomers, chemists and philosophers who have had their reputations destroyed and their careers ruined by a scientific establishment that allows absolutely no dissent from Charles Darwin’s theory of random mutation and natural selection.
“Big Science in this area of biology has lost its way,” says Stein. “Scientists are supposed to be allowed to follow the evidence wherever it may lead, no matter what the implications are. Freedom of inquiry has been greatly compromised, and this is not only anti-American, it’s anti-science. Its anti-the whole concept of learning.”
Expelled uncovers that educators and scientists are being ridiculed, denied tenure and even fired in some cases for the fact that they believe there is evidence of “design” in nature, challenging the idea that life is a result of random chance. For example, Stein meets Richard Sternberg, a double PhD biologist who allowed a peer-reviewed research paper describing the evidence for intelligence in the universe to be published in the scientific journal Proceedings. Not long after publication, officials from the National Center for Science Education and the Smithsonian Institution where Sternberg was a research fellow began a coordinated smear and intimidation campaign to get the promising young scientist expelled from his position. This attack on scientific freedom was so egregious that it prompted a congressional investigation.
"Nike does $14 billion in sales, and that is for every single thing it does from shoes to apparel," Rovell said. "Gatorade is a singular item, and it does $5 billion in sales. It's probably the second most-relevant brand in all of sports."
Cade and three colleagues developed Gatorade in 1965 to help the Florida Gators football team replace carbohydrates and electrolytes lost through sweat while playing in the swamp-like heat of Gainesville, Fla. The first batch cost $43 in supplies, and "sort of tasted like toilet bowl cleaner," Dana Shires, one of Cade's collaborators, told the Associated Press.
Researchers added sugar and lemon juice for flavor, and they left the rest to the likes of Steve Spurrier, the Florida quarterback who won the Heisman Trophy in 1966 while being fueled by Gatorade.
"The invention was great, but it needed the Florida Gators as a vehicle," Rovell said. "There had been other sports drinks available, but this was the perfect storm with Steve Spurrier and a good football team."
Cade and his collaborators were enmeshed in a legal dispute in the late 1960s and early '70s over rights to the Gatorade brand. The dispute was settled by awarding the university a 20 percent share of royalties, which to date total about $100 million. Gatorade today is marketed by Quaker Oats, a division of PepsiCo Inc.
A native of San Antonio and a Navy veteran, Cade graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. He practiced in Missouri, New York and in Dallas before moving to Florida in 1961. His research specialties included kidney disease, hypertension, exercise physiology, autism and schizophrenia.
He continued to work for the university until retiring at age 76 in November 2004 and was inducted in April into the university's athletics hall of fame.
Rovell, who while on vacation in Aruba raised a bottle of Gatorade — the wild berry Fierce flavor — in Cade's honor, described him as "the ultimate eccentric guy. He loved playing the violin, and he collected Studebaker cars. He became a rich man, but he always lived in the same ranch-style house.
"When you would ask him what he was most proud of, he wouldn't say, as you and I might, that he saw his invention every time he walked into a 7-Eleven or attended a sports event. He would talk about how Gatorade helped cure diarrhea-related diseases in Third World countries. He would always have some strange twist to talk about regarding the invention of Gatorade."
Rovell said he never asked the inventor what he thought about the modern sports cliché of Gatorade showers delivered to winning coaches but said, "He probably would have said, 'What a waste!' "
VectorMagic The Online Tool for Precision Bitmap to Vector Conversion
Topic: Technology
7:36 pm EST, Nov 27, 2007
If you've got an image that you'd like vectorized, VectorMagic will do it for you online, free of charge. It's currently tuned to work best with photographs or icons. You answer a couple of simple questions (with sensible defaults) as you upload the image, then sit back and watch it being converted.
"This site is the result of a Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory research project by James Diebel and Jacob Norda.
We have strived to make the site as easy to use as possible, with a distinct and clear user-interface, while imposing a minimum of fuss. All that is required is a reasonably modern browser, Flash Player and an image you'd like to vectorize."
This site is Web 2.0 to the max and is one bad ass web app!
