Do you Drive, Sail or Steer a boat?

Friends of mine and I were thinking about hiring a houseboat for New Years, which then started a side conversation between a one of those friends and I, as to whether you drive a boat or whether there was another nautical term that we were supposed to be using. She then challenged me (possibly because she is too lazy) to find out what word we were supposed to use. I know that if the boat has a sail, then the term would be to sail the boat, however since a houseboat has a motor, I wondered, do we just steer the boat, or are we considered to be driving the boat? A car has a motor and we also steer a car, however we generally say to people that we drive the car, steering is simply one of the actions we consider to be part of driving, along with accelerating, breaking, watching for road signs, and generally following road rules. Since some of these actions apply to 'driving' a boat as well, I thought that maybe driving was the best description, however I thought it best to consult Google, the all knowing and all powerful.

My quick ten minute Google search turned up very little in the way of hard facts, and gave me other options to consider. Basically, I decided to also check the dictionary definition of Drive. This turned out to be more useful, and decided me on the issue. My Google search highlighted that depending on the whether a boat was powered by a sail, or a paddle or a motor, you would use a different term, such as to sail the sailboat, paddle the canoe, or steer the motorboat. Dictionary.com defined 'drive' as, 'to cause and guide the movement of a vehicle,' and since a sailboat, a canoe and a motorboat could all be considered vehicles, of one description or another, I decided that you can drive them all. You can then choose if you wish to be more specific, depending on whether it has a sail or paddle, to say you are sailing or paddling, that is up to you. Now a sailor may disagree with me, but since I am not a nautical man myself, I am happy with saying that I will drive the houseboat (well perhaps not me specifically, but whoever does the driving).

Check out Dictionary.com for the definition, none of the other sites are reliable enough to be referenced!

A Soundscraper

The other day I was reading some interesting articles, however the most interesting that I found was about something called a Soundscraper. Now my first reaction on hearing this name, without actually reading the article, was that of a huge tall building built out of sound. My little imagination ran wild, and I imagined people building this tower by simply playing music at the site and the tower just getting bigger and bigger. Now obviously this not what the article was about, the idea in the article, although not a fun as my idea, was much more practical and infinitely more amazing!

Reading the article, I discovered that an entry into the 2013 eVola Skyscraper Competition (I am sure that you have all heard of this competition and talk about it constantly to your friends and family, or if you are like me, you have probably never heard of it), was to build a large tower that absorbs sound, and converts the sounds into electricity, which can then be connected to the grid to light people's homes and run their air conditioning. The size of these towers was not defined, but it was estimated that a single Soundscraper, ideally positioned near a noisy motorway or regular flight-path could power 10% of Los Angeles' lighting needs. Since these towers are only a theory at this stage, and no working prototype seems to have been created or being near creation, we can only look at the artists impressions of these towers. However the fact that people believe we have the technology available to construct such buildings, does highlight the potential for us to be pillaging less of our natural resources to power our electricity needs and instead actually take a pollutant, noise, and convert that into something useful.

To read more, and see an artist's impression of a Soundscraper, check out the Inhabitat website.

Real Life Invisibility Cloak

I don't know about everyone else, but I have always dreamed of being able to be invisible. Growing up there was many instances of people on television or in books who had some sort of device or a power that could make them invisible. Once I even watched one of the worst movies ever made (it even looked bad when I read the blurb), about an invisible plane. However I thought, "what the hell, it's about an invisible plane, it can't be that bad!" It was! I also recall Rowan Atkinson did a stand-up comedy routine back in the 80's about an Invisible Man (it was a really funny routine) and more recently J.K Rowling wrote about Harry Potter, who he had an invisible cloak. So I know that the idea has not died and has in fact been thought of by many other people than myself (an not all of them have made terrible movies with no real plot or story line).

Today however, I discovered that my long time obsession with being invisible and things being made invisible came a step closer to reality, and that it could be potentially possible in my life time to become invisible! Today I read a story about a Professor from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, Professor Baile Zhang, who earlier this month unveiled, to an amazed audience, a small box (it doesn't sound like much at this point, but wait for it). This box is made from calcite optical crystal (whatever that is), and has the ability to bend light around an object and make anything behind the box disappear! This is a remarkable discovery and although it is a long way into the future, this could be a step in the right direction for Professor Zhang, who admitted he invented the box, "just for fun", to then go on to create my invisibility cloak! So watch out people, sometime in my lifetime I might be sitting beside you and you would never know it (if you have never met me, the last statement would also be true, however in that instance you would at least know you were sitting beside someone, unlike if I was invisible).

Check out more about the invisibility cloak on the Daily Telegraph website.

Acalculia

I was once again watching the West Wing and as usual Martin Sheen's character was saying something intelligent, this time he was asking people the definition of Acalculia. Some of the other character's, being equally as smart as the president (or equally well rehearsed as the case may have been) knew the answer. I on the other hand had no idea! It turns out that Acalculia, according to the definition on the West Wing, is the inability to do simple mathematical problems. This reminded me of a friend of mine who after a big night out was supposed to be counting money at work, however instead of adding the notes together, she found herself just saying what each note was and putting it in a pile. Once her co-worker realised what she was doing, she told her it was best if she went home! So this is where my mind went when thinking about how somebody with Acalculia might suffer.

I decided not to rest here, but went to do one of my (hopefully now famous) ten minute Google searches, and discovered that actually Acalculia was much more serious. It turns out that Acalculia is actually more accurately described as, a person who has difficulty with simple mathematical equations due to an acquired brain injury. Basically it is not just that they cannot perform the mathematical functions, but in order to be diagnosed with Acalculia, they previously had to have had the ability to perform those simple mathematical problems. Now again my friend who acquired a hangover and lost the ability to count money, could technically be classed as have Acalculia, however the road for her to recover this function is a short one, with hydration and sleep. Most people with Acalculia would have a much longer road to recovery. As a sidebar, I also discovered that people who, from birth are unable to simply calculate numbers, are referred to as having Dyscalculia, not Acalculia.

If you want to check out some further information, check out Wikipedia and Medical Dictionary.

What is a Pingo?

I was playing Words with Friends the other day against my cousin. The word that I played was pin, then she played back pingo! I was in disbelief that such a word existed, so I accused her of making the word up, even though this would require collusion with the makers of Words with Friends and I was was reasonably certain that, a) She didn't know the makers of Words with Friends, b) They wouldn't change a word on her request, even if they knew her, and, c) That she wasn't likely to expend the level of effort and planning required to add this word into the game, just to score a few points. Nevertheless I challenged her to use pingo in a sentence, as I was sure that even if it was an accepted word, she was probably just playing around with letters and didn't know the meaning.

My cousin rose to this challenge and replied with the sentence, "the Eskimo swore as he tripped over the pingo." I had a good laugh as I read this, firstly assuming that she had just made the sentence up for a laugh, but then thought it was a bit obscure to add that it was an Eskimo, so perhaps she had actually looked up the meaning (a thing that I could have done myself instead of challenging her, but it would have been less fun). So I decided to check the meaning as well (at this stage the fun was over and I really needed to know if she was making things up, or had actually checked the definition), sure enough the meaning of the word pingo is, "a hill of soil-covered ice pushed up by hydrostatic pressure in an area of permafrost." So it would be reasonable to assume that Eskimos would see pingos all the time, and understandably might swear as they trip over them.  Obviously my cousin had looked up the definition and came to the same conclusions as myself. So I had to admit that pingo was an acceptable word, however I would still like to point out that my spell checker highlights pingo as a misspelt word, so I am not the only one in disbelief!

Check the definition of pingo yourself at dictionary.com.

What causes more deaths, vending machines or wolves?

I spent many hours during my holidays watching episodes of the West Wing. I love this show and I have picked up a few random facts, that I will share with you over the coming weeks. Today however, the fact that caught my eye happened whilst one of the characters, CJ, was listening to a group of people who were lobbying to have an Animals Only Highway built across the United States of America (USA) and into Canada (this has actually begun construction in real life, and is referred to as Y2Y). The group were using the example of a wolf, called Pluie (this wolf was also a real life wolf who was tracked, and provided inspiration for Y2Y), and in using this example stated that more people in the USA die from vending machines than wolf attacks. This is a statistic that is hard to find on the internet, and reminds me of another statistic which is equally hard to prove, 'that more people are kicked to death each year by donkeys than die in airplane crashes.'

These are two comparisons that are trying to make people think of the big picture, rather than focus on these facts in a small context, however from what I can find (in my 10 minute Google search), there are no statistics gathered around how many, if any, people are kicked to death each year by donkeys, however airplane fatalities are very well documented. Therefore I don't think that this statistic can be supported, although I am sure people will continue to use this comparison. As to the amount of wolf deaths versus that of vending machines, I think we may have a winner! Although I could not find statistics, from sources that were anywhere near credible, around the number of deaths per year by vending machine in the USA, I did find one Australian vending machine website that stated of the 15 injuries by vending machines recorded, only three resulted in death. Now there is not much detail around this statement, so it is my assumption these statistics are from all recorded incidences in Australia. I also found another website which stated that in North America (including Alaska and Canada) in the 100 years of the 20th century 20-30 wolf attacks were recorded and only three resulted in death, all due to rabies. Australia has a much smaller population than the USA, 20 million versus 300 million  so there are around 15 times more people in the USA. So if you calculate that Australia has had three vending machine deaths, you could reasonable multiply this number by 15 to get 45 deaths by vending machines in the USA (I know this is not exact, there are many other factors to consider, but lets just go with it). So based on this, you could reasonably state that more people's deaths are attributed to vending machines in the USA than to wolves!

I sourced many sites, Y2Y, the Yellowstone Insider around wolf attacks, Snopes, around the donkey deaths and SVA vending machines.