Outside of chronic degenerative diseases, the top cause of our demise has long been accidental death. This broad category of mortality – which includes much more than simply dying from falling into a ravine or meat grinder – is often taken for granted, yet it is one of our country’s most important strengths. You may be tempted to accept that 4.8% of fatalities in the United States being attributed to unintentional causes is adequate. After all, accidents are already the fifth-largest cause of death, second only to heart disease, cancer, stroke, and respiratory disease. I, however, know that we can do better. Although we are off to a great start, much remains to be done if our nation is to remain a viable world superpower and truly progress in the future. Unless we commit right now and adopt the “I don’t think, therefore I am not” attitude, our once-great nation will swiftly fail. Continue reading
Viewing posts from October 2008
Oct 2008
28
14 months ago I just made the graph myself using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The numbers came from one of the spreadsheets linked to in this PDF report: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr56/nvsr56_10.pdf
Tags: Your Family Share: $2.60
In 2007, the US Mint produced 2,089,500,000 new dimes. Two trillion! Averaged evenly across the year, this equates to over 66 dimes per second.
A single dime is 0.705 inches in diameter. Lined end-to-end, the dimes produced last year alone would stretch over 23,249 miles. For comparison, the circumference of the Earth is 24,800 miles.
A single dime weighs 2.268 grams, so there are 200 dimes in one pound. 2007’s dime production weighs in at over 10.4 million pounds. For comparison, my car weighs 2,800 pounds, and the world’s heaviest record land mammal, an African elephant found in Angola, weighed 27,000 pounds.
Oct 2008
11
Make Firefox Look Like Google Chrome
As cool as Google Chrome is, many of us have been reluctant to switch due to the lack of AdBlock Plus. With a few quick tweaks, however, you can give Firefox some of the same look and feel:
Of course, you’re not getting Chrome’s performance improvements by doing this, but it’s at least a start. Shown above is my Firefox 3 looking like the Chrome browser [running in Linux with the chrome-like GTK theme and the MurrinaChrome Emerald theme]. Here is what I did to achieve this: