Wind Extinguishes Eternal Flame

Flame's Self-Starter Is Broken, Won't Be Fixed Until January.
The day America sets aside to honor its veterans, many visitors to Jacksonville's Veterans Memorial Mall noticed the eternal flame was not burning.
The city said it learned two weeks ago that the self-starter built into the marble pedestal of the flame had stopped working, so when the wind blows out the flame, it has to be manually restarted by someone with a lighter.
Because the marble-covered ground around the pedestal has to be dug up to fix the flame, city leaders decided to wait to make the repairs until after the football season, when traffic in the surrounding sports complex drops off.
Harrison Conyers of the city's office of veterans affairs said it was unfortunate the flame was out much of Veterans Day, but the wind kept blowing it out.
The city plans a $20,000 repair project to not only fix the self-starter on the eternal flame, but also repair damage done by skateboarders and add an additional panel so more names of Jacksonville's war dead can be added.
"We're sorry the flame was out but it was something that was really out of our control," Conyers said Thursday. "Our staff was out working at the parade yesterday. There were multiple events going on all over town. We did the best we could."
The city is coming up with a schedule to have people check on the flame and relight it as necessary, but there is no way to ensure the eternal flame is constantly burning until permanent repairs are made.
"Could we have re-run the electric line in the last two or three days? Probably. But it would have meant tearing up all the marble that is out here. We could not have fixed that quickly," Conyers said. "So you would have had a flame but you would have had a monument that is defaced."

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Didn't get the Memo

Planners have driven motorists into a pole - by leaving a 40ft utility pole in the middle of a six lane highway.
The unmarked and unlit pole - in Zhengzhou, central China - has been the cause of dozens of accidents as unwary drivers smash into it.
And road signs only a few yards from the pole show an arrow directing drivers right into it at 50mph.
"We have complained to the council but they say it would cost too much to bury the cables underground so we are stuck with it," said local resident Chang Feng, 33.
The problem was caused when the road was widened and made worse when builders added an arrow less than 350 feet from the pole pointing straight at it.
The utility pole belongs to the local power authorities who explained that the pole used to be on the road side, but due to the widening of the road, the pole is now in the middle of the road.
A spokesman from the power authorities said: "They should have informed us before the road widening project, but none of us knew this. Now it's too expensive to move the pole."
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Bird Feathers "Sing"

Solving a longstanding puzzle among bird experts, scientists have found that the sharp, violin-like sounds of a South American songbird come not from the beak but from a suite of specially evolved, vibrating feathers.
A new study offers the first hard evidence that birds use feathers for audible communication as well as for flight and warmth.
In 2005 Kimberly Bostwick theorized that the male club-winged manakin—a tiny bird of the Andean cloud forest—was vibrating a club-shaped wing feather against a neighboring, ridged feather to "sing" when trying to attract females.
Proving the feather-song connection, though, would be a huge challenge.
"It was very hard to mess with the birds' feathers and still have them do their display," said Bostwick, curator of birds and mammals at the Cornell University of Vertebrates in Ithaca, New York.
"There were many times where I listened to the sound and started doubting that a feather could possibly make [the sound]," she recalled.
Bird Vibrations
To determine, once and for all, how the manakin was making its bizarre sounds, Bostwick and colleagues decided to take feather samples and analyze them in a lab.
She knew from previous work that the frequency of the sound made by the manakin was 1500 hertz—1,500 cycles per second. If the two feather types were making the sound, they should resonate when vibrated at the same frequency during the experiments.
The team used lasers to monitor vibrations as they were oscillated by a lab device called a mini-shaker. The special feathers vibrated at exactly 1500 hertz—proving they're responsible for the strange sounds.
But there's a twist: Bostwick was surprised to find that club and the ridged feathers aren't a duet, but part of a chamber orchestra.
Individually the manakin's "regular" feathers didn't resonate like the special ones. But when the nine feathers closest to the special feathers were still attached to the ligaments, they vibrated at around 1500 hertz, harmonized with the club feathers, and amplified the volume of the sound.
The results, Bostwick said, could lead to better understanding of the newly discovered form of bird communication.
Lots of birds make simple clapping sounds or whooshing noises with their wings, and we haven't even begun to understand how the sounds are made or how they've evolved, she added.
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This Dog Takes Fetching Seriously…

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Dirty PCs:

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When was the last time your PC been cleaned?

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All babies love a mud puddle, even this baby elk!

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Did You Know.....

From 1939 to 1942, there was a undersea post office in the Bahamas.

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Central Park located in New York has 125 drinking fountains.

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In 1907, on New Year's Eve, the original ball that was lowered in Times Square was made of wood and iron and had 100 light bulbs on it.

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Americans consume the most peanut butter in the world.

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850 peanuts are needed to make an 18 oz. jar of peanut butter.

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Carbonated water, with nothing else in it, can dissolve limestone, talc, and many other low-Moh's hardness minerals. Coincidentally, carbonated water is the main ingredient in soda.

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Annually 17 tons of gold is used to make wedding rings in the United States.

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Levan, which is located in Utah, got its name from "navel" which is levan spelt backwards.

It was named this because it is in the center of Utah

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A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.

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Thousands says “NO” color television.

Almost 30,000 people across the UK still tune into their favorite programs on black and white TV sets.
The figures were released by TV Licensing to mark the 40th anniversary of the first color transmissions on BBC1 and ITV.
The 28,000 black and white license holders included 1,950 in Scotland.
The figures showed the black and white sets have not yet been consigned to history despite the rise of flat-screens and the iPlayer.
While the figures show there is still life in the oldest TV equipment, BBC statistics show that emerging technologies are changing the way many of us watch TV.
In September, the BBC iPlayer attracted more than one million unique users a day, who watched a total of 60.8 million TV programs on the internet using computers, smart phones and games consoles, as well as on televisions equipped with the Virgin Media set-top boxes.
“These figures show TV has never been more popular across the spectrum”
Fergus Reid TV Licensing
Yet despite the increasingly divergent ways to watch, leaning back on the sofa in front of your TV set is still the most popular - with sales of flat-screen televisions almost trebling in the past three years.
TV Licensing spokesman Fergus Reid said: "These figures show TV has never been more popular across the spectrum, and with so many ways to watch TV now available, it is important people are aware of their legal responsibilities.
"Whether you watch in black and white on a 40-year-old TV set or in color on a brand new 37in LCD flat screen, you need to be covered by a TV License if watching or recording programs as they are broadcast.
"The same is true if you access programs via the internet as they are being shown on TV - if you're using a laptop, mobile phone, games console or any other device."
The first color TV broadcasts began in 1967 on BBC2 and on 15 November 1969 on BBC1 and ITV. The first color pictures were seen on BBC1 in Scotland in December 1969.
Comedy classic Dad's Army was among the first programs to receive a color makeover.
'Technological breakthrough'
Ian Lavender, who played Private Pike in the series, recalled: "I remember we bought our first color television set to watch the 3rd series of Dad's Army, which had been recorded in color.
"I was also the first actor to be killed by a color TV set on color TV in Z Cars when a robbery went wrong and the TV set was dropped on me from a great height by Nicholas Jones".
Iain Logie Baird, curator of television at the National Media Museum in Bradford and a grandson of John Logie Baird, the inventor of the first television, said he believed the arrival of color TV had an enormous social impact in the UK.
"The arrival of mass color television was a technological breakthrough," he said.

"As more viewers made the switch, it gradually altered the effect of television as a medium, changing both program styles and viewers' perceptions.
"The addition of color enabled viewers to have a greater feeling of actually 'being there' for live events and similarly, an increased sense of involvement in pre-recorded material, which had a major impact on the cultural fabric of the nation."

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Punishment

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Everyone Needs A Hug

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