At the “Swellin’ with Melon” contest in Ohio, Rich LeFevre consumed 11.22 pounds of watermelon (seedless, precut) in 15 minutes to win the title of World Watermelon Eating Champion. His wife Carlene came in second at 9.78 pounds. It was the first watermelon eating contest sanctioned by the International Federation of Competitive Eating. Rich is ranked fifth on the eating circuit, Carlene is ninth. First of course is that hot dog eating maniac Takeru Kobayashi.
The NY Times reports that the yellow Lance Armstrong Foundation bracelets are selling out in retail locations so I did an eBay search and indeed people are hawking these rubber bracelets online — probably without those extra proceeds going to the charity they should be. Some listings claim that profits go to the foundation, but how can you tell? On the official order site, all items are back-ordered. How many people will click “Make a Donation” instead? It’s a nice bracelet, but it’s not about buying a bracelet.
One way to get readers to visit your site frequently is to have frequent updates. I’ve been continually frustrated by online newspaper sites that mimic their printed counterpart by updating once a day. While there’s value in having the content online, they miss the greater point of the dynamic publishing medium. A study from the University of Texas at Austin tracked updates to the home pages of 30 news sites. Their two week sample took the top 10, the middle 10 and the bottom 10 from a list of the 100 largest circulation newspapers. During a day, 5 made almost no updates, 13 added minimal breaking news and 12 had constant updates. Automated wire feeds were not counted as updates. The researchers did more detailed analysis as well, identifying the types of news and timing of changes. I know where to go when I absolutely need new news, but the old print cycle is still ruling publishing in many news houses.
As a fundraiser for their educational outreach program, the Bellevue Philharmonic Orchestra is holding an “Art of the Violin Auction.” Twelve violins, donated by a local music shop, were decorated (most to unplayable extremes…alas) by artists. The instruments go on the auction block in September. Bows and cases were also provided, but photos don’t show if anyone took on the challenge of incorporating a bow into their artwork.
Based on my unscientific guess that most native-born American citizens would not be able to answer all the questions on the U.S. Citizenship test, I always considered it to be difficult. I was surprised to read that the test is being overhauled. Then someone I know told me her parents passed by rote memorization. I thought, well, that’s how I passed a lot of exams in school, right? Wasn’t I really learning too by memorizing facts? Well, I suppose I wasn’t memorizing the exact 100 potential questions and answers, as it is with the citizenship test. Putting aside the questions of whether English, history, and civics are important requirements for a new U.S. citizen to have, the announced goals for the new test sound reasonable. The aim is to reduce dependency on memorization and actually demonstrate a deeper level of understanding and literacy. Inconsistency between examiners, however, may still exist with the new methods.
It makes so much sense and yet I never would have considered it. You can dehydrate (and rehydrate) your own spaghetti sauce for camping trips. You end up with something like fruit leather which you can roll up and bring along.
Missed this one (did I even notice Earth Day?): Ben & Jerry’s went looking for environmentally friendly ice cream technology and discovered a thermoacoustic freezer being developed at Penn State. They convinced their parent company Unilever to throw in $600,000 of financing. The researchers made excellent progress and demonstrated a device that “uses sound waves in a closed container filled with helium to create cooling.” Compression of the helium gas throws off heat and expansion refrigerates. And don’t worry about your hearing; although the tone generates 185 decibels it can’t be heard. Penn State is working with a startup on commercial development. Ben & Jerry launched a commemorative flavor, Sweet & Sonic, and a Flash demo.
It needs some sort of advanced image recognition and pattern matching to be instantly useful to the home gardener, but Insect Images is still an interesting resource for pest identification.
Oh good, I wasn’t hallucinating, just not paying attention. As I skimmed over headlines of the Jeopardy! champion who is on his 37th win, I kept thinking “didn’t they used to retire them after five days?” Yes, they did, the rules were changed last fall.
CNN interviews Peter Gabriel on the future (and present) of digital music distribution. Gabriel co-founded On Demand Distribution (OD2) in 2000 and sold it to Loudeye in June. His philosophy on the digital distribution of music is that the artists had better get involved or “they’re going to get screwed, like they usually do.” He hopes for a future where the record label and artist relationship is a partnership, and realizes that the artists themselves need to take action to make that happen.