Archive for the ‘lightning’ Tag
Have you ever gone to the track and bet on a horse? Have you ever tracked the odds on your horse? It always amazed me that someone actually sat in an office somewhere and computed those odds. No one actually knows what criteria is used or even if they’re accurate but what the hell do I know, I’m not a gambler. Today’s post is going to be more of the same. I found this information quite by accident and I knew immediately that I had to post it. If you think horseracing odds were hard to compute, these are even more ridiculous. You might find them interesting, and I hope you do.
Odds of Dying
While playing a video game: 100,000,000 to 1
By venomous snake bite: 95,000,000 to 1
By an asteroid falling to earth: 75,000,000 to 1
By venomous spider bites: 25,000,00 to 1
By a champagne cork: 22 million to 1
By lightning: 10,000,000 to 1
By a bee or wasp sting: 5,000,000 to 1
By falling down stairs: 157,000 to 1
By choking: 100,000 to 1
By heart disease: 467 to 1
😵😵😵
ROLL THEM DICE
Living in Maine has given me a great appreciation for monitoring the weather. Our winter here starts in late October and extends itself to the end of April, a full six months of snow, sleet, and cold. If you’re not a lover of miserable weather, I recommend you never move here. Today’s posting contains random weather tidbits you haven’t likely heard before. Enjoy!
- Lightning strikes the earth of hundred times every second, from the 1800 thunderstorms in progress at any given moment.
- Rain contains vitamin B-12.
- Observations of increased rain after US Civil War battles led to abortive experiments with weather control. Cannon volleys were fired into the clouds in order to induce rain.
- Nearly 100 pollution-filled, weather-beaten years in New York have done more damage to Cleopatra’s Needle – a granite obelisk covered with hieroglyphics – than did 3500 arid years in Egypt.
- 17 1/2 inches in circumference and 1.67 pounds in weight: that’s the size of the largest hailstone known to have fallen in the United States. It struck during a severe storm at Coffeyville, Kansas, in September of 1970.
- In 1816, there was no summer in many areas of the world. In parts of New England, snow stayed on the ground all year. Crops there and in Europe were ruined. Volcanic dust from the corruption of Tomboro in Indonesia that blocked the rays of the sun has been blamed.
- In living memory, it was not until February 18, 1979, that snow fell on the Sahara Desert. A half-hour storm in southern Algeria stopped traffic but within a few hours all of the snow had melted away.
- Residents in a small village in Scotland schedule their television viewing according to the tides. At low tide, the nearby mudflats absorbed the broadcast “waves”. Thank God for cable.
- On June 10, 1958, a tornado was crashing through El Dorado, Kansas. The storm pulled a woman out of her house and carried her 60 feet away. She landed, relatively unharmed, next to a phonograph record titled “Stormy Weather”.
- Due to friction with the surface of the planet, the wind retards or accelerates the spin of the Earth very slightly. A peak in the seasonal slowing of the planet is most evident during the northern winter.
C’MON WINTER
Gardening and other outdoor pursuits have taken a spot much lower on my priorities list today. Yesterday we had a very short thunderstorm (badly needed) but with it came many problems. Some sort of power surge crashed my home network and fried my router. I spent most of yesterday attempting to repair and correct the problems. What a pain in the butt.
My home network is quite comprehensive (when working) and an absolute nightmare when it isn’t. Losing the router shut down our alarm system, the telephone system, the Xbox, the DVD player, the MyCloud, the Internet, and all printing capabilities. It’s times like these that force me to realize just how much our household relies on this damn technology.
After doing a lot of testing I determined the router had truly been destroyed. Since it was rather old replacing it wasn’t that big of a deal. Unfortunately that old router had been attached to the Time Warner modem on the Internet feed which was also badly damaged. It was off to my home-away-from-home, Best Buy, to begin the rebuilding process. I upgraded to a newer model of router and also purchased a network battery backup system. Then I stopped off at Time Warner on the way home and traded in the old modem for a new data modem.
I returned home and installed the new equipment which turned out to be much easier than I anticipated. Good news, right? No effing way. As I began the process of making sure all of our devices were reprogrammed to the new system I found a new problem caused by the upgrade. My “Old Faithful” of a desktop computer refused to connect to the new and improved network. Unfortunately this desktop is four years old and is my main storage device for over five thousand music files and an additional twenty-five thousand photographs. Please, just shoot me now.
The desktop also has my only working copy of Windows Live Writer which is one of the best programs ever created for posting blogs. Microsoft in it’s infinite wisdom has discontinued the product and that puts me in a serious bind.  If I can’t resolve the network issues with this computer I’ll be totally and truly screwed. The repair work will continue today and this posting will probably be handled through the WordPress system.
I love computers but OMFG can they be frustrating. Between virus protection, firewalls, hackers, and network requirements, it can make a person crazy. Hopefully I’ll figure things out quickly but as always with computers I expect the worst. I’ll keep you posted ( no pun intended).
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