Impromptu Examples

7. Glenda Proby, aka Gizzle,

A 28 year old queer female rapper who has been racking up writing credits on songs from Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Kevin Gates, and more. Until recently, an openly queer female MC with a viable career seemed an impossibility. She's making it a reality.

4. Smut Mutt

A dog named URL, with the Baltimore police department, can smell unique chemical compounds used in electronic devices. Police rely on the "smut mutt" to find hidden evidence of computer fraud, theft, and yes even pornography.

Sheilah Graham

Although marked by an inauspicious start, Graham quickly rose to fame through her column, "Hollywood Today," which she wrote daily for over 35 years, interrupted only by serving as a war correspondent during World War II. The column at its peak was carried in 178 papers in 1966, compared to 100 papers for rival Louella Parsons and 68 for Hedda Hopper." She divorced from John Gillam in June 1937 to become engaged to the Marquess of Donegall. A month later, she was to meet F. Scott Fitzgerald, with whom she relates having immediately fallen in love, and the engagement was broken soon thereafter.[6] Ruthe Stein quotes her as saying, "I'll only be remembered, if I'm remembered at all, because of Scott Fitzgerald."[citation needed] They shared a home and were constant companions while Fitzgerald was still married to his wife Zelda, who was institutionalized in an asylum.[6] Nonetheless, Graham protested her description as his "mistress" in her book The Rest of the Story on the basis that she was "a woman who loved Scott Fitzgerald for better or worse until he died." It was she who found his body in the living room of her West Hollywood, California apartment, where he had died of a heart attack in 1940.[6] They had been together only 3-1/2 years, but her daughter reports that Graham "never really got over him."[1] During those three years, Scott outlined a "curriculum" for her, and guided her through it, which she later wrote about in detail in A College of One.[5] Graham also later wrote of her years spent with Fitzgerald in the 1958 book Beloved Infidel,[6] which later was adapted as a movie. Upon Fitzgerald's death, seeking a respite from the social demands and frantic pace of her life, Graham arranged for an assignment as a foreign correspondent in NANA's London bureau.[6] This afforded her the opportunity to demonstrate her abilities as a serious journalist. Her first major story from the UK was an in-depth interview with George Bernard Shaw, and she later filed another with Winston Churchill. Her brief respite from Hollywood lasted until the conclusion of World War II.[6]

James Calendar

James Thomson Callender (1758-1803), well known in his time as a political writer and newspaper editor, is remembered today chiefly for his series of newspaper articles alleging that Thomas Jefferson had children with Sally Hemings. Born in Scotland, Callender wrote The Political Press Progress of Britain, that attacked British institutions. The document was outlawed in January 1793 and thus, he fled to America, arriving in the States in May 1793. Callender criticized elements of the Constitution which he believed were undemocratic, such as the election of the president through the Electoral College. He said that the Senate was flagrantly unrepresentative because it was not directly elected by the people, and blasted George Washington, who had "debauched" and "deceived" the nation by promoting himself as a popular idol. An advocate of an unfettered press, Callender declared, "The more that a nation knows about the mode of conducting its business, the better chance has that business of being properly conducted." Throughout Callender's career his writings were rabidly partisan. When Callender lost his job as the congressional reporter for the Philadelphia Gazette he turned to writing pamphlets supporting the Republican party cause, but he was continually in debt. Jefferson helped his journalist ally by securing him a position on the Republican paper,The Aurora, and provided him with money off and on for several years.[1] Jefferson understood the power of the printed word to reach people and he did not stop Callender in his attacks against Federalist leaders. In order to curb Alexander Hamilton's influence, Callender published in his work, History of the United States for 1796 (1797), a report of the affair between Alexander Hamilton and Maria Reynolds, a married woman. The day before the Alien and Sedition Acts became law on July 13, 1798, Callender fled to Virginia to the home of Senator Stevens Thomson Mason of Loudoun County. Then, in 1799, he moved to Richmond where he wrote for the Richmond Recorder. His anti-Federalist pamphlet, The Prospect Before Us, led to his prosecution under the Sedition Act. He was sentenced on May 24, 1800 to nine months in jail and a $200 fine. When he got out of jail in the spring of 1801 Callender expected President Jefferson to reward him for his work and his loyalty. He wanted the Richmond postmaster job but he did not get it. In the president's view, Callender was now too radical, and in an attempt to foster reconciliation after the difficult election, Jefferson did not include the more militant or radical Republicans. As Jefferson writes, "I am really mortified at the base ingratitude of Callender. It presents human nature in a hideous form."[2] In February 1802, Callender joined with Federalist newspaper editor Henry Pace and began to attack both parties, but even more so against the Republicans and Jefferson in particular. In a series of articles beginning on September 1, 1802, Callender alleged that Jefferson had several children by a slave concubine, Sally Hemings.[3]

Vincent Fernie

King of Shock Rock was a preachers son. Now after alcoholism overdoses and rehab he is a born again Christian

Japanese Fortunre Cookies

During world war two Chinese food restaurants on the west coast started serving fortune cookies, a practice that originated in Japan. The practice was so popular that it started spreading around the country.

Blake Mycoskie

is an American entrepreneur, author, and philanthropist. He is best known as the founder and Chief Shoe Giver of Toms Shoes (stylized as TOMS Shoes).Following college, Mycoskie moved to Nashville to found Mycoskie Media, an outdoor billboard company which focused largely on marketing country music. The company was quickly profitable, and was bought by Clear Channel nine months after its launch.[5] In 2001, Mycoskie and his sister, Paige Mycoskie, applied for the cast of Survivor. A member of the Survivor production team told them about The Amazing Race, which had yet to debut, and they instead pursued a team position on that show. They competed in the second season of The Amazing Race and finished in third place, missing a million dollar prize by four minutes.[6] Mycoskie moved to Los Angeles later that year.[7] In Los Angeles, Mycoskie co-founded the cable network Reality Central with Larry Namer, a founder of E! Entertainment Television. Raising $25 million from venture capitalists, along with other members of reality show casts,[8] the network launched in 2003 with a plan of airing original content and re-runs of reality programming.[9] Although the network had moderate success, it folded in 2005 after Rupert Murdoch launched the Fox Reality Channel and outbid Reality Central for advertisers and programming.[10] Determined to pursue an entrepreneurial path, Mycoskie then partnered with the founders of TrafficSchool.com to create DriversEd Direct, an online driver's education service which additionally offered behind-the-wheel training in hybrid and sport utility vehicles.[8] To promote DriversEdDirect, he created Closer Marketing Group, a Santa Monica-based marketing firm specializing in brand development and viral marketing.[11] Mycoskie visited Argentina on vacation in 2006. While there, he met an American woman who was part of a volunteer organization which provided shoes for children in need. Mycoskie spent several days traveling from village to village with the group, as well as on his own. "(I witnessed) the intense pockets of poverty just outside the bustling capital," he wrote in a 2011 article for The Business Insider. "It dramatically heightened my awareness. Yes, I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that poor children around the world often went barefoot, but now, for the first time, I saw the real effects of being shoeless: the blisters, the sores, the infections."[12] Inspired, Mycoskie returned to the United States and founded Shoes for Better Tomorrows. Designed as a for-profit business which could continually give new shoes to disadvantaged children, he created the "One for One" business model: the company would donate a new pair of shoes for every pair of shoes sold. An early example of social entrepreneurship, the shoes, similar to the Argentinian Alpargata, were created to appeal to a worldwide audience, which would both sustain the company's mission and generate profit.[13][14] Shoes For A Better Tomorrow, later shortened to TOMS,[15] was started in 2006; by 2013, the company had donated more than 10,000,000 pairs of shoes to people in need.[16] The shoes are sold globally in more than 1000 stores.[17] In 2011, Toms expanded to include eyeglasses in its "One for One" offering—for every pair of sunglasses purchased, sight-saving medical treatment, prescription glasses or surgery is donated to a person in need.[18] While Mycoskie conceived the idea, a "Sight Giving Partner," the Seva Foundation, was contracted to administer the actual program, which launched in Nepal, Tibet, and Cambodia.[19] In a 2012 interview with Fast Company, Mycoskie said it was helpful for him to work with Seva. "I've been there when (people have had) surgery... and I've handed out the glasses. But as Toms grows, it has to be less about 'What's Blake's most intimate, joyful experience?' and more about 'What's the great need?'"[20] Mycoskie published the book Start Something That Matters in 2011. In it, he wrote about the virtues of social entrepreneurship and the concept of businesses using their profits and company assets to make charitable donations or engage in other charitable efforts, using his experience with Toms to demonstrate both the intangible and real returns.[21] For every copy of Start Something That Matters sold, Mycoskie promised to give a children's book to a child in need.[22] Fifty percent of royalties from the book were then used to provide grants to up-and-coming entrepreneurs,[23] and Mycoskie increased this to 100% in late 2012.[24] The book became a New York Times best-selling business book,[25] and a number one New York Times best-seller in the advice category.[26] At SXSW in 2014, Mycoskie announced the launch of TOMS Roasting Co., a company which offers coffee sourced through direct trade efforts in Rwanda, Honduras, Peru, Guatemala and Malawi. TOMS Roasting Co. will donate a week of water to people in need in supplier countries for every bag of coffee sold. In 2014, Mycoskie announced that TOMS would launch an additional "One for One" product every year.[27][28] In August 2014, Mycoskie sold 50% of Toms to Bain Capital, retaining his role as Chief Shoe Giver. In a company press release, he said: "In eight short years, we've had incredible success, and now we need a strategic partner who shares our bold vision for the future and can help us realize it." He will donate 50% of the profits from the sale to establish a fund that identifies and supports social entrepreneurship and other causes. Bain committed to matching Mycoskie's donation to the fund, and will continue the One For One business model.[29][30][31]

Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Thought

During the height of the cold war, Herbert Marcuse argued that modernities ability to plaster over terrible fates like the barbaric practices of war, were testaments to modern societies insulation from criticism. In other words, capitalism is so persuasive at marketing, that it makes the worst things in the world, say, living in a bomb shelter because of nuclear fallout, seem just dandy. The obscene merger between appearance and reality. A cozy getaway and a situation that just sucks.

John Bohannon

I am Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D. Well, actually my name is John, and I'm a journalist. I do have a Ph.D., but it's in the molecular biology of bacteria, not humans. The Institute of Diet and Health? That's nothing more than a website. Other than those fibs, the study was 100 percent authentic. My colleagues and I recruited actual human subjects in Germany. We ran an actual clinical trial, with subjects randomly assigned to different diet regimes. And the statistically significant benefits of chocolate that we reported are based on the actual data. It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded. Here's how we did it.

Theodor "Ted" Seuss Geisel

He joined the war effort. Beginning in 1941, Seuss produced political cartoons for the left-wing newspaper PM in New York. In those pages, he criticized the U.S. policy of isolationism, urging the country to enter World War II. He also lambasted anti-Semitism and racism, although his depictions of Japanese people with exaggerated racial features proved problematic. "Insure your home against Hitler!", a July 28, 1942 political cartoon from Dr. Seuss. Image courtesy of Special Collection & Archives, UC San Diego Library "Insure your home against Hitler!", a July 28, 1942 political cartoon from Dr. Seuss. Image courtesy of Special Collection & Archives, UC San Diego Library"Cages cost money!", a Dec. 15, 1941 political cartoon from Dr. Seuss. Image courtesy of Special Collection & Archives, UC San Diego Library "Cages cost money!", a Dec. 15, 1941 political cartoon from Dr. Seuss. Image courtesy of Special Collection & Archives, UC San Diego Librar By 1942, Seuss was keen on joining the navy, but was instead asked to make war propaganda films with Oscar-winning director Frank Capra. Joined by P.D. Eastman of "Go, Dog. Go!" fame, Mel Blanc and Chuck Jones among others, Seuss co-created Private Snafu ("Situation Normal, All Fouled Up"), a cartoon dolt in a military uniform meant to teach new recruits how to be a good soldier.The black-and-white cartoon series was also off-color — and a hit with soldiers. "It's so cold, it would freeze the nuts off a jeep," one cartoon begins.Video by Periscope Film Seuss ended up writing most of the cartoons. The series proved a training ground for his rhymes, story development and working with limited vocabulary.5. He was a successful ad man before a children's author.Seuss' first foray into children's literature was with "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" in 1937. Before then, he had a successful career in advertising. He wrote copy and drew advertisements for companies such as Standard Oil and Flit bug spray, which, in particular, became his most lucrative work.Seuss had his first taste of contributing to the American vernacular in 1928 when the catchphrase "Quick, Henry, the Flit!" from one of his ads for the Flit insecticide became popular. The ad campaign was such a hit that Seuss continued to produce work for the company for 17 years.A Flit bug spray advertisement proof, between 1930 and 1940. Image courtesy of Special Collection & Archives, UC San Diego Library A Flit bug spray advertisement proof, between 1930 and 1940. Image courtesy of Special Collection & Archives, UC San Diego Library. A Standard Oil Company - Essolube advertisement, between 1930 and 1940. Image courtesy of Special Collection & Archives, UC San Diego Library A Standard Oil Company - Essolube advertisement, between 1930 and 1940. Image courtesy of Special Collection & Archives, UC San Diego Library "The only good thing Adolph Hitler did in starting World War II was that he enabled me to join the Army and finally stop drawing 'Quick, Henry, the Flit!'" Seuss is quoted as saying in Thomas Fensch's biography of the author. 6. His all-time best-selling book was created on a bet. Dr. Seuss' editor Bennett Cerf bet him he couldn't write a book using 50 or fewer words. The result is 1960's "Green Eggs and Ham." Although the Cat and the Grinch are among Seuss' most iconic characters, the story of Sam-I-Am trying to convince an unknown character to eat green eggs and ham has sold more than eight million copies since publication, according to a 2011 Publishers Weekly list. Can you craft a best-seller with these 50 words? a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you 7. He gifted the English language with "nerd" and redefined "grinch." In 1950's "If I Ran the Zoo," a kid rattles off a list of fantastical creatures that rival the animals found in the zoo: "I'll sail to Ka-Troo and bring back an It-Kutch, a Preep, and a Proo,/A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too!"In the book, a sign identifies a "nerd" as a red and yellow and white-haired sourpuss. It appears to be the first documented instance of the word, which has since morphed into a put-down for bookish people. Writing for The Boston Globe, Ben Zimmer said the word "nerd" has no one particular historical source, but it is a credible theory that Seuss played a role in popularizing it. And while Seuss didn't invent "grinch," the word's meaning — a grouchy person — is all him, Nel said. "He actually changed the language," Nel said. "There are poets that do that, but it's not common." "Nerkle," however, has yet to catch on. 8. He wrote two adult books, one with nude drawings. "The Seven Lady Godivas: The True Facts Concerning History's Barest Family" was a flop when it came out in 1939. The book featured the unclothed sisters throughout the book in a decidedly unsexy story. "[Seuss] would like to say he felt it was a flop because he couldn't draw sexy, naked ladies," Nel said. "And he has a point. Imagine naked ladies drawn by Dr. Seuss. Not particularly erotic." On subsequent reissues, there was a claim on the books that "Lady Godivas" was "reissued by multitudinous demand," "which is a lie because no one wanted it," Nel said. Besides being an interesting failure, a book of naked illustrations also upset the people's notion of Dr. Seuss, Nel said. His other adult book was the picture book "You're Only Old Once," published in 1986 about the indignities of growing older.

Michael Fay

In 1994 Michael Fay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_P._Fay

Matt O'Hayer

Matt O'Hayer thought he was in the idyllic part of the egg business. He's CEO of Vital Farms, based in Austin, Texas, which markets eggs from hens that run around outdoors, on grassy pastures, at about a hundred different farms. "I thought that there's nothing more beautiful than eggs, where you have sort of a symbiotic relationship; you take care of the hen and she gives you this little gift every day," says O'Hayer. Until a few years ago, he never thought about where those hens come from, or what happened to their male siblings. Then he ran into a couple of people from the animal rights group PETA. "I told them what I was doing for a living, and they said, 'Oh, that's horrific,' " O'Hayer recalls. "And I said, 'Why's that?' And they said, 'Because of what happens to the male chicks!'" That's when O'Hayer learned about something that happens at the hatcheries that supply his farmers with hens. Those hatcheries incubate fertile eggs from breeding flocks, in order to raise more egg-laying hens. Their breed of chicken is only used to lay eggs, not for meatO'Hayer now believes that he has the answer. Vital Farms teamed up with an Israeli company called Novatrans and found a way to analyze the chemical makeup of gases that leak from the pores of an egg and determine the sex of the embryo inside. "We are able to trap the gas and read whether it's male, female, or infertile, and do it in a matter of seconds, rather than minutes," says O'Hayer. O'Hayer says it's possible to make that determination two days after the egg is laid, before it enters the incubation chamber. At that point, it's still possible to sell the eggs containing male embryos as regular edible eggs. It normally takes 21 days of incubation for an egg to develop into a chick that breaks out of its shell. The Vital Farms-Novatrans partnership expects to have a commercial version of this invention up and running within a year. By that time, though, it may have competition. In Canada, Egg Farmers of Ontario has been funding research by Michael Ngadi, a scientist at McGill University, who's developing a way to determine the sex of embryos by shining light through them. Harry Pelissero, general manager of Egg Farmers of Ontario, told The Salt that the technique could be commercially available within two years. Meanwhile, German researchers are working on yet another approach. David Coman-Hidy, executive director of the Humane League, an animal-welfare advocacy group, says there has been a wave of technical innovation aimed at this problem, just within the past year. Last summer, he says, he hoped to get the egg industry to promise to stop killing male chicks by the year 2020. But "now that we've seen these new folks trying to get these contracts as soon as possible, I think we may see this change happen even sooner." According to Chad Gregory, from the United Egg Producers, there's huge demand within the egg industry for a way to solve this problem, and the first company to create a solution could earn a lot of money. "Over time, worldwide, it could be worth billions of dollars," he says.

For Your Consideration Campaigns

Oscars and other awards shows make these campaigns, the Golden Globes, only the Hollywood Foreign Press 87 seven members and everyone knows who they are. It's Bribery but not exactly. Denzel Washington made a joke about it. Studios may spend 10 million on an Oscar.

Kathy Whitworth

Professional golf's all-time leading tournament winner Kathy Whitworth was born on September 27, 1939, in Monahans, Texas. Whitworth won her first tournament, the Kelly Girls Open, in 1962. Three years later, she was named the Associated Press Athlete of the Year. She received the award again in 1967. For her outstanding performance between 1968 and 1977, Golf Magazine named Whitworth "Golfer of the Decade." Whitworth was inducted into the LPGA Tour Hall of Fame in 1975, but didn't rest on her laurels. By 1982, she had captured eighty-two LPGA titles. Whitworth won her eighty-eighth title in 1985, setting the tournament victory record for a professional golfer—man or woman.Golf first became popular among American women in the mid-1890s when the growing leisure class adopted it as one of its new amusements. Magazines such as Ladies Home Journal urged women to try the sport, a sixteenth-century favorite of Mary, Queen of Scots.For many women of privilege, golf provided the adventure and challenge missing from their restricted everyday lives. The sport's popularity grew, and by the 1920s, women's amateur golf tournaments were attracting a range of players and large crowds.

8. The Unknown Protestor

Tank Man (also known as the Unknown Protester or Unknown Rebel) is the nickname of an unidentified man who stood in front of a column of tanks on June 4, 1989, the morning after the Chinese military had suppressed the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 by force. As the lead tank maneuvered to pass by the man, he repeatedly shifted his position in order to obstruct the tank's attempted path around him. The incident was filmed and seen worldwide.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments"

The Theory of Moral Sentiments" (1759), Adam Smith observed that sensory experience alone could not spur us toward sympathetic engagement with others: "Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers." For Smith, what made us moral beings was the imaginative capacity to "place ourselves in his situation . . . and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them."

Neitzche's Active Nihilist

We must act to destroy what was formally accepted notions of value and morality.

Brian Sollit

You won't know his name, but Brian Sollitt was the genius who brought a perfect ending to countless dinner parties and family gatherings at Christmas. For more than half a century, the chocolatier and confectionery wizard beavered away in the kitchen of the Rowntree's factory working on recipes and ideas for tantilising new treats. But his greatest achievement was the iconic After Eight mint - a middle-class essential of the 1960s but still popular in households across the land. Remarkably, this one man, who has died aged 74, was also involved in bringing Yorkies, Matchmakers, Drifters and Lion Bars to our sweetshop shelves. The real-life Willy Wonka began his career at the age of 15 when he was recruited to the cream department with responsibility for hand piping Black Magic chocolates. He was swiftly transferred to the Creme Experimentation Department to become a confectioner and an artisan of his trade. Alex Hutchinson, the historian for Nestle which now owns Rowntree's, said: 'Brian's impact on the British confectionery industry is incalculable. 'It is easy to forget that the sweets we pick up in the shops today are things that would have been handmade lovingly in the early stages of development by Brian. 'He spent months, or sometimes years, agonising over the technical details of his creations. He was an incredible man. He was asked to come up with this new chocolate and he did.' Mr Sollitt also devoted much effort to raise money for charity. The skilled chocolatier made giant Easter Eggs and once made a 3ft chocolate Pudsey Bear for Children In Need. He was also a brilliant teacher and trained many confectioners in their craft. Most of all he was a very likeable 'larger than life' figure. 'Everybody said you would hear him laughing and singing before you saw him,' said Miss Hutchinson. Confectioner colleague Kath Musgrove added: 'Watching Brian at work was like watching a true craftsman at his trade. 'He spent hours at a marble slab expertly hand-covering chocolates each with their own individual markings on. 'He was an ideas man and Brian bombarded the marketing team with his thoughts on what they should sell next. 'He was instrumental over the years in assisting with the launch of many new products.' Millions of After Eights are now made each year in Halifax, West Yorkshire, and sent to more than 50 countries. In keeping with his colourful character Mr Sollitt decorated his house with 500 Santas each year. He said: 'I still believe in Father Christmas. When I was young, my dad used to make toys, so I loved Christmas time. Every surface in my house is covered with Father Christmases, snowmen and lights. 'I get them from all over the place. I couldn't live with anybody, there's no room.' He also opened his house up for a £1 fee to raise money for charity. Mr Sollitt never married or had children. Friends said he was married to his job.

Nicolas Steno

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If4I3aF1PRg Rock Layers were once layers of water. He invented the groundwork for geology. Uniformitarianism- The things of today were shaped by past events that could be studied. Made the connection between shark teeth from a shark and tongue stones in mountainous regions, which Steno proved where fossilized teeth. That would groundbreaking. He also let empiricism shape his understanding.

5. Aristotle's Lesbian Rule

in his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle, as a metaphor for the importance of flexibility in equitable justice: "For what is itself indefinite can only be measured by an indefinite standard, like the leaden ruler used by Lesbian builders; just as that ruler is not rigid but can be bent to the shape of the stone, so a special ordinance is made to fit the circumstances of the case."

Alabama's song "I'm in a Hurry"

"I'm in a Hurry (And Don't Know Why)" is a song written by Roger Murrah and Randy VanWarmer, and recorded by American country music band Alabama. It was released in September 1992 as the second single from their album American Pride. The song hit number one on both the US Billboard Hot Country Songs chart and the Canadian RPM Country Tracks chart.[1]

H.p. Lovecraft

Cosmic Horror. Instead of quick jumps, cosmic horror throws our insignificance at us.

Shooting Stars of Feces

Wishing upon shooting stars can be a wonderful experience. Except, it's hard to be sure if that shooting star is actually a star. Astronauts in space often release their bathroom refuse in space and let it burn up upon reentry. So, that shooting star you thought carried with it your wishes and dreams might have actually been a flaming pile of astroguano.

11. John Harvard

a 31-year-old clergyman from Charlestown, Massachusetts died, leaving his library and half of his estate to a local college. The young minister's bequest allowed the college to firmly establish itself. In honor of its first benefactor, the school adopted the name Harvard College. 1638

Meow Meow

a polyamorous, trans-humanist bio-hacker in Sydney. In 2014, Meow Meow opened Australia's first do-it-yourself bio-hacking lab, in which anyone could pay a membership fee to experiment with DNA and make whatever creatures they could imagine. Hello World's Ashlee Vance traveled to Sydney to visit Meow Meow's lab. It's a modest facility tucked in the back corner of an artists' warehouse. The humble setup hasn't stopped Meow Meow from making things that range from the bizarre (phosphorescent beer) to the practical (a take-home STD test).

Tonya Harding

an American former figure skating champion, a two-time Olympian, and a two-time Skate America Champion. In 1991, she won the U.S. Figure Skating Championships and placed second in the World Championships. Harding was the second woman, and the first American woman, to complete a triple Axel jump in competition.[4] In 1994, she was banned for life from the U.S. Figure Skating Association and pleaded guilty to hindering the prosecution following the attack on fellow skater Nancy Kerrigan.[5]

Jonathan Chapman

born in Leominster, Massachusetts, on September 26, 1775, came to be known as "Johnny Appleseed." Chapman earned his nickname because he planted nurseries and individual apple trees across 100,000 square miles of midwestern wilderness and prairie—resulting in settlers' planting their own orchardsThe first record of Chapman's presence in the Midwest dates to 1801 when he was known to be on the Ohio River transporting bushels of apple seeds from western Pennsylvania for his nurseries. Chapman's first apple-tree nursery was along the Allegheny Valley in northwestern Pennsylvania; he then ventured into central and northwestern Ohio and to eastern Indiana. Chapman scouted routes that he thought pioneers would settle and planted his seedlings ahead of the new settlements.

Jesse Jackson

"There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps... then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved." Jesse Louis Jackson, Sr. (born Jesse Louis Burns; October 8, 1941) is an American civil rights activist, Baptist minister, and politician. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988 and served as a shadow U.S. Senator for the District of Columbia from 1991 to 1997. He is the founder of the organizations that merged to form Rainbow/PUSH. Former U.S. Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr. is his eldest son. Jackson was also the host of Both Sides with Jesse Jackson on CNN from 1992 to 2000.ackson has been known for commanding public attention since he first started working for Martin Luther King Jr.[11] In 1965, Jackson participated in the Selma to Montgomery marches organized by James Bevel, King and other civil rights leaders in Alabama.[2] Impressed by Jackson's drive and organizational abilities, King soon began giving Jackson a role in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), though he was concerned about Jackson's apparent ambition and attention-seeking.[2][12] When Jackson returned from Selma, he was charged with establishing a frontline office for the SCLC in Chicago.[12]

Astronaut Ice Cream

-Apollo 7, Vanilla Ice May have gone up Walt Cunningham Flew on Apollo 7, They never had ice cream, the press just repeated the story so much they believed it. It it's super crumbly, and it would be problematic to have crumbs flowing around. Walt Cunningham stowed a couple things in his suit, and he stowed bacon squares in case he got stranded somewhere

Mansa Musa

1324 the king of Mali, Mansa Musa, took a pilgrimage to Mecca, and he brought a huge caravan with him, 10000's of soldiers, civilians, and slaves. He spent massive quantities of gold and even built statues along the way. He spent so much gold that he destabilized the regional economy.

Gene Rodenberry

36 people on the plane, and an engine took fire. He had already taken 89 bombing raids during world war 2, and he'd gone down twice, a third time would be statistically impossible. Eugene's ribs cracked, and then he unlocked his safety belt to run into the burning carriage and then saved person after person. The last person he saved died in his arms. He joined the LAPD, he saw too much racism, and maybe the best way to change the world was to create a new one, and wrote a new world and turned it into a world where interracial relations were common and technology could take people forward. He created Star Trek. The man who saw a world where everyone might live long and prosper.

Mohamed El-Erian

A 22-point list written by his 10-year-old daughter was all it took to change the trajectory of Mohamed El-Erian's life, the former CEO says. In January, El-Erian made headlines for announcing his resignation as chief executive officer of trillion-dollar investment fund PIMCO in January. In an article for Worth this summer, which has recently gone viral, El-Erian explains that he decided to step down after his daughter listed out the many milestones he had missed in her life. When El-Erian asked his child why she wasn't listening to him when he asked her to brush her teeth, she gave him a list of 22 things he had missed (from first soccer matches to Halloween parades) because of work. "Talk about a wake-up call," El-Erian writes. "I felt awful and got defensive: I had a good excuse for each missed event! Travel, important meetings, an urgent phone call, sudden to-dos... But it dawned on me that I was missing an infinitely more important point." Family may not have been the sole factor in his resignation, however; at least one report at the time suggested El-Erian's departure might also have been motivated by an alleged falling-out with PIMCO co-founder Bill Gross, who left the company Friday. But whatever El-Erian's actual reason for leaving, his blog post still struck a nerve. While discussion of work-life balance is often discussed with women in the C-Suite, men are rarely asked whether or not they "have it all."

Robert Morin

A University of New Hampshire librarian, who spent a lifetime living frugally, surprised the school by donating his entire estate — worth $4 million.But then UNH decided to allocate only $100,000 to the library, $2.5 million to a career center, and $1 million to a new video scoreboard at the football stadium, The Washington Post reported. "He would have some Fritos and a Coke for breakfast, a quick cheese sandwich at the library, and at home would have a frozen dinner because the only thing he had to work with was a microwave. He was a very unusual gentleman," Edward Mullen, Morin's longtime financial adviser, told The Boston Globe, who first reported the story of Morin's remarkable gift. Morin also had a voracious appetite for reading and watching videos. A UNH press release read: "Morin also had a passion for watching movies, and from 1979 to 1997 he watched more than 22,000 videos. Following this feat, he switched his attention to books. He read, in chronological order, every book published in the US from 1930 to 1940 — excluding children's books, textbooks, and books about cooking and technology. At the time of his death he had reached 1,938, the year of his birth."

Brené Brown Shame Resilience Theory

According to Brown, shame is a silent epidemic, and the more we keep it secret, the firmer its hold on us. Even helping professionals are hesitant to use the word shame with clients. Shame is associated with a host of issues including addiction, violence, and depression. She defines shame as "the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of connection and belonging." We cannot escape shame; it is a daily human emotion. However, we can develop resilience to shame. Shame resilience theory teaches that shame resilience can be cultivated by: Recognizing and accepting personal vulnerability: All of us are vulnerable to experiences of shame, our shame triggers. When we recognize the emotional and physical signs of shame, we have the chance to understand what's happening and why, and to seek help. Conversely, when we fail to acknowledge shame, we are taken off-guard, we are flooded with overwhelming emotions, and we fail to recognize what we are feeling. Raising critical awareness regarding social/cultural expectations: Critical awareness surrounding shame is the ability to link how we are personally feeling with society's sometimes conflicting and shaming expectations of us as individuals. We see the big picture (we contextualize)Forming mutually empathetic relationships that facilitate reaching out to others: When we reach out for support, we may receive empathy, which is incompatible with shame and judgment. We recognize that our most isolating experiences are also the most universal. We recognize that we are not defective or alone in our experiences (we normalize). "Speaking shame," possessing the language and emotional competence to discuss and deconstruct shame: By learning the language of shame, we learn to draw distinctions between shame, guilt, embarrassment, and humiliation. We can "name shame" by separating it from secondary emotions such as anger, fear, and isolation. We learn to ask for what we need. We learn and share what we know with others (we demystify).

John W. Gardner's In Common Cause: Citizen Action and How It Works (

After diagnosing America's social problems as the result of corrupt and undemocratic political processes and proposing a series of reforms, such as open-government laws and public financing for campaigns, Gardner encouraged his readers to join the organization Common Cause. He had founded this organization two years earlier by taking out advertisements in leading national newspapers, promising "to build a true 'citizens" lobby—a lobby concerned not with the advancement of special interests but with the wellbeing of the nation. ... We want public officials to have literally millions of American citizens looking over their shoulders at every move they make." More than 100,000 readers quickly responded by joining Gardner's organization and sending money. Common Cause was soon involved in passing the Twenty-Sixth Amendment (which lowered the voting age to 18), the Federal Election Campaign Act, the Freedom of Information Act, and the Ethics in Government Act of 1978. The book In Common Cause was an early part of the organization's successful outreach efforts.

Alka-Seltzer's Two Drops

Alka-Seltzer is one of those weird products that seem to have no competitors. It comes with two tablets you drop into a glass of water, they dissolve, you drink it, you feel better. You may only know Alka-Seltzer as a slayer of hangovers, but if you are old enough to remember the 1970s and 1980s, you remember their TV ads absolutely bombarding prime time television. You can guess someone's age by whether or not they can complete the phrase "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz." (The correct answer: "Oh what a relief it is.") Two tablets, that's all it takes. "Plop, plop," just like the jingle says. Except you actually only need one tablet. The second "plop" isn't doing anything but dissolving your money. The Deviously Simple Plan: Up until the 1960s, the instructions only said to use one tablet, and that's all they showed people doing in the ads. But the company hit a rut. Sales were steady, but not great. They needed a way to market the product to younger customers, and to get them to buy more.

10. Nicolas Marie Alexandre Vattemare

Around age seven, Vattemare discovered a talent for ventriloquism and the ability to imitate sounds.[1] He trained as a surgeon, but was refused a diploma after making cadavers seem to speak during surgical exercises.[1] At age 18 he was placed in charge of some 300 to 400 typhus-afflicted Prussian prisoners of war, and in 1814, the soldiers asked that he accompany them to Berlin.[1] Facing economic problems in Berlin, he decided to earn money as a ventriloquist, performing under the stage name Monsieur Alexandre.[1] His career lasted from 1815 to 1835, during which he visited over 550 cities and performed before royalty including the Tsar of Russia and Queen Victoria. His performances did not use a dummy, but rather involved Vattemare presenting plays in which he portrayed all the characters, involving dozens of voices. Vattemare wrote his own comedic scripts, which he performed in French, German, and English.[1] He gained acclaim and wealth through his ventriloquism, while becoming friends with famous writers and artists including Goethe, Lamartine, Pushkin, and Sir Walter Scott.[1]

9. Ruby Bridges

As a six-year-old, Ruby Bridges famously became the first African American child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in the South. When the 1st grader walked to William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans on November 14, 1960 surrounded by a team of U.S. Marshals, she was met by a vicious mob shouting and throwing objects at her. One of the federal marshals, Charles Burks, who served on her escort team, recalls Bridges' courage in the face of such hatred: "For a little girl six years old going into a strange school with four strange deputy marshals, a place she had never been before, she showed a lot of courage. She never cried. She didn't whimper. She just marched along like a little soldier. We were all very proud of her." Once Ruby entered the school, she discovered that it was devoid of children because they had all been removed by their parents due to her presence. The only teacher willing to have Ruby as a student was Barbara Henry, who had recently moved from Boston. Ruby was taught by herself for her first year at the school due to the white parents' refusal to have their children share a classroom with a black child. Despite daily harassment, which required the federal marshals to continue escorting her to school for months; threats towards her family; and her father's job loss due to his family's role in school integration, Ruby persisted in attending school. The following year, when she returned for second grade, the mobs were gone and more African American students joined her at the school. The pioneering school integration effort was a success due to Ruby Bridges' inspiring courage, perseverance, and resilience.

Neil deGrasse Tyson's First Daily Show interview

Before Neil deGrasse Tyson went on The Daily Show, he paid attention to how many sentences Jon Stewart usually allowed before interrupting. He picked up on the kind of phrases Stewart liked to pick up on, which is why he described astronomy using sexually suggestive language.

Karl Johann Person

CEO at H+M. His company has been extremely successful because it's based suiting the rapidly changing wants of Americas fashion market. Stores are often replenished daily with clothes that can go from sketches to the hanger in as little as 3 weeks. They sell clothes extremely cheap.

Vice Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood

Collingwood's merits as a naval officer were in many respects of the first order. His political judgement was remarkable and he was consulted on questions of general policy, of regulation, and even of trade. He was opposed to impressment and to flogging and was considered so kind and generous that he was called "father" by the common sailors. Nelson and Collingwood enjoyed a close friendship, from their first acquaintance in early life until Nelson's death at Trafalgar; and they lie side by side in St Paul's Cathedral. As Collingwood died without male issue, his barony became extinct at his death. Thackeray held that there was no better example of a virtuous Christian Knight than Collingwood.[5] Dudley Pope relates an aspect of Collingwood at the beginning of chapter three of his Life in Nelson's Navy: "Captain Cuthbert Collingwood, later to become an admiral and Nelson's second in command at Trafalgar, had his home at Morpeth, in Northumberland, and when he was there on half pay or on leave he loved to walk over the hills with his dog Bounce. He always started off with a handful of acorns in his pockets, and as he walked he would press an acorn into the soil whenever he saw a good place for an oak tree to grow. Some of the oaks he planted are probably still growing more than a century and a half later ready to be cut to build ships of the line at a time when nuclear submarines are patrolling the seas, because Collingwood's purpose was to make sure that the Navy would never want for oaks to build the fighting ships upon which the country's safety depended." Collingwood once wrote to his wife that he'd rather his body be added to Britain's sea defences rather than given the pomp of a ceremonial burial.[6]

Ray Kroc

Creator of the biggest restaurant chain in the world. Ownership and operators, franchising is credited to him.

Bobble Head David Ortiz

David Ortiz Red Sox ordered 15,000 David Ortiz bobble heads and people came to the stadium to get these bobble heads and then they couldn't get them. Then they were really upset. Counteracting the goal they started out with.

Richard Dawkins Meme Theory 1970's

Dawkins wrote that evolution depended not on the particular chemical basis of genetics, but only on the existence of a self-replicating unit of transmission—in the case of biological evolution, the gene. For Dawkins, the meme exemplified another self-replicating unit with potential significance in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution. Although Dawkins invented the term 'meme' and developed meme theory, the possibility that ideas were subject to the same pressures of evolution as were biological attributes was discussed in Darwin's time. T. H. Huxley claimed that 'The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals. Like, don't go to the bathroom in your drinking water. That would be a meme under Dawkins definition. an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture".[2] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.[

Chivas Regal Whiskey

Despite having a pretty-good-tasting whiskey, and selling it at a bargain, Chivas Regal's sales kind of sucked. Simple market math says in that situation you need to cut prices, or improve the product, or pour millions into advertising. Ideally via The Flintstones.But there is something unique about the liquor market that makes it different from selling other beverages. Perception is everything. But how do you change people's perception of your product? The Deviously Simple Plan: Leave the product exactly the same, and massively raise the price. And we're talking about charging far more than any of the major competitors.Suddenly, people started buying it. Yeah, it turns out that most people don't know anything about alcohol, or what makes for good-tasting scotch. You can't blame them -- besides looking at proof, there is no objective way to measure the quality of alcohol. So, in situations where there really isn't anything tangible to consider, people look at the price. People automatically assume that if the company charges more for a product, it must be worth more. And get this: They continue thinking that even after they drink it.

Jennifer Pahlka

From her office in an old leather factory South of Market, Jennifer Pahlka is working to change the way government uses technology, one city at a time. Pahlka is founder and executive director of the nonprofit Code for America, which brings in mid-career tech workers willing to work for a year in cities looking for outside help. The help comes at a price, but it's not money. Instead, the cities have to open themselves to new ways of operating. They have to be willing to replace the ever-so-detailed rules and requirements of traditional government with the agility, innovation and feedback of the tech world. "We want to help government work better for and by the American people," she said. For some cities, a year spent working with the Code for America team has transformed the way they operateIn Oakland, for example, the three-person team Pahlka sent in 2013 did plenty of work designed to better connect city government to the people it served. For example, it helped create an application to make it easier for city workers to deal with a growing flood of public records requests, but also posted the results of those searches online for everyone to see. "I tell people that the app was the least important" thing the Code for America team did, said Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf. Their presence and involvement "ignited an interest in innovation in city government that's only growing."

Sylvester Graham

Grahamites, as Graham's followers were called, accepted the teaching of their mentor with regard to all aspects of lifestyle.[7] As such, they practiced abstinence from alcohol, frequent bathing, daily brushing of teeth, vegetarianism, and a generally sparse lifestyle. Graham also was an advocate of sexual abstinence, especially from masturbation, which he regarded as an evil that inevitably led to insanity. He felt that all excitement was unhealthful, and spices were among the prohibited ingredients in his diet. As a result, his dietary recommendations were inevitably bland, which led to the Grahamites consuming large quantities of graham crackers, Graham's own invention. White bread was strongly condemned by Graham and his followers, however, as being essentially devoid of nutrition, a claim echoed by nutritionists ever since. Some Grahamites lost faith when their mentor died at the age of fifty-seven. Other than the crackers, the Grahamites' major contribution to American culture was probably their insistence on frequent bathing. However, Graham's doctrines found later followers in the persons of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and his brother Will Keith Kellogg. Their invention of corn flakes was a logical extension of the Grahamite approach to nutrition. Grahamism was influential in the vegan movement. Sylvester Graham focused on meat and milk, which he believed to be the cause of sexual urges. In fact, he claimed animal byproducts produced lust; Grahamism thus rejected meat, animal byproducts, and alcohol in order to develop a purer mind and body. Quite popular in the 1860s-1880s, Grahamism rapidly lost momentum and is now remembered mostly for its graham crackers, even though graham crackers do not resemble the graham bread he ate.

Richard Cordray

He has traversed socioeconomic levels. In his youth, he worked for minimum wage, $2.30 an hour, at McDonald's. Later, he attended Oxford University as a Marshall scholar, headed the law review at the University of Chicago Law School, and was a clerk for two Supreme Court justices, Byron R. White, a Democratic nominee, and Anthony M. Kennedy, a Republican one. He is a five-time "Jeopardy" champion."We overcame momentous challenges — just building an agency from scratch, let alone one that deals with such a large sector of the economy," Mr. Cordray said in an interview at his agency's office here. "I'm satisfied with the progress we have made, but I'm not satisfied in the sense that there's a lot more progress to be made. There's still a lot to be done." But his future and the agency's are uncertain. Democrats in Ohio are encouraging Mr. Cordray to run for governor in 2018, which would require him to quit his job in Washington fairly soon, rather than when his term ends in mid-2018. Champions of the agency are imploring him to stay, arguing that if he leaves, the agency is likely to be defanged, its powers to help consumers sapped.

William Seales

IN 1970 archaeologists digging at Ein Gedi, an ancient settlement on the shores of what is now called the Dead Sea, dug up the ark of a synagogue that had stood on the site from about 800BC until it was destroyed by fire in around 600AD. Within was a trove of scrolls but sadly, though the ark had protected them from the worst of the blaze, they were badly scorched. They were, indeed, so damaged that any attempt to handle them simply made things worse. That left archaeologists with a cruel dilemma: attempt to read their discoveries, which would destroy them, or preserve them as found, but remain ignorant of what they said. Seales, A computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, describe how they have managed to read one of the charred scrolls without having to open it—or, indeed, to touch it at all. The first part of Dr Seales's remote-reading method was to take an X-ray of the scroll—or, rather, multiple X-rays from different directions that could be combined by a computer into a three-dimensional representation of the scroll's interior. This is a well-established procedure. It is, for example, the basis of medical CAT scanning. The real wizardry came when the 3D image was fed into a series of computer algorithms that attempted to "unroll" the scroll virtually, leaving it to be read at an archaeologist's leisure. The result, though, was worth the effort. The outcome of Dr Seales's labour is a computer image showing the scroll as it would look if it were unrolled (see picture). The resolution is so good that the text is easily legible, as are the guidelines scored by its scribe. The scroll, which was written around 200-300AD, turns out to be part of Leviticus. It is thus the oldest known example of one of the books of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible.

David Wallerstein work for McDonalds

If you went back in time to the 1960s, you'd be shocked at how small fast food was back then. And we don't mean Baconators had less bacon, we mean burgers are now 500 freaking percent bigger than they were when McDonald's first came around. It was just good economic sense: The meals were cheap, so you only got a little food. If you wanted more, you just had to order more. There was way more profit in selling two orders of fries than there was in selling one larger size. But when McDonald's head Ray Kroc noticed that some of the local store sales were starting to plateau in the 1970s, he hired a guy named David Wallerstein to figure out why. Wallerstein started his research by going to several McDonald's locations around Chicago to watch people eat, presumably through a newspaper with eye holes cut into it. Wallerstein noticed a peculiar trend: People would sit picking at the bottom of their fry bags while others fruitlessly tried to suck nonexistent soda out of their insultingly small cups, but they never went back to buy more. This is when Wallerstein realized that there was a social stigma in being seen ordering extra portions of anything. People who loved fries didn't just ask for a double order, because they thought other people would judge them for their gluttony. The Deviously Simple Plan: Wallerstein's solution was simplicity itself: Normalize the idea of ordering bigger food. Put it right on the menu, promote it and just charge more up front. Tell the cashiers to offer the larger sizes to customers, sending the subconscious message that "It's totally OK to eat twice as much food as is recommended for a person your size, and in fact we would prefer if you did." Wallerstein pitched his idea to Kroc, who promptly shot it down. But Kroc eventually came around, and McDonald's would fully embrace the idea of "supersizing" meals in the 1990s. An entirely new model for selling fast food was born, booming almost as dramatically as the worldwide obesity epidemic that mysteriously occurred around the same time.

Sir William Cubit's Treadmill

In 1818, an English civil engineer named Sir William Cubitt devised a machine called the "tread-wheel" to reform stubborn and idle convicts. Prisoners would step on the 24 spokes of a large paddle wheel, climbing it like a modern StairMaster. As the spokes turned, the gears were used to pump water or crush grain. (Hence the eventual name treadmill.) In grueling eight-hour shifts, prisoners would climb the equivalent of 7,200 feet. The exertion, combined with poor diets, often led to injury and illness (as well as rock-hard glutes), but that didn't stop penitentiaries all over Britain and the United States from buying the machines. In 1824, prison guard James Hardie credited the device with taming New York's more defiant inmates. He wrote that it was the treadmill's "monotonous steadiness, and not its severity, which constitutes its terror." Over the years, American wardens gradually stopped using the treadmill in favor of other backbreaking tasks, such as picking cotton, breaking rocks, or laying bricks. In England, the treadmill persisted until the late 19th century, when it was abandoned for being too cruel. The machine was all but lost to history. But when Dr. Kenneth Cooper demonstrated the health benefits of aerobic exercise in the 1960s, the treadmill made a triumphant return. Today, well-paid personal trainers have happily taken the place of prison wardens. Monotony Bad, Turn good things from bad, personal gains good, labor and ingenuity bad

Jacob Cohen

In 1962 Cohen, a psychologist at New York University, reported an alarming finding. He reckoned most of the studies he looked at would actually have detected the effects their authors were looking for only about 20% of the time—yet, in fact, nearly all reported significant results. Scientists, Cohen surmised, were not reporting their unsuccessful research. No surprise there, perhaps. But his finding also suggested some of the papers were actually reporting false positives, in other words noise that looked like data. He urged researchers to boost the power of their studies by increasing the number of subjects in their experiments.

Bobby Breen

In the 1930s, with the United States paralyzed by the Depression, a small army of child stars lifted the nation's spirits, offering innocence, hope and oodles of sentiment. Shirley Temple led the pack of adorables, but in 1936, a small but powerful rival appeared on the scene: an 8-year-old boy with an angelic face and a celestial voice, first raised heavenward in the film "Let's Sing Again."

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre

Inventor of the first practical process of photography, was born near Paris, France, on November 18, 1789. A successful commercial artist and a skilled theatrical designer, Daguerre began experimenting with the effects of light upon translucent paintings in the 1820s. In 1829, he formed a partnership with Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833) to improve the process that Niépce had developed to take the first permanent photograph in 1826-27.fter several years of experimentation, Daguerre developed a more convenient and effective method of photography, naming it after himself—the daguerreotype. In 1839, he formally announced the process and he and Niépce's son sold the rights for the daguerreotype to the French government. They published a booklet describing the process.

Linus Pauling

Linus Carl Pauling (February 28, 1901 - August 19, 1994)[4] was an American chemist, biochemist, peace activist, author, and educator. He published more than 1,200 papers and books, of which about 850 dealt with scientific topics.[5] New Scientist called him one of the 20 greatest scientists of all time,[6] and as of 2000, he was rated the 16th most important scientist in history.[7] Pauling was one of the founders of the fields of quantum chemistry and molecular biology.[8] For his scientific work, Pauling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. In 1962, for his peace activism, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This makes him the only person to be awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes. He is one of only four individuals to have won more than one Nobel Prize (the others being Marie Curie, John Bardeen, and Frederick Sanger). Pauling is also one of only two people to be awarded Nobel Prizes in different fields, the other being Marie Curie.[9] Pauling also worked on DNA's structure, a problem which was solved by James Watson, Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins.[10] In his later years he promoted nuclear disarmament, as well as orthomolecular medicine, megavitamin therapy,[11] and dietary supplements. None of the latter have gained acceptance in the mainstream scientific community.Pauling's discoveries led to decisive contributions in a diverse array of areas including around 350 publications in the fields of quantum mechanics, inorganic chemistry, organic chemistry, protein structure, molecular biology, and medicine.[163][164] His work on chemical bonding marks him as one of the founders of modern quantum chemistry.[8] The Nature of the Chemical Bond was the standard work for many years,[165] and concepts like hybridization and electronegativity remain part of standard chemistry textbooks. While his Valence bond approach fell short of accounting quantitatively for some of the characteristics of molecules, such as the color of organometallic complexes, and would later be eclipsed by the molecular orbital theory of Robert Mulliken, Valence Bond Theory still competes, in its modern form, with Molecular Orbital Theory and density functional theory (DFT) as a way of describing the chemical phenomena.[166] Pauling's work on crystal structure contributed significantly to the prediction and elucidation of the structures of complex minerals and compounds.[33]:80-81 His discovery of the alpha helix and beta sheet is a fundamental foundation for the study of protein structure.[71] Francis Crick acknowledged Pauling as the "father of molecular biology".[8][167] His discovery of sickle cell anemia as a "molecular disease" opened the way toward examining genetically acquired mutations at a molecular level.[78]

Lisa Loppes

Lisa Loppes was a member of the band TLC and she wrote one of their most famous songs Waterfalls, advising us against chasing desires that will take us nowhere. Specifically, it was about the AIDs and Drug epidemics of the 1990's.

Ignatius of Loyola

Living in the early 1500s, Ignatius spent a good chunk of his life as a military man. A gambling, barroom brawlings military man. Oh, did we mention the whoring? Or as he put it in his autobiography "wenching." During a huge battle with the French, his own men knew they were doomed and proposed a surrender. Ignatius would have none of that shit. He fought on and, shortly thereafter, he was shot with a friggin' cannon. And lived. The ball passed right between his legs, tearing one open and smashing the shin in his other leg. When he was carried to town to be treated, his broken leg had to be set, rebroken then set again. A chunk of bone sticking out had to be sawed off. When it was discovered that whoever set his leg had ****ed it up so bad it was now shorter than the other one, they used weights to try to unsuccessfully stretch it out. When you consider this was around 1520 and they didn't have frivolous luxuries like sterilization and anesthesia, you realize the guy was more hard-core than entire countries' worth of today's pansies. It was during his recovery, when his cannon wound made the whoring and brawling inconvenient, that he was forced to read stories of Christ and eventually decided to devote his life to God. That led him to one day found Society of Jesus, what most of us know as Jesuits. You may know them from their statues of a guy giving the finger to a cannonball.

Benjamin Banneker

Mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Banneker was born on November 9, 1731, in Ellicott's Mills, Maryland. Largely self-taught, Banneker was one of the first African Americans to gain distinction in science. His significant accomplishments and correspondence with prominent political figures profoundly influenced how African Americans were viewed during the Federal period.Banneker spent most of his life on his family's 100-acre farm outside Baltimore. There, he taught himself astronomy by watching the stars and learned advanced mathematics from borrowed textbooks. In 1752, Banneker garnered public acclaim by building a clock entirely out of wood. The clock, believed to be the first built in America, kept precise time for decades. In 1789, Banneker began making astronomical calculations that enabled him to successfully forecast a solar eclipse. His estimate, made well in advance of the celestial event, contradicted predictions of better-known mathematicians and astronomers. Banneker's mechanical and mathematical abilities impressed many, including Thomas Jefferson, who recommended him for the surveying team that laid out Washington, D.C. In his free time, Banneker began compiling his Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia Almanac and Ephemeris. The almanac included information on medicines and medical treatment and listed tides, astronomical information, and eclipses that Banneker had calculated. He published the journal annually from 1791 to 1802. On August 19, 1791, Banneker sent a copy of his first almanac to then secretary of state Thomas Jefferson. In an accompanying letter, he questioned the slaveholder's sincerity as a "friend to liberty." Banneker urged the future president to fight for the abolition of slavery. Jefferson responded by expressing his ambivalence about slavery and endorsing Banneker's accomplishments:Jefferson closed by informing Banneker that he had forwarded the almanac to the French philosopher the Marquis de Condorcet for the purpose of dispelling racial prejudices. In other writings, notably Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson revealed conflicting perspectives on race. The Words and Deeds feature on Jefferson's letter to Banneker notes correspondence with diplomat Joel Barlow and French clergyman Henri Gregoire in which Jefferson expresses less favorable attitudes toward African Americans. Banneker died on October 25, 1806. His accomplishments continued to inspire African-Americans and provide ample evidence of African-American achievement in the sciences.

Mercedes Maidana' Motivational Speeches

Mercedes Maidana is a Motivational Speaker and Business and Abundance Life Coach who guides women to launch and improve their businesses, go for their dreams, and take action steps to live life to their highest potential. We need to learn to stop to smell the roses. It is important that we acknowledge our business victories, as big or as small as they may be, and that we celebrate and honor them. This is how the Universe works when we manifest abundance. When we are grateful and enjoy what we have today, then we will receive more tomorrow. Part of being grateful for your tiny or huge successes, is to allow them to become a part of you before you move into the next great thing. Sit with them, take a break, enjoy your few clients before you take on the world with a huge new enterprise, at least for a little while. The carrot will always be there dangling and tempting us to do more. It is important for us to honor what we've accomplished so far, enjoy it and embrace it fully before we move forward in our creation. If you are a go-getter, here's some news: You can rest You can have some fun (hopefully a lot) You can enjoy what you've achieved so far. Even if it's not your ultimate goal, it is a great stepping stone toward it! And the best part is that if you stop for a second (or for as long as you want) before going on to your next big goal, your business WILL NOT COLLAPSE. You can set aside that sense of urgency, the little voice that says you have to produce constantly. The Universe has its way of delivering its abundance into your life. Sometimes we are so worried and busy producing more, that we actually block the gifts that the Universe is trying to give us. There is a time for everything, a process to be done and lessons to be learned as we manifest our dreams. Allow it to work its flow by relaxing, letting it be what it is today, and giving it all up in loving gratitude. If you want to get clarity around your business, and in turn, have more time and space to stop and smell the roses, I'd love to show you how! I'm hosting a Live Mastermind event in Austin, TX on December 12. I hope you can join me! Mercedes Maidana is a Motivational Speaker and Business and Abundance Life Coach who guides women to launch and improve their businesses, go for their dreams, and take action steps to live life to their highest potential. Continue the conversation with Mercedes and learn more about her work on Facebook and Instagram.

Mike Rowe

Mike Rowe, host of Dirty Jobs on the discovery channel, got his start as a salesman on QVC. In his interview for the position, he was handed a pencil and asked to sell it. And he talked for 8 minutes about a number two pencil. Called fondly on his memories of writing with pencils in the old days, wrote quality on a pad of paper and held it up to the camera, all impromptu, and QVC hired him on the spot. Confidence even in the face of a lack of preparation is a necessary skill.

Ronald Reagan

No fault divorce as the governor of California. The concept soon spread to other states. 20% decrease in suicide rtes. That's why divorce rates climbed during the seventies, not because society was crumbling, but rather because people really needed it.

12. Jack Garman

On July 20, 1969, moments after mission control in Houston had given the Apollo 11 lunar module, Eagle, the O.K. to begin its descent to the moon, a yellow warning light flashed on the cockpit instrument panel.Mr. Garman had painstakingly prepared himself for just this contingency — the possibility of a false alarm. "So I said," he remembered, "'As long as it doesn't reoccur, it's fine.'"

William H. Seward apology for the Trent Affair

On November 8, 1861, U.S. Navy Captain Charles Wilkes commanded the crew of the U.S.S. San Jacinto to intercept the British mail steamer Trent and arrest Confederate commissioners James M. Mason and John Slidell. En route to Europe to rally support for the Confederate cause, the two men and their secretaries were brought ashore and imprisoned at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor. The seizure of Mason and Slidell sparked an international controversy that brought the United States to the brink of war with Great Britain. Claiming violation of international law, Britain demanded release of the commissioners and ordered troops to Canada to prepare for a potential Anglo-American conflict. To avoid a clash, Secretary of State William H. Seward apologized for the incident. The diplomats were released in early January 1862, bringing the Trent Affair to a peaceful close.

Nathan Hale

On September 22, 1776, American patriot Nathan Hale was hanged for spying on British troops. As he was led to the gallows, Hale's famous last words—inspired by a line from Joseph Addison's popular play, Cato, reportedly were—"I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country." Hale allegedly spoke these words to British Captain John Montresor, chief engineer of His Majesty's Forces in North America and aide-de-camp to British General William Howe, while the preparations for his hanging were underway.

The Quest of Ponce De Leon

On September 27, 1514, the Spanish crown granted the explorer Juan Ponce de León a contract to settle the islands of Bimini and Florida (de León thought the latter was an island). His first contract, granted in February 1512, authorized de León to discover and populate Bimini. For his second voyage, he equipped his fleet and sailed for Florida from Puerto Rico in 1521 with two ships, two hundred men, fifty horses, and a variety of domestic animals and agricultural tools. Ponce de León landed near Charlotte Harbor on Florida's west coast, and his arrival did not go unnoticed; the colonists were soon attacked by Seminole Indians. During the assault, an arrow struck and wounded Ponce de León. He returned to Cuba, where he died as a result of his infected wound that same year. On his first visit to Florida, in April 1513, Ponce de León landed at the site of modern day St. Augustine. He named the region Florida because of the lush, florid vegetation that grew there. Thinking he had found the island of Bimini, he searched for the mythical Fountain of Youth, said to rejuvenate those who drank from it. Subsequent Spanish incursions in North America led to the founding of a permanent settlement at St. Augustine in 1565.

Cadbury Eggs

Regardless, one of the most popular treats around Easter is the Cadbury Creme Egg, a seasonal candy that is just a chocolate shell shaped like a chicken's egg, with a sugary white-and-yellow filling inside. You know, so you feel like you're eating a raw egg. So what were the people at Cadbury to do when sugar prices started eating into their profits, with consumers unwilling to pay more? The Deviously Simple Plan: Shrink the eggs, and tell consumers that they're simply misremembering how big they were before. Because the eggs are a seasonal item, that means that for nine months of the year, no one has any access to them. In 2006, when the company shrank the size of the eggs, they posted a message on their website saying that the eggs hadn't gotten smaller, your hands and mouth had just gotten bigger (or as they phrased it, "You've just grown up"). Strangely, it was actor B.J. Novak (Ryan from The Office, also seen in Inglourious Basterds) who decided to go on TV to prove that Cadbury was giving everyone less for their money:

Monty Python's the Holy Grail

The movie couldn't afford horses so they were going to have camera shots from the waist up until a person cracking the coconuts together ended up in a shot and they decided that's what it had to be.

2. Anaya Ellick

Seven-year-old Anaya Ellick, who was born with no hands and does not use prostheses, recently won a national penmanship contest. Holding the pencil between her wrists, the first-grader at Greenbrier Christian Academy in Chesapeake, Va., formed neat, careful letters, earning her the Nicholas Maxim Special Award for Excellence in Manuscript Penmanship. The award is one of several that the educational company Zaner-Bloser gives out every year.

Steven Bradbury

Short track skater Steven Bradbury survived a late wipe-out to win the men's 1,000m and Australia's first Winter Olympics gold medal. The Australian was almost the last man standing after Chinese skater Li Jiajun triggered a mass tumble on the last turn. Among the fallen was American medal hope Apolo Anton Ohno, who clambered to his feet to take silver. The bronze medal went to Mathieu Turcotte of Canada, while Li was disqualified.

State Franchise Laws

Since the 30's dealership associations have pressured states into passing laws that prohibit the sale of new cars unless you are a car dealership. Why can't you just buy a car online like on Amazon? Well, as much as 20% of state sales tax revenue comes from these dealerships, and they're so anticompetitive that it's illegal to open up a new dealership in another's territory. We could save an average $1,800 if they would change these laws.

John B. Watson's Coffee Break

So, during the 1950s, coffee was going out of style. For whatever reason, people started thinking of it as something low class, only consumed for the side effects. To turn the tide, the coffee-growing nations of South America and the major coffee companies in the United States banded together to form the Pan-American Coffee Bureau. They poured a ridiculous $2 million a year into making Americans love coffee again. To do this, they recruited sociologist John B. Watson, now working in advertising after a previous career in scaring the shit out of babies, to lead their campaign.The Deviously Simple Plan: Watson noticed that during World War II, some factories started giving their employees a couple of minutes off every shift, during which time some of these workers would drink a quick cup of coffee to wake themselves up. Figuring that using the novel idea of "work less" to sell coffee was worth a shot, he ran a massive series of advertisements to get people on board with the new "coffee break" idea he had thought up. His ads featured happy people sitting around and conspicuously not working, all while drinking huge mugs of coffee. It makes no sense whatsoever. At most jobs, you can drink coffee while you work. And there are a million things you could be drinking or eating on a work break. It didn't matter -- you don't question tradition, even if it's a tradition somebody just made up last week. Getting people to refer to their morning break as a "coffee break" was enough to cement the idea that if you consumed anything else but coffee on that break, then you were screwing it up somehow.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Stanton formulated the philosophical basis of the woman suffrage movement, blazing a trail many feared to follow. The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world...wherever we turn, the history of woman is sad and dark, without any alleviating circumstances, nothing from which we can draw consolation. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Declaration of Sentiments." In The First Convention Ever Called to Discuss the Civil and Political Rights of Women, Seneca Falls, N. Y., July 19, 20, 1848. Votes for Women: Selections from the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921. Rare Book & Special Collections Division. In advocating suffrage for women as a central point in her manifesto of woman's rights, the "Declaration of Sentiments," Stanton forged ahead of Quaker minister Lucretia Mott and other organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention of July 19 and July 20, 1848. As the suffragists gathered adherents to the cause, however, Stanton refused to limit her demands solely to the vote. She remained in the movement's vanguard, arguing vigorously for a woman's right to higher education, to a professional life, and to a legal identity that included the right to own property and to obtain a divorceElizabeth Cady was educated at Johnstown Academy, where she was the only girl in the higher classes studying Latin, Greek, and mathematics. Barred from obtaining a college degree because of her gender, she continued her studies at Emma Willard's academy, where she discovered natural rights philosophy. She read law with her father, Judge Daniel Cady, but was not admitted to the New York Bar because women were excluded. Her legal and philosophical studies and her own experiences convinced her of the discriminatory nature of the laws regarding women, and she resolved to work for the reform of those laws. In 1840, Cady married anti-slavery activist Henry Stanton, refusing to use the word "obey" in the ceremony. The mother of seven children, she lectured on the subjects of family life and child rearing, abolition, temperance, and women's rights until her death at the age of eighty-seven. Her daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch followed in her footsteps to continue the fight for women's rights.Elizabeth Cady Stanton died October 26, 1902, before the Woman's Suffrage Amendment was passed by Congress in 1919. Her papers were donated to the Library of Congress' Manuscript Division.

1. George Washington Prevention Leadership

Starting during the winter of 1777 in Morristown, New Jersey, Washington took the bold and controversial move to have soldiers in his army inoculated against smallpox infection using a technique called variolation. Later during the winter encampment at Valley Forge, Washington went even further, demanding that his entire army be inoculated - an action that required great secrecy since inoculated soldiers were incapacitated for a period of time. By some reports, death by smallpox in the ranks dropped from 17% of all deaths to a low of 1% of all reported deaths - a tremendous reduction. Historian Elizabeth Fenn, author of Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-1782, claims that "Washington's unheralded and little-recognized resolution to inoculate the Continental forces must surely rank with the most important decisions of the war..."

Leslie Jamison

The Empathy Exams: Empathy requires you to pass into anothers mind like a trip to another country, full of questions about what you dont know, and accepptingyou may not understand We have a tndency to be cold and truthful not help others, but to defend outselves, and that is what is wrong with complete honest.

Roger Williams

The First Baptist Church in America is the First Baptist Church of Providence, Rhode Island, also known as First Baptist Meetinghouse. The oldest Baptist church congregation in the United States, it was founded by Roger Williams in Providence, Rhode Island in 1638. The present church building was erected in 1774-75 and held its first meetings in May 1775. Located at 75 North Main Street in Providence's College Hill neighborhood, it is a National Historic Landmark. Roger Williams had been holding religious services in his home for nearly a year before he converted his congregation into a Baptist church in 1638. This followed his founding of Providence in 1636. For the next sixty years, the congregation met outside in nice weather or in congregants' homes. Baptists in Rhode Island through most of the 17th century declined to erect meetinghouses because they felt that buildings reflected vanity. Eventually, however, they came to see the utility of some gathering place, and they erected severely plain-style meetinghouses like the Quakers.

Four Pests Campaign

The Great Sparrow Campaign (Chinese: 打麻雀运动; pinyin: Dǎ Máquè Yùndòng) also known as the Kill a Sparrow Campaign (Chinese: 消灭麻雀运动; pinyin: Xiāomiè Máquè Yùndòng), and officially, the Four Pests Campaign was one of the first actions taken in the Great Leap Forward in China from 1958 to 1962. The four pests to be eliminated were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows.[1] The systematic extermination of sparrows led to an upset of the ecological balance, and enabled crop-eating insects to proliferate.

Balance Fallacy

The Missouri compromise, which tried to find a "middle ground" between abolitionists and pro-slavery forces. Of course, the abolitionists were entirely correct to want to outlaw slavery completely but this was seen as too extreme for many at the time. An example of the balance fallacy is found in the Discovery Institute's campaign for American schools to "teach the controversy" in science lessons, giving equal weight to the theory of evolution and intelligent design criticisms of it, although these criticisms are reliant on creationist religious views overwhelmingly discredited within the scientific community. The book Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left by Alex B. Berezow and Science 2.0 founder Hank Campbell contains a chapter on False Equivalence. ""...You might not remember false equivalence from logic class. Why? Because progressive political writers made it up. They invented the term just for conservatives. False equivalence is the ultimate manifestation of progressives' relativist worldview because the definition of the term can change at the whim of the person speaking. Essentially, what progressives mean by false equivalence is that any comparison that makes them look bad is, by definition, false. It's convenient, but intellectually vacuous

Eugene's Thacker's Cosmic Pessimism

The University does not care about us. Not only are we an insignificant speck of dust in our universe, we are but one in an infinity of universes. But the point isn't to be in despair, it's to find humor in it. Values and meanings start to slip away.

6. Jeannette Rankin

The first woman elected to Congress, Jeannette Rankin, died 38 years ago today. She served two terms, each time voting against U.S. entrance into a world war.

Edward Bernays

The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays had weird ideas about marketing. In fact, when cake mix was just getting started on the shelves Bernays wanted it to include egg as an ingredient (even though that wasn't necessary) because he thought women would want to buy it more if it allowed them to act out giving their egg to their husband. Stupid right? Bacon seller beech nut packaging hired him to sell more bacon. His target would be a specific meal: breakfast. Now, at the time, breakfast wasn't considered a big, heavy meal -- it was a cup of coffee and some toast for most people. Bernays needed to convince America that breakfast was Bacon Time. Being the nephew of the legendary Sigmund "You're always thinking about wangs" Freud, Bernays knew that to a customer, the words of famous spokespeople were nothing compared to the words of a trusted professional. So Bernays approached a doctor with a simple question: Was a hearty breakfast better for a person than a smaller, shittier one? Once he had the obvious answer, he then asked whether bacon and eggs could be considered a hearty breakfast. Again the doctor agreed. That was all he needed; Bernays repeated this process with 5,000 doctors, using this roundabout method to get them to actually say that strips of fried pig fat was a healthy way to start your day. Newspapers across the country treated this bullshit publicity stunt as a scientific study and ran story after story about how if you weren't starting the day with a big plate full of bacon and eggs, you were signing your own death warrant. Beech-Nut's sales soared. We can't really do the story as much justice as the man himself, because you can totally tell that all the way through the story, he still can't quite believe that people fell for his bullshit:

Peter Dukes

The pumpkin spice latte, Starbucks' most iconic and popular seasonal drink, almost didn't happen. "A number of us thought it was a beverage so dominated by a flavor other than coffee that it didn't put Starbucks' coffee in the best light," says Tim Kern, who recently left Starbucks after 20 years, and who started at Starbucks when it was a regional chain of just six stores.

Martha Matilda Harper

The real inventor of franchising. A Canadian born maid, and in the employment of a doctor's family in Ontario she found a recipe for shampoo. In the late nineteenth century She saved enough money to open her own public hairdressing salon. She wasn't allowed to own her own shop. So she spent some of her money on a lawyer. The Harper Method was as much about spiritual cleansing as hair. She designed the first reclining shampoo chair. Visiting celebrities wanted her to open stores in their cities. Instead of the usual model of one owner, Martha got women to own their own Harpers.

Jack Lucas

The youngest American to ever receive the Medal of Honor, Jack Lucas at just 13 years old enlisted in the US Marine Corps by forging his mother's signature. When it was found out that he wasn't actually 18, he was stuck behind a desk on Hawai, so shortly before the battle of Iwogima he stowed away on a naval vessel and snuck his way into the action. When he and three other guys were ambushed by 11 enemy soldiers the odds didn't look good, but when two Japanese grenades landed right next to his men, without hesitation he dived right on top of them. The remaining three soldiers in a fury, defeated the combatants and got Jack to safety. Never knowing that he was just 17 at the time.

Johnny Depp

While Johnny Depp was trying to be rock star, he had a job at a telemarketing firm. He hated that job, because being constantly rejected starts to feel personal after a while. But one day, he called an old man and started reading from a script that he hated but had to read, and told the old man that if he bought one gross of pens he could win a trip to Tahiti or a grandfather clock. And to his surprise the old man asked how much the pens were, he told Johnny Depp that he'd really love to go to Tahiti and wanted to know if buying two grosses of pens would improve his odds in the drawing, and Johnny Depp couldn't go through with the sale. He told the old man that it was all a scam, that customers only ever got grandfather clocks, and he quit the firm that day. Those constant rejections though, helped prepare him for the inevitable rejection any actor faces on their quest to stardom. His band opened once for the Ramones but never really made off, but not he can live the life of a rockstar anytime he wants.

Smoky The Yorkshire Terrier

This is Smoky, a female Yorkshire Terrier that served in World War II. Smoky was found in a foxhole by an American solider during the war and later sold to Cpl. Bill Wynne. She became a wartime sensation, backpacking through the New Guinea jungle and visiting injured soldiers to become one of the first therapy dogs. Wynne found her exceptionally easy to train and she was soon aiding in the war effort, including an assignment to help string communication lines between outposts in the Philippines. You can read Wynne's description of the event in the caption below. Bob Gapp and Bill Wynne set up Smoky when it became imperative that phone wires be strung to the airfield from three squadron areas. A culvert 8" in diameter and 70-feet-long under the taxiway was the logical place. If dug up by hand it would have required many men three days work and the planes to remain operational would have to be moved to the steel matting along the runway. The runway was being bombed daily. Wynne coaxed Smoky through from the far end. She had to climb 4" mounds of sifted sand every 4" feet. She did it in a few minutes. She did it because she was asked to. This was a stunt I dreamed up in New Guinea to draw judges' attention to Smoky for the Best Mascot of the Southwest Pacific Area, SWPA, Theater of Operations. It worked as Smoky was chosen First Prize Mascot in the YANK Contest over more than 400 entries. In my book, you will find the wind collapsed the chute and Smoky was blown clear of the catching blanket on the seventh jump — one jump too many. She could have been killed. After the war, the pair traveled the country, visiting Hollywood and performing on local television shows. Smoky died in 1957, but a statue in Cleveland, Ohio immortalizes her, and at 91, Wynne still remembers his companion's heroic efforts.

3. Marilyn Sevant

This question is called the Monty Hall problem due to its resembling scenarios on the game show Let's Make a Deal; its answer existed before it was used in "Ask Marilyn". She said the selection should be switched to door #2 because it has a 2/3 chance of success, while door #1 has just 1/3. To summarize, 2/3 of the time the opened door #3 will indicate the location of the door with the car (the door you had not picked and the one not opened by the host). Only 1/3 of the time will the opened door #3 mislead you into changing from the winning door to a losing door. These probabilities assume you change your choice each time door #3 is opened, and that the host always opens a door with a goat. This response provoked letters from thousands of readers, nearly all arguing doors #1 and #2 each have an equal chance of success. A follow-up column reaffirming her position served only to intensify the debate and soon became a feature article on the front page of The New York Times. Parade received around 10,000 letters from readers who thought her wrong.[

Symeon the Stylite

Unlike those first guys up there who kind of stumbled into sainthood and badassery due to extreme circumstances, Symeon chose both willingly. The man had a real hate-on for the pussified way all the rest of us live and decided he couldn't take it any more. At first he tried to shun the luxuries of mid 5th century life by shutting himself in a little ramshackle Unabomber-style hut for three years, where he figured not eating or drinking anything at all for the entire period of Lent would be a good idea. After the hut proved too expansive and extravagant for him, Symeon packed up his loincloth and moved to a crevice in a rock in the desert. In a space about 20 yards in diameter, he set up shop but soon learned that when you decide to live your life as a religious sideshow, you're going to attract attention. Soon pilgrims arrived to watch him presumably just sitting on his rock. They asked him for advice and prayers and probably threw peanuts and tried to get him to do tricks. Realizing the rock was still too awesome a place to spend his life, Symeon raised a stone pillar with a little platform on top, climbed up and sat there. He went through a couple of these pillars before he settled on one over 50 feet high where he stayed ... for 36 years.He continued to get visitors and for a while each day, a ladder was used so people could come up and chat with him while those below waited their turn and tried to avoid getting pooped on from 50 feet up. If you're still not clear on the badassery involved here, keep in mind this was all taking place in Syria, where summer temperatures can get over 100 and in winter dip below 50, which is probably just slightly more awful when you're on a stone pillar 50 feet off the ground.

Curelator Headache app

avid Dodick, a professor of neurology and director of headache medicine at Mayo Clinic, in Phoenix, says some migraine sufferers may not need the apps if they have obvious triggers, such as alcohol use or menstruation. More likely to benefit are people whose migraine attacks occur when several triggers "stack" on top of each other. "For example, you're an accountant and it's tax time, you're stressed, sleep-deprived and you have a glass of wine to unwind. All those factors together have pushed you over the edge," suggests Dr. Dodick, who is president of the International Headache Society. The software in the apps is designed to refine its conclusions about you with each new data point entered, says Stephen Donoghue, vice president clinical development at Curelator Inc., of Cambridge, Mass. The company's Curelator Headache app, available for the iPhone, costs $50 for the premium version. People can get a coupon from many neurologists to get the app free if they agree to allow their data to be used anonymously in the company's research. Curelator asks users to spend two or three minutes logging their data daily, whether or not they have a migraine. The app presents 70 possible factors, ranging from caffeine intake to stress level. At the end of 90 days, you get a "map" of your triggers, showing the most likely culprits in the center of a circle and those that are less likely toward the outside.

Richard Sherman

could barely walk off the field after the effort he gave playing five quarters of football and 90-plus snaps in this past Sunday night's 6-6 tie against the Cardinals in Arizona. But on Wednesday afternoon at Renton's Virginia Mason Athletic Center, the Seahawks Pro Bowl cornerback was back in good spirits sporting an entertaining new look, one he hopes come Monday night will help him fly under the radar as he takes his young son, Rayden, trick-or-treating. Sherman greeted reporters while wearing a Harry Potter robe, walking to the podium wielding what looked to be a replica of Albus Dumbledore's wand in his right hand, all while the Harry Potter theme song played on his phone. "You've got to bring your own music, this is a serious occasion," Sherman said. "It's Halloween. My son told me he wanted me to wear something, so it's happening. It's happening." Donning the Gryffindor house shield on his chest, Sherman met challenging questions from the media head on. Q: What's tougher, playing five quarters of football, or Quidditch? Sherman: "Five quarters of football is pretty tough, but Quidditch — the beaters, the chasers, trying to find the golden snitch, things like that — that's tough. Five quarters of football, though, in the elements, I'd say that'd take the cake."

Heinrich Schleiman

was a German businessman and a pioneer in the field of archaeology. He was an advocate of the historicity of places mentioned in the works of Homer. Schliemann was an archaeological excavator of Hissarlik, now presumed to be the site of Troy, along with the Mycenaean sites Mycenae and Tiryns. His work lent weight to the idea that Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid reflect historical events. Schliemann's excavation of nine levels of archaeological remains with dynamite has been criticized as destructive of significant historical artifacts, including the level that is believed to be the historical Troy.[1]On March 1, 1844, 22-year-old Schliemann took a position with B. H. Schröder & Co., an import/export firm. In 1846, the firm sent him as a General Agent to St. Petersburg. In time, Schliemann represented a number of companies. He learned Russian and Greek, employing a system that he used his entire life to learn languages—Schliemann claimed that it took him six weeks to learn a language[7] and wrote his diary in the language of whatever country he happened to be in. By the end of his life, he could converse in English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Polish, Italian, Greek, Latin, Russian, Arabic, and Turkish as well as German.

James Madison Jr.

was a political theorist, American statesman, and the fourth President of the United States (1809-17). He is hailed as the "Father of the Constitution" for his pivotal role in drafting and promoting the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.[1] Madison inherited his plantation Montpelier in Virginia and owned hundreds of slaves during his lifetime. He served as both a member of the Virginia House of Delegates and as a member of the Continental Congress prior to the Constitutional Convention. After the Convention, he became one of the leaders in the movement to ratify the Constitution, both nationally and in Virginia. His collaboration with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay produced The Federalist Papers, among the most important treatises in support of the Constitution. Madison changed his political views during his life. During deliberations on the constitution, he favored a strong national government, but later preferred stronger state governments, before settling between the two extremes late in his life. In 1789, Madison became a leader in the new House of Representatives, drafting many basic laws. He is noted for drafting the first ten amendments to the Constitution, and thus is known also as the "Father of the Bill of Rights".[2] He worked closely with President George Washington to organize the new federal government. Breaking with Hamilton and the Federalist Party in 1791, he and Thomas Jefferson organized the Democratic-Republican Party. In response to the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson and Madison drafted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions arguing that states can nullify unconstitutional laws. As Jefferson's Secretary of State (1801-09), Madison supervised the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the nation's size. Madison succeeded Jefferson as President in 1809, was re-elected in 1813, and presided over renewed prosperity for several years. After the failure of diplomatic protests and a trade embargo against the United Kingdom, he led the U.S. into the War of 1812. The war was an administrative morass, as the United States had neither a strong army nor financial system. As a result, Madison afterward supported a stronger national government and a strong military, as well as the national bank, which he had long opposed.

John Jay

was an American statesman, Patriot, diplomat, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, signatory of the Treaty of Paris, and first Chief Justice of the United States (1789-95). Jay was born into a wealthy family of merchants and government officials in New York City. He became a lawyer and joined the New York Committee of Correspondence and organized opposition to British rule. He joined a conservative political faction that, fearing mob rule, sought to protect property rights and maintain the rule of law while resisting British violations of human rights. Jay served as the President of the Continental Congress (1778-79), an honorific position with little power. During and after the American Revolution, Jay was Minister (Ambassador) to Spain, a negotiator of the Treaty of Paris by which Great Britain recognized American independence, and Secretary of Foreign Affairs, helping to fashion United States foreign policy. His major diplomatic achievement was to negotiate favorable trade terms with Great Britain in the Jay Treaty in 1794. Jay, a proponent of strong, centralized government, worked to ratify the U.S. Constitution in New York in 1788 by pseudonymously writing five of The Federalist Papers, along with the main authors Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. After the establishment of the U.S. government, Jay became the first Chief Justice of the United States, serving from 1789 to 1795. As a leader of the new Federalist Party, Jay was the Governor of the State of New York (1795-1801), where he became the state's leading opponent of slavery. His first two attempts to end slavery in New York in 1777 and 1785 failed, but a third in 1799 succeeded. The 1799 Act, a gradual emancipation he signed into law, eventually granted all slaves in New York their freedom before his death in 1829.