respublica

Static Electricity Day

Yes, January 9th is the day to celebrate static electricity. But the explanation for the day is why I never liked or understood much about science.

"Static electricity is different from the electrical current carried by wires through a building or transmitted by the electric companies. Static electricity is produced when the positive and negative charges of an atom are out of balance.

The atoms of some materials hold their electrons tightly. These materials, such as plastic, cloth, or glass, are insulators. While electrons of these substances do not move very freely, the electrons of other materials, such as metal, move more freely and are called conductors.

By rubbing two insulators together, we transfer electrons, causing positive and negative charges. Opposites do attract. Atoms with a positive charge become attracted to atoms with a negative charge. We can see the evidence if we rub a balloon head.  When we pull the balloon away, the hair clings to the balloon.

Remove the balloon, and the hair may stand on end. In this circumstance, the hair has the same charge (either positive or negative). Items with the same charge repel each other.

At some point, these charges need to be put back in balance, and the static electricity is discharged. The release or the resulting shock occurs when an insulator comes in contact with a conductor, such as a piece of metal."

And now what to do to observe this day:

Learn how static electricity affects us. Explore the ways you come into contact with static electricity and how you create it, too. Run an experiment and share your results.

Use #StaticElectricityDay to post on social media. Check, I got something right.

Ear buds

I am not normally a person who wears ear buds to listen to music or stories on my phone, ipad or computer. But occasionally I put them in when I want to listen to something or play a noisy game and not disturb The Dale. One thing that annoys me about them is how long the strings are. Why do ear bud cords have such long cords? They get tangled up and hang over everything.

First world problem, I know, but it makes no sense to me. I've thought about getting a set of wirelss, cordless ear buds, but the cost is too high for the little time I'd use them.

Number memories

Can you remember your childhood phone number? I bet you can no matter how old you are. Mine was Pullman 5-3675, dialed as PU 5-3675. That was during the years we lived on the south side of Chicago. When we moved to the suburbs, the number was Terrace 2-9296, dialed as TE-2-9296.

What weird things we remember when we can't even remember what we had for dinner last night.

Mattresses in the news

It seems buying mattresses online is a big thing these days and many people are taking advantage of the accompanying free trials offered by the sellers. It seems you can buy a mattress online and have a 100 days free trial and when that time ends, the buyer has it sent back and does it all over again with another brand. Somehow they get out of really paying for their mattresses and can pull this stunt for years. For every offer there will be those who know how to game the system.

Frankly I wouldn't buy a mattress online much less have the nerve to keep sending one or more back. But, mattresses are interesting things. They are hard to give up because you become so used to them and the areas where you can best nestle in to sleep. Who really wants to break in a new one? Plus going to the mattress store and testing their firmness of softness is just weird. But when your mattress has begun to give up you know it's that terrible time to begin the search for a new one.

And the worst part is not getting a new one into the house around corners or up stairs, it's what to do with the old one. That disposal part is probably why we hang onto our too long. Maybe so many mattresses fall off cars or trucks onto highways is the way some people have found to dispose of theirs.

We Women sure have changed

Maybe a better word than changed would be, evolved. This old bit of advice to women from the Singer Sewing Machine manual in 1949 is quite something. I can believe this is advice given sincerely and taken as such, but wow that is a blast from the past. click it to enlarge if your can't read it well.

Woman worries, 1949

A "How To" information just in case

Just in case you are planning to visit Niagara Falls and find yourself falling, here is some advice. All I can say is, please don't and...we've lost our minds these days.

Click to enlarge after you realize this is a joke.

Wordy

There are lots of seasonal posts these days centering on Christmas or the weather. This one stopped me because of a word I thought was weird.

Can you figure out what word bothered me? Maybe too much vocabulary pride in whoever wrote this.

 

The word is 'attenuates'. I have never, ever, heard anyone use this word and had to look it up. It means "reduces". Why could he/she just not say that?

Here a bank, there a bank

Everywhere a bank...

A story in the St. Louis Business Journal relates that the Chase Bank will be opening 25  bank branches in the St. Louis area this fiscal year and hire more than 200. Chase has been expanding all over the country this year.

I find it difficult to follow all the ins and outs of banking, investments and other fiscal things, but what I have noticed is the enormous number of banks located everywhere in this area. We drove from Collinsville to Edwardsville over the past weekend and there were banks on every intersection all along 159. Most areas had more than one, the banks faced each other from across the road. It got to the point where we gave up trying to count them.

So what is with all these banks? Banks we've used for years have one by one sold out, changed names. That is the real news to me. The new version of an old bank is never as customer friendly as the previous one. Or as reliable.

Manure vaults

I came across this post on Facebook's Original Chicago page and found it surprising and interesting. It told of the many manure vaults in the city of Chicago back in the days before cars when horses pulled wagons and buggies. Who knew, but when you think about it, something had to be done with all the manure.

Here is his post.

"Manure vaults that were an underground covered hole in alleys all over Chicago that "Manure Mongers" (street sweeper) would swept-up horse manure from the local area and empty it into the vault closing the lid. Later, the vault would be shoveled out and the manure carted off.

Pic is of a typical “Manure Vault” in a Chicago alley in 1918.

These vaults were one way of keeping the streets clean of horse manure. In 1900, Chicago had 83,000 horses living and working in the city.

On average, one horse creates between 40 to 50 pounds of manure a day. At 40 pounds per day, that equals 3,320,000 pounds or 1,660 tons of horse manure to dispose of per day. The sheer volume made what was a nuisance in small towns and a crisis in large metropolitan areas."

Now we can get a product we didn't think we needed.....and don't need. Chip Fingers! Protective finger covers for eating messy snacks.