Archive for July 2nd, 2010

  1. 07.02.10

    Wife and Kids will be Home!

    Comments Off - Posted by Iowadawg - Filed under Iowadawg

    Okay, today, or more timely late this afternoon, my wife and the kids will be back from Chicago. They had almost an hour late start leaving, as the bus was behind schedule. Driver said to make up time, there would be no stopping until they got to Iowa City. Anyways, wife will call me when the bus gets to Newton so that I will have plenty of notice of when they should be in Des Moines and I go pick them up. Now, this bus company does not have a terminal in Des Moines, but rather they stop to pick up and drop passengers at a bus stop downtown Des Moines. Or at 4th and Walnut. And there is no parking there as I found out when I dropped them off Wednesday. But I will get them picked up and brought back home.

    This morning went grocery shopping. By myself! Surprising how fast I can be in and out of a grocery store without the wife. Of course, wife told me that I probably did not get everything she wants so we will go back tomorrow. Hey, did get bread, milk, eggs (on sale so I got some only to find we already have 4 dozen!) and some steaks for dinner tonight.

    Son and the grandkids, after all day on a bus, will stay here tonight and go back down to Missouri tomorrow. Thus the steaks and fixings for dinner tonight. Plus the eggs and sausage for breakfast tomorrow.

    I am ready, as I made the bed (which for some reason is always a wonder to my wife that I can actually do so), cleaned up the bathroom, made sure all rooms are neat and clean (like they would get dirty in a couple of days and me not using them), and cleaned up the kitchen and got all the dishes cleaned and put away. Even took the trash out last night. Now I have the a/c on so the place will be cooler just for my wife (she asked me when she called if I had the a/c on and if it was cool here….I said yeah).

    Now this is funny:

    Judge Rules for Student Who Sued Her Father for Tuition Payments

    A state-court judge ruled last month that a father had breached a contract with his daughter to pay for college, The Connecticut Law Tribune reported. The student, Dana Soderberg, had written a contract obligating her father, Howard Soderberg, to cover her college costs (and car insurance) until she was 25, and he apparently did—until her senior year at Southern Connecticut State University. She took out a loan, graduated, and sued him. He filed a counterclaim alleging that she had dropped courses and pocketed the refunds, according to the newspaper. But the judge found Ms. Soderberg more credible and awarded her $47,000 to cover her loan, interest, missed car-insurance payments, and legal fees, the newspaper reported.

    The brain has as many as 100 billion neurons, and they – along with their thousands of connections to other neurons – are very good at generating electrical impulses, and it doesn’t much matter what time of day it is or what the person is doing, this electrical activity – powered by food, mostly sugar – in the blood, amounts to about 20 watts of power, or about the equivalent of the little light bulb in one’s refrigerator. – Provided by The World Almanac 2010

    Well, since he was mentioned a few times at the Senate hearings for the confirmation of Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court, it is nice that today was the day he was born in 1908. I am speaking of Thurgood Marshall.

    As the chief legal counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for more than 20 years, Marshall argued 32 cases before the US Supreme Court, successfully challenging racial segregation, most notably in Brown v. Board of Education. In 1967, he became the first African American appointed to the Supreme Court, a position he held until his retirement in 1991. How many of the 32 cases that Marshall argued before the Supreme Court did he win? More…

    Galaxies on a String
    Image Credit & Copyright: Adam Block, Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter, U. Arizona

    Explanation: Galaxies NGC 5216 (top) and NGC 5218 really do look like they are connected by a string. Of course, that string is a cosmic trail of gas, dust, and stars about 22,000 light-years long. Also known as Keenan’s system (for its discoverer) and Arp 104, the interacting galaxy pair is some 17 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. The debris trail that joins them, along with NGC 5218′s comma-shaped extension and the distorted arms of NGC 5216, are a consequence of mutual gravitational tides. The tides disrupt the galaxies as they repeatedly swing close to one another. Drawn out over billions of years, the encounters will likely result in their merger into a single galaxy of stars. Such spectacular galactic mergers are now understood to be a normal part of the evolution of galaxies, including our own Milky Way.