How do you like them beans?

When I suspected that the cleaners who work at night in my building were helping themselves to my jelly beans, I wish I had known about Bean Boozled jelly beans. They're basically a container of jelly beans where some of them taste good and some of them look almost identical but taste really bad.

How bad? How about flavours like Dirty Dishwasher, Stink Bug, Rotten Egg, Barf, Canned Dog Food, Stinky Socks, Moldy Cheese, Spoiled Milk, Dead Fish and Booger.

Yeah, I would have totally mixed some of those in.

Nextfix

Small things 20 Sep

• Is it just a matter of time before someone caters their wedding reception with 'Skip the Dishes'?
• My face lights up every time I open the fridge at night.
• A joke doesn't become a dad joke until it's full groan.
• If a cow doesn't produce milk, is it a milk dud, or an udder failure?
• There's no point calling the tinnitus help line. It just keeps ringing.
• Some puns make me numb, but math puns make me number.
• My friend David had his ID stolen. Now he's just Dav.
• I shot a man with a paintball gun just to watch him dye.
• The word queue is just the letter 'q' followed by 4 silent letters.
• Are mashed potatoes just Irish guacamole?
• Can we please stop calling coffee peddlers 'baristas'? Barista is Italian for 'bartender'.
• When a problem comes along, you must whip it.
• Isn't it odd that a lot of people who say they don't like too much drama in their lives excel at creating it?
• Fashion savvy people probably look at my clothing outfits the same way I look at someone who opens their browser and has the Yahoo! toolbar installed.
• The people in the car beside me are listening to some great music. Whether they want to or not.
• 9 out of 10 forest fires are caused by humans? So, there's a bear out there that knows how to use matches? 
• "More duck lips!" ~Said no photographer ever
• The pirate encyclopedia only had one volume. 'R'...

Deep Field: The impossible magnitude of our universe

I completely stumbled across this astounding video by accident. I made it 60 seconds in before I called my granddaughter (who is a space nut) to come watch it with me.

If you can, don't let YouTube decide what resolution to show this at - go for the highest (4K). It's necessary. Trust me. 30 minutes that will boggle your mind.

Now, they did take some artistic liberties with the imagery of the deep field images from Hubble, but the effect is mesmerizing.

Captain Canada

Things I learned lately 20 Sep

• A one dollar investment in solar power will yield six to seven times as much useful energy as a one dollar investment in oil, over the course of the investment’s lifetime.
• The "diesel-gate" controversy seems to have motivated Volkswagen to accelerate their electric vehicle transformation plans. VW aims to launch almost 70 new electric models in the next decade, and hopes to build 22 million electric cars over this same period. 
• "'i' before 'e', except after 'c'." One of the biggest myths propagated by English schools in my time.
• The top 4 banks in the world, based on Tier 1 capital, are Chinese.
• At dozens of American KFC locations, they're serving fried chicken sandwiched between two glazed doughnuts. 'Merica!
• I wonder how the first person to heat corn in hot oil reacted when those kernels exploded.
• The biggest factor contributing to US Army recruiting success this year was the student loan crisis.
• The 40 prisoners left in Guantanamo Bay prison cost the US half a billion dollars per year.
• There are around 100,000 fully electric vehicles in Canada in autumn 2019.
• The beginnings of Switzerland’s famous neutrality dates all the way back to a peace treaty the nation signed with France on November 12, 1516.
• The Harlem Globetrotters are not actually from Harlem, but from Chicago; they didn’t actually play a game in Harlem until 40 years after the team was formed.

Come and discuss the common obstacles to getting stuff done at work

http://chinooklearningservices.com/ContEd/AdultCourses/Jobstacles-Eliminating-Obstacles-Workplace.html

"I'm not a scientist, but......"

Small things 7 Sep

• How much does a hipster weigh? An instagram... 
• People who don't get sarcasm are very, very, very lucky.
• We'll believe anything that's prefaced with "A new study shows..."
• Money doesn't buy happiness, but it does pay for my internet, so.... close enough.
• Give 100%. Unless you're giving blood. Or money.
• When I was a boy, all I got for an allowance was a quarter. So I'd go to the store and get two chocolate bars, a bag of chips and a Coke. Can't do that now. Too many security cameras.
• Irony: Drawing trees on a piece of paper.
• Anarchy in the UK: Q: Would you like some tea? A: NO!

It's tough to find room for a starship

Houses from plastic bottles?

A new home in rural Nova Scotia was built from 612,000 recycled plastic bottles, shredded and melted and injected with gas to become a new type of foam panel 6 inches thick.

JD Composites is the startup that built the prototype house. The recycled-plastic panels provide more insulation than typical walls, so homeowners can save energy in heating and cooling.

This type of panel being used to build a house isn't new, but they chose to use a fully recycled material to tackle the problem of plastic pollution. JD Composites partnered with Armacell, a Belgian company that uses bottles rejected by the recycling industry to build a foam core from 100% recycled plastic. The material is trimmed and laminated to create the panels.

The walls are lightweight and engineered to be strong. In testing, the wall withstood 326 mph wind speeds, twice as strong as a Category 5 hurricane. The testing facility had never loaded a panel in the test chamber that they couldn’t break, ever.

The main structure was built in two days. It eliminates the need for framing, separate insulation, siding, shingles on the roof, and nails; the panels are chemically bonded together, helping make the whole structure stronger. The cost for the prototype home was comparable to conventional construction and would save money long term because of the energy efficiency.

"Unlimited" data phone plans in Canada

Things I learned lately 7 Sep

• Stewart Resnick, the biggest farmer in the US, owns 180,000 acres in California's San Joaquin valley. His 15 million fruit and nut trees use 400,000 acre-feet of water every year. As a reference, Los Angeles uses 587,000 acre-feet of water.
• You no longer need to pay a license fee to use the Happy Birthday song. The company that claimed rights (Warner/Chappell) does not in fact have the rights that it originally claimed. If you paid a fee, you are entitled to get it back as well.
• The Iraqi Army was the 4th largest until the US laid it to waste in 100 hours during the Gulf War.
• In 1963, Albert Heineken created two different sized beer bottles called WOBO (World bottle) that could function as bricks to build sustainable housing.
• Type O blood was meant to be Type Zero blood, due to the absence of glycoproteins in the red blood cells. It was misread and is now called Type "O". So, you could call it a typo..........