The United States is the third-largest gold-producing country in the world, after South Africa and Australia. Over 80 percent of US production comes from mines in Nevada. Other gold-producing states include Alaska and Colorado.
The Krugerrand is a gold coin, minted by the South African Mint, which was first introduced in 1967, as a way to market South African gold to individual buyers and investors. The coin’s name is a compound of the name of Paul Kruger, the former president of the South African Republic, who appears on the coin’s obverse, and “rand,” which is the South African unit of currency.
The South African documentary My Octopus Teacher, produced by and starring Craig Foster, won the 2020 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
My family saw it and recommends it; beautiful underwater footage and a bittersweet but heartwarming story.
Foster’s rule is an eco-geographical rule in evolutionary biology stating that members of a species get smaller or bigger depending on the resources available in the environment. For example, it is known that pygmy mammoths evolved from normal mammoths on small islands. Similar evolutionary paths have been observed in elephants, hippopotamuses, boas, sloths, deer and humans.
The rule was first formulated in 1973 based on the studies by mammalogist J. Bristol Foster in 1964. In it, Foster compared 116 island species to their mainland varieties. Foster proposed that certain island creatures evolved larger body size (insular gigantism) while others became smaller (insular dwarfism). Foster proposed the simple explanation that smaller creatures get larger when predation pressure is relaxed because of the absence of some of the predators of the mainland, and larger creatures become smaller when food resources are limited because of land area constraints.
The Australian beer, Foster’s Lager, is now owned by the Japanese beer conglomerate Asahi.
A lager is a style of beer which has been brewed and conditioned at cool temperatures; the term is derived from the German word for “storage,” as such beers were often stored in cool caves before drinking.
Most lagers are also defined by the yeast which is used in their brewing: Saccharomyces pastorianus, a “bottom-fermenting” yeast, which is able to ferment at relatively cool temperatures.
Yeast have a much simpler genome than people. So it is easier to study them, although the results do not always carry over to people. In particular, the interesting notion restricting calorie intake lengthens lives was first shown in yeast, than mice.
One yeast organism can undergo around 25 generations of splitting. The hardest part of the research is said to actually finding the original yeast, to study, when it is surrounded by over ten million of its progeny.
Since it is almost universally acknowledged that bacon, Cheezies and hamburgers taste delicious, much gerentological research is along the lines of studying how and if calorie restriction works in people. The goal is to get these effects without actual sacrifice. In extreme cases, this can lead to “false fat” in food products, or “complete nutrition” items like Soylent Green marketed to the busy, on-the-go computer sociopath.
Soylent Green is a 1973 American ecological dystopian thriller film, loosely based on a novel by Harry Harrison entitled Make Room! Make Room! One of the stars of the movie was Edward G. Robinson, who died of bladder cancer on January 26, 1973, twelve days after the completion of filming. His character dies in the film; that scene has been described as the best in the movie.
Harry Harrison was a writer from the world of American comics and science-fiction magazines of the 1950s. An amazingly prolific author, who gradually took on more serious themes as he aged, Harrison is probably best known for the book that inspired the Hollywood film Soylent Green. His most popular and best-known work is contained in fast-moving parodies, homages or even straight reconstructions of traditional space-opera adventures. He wrote several named series of these: most notably the Deathworld series (three titles, starting in 1960), the Stainless Steel Rat books (12 titles, from 1961), and the sequence of books about Bill, the Galactic Hero (seven titles, from 1965).
“Stainless steel” is a term for a range of iron alloys. These alloys use chromium (and sometimes nickel and/or molybdenum) to prevent rusting of the iron, and may include other elements to impart additional properties to the alloy.
The five-cent coin, or ‘nickel’, was first minted in the United States immediately following the Civil War. It was the most popular coin for years thereafter. Bottles of Coca-Cola, which entered the marketplace in 1886, cost a nickel for 73 years. Nickels were also the ideal coins for the first vending machines, jukeboxes, and slot machines.
The current five-cent coin, or Jefferson-head nickel, is made of an alloy of 75% copper and 25% nickel. During the WWII period, however, nickel was of high strategic value and the five-cent coins during that time were minted of from an alloy of 56% copper, 35% silver and 9% manganese.
-“BB”-
In 1860, Sir Henry Bessemer was trying to develop the steelmaking process which was to bear his name. But he was experiencing difficulty with an excess of residual oxygen and sulfur in the steel. A man named Robert Mushet suggested adding spiegeleisen, a pig-iron containing a high percentage of manganese, to introduce both manganese and carbon and remove oxygen. This procedure made the Bessemer process possible, and thus paved the way for the modern steel industry.
In 1859, a conflict over the border between British Columbia and Washington state flared up. It was triggered by an American settler shooting a Large Black pig, owned by an Irish settler. The American said that the pig had been eating his potatoes. The Irishman replied that "“It is up to you to keep your potatoes out of my pig!” and threatened to have British authorities arrest the American, which triggered American angst.
After much huffring and puffing, the British and American governments came to a settlement, and the so-called Pig War ended without fatalities.
Except the Pig.
On February 22, 1889, the United States Congress passed an act enabling the territories of Washington, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana to seek statehood. This was the first enabling act passed by Congress since Colorado became the 38th state in 1876. Both Dakotas were admitted to the Union on November 2, 1889; Montana was admitted on November 8, 1889; and Washington was admitted as the 42nd state on November 11, 1889.
“Fargo North, Decoder” was a recurring character on the children’s educational program The Electric Company, which first ran on PBS from 1971 through 1977. The character, whose name was a pun on the city of Fargo, North Dakota, was portrayed by actor Skip Hinnant, and was a detective who would decode scrambled word messages for his clients.
In Australia, New Zealand and Britain, a skip is a large open-topped container for waste, designed to be lifted onto the back of a truck to remove it along with its contents.
In curling, the skip is the captain of the team, responsible for the overall strategy of each match. The skip also normally shoots last, but there have been cases where the skip shoots in a different position and one of the other players on the rink shoots last.
Randy Ferbey, six-time Canadian champion and four-time World champion generally threw third rather than last.
Charlie Chaplin’s comedy The Rink is set at a roller skating rink, allowing him to show off his prowess.
Charlie Chaplin, born in 1889, began his show-biz career at the age of ten, when he joined a clog-dancing troupe which performed at various English music halls. His last appearance was in a 1975 documentary about his life and career, entitled The Gentleman Tramp. Chaplin died on Christmas Day in 1977.