Learn & Tell

In-Bound Link (IBL) Quality. This is a measurement of key elements on the page containing an in-bound link which, in combination, influence the link reputation for the target of the link. This is the only factor that had the same level of relative influence across the search engines and happened to be the most influential in all cases.

• Executive Summary SEMLogic Findings

P.S. Also note that I’ve added a “web” category and will start adding more web-related items into this category, even though they may not be typical Learn & Tell material…

Just a coincidence I suppose, but I received some photos via email of jets breaking the sound barrier today. I say its a coincidence because I just recently posted some amazing photos of other military-type stuff. Anyway, here they are:

These are pretty interesting photos. I just posted two here, there are 25 at the link below.

• Source: Things You Won’t See on CNN

In the first quarter of 2006, Verizon Wireless’s 54.8 million customers sent and received about two messages a day on average, generating nearly 10 billion text messages over three months.

Source: Ohmigod, teens are so over e-mail!

That’s about 1,272 text messages every second, 76,313 per minute, and 4.5 million per hour.

Oil company BP released their Q2 2006 earnings today. Amazing amounts of money:

[BP] posted a net profit of $7.3 billion for the three months to June 30, up from $5.6 billion a year earlier.

Here’s some math for ya:

• In one quarter, there are 2,184 hrs (3 months * 4.33 wks per month * 7 days per week * 24 hrs per day)
• So, with a profit of $7,350,000,000, that means that BP was making a profit of $3,365,384.62 per hour

$3.37 million per hour profit! Not too shabby.

According to this article, Fear of Snakes May Have Driven Pre-Human Evolution, it is possible that early mammals (and eventually humans) developed their advanced sense of smell, color, and even 3D vision through years of evading snakes in our early early stages. I thought this was interesting:

Fossil and DNA evidence suggests that snakes were already around when the first mammals evolved some 100 million years ago. The reptiles were thus among the first serious predators mammals faced.

Today, the only other threats faced by primates are raptors, such as eagles and hawks, and large carnivores, such as bears, large cats and wolves, but these animals evolved long after snakes did.

Makes me think of an ancient landscape with giant snakes chasing after our little mammalian ancestors…

Learned:

• ophidiphobia - fear of snakes

photo credit

When I first learned this fact back around 2000, it was part of the impetus for the very first print Learn & Tell (which has been defunct for many years).

Polar bear hair is actually transparent and colorless and they have black skin. So why does it look white?

Most sources indicate that the long, coarse guard hairs, which protect the plush thick undercoat, are hollow and transparent. The thinner hairs of the undercoat are not hollow, but they, like the guard hairs, are colorless.

The hair of a polar bear looks white because the air spaces in each hair scatter light of all colors. The color white becomes visible to our eyes when an object reflects back all of the visible wavelengths of light, rather than absorbing some of the wavelengths.

• Source: Library of Congress

photo credit

What I thought especially interesting about this article entitled Study: Elders with dementia can tap into memory stores to give advice was this excerpt:

The researchers asked about marriage, children and church in a purely social way, such as “Tell me about your children.” In later conversations, they asked the adults for advice on the same topics, as in, “I’m thinking about having children. What kind of advice can you give me on that?”

They found that adults were more coherent, informative and focused on the topic when asked for advice as opposed to when they were simply asked about their children, church or marriage.

The goal of Learn & Tell is to get the brain juices flowing. If I find something interesting, be it fascinatingly mind-blowing or it simply inspires a “hm”, I’ll post it here. If you find anything interesting that you think is deservant of being posted here for the enjoyment of all, send it to me.