How many more to get 99%

What's the deal?
How many are needed to hit 99% ?

Jetski across the Pacific

It's almost overdone but it still cracks me up. Google Maps from Japan to China and you get this map.  Part of the instructions include "jetski across the Pacific". Actually, it's the East China Sea, but you get the idea.

So how fast is that JetSki anyway?

A bunch of AnyQs

Images for the 101qs.com website ....

Found the juxtaposition of the rating and the sign rather amusing.

Kind of a neat idea, too.

Interesting how they built along the cliff.

Facebook timeline background - fit your smiling face in perfectly.

Notice the number of pints:

What is the fraction representation?

Innumeracy in the News again

A town in Illinois got hit by a tornado, causing $3 million in damage.

News clip: A powerful tornado hit Harrisburg, Illinois, killing seven people and caused widespread damage throughout the town. Dean Reynolds reports on how the state will not be receiving nearly $3 million in relief aid from FEMA to help homeowners and renters. On the day that a tornado ripped through Harrisburg, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn surveyed the damage and tried to think ahead. "We have an emergency management agency and I signed a declaration, a state disaster declaration," Quinn said. "And I will ask the feds for assistance. You have to file a good application if you want federal assistance."

They got denied and everyone started screaming how awful it was that FEMA would do such a heinous act. Predictably, someone blamed the President. A couple of talking-heads compared it to Irene and wondered if Vermont's democratic leanings had something to do with it.

Let's compare that Illinois damage to what they pay their school superintendents, shall we? The 100 highest-paid school administrators in Illinois in 2006 (and now, with inflation and the inevitable raises, much more!) had salaries ranging from $205,590 to $380,227. (#1: Catalani Gary T $380,227 CUSD 200 to #17: Wolf Boyce J $256,380 ROCK FALLS TWP HSD 301.)  The total for the top 100: $23,000,000.

That's the cost of ONE salary from each district, six years ago. In 2011, the top two salaries were $402,000 and $411,000. source. Summary: the top 100 (from six years ago) of 1145 district account for 22 million.

AnyQs?

Yeah, I think FEMA had this one right. Illinois can certainly afford it. Governor, shut up.

There used to be three lanes here, two up, one down.
There were five washouts this size in a two mile stretch.

Compare that to Irene in Vermont -- infrastructure damage could cost state $100 million. That's not including citizens' home and property damage. Many of my kids' homes were devastated, farmland ruined and crops destroyed. You can't sell food crop that's been flooded, you know, so the money was paid out all year for seed and fertilizer et. al., and then the only income is declared "spoil". FEMA sort of helped out; 10% - 20% of the cost of the replacement. Of the barn.


Farms were destroyed and crops ruined and whole sections of the state inaccessible due to washouts; farmers and contractors and citizens went out on their own initiative and used their own money and equipment to rebuild roadways, dredge and reconfigure streams and rivers, haul away trees and debris. The state had to come in to check and finish and pave, but a lot of that work was done by volunteers. Everyone helped out. The soccer team went door-to-door instead of to practice, even though school closed because no one could physically get there. Even the road contractors stopped leaning against their truck doors with cups of coffee - major bridges were rebuilt in weeks, roads like the one in the picture were rebuilt in days.

Since we used the schools as a proxy for our state wealth capability calculations: "On average, Vermont’s 60 superintendents earn $105,337 a year." That's all of them. $6 million. source.

Fallacy of Relevance

Here is some material for an exploration ANYQs. You have to be careful with medical issues because kids misinterpret and will sometimes take this as a criticism of their lifestyle, parents, capitalism, world-view.  They will also assume that I'm out to bash big Pharma (why they care is beyond me).

I start with the first article.

From the tone, it is obvious to someone that OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG

Fake drugs are increasingly being sold on the Internet in a global counterfeit medicines market that has doubled in the last five years to more than $75 million. The medicines, many of which are life-threatening, have even turned up in the legitimate supply chain and found their way into pharmacies, according a review by Dr Graham Jackson and colleagues published in the March issue of the IJCP, the International Journal of Clinical Practice.

Is that a problem? For most kids, that scares the germs right out of them until you line that statement up against this one:

Accounting for 6.5 percent of the total market share, statin drugs are the most widely sold pharmaceutical drugs in history. To date, Forbes Magazine tells us that statins are earning drug companies $26 billion in annual sales. ... Pfizer spends over $3 billion each year to convince us that we need more and more drugs to be healthy.

And that's just for Lipitor, the cholesterol-lowering drug. So, if $26 Billion is only 6.5% of market, that means the market is worth about $400 billion.

Aside: Pfizer pushes their drugs so hard that it incurred a $2.7 Billion fine for health care fraud (partly the largest criminal fine ever in any case in the US and partly for violations of civil law, the False Claims Act.) Pfizer sales in that same year: $48 billion. Pfizer profits in that same year, after paying that fine: $5.7 Billion. Much of that despite the fact that many other countries force Pfizer to charge far less for their product, but we digress ...

And then you find that the other, "much more acceptable", fake drugs have a fairly strong market as well:

The market for homeopathic and herbal remedies increased 17% from 2005-09 to reach $5.9 billion. As these once considered “alternative” remedies continue to transition into the mainstream, Mintel expects growth to continue at a steady rate, averaging 3.5% growth annually through 2015. This report explores the market for homeopathic and herbal remedies, looking at sales across all channels, as well as consumer usage habits and attitudes towards such remedies. Topics covered in this report include:..

The report seems interesting, but I did not want to pay for that report to find out more details; the price was £2,464.53! "Add to Cart?"  .... um, No.

That's the United States. Now multiply by 5 (maybe?) to get the Global ... $400 Billion for the US * 5 = $2 trillion.

75 million in (possibly) fake vs 2 trillion. Which means that fake-fakes are 0.00375% of the market. I'd interpret that as something to be improved but pretty damned good.Acceptable fakes (homeopathics), on the other hand are 0.295% of the market, nearly 80 times as big a problem.

Kinda makes that $75 million fade into insignificance, doesn't it?

#AnyQs - Chocolate cake mix

I also like the last visible comment:
"The batter may look curdled; that's OK, it will bake up fine."

Copper Statue

"The Statue of Liberty ("Liberty Enlightening the World" by Frèdèric Aguste Bartoldi) in New Jersey waters outside New York Harbor is sheathed in copper of average thickness 2 mm. The statue is 50 m high and some 80 metric tons of copper was required for its fabrication. It is probable that few projects before or since the Statue`s construction in 1876-1885 ever required as much copper."

Any Questions?

AnyQs - Cleaners

Two seemingly identical bottles. 28 and 32 oz.

If you can't read it, it says
33% more 
than other leading national brands **
**Compared to 24 fl.oz. of other leading national brands.

#AnyQs -- Roof tiles

Any Questions? License Plates

Yup. Nearly 100 years old.

Any Questions?

Four one-gallon milk jugs in the red crate.
Nine half-gallon milk jugs in the gray crate.

#anyqs Fireworks

It's a goldmine:

But the embedded NatGeo clip doesn't show up in Google Reader. Click through.
size of shell vs height
time differential between first and second explosion
COLORS !
Bunch of things.