SCM.Resistant.Weak: novembre 2010

giovedì 11 novembre 2010

Post It Note

A Post-it note is a piece of stationery with a re-adherable strip of adhesive on the back, designed for temporarily attaching notes to documents and other surfaces. Although now available in a wide range of colors, shapes, and sizes, Post-it notes are most commonly a 3-inch (76 mm) square, canary yellow in color. A unique low-tack adhesive allows the notes to be easily attached and removed without leaving marks or residue, unless used on white boards.
Post-it notes were invented by 3M's Art Fry, using an adhesive developed by a colleague, Spencer Silver. Until the 1990s, when the patent expired, they were produced only in the 3M plant in Cynthiana, Kentucky. Although other companies now produce sticky or repositionable notes, most of the world's Post-it Brand notes are still made in Cynthiana.
The term "Post-it" and the canary yellow color are trademarks of 3M. Accepted generic terms for competitors include "sticky notes", "repositionable notes", and "repositional notes". To take advantage of the success of the brand, 3M manufactures other products related to the Post-it concept.

In 1968, Dr. Spencer Silver, a chemist at 3M in the United States, accidentally developed a "low-tack", reusable, pressure sensitive adhesive. For five years, Silver promoted his invention within 3M, both informally and through seminars, but without much success. In 1974, a colleague of his, Art Fry, who had attended one of Silver's seminars, came up with the idea of using the adhesive to anchor his bookmark in his hymnbook. Fry then developed the idea by taking advantage of 3M's officially sanctioned "permitted bootlegging" policy.
3M launched the product in 1977, but it failed, as consumers had not tried it. A year later, 3M issued free samples to residents of Boise, Idaho, and 90 percent of the people who tried them said that they would buy the product. By 1980, the product was being sold nationwide in the US; in 1981 Post-its were launched in Canada and Europe.
In 2003, the company came out with Post-it Brand Super Sticky notes, with a stronger glue that adheres better to vertical and non-smooth surfaces.
Standard Post-it Brand notes have only partial adhesive coating on the back, along one edge. Similar products are used for specialized purposes with full adhesive coating; the US Post Office uses such yellow address labels to forward mail.
The yellow color was chosen by accident; a lab next-door to the Post-it team had scrap yellow paper, which the team initially used.

Post It US patent (Glue formula): http://www.google.com/patents?id=tPIrAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

Post It Canadian patent (Pressure sensitive adhesives):
http://v3.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/originalDocument?CC=CA&NR=961198&KC=&FT=E

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-it_note

lunedì 8 novembre 2010

Weak link (Brian Mitchell)

A reviewer wrote, "In Weak Link: The Feminization of the American Military, army veteran Brian Mitchell argues that women have had a profoundly disruptive and negative effect on the fighting capabilities of the American armed forces. Mitchell shows how the service academies have had their morale, traditions, and standards shattered by the enrollment of women. "

We read in The Weak Link: "Despite proud boasts that women can easily do Ranger school, no woman presently in service has done anything like it. Not one of them has ever walked day and night through freezing rain, up and down the Tennessee Valley Divide with a 70-pound ruck on her back and a 23-pound machine gun in her arms. Not one of them has gone nine days without sleep, with a single cold meal a day and nothing over her head but a canvas cap."

"Such are the discomforts of not combat but training. Combat -- the business of barbarians, Byron's 'brain-spattering windpipe-slitting art ' -- is many times worse. Of his time as a Marine Platoon commander in Vietnam, James Webb wrote: 'We would go months without bathing, except when we could stand naked among each other next to a village well or in a stream or in the muddy water of a bomb crater. It was nothing to begin walking at midnight, laden with packs and weapons and ammunition and supplies, seventy pounds or more of gear, and still be walking when the sun broke over mud-slick paddies that had sucked our boots all night. We carried our own gear and when we took casualties we carried the weapons of those who had been hit. "

"When we stopped moving we started digging, furiously throwing out the heavy soil until we had made chest-deep fighting holes.... We slept in makeshift hooches made out of ponchos, or simply wrapped up in a poncho, sometimes so exhausted that we did not feel the rain fall on our own faces. Most of us caught hookworm, dysentery, malaria, or yaws, and some of us had all of them."

"We became vicious and aggressive and debased, and reveled in it, because combat is all of those things and we were surviving. I once woke up in the middle of the night to sounds of one of my machine gunners stabbing an already dead enemy soldier, emptying his fear and frustrations into the corpse 's chest. . . . ' "

Pheidippides

Pheidippides (Greek: Φειδιππίδης, sometimes given as Phidippides or Philippides), hero of Ancient Greece, is the central figure in a story which was the inspiration for a modern sporting event, the marathon.
The traditional story relates that Pheidippides (530 BC–490 BC), an Athenian herald, was sent to Sparta to request help when the Persians landed at Marathon, Greece. He ran 240 km (150 miles) in two days. He then ran the 40 km (25 miles) from the battlefield near Marathon to Athens to announce the Greek victory over Persia in the Battle of Marathon (490 BC) with the word "Νενικήκαμεν" (Nenikékamen, "We have won") and collapsed and died on the spot from exhaustion.

Most accounts incorrectly attribute this story to the historian Herodotus, who wrote the history of the Persian Wars in his Histories (composed about 440 BC). In reality, the traditional story appears to be a conflation from several different ancient Greek sources having varying levels of authenticity.

The significance of this story is only understood in the light of the legend that the god Pan returned the favor by fighting with the Athenian troops and against the Persians at Marathon. This was important because Pan, in addition to his other powers, had the capacity to instill the most extreme sort of fear, an irrational, blind fear that paralysed the mind and suspended all sense of judgment - panic.

Herodotus was writing about 30 to 40 years after the events he describes, so it is reasonably likely that Pheidippides is a historical figure. If he ran the 246 km over rough roads from Athens to Sparta within two days, it would be an achievement worthy of remembrance. Whether the story is true or not, it has no connection with the Battle of Marathon itself, and Herodotus's silence on the subject of a herald running from Marathon to Athens suggests strongly that no such event occurred.

The first known written account of a run from Marathon to Athens occurs in the works of the Greek writer Plutarch (46–120), in his essay On the Glory of Athens. Plutarch attributes the run to a herald called either Thersippus or Eukles. Lucian, a century later, credits one "Philippides." It seems likely that in the 500 years between Herodotus's time and Plutarch's, the story of Pheidippides had become muddled with that of the Battle of Marathon, and some fanciful writer had invented the story of the run from Marathon to Athens.

While the marathon celebrates the mythical run from Marathon to Athens, since 1982 an annual footrace from Athens to Sparta, known as the Spartathlon, celebrates Pheidippides's at least semi-historical run across 250 km of Greek countryside.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheidippides

Liberty Leading the People - Eugène Delacroix

Delacroix's most influential work came in 1830 with the painting Liberty Leading the People, which for choice of subject and technique highlights the differences between the romantic approach and the neoclassical style. Less obviously, it also differs from the Romanticism of Géricault and the Raft of the Medusa.

"Delacroix felt his composition more vividly as a whole, thought of his figures and crowds as types, and dominated them by the symbolic figure of Republican Liberty which is one of his finest plastic inventions…"

Probably Delacroix's best known painting, it is an unforgettable image of Parisians, having taken up arms, marching forward under the banner of the tricolour representing liberty, equality, and fraternity; Delacroix was inspired by contemporary events to invoke the romantic image of the spirit of liberty. The soldiers lying dead in the foreground offer poignant counterpoint to the symbolic female figure, who is illuminated triumphantly, as if in a spotlight.

The French government bought the painting but officials deemed its glorification of liberty too inflammatory and removed it from public view. Nonetheless, Delacroix still received many government commissions for murals and ceiling paintings. He seems to have been trying to represent the spirit and the character of the people, rather than glorify the actual event, a revolution against King Charles X which did little other than bring in a different king, Louis-Philippe, to power.

Following the Revolution of 1848 that saw the end of the reign of King Louis Philippe, Delacroix' painting, Liberty Leading the People, was finally put on display by the newly elected President, Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III.) Today, it is visible in the Louvre museum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugène_Delacroix

Oscar Pistorius

Oscar Leonard Carl Pistorius (born 22 November 1986) is a South African Paralympic runner. Known as the "Blade Runner" and "the fastest man on no legs", Pistorius, who has a double amputation, is the world record holder in the 100, 200 and 400 metres (sport class T44) events and runs with the aid of Cheetah Flex-Foot carbon fibre transtibial artificial limbs by Ossur. In 2007 Pistorius took part in his first international competitions for able-bodied athletes. However, his artificial lower legs, while enabling him to compete, generated claims that he has an unfair advantage over able-bodied runners. The same year, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) amended its competition rules to ban the use of "any technical device that incorporates springs, wheels or any other element that provides a user with an advantage over another athlete not using such a device". It claimed that the amendment was not specifically aimed at Pistorius. After monitoring his track performances and carrying out tests, scientists took the view that Pistorius enjoyed considerable advantages over athletes without prosthetic limbs. On the strength of these findings, on 14 January 2008 the IAAF ruled him ineligible for competitions conducted under its rules, including the 2008 Summer Olympics. This decision was reversed by the Court of Arbitration for Sport on 16 May 2008, the Court ruling that the IAAF had not provided sufficient evidence to prove that Pistorius's prostheses give him an advantage over able-bodied athletes.

Although eligible to compete in the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, Pistorius did not qualify for the South African team. Despite achieving third place and a personal best time of 46.25 seconds in the 400 metres in Lucerne, Switzerland, on 16 July 2008, this was short of the Olympic qualification time of 45.55 seconds. He was also not selected by the South African Olympic Committee for the 4 x 400 metres relay team as there were four other runners who had achieved better times. At the 2008 Summer Paralympics, he took the gold medals in the 100, 200 and 400 metres (T44) sprints.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Pistorius

Lance Armstrong

Lance Edward Armstrong (born Lance Edward Gunderson on September 18, 1971) is an American professional road racing cyclist who is best known for winning the Tour de France a record seven consecutive times, after having survived testicular cancer. He is also the founder and chairman of the Lance Armstrong Foundation for cancer research and support. He rides for UCI ProTour team Team RadioShack.

In October 1996 he was diagnosed with testicular cancer, with a tumor that had metastasized to his brain and lungs. His cancer treatments included brain and testicular surgery and extensive chemotherapy, and his prognosis was originally poor. He went on to win the Tour de France each year from 1999 to 2005, and is the only person to win seven times, having broken the previous record of five wins, shared by Miguel Indurain, Bernard Hinault, Eddy Merckx, and Jacques Anquetil.

In 1999, he was named the ABC Wide World of Sports Athlete of the Year. In 2000 he won the Prince of Asturias Award in Sports. In 2002, Sports Illustrated magazine named him Sportsman of the Year. He was also named Associated Press Male Athlete of the Year for the years 2002–2005. He received ESPN's ESPY Award for Best Male Athlete in 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006, and won the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Overseas Personality Award in 2003. Armstrong retired from racing on July 24, 2005, at the end of the 2005 Tour de France, but returned to competitive cycling in January 2009, and finished third in the 2009 Tour de France.

Armstrong has recorded an aerobic capacity of 83.8 mL/kg/min (VO2 max), much higher than the average person (40–50), but lower than some other Tour De France winners, such as Miguel Indurain (88.0, although reports exist that Indurain tested at 92–94) and Greg LeMond (92.5). He has a resting heart rate of 32–34 beats per minute (bpm) with a maximum heart rate of 201 bpm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong

domenica 7 novembre 2010

Literature

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Zubizuri

The Zubizuri (Basque for "white bridge"), also called the Campo Volantin Bridge or Puente del Campo Volantin, is a tied arch footbridge across the Nervion River in Bilbao, Spain. Designed by architect Santiago Calatrava, the bridge links the Campo Volantin right bank and Uribitarte left bank of the river. The floor of the bridge is made of glass and that shows that is possible to build a resistant structure with a weak material. The main problem of the glass is that makes the floor too slippy when it rains.