100 Years Ago...

A lot of this is applicable to our grandparents, and even some of our parents.

It May Be Hard to Believe That A Scant 100 Years Ago...

• The average life expectancy in the United States was forty-seven.
• Only 14 percent of the homes in the United States had a bathtub.
• Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone. A three minute call from Denver to New York City cost eleven dollars.
• There were only 8,000 cars in the US and only 144 miles of paved roads.
• The maximum speed limit in most cities was ten mph.
• Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee were each more heavily populated than California. With a mere 1.4 million residents, California was only the twenty-first most populous state in the Union.
• The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower.
• The average wage in the U.S. was twenty-two cents an hour. The average U.S. worker made between $200 and $400 per year.
• A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year, a dentist $2500 per year, a veterinarian between $1500 and $4000 per year, and a mechanical engineer about $5000 per year.
• More than 95 percent of all births in the United States took place at home.

Ninety percent of all U.S. physicians had no college education. Instead, they attended medical schools, many of which were condemned in the press and by the government as "substandard."

Sugar cost four cents a pound.

Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen.

Coffee cost fifteen cents a pound.

Most women only washed their hair once a month and used borax or egg yolks for shampoo.

Canada passed a law prohibiting poor people from entering the country for any reason, either as travelers or immigrants.

The five leading causes of death in the U.S. were: 1. Pneumonia and influenza 2. Tuberculosis 3. Diarrhea 4. Heart disease 5. Stroke

The American flag had 45 stars. Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Hawaii and Alaska hadn't been admitted to the Union yet.

Drive-by-shootings, in which teenage boys galloped down the street on horses and started randomly shooting at houses, carriages, or anything else that caught their fancy, were an ongoing problem in Denver and other cities in the West.

The population of Las Vegas, Nevada was thirty. The remote desert community was inhabited by only a handful of ranchers and their families.

Plutonium, insulin, and antibiotics hadn't been discovered yet. Scotch tape, crossword puzzles, canned beer, and iced tea hadn't been invented.

There was no Mother's Day or Father's Day.

One in ten U.S. adults couldn't read or write. Only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated from high school.

Some medical authorities warned that professional seamstresses were apt to become sexually aroused by the steady rhythm, hour after hour, of the sewing machine's foot pedals. They recommended slipping bromide, which was thought to diminish sexual desire,into the woman's drinking water.

Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over the counter at corner drugstores. According to one pharmacist, "Heroin clears the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind, regulates the stomach and the bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health.

Coca-Cola contained cocaine instead of caffeine.

Punch card data processing had recently been developed, and early predecessors of the modern computer were used for the first time by the government to help compile the 1900 census.

Eighteen percent of households in the United States had at least one full-time servant or domestic.

Author Unknown

The Owl & the Pussy-Cat

Edward Lear

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat.
They took some honey and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
'O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!'

Pussy said to Owl, 'You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?'
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-Tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood,
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose!
With a ring at the end of his nose.

'Dear Pig, are you willing to selling for one shilling
Your ring?' Said the Piggy, 'I will.'
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

Swarm of locusts

Interesting article from The Writer's Almanac

It was on this day in 1875 that the largest recorded swarm  of locusts in American history descended upon the Great   Plains. An estimated 3.5 trillion locusts made up the swarm.  It was about 1,800 miles long and 110 miles wide, ranging from Canada down to Texas.
Swarms would occur once every seven to 12 years, emerging  from river valleys in the Rocky Mountains and  sweeping east across much of the country. The size of the swarms tended to grow  when there was less rain, and in 1873, the American West began to go through  one of its driest periods on record.
The land was still relatively dry on this day in 1875 when  farmers just east of the Rocky Mountains began  to see a cloud approaching from the west. Some farmers noticed the distinctive  color of the cloud, glinting around the edges where the locust wings caught the  light of the sun.
People there that day said that the locusts descended like a  driving snow in winter, covering everything in their path. Some people  described the sound of the swarm landing as like thunder or a train. The  locusts blanketed the ground, nearly a foot deep. Trees bent over with the  weight of the insects, and large tree limbs broke off under the pressure.
They ate nearly every living piece of vegetation in their  path, as well as harnesses on horses, the bark of trees, curtains, and clothing  hung on laundry lines. They gnawed on fence posts and railings, and they  especially loved the handles of farm tools, which were left behind polished, as  if by fine sandpaper. Some farmers tried to scare away the locusts by running  into the swarm, and they had their clothes eaten right off their bodies.
In the wake of the swarm, settlers on half a million  square miles of the West faced starvation. Similar locust swarms occurred in  the following years, and farmers became desperate. But by the mid-1880s, the  rains had returned, and the swarms died down. Most scientists predicted that  the locusts would return with the next drought. Mysteriously, they did not.  Within a few decades they were believed to be extinct. For most of the 20th  century, no one knew what had happened to the locusts, but recent evidence  suggests that the cultivation of the land on the Great Plains changed the  geography so much so quickly that the Rocky Mountain  locust was unable to adapt. The last two live specimens of the Rocky Mountain  locust were collected in 1902, and those specimens are now stored at the  Smithsonian Institution.

"Can machines think?"

"Can machines think?" The problem can be described in terms of the "imitation game", with a man, a woman, and an interrogator. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the other two and tries, by sending questions (perhaps by teleprinter) to the others, to determine which is the man and which the woman. Could a digital computer convince the interrogator that it was a man?
Digital computers work by following written-down rules, called 'programmes', and can even change their own rules in response to other rules. I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible to programme computers to make them play the imitation game.
It could be argued that machines cannot have souls, but, if this matters at all, why could not God give a soul to whatever He wants. We cannot know if computers could have consciousness, because we cannot really know if other people have consciousness. Computers can still surprise us with their answers. It might be best to try and build a computer like a human infant, and then programme it to learn.

Alan Turing, 1905
Computing Machinery and Intelligence read more

Sheep or Dog

Our two sheep both ewes  (Mother Daughter) from our original herd, there all I have left. They came down with something, the older sheep died. I was able save the other one.

Now she is feeling pretty feels good and follow me around every where I go. Good thing we have doors on our house she would walk right in. Every time I poke my head out the door she won’t shut up.

Short Story

Listening to short story Brams Stokers "Dracula's Guest" which almost makes you here and feel the wolves on the wind swept moor preformed by Aasif Mandvi. "It Great"

Burning Books

"And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)