Blog - foXnoMad

Toy of the Century-Lego!

by Anil Polat | Dec 2, 2006 | Travel | 1

Legos are the coolest toys around. Everyone knows Lego – the toy of the century, twice! This is an interesting article about the Danish company (didn’t know they were Danish, did you?) that produces 15 billion individual pieces a year.

The LEGO Group’s story begins in 1932, when Ole Kirk Christiansen began making wooden toys for children. However, the LEGO brick?as we know it today?wasn’t launched until 1958.

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The bricks produced today can interlock with those produced back in 1958.

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LEGO Group is producing 15 billion components a year?that’s 1.7 million items an hour, or 28,500 a minute. Tire production accounts for some of that number; the factory also produces 306 million tiny rubber tires a year. In fact, going by that number, LEGO is the world’s No. 1 tire manufacturer.

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The bricks are so versatile that the LEGO Group has calculated that just six eight-stud bricks can be arranged in 915,103,765 different ways.

Pug Power

by Anil Polat | Dec 2, 2006 | Travel | 0

This is so me.

Thanks for the link Matt-

The Scoville Scale

by Anil Polat | Dec 2, 2006 | Travel | 0

I have no idea why I found this interesting.

The Scoville scale is a measure of the “hotness” of a chili pepper. These fruits of the Capsicum genus contain capsaicin, a chemical compound which stimulates thermoreceptor nerve endings in the skin, especially the mucus membranes, and the number of Scoville heat units (SHU) indicates the amount of capsaicin present.

New Johnny Cash Video

by Anil Polat | Dec 1, 2006 | Pictures and Video | 1

Full of celebrities, if you watch closely towards the end, you’ll see how I stumbled upon this.

NIST Warns the Electronic Voting ‘Cannot be Made Secure’

by Anil Polat | Dec 1, 2006 | Security, Tech | 0

Makes you wonder what happens to your vote after you leave the booth. And if NIST (National Institutes of Standards and Technology) is saying this, we’d better take it seriously.

Paperless electronic voting machines used throughout the Washington region and much of the country “cannot be made secure,” according to draft recommendations issued this week by a federal agency that advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

NIST says in its report that the lack of a paper trail for each vote “is one of the main reasons behind continued questions about voting system security and diminished public confidence in elections.” The report repeats the contention of the computer security community that “a single programmer could ‘rig’ a major election.”

DHS Traveler Terror Scores Leaked

by Anil Polat | Dec 1, 2006 | Security, Travel | 2

This is ridiculous. These types of security measures are both ineffective and don’t target the terrorists. They merely inconvenience innocent travelers while the “bad guys” simply go around ineffective security procedures. It happens all the time.

Without notifying the public, federal agents have assigned millions of international travelers, including Americans, computer-generated scores rating the risk they pose of being terrorists or criminals.

The travelers are not allowed to see or directly challenge these risk assessments. The government intends to keep the scores on file for 40 years.

The scores are assigned to people entering and leaving the United States after computers assess their travel records, including where they are from, how they paid for tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preference and what kind of meal they ordered.