Stephen’s Untold Stories

Of course Alaska is not included in the U.S. portion, but you can still see that Africa is quite large.

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I took this quiz a while back and scored 79% Dixie. I just took it again andf scored 96% Dixie. I can’t decide if that’s good or bad, ya’ll.

• Take the Yankee or Dixie Quiz (It’s a short one)

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If you near a computer at 5:00 EST today, take a look!

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

Thanks, Wes!

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At around six o’clock today it started to sound like someone was throwing rocks at the house. I looked outside and saw hailstones crushing everything in sight. I decided to take a prisoner.

Note: Actual golf balls were not falling from the sky. Just hail.

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At least they are interesting to me.

• Madrid, with summers so blazing hot that most people take a long break from work every afternoon, is about 10 miles farther north than Salt Lake City, Utah.
• Portland, Oregon, where it rarely snows, is about 130 miles farther north than Toronto, and over 200 miles farther north than Boston.
• The entire country of England, with over 50 million residents, is a wee bit smaller than the state of Louisiana.

Here is the complete list.

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Nice photos of animals who have been able to overcome their differences in species.

Link to gallery

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Here is an excellent interactive Flash-based tool that shows how much Americans spend on various things.

Link to full graphic

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A Georgia man has made an amazing mini replica of the Alamo.

Story and more pictures here!

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I’ve played tennis for most of my life, and I had never thought of many of these.

• When packing something for shipping in a box that’s too large, use tennis balls as shock-absorbing cushions that will hold the item steady in the box.
• Tennis balls can also help any laundry load dry faster - just throw two or three in the dryer and your clothes will be done quicker.
• Put tennis balls on the tops of poles to mark the edges of your driveway or drainage ditch. The bright yellow balls will be visible in the dark and help you avoid driving into the ditch or over the grass in the dark.
• Prevent your bike’s kick stand from sinking into soft dirt by cutting a small slit in a tennis ball and sliding it over the kick stand.

Here is the complete list.

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It doesn’t feel like spring in Georgia, but it’s still time to push the clock forward.

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Nice!

Researchers have uncovered a rare photograph of a young Helen Keller with her teacher Anne Sullivan, nearly 120 years after it was taken on Cape Cod.

The photograph, shot in July 1888 in Brewster, shows an 8-year-old Helen sitting outside in a light-colored dress, holding Sullivan’s hand and cradling one of her beloved dolls.

Experts on Keller’s life believe it could be the earliest photo of the two women together and the only one showing the blind and deaf child with a doll — the first word Keller spelled for Sullivan after they met in 1887 — according to the New England Historic Genealogical Society, which now has the photo.

“It’s really one of the best images I’ve seen in a long, long time,” said Helen Selsdon, an archivist at the American Federation for the Blind, where Keller worked for more than 40 years. “This is just a huge visual addition to the history of Helen and Annie.”

For more than a century, though, the photograph was hidden in an album that belonged to the family of Thaxter Spencer, an 87-year-old man in Waltham.

Link to article

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Some nice photos of a baby giraffe in Britain.

Here is the link to the entire gallery.

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This guy creates a Prandtl-Glauert condensation cloud by flying about 25 feet above the water.

From our neighbors in Canada.

Now I want to do some traveling to see these.

The mysterious “Relámpago del Catatumbo” (Catatumbo lightning) is a unique natural phenomenon in the world. Located on the mouth of the Catatumbo river at Lake Maracaibo (Venezuela), the phenomenon is a cloud-to-cloud lightning that forms a voltage arc more than five kilometre high during 140 to 160 nights a year, 10 hours a night, and as many as 280 times an hour. This almost permanent storm occurs over the marshlands where the Catatumbo River feeds into Lake Maracaibo and it is considered the greatest single generator of ozone in the planet, judging from the intensity of the cloud-to-cloud discharge and great frequency. The area sees an estimated 1,176,000 electrical discharges per year, with an intensity of up to 400,000 amperes, and visible up to 400 km away. This is the reason why the storm is also known as the Maracaibo Beacon as light has been used for navigation by ships for ages.

Here is the entire list.

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In December of 1992 I was living in Savannah when I decided to make a trip to the Humane Society to get a kitten. The lady there told me that this calico kitten had been found wandering along Bay Street and needed a home. They had named her Stephanie, but I took her home and decided that I would shorten her name to Steffi, in honor of the great Steffi Graf.

Earlier today I had to take Steffi and have her put to sleep. I’ve had other cats, but Steffi outlasted them all. She was a great cat for almost 15 years, and I will miss her.

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I’m sure I’m one of countless others who are glad to see these results.

“Telecommuting has mostly positive consequences for employees and employers,” according to a press release from the American Psychological Association. The release summarizes the findings of a paper from Journal of Applied Psychology that performed a meta-analysis of 46 different studies of telecommuting over the years. According to the paper’s authors, the evidence shows that:

• Telecommuting has more positive than negative effects on employees
• Telecommuting has more positive than negative effects on employers
• Performance was not adversely affected by working at home
• Careers were not likely to suffer from telecommuting

You can read the entire report here.

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Here are some incredible photos taken this year. Here is a link to the complete gallery.

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