Deadly Yogurt From Costco

August 5, 2008 – 10:12 am

If you're a "generation X" member, you probably remember the 1970s Dannon Yogurt commercial about the people in Soviet Georgia who ate lots of yogurt and lived into their hundreds. For decades, we've been told that yogurt is healthy and good for you. Unfortunately, not all yogurts are created equal.

This morning, I got up early and had breakfast with my son before he went to day care.  He likes to have yogurt for breakfast, so I had some with him.

They had Brown Cow yogurt on sale at our local supermarket, and he and my wife loooove it. When I told him he could have some Brown Cow this morning, he did a happy dance (he's 3). I decided to eat a cup of the Kirkland brand (Costco's house brand) yogurt we had in the fridge so that I wouldn't depelete the stash of Brown Cow for my wife and son.

All I can say after eating that cup of Costco yogurt is... what the bloody hell? Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Food & Diet, Health | 6 Comments »

Billions and Billions

July 28, 2008 – 10:09 pm

So, I recently got the idea of "billions and billions" in my head, thanks to memories of Carl Sagan, and wondered how many "billions and billions" is, particularly in respect to the Milky Way galaxy.

According to the Physics Factbook, the consensus among modern theorists seems to be that the number of stars in our galaxy is around 100 billion give or take a handful.

Of course, stars are massive. Our own sun, which is not one of the bigger classes of stars masses 1.9891 * 10³⁰ kilograms or 332,946 times the weight of the Earth. So 100 billion stars is obviously pretty massive.

But what if you had 100 billion grains of sand, or 100 billion popcorn kernels--as many as all the stars in the galaxy?
How much would they weigh?

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Weight/Mass | 1 Comment »

A Million Times

July 16, 2008 – 8:52 am

When you were a kid (some of you may still be), how many times do you recall your parents or some authority figure prefacing an admonition with "if I told you once, I told you a million times"? Well, how long would it take them to tell you something a million times?

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Posted in Quantity, Time | Post A Comment »

When Is A Gigabyte Not A Gigabyte?

July 14, 2008 – 5:20 pm

We've all run into it.  You get your computer with the 300 gigabyte drive and when you look at the space free, it says that the drive's capacity is actually 279 gigabytes.  You think you were a victim of false advertising until you read the fine print.  The manufacturer measures a gigabyte as 1 billion bytes and you find out that your computer measures it as 1,073,741,824 bytes.

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Posted in Bits & Bytes, Quantity | 1 Comment »