| Contractor emerges as charity's Champion
Vandals destroyed the heater at the American Red Cross' headquarters on Sixth Street in Modesto last week, sending a shiver through the charity, but things began to warm up again Tuesday. Champion Industrial Contractors Inc. of Modesto donated the $2,500 deductible the Red Cross would have had to pay to replace the heating and air conditioning unit, said Rebecca Ciszek, executive director of the Red Cross's Stanislaus County chapter. Then the contractor installed a $5,702 replacement unit. The balance will be covered by insurance. By early afternoon, the place was heating up. "The classroom is nice and warm," Ciszek said about 1 p.m. "It took a little while because that room had been cold now for a week." The donation means the organization won't have to dig into its charity funds to fix the unit, Ciszek said.
Watsco, Incorporated Earnings Conference Call (Q4 2007)
Watsco, Inc., along with its subsidiaries, distributes air conditioning, heating, refrigeration equipment, and related parts and supplies in the United States. Its products primarily comprise residential central air conditioners; light commercial air conditioners; gas, electric, and oil furnaces; commercial air conditioning and heating equipment and systems; and other specialized equipment. The company also offers various parts, including replacement compressors, evaporator coils, motors, and other component parts; and supplies consisting of thermostats, insulation material, refrigerants, ductwork, grills, registers, sheet metal, tools, copper tubing, concrete pads, tape, adhesives, and other ancillary supplies. Watsco operates through approximately 380 locations in 32 states. It distributes its products to contractors and dealers who service the replacement and new construction markets.
Mother Earth Mother Board
During the decades after Morse's "What hath God wrought!" a plethora of different codes, signalling techniques, and sending and receiving machines were patented. A web of wires was spun across every modern city on the globe, and longer wires were strung between cities. Some of the early technologies were, in retrospect, flaky: one early inventor wanted to use 26-wire cables, one wire for each letter of the alphabet. But it quickly became evident that it was best to keep the number of individual wires as low as possible and find clever ways to fit more information onto them. This requires more ingenuity than you might think - wires have never been perfectly transparent carriers of data; they have always degraded the information put into them. In general, this gets worse as the wire gets longer, and so as the early telegraph networks spanned greater distances, the people building them had to edge away from the seat-of-the-pants engineering practices that, applied in another field, gave us so many boiler explosions, and toward the more scientific approach that is the standard of practice today.
January 2008
UV exposure is the leading cause of skin cancer and to avoid overexposure many people protect their body with sunscreen. Unfortunately, if people are protected the coral reefs suffer. A new study finds that chemicals in sunscreen wash off swimmers and awaken dormant viruses inside coral reefs. Researchers from the online journal Environmental Health Perspectives estimate that "4,000 to 6,000 metric tons of sunscreen wash off swimmers annually in oceans worldwide, and that up to 10 percent of coral reefs are threatened by sunscreen-induced bleaching." It's the BPP's Ramble. Swimmers' sunscreen killing off coral/ Cop's report that woman attends church with crowbar in her pants/ Space race anniversary / Playground for 60-year-olds Will Hoffman 6:16 AM ET | 01-31-2008 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post .
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