Random Stuff

Twilight vs Lord Of The Rings vs His Dark Materials vs Harry Potter vs Lemony Snicket

scotlandrulz — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 12:53:03 -0700

what are your fave collection of books?

Some animals, photos and stats, Are they endangered?

scotlandrulz — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 11:59:44 -0700

Bottlenose Dolphin
Where they live: Scotland, Caribbean, New Zealand, other places
Conservation Status: Bottlenose dolphins are not endangered. Their future is stable because of their abundance and high adaptability. However, some specific populations are threatened due to various environmental changes. The population in the Moray Firth in Scotland is estimated to consist of around 150 animals and is declining by around 6% per year due to the impact of harassment and traumatic death, water pollution and reduction in food availability.

Cheetah
Other name: Acinonyx jubatus
Where they live: Africa and Asia
Conservation Status: Endangered. Cheetah cubs have a high mortality rate due to genetic factors and predation by carnivores in competition with the cheetah, such as the lion and hyena. Recent inbreeding causes cheetahs to share very similar genetic profiles. This has led to poor sperm, birth defects, cramped teeth, curled tails, and bent limbs. Some biologists now believe that they are too inbred to flourish as a species

Killer Whale
Other names: Orca (Orcinus orca), less commonly, Blackfish or Seawolf
Where you can find them: It is found in all the world's oceans, from the frigid Arctic and Antarctic regions to warm, tropical seas
Conservation Status: Although the Killer Whale Population as a whole is not considered to be an endangered species, some local populations are considered threatened or endangered due to depletion of prey species and habitat loss, pollution by PCBs, captures for marine mammal parks, and conflicts with vessels. In late 2007, the Killer Whales known as the Southern Resident Killer Whales, were placed on the Endangered Species list.

Orangutans
Where they live: Native to Indonesia and Malaysia, they are currently found only in rainforests on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, though fossils have been found in Java, the Thai-Malay Peninsula, Vietnam and China
Conservation Status: The Sumatran species is critically endangered and the Bornean species of orangutans is endangered according to the IUCN Red List of mammals, and both are listed on Appendix I of CITES. The total number of Bornean orangutans is estimated to be less than 14% of what it was in the recent past (from around 10,000 years ago until the middle of the twentieth century) and this sharp decline has occurred mostly over the past few decades due to human activities and development.

Polar Bear
Other names: Ursus maritimus
Where they live: Native to the Arctic Ocean and its surrounding seas.
Conservation Status: Classed as vulnerable. The polar bear is classified as a vulnerable species, with 5 of the 19 polar bear subpopulations in decline. For decades, unrestricted hunting raised international concern for the future of the species; populations have rebounded after controls and quotas began to take effect. For thousands of years, the polar bear has been a key figure in the material, spiritual, and cultural life of Arctic indigenous peoples, and the hunting of polar bears remains important in their cultures.

How Well do You Know The Phonetric Alphabet N-Z

scotlandrulz — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 10:11:50 -0700

The NATO phonetic alphabet, more formally the international radiotelephony spelling alphabet, is the most widely used spelling alphabet. Though often called "phonetic alphabets", spelling alphabets have no connection to phonetic transcription systems like the International Phonetic Alphabet. Instead, the NATO alphabet assigns code words to the letters of the English alphabet acrophonically so that critical combinations of letters (and numbers) can be pronounced and understood by those who transmit and receive voice messages by radio or telephone regardless of their native language, especially when the safety of navigation or persons is essential. The paramount reason is to ensure intelligibility of voice signals over radio links.

Take the quiz

How Well Do You Know The Phonetric Alphabet A-M

scotlandrulz — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 10:01:26 -0700

Take the quiz

How many American Presidents...

scotlandrulz — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 09:19:13 -0800

me and my firend were guessing how many we could count and how many there were
found some facts

how many were lawyers: 25
25 of the 42 presidents were lawyers. The U.S. has seen 43 presidencies, but only 42 presidents -- Grover Cleveland was elected to two non-consecutive terms.
how many presidents: 44/43
how many have been assassinated: 4
Four presidents have been killed in office: Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy.

How they choose the Oscar nominees!

scotlandrulz — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 13:51:35 -0800

The nomination ballots for the 80th Academy Awards are due this Saturday at 5 p.m. PST, at which point a team of about a dozen accountants from PricewaterhouseCoopers will tabulate the votes. It will take seven days of counting to determine the nominees. It takes that long because the Academy uses the rather complicated preferential-voting system. Furthermore, the counting is done by hand. That's right - in an age of computers, the Oscar nominations are still determined by moving thousands of paper ballots into pile after pile after pile.

Since this process seems so contrary to public perception, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences invited a group of journalists to a demonstration of the voting procedure. Accountants Brad Oltmanns and Rick Rosas, who will lead the balloting process for the Academy this year (and, thereby, will be the only two people in the world to know the actual winners before the show airs), conducted a mock voting tabulation for the 1939 Best Actress race. We journalists voted for nominees and then observed what happened to our ballots.

The following is a detailed and yet hopefully clear description of exactly how the Oscar nominees are determined.

(1) The Academy is made up of approximately 6,000 members. Each member belongs to a branch - the directing branch, the writing branch, the cinematography branch, etc. You can't belong to multiple branches, so the Coen brothers are out of luck even though they direct, write, and edit their movies.

(2) Each branch votes within its own category: Actors vote for all the acting categories; directors vote in the direction category; and so on. Everybody gets to vote for Best Picture.

(3) Voters are asked to list up to five names, ranked in order of preference. The Academy instructs voters to "follow their hearts" because the voting process doesn't penalize for picking eccentric choices, as we will see. Also, listing the same person or film twice doesn't help their cause - in fact, it actually
diminishes the chance that the voter's ballot will be counted at all.

(4) A "magic number" is devised for each award category. This number is calculated by taking the total number of ballots received for that category and dividing it by the number of possible nominees plus one. So, for Best Actress, say that 600 ballots were received. There are always five nominees chosen for Best Actress, so you divide 600 ballots by six (five potential nominees plus one), which equals 100. That's your magic number.

(5) The magic number is important because as soon as a potential nominee reaches that number, they automatically become an official nominee. And so, the counting begins...

(6) The ballots are sorted into piles based upon each voter's first-choice selection. A nominee must have at least one first-choice vote to be eligible. If any nominee reaches the magic number based solely upon first-choice selections, they're in. So, for the 1939 race, let's say Bette Davis received 125 first-choice votes. She's now an official nominee, and all the ballots that listed her as a first-choice are set aside - those ballots are done.

(7) We now have four nominee slots left to fill. The actress who received the fewest first-place votes is eliminated, and those ballots are redistributed to the other piles based upon those voters' second-place selections and another round of tabulations begin. Let's say Vivien Leigh started out with 98 first-choice votes, and now has received two more votes from ballots that were redistributed. She has reached the magic number (100) - she's in! All the ballots in Vivien Leigh's pile are set aside.

( This process is continued. The actress who has the fewest ballots in her pile has those ballots redistributed to other piles based upon the voters' second-choice selections, and if need be, their third-choice, fourth-choice, and fifth-choice selections. If a ballot runs out of selections, that ballot is voided and is no longer in play, which is why it's important for voters to list five different nominees.

(9) The magic number will drop as ballots are voided. For instance, if 12 ballots are voided, the new magic number becomes 588 divided by 6 = 98.

(10) Actresses continue to be eliminated and ballots redistributed until five nominees reach the most current magic number, OR until there are only 5 nominees left in the running.

And there you have it. What this process means is that it's better to have a small but passionate group of voters who love your film than a larger but less passionate group. And it explains how a small foreign movie such as City of God was nominated in four major categories - it inspired enough supporters who most likely placed it No. 1 or No. 2 on their ballots to let it squeak into the final five. Having a lot of No. 4 or No. 5 votes isn't as advantageous because most of those ballots will have already been counted toward another film.

And in case you're wondering, the procedure for choosing the Oscar winner is much simpler. Once the nominations are decided, the entire Academy can vote for every category. Each member gets one vote per category, and the nominee that receives the most votes wins. It takes the accountants only three days to determine those winners.

Academy voters are discouraged from voting in categories they don't fully understand (who knows exactly what sound editing is?), and from voting in categories in which they haven't seen all the nominees. But try convincing a member not to vote in a certain technical category - checking boxes is just way too much fun.

So, when the nominations are announced on the morning of Jan. 22, now you know how and why about 1,700 "person-hours" went into the effort. Let's hope there still is an actual Academy Awards show this year. At the voting demonstration, Sid Ganis, the Academy's president, said the show was on and that they are doing everything they normally would be doing right now. But, only time (and many disgruntled writers) will tell.

How many media players do you have on your computer?

scotlandrulz — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 09:58:33 -0800

i am talking about Real Player, iTunes, Windows Media Player etc

Help with my money

scotlandrulz — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 11:32:54 -0800

i got some money for christmas and have some ideas of what i want to by:

4 DVDs - Drillbilt Taylor, My Fair Lady, Bewitched, Angus Thong and Perfect Snogging
6 CDs: In The Ranch, Play, Enjoy The Ride, Some Hearts, Fearless, Taylor Swift
2 Books: Practical Magic (film) based on the book so i want the book, The Fortunate Son: Sometihng of Keith Urban
Clothes: Nike trackies, purple converses, 3 t shirts, baggy jeans, spongebob slippers

What is worse?

scotlandrulz — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:39:58 -0800

bloody viruses!

Out of these actresses who will be the first to get an oscar?

scotlandrulz — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 13:40:07 -0800