• Holly Day
• Look for an Evergreen Day
• National Hard Candy Day
• National Oatmeal Muffin Day

ON THIS DAY IN ...

1606 – The ships Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery depart England carrying settlers who founded, at Jamestown, Virginia, the first of the thirteen colonies that became the United States.

1686 - Robinson Crusoe leaves his island after 28 years (as per Daniel Defoe)

1732 - Benjamin Franklin under the name Richard Saunders begins publication of "Poor Richard's Almanack"

1776 – Thomas Paine publishes one of a series of pamphlets in The Pennsylvania Journal entitled "The American Crisis".

1835 - HMS Beagle with Charles Darwin aboard arrives in New Zealand

1843 – The novella A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens is first published.

1871 - Albert L Jones of New York City patents corrugated paper

1890 - Start of Sherlock Holmes "Adventure of Beryl Coronet"

1910 - Rayon first commercially produced in Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania

1917 - First two NHL games are played -- Montreal Quebec/ Toronto Ontario - NHL starts inaugural season: original members of the league are the Montreal Canadiens, the Montreal Wanderers, Toronto Arenas, Ottawa Senators and Quebec Bulldogs.

1918 - Robert Ripley began his "Believe It or Not" column (NY Globe)

1924 – The last Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost is sold in London, England.

1932 – BBC World Service begins broadcasting as the BBC Empire Service.

1955 - Carl Perkins records "Blue Suede Shoes"

1957 - "Music Man" opens at Majestic Theater NYC for 1375 performances

1958 - first radio broadcast from space, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower Christmas message "to all mankind, America's wish for peace on Earth and goodwill to men everywhere"

1962 - Transit 5A1, first operational navigational satellite, launched

1971 - CBS airs "Homecoming A Christmas Story," (introducing the Waltons)

1971 - NASA launches Intelsat 4 F-3 for COMSAT Corp

1972 – The last manned lunar flight, Apollo 17, crewed by Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and Harrison Schmitt, returns to Earth.

1991 - 6,000th episode of One Life To Live

1997 - "Titanic," the second highest-grossing movie of all-time, opened in American theaters.

2001 – A record high barometric pressure of 1085.6 hPa (32.06 inHg) is recorded at Tosontsengel, Khövsgöl, Mongolia.

2001 - "The Fellowship of the Ring", 1st Lord of the Rings film is released. Makes US$47 million US opening weekend, $871 million total worldwide.

2013 – Spacecraft Gaia is launched by European Space Agency.

Quote of the day:
"How we spend our days is how we spend our lives."
~ Annie Dillard, an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction.

Today I learned what a micromort is – a measurement of the very tiny chance of any given activity leading directly to your death and one micromort is defined as a unit of one one-in-a-million chance of death.  Now that sounds pretty infinitesimal for any one thing you might contemplate doing.  There are two classes of risk – acute and chronic  The interesting thing is that it is cumulative the more you indulge in an activity – or rather not YOU personally but you on average because it is calculated across the entire population.

  "According to Cambridge University's Understanding Uncertainty site, getting out of the bed every morning for an 18-year-old costs roughly 1 micromort. For a 90-year-old man, that number skyrockets to a whopping 463 micromorts, which means that getting out of bed kills roughly 463 90-year-old men out of one million."

Interestingly, although folks put a high price on their lives – you know, the kind of question like “would you jump out of a plane without a parachute for a million dollars?’ – when it comes to actually paying to add safety features to their day-to-day lives that would reduce their risk, they aren’t quite as willing to put cash on the barrelhead.  As a result, the current real world monetary value for a single micromort is approximately $50





 

 

Just stray thoughts on how we spend the moments of our lives….