Wow, just Wow….I never even thought of the power consumption of cable boxes and DVR’s, just sitting there doing seemingly nothing. The luxury of being ready to record your favorite shows is actually costing your household a fair chunk of change.
Although a DVR could be made to spin down the drive and underclock the processor when not in use, a big chunk of power will still be consumed.
For those of you yet to take lunch, we think it’s the perfect time for a hunger-inducing stat of the day. The Daily tells us, in a profile of healthy pizza purveyor Naked Pizza, that the United States pizza industry “serves about 100 acres of pizza a day.” This figure comes from the National Association of Pizza Operators, an organization that aims “to create and foster a community of independent and small chain pizzeria operators and their industry suppliers where doing business with one another is mutually beneficial.
A giant 55 foot ’sea monster’ has been found washed up on a beach in China. The beast from the deep is so badly decayed it cannot be identified. But according to local reports from Guangdong, in the south-east of the country, it weighed at least 4.5 tons.
People have flocked to see the creature — despite the rotting corpse’s foul stench. It was found tangled in ropes and one theory is fisherman caught it but could not land it as it was so big.
Marilyn Monroe’s white “subway” dress sold for more than $5.6 million in a Beverly Hills, California auction Saturday night in which bidders paid another $2.7 million for three other Monroe movie outfits.
It was the first in a series of auctions to sell the massive Hollywood history collection that singer, dancer and actress Debbie Reynolds accumulated over the past 50 years.
Sunspot activity, which follows an 11-year cycle, is due to peak in 2013 after which it will start to wane slightly. But astronomers think the next upswing will be less intensive than normal, or could fail to happen at all. That could affect weather on Earth because low solar activity has been linked to low global temperatures in the past.
Three studies, presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s solar physics division, all point towards declining sunspot activity into the next decade.
Between 1645 and 1715 almost no sunspots were observed, a solar period which came to be called the Maunder Minimum. During those decades Europe suffered frequent unusually harsh winters, and the time was later termed the Little Ice Age.
