The movie hits theaters on September 27

An Indian entrepreneur is using sugar, cellulose, and corn fibers to make a plastic-like carrier bag for small Indian businesses. His company Bio Reform has already replaced 6 million plastic bags in the checkout counters of stores all over India. Based in Hyderabad, Mohammed Azhar Mohiuddin first got the idea during the general mayhem that […] The post Startup Replaces 6 Million Plastic Bags with Prototype Made from Corn Waste That Decomposes in 180 Days appeared first on Good News Network.

A farming family battles severe storms, while taking a valiant stand against a bank foreclosure and a powerful land grabber. Cast: 1984 memories Someone in my house rented this, most likely my dad. When I CONTINUE READING... The post 84 From ’84: The River appeared first on The Retro Network.

We present you funny dog posts from Aug 11 to Aug 17 that will paws-itively make you through the rest of the week!

Duke, a four-year-old dog, was returned to a Las Vegas-based animal shelter for being "too boring". Shortly after, the good boy immediately found a new foster home.

Is Kamala Drunk?

On September 10, 2009, the Bulgarian national lottery announced that week’s winning numbers to be 4, 15, 23, 24, 35, and 42. A perfectly unremarkable set of figures, you might think – unless that is, you happened to have seen the draw just four days earlier, in which the exact same combination had been drawn.“So much for this being a game of chance!” you might have thought – and you wouldn’t have been alone. People demanded an investigation; a government inquiry was established to rule out fraud or manipulation – but no wrongdoing was ever found.And that… makes perfect sense, actually. Freak coincidences, it turns out, are more likely than you might think.The Strange Case of the Shared BirthdaysThe idea of a one-in-fourteen-million-result turning up twice in the span of four days can be a bit, well, mind-boggling – so let’s start with a simpler example. How large does a group of people need to be before there’s a better-than-even chance that two of them share a birthday?The answer, you might be surprised to learn, is just 23.You may have heard this problem before – it’s a pretty famous one. It’s known as the “birthday paradox”, though there’s nothing really paradoxical about it at all – it’s just unexpected that the result should be such a low number.Mathematically, though, it’s watertight – even if it doesn’t seem like it at first glance. “Perhaps you reasoned as follows: There's only a one-in-365 chance that any particular other person will have the same birthday as me. So there's a 364/365 chance that any particular person will have a different birthday from me,” explained statistician David Hand, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Senior Research Investigator at Imperial College, London, in his 2014 book The Improbabilty Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day.“If there are n people in the room, with each of the other n − 1 having a probability of 364/365 of having a different birthday from me, then the probability that all n − 1 have a different birthday from me is 364/365 × 364/365 × 364/365 × 364/365 … × 364/365, with 364/365 multiplied together n − 1 times,” he continued. “If n is 23, this is 0.94.”Now, a 0.94 chance of nobody sharing your birthday is equivalent to a 0.06 chance of somebody sharing your birthday – and that, Hand admits, is “very small”. But here’s the thing: “that probability – the probability that someone has the same birthday as you – is not what the question asked.”See, by starting with yourself, you’re only considering a small fraction of the possible pairs in the group. Yes, it’s true that any single person has a 364/365 chance of having a birthday different from yours – but introduce a second acquaintance, and the picture already becomes more nuanced than your gut is insisting it should be.“The probability that [the first] two are different and that a third doesn't share the same birthday as either of them is 364/365 × 363/365,” Hand explained. “Likewise, the probability that those three have different birthdays and that [a] fourth does not share the same birthday as any of those first three is 364/365 × 363/365 × 362/365.”Scale that calculation up to 23 people, and you get a probability that no two people share the same birthday as 0.49 – making the probability that at least one pair does 0.51, or slightly more than one-half. Twice In A LifetimeSo, now we’ve got a taste of where these lower-than-expected odds are coming from, how do we explain the identical lotto draws?First, let’s go over the setup: the Bulgarian lottery was a random selection of six numbers out of a pool of 49. Lottery officials at the time said that tampering with the machines was impossible; the draws "take place in the presence of a special committee and is broadcast live on national television which guarantee no cheating,” they told Reuters at the time.That makes any given set of six numbers a one in 13,983,816 occurrence: the result of a combinatorial calculation expressed as The exclamation points mean "factorial", we're not just super excited about them.Image Credit: IFLScienceand pronounced “49 choose 6”.So yes, given the September 6 selection – remember: 4, 15, 23, 24, 35, and 42 – the chances of that exact combination occurring again would be, to put it mildly, extremely unlikely. But just as with the birthday paradox, that’s not the question we ought to be asking.“The chance that any particular two draws will match is one in 13,983,816,” Hand agreed. “But what about the chance that some two draws among three draws will match? Or the chance that some two draws among 50 draws will match?”After all, he explained, in any three lottery draws, there are three potential ways for two of them to match. In any four draws, there are six possible pairs; in five draws, there are ten. By the time you get to 50 draws, there are 1,225 possible pairs – and with 1,000 draws, there are 499,500 possible ways for two sets of numbers to match.That brings up the odds dramatically. By the time you’ve done 4,404 draws, it’s actually more likely than not that two draws will match exactly – and as Hand points out, “if two draws occur each week, making 104 in a year, this number of draws will take less than 43 years.”Put like that, it’s not so surprising that it happened once 15 years ago – or, indeed, that it’s happened on other occasions, too. “When we take into account the number of lotteries around the world, we see that it would be amazing if draws did not occasionally repeat,” Hand noted. Of course, four days is a far cry from 43 years – but it’s clear that the duplication was never quite as outlandish as it first appeared. In fact, if anything, it was a particularly unlucky event, in the end: “Nobody won the top prize in the first draw,” the BBC reported at the time. “But a record 18 people guessed all six numbers in the 10 September draw.”

There are technically 50 states in the USA, but let’s face it: some of them are cheating. Take Alaska, for example – clearly a part of Canada, sorry guys, but look at a map – or Hawaii, which is separated from the rest of the states by about 3,860 kilometers (2,400 miles) of ocean and therefore by all rights should be its own country.And then there are the double states – your Dakotas, Virginias, and Carolinas. For some reason, these three states decided at some point to split themselves into North and South, or West and… well, not-West.And while 50 is undoubtedly a nice round number, splitting three states into six seems like more effort than that reward deserves. So why did they do it?Why two Dakotas?Dakota Territory – singular – was first established as part of the United States in 1861, and it was, compared to the states’ areas today, huge. That’s not just because it was the size of both modern Dakotas combined – it also contained within its borders almost all of Montana and Wyoming, too. In fact, more than half of what was Dakota Territory is now one of those two states.After a bit of quite dramatic border shuffling with neighboring Idaho Territory, and the loss of Wyoming Territory in 1868, The Dakotas were reduced to basically what they are today – but it would take three more years before they officially split into two. So, what was the cause of the divorce?Like so much of US expansionism through the ages, the root cause of the split was a brutal combination of colonialism and capitalism. To put that in context: before the mid-1860s, interactions between the Native peoples of Dakota Territory – the name “Dakota” comes from the Dakota Sioux tribe who were indigenous to the area, but many other tribes lived there too – and the relatively few white traders, explorers, and military personnel who visited the region were… mostly peaceful. But that all changed in 1874, for one simple reason: gold.“The Treaty of Fort Laramie granted the Sioux nation ownership of the Black Hills, which were considered sacred grounds for the Sioux (also known as the Lakota) and Cheyenne Indians,” explains PBS’s American Experience. “There the Native Americans would live on the newly-created Great Sioux Reservation.”But in 1874, the US government sent out a military excursion led by General Custer – yes, that General Custer – to investigate the potential natural resources in the area. Unfortunately for the Sioux and Cheyenne, they were successful: “The expedition's confirmation of gold in the region drew thousands of whites to the Black Hills,” PBS notes, “ultimately fueling tensions between the whites and the Native Americans, leading to the Great Sioux war of 1876 and Custer's Last Stand.”As a result, the south of the Territory saw massive growth: the population jumped from around 12,000 in 1870 to more than 98,000 in 1880. The north, meanwhile, remained relatively empty, settled mostly by homesteaders and farmers.The split between the North and South Dakotas, then, was ultimately the result of, well, snobbery. The north of the territory was seen by those in the south as “too much controlled by the wild folks, cattle ranchers, fur traders,” Kimberly Porter, a history professor at the University of North Dakota, told Time Magazine in 2016. Put simply, she said, “the south half did not like the north half.”And since the south already had a high enough population to qualify, it opted to try for statehood. Alone. But none of its many attempts were successful, with the federal government’s response basically being “either do it as one very large state, Dakota, or wait until you have enough people on both sides to be two separate states,” Porter explained.It would take until 1889 for that to happen, and, on November 2 of that year, President Benjamin Harrison signed the two states into the Union. Which one gained statehood first is a detail lost to time: Harrison reportedly shuffled the paperwork first, and signed them without checking the order.Why two Virginias?“Virginia”, originally, was just the name for the pieces of North America claimed by the English. Its boundaries, according to the Second Charter of Virginia in 1609, stretched “from the Point of Land, called Cape or Point Comfort, all along the Sea Coast to the Northward, two hundred miles, and […] all along the Sea Coast to the Southward, two hundred Miles, and all that Space and Circuit of Land, lying from the Sea Coast of the Precinct aforesaid, up into the Land throughout from Sea to Sea, West and Northwest” – or to put it another way, most of today’s contiguous United States, plus a hefty chunk of Canada.“Virginia was the mother of the colonies,” wrote then George Mason University geographical historian Karl Phillips in a 1999 paper. “Each of the other original colonies was directly or indirectly carved out of Virginia.”The size of the colony shrunk dramatically over the next few decades, however, and eventually, the borders of Virginia settled to roughly what we know today – if you add the two states together. It would take the Civil War to split Virginia into its eastern and western halves – and the reason why is exactly as grim as you’re assuming from that background.“West Virginia became a state in the midst of the Civil War,” explained Mark Stein in his 2012 book How The States Got Their Shapes Too: The People Behind the Borderlines.“Previously, it had been part of Virginia,” he wrote, but “after Virginia seceded from the Union, western Virginia seceded from Virginia.”Of course, “legally, that was precisely what it did not do,” Stein pointed out – since secession from the Union was illegal, seceding from a state was equally forbidden. The western portion of the state had to really go out of its way to separate from the east – so why did they even bother?“The short answer is that the region opposed slavery,” Stein wrote, “but there was more to it than that.” Rather than being a purely moral issue, he said, western Virginians’ attitudes towards the enslavement of other people were often rooted in the fact that they personally could not afford to do it. That logic wasn’t always as, uh, evil as it sounds, either: voting rights at the time were based on property ownership, including people, and so while obviously not the worst-off in the situation, Virginians who didn’t own slaves were being systematically disenfranchised by those who did.“Slaves in Virginia were counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportioning representation in the state legislature (though, of course, slaves could not vote),” Stein pointed out, which “resulted in slave regions having greater representation than nonslave regions.”So, when Virginia voted to secede in 1860, those in the west were “dumbfounded,” the judge Alston G. Dayton recalled a few decades later. “They began to ask each other why they had been so betrayed, why they should be swept into disunion and dishonor against their wills?”“They would not bear it,” he said. “They would protest […] they would secede from the seceding Virginia, form a new State of their own […] loyal to the Stars and Stripes.”West Virginia was officially recognized as a state on June 20, 1863, with a constitution that included the emancipation of slaves who lived there. And while the President who signed it into being – one Abraham Lincoln – wasn’t exactly happy about the precedent being set by splitting one state into two, he did acknowledge that “the admission of the new State turns that much slave soil to free; and thus, is a certain, and irrevocable encroachment upon the cause of the rebellion.” In other words: he wasn’t happy about it – but it was 1862, and they needed all the pro-Union states they could get. So, sure, West Virginia, you can be a state.Why two Carolinas?Compared to the Dakotas and Virginias, the Carolinas’ divorce was by all accounts fairly amicable – a no-fault, you might say, rather than the result of irreconcilable differences.“South Carolina was originally joined with North Carolina as, simply, the Carolina Colony,” Stein wrote in 2008’s How The States Got Their Shapes. “King Charles I issued Carolina’s initial charter in 1629 to reward a political ally named Robert Heath […] grant[ing] to Heath all the land between the St Mathias River (now known as the St Mary’s River) on the south, the middle of Albemarle Sound on the north, the Atlantic Ocean on the east, and the Pacific Ocean on the west.”Like the original boundaries of Virginia, this resulted in a fantastically huge piece of land – so it may be surprising to hear that Heath didn’t seem all that interested in his gift. And why would he? At the time, the area we now know as the Carolinas was best known for disease, rebellions, conflict with Native Americans, and of course, Blackbeard.So Heath ignored his gift – in fact, he ignored it for so long that the grant became void, and in 1663, after England had seen an entire civil war fought, a republic established and dissolved, and the monarchy restored under Charles I’s son Charles II, it was given by the new king to a group of his own allies, known as the Lords Proprietors.This time, settlers did move into the colony, and in particular to two distinct regions: Albemarle Sound in the north, and Charleston in the south. As in Virginia, there was a demographic difference between the two populations, with richer, slave-owning planters keeping to the south of the colony, and the northern colonists being mostly former indentured servants from the Chesapeake colonies.Add to that the distance between the two hubs – it’s around 644 kilometers (400 miles), which probably doesn’t sound much to someone from, say, Texas, but is in fact roughly the same as going from London to Edinburgh, and quite a bit further than going from London to Paris – and it’s clear why a bunch of posh English guys in the 17th century would have considered the north and south to be virtually different countries.“The distance separating these regions, along with differences in the background and prosperity of their settlers, created an increasing strain on the colonial government,” Stein explained. After a few years of being governed as de facto separate states, the two were officially divided into North and South Carolina in 1712.Sounds positively friendly, doesn’t it? Just, you know, don’t google “Trail of Tears.”

We’re told Vice President Kamala Harris is the next great thing: a political phenom, long underestimated, and now finally able to spread her “very cool” wings and soar. “Could the Harris campaign become the Harris movement?” read the headline of Playbook’s Friday newsletter. “Her moment,” read the cover of Time magazine’s slobbering cover piece. But is it substantive or vaporous? A mirage? If you look closely, you’ll find plenty of similarities to the 2016 matchup between businessman/reality TV star Donald Trump and Secretary of State/Sen. Hillary Clinton. Kamala Harris represents an administration working hard to convince Americans that things are good when everyone knows they aren’t. First, uncomfortable as it is for some people to hear, Harris is deeply unlikeable. You can protest all you want about her accomplishments in life, and they are impressive, at least as far as titles go. But she has a people problem. Her employees don’t like her and quit often. Her boss doesn’t care much for her and has quietly questioned whether she even knows who she wants to be. The Obamas don’t like her. Michelle didn't even mention Harris, the first black female Democratic nominee for VP, in her address to that strange, empty 2020 Democratic National Convention. She excused herself, saying it was because she’d recorded it a few days before the announcement was made, but the subtext was clear: The essentially retired former first lady couldn’t be bothered to break from Martha’s Vineyard to re-record a 10-minute video mentioning the “historic occasion.” Four years later, the former first couple were among the last prominent Democrats to endorse Harris’ candidacy. People didn’t like Hillary Clinton, either. You can moan all you want about it and point to her own fancy titles — lest we forget, she helped turn her position as the president’s wife into a multibillion-dollar global influence empire, complete with a carpetbagged Senate seat in a deeply blue state and, later, a position in President Barack Obama’s Cabinet. None of that changes her likeability. And don’t say it’s because she’s a woman; it’s because she was mechanical with forced and unnatural expressions — and because she was blatantly Machiavellian. Sound familiar? Next: Kamala Harris represents the status quo. She’s the sitting vice president of an administration working very hard to convince Americans that things are good when everyone knows they aren’t. She’s working hard to run away from this record, but it’s hers. The Marines play “Hail Columbia” when she gets off the plane. Further, she has simultaneously attempted to use the dignity of the office to propel her campaign while trying to avoid the pitfalls of representing an historically unpopular administration. That’s a tough balance to strike. And though he’s now a former president, Trump remains the consummate outsider. You can try to paint him as his own special kind of swamp creature if you like, but when every other creature in the swamp hates him to the core, it’s a hard sell. By contrast, Clinton was the consummate insider: lauded by Hollywood, cheered on Broadway, loved on Wall Street, and feted by Georgetown’s elite (when they were still a thing). Hell, when she wanted to run for Senate, she picked a state to run in. Unfortunately for her, it turned out that 2016 was an anti-incumbent year. Does anyone think the pressure has decreased in the years since? In mid-August 2016, a shocking 64.3% of the country believed the country was headed in the wrong direction, according to the RealClearPolitics average. Only 28.2% believed we were going the right way — a -36.7 spread. Eight years later, those numbers stand at 65.1 to 24.8, respectively. It somehow got worse. Will Harris make it better? To have a chance at it, she’d have to reunite the winning Obama coalition, uniting working-class whites, black voters, Hispanics, environmentalists, Big Labor, the myriad and multiplying gay interest groups, and all the rest in a movement that has a purpose. “Yes, we can!” “Sí se puede!” “Hope and change” and all that. Her husband, Doug, may have the West Hollywood Soul Cycle boys on lock, but absent Obama’s personal political magnetism, much of the rest have splintered. And what’s she doing to change that? Thus far, Harris is trying to make the election all about Trump being a nutjob, plus some promised handouts, which is basically what Hillary did for her campaign. And don’t forget the “vibes.” Clinton’s slogan was “I’m with her.” Her campaign theme song was "This is my fight song,” featuring an array of the high school theater horribles who now populate Hollywood shrilling vapid lyrics into the ether. Watch this video, I beg you. It’s truly awful. Really, the only thing different this time is Harris isn’t even showing up. Seriously: The first “interview” she’s done was with her vice presidential nominee, filmed, cut and released by the campaign. And somehow it was still cringey. The folks at Vogue actually sat down and “interviewed” Walz’s dog. They called him “man’s (and maybe America’s) best friend.” The dog is probably great. Most people really like dogs, me included. But what kind of palace eunuch of a reporter do you have to be to let the VP and her running mate turn you down for a chat, then accept an interview with the canine? To capitalize on this unwanted sequel, of course, Trump is going to have run like 2016. We got a taste of that at his Thursday press conference in Bedminster, New Jersey: hammering the wall, jobs, and crime every day. Don’t get hung up on the “perfect phone call” or former Vice President Mike Pence. That’s looking inward instead of forward, and it won’t win the vibes war. Trump needs to stay on message. He clearly read it from a piece of paper last week, but one line of attack in particular stood out in his Garden State address: "You don't have to imagine what a Kamala Harris presidency would be, because you're living through that nightmare right now.” The line was reminiscent of his dig on Clinton, who he correctly noticed had been in office 30 years without fixing all the things she was running to fix. Take Harris’ speech unveiling her inflation policy Friday! She’s out there complaining about the massive rise in the cost of bread and meat under a Democratic administration. Clip it and slap your name on it (like this Red State author did). Trump isn’t running against the opponent he’d hoped to. That's not changing. But he is running against a campaign style he’s beaten before. The trick is going to be remembering the plays. Blaze News: Obama embarrassingly chases Kamala’s ‘BRAT’ buzz with Gen Z-studded ‘summer playlist’ Blaze News: Obama economist on Harris’s policies: 'There’s no upside here, and there is some downside' Blaze News: Harris reveals economic strategy she claims is 'laser-focused on the middle-class' Blaze News: Trump to resume outdoor rallies after Secret Service proposes new security plan: Report Sign up for Bedford’s newsletter Sign up to get Blaze Media senior politics editor Christopher Bedford's newsletter.

The Force Is EXPENSIVE With This One: Check Out What Mark Hamill Charges for Autographs