Tesla and the worlds greatest drag race

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This blog post goes for all my petrol-head friends who love cars, specifically sports cars. When I’m with this group of friends, you hear all kinds of debates about what cars are best or faster or more beautiful. But there is an interesting aspect that not everyone knows.  An aspect that is really cool, but not as pleasing to all these fanatics.  This is a sometimes uncomfortable but recent reality, that electric cars are faster.

How can an electric car, totally silent, no “brum brum”, no “turbo whistle”, no “valve tickling”, be…as exciting than a traditionally gas- or diesel-powered vehicle.  Well, it maybe not as exciting, but it seems it is actually faster and that there is nothing we can do about the “instant torque” the electric vehicle brings.  Enter the Tesla…

One interesting, shocking, and eye-opening video is one that the Magazine Motor Trend published in September 2017 (yes, 3 years ago…today we are even more advanced in this technology).

Motor Trend has a series of videos they call the “World’s greatest drag race”, where they select several of the best and fastest street legal sports car and make a race to see how it goes. Sometimes there is a lot of debate on the cars they select, but it is what it is.

Anyway, going back to this specific one (World’s Greatest Drag Race #7), again; we see an impressive reality. Here we have the lineup:

  1. Lexus LC 500
  2. Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio
  3. Aston Martin DB11
  4. Mercedes Benz AMG GTR
  5. McLaren 570 GT
  6. Ferrari 488 GTB
  7. Tesla Model S P100D
  8. Porsche 911 Turbo S
  9. Nissan GTR Nismo
  10. Camaro ZL1 1LE
  11. Porsche Cayman 718 S
  12. Corvette Grand Sport

The Tesla P100D wins by a considerable margin.  If we go again and look at the list, you can notice the brands, the models that long have been the fastest cars on the planet.  But now a four-door sedan takes over all of them.

The automotive world has been changing very quickly since that race in 2017 and now other car manufacturers have engaged on the electric motor’s technology.  Well see how Tesla keeps up in a world of more experienced car manufacturers entering this technology (all electric or hybrid) like we see today with the Porsche Taycan, the BMW 8i, the Koenigsegg Gemera and much others.

You can also see videos of this race for more recent years!!!

Why can’t we raise our Ring Finger?

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I bet that you have noticed that you can raise all of your fingers (alone) except the ring finger. Before we get to the bottom of that, let’s learn more about the finger we pay less attention to in our lives.

From giphy.com

The Ring Finger is originally called digitus annularis. Digitus is a technical name given to the fingers and annularis comes from the Latin “ring”.

Since ancient Rome, this was the finger in which rings should be carried. Antonio Marco Martinez says in antiquitatem.com, “The name of this finger deserves its own article, because it is very much the ancient literature on the Roman rings, and on the fingers and hand in which it must to be carried”. It was thought that the ring finger was the one directly connected from the heart.

This was all before we discovered our circulatory system and how our body works. Modern-day biological science says that all of our fingers have veins that are connected to the heart.

Since then, it is given the name of “The Ring Finger” because of an old pretty practice and habit.

This peculiar finger has a feature that we have seen. Like it says on http://www.sciencemadesimple.co.uk:

“Bend your middle finger and place the center section on a table or hard surface. You will be able to lift your thumb, index, and little finger without moving your middle finger. But it is impossible to lift your ring finger.

The tendons in your fingers are independent from one another apart from the ones in your middle and ring finger. These tendons are connected, so that when your middle finger is folded down you cannot move your ring finger. It feels like your ring finger is stuck!”

As the page’s URL mentions, this is science made easy! All of our fingers have a special role in our body so let’s appreciate each one of them.

Diigo saved my life!

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Internet is a place where we explore and learn new things, and at the same time find stuff we like and love. We tend to have our favorite websites with our favorite content.

There are plenty of ways of saving these websites on our phone, computer, etc. so we don’t lose or forget about them, be it copying and pasting it on notes, sending it to a friend, bookmark it or simply reminding it.

I personally have lots and lots of websites I love that I sometimes don’t know how to keep up with them! So, I was introduced to Diigo.

Diigo is a social bookmarking website where you can save all your websites and pages. You can make them private or public, it all depends on you!

Click Here to access the link to my page, where you can find all of my bookmarks..

I hope you can all enjoy this experience and use Diigo as your bookmark website ‎😃.

Technology

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Technology is a very general term, which means that it does not have an exact “birth” date. It may be that you are wondering, What is technology? What is modern technology? What are applications? What applications help us access this modern technology? I will be answering these questions through this blog.

What is technology? When people talk about technology, the first thing that pops into their head is computers, robots, headphones, etc. Actually, that is known as modern technology, which I’ll be talking about later. As I mentioned earlier, technology is a topic with various branches. In general terms, it’s the knowledge acquired from techniques to achieve a goal.

In this next image, we can see how technology has evolved when it comes to communication between people.

Image posted by Martyna Dela Cruz in medium.com

What is Modern Technology? As we know, the word modern is known as what we experience in the present. Technology are developed techniques, in short words. With these brief definitions, Modern Technology is the kind of technology that we use in the present.

What are applications? These are programs designed for the user to solve specific problems.

Here in the Caribbean are experts that I personally know and others are known around the area by professionals, like:

  1. Carlos Berrios, Protection Services Program Manager – Microsoft
  2. Ines Ibarra, Programmer II – MMM Holdings LLC
  3. Bezabeth Rosado, Senior Programmer – MMM
  4. Lorraine Figueroa, System Analyst – MMM
  5. Alfonso Berrios, IT Process Engineering Proyect Management Consultant

To finish off, we have a video from Crash Course that explains technology:

References:

Beal, V. (2019, October 20). application (application software). Retrieved April 12, 2020, from https://www.webopedia.com/TERM/A/application.html

Educational Technology: Crash Course Computer Science #39. (2017). Retrieved from https://youtu.be/zTi3_l5h5PQ

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2019, October 20). Technology. Retrieved April 12, 2020, from https://www.britannica.com/technology/technology

(n.d.). Retrieved from https://usa.kaspersky.com/resource-center/preemptive-safety/privacy-and-security-on-the-internet

Mitchell, R. L. (2009, January 27). What the Web knows about you. Retrieved from https://www.computerworld.com/article/2530129/networking-what-the-web-knows-about-you.html

Mineo, L. (2019, March 21). When it comes to internet privacy, be very afraid, analyst suggests. Retrieved from https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/08/when-it-comes-to-internet-privacy-be-very-afraid-analyst-suggests/

Google “Privacy”

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Google is one of the things we use most in our daily lives, whether it is to search for news, games, information in general, among others. When we search for these things, Google collects all the information to give us recommendations on things that may interest us. Sounds nice, right? Well it is not entirely.

Besides Google, other search engines do exactly the same thing. In addition to making everything easier for us by giving us personalized information, personal information about us, such as where we live, our name, social relationships, etc…is stored.

Search engines are not necessarily going to tell us that they have this information, but we can see it in some details.

For example, as I mention in “About“, I am from the Caribbean, meaning that I also speak Spanish but I, out of habit, like to have my social networks in English. Surprisingly, Google always gives me the option to change my language to Spanish, but not to any type of Spanish, to Latin American Spanish. This tells me that Google already knows my location, without necessarily telling me.

In addition to knowing your location, if you have accessed a personal page of a social network, even if you log out, that information stays on the internet. It’s not going to be that easy to access it again without your password, but its not impossible.

Jordi Pérez Colomé in EL PAIS, which stand for the country in English, talks about how Facebook and Twitter know your profile even if you don’t have an account, delete it or don’t use it. Here they talk about what I just explained but with social media accounts.

Now, this doesn’t seem as cute as we thought at first, right?

Well, there’s more…

In another page, written by Brian X. Chen in New York Times, he discovers all the information Facebook has about him by downloading the data. He mentions that he rarely posts things or shares information, which took him by surprise when he saw all the personal information he saw about himself.

If you want to know how to access these and how to know the information google has about you, you can use this link to help you out. Here Dylan Curran talks about all the data Facebook and Google have about you.

Stay safe and even if we can’t protect all of our information, let’s make the most of it by avoiding to share as much personal information as posible. 👍

The Coronavirus Disease

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As we have seen lately, Coronavirus has been everywhere, especially through social networks. This has led us to a state of worldwide panic and has brought many problems around the world, especially racist problems.

What is Coronavirus (COVID-19)?
A virus as such is an infectious agent smaller than a bacterium that lives from an organism and depends on its cells to survive.
Like many diseases, and viruses, the name comes out of its genetic structure. Corona is crown in Spanish. So, as we see in the image below, since the coronavirus is shaped like a crown, it was given that name.
Coronavirus is a family of viruses, not just one. Said by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:
“There are four main sub-groupings of coronaviruses, known as alpha, beta, gamma, and delta. The best known are:
229E (alpha coronavirus)
NL63 (alpha coronavirus)
OC43 (beta coronavirus)
HKU1 (beta coronavirus)
SARS-CoV-2 (Known as the 2019 Coronavirus)

From Wikipedia.org
By Photo Credit: Content Providers(s): CDC/Dr. Fred Murphy

How did it begin?
In general, the coronavirus family of viruses was identified in the 1960s.

The Coronavirus outbreak of 2019 began in Wuhan, China at the end of the year and increased in January 2020. This prevented them from celebrating one of their biggest holidays, the Chinese New Year. Initially, it all started with an obscene number of patients in hospitals diagnosed with Pneumonia, but by this time it was not known that it was a virus.

When was the first death?
The first reported death was the owner of a business, which already had health problems, where it is estimated that the virus originated. As of March 10, 2020, 4,087 deaths were reported.

What are the symptoms?
Although the virus has been seen as a deadly enemy through social networks, it is not as serious as many other diseases that are much more common and serious.


The most common symptoms, said by John Hopkins Medicine, are:
Cough
Fever
Shortness of breath

Symptoms of coronavirus disease 2019 2.0.svg
From Wikipedia.org

“In rare cases, COVID-19 can lead to severe respiratory problems, kidney failure or death.” (John Hopkins Medicine)
Cases of death have been people who already had a very weak immune system or very old and sick people.

How are people with the coronavirus treated?
At the moment, there are no vaccines or any medicine to prevent this. Patients have been placed in quarantine and in hospitals, or in their homes, strictly isolated from society until cured.

How to take care of yourself
John Hopkins Medicine mentions that the best way to prevent this is:
1. Washing your hands frequently and thoroughly for at least 20 seconds. Use alcohol-based hand sanitizer if soap and water aren’t available.
2. Cover coughs and sneezes with a tissue, then throw the tissue in the trash.
3. Avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth with unwashed hands.
4. Stay home when you are sick.
5. Clean and disinfect surfaces and objects people frequently touch.

In general, viruses are deadly and many of us have been given some. The important thing is to be aware and take great care so we can improve the world situation.

References:

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/coronavirus

https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/types.html

The WWW and Me

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The internet is something we all love and frequently need for many things, such as for school, jobs, experiments, , college, entertainment, specially to access the web.

What is the web?

First of all, it comes from the acronym WWW, which means World Wide Web. It’s a system used to access content on different global servers, known as websites.

What are the cons of using the WWW? Sadly, it can have its negative parts too, such as cyberbullying, viruses, false information and much more. This is why we have to take certain precautions when accessing these sites. We can protect ourselves by using complex passwords on different accounts, accusing verified websites, etc.

Here are some tips and links for more internet safety ideas from other social medias:

Up next is a video of Bill Gates explaining the internet in 1995, when no one knew what it was.

Copyright Lesson

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On February 18, 2020 we discussed in the Computer class, Section 3, about copyright and copyright laws.  Since we have been creating our website, it is always important to be well informed to avoid minor or major accidents.  For this, Professor Vantaggiato showed us different websites where you can find photos and content where the author gives us permission to share and use.  The best example was creativecommons.org, where you have access to a search tab and find exactly what you are looking for, well, you will almost always find what you need.  In case you do not find your favorite content, you can always go to Google or any page, as long as its safe and secured, and take a photo, AS LONG AS YOU GIVE CREDIT TO THE PHOTOGRAPHER OR THE AUTHOR.  If this is not complied with, you will suffer the consequences, at a legal level.  To avoid this, let’s do everything correctly, inform ourselves correctly and others about this issue.

Welcome to RandomFacts!

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Welcome to my blog. Here we will be talking about random topics, facts and different things to expand our knowledge on things you might or might not know. Our mission is to inform you with the best definitions, history, events and information about these the easiest way possible.

This is a tweet I made to express my happiness in the class.

Soon I will be providing you all with new information. Stay tuned for these. Again, our mission is to inform you the best way possible about these terms so you can gain general knowledge and others. Thank you for your attention! 💕

Greetings, my name is Agnes and I am the leader of this page. Also, I study in Universidad del Sagrado Corazon in Santurce, Puerto Rico. This page was created for my computing class, aka inf103 sec3.