Set your thermostat a couple of degrees lower in the winter and and 5 degrees higher in the summer. This tactic saves as much as 10% on your electricity and gas costs. Over a year’s time, that’s $200-$500 if you live in the Midwest, more in the Northeast or Northwest.

Install compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) when your older incandescent bulbs burn out. Saves $20-50 in electricity cost over the life of a typical CFL bulb. If your home has an average of 3 bulbs per room, that’s 25 – 50 bulbs, or anywhere from $450 to as much as $2500 in savings. LED bulbs are coming, and when the cost is reasonable, the savings will be even more dramatic.

Use smart power strips that sense when TVs, DVD and CD players, computers, and chargers are off or on standby. This can cut phantom (vampire) electrical drain and will save 25 to 40% of your electricity cost annually. If your electricity bill averages $200 a month, that’s a potential savings of $50.00 to $80.00 a month, or $600 to almost $1,000 a year.

Wash clothes in cold water. About 85 percent of the energy used to machine-wash clothes goes to heating the water. Think in terms of about $.35 per wash, times 10 loads a week, or about $175 a year.

2. Cut down on water usage. Save another $250 or more.

Take shorter showers to lower your water and energy costs. Less dry skin, too. Install a low-flow showerhead; the savings can quickly pay back your investment in a matter of weeks.

Install faucet aerators. These cheap components mix air with the water, resulting in a higher-velocity faucet stream composed of less water. This conserves heat and water. The payback comes in the form of lower water usage, as much as 5-15% depending on usage patterns.

Install drought-tolerant landscaping plants. Spot-water your lawn instead of blanket-watering, particularly if you have a sprinkler system. You can save as much as $250 to $1000 a year, depending on the cost of water in your area.

3. Burn less oil. Save at least $1,400.

At today’s fuel cost of about $4.00 a gallon, If you drive about 300 miles a week, the annual fuel cost to commute in a 17 mile per gallon SUV is about $3,529 a year, or $294 a month. Switching to a car that averages 29 miles per gallon saves you about $1,460. That’s more than $120 a month. Assuming gas prices stay constant (!??), you will save more than $7,000 if you keep your fuel-efficient car for 5 years.

Here is a group of 10 books of eclectic origin, all of which address the first of Mike’s Laws, “We are all in this together.” I commend them to your attention. Click on the titles for information on each book.

I propose a similar contest, updated and modernized, to decide who will be the next leader of the free world. This could offer many advantages, including but not limited to saving time, money, media bandwidth and avoiding having to parse hanging chads. Any support out there? Any notion who might be the ordained one? Hint: Looks good wearing ear buds.

The answer that relies on the fewest assumptions is usually the most accurate.

1. The time in minutes required to come to a decision on what toppings to order is equal to the square of the number of people trying to decide.
2. The number of people who actually eat the pizza divided by the number who actually pay for the pizza, is always a number greater than one.
3. The time required to deliver a pizza is inversely proportional to the distance from your location to the pizza joint.
4. The likelihood of a delivery person finding your house is inversely proportional to the number of digits in your street address.
5. In any event, pizza delivery time will always be faster than your city’s police response time.
6. Your ability to taste a topping on a pizza is inversely proportional to the number of toppings on the pizza.
7. As the number of toppings approaches infinity, the amount of cheese found on the pizza approaches zero.
8. The amount of a particular topping is inversely proportional to the price of the pizza.
9. The number of napkins available is inversely proportional to the number of pizza eaters in the room.
10. The amount of sauce that gets on your shirt is inversely proportional to the cost of the shirt.

Cecil Rhodes, of Rhodes Scholarship fame,
who had noting to do with this.
Lord knows why it was deleted from Wikipedia.

Rhode’s Law

When any principle, law, tenet, probability, happening, circumstance, or result can in no way be directly, indirectly, empirically, or circuitously proven, derived, implied, inferred, induced, deducted, estimated, or scientifically guessed, it will always for the purpose of convenience, expediency, political advantage, material gain, or personal comfort, or any combination of the above, or none of the above, be unilaterally and unequivocally assumed, proclaimed, and adhered to as absolute truth to be undeniably, universally, immutably, and infinitely so, until such time as it becomes advantageous to assume otherwise, maybe.

eructation – a reflex that expels gas noisily from the stomach through the mouth

“For thousands of years,

the human race has spread out across the Earth, scaling mountains and plying the oceans, planting crops and building highways, raising skyscrapers and atmospheric CO2 levels, and observing, with tremendous and unflagging enthusiasm, the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply across our world’s every last nook, cranny and subdivision.

“An invitation.

Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.

“The question is, do you want to join us?

Ever yearned to journey to the stars? You can learn how to become a Virgle Pioneer, test your Pioneering potential, or join the Mission Control community that will help develop the 100 Year Plan we’ve outlined here.