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UberFacts @UberFacts

There are more than 86,000 people in Japan who are over 100 years old

88% of them are women

We received the $65 replacement battery for the Rhoomba and installed it. After letting it charge overnight my wife turned on the robot to do it's thing. This battery is twice the capacity of the old one and that should give it more run time. Since I never kept tract of it I don't know what the old ...

It might be true that I would pay a minimum of 5% more for the products and services, but I would not be paying 20% income tax What I actually said was ... I'd gladly pay 5% more for all the goods and services I consume if I did not have to pay personal income tax. It's got to be difficult for you ...

Because most of my life experience has been lived as a consumer I look at taxes from that point of view. Businesses have a different perspective out of necessity. My goal in life is to survive, and be able to pay my way. Businesses are there to make a profit. The two perspectives are diametrically o...

I have some very old school ideas in my head and being the flexible guy that I am, that surprises me. One of my old school values has to do with silk screened shirts. They are awful. On rare occasion I have owned one that looks great until it gets washed. The shirt washes well but the screening gets...

I don't think I ever listened to KMOX but I do follow them on Twitter. I can't say they are any more interesting than any other radio station but I do like the fact that they are local news. I had a long wire antenna that stretched the length of the house. We lived in a two story and the roof was st...

We bought a Tyson vacuum cleaner many years ago. It's an interesting concept in that the business end is a ball, something like a small bowling ball. The handle is attached to the ball in a way that you can rotate the handle left to right to quite a steep angle. This allows you to do sideways vacuum...

During the Eisenhower presidential administration the corporate tax rate was 53%. The corporate tax rate today is around 28% which is about half what it was in the 50's. Obviously today's consumer is paying a greater share of income taxes than they were during Eisenhower's time. Do we have more disp...

Getting beat up by the union truckers is an image that has contributed to my disliking unions on principle. They act like gangsters and run their show like the Mafia. Being from Chicago you would think I'd be accustomed to the gangster lifestyle. Well, that's a stereotype, Al Capone notwithstanding....

Roomba's come in several flavors. We got the low end i3 series that sells for $300 or $500 depending on the version. The bulk of the cost must be in the home stand that does the recharging and holds all the dust collected by the bot. The bot itself can't be more than $100, and 60 of those dollars go...

I owned at least one crystal radio set, possibly two. The one I remember was a kit. The crystal was about the size of a large pea and was embedded in a metal cup. There was a upside down J bracket with the short end of the J pointing down to the crystal. The whisker was a coiled copper wire wrapped ...

Conventional hearing aids can be made with adjustable audio equalizer circuits. The beauty in that is that you can select which frequencies and what amplitude thereof sound best in a given situation. That can't be done, as far as I know, by applying a simple rf carrier to a passive detector, such as...

The high intensity light heating system sounds intriguing. Light, in a technical sense, is just high frequency microwaves. The heat generated by conventional microwaves is accomplished by resonating with the food so that the molecules of food become excited and give off heat. Light waves are too hig...

In some ways I was fortunate in my career because I did not have to deal with unions. Motorola was not a union shop which was unusual given the size of the company. There were a few votes taken over the years, mostly by the electronic techs, but none of the unions ever managed to get a foothold. The...

You likely are right about the electrician being unionized. The rules down here in Missouri are probably similar to the ones they go by up north, but there is one huge difference. Every tradesman up north must be unionized. Down here it apparently is an option. Thus you don't know who you are dealin...

I have wondered about the time it takes to come to temperature with induction heat. I can deal with a longer wait time as long as the temperature is stable and evenly distributed. One issue I have with electric cooking elements is that the burner temperature is not stable. The element turns on and o...

Whoever invents a way to treat tinnitus will become wealthy. A lot of people have it, and some literally go insane because of it. No doubt they will find the cause and effect at some future time. I did a little, very little, research regarding the ear lens I mentioned earlier. It seems to be a passi...

You are right to be suspicious of the hearing aid attached to the eardrum. It seemed odd to me as well, but this company has been selling these things for a while. I suppose the ad could have been misleading, or more likely I didn't read it closely enough. The problem with my hearing, and with many ...

I feel most comfortable with gas cooking, but it is not as clean as electric. Whatever fumes came off the cooker never bothered me but then you can get used to ingesting poison over a long period of time. This house has carbon monoxide detectors and I would shudder at the possibility of gas cooking ...

I first saw a real bidet dozens of years ago at my cousin's house. She had one of those old styles that you describe. It actually looked like a water fountain that you would sit on, and I wasn't too sure which direction you would face when seated. She claimed she loved it about once a month, and I c...