A special note about and for my grandkids, Elena, Devin and Drew, who I hope will be visiting this blog at sometime in the future. If you've just found me on this blog, I'm very happy! Please, your individual blog is also nearby, so ... 

Elena, please go to https://elenashultz.blogspot.com/

Devin please go to https://devinshultz.blogspot.com/; and

Drew please go to https://andrewshultz.blogspot.com/.

Yeah, I know that they all pretty much say the same thing, but I wasn't comfortable writing you en masse in a single blog and wanted to make it more personal. I thought it was better to make each of you individual blogs, even if they each say almost the same thing, at least right now.

Please write me before I die!

panama.rick@ymail.com or rickinpanama@gmail.com

Much love from your grandfather!

【ツ】

Larger Nicaragua Canal Looms Over Panama

Panama's greatest fear, other than the rise of another Manuel Noriega or of a somewhat lesser risk, the return of another Mussolini-like Ricardo Martinelli, is the threat of competition to its world-famous and immensely lucrative Canal (revenue of about two billion US dollars or so each year).  And who uses this "Eighth Wonder of the World" the most are the world's larger ships. Not the biggest ones, mind you, because they are too big to fit into it. 

That's why Panama embarked a couple of years ago on a second canal that's going to cost the country 5 or 6 billion dollars, assuming they can finish the thing after the people building the locks suddenly said they needed tons more money because they lied about the building costs in order to get the contract in the first place. 

Putting all of that aside for the moment, here's Panama's main problem. It seems that it ain't gonna be big enough. There's this company called Maersk that happens to make humongous container ships, the world's biggest, and they just happen to be the just about the world's largest shipping company. And there's been floating around this idea to build a really big canal that will not only handle these biggest of the biggest container ships, but is also about 800 kilometers further north to where everything goes, so much further in fact that it's, unfortunately, not in Panama but in Nicaragua. 

Well, there goes the ball game. Maersk has decided to throw its considerable weight behind the idea of building the Nicaraguan Canal, a project that has until now been surrounded by distrust from the outside world and, not at all the least, from its competitor in Panama. This represents the first time that one of the world's shipping carriers has publicly voiced its support in favor of the colossal construction project.

"Building a Nicaragua Canal seems to make good sense. The canal is projected to have room for the biggest ships, while also saving 800 kilometers on a journey from New York to Los Angeles. We generally support infrastructure improvements. It brings improved opportunities for transport, and thus trade. When we built container ships 20 years ago they were scaled according to the Panama Canal, but the ships today are bigger than the 4,500 ton that could fit on the biggest ships back then. Even after the expansion of the Panama Canal, the biggest ships won't fit there," says Keith Svendsen, Head of Daily Operations at Maersk Line. He adds that there is currently a waiting period for sailing through the Panama Canal, and that the expansion of the canal - expected finished in early 2016 - will only make it possible to handle ships of up to 336 meters. Maersk Line's new Triple-E series clocks in at 400 meters, and estimates in the maritime community say that this magical barrier will soon be breached, so that ships will become even longer.

The Nicaragua Canal will be three times the length of the Panama Canal, and - according to plan - the new canal will cross the major Lago de Nicaragua, one of the largest freshwater reservoirs in the region, a fact that has led to criticism from various environmental organizations.

The somewhat unknown Chinese business man and investor Wang Jing, backed by several state-owned Chinese companies, has managed to win the 50-year concession for the canal, which is estimated to have a construction cost of USD 40 billion in 2014-prices. Estimates say that the feasibility studies alone are approaching a price of around USD 1 billion.

Meanwhile, as Russia continues to take strategic initiatives that put the United States on the defensive, Russian President Vladimir Putin has teamed up with China to help construct the new canal, giving Moscow an even greater foothold in Washington’s area of influence. The prospect comes as Moscow not only intends more massive arms sales in Latin America but, is also moving to establish a base in Nicaragua besides using existing facilities for refueling for aircraft and port calls for Russian warships. (In addition to Nicaragua, Moscow also is looking to establish bases in Cuba and Venezuela.)

The establishment of permanent Russian bases and a major Russian presence in the Western Hemisphere will challenge U.S. policies and threaten to diminish Washington’s influence in the region. And like a repeat of events leading up to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, it will give Moscow a basis to stage offensive weapons in the Western Hemisphere, placing another formidable challenge to U.S. homeland defenses from potential missile threats. “The Russian Federation considers itself to be a global power that is active everywhere and that, whatever Russia’s leadership might publicly claim, is challenging the United States anywhere that it can,” said Stephen Blank of the Washington think-tank Jamestown Foundation. “One such arena is Latin America,” Blank said. “Even as the Ukrainian crisis rages, Moscow is steadily trying to increase its profile throughout the Western Hemisphere.” And Moscow’s Latin American focus for establishing a base will be Nicaragua. 

The current plan is that China would do the construction while Russia would provide security and take on other yet undefined roles in connection with the canal. In bringing in the Russians, Chinese businessman Wang Jing, who has a concession to build the canal in Nicaragua, also is said to hold a concession to build a deep water port in Crimea, a strategic area of Ukraine which recently was annexed to the Russian Federation. According to Blank, Nicaraguan opposition deputy Eliseo Nunez Morales said that the planned Nicaragua Grand Canal project doesn't have a “declaration of neutrality.”

In the event of a conflict, the maritime route would not remain neutral. In addition, the canal concession also allows for the establishment of a military base. “Therefore, granting Russia the security concession could be a cover for a military base, which, in turn, would afford excellent cover for the introduction of a host of covert agents and programs and for laundering criminally obtained profits,” Blank asserted.

Several of the biggest Western infrastructure companies are also working to evaluate the key elements necessary to realize the Nicaraguan project. American McKinsey is looking at the finances of the project. Australian mining company MEC Mining is reviewing the scope of the digging work through the country's jungle, while British ERM is handling the environmental consequences, and consulting engineers SBE, of Belgium, will present a proposal for the dimensions of the massive water locks necessary to realize the project.

Panama's economy over the last few years has been amazing, making Panamanians the second richest in all of Latin America (Only Chile has a higher per capita income). Most of this wealth has come either directly or indirectly from the ships that use the Panama Canal. Even with the new Canal expansion, the world's largest ships will still not be able to cross the middle of Central America. If the Nicaragua Canal is built, those ships will use it instead. Panama will face competition in an area it can not compete. Add the fact that by mid-century, because of global warming, even ordinary shipping vessels will be able to navigate previously inaccessible parts of the Arctic Ocean, and the future of Panama and its Canal may not be as robust as in the past.

Juan Carlos Varela Surprise Winner in Presidential Election

Against almost all odds, Panama's amicable Vice President Juan Carlos Varela has won election as the new president of this Central American republic.  Varela was declared the victor yesterday, thwarting an attempt by former ally President Ricardo Martinelli to extend his grip on power by electing a hand-picked successor.

With 60 percent of ballots counted, officials said Varela led with 39 percent of the votes, compared to 32 percent for former Housing Minister Jose Domingo Arias, the preferred choice of Martinelli. Juan Carlos Navarro, a former mayor of the capital, was in third place in the seven-candidate field with 27 percent.

Varela, who takes office July 1, dedicated his victory to Panama's democracy when the Electoral Tribunal's chief magistrate notified him by telephone of his victory. The incumbent party has still never won re-election to Panama's presidency since the United States' 1989 overthrow of military strongman Manuel Noriega.

Election day began with opinion polls pointing to a tight race among the top three candidates, but none of the major surveys had Varela with a lead. Most gave a razor-thin edge to Arias. Although Martinelli wasn't on the ballot, the billionaire supermarket magnate's presence loomed large during the campaign, with many worried that he would be the power behind the throne if voters chose Arias, a soft-spoken newcomer.

As the race narrowed in recent weeks, Martinelli crisscrossed the isthmus inaugurating hospitals, stadiums and Central America's first subway system while warning the 3.2 million Panamanians that record low unemployment and economic growth averaging more than 8 percent since he took office in 2009 could be jeopardized if his opponents won. His use of the bully pulpit drew widespread criticism, as did his decision to place his wife, Marta Linares, as Arias' running mate on the Democratic Center ticket.

Varela, a 50-year-old engineer, is the scion of one of Panama's richest families and owner of a namesake rum distillery. He left the 2009 presidential race to throw his conservative Panamenista party's support behind Martinelli in exchange for the vice presidency.

But the political marriage didn't last, and Martinelli (seen above) dismissed him from an additional role as foreign minister in 2011 for refusing to back a plan for a referendum to allow presidents to serve consecutive terms. Since then, Varela has been the president's fiercest critic, accusing him of numerous shady deals including taking kickbacks for a government radar system contract. Martinelli denied the charges. In turn, Martinelli all but marginalized Varela from decision-making and criticized the vice president for collecting his government paycheck without doing any work.

A free-market conservative, Varela also has strong social credentials, having been the architect of a popular program at the start of Martinelli's presidency to provide a $100 monthly stipend to Panamanians over age 70 without a pension or retirement benefits.

As campaigning turned ugly in the final stretch, Varela was hit by accusations that he had received payments from the daughter of a political ally convicted in the U.S. of laundering money for an illegal online gambling ring. Varela vigorously defended himself after the accusations first appeared last month on a Florida-run website, Diario Las America, and he accused Martinelli of leaking the story trying to derail his campaign. He said the checks he received from accounts managed by Michele Lasso were connected to legitimate business dealings with her father, a former Panamanian ambassador to South Korea, and donations to his 2009 presidential campaign, which he reported to the nation's electoral tribunal.

Team Pays $3M Settlement for Texting

Jerry Wojcik is a Buffalo Bills fan, and he signed up for a text service from the team. The agreement said he'd get no more than five texts a week, but when he got 13 in two weeks, what did he do? Hey, this is America, so of course he sued! And won! 

The suit, filed in 2012, said the Bills' behavior was a violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Well, it seems that this law was created to protect real people against unwanted spam. Some might argue he was getting precisely the sort of messages he wanted, but just a few too many, but that's a no-no according to the law. The Bills apparently decided not to pursue the case in court and have now settled for the sum of $3 million. 

No, you might ask, Mr. Wojcik didn't become $3 million richer. It was a class action lawsuit, so $2.5 million will be paid to the approximately 39,750 people who signed up for the text alert service. And, the money will not be paid in cold, hard cash. Instead, the Bills will issue debit cards that can be used at the team store. This seems rather a nifty proposal, given that all the people so heinously affected were supposedly Bills fans, desperate for information about their team. 

Mr. Wojcik himself will receive $5,000 for leading the class action. Of course, the remaining $562,500 will be going to Mr. Wojcik's lawyers. This is America, right?

Your Tax Dollars at Work (Again)

A watchdog report has been released showing that over a thousand employees of the IRS received bonuses even though they had disciplinary issues, including over $1 million paid to employees who didn't pay their federal taxes. And the bonuses weren't just monetary. Employees with tax problems received a total of 10,582 hours of paid time off — valued at about $250,000 — and 69 received permanent raises through a step increase. 

The report looked at bonuses just in 2011 and 2012, who knows about those other years? Employees' tax problems included "willful understatement of tax liabilities over multiple tax years, late payment of tax liabilities, and underreporting of income," the report said. "We take seriously our unique role as this nation's tax administrator, and we will strive to implement a policy that protects the integrity of the tax administration system and the reputation of the service," IRS chief Human Capital Officer David Krieg said in a written response to the audit. (Do people actually talk like that?) 

The IRS said it has instituted a policy to take conduct into account when handing out bonuses to senior executives. (They never thought of this before?) In fiscal year 2012, the agency awarded bonuses of $86.3 million in cash and almost 490,000 hours of time off. About 69% of the agency's 98,000 employees received some kind of bonus. Apparently non-payment of taxes by federal employees is a government-wide problem. The IRS says 311,536 federal employees were tax delinquents in 2011, owing a total of $3.5 billion. Huh? Bills have been introduced in the House and Senate to fire federal employees with seriously delinquent taxes. Better late than never, I suppose.

Survey Says Public Often Wrong

And the survey says .... Well, here you go. Few Americans question that smoking causes cancer. But as we get farther from our own bodies and the present, a new poll shows Americans have much more doubts in other concepts that scientists say are basic truth: global warming, evolution, and their largest question mark was in the Big Bang that created the universe. While scientists believe the universe began with a Big Bang, most Americans put a big question mark on the concept. Yet when it comes to smoking causing cancer or that a genetic code determines who we are, the doubts disappear. When considering concepts scientists consider truths, Americans have more skepticism than confidence in those that are farther away from our bodies in scope and time: global warming, the age of the Earth and evolution and especially the Big Bang from 13.8 billion years ago.

Rather than quizzing scientific knowledge, the survey asked people to rate their confidence in several statements about science and medicine. On some, there's broad acceptance. Just 4 percent doubt that smoking causes cancer, 6 percent question whether mental illness is a medical condition that affects the brain and 8 percent are skeptical there's a genetic code inside our cells. More — 15 percent — have doubts about the safety and efficacy of childhood vaccines. About 4 in 10 say they are not too confident or outright disbelieve that the earth is warming, mostly a result of man-made heat-trapping gases, that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old or that life on Earth evolved through a process of natural selection, though most were at least somewhat confident in each of those concepts. But a narrow majority — 51 percent — questions the Big Bang theory.

Those results depress and upset some of America's top scientists, including several Nobel Prize winners, who vouched for the science in the statements tested, calling them settled scientific facts. "Science ignorance is pervasive in our society, and these attitudes are reinforced when some of our leaders are openly antagonistic to established facts," said 2013 Nobel Prize in medicine winner Randy Schekman of the University of California, Berkeley. The poll highlights "the iron triangle of science, religion and politics," said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. To the public "most often values and beliefs trump science" when they conflict, said Alan Leshner, chief executive of the world's largest scientific society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Political and religious values were closely tied to views on science in the poll, with Democrats more apt than Republicans to express confidence in evolution, the Big Bang, the age of the Earth and climate change. Confidence in evolution, the Big Bang, the age of the Earth and climate change decline sharply as faith in a supreme being rises, according to the poll. Likewise, those who regularly attend religious services or are evangelical Christians express much greater doubts about scientific concepts they may see as contradictory to their faith. "When you are putting up facts against faith, facts can't argue against faith," said 2012 Nobel Prize winning biochemistry professor Robert Lefkowitz of Duke University. "It makes sense now that science would have made no headway because faith is untestable." But evolution, the age of the Earth and the Big Bang are all compatible with God, except to Bible literalists, said Francisco Ayala, a former priest and professor of biology, philosophy and logic at the University of California, Irvine.

Beyond religious belief, views on science may be tied to what we see with our own eyes. The closer an issue is to ourselves and the less complicated, the easier it is for people to believe, said John Staudenmaier, a Jesuit priest and historian of technology at the University of Detroit Mercy. Experience and faith aren't the only things affecting people's views on science. Duke University's Lefkowitz sees "the force of concerted campaigns to discredit scientific fact" as a more striking factor, citing significant interest groups — political, business and religious — campaigning against scientific truths on vaccines, climate change and evolution.

NY Police Twitter Campaign Backfires

This is hilarious! The New York City Police Department has a Twitter account, and somebody there thought it would be a good idea to ask people to post images of themselves and NYPD officers on Twitter, just to show how much they meant to the community. I guess they had images in their head of kindly benevolent officers helping little old ladies cross the street or handing out candy to children or something like that. "Do you have a photo with a member of the NYPD? Tweet us & tag it #myNYPD. It may be featured on our Facebook page," the department posted on its NYPD News Twitter feed. Of course the idea was to fuel a feel-good, low-cost public relations campaign. 

Well, guess what? Those are not the kind of images and tweets they got back. Some samples of the deluge of pictures they received were of alleged police brutality, including many arrests of demonstrators that included such presumed low-lights as an officer pulling the hair of a handcuffed young black woman and another of the bloodied face of an 84-year-old stopped for jaywalking. Another image showing police after striking a protester brought the remark "Here the #NYPD engages with its community members, changing hearts and minds one baton at a time." Also largely criticized was the department's unpopular "stop and frisk" policy, which many argue unfairly targets minority youth. The NYPD so far has yet to post any happy shots on its Facebook page from its request for public submissions.

Oops!

Bacteria Infects Thousands of Your Dollars

Researchers have discovered that thousands of bacteria live on the cash you carry around with you. In the first comprehensive study of the DNA on dollar bills, researchers at New York University found that currency is a medium of exchange for hundreds of different kinds of bacteria as bank notes pass from hand to hand. By analyzing genetic material on $1 bills, the NYU researchers identified 3,000 types of bacteria in all—many times more than in previous studies that examined samples under a microscope. Even so, they could identify only about 20 percent of the non-human DNA they found because so many microorganisms haven't yet been cataloged in genetic data banks. One cause appears to be acne. Others were linked to gastric ulcers, pneumonia, food poisoning and staph infections. "It was quite amazing to us," said Jane Carlton, director of genome sequencing at the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology."We actually found that microbes grow on money."

Paper money is one of the most frequently passed items in the world. Hygienists have long worried that it could become a source of contagion. "A body-temperature wallet is a petri dish," said Philippe Etienne, managing director of Innovia Security Pty. Ltd., which makes special bank-note paper for 23 countries. Central banks and state treasuries usually worry more about counterfeiting and durability than microbiology, currency experts say. Talk about dirty money. Yecch!

Powdered Alcohol Approved by FDA

This is gonna be something else. The Food and Drug Administration has just given the go-ahead to market and sell an alcohol in powder form called Palcohol. It will be available in liquor stores this fall, according to the company website. Interest in the curious new product has already driven thousands of people to the official website, which at the moment is still under construction. 

There are going to be four flavors to choose from — Cosmopolitan, Mojito, Powderita, and Lemon Drop. You mix the powder into five ounces of any liquid you like to create a drink that contains just as much alcohol as a standard cocktail. The powder can even be sprinkled onto food, though as the website warns, the intoxicating food should not be given to minors. 

I don't know about this, but it'll probably sell like Kool Aid. What'll they think of next?

Wikipedia Tracks Flu Better Than CDC

Researchers at the Boston Children's Hospital have concluded a study comparing Wikipedia articles that included terms related to flu-like illnesses and similar data from the Center for Disease Control and found that Wikipedia can estimate flu levels in the US up to two weeks sooner than the CDC. 

The researchers analyzed the data from Wikipedia on how many times in an hour a certain article was viewed, and combined their data with flu data from the CDC, using a model they created. Looking at data spanning six flu seasons between December 2007 and August 2013, the new system estimated the peak flu week better than Google Flu Trends, another data-based system. The Wikipedia-based system accurately estimated the peak flu week in three out of six seasons, while the Google-based system got only two right, the researchers found. The research team wanted to use a database that is accessible to everyone and create a system that could be more accurate than Google Flu Trends, which has flaws. 

When a pandemic strikes, people search for news stories related to the pandemic itself, but this doesn't mean that they have the flu. In general, the problem with Internet-based estimation systems is that it is practically impossible to tell whether people are looking for information about an illness because they are sick, the researchers said. In the new system, the researchers tried to overcome this issue by including a number of Wikipedia articles "to act as markers for general background-level activity of normal usage of Wikipedia," the researchers wrote in the study. 

However, just like any other data-based system, the Wikipedia system is not immune to the issues related to figuring out the actual motivation of someone checking information related to the flu. Therefore, it's important to view systems such as Google Flu Trends and the Wikipedia system as complementary to data from official sources such as the CDC, McIver said. "We are not trying to create something that will replace the CDC or anything like that," he said. Rather, the researchers' goal is "to get both things to work well together, to give us a more holistic view of what is going on," they said.

Homesick Robber to be Sentenced Again

Walter Unbehaun has spent nearly all of his adult life in jail, so it's not surprising that he faces sentencing Thursday for yet another crime. His reason for robbing a bank is that he was homesick for prison. 

On Feb. 9 last year, he entered a Chicago-area bank with a cane but no disguise, displayed a loaded revolver in his waistband to a teller and told her softly over and over, "I don't want to hurt you." Then, with $4,178 in loot shoved in his pockets, he drove to a nearby motel and waited for police to arrive. Confronted by authorities in the motel parking lot, the bald, portly Unbehaun dropped his cane, raised his hands and startled police by his apparent joy at getting nabbed. He told them that he wanted to do something that would guarantee that he would spend the rest of his life in prison," an FBI affidavit said. One officer observed, "(He) was happy to be going home to prison." 

Now, the judge in Chicago sentencing Unbehaun faces a dilemma, prosecutor Sharon Fairly said in one filing: Sending Unbehaun to prison would be more reward than punishment to him, but setting him free would risk him committing another serious crime.

Portland dumps 38m gallons of water with pee

The Portland, Oregon, water supply is now safe again after the city dumped 38 million gallons of water from its reservoir after discovering that a teenager urinated into the water supply. The kid was caught on closed circuit television at the Mt Tabor reservoir "deliberately contaminating" the water according to Portland water administrator David Shaff. Although the health risk was small, he says customers "don't anticipate drinking water that's been contaminated by some yahoo who decided to pee into a reservoir.” Upon learning of the contamination on Wednesday, officials immediately removed the affected reservoir from service, took water quality test samples and will replace it with fresh water from another of the city's water supplies. Portland emptied 7.5 million gallons of water from the same reservoir in 2011 after another man urinated into it. Mr Shaff said, "While animal waste often found its way into the reservoir without any public health risk, there was at least a perceived difference from my perspective" on human waste. He said the city had plenty of water to meet demand and that replacing the 38 million gallons would be "easy. We're not in the arid South-west. We're not in drought-stricken parts of Texas or Oklahoma." But critics disagree saying the process is extremely wasteful and that even if urine reached the main water supply, it would not harm anyone.

Squirrel Causes $300,000 in Damages to New Building

In Fort Wayne, Indiana, they've been working on transforming an old ice arena into a nearly $2 million community center for sports-related activities including basketball and track & field. The center was supposed to open in June, but now may take a little longer. Apparently security was not as great as it should have been and it seems a wayward squirrel somehow found its way into the place and discovered a cozy little spot to set up home. The problem, however, was that his (or her) new domicile happened to be located in an area where some brand new and pretty sensitive electrical equipment had been hooked up. While making him (or her) self comfortable, the little creature must have disrupted something in the place which caused a rather large power surge that not only fried the little rascal to a crisp but also burned up a great deal of the building's new heating and air conditioning equipment plus some parts of the boiler system. Officials say the total damage is going to amount to around $300,000. Gosh, that must have been quite a shock!

Your Tax Dollars At Work (Again)

As you probably know, the Windows XP operating system has been around for over 12 years and a lot of people would rather keep it than move on to something newer, but Microsoft terminated official support on April 8th and that was that. Many organizations had taken the six years of warnings to heart and migrated to another operating system, but not the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Only 52,000 of their 110,000 Windows-powered computers were upgraded to Windows 7. Now they have a problem. If they follow the rules, and you'd think they will, they'll have to pay Microsoft for Custom Support. How much? Well, using Microsoft's standard rate of $200 per PC, it'll be $11.6 million for one year. That leaves $18.4 million of their $30 million budget to finish the upgrades themselves, which works out to $317 per computer. Another fine example of our government's inability to do much of anything right.

Pa. Man Trashes $1.25M Lottery Tickets

Oh gosh, this guy must feel really, really awful. Back in December one of the regular customers of a convenience store in York bought his normal 20 or 25 Quinto tickets, and then threw them away after he misread the winning numbers. The Pennsylvania Lottery put out a news release back in February, warning whoever held the tickets with the wining numbers of 4-3-4-1-8 that they had until March 13 to cash them in, figuring that the person may have tucked them away in a kitchen junk drawer or had them in a wallet or pocketbook and hadn't bothered to check them. Since the guy always played the same numbers, 4-3-4-1-8, it's pretty obvious that he had the winning tickets. Except that he threw them away. The 25 tickets were worth $50,000 each - $1.25 million total. "He was mad," a convenience store employee said of the day he found out that he threw away more than a million dollars. Lottery officials had been mystified about what happened to the tickets. When told what had happened, lottery spokeswoman Lauren Bottaro said, "Oh no! Wow." Bottaro said the lottery hates for tickets to go unclaimed and said this instance emphasizes the importance of players checking their tickets. The $1.25 million jackpot will now remain in the state Lottery Fund. Bottaro said unclaimed tickets are very rare, composing maybe 1 percent of the number of tickets sold in the state. "We do what we can" to notify winners, Bottaro said. "But sometimes, it's just not enough."

Man Makes Paper Car, Hired By Red Bull Racing

Paul Bischof is a student in mechanical engineering at the Graz University of Technology in Austria. Since the age of eight, Paul has been building model planes out of paperboard. In 2004 he fell in love with Formula 1 racing and in October 2011 he decided to undertake the massive project of building a race car out of paper. Now, some three years later, he has finished the project. Paul's model of the Red Bull RB7 has around 6,500 parts, including a fully-detailed engine, suspension, and cockpit. You'd be hard pressed to tell any of it was made from paper. In fact, the model was so good that it didn't just impress a lot of people on the Internet, but also the top brass at Infiniti Red Bull Racing. Paul was offered a job in the team's engineering department, where he's now working on the 2014 RB10 car. While Paul has traded paper and scissors for carbon fiber and modeling software, he views both as two facets of the same pursuit: designing objects in two dimensions, and making them in three dimensions. "It's basically my hobby," Paul said of his job at Red Bull. Talk about doing what you love.

Doctors Forgot to Remove Appendix, Patient Sues

Forty-three year-old William McCormack of Bronxville, New York needed an appendectomy and went to a local clinic for the operation. Apparently the doctors were distracted by something because some time later he began having stomach pains and when they checked him at the hospital it was discovered that his appendix was still inside him. Apparently no one from the hospital, nor the doctor or anyone from his office called Mr. McCormack to advise him that apparently something had run amiss in the operation and that the appendix was not removed. McCormack is now suing the hospital. The hospital pathology report says what had been removed was "a three centimeter yellowish mass", but not the appendix.

Amazon Offers Employees $5,000 to Quit

Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, is offering its warehouse employees up to $5,000 to quit their jobs, even as the company is in the process of adding workers and locations. The "Pay to Quit" program, which was announced by CEO Jeff Bezos in his letter to shareholders last Thursday, is an effort to make sure that the Internet retailer's employees really want to be there. According to Bezos, "The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want," he wrote in the letter. "In the long-run, an employee staying somewhere they don't want to be isn't healthy for the employee or the company." Bezos said the offer is made under the headline "Please Don't Take This Offer." The company has experimented with this program in recent years, but rolled it out to its 40,000 warehouse employees in January, according to a company spokeswoman. Newer employees are offered $2,000 to quit. The plan is to increase that offer by $1,000 each year until the amount hits $5,000. Fewer than 10% of the employees who got the offer took it and left the company.

Scientific Proof: Life Gets Better As You Get Older

Apparently there are two major peaks of satisfaction in life. The first is when you are about 23 and the second when you are around 69. According to a recent study, after your early 20s, happiness was generally found to decline until the mid-50s, after which point it increased again into the 80s. Other studies (notably, a large 2010 Gallup poll) have corroborated this finding, suggesting that happiness tends to be positively linked with age. The Gallup poll found that 85-year-olds are generally more satisfied with themselves than 18-year-olds. In other words, life isn't a downhill decline, it's basically a U-curve.

"Mankind is wrong to dread aging," The Economist writes. "Happiness arcs through the average individual's lifespan. Life is not a long slow decline from sunlit uplands towards the valley of death. It is, rather, a U-bend." On average, happiness declines from youth to middle age until you hit the "midlife crisis" point, at which point people head towards old age and they experience surging levels of happiness and life satisfaction. The U-curve of happiness has been documented in countries around the world, and applies to both global well-being and emotional wellness. Why? Probably because decreased ambition and greater acceptance seems to play a significant role. Whether you're old or young, chances are you think of young people as being happier, even though science has proved that this isn't the case. A study at Duke University that asked groups of 30-year-olds and 70-year-olds which age group (30 or 70) they thought would be happier, both groups pointed towards the 30-year-olds, but when they rated their own happiness levels, the 70-year-olds scored higher. In another study, both the young and the old believe that happiness declines with age, but older adults described themselves as being happier than the younger adults did. The older we get, the more we seem to appreciate the little things. Also, Psychology Today reports, "As we age, we have the opportunity to accept who we are, instead of focusing on who we feel we need to become. We relax into being ourselves. Our faces start to look like who we are. And the world settles into more and more familiar patterns. That acceptance brings diminished anxiety and a higher degree of enjoyment."

Fortwo Tipping Hits San Francisco

The Smart Fortwo is a really small little two-passenger car made by a division of the company that makes Mercedes Benz. It's made in France and until recently couldn't be imported into the US because it didn't pass safety standards and most people thought it would look silly among American cars that are two or three times as large. Well they got it to pass the import restrictions and now you can actually buy one in America. The problem is that the thing only weighs 1800 pounds and some folks in the US appear to think it would be really cool to have a few drinks and go out and find one of the cars and tip it up on it's nose. Maybe they had more than just a few drinks. But anyway, it's the latest thing, at least in the San Francisco area. It's called "Smart tipping", and last weekend three, count 'em, three of the cars were rolled onto their front or rear ends Sunday night. A witness described seeing between six and eight individuals carrying out one of the dastardly deeds. Why is this happening? Well, it could be that SF is finally catching up to other parts of the world, where fortwo tipping has been a "thing" since 2009. Or perhaps SF has been infested with a bunch of urban cowboys who mistakenly think that cow tipping is real. But the most likely bet is that the city's growing hatred for high-tech "Glassholes" has spilled over from boycotting buses to flipping cars. Moral of the story: if Oprah gives you a Smart fortwo and you live in the Bay Area, keep it locked in the garage.