Monday, February 28, 2011

cosset \KOSS-it\, verb:

• To treat as a pet; to treat with excessive indulgence; to pamper.

noun:

• A pet, especially a pet lamb.

Cosset comes from the noun cosset, "a pet lamb."

superstistics

• The use of prior evidence of one event to predict the outcome of another unrelated event - from the words superstitious and statistics.

1. Toss a coin and get heads 100 times in a row and use superstistics to conclude that the next toss is more likely to be tails than heads.

2. A well known superstistics conclusion: "The outcome of Washington Redskins home football games has correctly predicted the winner of every U.S. presidential election

Trivia

Where was a tiny listening device found hidden in the American ambassador’s residence in Moscow in 1952?

• Beneath the beak of the bald eagle in a carving of the Great Seal of the United States that had been hanging on the wall behind the ambassador’s desk since 1945, when it was presented as a token of friendship by a group of Soviet schoolchildren.

History

• Methodism: Anglican clergyman and evangelist John Wesley chartered the first Methodist church (1784)
• Shanghai Communiqué: US President Nixon and Chinese Premier Chou En-lai issued a document advancing normalization between the two countries (1972)
• M*A*S*H: the final episode — "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen" — aired; it was the top-rated TV episode in the US (1983)
• Olof Palme: the Swedish prime minister and his wife were shot in Stockholm; he was killed, she survived (1986)
• Waco siege: 51-day standoff began with a gun battle between federal agents and members of the cloistered Branch Davidian sect; the agents were attempting to arrest leader David Koresh on a weapons charge (1993)

Birthdays

• Linus Pauling (1901-1994): Nobel Prize-winning chemist and advocate of Vitamin C; plus, physicist and naturalist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683-1757)
• Bugsy Siegel (1906-1947): gangster responsible for building up Las Vegas
• Tommy Tune (72): dancer and choreographer
• Mario Andretti (71): champion racecar driver; another winning racer born today is Smarty Jones (10)
• Robert Sean Leonard (42): House's Dr. James Wilson; also, actors Zero Mostel (1915-1977), Charles Durning (88), Gavin McLeod (80), Frank Bonner (69), Kelly Bishop (67), Bubba Smith (66), Mercedes Ruehl and Bernadette Peters (both 63), Gilbert Gottfried (56), John Turturro (54), Rae Dawn Chong (50) and Maxine Bahns (40)