Cool Things Collection

Category: Learn

Grooming Tips for Regular Guys

As a regular guy, you’re probably not on first name basis with your local beauty salon employees. In fact, I’d hazard a guess that the thought of stepping foot into a beauty salon (especially when the words back, sack and crack are used in the same sentence) brings you out in a cold sweat. Male beauty, ‘manscaping’ and metrosexuality are all growing in popularity, but there’s no need to fret if that’s just not you. You can stay looking sharp and feeling good by following these hassle-free tips.

Keep your facial hair in check

Nothing says ‘hobo’ quite like unkempt facial hair, and so even if you’re a casual kinda guy you’re going to want to keep it in check. A bit of a trim in the morning will tidy up a beard or moustache nicely. If you prefer to stay clean shaven, then a good quality razor and a simple (but vigilant) pre and post shaving routine is a must. A wash beforehand with warm water will loosen your pores making shaving easier and more comfortable, and moisturising balm afterwards will soothe and replenish skin. If dull razors are the bane of your mornings, try signing up for a shaving subscription and have new blades regularly delivered to your door.

Don’t forget about eyebrows, nose and ears

If you’re currently rocking a crazy monobrow it’s time to dust off those tweezers. Don’t panic you don’t need to do anything drastic and start shaping them, simply yank out the ones in the middle. There’s no denying that two brows are better than one! Unruly nose and ear hair is grim and enough to scare the kids, you can easily tackle it with a trimmer. They’re not expensive to buy, and are a quick and painless method to keep everything under control.

Keep Crows Feet at Bay

Moisturising after a shower takes seconds; it alleviates that uncomfortable tight skin feeling that can come after washing your face, and also prevents premature aging. You might be happy to grow old gracefully and embrace your rugged wrinkles, but let’s face it no one wants to look years older than their actual age. This is an easy step that will make a real difference if you stick with it. If you get a moisturiser with an added SPF, you’ll kill two birds with one stone. You pay attention to what you wear and dress well, and so why would you neglect your skin?

Get an Easy to Maintain Haircut

If you go for a style that looks good even when it’s little grown out, your appearance won’t go to the dogs between cuts. A simple style that’s quick for the barber to do will mean you’re not spending hours of your life sat in the chair. Find a hair product that’s comfortable to wear and easy to use, and you’ll be able to do your hair and dash out the door in the mornings with no messing around.

Find Products That Work For You

Having a small yet carefully selected arsenal of products is a great way to ensure you stay looking fresh. Look for things that are targeted to your skin and hair type for the best results. You don’t need to spend a fortune but don’t skimp too much either, once you’ve found things that work for you getting ready and looking your best will be quick and easy.

25 July 2016
4 Awesome Road Trip Tips

The open road, home of a hundred thousand arguments. But also one of the best places to have a holiday. We’re talking about road trips. How exhilarating and delightfully exhausting they can be. Making stupid jokes about the things you see. Stopping off at places where the people are just a little weirder. Catching some genuinely beautiful sights. It’s all a great way to travel with friends. So how do you make sure it’s even more awesome? By following the tips below, of course.

Know where the heck you’re going

At some point on the road trip, there is going to be a bit of bickering. No escaping that. But by all means, make sure it isn’t about which route you’re taking. Even those who’ve never had that argument are sick of it by now. Get things all planned out before you go and take a GPS or app with you. Feel free to explore, by any means….Pokemon Go if you have to 🙂 Just make sure you can get back to your next stop and argue about meaningful things. Like what kind of food to stop for.

Take everything but the kitchen sink

Road trips are all about adventure. About dealing with new and interesting scenarios. Going further than you would usually. So make sure that you’re actually prepared to go there. If you want to head up beyond the highlands, make sure you have the right clothes to keep you warm. Or something a bit looser if you’re heading south. If you’re going camping, make sure you got the tools for that. You don’t want to miss out on those kinds of experiences by simply failing to pack for them.

Dealing with trouble

As much you want, there are sometimes you can’t avoid a bit of trouble. So just accept it all as part of the package. But make sure you prepare for it as well. Take an emergency kit so you can easily get off the road. Have a switched off phone lying in the glove compartment so you’re in no risk of running out of battery when you need help. If you need to make a car accident compensation claim, you need to actually be able to talk to someone, right?

Keep it fun

The arguments and road bumps are all worth it, however. That is, so long as you make sure to keep it fun. Don’t let just one person drive the whole way. Circulate and delegate responsibilities. Keep someone in charge of keeping music going. Or overseeing what stupid games you might want to play on the road. Like a game of ‘take the worst road trip photo you can’. It’s supposed to be fun, so if the mood starts getting a bit sour, change the pace. Make a sudden stop or start a game that’s going to perk everyone up.

We hope the tips above help. Don’t worry if something goes wrong now and then. It’s a road trip, so road bumps are expected. Just take it all in as part of the trip.

25 July 2016
Largest 3d universe map made – astronomers map 1.2 million galaxies

An international team of astronomers, co-led by Dr Rita Tojeiro of the University of St Andrews, have produced the largest-ever, three-dimensional map of the Universe, using distant galaxies.

Hundreds of scientists from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) collaborated to make the map, and then used it to make one of the most precise measurements yet of the dark energy currently driving the accelerated expansion of the Universe. Dr Tojeiro explains:

“Over the last decade we have prepared and conducted the largest survey of the Universe yet. By measuring the positions of 1.2 million galaxies over one quarter of the sky, we mapped the three-dimensional structure of the Universe over a volume of 650 cubic billion light years. Using this map we were able to make some of crispest measurements yet of how dark energy is driving the expansion of the Universe.”

These new measurements were carried out by the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) program of SDSS-III.

Shaped by a continuous tug-of-war between dark matter and dark energy, the map allows astronomers to measure the expansion rate of the Universe and thus determine the amount of matter and dark energy that make up the present-day Universe. A collection of papers describing these results was submitted this week to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

BOSS measures the expansion rate of the Universe by determining the size of the baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the three-dimensional distribution of galaxies. The original BAO size is determined by pressure waves that travelled through the young Universe up to when it was only 400,000 years old (the Universe is presently 13.8 billion years old), at which point they became frozen in the matter distribution of the Universe. The end result is that galaxies are preferentially separated by a characteristic distance, that astronomers call the acoustic scale. The size of the acoustic scale at 13.48 billion years ago has been exquisitely determined from observations of the cosmic microwave background from the light emitted when the pressure waves became frozen. Measuring the distribution of galaxies since that time allows astronomers to measure how dark matter and dark energy have competed to govern the rate of expansion of the Universe.

Dr Tojeiro continued:

“If we were to scale the volume of our survey to a cube 1 mile on each side, then the visible part of an individual galaxy would be about 1 millimetre across. Our challenge in the analysis of this map was equivalent to measuring the distances between all the pairs of galaxies separated by 100 yards throughout a cubic mile of space!”

To measure the size of these ancient giant waves to such sharp precision, BOSS had to make an unprecedented and ambitious galaxy map, many times larger than previous surveys. At the time the BOSS program was planned, dark energy had been previously determined to significantly influence the expansion of the Universe starting about 5 billion years ago. BOSS was thus designed to measure the BAO feature from before this point (7 billion years ago) out to near the present day (2 billion years ago).

Dr Florian Beutler of University of Portsmouth, who led two of the papers submitted this week, said:

“If dark energy has been driving the expansion of the Universe over that time, our map tells us that it is evolving very slowly if at all: the change is at most 20% over the past 7 billion years.”

Dr Tojeiro said:

“We see a dramatic connection between the sound wave imprints seen in the cosmic microwave background 400,000 years after the Big Bang to the clustering of galaxies 7-12 billion years later. The ability to observe a single well-modelled physical effect from recombination until today is a great boon for cosmology.”

The map also reveals the distinctive signature of the coherent movement of galaxies toward regions of the Universe with more matter, due to the attractive force of gravity. Crucially, the observed amount of infall is explained well by the predictions of general relativity. This agreement supports the idea that the acceleration of the expansion rate is driven by a phenomenon at the largest cosmic scales, such as dark energy, rather than a breakdown of our gravitational theory.

Dr Tojeiro funded her travel to support the project using her 2015 L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women In Science Fellowship (FWIS) award. These fellowships reward outstanding female postdoctoral researchers, with the aim of encouraging greater participation of women in the field of science.

This is one slice through the map of the large-scale structure of the Universe from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and its Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. Each dot in this picture indicates the position of a galaxy 6 billion years into the past. The image covers about 1/20th of the sky, a slice of the Universe 6 billion light-years wide, 4.5 billion light-years high, and 500 million light-years thick. Colour indicates distance from Earth, ranging from yellow on the near side of the slice to purple on the far side. Galaxies are highly clustered, revealing superclusters and voids whose presence is seeded in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. This image contains 48,741 galaxies, about 3% of the full survey dataset. Grey patches are small regions without survey data.

Image credit: Daniel Eisenstein and the SDSS-III collaboration

This is a section of the three-dimensional map constructed by BOSS. The rectangle on the far left shows a cut-out of 1000 sq. degrees in the sky containing nearly 120,000 galaxies, or roughly 10% of the total survey. The spectroscopic measurements of each galaxy — every dot in that cut-out — transform the two-dimensional picture into a three-dimensional map, extending our view out to 7 billion years in the past. The brighter regions in this map correspond to the regions of the Universe with more galaxies and therefore more dark matter. The extra matter in those regions creates an excess gravitational pull, which makes the map a test of Einstein’s theory of gravity.

Image credit: Jeremy Tinker and the SDSS-III collaboration

14 July 2016
Cool Ways Technology Is Making Life Easier

Even within the past couple of decades, technology has advanced at such a rate that life is becoming easier and easier. Things we take for granted now would have been seen as a miracle even as recently as the turn of the century, which was only just a decade and a half ago. From educational tools to automation in industry, there are so many ways in which technology has infiltrated our lives that many of us would be lost without it. Here are just a few of the cool ways technology is making life easier.

Cars and Driving

It is forecast that within the coming decades there will be driverless cars on many of the roadways. This technology is still in the ‘cool’ prototype stages, but soon many of the roadways in the UK will be prepared for automated, computerised, driverless vehicles – imagine autonomous self-driving cars…John Lennon didn’t put that in his lyrics….but it’s easy to imagine as it’s a reality right now. Google successfully tested an automated car that drove 300,000 miles with only one accident, a parking lot fender bender. That occurred when a human was driving! This week Rolls-Royce unveiled its first driverless vehicle, a concept car that promises to help its owner announce their importance to the world.

In fact, getting your driving license is easier than ever before because you no longer need to study from a cumbersome paper manual. You can find all the rules and regulations you need to pass the theory portion of the test online, take a practice theory test online and then go in and ace your theory so that you can move on to the practical driving portion of the test. Have you seen those practice tests? If not, check this site out.

Automated Production Lines in Manufacturing

Those in the business of manufacturing have seen the benefits of automated processes in their production lines for several years now. However, with recent advances in technology, computerised processes control almost every aspect of production from controlling temperature to assembling parts as the piece is propelled down the line.

CNC (Computer Numerical Control) can control tools such as saws, CNC waterjet and milling machines and the specifications can be quite precise. Many proponents say that quality control is increased with a computer operated process whilst opponents believe that technology is taking jobs from human workers. At this time, technology is simply making life easier for those who own and work in the manufacturing sector. Down the road, who knows?

Smart Homes for Greater Comfort

Now technology has advanced to such a stage as to make it almost unnecessary to do anything in your home except perhaps sort the laundry and load the dishwasher. There are robots that vacuum your floors, and smart controls for climate control, lighting the interior and exterior of your home, and the ability to pre-set water temperatures for each member of the family. Smart faucets and thermometers can ensure that each member of the family runs water at the exact temperature most suited for him/her and once the thermostat is programmed, you never need to worry about your youngest child getting scalded ever again.

There are so many cool ways in which technology is making life easier that there is some amount of concern that we will be raising a generation of lazy children. Could this be so? It might be but why not take some of this ‘smart’ technology and put it to use challenging them to think things through before making decisions. It’s a thought that many manufacturers are toying with at the moment but for the time being, it’s thrilling to run your hands under the bathroom faucet, letting the water run out at the perfect temperature for you when you go to wash your hands. That’s innovation at its best!

17 June 2016
Telematics

If your business runs a fleet of vehicles or if you and your employees drive a lot as part of your day-to-day job, vehicle tracking is a great way to ensure that you are getting the most out of your vehicles and your drivers. Telematics can be fitted in your vehicles, from one car to a whole fleet, allowing you to track your vehicles and drivers 24/7. One little box gives you a huge amount of information and data regarding your fleet. Here are just a few of the benefits of adopting telematics in your business:

Improve fuel efficiency

Identifying inefficient driving practices such as speeding or excessive braking and accelerating will help drivers to drive in a more fuel efficient manner. Telematics can provide this information for your business and can also help you to reduce the amount of time vehicles are idle and identify the fastest routes to reduce mileage. This will reduce the amount of money spent on fuel and will also promote greener, eco-friendly driving, which is good for the environment and also your company’s reputation.

Improve driver behaviour

Gaining insight into the behaviour of your fleet drivers will allow you to identify any inefficient or dangerous drivers or driving practices. From this knowledge you can determine where additional training and risk management is required to improve driving practices, and you can also reward good drivers to encourage these behaviours in the future. Better drivers will make your service more time efficient, will reduce maintenance costs for your fleet and also protect the reputation of your company.

Stay informed about crashes

Most ‘crashes’ that occur are minor mishaps, but staying informed about these incidents is still important as it can help with insurance claims. As the technology used for telematics advances, their collision detection is becoming more and more accurate. For example, RAC’s telematics have been proven to detect crashes and non-crash events to a 92% degree of accuracy by monitoring acceleration and vibration signatures (versus an industry standard of 50%). It has the ability to detect collisions at speeds as low as 5mph, which are just as significant to vehicle costs as high speed crashes. It can also separate out real collisions from false positives, if someone drives over a kerb or a speed bump, for example.

Know where your driver/vehicles are at all times

Telematics gives you the ability to locate your fleet at all times. This lets you keep an eye on drivers to ensure that they are where they are supposed to be, letting you also clearly differentiate between business and personal mileage. It also improves your communication with both the drivers and your customers. If, for example, you are delivering goods to a customer, you can give them an accurate time of arrival, improving your customer service.

If you want to stay in full control of your fleet and operate it as safely and efficiently as you can, you should be installing telematics in your vehicles. It’s a simple solution that provides a great deal of functionality to improve your business.

14 June 2016