Yahoo! Answers

Boy meets girl and falls head over heels – that’s the start of most romantic comedies. Those first exciting moments of chemistry and attraction that make your heart flutter, eventually develop into love, and as the playground song says “then comes marriage”. The girl gets her prince charming and they go on to live a happy romantic fairytale.

Real life however isn’t like the movies and eventually, your happy ever after ends either in a break up or death. However, is it possible that being in love can lead to dying of a broken heart?

Marriage statistics and divorce rates are always in the media, and whenever there is a relationship that lasts it garners headlines.  Yahoo! Shine printed a story about a husband and wife that died 16 hours apart after 76 years of marriage. There are several stories similar to this one, where couples who are married for 50+ years die within hours or days apart.

The pain of having a relationship end is very real and well documented. A study in 2005 in The New England Journal of Medicine showed that when a loved one dies, stress hormones are increased which increases blood pressure and can trigger a heart attack. Falling in love is not only an emotional, mental, and physical sensation it also is a physiological response that can literally break your heart.

Dying of a broken heart is a very real occurrence and isn’t rare. But, what makes a couple’s love so deep that they literally honor their vows of “till death do us part?” Please leave a comment below.

Thanks for reading,

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Hey Guys,

Baseball is the sport of choice for stat nerds. There are home runs (HR), earned run averages (ERA), runs batted in (RBIs), and, of course, strikeouts (K). But hold up — why are strikeouts abbreviated with a “K” instead of “S”? Here’s the scoop.

According to legend, the credit goes to an old school sports writer named Henry Chadwick. Apparently, Chadwick used “K” for a strikeout because the letter “K” is the last letter of the word “struck.”

Why didn’t he just use “S”? Good question. According to The Straight Dope, it’s because Chadwick had already used the “S” as shorthand for sacrifice hits. So, he went with “K.”

Chadwick, a respected sportswriter, was largely responsible for creating much of the shorthand that baseball fans use on scorecards. You know how during a double play the announcers will say something like, “That was a 6-4-3″? That’s due to Chadwick, who came up with the system used to number the fielders. A shortstop is “6,” a second baseman is “4,” a first baseman is “3,” and so on. That’s still in use today.

Chadwick died in 1908 and was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame posthumously in 1938. According to the Hall, Chadwick wrote the first hard-cover book on baseball ever.

Thanks for reading and let’s play ball,

Mike

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Quick picks, scratch tickets, mega millions, all bring one thing to mind – million dollar windfall!  Millions of us dream about the riches whenever we see a huge prize amount to be won in a lottery.  It’s always fun to think about what you would do if you won.  Houses, fancy cars, paying off loans, exotic vacations all seem just a few lucky numbers away.

During times of economic distress, people’s desire to get rich quickly increases.  Taking short cuts, or hoping luck is on your side are what fuels the frenzy for large jackpots.  That and the belief that once you’ve hit it big, all your problems disappear.  But as we’ve seen with many lottery winners, that isn’t the case most of the time.

Like they say “money doesn’t buy happiness.”   This overused quote even though a cliché has been proven true by several studies stating that once your basic needs are taken care of money doesn’t make you happier.  Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman professor’s at Princeton University wrote a paper entitled “Income’s Influence on Happiness” and in that they state that emotional well being is tied to wealth but the threshold of increased happiness peaks at $75,000.

Money changes everything, in good ways and bad.  They can bring people’s worst traits out, jealously, greed, materialism, and selfishness.  It can also bring out good things as well, such as generosity, broaden your interests and horizons; help you reach your goals by giving you accessibility, and education.  As you prosper you also have the potential of helping someone else flourish.

How you relate to money, and the way it affects you or changes you is based on your personality and how money was talked about when you were growing up in your own families.

Do you think our desire to win millions contributes to our materialistic culture?  And if money wasn’t such a focus in our society would you still spend or gamble your hard earned cash on lotteries, casinos, and get rich quick scams?  Please leave a comment below.

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**Secret Revealed**

I’ve been saving hotel key cards for years because I want to see exactly what is on them.

Years ago, somebody told me that hotel room access cards contained personal info and credit card data. The rumor was that this info was necessary for you to charge items to your room during your stay.

I recently got my hands on a magnetic card reader and started swiping all my old cards. The results fit into three categories.

1. 77% of all the cards could not be read at all. This should not be a surprise to anyone who has ever stayed in a hotel with magnetic card keys; some are notoriously poor at holding their magnetic charge. Another reason they may appear blank is that some systems use non-standard data encoding which make it difficult for an ISO card reader to extract information. Whether the charge is weak, distorted or proprietary, specialized card readers may be able to extract data from these cards. Still, that data would likely fall into one of the two following categories.

2. The information on the card is encrypted or written in a proprietary format. 8% of the cards did yield data of this sort. This makes it extremely difficult to see the meaningful data. Even if you could decode the data, it would still likely fall into category three.

3. Most of the data on the card is unreadable to humans. The other 15% of cards were in this group. The only numbers that could be recognized on any given hotel card were the expiration date, which I was able to match up with my checkout dates from old travel confirmation emails. The expiration date is used by the door lock to ignore your card after you’re supposed to be checked out. If you’ve ever tried to get back into your room after checkout time, you have seen this in action.

Here’s what the data on a hotel card looks like. I highlighted the expiration date which is in yy/mm/dd format:

1122725628023063=1012051500001742

From my research, the remaining numbers on the card can include the room number itself, although I didn’t see any cards where this number was evident, along with a code the door lock uses to grant access to the room and sometimes a code used for billing charges to your room. Generally, the door locks are battery powered and don’t have a link to the reservation computer — the key cards are the only external source of data used to unlock the door.

In many cases, if you watch the hotel employee program your card at check-in they use a standalone device that is completely separate from their computer system. The room number, nights of stay and number of cards being issued are punched in before they program your card. If the card programer is integrated with the computer system then it’s likely just to improve speed and reduce human error since the agent wouldn’t have to manually enter your room data.

Card programmers that integrate with the computer system are also popular at resorts where the key card can be used to make room charges. Your actual credit card info is not on the card. That is against the policy of most credit card companies, not to mention it’s unnecessary. As long as the card identifies you, the charges can be added to your bill. I scanned a couple resort cards which could be used for room charges and found no personal data.

The door locks themselves often store a log of which keys accessed the room and when. So, you should still treat your card with care and let the staff know if it’s lost or stolen. You wouldn’t want somebody else to access your room with your key since the log just knows which key was used, not who used it. The hotel staff typically have a unique key so they can be differentiated from you in the log.

The idea that these cards do contain personal info seems to be a myth perpetuated by a misunderstanding of a credit card fraud presentation that suggested any type of magnetic card could be programmed with stolen credit card info. That said, there are some specific claims of personal info being found on hotel key cards. The Pasadena, California police department mentioned one case in it’s retraction about a previous email indicating hotel key cards could be an identity theft risk. The other case was reported by Robert L Mitchell at Computerworld. For legal and business reasons, his source could not provide proof or indicate the names of the hotels where he claimed to find personal info on the key cards.

There is truth to the idea that the cards could have personal data written to them. Technically, you could write any type of data to magnetic cards. In fact, I scanned every magnetic card I could find: credit, debit, loyalty club, membership, etc. All of my bank related cards and one of my airline loyalty cards did have my full name programmed into the magnetic strip.

I wasn’t too worried about that since my name is also on the front of these cards for anyone to read. I shred anything personally identifiable before I throw it out and these cards would be no different. I didn’t find any cards with any personal info magnetically programmed on them that wasn’t also on the front.

All of my results, including the exact percentage of readable cards, match up with Robert L Mitchell’s findings at Computerworld.com. Robert interviewed a number of industry experts and they stated that it is extremely unlikely that any travelers in the US would find personal private information on their hotel key cards. That’s not to say it’s impossible, but they weren’t convinced the probability was high enough for anybody to worry about it.

While most experts agree that current systems are likely very secure, there is suspicion in the industry that very old card key access systems from years past may not have been as secure and these systems may have included personal information on the cards. Although there are a couple unproven claims to the contrary, I cannot find any demonstrable proof that hotel key cards have any personal info on them.

Chad Upton is the editor-in-chief of Broken Secrets and an official Yahoo Answers contributor.

Thanks for reading,

Sources: nytimes, consumer affairs, Computerworld (2005, 2006), snopes.com

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Not a day goes by, on leaving my daughter in daycare, that her little brown eyes don’t well up with tears, looking up at me so sadly, reluctantly removing the buttons of her coat and stomping her feet in protest. I press my lips so hard they bleed sometimes, and force a smile on my face, telling her I’ll be back soon to pick her up and take her to the park (when in reality, in most cases I barely make it home in time for bedtime).

It’s a common dilemma for many mothers – going back to work after the baby. In many cases it’s not a choice, but a financial necessity, yet we are filled with overwhelming guilt. Can I be a good mom and rock at my career?

The guilt, of course, is almost exclusively a female problem.  I have yet to meet a Dad who expresses guilt for having to work and provide for his family. So I work, very hard.  As well as running a few volunteer networking  groups, giving back to the community, regular visits to Granny and all the other things that ‘Momdom’ entails. It’s like keeping the plates spinning – needing organization, patience and coordination.

Like every other Mom, I end up working twice as hard in the workplace, because I face a different type of guilt there -  am I putting in as much time as my non-mom colleagues?   Will skipping Social Happy Hour reflect negatively on me?  I’d rather be home drinking juice with my daughter… but will they think I am not a team player?

Luckily, I work for a company marketing a product that is truly servicing Moms: Recalls Plus is a fantastic new app to help busy Moms by alerting them to any recalls of their kids’ stuff, including vital allergy alerts. It’s a product I really believe in.  But, ironically, a new type of guilt is emerging now.  Why? Because I actually love what I do.

I asked my husband if I was a bad Mom for wanting to steal a precious hour on a Saturday morning to write this blog, instead of making Belgian Waffles from scratch like I usually do?  My husband looked at me stupefied, “What is wrong with Eggo”?

Of course, a good Mom would probably take this opportunity to educate him on all the facts associated with why one must avoid processed food, but instead, I grab our video camera and our daughter, and head out to combine motherhood, playdate and work in this fun new video.

Any thoughts on dealing with “motherhood guilt” would also be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for reading,

Layla – Guest Blogger

Recalls Plus is a Knowledge Partner on Yahoo! Answers.

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