Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Who Invented Hair Weave?

Christina JenkinsChristina's Technique

  • Jenkins technique for adding hair extensions was extremely time-consuming. This method entailed sewing locks of hair on netting and braiding hair in cornrows. Once the hair was sewn on the netting, the netting was attacked to the cornrows in the hair. After all of the steps had been followed, like most synthetic hairpieces of the time, the finished products looked fake and bulky. However, her hair weave invention became the stepping stone for advancements in hair weaving techniques.

1980s

  • In the 1980s, hair dressers improved Jenkins' hair weave invention by creating hair that looked natural and flowed, instead of being stiff and unmovable. According to The Encyclopedia of Hair by Victoria Sherrow, African-American women wanted longer, straight natural looking hair that moved as they walked. Some types of hair weaves, such as those using smaller cornrows, are barely detectable.

Human Hair

  • The rise in people opting for hair weaves made of human hair created a boom in the industry by the end of the 1990s. Asian countries like China, India, Indonesia, and Korea are the largest exporters of human hair used for hair weaving in the United States.
  • Hair historians, such as Lori L. Tharps and Ayana D. Byrd, state that in 1950, an Ohio housewife and hairdresser named Christina Jenkins invented hair weaves and patented her unique hair weaving technique. Jenkins, the wife of a jazz musician, thought it would be more feasible to sew hair directly to the head instead of weaving hair together and attaching it to the scalp with pins.

Christina's Hair Weave

  • Christina Jenkins and her husband Duke established a company called Christina's Hair Weaves in the early 1950s. During the company's zenith, people from around the world wanted to learn from the woman who invented hair weaves, and these individuals paid her to come to their countries to teach her unique weaving technique. 

Monday, May 19, 2014

Kool-Aid

This internationally known soft drink mix, now owned by Kraft Foods, actually started out as a liquid concentrate called Fruit Smack, invented by Edwin Perkins.
Edwin Perkins was always fascinated by chemistry and enjoyed inventing things. When his family moved to southwest Nebraska around 1900, a young Perkins experimented with home made concoctions in his mother’s kitchen. His father opened a General Store in Hendley, Nebraska, and it was in that store where Edwin became entranced with a new dessert mix introduced by a childhood friend (and future wife) Kitty Shoemaker. The popular powdered dessert came in six delicious flavors and was called Jell-O.
Edwin convinced his father to carry the dessert line in his store. It was at this same time Edwin sent away for a kit called “How to Become a Manufacturer.” During the following years, Perkins graduated from high school, published a weekly newspaper, did job printing, served as postmaster and set up a mail order business called “Perkins Products Co.” to market the numerous products he had invented.In 1918, Perkins married his childhood sweetheart, Kitty, and developed a remedy to kick the tobacco habit called Nix-O-Tine. By 1920, the demand for this and other products was so great, Perkins and his wife moved to Hastings, which had better rail service for shipping purposes.
Another product that was proving to be popular was a concentrated drink mix called Fruit Smack. Fruit Smack, like Jell-O, came in six delicious flavors. The four-ounce bottle made enough for a family to enjoy at an affordable price. However, shipping the bottles proved to be costly and breakage was also a problem. In 1927, Perkins developed a method of removing the liquid from Fruit Smack so the remaining powder could be re-packaged in envelopes (which Perkins designed and printed) under a new name to be calledKool-Ade. (He later changed the spelling to Kool-Aid.)
The product, which sold for 10¢ a packet, was first sold to wholesale grocery, candy and other suitable markets by mail order in six flavors; strawberry, cherry, lemon-lime, grape, orange and raspberry. In 1929, Kool-Aid was distributed nation-wide to grocery stores by food brokers. It was a family project to package and ship the popular soft drink mix around the country.

Where did Colors' Name Come From?

Black
Black derives from words invariably meaning the color black, as well as dark, ink and “to burn.”
Originally meaning, burning, blazing, glowing and shining, in PIE it was *bhleg. This was changed to *blakkaz in Proto-Germanic, to blaken in Dutch and blaec, in Old English. This last word, blaec, also meant ink, as did blak (Old Saxon) and black (Swedish).
The color was called blach in Old High German and written blaec in Old English. One final meaning, dark (also blaec in Old English) derived from the Old Norse blakkr.
White
White began its life in PIE as *kwintos and meant simply white or bright. This had changed to *khwitz in Proto-Germanic, and later languages transformed it into hvitr (Old Norse), hwit (Old Saxon) and wit (Dutch). By the time Old English developed, the word was kwit.
Red
In PIE, red was *reudh and meant red and ruddy. In Proto-Germanic, red was *rauthaz, and in its derivative languages raudr (Old Norse), rod (Old Saxon) and rØ(Danish). In Old English, it was written read.
Green
Meaning grow in PIE, it was *ghre. Subsequent languages wrote it grene (Old Frisian), graenn (Old Norse) and grown (Dutch). In Old English, it was grene and meant the color green as well as young and immature.
Yellow
Thousands of years ago, yellow was considered to be closely related to green, and in PIE it was *ghel and meant both yellow and green. In Proto-Germanic, the word was *gelwaz. Subsequent incarnations of German had the word as gulr (Old Norse), gel (Middle High German) and gelo (Old High German). As late as Old English, yellow was written geolu and geolwe
Blue
Blue was also often confused with yellow back in the day. The PIE word was *bhle-was and meant “light-colored, blue, blond yellow” and had its root as bhel which meant to shine. In Proto-Germanic, the word was *blaewaz, and in Old English, it was blaw.
English also gets some of its words from French, and blue is one of them. In Old French (one of the vulgar Latin dialects whose height was between the 9th and 13th centuries AD) blue was written bleu and blew and meant a variety of things including the color blue.
Brown
Derived from the Old Germanic for either or both a dark color and a shining darkness (brunoz and bruna),brown is a recent addition to our language. In Old English it was brun or brune, and its earliest known writing was in about 1000 AD.
Purple
This word also skipped the PIE and seems to have sprung up in the 9th century AD, in Old English aspurpul. Burrowed from the Latin word purpura, purple originally meant alternately, “purple color, purple-dyed cloak, purple dye . . . a shellfish from which purple was made . . . [and] splendid attire generally.”
Orange
This color’s name derives from the Sanskrit word for the fruit naranga. (Yes, the color orange was named after the fruit, not the other way around). This transformed into the Arabic and Persian naranj, and by the time of Old French to pomme d’orenge. It was originally recorded in English as the name of the color in 1512.  Before then, the English speaking world referred to the orange color as geoluhread, which literally translates to “yellow-red.”
Pink
One of the most recent colors to gain a name, pink was first recorded as describing the “pale rose color” in 1733. In the 16th century, pink was the common named to describe a plant whose petals had a variety of colors (Dianthus), and it originally may have come from a Dutch word of the same spelling that meant small.

Crazy Week

How My Week Plans Out :
1st Period: Test And Movie
2nd Period: Essay
3rd Period: Project And Study Review Guide
4th Period: Notes Notes Notes
5th Period: Outline Textbook
6th Period: Read
7th Period: Study Review

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Being Left-Handed

For the left-handed people of the world, life isn’t easy. Throughout much of history, massive stigmas attached to left-handedness meant they were singled out as everything from unclean to witches. In Medieval times, writing with your left-hand was a surefire way to be accused of being possessed by the devil; after all, the devil himself was thought to be a lefty. The world has gotten progressively more accepting of left-handed folk, but there are still some undeniable bummers associated with a left-handed proclivity: desks and spiral notebooks pose a constant battle, scissors are all but impossible to use and–according to some studies–life-expectancy might be lower than for right-handed people.
What makes humanity’s bias against lefties all the more unfair is that left-handed people are born that way. In fact, scientists have speculated for years that a single gene could control a left-right preference in humans. Unfortunately, they just couldn’t pinpoint exactly where the gene might lie.
Now, in a paper published today in PLOS Genetics a group of researchers have identified a network of genes that relate to handedness in humans. What’s more, they’ve linked this preference to the development of asymmetry in the body and the brain.
In previous studies, the researchers observed that patients with dyslexia exhibited a correlation between the gene PCSK6 and handedness. Because every gene has two copies (known as alleles), every gene has two chances for mutation; what the researches found was that dyslexic patients with more variance in PCSK6–meaning that one or both of their PSCK6 alleles had mutated–were more likely to be right-handed.
The research team found this especially interesting, because they knew that PCSK6 was a gene directly associated with the development of left-right asymmetry in the body. They weren’t sure why this would present itself only in dyslexic patients, as dyslexia and handedness are not related. So the team expanded the study to include more than 2,600 people who don’t have dyslexia.
The study found that PCSK6 didn’t work alone in affecting handedness in the general population. Other genes, also responsible for creating left-right asymmetry in the body, were strongly associated with handedness. Like PCSK6, the effect that these genes have on handedness depends on how many mutations the alleles undergo. Each gene has the potential for mutation–the more mutations a person has in any one direction (toward right handedness or left handedness) the more likely they are to use that hand as their dominant hand, or so the researchers speculate.



Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-are-some-people-left-handed-6556937/#GmmcyZmHiDHgmBlR.99
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How Did Crayola Get It's Name?

The Crayola Company was originally named Binney & Smith after its founders, who started it in 1885. They began making products such as red pigment for barn paint and carbon black for car tires. Soon they started producing school products, and made the first dustless school chalk which was a big hit. 

They noticed that there was a need among students for safe and affordable, but still quality, wax crayons, and so the first box of Crayola crayons was made. Binney's wife Alice made up the name, which came from the French words "craie" (chalk) and "oleagineaux"/"oleaginous" in English (meaning oily). 

Soon they made even more art products, like paints and sharpenable fine art crayons. Over the years the company focused on art products and sold the pigment part of their company in 1955 while acquiring several other art product companies. They finally consolidated them all under the Crayola brand name in 1979.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Personal Pet Peeves

1. People who sit next to you on public transportation even when there are other seats available.
2. People that interrupt you when your telling a story and then they continue to tell you their story and then ask you in an uninterested tone to continue on with your story when they are finished talking. 
3. People who take forever to order food while I'm in line.
4. When you're eating candy and someone asks if they can have a certain color.
5. People who chew with their mouth and pretend they don't know they are.
6. You know when you ask someone a simple, straightforward question and they spend ten solid minutes rambling on about everything in the world EXCEPT the answer to your simple, straightforward question? 
7. When someone you don't know join in your conversation, like you're friends. -_-
8. When you find a really cute piece of clothing on the rack and they have like twenty in size XS, two in size 3X, and not a single one in your size.
9. Unexpected company. 
10. When teachers don't post the rigt grade....... Or no grade at all. 
11. People who don't dress their age
 12. When you have to borrow your own item back from someone. 
13. Skinny jeans on men
14. Girls who wear way too much make up. KILL IT! 
15. When someone is writing on a chalkboard and then they erase it to write something new, but they don't erase all of it, so you still see half of a letter here and there. 16. How hard it is to open a new music CD.
 17. When people walk extremely slow in front of you, like the time stops for them. 
18. When you tell someone stop and they think you're playing so they still keep doing it. 
19. People that come up to you and say "Do you remember me?" .. Obviously Not!!
20. PEOPLE ..