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Establishing a workout routine is a great way to get in shape. The issue you may have is not knowing about what you can do to workout because you do not have the proper equipment in your home. This is when you may want to have some tips on how to find the best exercise bike to provide you with a great workout all the time.

The first thing you need to look for is the brand of the machine you will be working out on. By knowing about the brand name, you can determine how long it will last for you, but also know if this is going to be the best model for your needs.

You should also consider different types of workouts. Knowing which workouts work best for you and your lifestyle will ensure that you are completing a proper workout. For example, some of these exercise bikes will have a workout designed by a professional and these can really be situated to help you become in better shape in the long run. However, you may find some of the workouts allow you to make some modifications to the workout to better suit your needs and conditions.

Enjoying your workouts can be a hard thing to do when the workouts are at the gym. However, if you know how to properly select an exercise bike, it is easy for you to find the one which will suit your needs and know you are going to get in shape while using it, in the convenience of your home.

Six conferences have league championship games on tap this weekend ... among them the Pac-12, Southeastern Conference and Conference USA

Pac-12

In order to get a bead on their opponent Stanford and UCLA have to think all the way back to ... last Saturday.  Yes, the same two teams meet for the second time in six days.  That's one of the downfalls of having a conference title game ... not just the chance of a rematch, but an immediate rematch.

When the teams met last weekend, Stanford put a 35-17 hurt on the Bruins, and that was in Los Angeles, and the rematch in is Palo Alto.  The winner gets the conference spot in the Rose Bowl, even though Oregon will have a higher ranking.

Anything can happen in rematches, but the Cardinal are playing well.  They derailed the seasons of both USC and Oregon when they were highly ranked, and fell in overtime to current No. 1 Notre Dame.  Look for Stanford to get the roses.

SEC

Alabama made the most of its second chance last year, when the Tide rose to No. 2 in the BCS standings despite a loss, and then won its rematch with LSU in the national title game.  Well, 2012 could be repeat.

There's 'Bama back at No. 2 in the BCS despite its loss at home to Texas A&M.  All the Tide has to do to return to the BCS championship is defeat Georgia in the SEC title match.

The Bulldogs had to overcome an even uglier loss -- a 35-7 slapdown from South Carolina -- but they rallied with a signature win over Florida, 17-9, to put themselves back in the title picture.

But expect Alabama to remove the Dawgs from title contention again, as Georgia's season outside of the Florida win doesn't seem to warrant its lofty ranking.

Conference USA

Is this oddly monikered conference still around?  Why, yes ... it is.  It's the place the Big East goes to restock its depleted ranks.

Two teams tied for first in the East:  Central Florida (headed to the Big East) and East Carolina (also headed to the Big East).  UCF won the tiebreaker, and earned a spot in the title game against Tulsa (not headed to the Big East).  The Golden Hurrican finished two games ahead of SMU (headed to the Big East ... you get the idea).

Tulsa can strike a blow for the "not-headed-to-the-Big-East" teams, if there are any other ones (OK ...  I guess Rice and Texas-El Paso), with a win, so they're the pick.

              The Manhattan Project to create nuclear bomb during the early 1940s was successful. Two bombs were created, one based on the fission of uranium-235 called “Little Boy” and a second based on the fission of plutonium-239 called “Fat Man”. Upon completion of the bombs in the summer of 1945, the U.S. President, Harry Truman was faced with making the decision of whether such terribly destructive weapons should be deployed in World War II which had been raging for years in Europe and Asia. The war in Europe ended in May of 1945 but the war with Japan in the Pacific continued.

             The U.S. had driven the Japanese out of Okinawa and Iwo Jima but they still had an army of two million in their home islands. The U.S. had demanded an unconditional surrender from the Japanese government threatening “total destruction” if the Japanese refused. The Japanese did refuse but there were hints that they would consider a conditional surrender.

            Truman said that his decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan was a purely military decision. It was estimated that if the United States staged an amphibious landing on the coasts of Japan over a million U.S. soldiers would be killed. Truman was dedicated to ending the war as quickly as possible to save both American and Japanese lives. Some of his advisors suggested a demonstration of the power of the atomic bomb to persuade the Japanese military of the futility of continuing the conflict. Truman decided against it because there was no guarantee that a successful test would end the war and an unsuccessful test might embolden the Japanese to keep fighting.

           Some critics claimed that Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan were motivated by racism and that he would never have dropped such bombs on Europeans. Other critics suggested that Truman wanted to end the war quickly so that the Russians would not have an opportunity to invade the heavily industrialized northern Japanese islands. Considering what happened in Eastern Europe after the Russians beat back the Germans, this may have been a realistic fear. Other say that Truman wanted to intimidate the Russians and that the explosions of the atomic bombs were really the opening shots in the Cold War.

          In August 6 of 1945, Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan and Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan on August 9. On August  14, the Supreme War Council of Japan surrendered unconditionally. Although great destruction had been wrought by firebombing raids over Tokyo, the sheer fury of the atomic explosions and the fact that all that destructive potential was delivered in a pair of relatively small bombs.

         Truman succeeded in ending the war in Asia with the use of the atomic bombs. He also hurled the human race into the nuclear arms race and the threat of the annihilation of human civilization that continues to this day.

President Harry S. Truman:

Harry S Truman.PNG

Whenever a severe thunderstorm is roaring over the apartment building I live in, my ears prick in anticipation of a certain sound that can get mixed with the noise of rain drumming on the roof and walls like it was pouring out of a fire hose. Whenever the storm begins to fade and I still have not heard it, I am relieved, because the sound of hail has not come.

Whenever my ears do pick it up amidst the sound of gushing water and claps of thunder, the sound hail makes as it hits and rebounds off the shingles is like that of a million golf balls. Sometimes if it is light enough outside, I can even see it coming thanks to hail giving severe thunderstorms a greenish tint.  

Whenever it falls, it leaves behind sights like the one above, and it is an ugly sight, since frozen ice pelting the earth in the warmer months is does not make a pretty picture.  

The damage it leaves behind is even uglier.  Hail can batter cars, aircraft, glass roofs, skylights, roofs in general and even crops. Animals and humans too are vulnerable, and no wonder: imagine getting bonked on the head by a piece of hail the size of a grapefruit! It would give you no end of pain, maybe even be a cause of death.  And this stuff can get up to the size of bowling balls if the severe thunderstorm spitting it out is strong enough.

The ugliest-looking of this ugly gift severe thunderstorms can give are the larger-sized hail stones that have spikes all over them.   They make my skin crawl, because they look like a caricature of a snowflake.

To date, I have only seen hail as large as a golf ball, but that is no picnic, especially when your car is parked outdoors, vulnerable to the elements. Good luck has been with me, however, in that I have not had to deal with the chaos of an automobile with windows shattered and body so badly dented by hail as to look like it had been set on by a horde of vandals.

I have not (nor ever will) let my guard down whenever I hear hail rebounding off my roof, though, and will always race to see if my car is all right. With hail –as in all forms of severe weather- you never know what it will do until it is right on top of you.