...a driver on the Golden Gate became unconscious and her Jeep Grand Cherokee came to a stop in the second lane from the center divide. John Beatty almost rammed his Ford F-350 into the back of the Jeep, but stopped just in time. The 50-year-old man from Mill Valley, CA then noticed the Jeep began to creep forward and to the left. Realizing it was headed towards the divide and into oncoming traffic, Beatty positioned his truck in front of the SUV so that it would hit him instead of crossing over. He then guided the Jeep across two lanes of road, which had fortunately been cleared of traffic when other drivers began to realize what Beatty was doing. Unfortunately... the unconscious driver of the Jeep eventually died at the hospital. If it hadn't been for Beatty, however, you would've heard about a fatal multi-car accident on the Golden Gate bridge
Friday, November 30, 2007
Good Samaritan Helps Avoid Accident
Color Changing Cars
One of the hardest decisions when picking a new car is choosing the right color but the day when cars will be available in multiple colors could be here sooner than you think. Scientists have developed a new coating called ‘paramagnetic’ paint that has the ability to change colors at the touch of a button. One carmaker looking into the technology is Nissan, which has already developed a self-healing paint.
Before the vehicle is painted, a special polymer containing the special ‘paramagnetic’ iron oxide particles is applied to the car’s body. An applied electric current then adjusts the spacing of small crystals within the iron oxide particles and therefore affects their ability to reflect light and change color.
The process is perfect for metal objects like cars because a continuous small current is needed to maintain the desired color. When the vehicle is switched off, the car returns to a default color of white.
The coating has the ability to reproduce any color visible to the human eye and it takes less than a second to change the entire car. The first commercial applications could be on the market as early as 2010.
More.
Man Arrested and on Sex Offenders List for Having Sex With a Bicycle
Robert Stewart was having sex with a bike in his locked hostel room. Robert said he was drunk and his actions misunderstood but when cleaners knocked and there was no response, they opened the door with a key and saw Robert having sex with a bike. The cleaners called the police, Robert got three years probation and is on the sex offenders list.
John Scott, human rights expert says "the man involved in this case pleaded guilty to a breach of the peace so these issues of privacy weren't considered by the court. ... This case should not prevent people who want to engage in this sort of activity doing so." So, it's still legal to have sex with your bike in the privacy of a room. Just make sure to do it in a locked room, where the locks have no duplicate keys and you are able to hear a knock.
Some things you just can't make up. More.
Speaking of Poo... Poo as a Key for Evolution
The Cambrian period began a little over 500 million years ago. Before the Cambrian period, life on earth consisted of mostly single-celled organisms and bacteria. Afterwards the evolutionary ancestors of all the major groups of living things today were hanging around the planet. So what caused this evolutionary leap? According to one scientist, poop.
Biogeochemist Graham Logan published his opinion on the matter a few years ago. He points out that feces producing creatures, ones that ate food then excreted it like humans today, first arrived around 40 million years before the Cambrian period. He argued that their poo was what allowed oxygen levels to rise, and evolution to explode.
Before the advent of feces producing organisms, bacteria kept oxygen levels low. Plankton produced oxygen, but slowly. When they died, bacteria ate them and used most of the oxygen they produced to digest the dead plankton. This meant less oxygen for everyone else, and when you don’t have a lot of oxygen you’re apparently not going to be using all your energy on evolving into higher life forms.
Here’s where the feces creatures come in. Instead of bacteria eating the plankton bodies, these creatures, with their guts and what have you, would eat the plankton themselves. Then they’d excrete them. The excretions dropped to the ocean floor quickly and the bacteria starved. This meant lower bacteria populations, meaning they used less oxygen so everyone else had more.
More.
The Origin of Fantasy Football
But where did fantasy football come from? What unheralded genius is responsible for making every Sunday afternoon from September to January a national holiday?.
His name is Wilfred Winkenbach.
Winkenbach, an Oakland area businessman and limited partner in the Oakland Raiders, along with Raiders Public Relations manager Bill Tunnel and reporter Scotty Starling developed the rules that eventually became modern fantasy football in the Milford Plaza Hotel during a 1962 team trip to NYC.
When he returned to Oakland, Winkenbach organized the inaugural eight-team league called the GOPPPL (Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Procrastinators League), which consisted of those who were either an administrative affiliate of the AFL, a pro football journalist or someone who has purchased or sold 10 season tickets for the Raiders’ 1963 season.
More.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Artificial Beach -- With a Real Beach 300 Meters Away
The Ocean Dome, the world’s largest indoor beach, Kyushu Island, Japan (about 1,500 kilometers south of Tokyo) — 300 meters in length and 100 meters in width, with a height of 38 meters, it can accommodate 10,000 people.
More.
New plastic optical fiber could solve the "last mile" conundrum
Solving the "last mile" problem is a goal both the telecommunication and cable industries have pursued for years without discovering a single, easily implementable solution. Now, researchers at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology think they have developed a new type of plastic optical fiber that could potentially be used to provide low-cost fiber connectivity from the consumer to the provider.
Plastic optical fiber isn't as fast as traditional glass, but its 2.5GB/s transfer speed still represents a meteoric leap beyond copper. Currently, the majority of optical fiber is prone to breakage (being made from glass), cannot bend, and can be difficult to connect. The Korea Times reports that the new plastic fiber can be easily bent and connected to additional lines, making it useful in hard-to-reach homes or apartments.
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Verizon, in particular, might be interested in plastic optical fibers. The company's FiOS technology runs fiber directly into the home of each subscriber, a choice that was costing the company well in excess of $900 per subscriber as of last March. Verizon has already shown an interest in flexible cable, and announced last summer that it wanted to purchase Corning's new flexible optical fiber as soon as it became available in quantity.
More.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Video Left out From Michael Moore's Sicko
This is a videoclip teaser from the bonusmaterial on the DVD-version of Michel Moores movie Sicko.
This clip was left out of the original movie because it was said to be "unbelivable" and "people wouldnt belive it" because it was too good to be true.
The movie "Sicko" is know for its critque of the US healthcare system and it praised systems in Canada,Uk and France. This praise reaped a storm of protests through the media and big coorporations but as you will see in this video, those countries who were told to be "not as good as MM( michel moore) told them to be", is nothing compared to the legal system and state welfare we have in Norway.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Monday, November 12, 2007
Ron Paul on Drugs - 1988
While I'm not generally on board with a too broad Libertarian view, these comments definitely have merits... and it's also funny.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Huge Offshore Oil Reserve Found in Brazil
A huge offshore oil discovery could raise Brazil's petroleum reserves by a whopping 40 percent and boost this country into the ranks of the world's major exporters, officials said.
The government-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA, or Petrobras, said the new "ultra-deep" Tupi field could hold as much as 8 billion barrels of recoverable light crude, sending Petrobras shares soaring and prompting predictions that Brazil could join the world's "top 10" oil producers.
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"If the best-case scenario happens, this discovery would make Petrobras' reserves overcome those of Shell and Chevron and put Petrobras behind only Exxon and British Petroleum," Cunha said.
Petrobras has a 65 percent operating stake in the field, Britain's BG Group PLC holds 25 percent, and Petroleos de Portugal holds the remaining 10 percent.
More.
Friday, November 09, 2007
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Dolphins Save Shark Attack Victim
Surfer Todd Endris needed a miracle. The shark — a monster great white that came out of nowhere — had hit him three times, peeling the skin off his back and mauling his right leg to the bone.
That’s when a pod of bottlenose dolphins intervened, forming a protective ring around Endris, allowing him to get to shore, where quick first aid provided by a friend saved his life.
More.
Here's a related, humorous take from the Onion: Dolphins Evolve Opposable Thumbs.
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Wine Tasting - What We Experience is Not What We Sense
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So much for objectivity. But results like this shouldn't be surprising. I've blogged about this before, but it's such a cool experiment that it's worth repeating. In 2001, Frederic Brochet, of the University of Bordeaux, conducted two separate and very mischievous experiments. In the first test, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn't stop the experts from describing the "red" wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its "jamminess," while another enjoyed its "crushed red fruit." Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine.
The second test Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle was a fancy grand-cru. The other bottle was an ordinary vin du table. Despite the fact that they were actually being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the differently labeled bottles nearly opposite ratings. The grand cru was "agreeable, woody, complex, balanced and rounded," while the vin du table was "weak, short, light, flat and faulty". Forty experts said the wine with the fancy label was worth drinking, while only 12 said the cheap wine was.
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What these experiments neatly demonstrate is that the taste of a wine, like the taste of everything, is not merely the sum of our inputs, and cannot be solved in a bottom-up fashion. It cannot be deduced by beginning with our simplest sensations and extrapolating upwards. When we taste a wine, we aren't simply tasting the wine. This is because what we experience is not what we sense. Rather, experience is what happens when our senses are interpreted by our subjective brain, which brings to the moment its entire library of personal memories and idiosyncratic desires.
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More.
Tobacco Lung Damage Caused by Radiation?
It's not tobacco's tar which kills, but the radiation!
Cannabis is often compared to tobacco, with the damage caused by smoking tobacco given as a reason to prohibit use of cannabis. Yet most of the harms caused by tobacco use are due not to tar, but to the use of radioactive fertilizers. Surprisingly, radiation seems to be the most dangerous and important factor behind tobacco lung damage.
It's a well established but little known fact that commercially grown tobacco is contaminated with radiation. The major source of this radiation is phosphate fertilizer.1 The big tobacco companies all use chemical phosphate fertilizer, which is high in radioactive metals, year after year on the same soil. These metals build up in the soil, attach themselves to the resinous tobacco leaf and ride tobacco trichomes in tobacco smoke, gathering in small "hot spots" in the small-air passageways of the lungs.2 Tobacco is especially effective at absorbing radioactive elements from phosphate fertilizers, and also from naturally occurring radiation in the soil, air, and water.3
To grow what the tobacco industry calls "more flavorful" tobacco, US farmers use high-phosphate fertilizers. The phosphate is taken from a rock mineral, apatite, that is ground into powder, dissolved in acid and further processed. Apatite rock also contains radium, and the radioactive elements lead 210 and polonium 210. The radioactivity of common chemical fertilizer can be verified with a Geiger-Mueller counter and an open sack of everyday 13-13-13 type of fertilizer (or any other chemical fertilizer high in phosphate content).4
Conservative estimates put the level of radiation absorbed by a pack-and-a-half a day smoker at the equivalent of 300 chest X-rays every year.5 The Office of Radiation, Chemical & Biological Safety at Michigan State University reports that the radiation level for the same smoker was as high as 800 chest X-rays per year.6 Another report argues that a typical nicotine user might be getting the equivalent of almost 22,000 chest X-rays per year.7
US Surgeon General C Everett Koop stated on national television in 1990 that tobacco radiation is probably responsible for 90% of tobacco-related cancer.8 Dr RT Ravenholt, former director of World Health Surveys at the Centers for Disease Control, has stated that "Americans are exposed to far more radiation from tobacco smoke than from any other source."9
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More.
Monday, November 05, 2007
WTF? Is Iran an Iraq Deja Vu?
Déjà Vu All Over Again
The US is smearing IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei for not finding evidence of Iranian nuclear weapons. Sound familiar?
by Ian Williams
When it comes to Iran’s nuclear capabilities, whose word would you rather take: that of a Nobel prize-winning head of an international agency specializing in nuclear issues who was proved triumphantly right about Iraq, or that of a bunch of belligerent neocons who make no secret of their desire to whack Iran at the earliest opportunity and who made such a pigs ear of Iraq?
That is the stark choice facing the sane people of the world, given the smearing of IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei for not joining the hysterical lynch mob building up against Iran. Criticised by Condoleezza Rice and others in the Bush administration, it is uncannily reminiscent of the slurs against him and UN weapons inspector Hans Blix in the run up to the invasion of Iraq - and we should remember that the US vindictively tried to unseat him afterwards for not joining in the lying game.
ElBaradei is hardly acting as cheerleader for the Iranians. He says that his inspectors have not seen “any concrete evidence that there is a parallel military program,” though he could not yet swear to its absence. But he does believe that our issues with Iran can be resolved through negotiations - in which it would help if the US were not implicitly threatening war. But it looks as though we have reached a similar stage to when Saddam let in the inspectors. When they found no WMDs Washington cried foul, ordered the UN inspectors out and sent the troops in. The US and its allies will not accept anything short of regime change in Teheran - no matter what ordinary Iranians might want and what the IAEA says.
The only difference from last time is that France has defected, and France’s opposition to the war in Iraq was as much because of Saddam’s oil contracts with Total and Elf-Aquitaine as any deep attachment to international law. Teheran should sign a contract immediately!
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More.
How Global Warming May Cause the Next Ice Age
How Global Warming May Cause the Next Ice Age...
by Thom Hartmann
While global warming is being officially ignored by the political arm of the Bush administration, and Al Gore's recent conference on the topic during one of the coldest days of recent years provided joke fodder for conservative talk show hosts, the citizens of Europe and the Pentagon are taking a new look at the greatest danger such climate change could produce for the northern hemisphere - a sudden shift into a new ice age. What they're finding is not at all comforting.
In quick summary, if enough cold, fresh water coming from the melting polar ice caps and the melting glaciers of Greenland flows into the northern Atlantic, it will shut down the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe and northeastern North America warm. The worst-case scenario would be a full-blown return of the last ice age - in a period as short as 2 to 3 years from its onset - and the mid-case scenario would be a period like the "little ice age" of a few centuries ago that disrupted worldwide weather patterns leading to extremely harsh winters, droughts, worldwide desertification, crop failures, and wars around the world.
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Most scientists involved in research on this topic agree that the culprit is global warming, melting the icebergs on Greenland and the Arctic icepack and thus flushing cold, fresh water down into the Greenland Sea from the north. When a critical threshold is reached, the climate will suddenly switch to an ice age that could last minimally 700 or so years, and maximally over 100,000 years.
And when might that threshold be reached? Nobody knows - the action of the Great Conveyor Belt in defining ice ages was discovered only in the last decade. Preliminary computer models and scientists willing to speculate suggest the switch could flip as early as next year, or http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifit may be generations from now. It may be wobbling right now, producing the extremes of weather we've seen in the past few years.
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Do read more.
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Daniel Tammet - Savant Genius
Daniel Tammet. A twenty-something with extraordinary mental abilities, Daniel is one of the world’s few ... all » savants. He can do calculations to 100 decimal places in his head, and learn a language in a week. This documentary follows Daniel as he travels to America to meet the scientists who are convinced he may hold the key to unlocking similar abilities in everyone. He also meets the world’s most famous savant, the man who inspired Dustin Hoffman’s character in the Oscar winning film ‘Rain Man’. (2005)
Very interesting. It's great to see someone who was lucky to be a Savant but not autistic, so he can actually explain what he perceives in his mind. At around 17 mins, he explains what numbers "feel" like to him: 1 is like someone "flashing a light on his face", 2 is "a movement from right to left, kind of a like a drifting motion", 5 is like a "thunder, a clap", 6 is like a "hole or a chasm"... every number up to 10 thousand he perceives like a distinctive sinesthetic impression.
Here's his interpretation of Pi:
Effective Swedish HIV Vaccine
Unique Results from Swedish Study of HIV vaccine
A Swedish HIV vaccine study conducted by researchers at Karolinska Institutet (KI), Karolinska University Hospital and the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control (SMI) has produced surprisingly good results. Over 90 per cent of the subjects in the phase 1 trials developed an immune response to HIV.
"Never has such a good result been seen with a vaccine of this type," says Professor Eric Sandström, Chief Physician at Karolinska University Hospital.
The trial subjects were vaccinated on three occasions with this vaccine using a needle-free method of injection. In order to enhance the effect, the researchers also gave the subjects a fourth dose of a vaccine in which parts of the HIV virus DNA had been integrated into another virus (vaccinia = the cowpox virus). This vaccine-based HIV vaccine is produced by the USA's National Institutes of Health and was donated for use in this Swedish study.
"Our vaccine is designed in such a way that it's able to protect against many of the circulating HIV types in Africa and the West," says Professor Britta Wahren at the SMI/KI.
Over 90 per cent of the trial subjects developed an immune response to HIV, and the vaccines have been tolerated well.
For further information, please contact:
Gunnel Biberfeld, Professor of Immunology, SMI and KI. Phone: +46-8-457 26 60, +46-73-346 26 60. E-mail: gunnel.biberfeld@smi.ki.se
Eric Sandström, Professor of Dermatovenerology, Chief Physician at Karolinska University Hospital. Phone: +46-8-616 25 71, +46-70-484 60 37. E-mail: eric.sandstrom@karolinska.se
Britta Wahren, Professor of Virology, SMI and KI. Phone:+46-8-457 26 30, +46-70-674 15 27. E-mail: britta.wahren@smi.ki.se
Last modified by: Jenny Hermansson 2006-08-31
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Warren Buffet Says: Rich Should Not Pay Lower Taxes
Multi-billionaire Warren Buffett has been complaining for years that his taxes are too low. Last June, he said at a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton that he was taxed at only 17.7% last year on his $46 million in income, while his secretary paid 30% of her $60,000.
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"The taxation system has tilted toward the rich and away from the middle class in the last 10 years," Buffett, the nation's third richest man, told Brokaw. Buffett said he did an informal survey of federal taxes paid by his own office staff, and the average was 32.9%, compared to his 17.7%.
"There wasn't anybody in the office, from the receptionists on, that paid as low a tax rate," Buffett stated, noting that "I have no tax planning, I don't have an accountant, I don't have tax shelters."
Bless his heart.
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