Beautiful skeleton advertisement
This Craftsman advertisement drives me wild. I wish I had this skeleton made from tools hanging in my house.
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There’s more truth to “7 minutes in heaven”
So what do you think? Did they get the timing right?
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Settlement in case of child who developed autistic symptoms after being vaccinated
Hannah Poling is a nine year old girl with mild to moderate symptoms of autism, which developed three months after she received vaccinations. The Department of Health and Human Services announced that her family will receive a settlement from the vaccine compensation fund. Autism activists are encouraged, but the DHHS officials insist they are not admitting a link between autism and vaccines and maintain that for most, vaccines are safe. Rather, they say, the series of vaccines Hannah received exacerbated an underlying mitochondrial condition, causing the symptoms of autism.
Hannah had a mutation in a gene which controlled mitochondrial function. When she received the immunizations, the DHHS concluded, this mutation was aggravated, predisposed her to deficits in energy metabolism, and ultimately caused brain damage with “features of autism spectrum disorder“.
For the nearly 5,000 autistic individuals and their families seeking compensation from the special fund, it is unclear whether Hannah’s case represents an opportunity or not. The cases are reviewed by a special court None of the 950 claims the special fund has paid out since it was created by Congress in 1988 have been for autism. Officials insist that this case is no different from other claims paid out by the fund in the past.
The cases are before a special “vaccine court” that doles out cash from a fund Congress set up to pay people injured by vaccines and to protect makers from damages as a way to help ensure an adequate vaccine supply. The burden of proof is lighter than in a traditional court, and is based on a preponderance of evidence. Since the fund started in 1988, it has paid roughly 950 claims — none for autism.
The document released by the DHHS focuses on the rare mitochondrial disorder. It does not raise the issue of the organomercury preservative Thimerosal used in many vaccines, which many autism activists believe has a link to autism. Instead, the document states that the “five vaccines the girl received on one day in 2000 aggravated her mitochondrial condition, predisposing her to metabolic problems that manifested as worsening brain function with features of autism spectrum disorder”. DHHS officials claim that Hannah’s is a unique case, and that the underlying condition she had is very rare.
Neurologist Jon Poling (MD/PhD), Hannah’s father, who co-authored a paper in the Journal of Child Neurology on his daughter’s case does not agree, saying: “I don’t think Hannah’s case is as unique as many experts believe.” Some believe that autism could in fact be a mitochondrial disease. A study of 69 Portuguese children conducted in 2005 and published in the journal of Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology found that five had mitochondrial abnormalities.
Interestingly, Dr. Poling says that he still supports giving vaccines to children. “Each treatment has a risk and a benefit,” Dr. Poling says.
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Funny tech support transcripts
David Pogue of the NY Times visited a tech suppport center, and they gave him a CD with recordings of their favorite funny phone calls.
Caller: Hey, can you help me? My computer has locked up, and no matter how many times I type eleven, it won’t unfreeze.
Agent: What do you mean, “type eleven?”
Caller: The message on my screen says, “Error Type 11!”
—
On one call, the caller seemed to be taking an inordinately long time to complete each instruction she was given.
Agent: Ma’am, I can’t help noticing that every time I give you an instruction, it takes a really long time before you get back to me. Is your computer that slow?
Caller: Oh, no, it’s just the stupid, stupid design of this computer. Every time I want to click something, I have to unplug the keyboard to plug in the mouse. And then every time I want to use the keyboard again, I have to unplug the mouse. Because there’s only one jack.
Agent: Ma’am, you do realize that there’s a jack on the keyboard itself? You’re supposed to plug the mouse into the keyboard, and the keyboard into the computer.
Caller: Are YOU KIDDING ME!? Oh, wait a minute–yes, I see it now! Oh, holy cow. That’s going to be so much easier!
Agent: Just out of curiosity, how long have you been using your computer that way?
Caller: Six weeks!
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Will the 2008 Election Be Cancelled?
“War with Iran – unfortunately, not so far-fetched. The National Intelligence Estimate released in December concluded that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program back in 2003. But when have Bush and Cheney ever based their foreign policy decisions on evidence? Moreover, the most important reason they want to attack Iran is to control the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf, nukes or no nukes.
The assassination of a presidential candidate. Obama evokes memories of JFK and Martin Luther King. The bullet could come from a lone racist, a terrorist, or an agent of a state. The threat is real. The Secret Service knows it and so should we.
A terrorist strike, on the scale of 9/11 or worse. Again, not so far-fetched. Bush and Cheney have been Osama bin Laden’s greatest recruiters, making the U.S. appear to be the enemy of millions across the world. Al Qaeda may consider that regime change in the U.S. is not in their interest.”
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Men who do housework may get more sex
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Red-Eyed Asian Girl Follows Your Cursor
http://www.motionportrait.com/about/TIminoriHair.swf
MotionPortrait.com.. this is prob the best remapping apps I’ve seen in recent years.
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I found a shower gift…
Lisa Congdon turned her scissor collection into a gorgeous mobile —
think of the incredible mental scars you could leave on your child by
hanging this over her crib!
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Why free reading is important
Neil Gaiman’s got some good further ruminations on the nature and
reason for free ebooks in a post he called “The nature of free.” Bottom
line: low-risk/low-cost books are how readers discover new authors, and
the biggest threat writers face is the overall unpopularity of reading
books, not people reading for free. The more barriers there are to
reading, the worse the former gets.
During one of the interviews recently, a reporter said something like, “Of course, a real publisher wouldn’t give away paper books,” and I pointed out that 3,000 copies of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy were given away by Douglas Adams’ publisher, with a ‘write in and get your free book’ ad in Rolling Stone.
They wanted copies of HHGTTG on campuses in the US, and they wanted
people to read it and tell other people. Word of mouth is still the
best tool for selling books.
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Happy belated valentines…
Also, a nice valentines meal… of sorts…
Damn, I love UK commercials…
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Free download of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods
Neil Gaiman’s publisher Harper Collins has put his magnificent novel American Gods online for free reading as an experiment to see free digital copies sell print books.
This is a great idea — it’s really exciting to see publishers trying to get actual data about the market, rather than simply condemning all copying as piracy and hoping that the Internet just goes away.
However, I think that Harper Collins got this one wrong. They’ve put the text of American Gods up in a wrapper that loads pictures of the pages from the printed book, one page at a time, with no facility for offline reading. The whole thing runs incredibly slowly and is unbelievably painful to use. I think we can be pretty sure that no one will read this version instead of buying the printed book — but that’s only because practically no one is going to read this version, period.
The fact is that the full text of American Gods has been online for years, and can be located with a single Google query. I managed to buy/download the entire text of the book in less time than it took me to get the Harper Collins edition to load the first page of Chapter One (literally!). The “security” that Harper Collins has bought with its clunky, kudgey experiment is nonexistent: pirates will just go get the pirate edition.
Unfortunately, the “security” has also undermined the experiment’s value as a tool for getting better intelligence about the market. This isn’t going to cost Neil any sales, but it’s also not going to buy him any. We take our books home and read them in a thousand ways, in whatever posture, room, and conditions we care to. No one chains our books to our desks and shows us a single page at a time. This experiment simulates a situation that’s completely divorced from the reality of reading for pleasure. As an experiment, this will prove nothing about ebooks either way.
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Brief books in style
Brief books are in style. “Fine, old-fashioned self-improving middlebrow literature.”
Series mentioned:
*Penguin Lives (Penguin Group)
*Books That Changed the World (Grove/Atlantic)
*Eminent Lives (HarperCollins)
*Ackroyd’s Brief Lives (Doubleday)
*The Canongate Myth Series (Canongate)
*The art of .. (Graywolf Press)
*Great Generals Series (Palgrave
*The American Presidents Series (Times Books)
*National Geographic Directions (National Geographic)
*Jewish Encounters (Next Books)
*Very Short Introductions (Oxford University Press)
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Don’t you die on me man!
Experience the thrills of amateur surgery as you play Amateur Surgeon over at Adult Swim . You’ll be performing transplants with a chainsaw, suturing wounds with staples and shocking patients back to life with a car battery.
I’ve been playing this all week. Uber fun
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Woman vs Desert Eagle
Haha, hot chick, but damn, test fire with blanks first so you dont blow somebodys head off with that damn thing.
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New ‘Iron Man’ Trailer Continues Clever Use of ‘Iron Man’ in Soundtrack
As much I find Iron Man and his glib alter ego Tony Stark to be intolerable characters, I have to admit that Jon Favreau looks to have made a decent adaptation of the source material. And with a non-stop barrage of hard rock (AC/DC, Audioslave, Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man”, of course), constant alcohol imbibing, and the flagrant use of sports cars as backdrops, Iron Man looks to be the first superhero movie to fully capture the sensibilities of Maxim Magazine. The biggest surprise isn’t that this looks like a surefire hit but that they didn’t put Gwyneth Paltrow in a bikini. Make sure to watch this if you’re a male 13 to 35. Otherwise, you’re totally going to look like a gay..
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Tampires are out to suck your blood….
Tampires – The tampons that want to suck your blood.
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Quantum Mechanics: Myths and Facts
Quantum Mechanics: Myths and Facts (pdf), a recently-updated paper on the Cornell arXiv peer-review site. By Hrvoje Nikolić of the Rudjer Bošković Institute in Croatia.
Note: the presence of a paper on arXiv does not necessarily mean it has been reviewed and is not equivalent to having been published in a journal.
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An optical illusion
Stare at the dot for 30 seconds. Then, without moving your eyes, move the mouse over the image. The image will look like it’s in color until you move your eyes. (How make your own | More examples)
RobDurdle.com 
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