lunes, 18 de abril de 2011

Depressed man eats own finger

Depressed man eats own finger: "A severely-depressed fellow in New Zealand severed his own finger, cooked it up with some vegetables, and ate it. Apparently this is only one of eight known cases of 'self-cannibalism.' The incident was discussed in the scientific journal Australasian Psychiatry. From their report, quoted in the New Zealand Herald:

'At the end of 2008, following another personal crisis, and while not being fully compliant with his medication, he spiralled into another episode of depression. He experienced significant insomnia and suicidal ideation, and ruminated for days about cutting off his fingers.


'In an effort to seek reprieve from these thoughts, he tied a shoelace around his [little] finger to act as a tourniquet and cut the finger off with a jigsaw.


'He then cooked it in a pan with some vegetables and ate its flesh. His plan was to amputate another two fingers the following day.


'Mr X reported initial excitement - non-sexual - and a sense of relief from his ruminations. Given the instantaneous benefit, he felt that there was no point in cutting off any more fingers.'


The man later regretted the act of self-harm - his first - 'because of its debilitating effect'.




'Depressed man cooks and eats his finger'


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jueves, 7 de abril de 2011

Radioactive waste in the ocean

Radioactive waste in the ocean: "
This week the press has given extensive coverage to a leak of radioactive water into the ocean in Japan. I have not heard anyone mention the longstanding problem of the dumping of nuclear (and other) waste into the world's oceans, as exemplified by this article in Somaliland Press:
According to Mr. Mohammed O. Ali, the once clean blue-water coast off Somalia is littered with a toxic-waste calamity of health and environment hazards that has been dumped by Western chemical and shipping firms...

During the height of the Somali civil war, Swiss and Italian firms Achair Partners and Progresso, signed a secret agreement with the transitional government of warlord Ali Mahdi Mohamed. Taking advantage of the chaos and the fact that Ali Mahdi was desperate for arms and cash to oust rival General Farah Aideed– the European firms began to unload thousands of tonnes of toxic waste arriving in steel drums off the coast of Somalia. Some even made it to the mainland and were buried in 40 inches by 30 inches holes.

The main perpetrators are said to be Italian firms controlled by the mafia, whose job is to dispose Europe’s extremely hazardous waste. Locals also suspect German and Danish shipping companies are in the trade, with some contracted to transport thousands of tonnes of poisonous stockpile including 60, 000 hexachlorobenzene (HCB) barrels from Australia. They say, sometimes instead of taking the hazardous waste to Europe where it can be incinerated, they dump it in the Somali coast to save money and time and also they face strong opposition from Europe’s environmental action groups...

The United Nation has in the past said it has reliable information that European and Asian firms have been dumping uranium radioactive waste, lead and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury off the coast of Somalia for the last two decades. The practice has infuriated many Somali fishing communities who took on the large foreign ships with their own fishing boats and small arms. Many fishermen hijacked ships demanding ransom to clean the coastline, this eventually led to the current piracy problem. They insist there was no one to safeguard the region so they had to take matters to their own hands.
Via Reddit. Similar information is available at Project Censored:
Allegations of the dumping of toxic waste, as well as illegal fishing, have circulated since the early 1990s, but hard evidence emerged when the tsunami of 2004 hit the country. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) reported that the tsunami washed rusting containers of toxic waste onto the shores of Puntland, northern Somalia.

Nick Nuttall, a UNEP spokesman, told Al Jazeera that when the barrels were smashed open by the force of the waves, the containers exposed a “frightening activity” that had been going on for more than a decade. “Somalia has been used as a dumping ground for hazardous waste starting in the early 1990s, and continuing through the civil war there,” he said. “The waste is many different kinds. There is uranium radioactive waste. There is lead, and heavy metals like cadmium and mercury. There is also industrial waste, and there are hospital wastes, chemical wastes—you name it.”

Nuttall also said that since the containers came ashore, hundreds of residents have fallen ill, suffering from mouth and abdominal bleeding, skin infections and other ailments. “What is most alarming here is that nuclear waste is being dumped. Radioactive uranium waste that is potentially killing Somalis and completely destroying the ocean,” he said...
More at the link re these events and the genesis of Somali pirates.
"

5 Soviet Space Programs that Prove the USSR Was Insane

5 Soviet Space Programs that Prove the USSR Was Insane: "

The Soviet Union used their space program as one of the front line battles of the Cold War. And for a time they were ahead, as anyone who remembers Sputnik and Gagarin will tell you. They had an edge in that reaching their goals was more important to the nation than the lives of the cosmonauts. Documentation on the cosmonauts is limited, and some evidence has been altered, such as the disappearing cosmonaut in the photo here. Then there was Voskhod 2, the mission featuring the first space walk.


The launch went up safely, got into an orbit, and a cosmonaut, Alexei Leonov, became the first human to perform a spacewalk. Super. But that was about when things took a turn for the cataclysmic.


On his way back in, Leonov’s spacesuit inflated due to the vacuum of space, which, apparently, the guys who designed the suit had never heard of. His suit was so laughably ballooney, in fact, that he could barely move and most definitely couldn’t fit back in the spaceship door. Leonov was forced to let some air out, all the while suffering from heatstroke and the bends. By the time his little 12 minute walk turned into a 20 minute walk, he was up to his knees in sweat. But he made it back in to the ship, safe and sound.


However, things got worse for Voskhod 2 after that. Read all about it at Cracked. NSFW text. Link -via reddit

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lunes, 4 de abril de 2011

Japanese Dog Who Survived Three Weeks at Sea after the Tsunami Reunited with Owner

Japanese Dog Who Survived Three Weeks at Sea after the Tsunami Reunited with Owner: "



(Video Link)


Ban, a two-year old dog from Japan, survived three weeks at sea on a rooftop after the recent earthquake and tsunami. He was rescued from the Japanese Coast Guard and, as you can see in this video, reunited with his owner:


The 2-year-old dog, named Ban, greeted her owner “with joy, jumping and wagging her tail.”


”We’ll never let go of her,” the owner was quoted as saying by a center official, according to Kyodo News, which portrays the reunion as more subdued, writing that the dog “happily wagged her tail when the owner appeared.”


Link via Urlesque

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Using CAPTCHA to Decipher Old Text

Using CAPTCHA to Decipher Old Text: "

If you think that CAPTCHA, the squiggly lines you have to decipher in order to login or place your comments on many websites, are only there to keep out spammers, think again!


There is actually another use of the annoying feature: to correct mistakes in scanning old text. Guy Gugliotta of the New York Times explains:


For vintage 19th-century texts in English, O.C.R. programs mess up or miss 10 percent to 30 percent of the words. Only humans can fix the errors. The standard method, called key and verify, uses two transcribers to type the text independently and compares the results. This is time-consuming and extremely expensive.


But in 2006, Dr. von Ahn’s team figured out a way around this obstacle. The ubiquitous Captchas, familiar to even the most casual Web user, were the perfect tools. Captchas, short for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart,” are impossible for machines to decipher, but easy for humans. (The test is named for the British computer pioneer Alan Turing.)


Dr. von Ahn’s group estimated that humans around the world decode at least 200 million Captchas per day, at 10 seconds per Captcha. This works out to about 500,000 hours per day — a lot of applied brainpower being spent on what Dr. von Ahn regards as a fundamentally mindless exercise.


“So we asked, ‘Can we do something useful with this time?’ ” Dr. von Ahn recalled in a telephone interview. Instead of making Captchas out of random words printed in a woozy way, why not ask Web users to translate problem words from archival texts?



Link


It’s like a stealth Amazon Mechanical Turk, except you’re not being paid $0.01 cent to do the task!

"

History's first "press badge"

History's first "press badge": "
Offered for sale at Heritage Auctions:
Very Rare Civil War Press Badge. The first war in history to be covered extensively by the press, much less to be photographed in detail, the Civil War saw the advent of the issuance of press badges to identify the press corps and to distinguish them from spies or civilians who had no place on the battle lines.

Measuring 1½" across, this five-pointed metal badge is engraved "PRESS" within a floral design. The pin at back is broken and the silver metal somewhat tarnished. This is a rare example of the earliest badges used by the American press.
Via Historical Indulgences.
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Bacon-Related Sewer Mishap

Bacon-Related Sewer Mishap: "

Four people sent me this Canadian story, so it must be important: Bacon fat clogs Bedford sewage pipes.

clogged pipe Halifax Water is warning residents to be careful about what they pour down the kitchen sink after an accumulation of bacon fat clogged sewage pipes in the Ridgevale Drive subdivision in Bedford.

Some basements were damaged when raw sewage built up during a two-week break in February and spewed into homes.

Halifax Water spokesman James Campbell said crews sent cameras down manholes, and discovered the problem was created by bacon fat. The cameras sent back images of thick, white congealed fat, oil and grease.

"Most people think, 'If I just pour a little bit down, what's the big deal?' But, you know, if there's a couple hundred thousand people doing the same thing throughout the city, I mean it's going somewhere," Campbell said Friday.

"It doesn't just go away, it congeals and it clogs the pipes."

The photo here shows a random clogged pipe. The material isn't identified, but it sure looks like bacon grease to me. The only way to know for sure is to taste it.


Comments
| Posted in Bacon"

Babirusa

Babirusa: "
'The male has highly conspicuous tusks formed from the canine teeth, but their exact shape depends on the species. In the north Sulawesi babirusa, they grow upward through the skull and curve back towards the skull between the eyes.'
Text from Wikipedia, photo via OddAnimals.
"

¿Por qué Google quiere comprar 6.000 patentes?

¿Por qué Google quiere comprar 6.000 patentes?: "

Google anunció al mundo sus intenciones de adquirir cerca de 6.000 patentes provenientes Nortel, el una vez gigante de las telecomunicaciones. En un pequeño post titulado “Patentes e Innovación”, Google afirma que

El mundo tecnológico ha visto recientemente una explosión en litigaciones relacionadas con patentes, con frecuencia sobre patentes de software de baja calidad que amenazan con ahogar la creatividad.

Google piensa que el sistema de patentes debería premiar a quienes ofrecen las innovaciones más útiles para la sociedad —supongo que esto incluye patentar los doodles—, y añade:

Algunas de esas demandas han sido impulsadas por personas o compañías que nunca han creado nada; otros han sido motivados por el deseo de bloquear los productos o beneficios del éxito de la nueva tecnología de su rival.

Es evidente. Con esas palabras Google nos comparte su opinión sobre las amenazas de demanda que la empresa recibe últimamente de Oracle o Microsoft.

Google quiere una reforma para el sistema de patentes de los EE. UU. En tanto eso sucede, considera que la única forma de defender a largo plazo su posición como empresa innovadora de los ataques de esas otras que no lo son —los trolls de las patentes—, es incrementar de gran manera su portafolio de patentes. Por eso Google ofreció 900 millones de dólares a Nortel, para adquirir su rico portafolio de patentes en redes inalámbricas, telefonía 4G, redes de datos, ópticas, voz, incluso relacionadas con semiconductores, redes sociales, búsqueda en Internet y más sobre telecomunicaciones.

Para quienes no lo sepan, Nortel es una empresa de telecomunicaciones de clase mundial que entró en un periodo protección por bancarrota a partir de enero de este año. Como consecuencia, está subastando todos sus bienes, entre ellos toda su propiedad intelectual.

Sin rodeos, Google deja en claro que quiere esas patentes para no ser blanco fácil de demandas —contra Android, sobre todo—. También, dice, las quiere para seguir apoyando la innovación de sus socios y la comunidad open source.

Google es una compañía relativamente joven, y aunque contamos con un número creciente de patentes, muchos de nuestros competidores tienen portafolios más numerosos porque su historia es más larga.

Lo dicho por Google nos da a entender que para sobrevivir en el hostil mundo de las patentes mientras más grande el portafolio, mejor. El problema es que en juegos como ése, donde no existe un equilibrio natural y cada cual ve por su propio beneficio o bien dañar el de los demás, hace su aparición el monopolio de las ideas.

¿Por qué Google quiere comprar 6.000 patentes? escrita en ALT1040 el 4 April, 2011 por alan.lazalde
Enviar a Twitter | Compartir en Facebook





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Time Lapse: Lego Ship in a Bottle

Time Lapse: Lego Ship in a Bottle: "



This build from Julia Morley took “a week of planning, three days of building, a large number of expletives, and some interesting use of very long tools.” And you can enjoy the whole process (minus the expletives, which have been replaced with soothing music) in three minutes of 32X time-lapse bliss here. [via The Brothers Brick]


More:

Lego Ship In a Glass Bottle

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Animals As Keyrings

Animals As Keyrings: "

It's happening in China: Live animals being sold as keyrings.

Keyring ornaments are perhaps the most useless item you'll ever carry in your pocket or stuff in your purse -- but now, thanks to an increasingly popular item being sold in China, it can easily be the cruelest, too. For the price you might expect to pay for some kitschy trinket, Chinese street vendors are selling live animals, permanently sealed in a small plastic pouch where they can survive for a short while as someone's conversation piece.

Apparently, these unimaginably inhumane keyrings are actually quite popular -- and worst of all, it's totally legal.

Potential buyers (read as animal-abusers) have the choice between a living Brazil turtle or two small kingfish, sealed in an airtight package along with some colored water. One vendor claimed that the trapped creatures "can live for months inside there" because the water contains "nutrients," though veterinarians have already disputed this claim.

turtle keyring photo


Comments
| Posted in General"

Large Pizza, With Extra Cheesus

Large Pizza, With Extra Cheesus: "

Sold for AU $153! Pizza with image of Jesus?

We are a pizza shop in New Farm, QLD. We made a three cheese pizza and when we pulled it out of the oven, this is how it turned out!

Jesus in a pizza

Some people are already calling it the Cheesus Pizza. We feel like we have a responsibility to do something good with this, so we're auctioning it off for charity.

The pizza is currently vacuum packed and we believe it brings luck. After discovering it, the owner of the store parked in a loading zone and didn't get a parking ticket.


Comments
| Posted in Food & Drink"

Cosas que son «peligrosas» en México D.F.

Cosas que son «peligrosas» en México D.F.: "

México DF / Santiago LLobet



México DF / Santiago LLobet



Dinosaurios, gente con dos cabezas, zancos, teléfonos móviles-ladrillos de los 80…



Sin duda una obra artística de algún tipo, que habrá hecho exclamar a más de un caminante: ¡WTF!



(¡Gracias Santiago por enviarnos tus fotos!)



Microsiervos
{
Ecología +
Fotografía +

Juegos +
Ciencia +
Internet +
Aviones +
WTF
}


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El consumo excesivo de alcohol y su efecto sobre la nutrición

El consumo excesivo de alcohol y su efecto sobre la nutrición: "

alcohol
Todos sabemos que el alcohol en la dieta es un factor a considerar si queremos cuidar de la salud, ya que aunque puede resultar beneficioso ingerido en pequeñas cantidades diarias, también es muy fácil alcanzar un consumo excesivo de alcohol y éste puede afectar la nutrición severamente.

El estado nutricional de una persona puede resultar alterado por el excesivo consumo de alcohol. A continuación te mostramos cuáles son sus efectos sobre la nutrición:

  • Altera el equilibrio de la glucosa en sangre pudiendo causar hipoglucemias severas en estados de ayuno.
  • Produce infiltración de grasa en el hígado o esteatosis hepática.
  • Aumenta el colesterol LDL o colesterol malo en sangre.
  • Inhibe la síntesis de algunas proteínas de gran importancia funcional en el organismo.
  • Reduce la absorción de ácido fólico pudiendo ser éste un factor desencadenante de anemia nutricional.
  • Disminuye la absorción de vitamina B1 y aumenta la excreción urinaria de vitamina B6, importantes para el correcto metabolismo de los hidratos de carbono y para el funcionamiento del sistema nervioso.
  • Reduce las concentraciones plasmáticas de vitamina A y E, fuertes antioxidantes en el organismo.
  • Reduce la absorción de zinc y selenio, minerales antioxidantes e importantes para el sistema inmunológico del organismo.
  • Interfiere en la capacidad del organismo de absorber calcio, lo cual puede afectar la salud ósea negativamente.
  • Su consumo puede causar desequilibrios energéticos, llevando a la desnutrición en alcohólicos severos o a obesidad en bebedores fuertes pero no adictos.


Es claro que siempre debemos tener mucho cuidado cuando consumimos bebidas alcohólicas, pues su ingesta excesiva no sólo puede propiciar las carencias nutricionales, sino también, el desarrollo de enfermedades irreversibles y severas al alterar la absorción, depósito, metabolismo y excreción de nutrientes.

Imagen | Candida.Performa



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