In his latest trials promo, stunt cyclist Andrew Dickey makes the streets of Melbourne his life partner.
[wtc.]
Optical Illusion
This image never really ever stops moving. If you stare at it long enough, you can kind of get it to slow down but it never stops.
USA Humour: Oklahoma State Senator Constance Johnson Writes Satirical Amendment Banning Non-Procreative Ejaculation
Oklahoma State Sen. Constance Johnson introduced an amendment to an Oklahoma ‘Personhood” bill giving zygotes the same rights as adults. Her amendment state that any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.
Humour: priorities
A man goes to bed and reaches over to his wife. He starts sliding his hand slowly across her back, shoulders, then down her side just glancing her breasts, and then carries on down her side and legs.
He slides her legs apart and slowly runs his hand up and down her inner thigh.
He moves back towards the top and stops.
His wife opens her eyes and gasps, “Why did you stop?”
He replies, “Found the remote … Go back to sleep!”
Some kind Canuck did us all a big favor and slowed down the extended title sequence of the Simpsons’ 500th episode, which features a flipbook-style look at all the couch gags in the show’s storied history.
Music: “Feel It All Around” by Washed Out (AKA the Portlandia theme song).
[wow.]
ACTA Stalled by European Commission
European Union approval of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been postponed by the European Commission, which plans to ask the European Court of Justice to decide whether the treaty violates any fundamental EU rights.
According to EU trade commissioner Karel De Gucht, ACTA doesn’t violate the EU’s rights of freedom of expression and freedom of information.
“ACTA will not censor websites or shut them down; ACTA will not hinder freedom of the Internet or freedom of speech,” he said today.
Protestors in several EU countries, including Germany, Poland and the Netherlands, disagree. Several EU governments have now refused to ratify the treaty because they believe it’s a threat to citizens’ privacy.
For ACTA to take effect in the EU, it must be approved by all 27 member states.
[guardian]
Humour: “This is good”
There was this king in Africa who had a close friend he had known all his life. This friend had a habit of looking at every situation that ever occurred in his life (positive or negative) and remarking, “This is good!”
One day the king and his friend were out on a hunting expedition. The friend would load and prepare the guns for the king. The friend had apparently done something wrong in preparing one of the guns, for after taking the gun from his friend, the king fired it and his thumb was blown off.
Examining the situation the friend remarked as usual, “This is good!” To which the king replied, “No, this is NOT good!” and had his friend immediately sent to prison.
About a year later, the king was hunting in an area that he should have known to stay clear of Cannibals captured him and took him to their village. They tied his hands, stacked some wood, set up a stake and bound him to the stake. As they came near to set fire to the wood, they noticed that the king was missing a thumb. Being superstitious, they never ate anyone that was less than whole, as it would be bad luck for the whole village. So they untied the king and sent him on his way.
As he returned home, he remembered the event that had taken his thumb and felt remorse for his treatment of his friend. He went immediately to the prison to speak with his friend. “You were right,” he said. “It was good that my thumb was blown off.” And he proceeded to tell his friend all that had just happened. “And so I am very sorry for sending you to prison for so long. It was horrible for me to do this.”
“No,” his friend replied, “this is good!”
“What do you mean, ‘This is good?!’ How could it be good that I sent my lifelong friend to prison for a year?”
“If I had not been in prison … I would have been with you.”
Misconceptions: C.G.P. Grey follows up his random myth-debunking video with another misconception rundown devoted to clearing up eight long-held beliefs about animals.
[cgpgrey.]
Cinderella: On her way to accept a BAFTA Award for Best Actress, Meryl Streep loses a slipper.
Luckily, King George was on hand to play the part of Prince Charming.
[mefi.]
Treatment with light benefits Alzheimer’s patients, Wayne State University finds. By Julie O’Connor
Exposure to light appears to have therapeutic effects on Alzheimer’s disease patients, a Wayne State University researcher has found.
In a study published recently in the Western Journal of Nursing Research, LuAnn Nowak Etcher, Ph.D., assistant professor of nursing, reported that patients treated with blue-green light were perceived by their caregivers as having improved global functioning.
Caregivers said patients receiving the treatment seemed more awake and alert, were more verbally competent and showed improved recognition, recollection and motor coordination. They also said patients seemed to recapture their personalities and were more engaged with their environment. Patients’ moods also were described as improved.
Etcher’s work is inspired by her interest in a phenomenon known as “sundowning,” when Alzheimer’s patients sleep during the day, wake up later and may be up all night long. Part of her doctoral research was to utilize light, a common intervention for circadian disorders, to regulate the rest-activity patterns of women with Alzheimer’s.
This study, Etcher said, was an effort to address disagreement among researchers on the effect of therapeutic light in regulating rest-activity patterns in Alzheimer’s patients. The study involved 20 women older than age 65 with Alzheimer’s dementia from nursing homes in southeast Michigan. Each patient was assigned randomly to an experimental group receiving blue-green light treatments or a control group receiving dim red light.
A commercially available visor used to treat seasonal affective disorder and jet lag was used to administer the light to patients. Caregivers - patients’ family members and nursing facility personnel - were not told which type of light was hypothesized to have physiologic effects.
Although blue-green light recipients comprised the active experimental group, Etcher said she was surprised when some recipients of red light - the placebo group - also were reported as showing improvements, with caregivers saying their patients were calmer and had reduced resistance to care.
The level of effects varied, Etcher said, noting that while the blue-green group recipients were largely reported by caregivers as showing improvement, a few showed little to no effect from the treatments.
“Some of the rest-activity pattern disruptions that we see associated with Alzheimer’s dementia may not necessarily be circadian based,” Etcher said. “They may be due to unmet needs, pain or other phenomena, and therefore would not respond to an intervention aimed at regulation of the circadian system.”
Calling her study preliminary, she said it now needs to be replicated with a larger sample and different demographics.
In addition to ascertaining which behaviors are circadian based, establishing which methods are most appropriate to analyze data like Etcher’s requires exploration, she said. She is proposing further work that uses two different nonlinear analytic methods to examine sensitivity and specificity to detect change in circadian patterns, with a long-term goal of developing interventions to regulate those patterns to the benefit of patients’ overall function.
“If they sleep better at night, and are more awake during the day, they can eat, they can interact with other people and they can take advantage of other cueing agents in the environment,” she said. “In addition to light during daytime and darkness during the nighttime, smells at mealtimes, food intake, interactions - all these things in conjunction help regulate our day.”
Julie O’Connor
julie.oconnor@wayne.edu
313-577-8845
Wayne State University - Office of the Vice President for Research
Oldie: Dilbert’s “Salary Theorem”
Dilbert’s “Salary Theorem” states that “Engineers and scientists can never earn as much as business executives, sales people, accountants and especially liberal arts majors.” This theorem can now be supported by a mathematical equation based on the following two well known postulates:
Postulate 1: Knowledge is Power.
Postulate 2: Time is Money.
Postulate 3: As every engineer knows: Power = Work / Time.
Since Knowledge = Power then Knowledge = Work / Time
Since Time = Money, then Knowledge = Work / Money.
Solving for Money, we get: Money = Work / Knowledge.
Thus, as Knowledge approaches zero, money approaches infinity, regardless of the amount of work done.
