Weird News Stories part2

[Valsuelm]

#41 Humans share 50% of their DNA with bananas.

 

 

 

 

Considering most modern scientists seem to think that somewhere around 98% of your DNA is 'junk' (because yea, if we don't understand what it is it must be junk right?),  it's not too surprising they think we're half bananas. It wouldn't surprise me if they thought we were half eggplant, half snotball, or half toejam too. I certainly believe they are at least half bananas, and I think the case could be made that most people in modern times are at least half bananas, my personal experiences certainly validates that argument, so maybe they're on to something with this.

[Mor]

The info about 98% of junk DNA (or more correctly non coding DNA) is outdated. Also it is not news that many organism share DNA sequences after all we all made of cells underneath and no scientist thinks that because of that we are half bananas.

[Raithe]

The Spoon Theory

 

 

 

My best friend and I were in the diner, talking. As usual, it was very late and we were eating French fries with gravy. Like normal girls our age, we spent a lot of time in the diner while in college, and most of the time we spent talking about boys, music or trivial things, that seemed very important at the time. We never got serious about anything in particular and spent most of our time laughing. As I went to take some of my medicine with a snack as I usually did, she watched me with an awkward kind of stare, instead of continuing the conversation. She then asked me out of the blue what it felt like to have Lupus and be sick. I was shocked not only because she asked the random question, but also because I assumed she knew all there was to know about Lupus. She came to doctors with me, she saw me walk with a cane, and throw up in the bathroom. She had seen me cry in pain, what else was there to know? I started to ramble on about pills, and aches and pains, but she kept pursuing, and didn’t seem satisfied with my answers.

 

I was a little surprised as being my roommate in college and friend for years; I thought she already knew the medical definition of Lupus. Then she looked at me with a face every sick person knows well, the face of pure curiosity about something no one healthy can truly understand. She asked what it felt like, not physically, but what it felt like to be me, to be sick. As I tried to gain my composure, I glanced around the table for help or guidance, or at least stall for time to think. I was trying to find the right words. How do I answer a question I never was able to answer for myself? How do I explain every detail of every day being effected, and give the emotions a sick person goes through with clarity. I could have given up, cracked a joke like I usually do, and changed the subject, but I remember thinking if I don’t try to explain this, how could I ever expect her to understand. If I can’t explain this to my best friend, how could I explain my world to anyone else? I had to at least try.

 

At that moment, the spoon theory was born. I quickly grabbed every spoon on the table; hell I grabbed spoons off of the other tables. I looked at her in the eyes and said “Here you go, you have Lupus”. She looked at me slightly confused, as anyone would when they are being handed a bouquet of spoons. The cold metal spoons clanked in my hands, as I grouped them together and shoved them into her hands. I explained that the difference in being sick and being healthy is having to make choices or to consciously think about things when the rest of the world doesn’t have to. The healthy have the luxury of a life without choices, a gift most people take for granted. Most people start the day with unlimited amount of possibilities, and energy to do whatever they desire, especially young people. For the most part, they do not need to worry about the effects of their actions.

 

So for my explanation, I used spoons to convey this point. I wanted something for her to actually hold, for me to then take away, since most people who get sick feel a “loss” of a life they once knew. If I was in control of taking away the spoons, then she would know what it feels like to have someone or something else, in this case Lupus, being in control. She grabbed the spoons with excitement. She didn’t understand what I was doing, but she is always up for a good time, so I guess she thought I was cracking a joke of some kind like I usually do when talking about touchy topics. Little did she know how serious I would become? I asked her to count her spoons. She asked why, and I explained that when you are healthy you expect to have a never-ending supply of “spoons”. But when you have to now plan your day, you need to know exactly how many “spoons” you are starting with. It doesn’t guarantee that you might not lose some along the way, but at least it helps to know where you are starting.

 

She counted out 12 spoons. She laughed and said she wanted more. I said no, and I knew right away that this little game would work, when she looked disappointed, and we hadn’t even started yet. I’ve wanted more “spoons” for years and haven’t found a way yet to get more, why should she? I also told her to always be conscious of how many she had, and not to drop them because she can never forget she has Lupus. I asked her to list off the tasks of her day, including the most simple.

 

As, she rattled off daily chores, or just fun things to do; I explained how each one would cost her a spoon. When she jumped right into getting ready for work as her first task of the morning, I cut her off and took away a spoon. I practically jumped down her throat. I said ” No! You don’t just get up. You have to crack open your eyes, and then realize you are late. You didn’t sleep well the night before. You have to crawl out of bed, and then you have to make your self something to eat before you can do anything else, because if you don’t, you can’t take your medicine, and if you don’t take your medicine you might as well give up all your spoons for today and tomorrow too.”

 

I quickly took away a spoon and she realized she hasn’t even gotten dressed yet. Showering cost her spoon, just for washing her hair and shaving her legs. Reaching high and low that early in the morning could actually cost more than one spoon, but I figured I would give her a break; I didn’t want to scare her right away. Getting dressed was worth another spoon. I stopped her and broke down every task to show her how every little detail needs to be thought about. You cannot simply just throw clothes on when you are sick. I explained that I have to see what clothes I can physically put on, if my hands hurt that day buttons are out of the question. If I have bruises that day, I need to wear long sleeves, and if I have a fever I need a sweater to stay warm and so on. If my hair is falling out I need to spend more time to look presentable, and then you need to factor in another 5 minutes for feeling badly that it took you 2 hours to do all this.

 

I think she was starting to understand when she theoretically didn’t even get to work, and she was left with 6 spoons. I then explained to her that she needed to choose the rest of her day wisely, since when your “spoons” are gone, they are gone. Sometimes you can borrow against tomorrow’s “spoons”, but just think how hard tomorrow will be with less “spoons”. I also needed to explain that a person who is sick always lives with the looming thought that tomorrow may be the day that a cold comes, or an infection, or any number of things that could be very dangerous. So you do not want to run low on “spoons”, because you never know when you truly will need them.

 

I didn’t want to depress her, but I needed to be realistic, and unfortunately being prepared for the worst is part of a real day for me. We went through the rest of the day, and she slowly learned that skipping lunch would cost her a spoon, as well as standing on a train, or even typing at her computer too long. She was forced to make choices and think about things differently. Hypothetically, she had to choose not to run errands, so that she could eat dinner that night. When we got to the end of her pretend day, she said she was hungry. I summarized that she had to eat dinner but she only had one spoon left. If she cooked, she wouldn’t have enough energy to clean the pots. If she went out for dinner, she might be too tired to drive home safely.

 

Then I also explained, that I didn’t even bother to add into this game, that she was so nauseous, that cooking was probably out of the question anyway. So she decided to make soup, it was easy. I then said it is only 7pm, you have the rest of the night but maybe end up with one spoon, so you can do something fun, or clean your apartment, or do chores, but you can’t do it all. I rarely see her emotional, so when I saw her upset I knew maybe I was getting through to her. I didn’t want my friend to be upset, but at the same time I was happy to think finally maybe someone understood me a little bit. She had tears in her eyes and asked quietly “Christine, How do you do it? Do you really do this everyday?”

 

I explained that some days were worse then others; some days I have more spoons then most. But I can never make it go away and I can’t forget about it, I always have to think about it. I handed her a spoon I had been holding in reserve. I said simply, “I have learned to live life with an extra spoon in my pocket, in reserve. You need to always be prepared.”

 

Its hard, the hardest thing I ever had to learn is to slow down, and not do everything. I fight this to this day. I hate feeling left out, having to choose to stay home, or to not get things done that I want to. I wanted her to feel that frustration. I wanted her to understand, that everything everyone else does comes so easy, but for me it is one hundred little jobs in one. I need to think about the weather, my temperature that day, and the whole day’s plans before I can attack any one given thing. When other people can simply do things, I have to attack it and make a plan like I am strategizing a war. It is in that lifestyle, the difference between being sick and healthy. It is the beautiful ability to not think and just do. I miss that freedom. I miss never having to count “spoons”.

 

After we were emotional and talked about this for a little while longer, I sensed she was sad. Maybe she finally understood. Maybe she realized that she never could truly and honestly say she understands. But at least now she might not complain so much when I can’t go out for dinner some nights, or when I never seem to make it to her house and she always has to drive to mine. I gave her a hug when we walked out of the diner. I had the one spoon in my hand and I said “Don’t worry. I see this as a blessing. I have been forced to think about everything I do. Do you know how many spoons people waste everyday? I don’t have room for wasted time, or wasted “spoons” and I chose to spend this time with you.”

 

Ever since this night, I have used the spoon theory to explain my life to many people. In fact, my family and friends refer to spoons all the time. It has been a code word for what I can and cannot do. Once people understand the spoon theory they seem to understand me better, but I also think they live their life a little differently too. I think it isn’t just good for understanding Lupus, but anyone dealing with any disability or illness. Hopefully, they don’t take so much for granted or their life in general. I give a piece of myself, in every sense of the word when I do anything. It has become an inside joke. I have become famous for saying to people jokingly that they should feel special when I spend time with them, because they have one of my “spoons”.

 

[ManifestedISO]

 

Considering most modern scientists seem to think that somewhere around 98% of your DNA is 'junk' (because yea, if we don't understand what it is it must be junk right?),  it's not too surprising they think we're half bananas. It wouldn't surprise me if they thought we were half eggplant, half snotball, or half toejam too. I certainly believe they are at least half bananas, and I think the case could be made that most people in modern times are at least half bananas, my personal experiences certainly validates that argument, so maybe they're on to something with this.

 

Compulsive contrarianism should be something drug companies invent and then cure ... with a bunch of blue pills called Stfu. Ask your psychiatrist if Stfu is right for you. 

[Elerond]

'I thought only people in Africa got HIV,' says mother-of-three who contracted the condition after summer romance

[Woldan]

The stupidity of people never ceases to amaze me, what about the other million of STD's? She could have gotten hepatitis and infect her children with it. I wonder how such walnut-sized-brain people can get to an old age. If dumb luck didn't exist there weren't any stupid people on this planet. 

Edited March 23, 2014 by Woldan

[Humanoid]

The kicker there is that the article states the events happened before she even hit age 40, so apparently at 39 you can no longer fall pregnant.

[Lexx]

I don't think I've ever used the term 'douchewaffle' before, but now I just might have to start using it. 

I never ever heard of it before, but now I think it is the best word in the world and I will try to use it as often as possible.

[Raithe]

Forbes - Google, DuckDuckGo, and the Regulation of Privacy
 
 

This piece about DuckDuckGo rather interested me, for it speaks to the argument that is being had over the regulation of privacy in both the US and the European Union. And while this isn’t entirely and wholly true it is in essence: the US has, in my opinion, taken the right view of that regulation. Leave it, largely, to the marketplace to deal with. By contrast the EU is in the throes of regulating it all to heck and back which is, I think at least, the wrong solution.

Yet go up against Google is exactly what Gabriel Weinberg did. In 2008, he launched his own search engine, DuckDuckGo, in the gloom of his Pennsylvania basement. The project started quietly, but over the last six months it has gained ground and is now starting to ruffle Google’s feathers.

OK, competing against the 800lb bear in the market is something of an interesting business plan. But there’s more to it than just being yet another search engine operating along the usual lines:

DuckDuckGo tapped into this demand, by offering a service which does not retain any of their information. It does not download “cookies” onto people’s devices. It does not register the “IP address”, which pinpoints a users computer.
The only thing Weinberg knows about its customers, based on the servers requests are run through, is whether they are in America, Europe or Australasia.
“That is distinct from what other companies do. We are not anonymising the data. We actually throw it away – everything related to the user and anything that is personally identifiable,” Weinberg says.

But that is very different indeed. And given the greater concerns over privacy surfacing it seems to be enough of a differentiation that it is bring reasonable levels of custom.
 
Hurrah we might say and leave it at that. Yet there’s an economic point that needs to be explored here. What actually is the right level of regulation over such privacy issues? How far should the EU Commission, say, go in protecting user data?
 
The problem is that there’s no objective method of reaching a decision on this. Different people will obviously have different views on how their own data may be used. It’s not therefore something that can be decided by bureaucratic fiat. Nor is it something that except in a de minimis manner really needs to be the subject of any regulation at all. As long, that is, as there’s a competitive market in whatever the services on offer are.

As long as, for example, we can use Google and provide out information to them if we wish, and we can also use DuckDuckGo and not provide information then we the consumers can make our choices. And given that the whole idea of this economy thing is that we consumers get what we want then that’s just fine.
 
However, I would take the example slightly further. We tend to think of market competition as being about people competing to provide some good or service to consumers. But competition is a great deal more than that. We have competition between forms of organisation for example: all of our economics have in them investor owned corporates, one man bands, mutuals, co-ops and so on. In some areas of the market one form predominates, in others, others. It’s the competition between the forms of organisation that also matters, over and above the specific goods and services on offer.
 
So too we can think about competition through data privacy: this is clearly a good part of DuckDuckGo’s business offering to consumers. We can even take it further to people competing on the regulations that they obey. One example might be suppliers of raw milk (and cheeses made therefrom) where the entire point of the offering is that they’re not obeying the regulations about the pasteurisation of the milk.
 
Competition is a lot more than just prices or designs of what is on offer. There’s also competition in forms of organisation, in regulatory frameworks and so on. And, providing that there is still a free market in those things then the competition is probably the best way of delivering what people actually want

[Raithe]

For the feel good piece..

 

USA Today - Flat Stanley home safe after a decade in a soldier's wallet

 

 

PHOENIX -- "People don't write letters anymore," according to third-grade teacher Luella Wood.

But 10 years ago, in the painstaking scrawl of an 8-year-old, Alan Orduna did.

 

The Huntsville, Ark., boy, along with other students in Wood's class, penned a note to accompany a paper cut-out modeled after the title character in the popular children's book "Flat Stanley." After being smashed by a bulletin board in his sleep, the book's protagonist makes the most of his new 2-D state by mailing himself to friends.

Wood asked her students to send their Stanley cut-outs to relatives or friends, who would then take them on a journey and detail the characters' exploits in a letter back.

Alan didn't have a friend in mind — or at least not one who would take Stanley on an adventure worthy of a third-grader's imagination. So, Wood sent Alan's packet off to an Army unit stationed in Baghdad and asked Alan to wait.

 

Alan did wait, patiently, through the rest of the school year.

He waited through the rest of elementary school.

He waited so long that he forgot he was waiting.

 

Then, shortly before Veterans Day last year,the 17-year-old high-school senior was called into the library with the rest of his class.

"There were a lot of people surrounding the library, and I was like, 'What's going on?' " he said. "They called me over and said, 'Some soldier sent mail for you.' "

Stanley was home.

 

The journey begins

 

Brian Owens was young when the military bug bit him.

"My grandfather served in World War II. My father was a chaplain with the state Guard," said the New Mexico native, now a Phoenix resident. "As a kid, I had grown up in camouflage and wore dog tags and had buzz cuts."

Owens didn't consider a career until college, though.

"I was struggling with my grades. I loved education and I loved learning, but I just couldn't make heads or tails of what I wanted to do with myself," he said. "I needed some direction."

 

At 20, he enlisted in the Army. He was 24, with two small sons of his own, when Stanley emerged from a box at mail call in the spring of 2004. Owens was immediately on board, folding Stanley up and tucking him safely into his wallet.

"I'd always been a fan of cool little projects like that, and I imagined my own kids taking part in something similar," he said. "I could just picture them kind of starry-eyed after getting a letter back, thinking 'Oh, wow! A soldier overseas carried this, and he went here and there and did this and that.'

"I thought, 'I can be that guy for this kid.'"

 

Getting lost

 

Stanley built an impressive military resume.

He helped carry out dozens of combat patrols through Baghdad. He held steady through firefights and mortar attacks.

He saw car bombs, the banks of the Tigris River and the palace of Uday Hussein, the eldest son of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

He was there on the day of Iraq's first democratic elections.

He was there when Owens, standing guard on a tower, dodged a sniper's bullet by about 6 inches, and when his patrol hit an improvised explosive device. He saw the fate of some colleagues who weren't so lucky.

 

He was there, still, when the disturbing scenes and constant stress began to wear Owens down, leaving the soldier angry and confused.

"I experienced many things that changed who I was, how I thought and who my loved ones remembered me being," Owens wrote in a narrative travel log that eventually accompanied Stanley on his trip back to Arkansas.

"I lost track of a lot of things, including the silent passenger ... folded up in my back pocket."

 

Holding on

 

Upon returning to Silver City, N.M., after his deployment, Owens found himself ill-equipped to deal with a key civilian responsibility: being a dad.

His marriage didn't survive his time in the Middle East, and he'd gotten custody of the boys.

"In the Army, if you didn't know how to do something, you referenced the field manual, or 'FM,'" Owens wrote. "(There) isn't an FM to reference on how to be a single dad, so I was lost."

He and the boys lived in a tiny apartment that was chilly in the winter and "hot and full of critters" in the summer, subsisting on macaroni and cheese, Hamburger Helper and scrambled eggs. Owens said he was impatient and asked too much of his kids.

 

"I was trying to support us, and the logistics of trying to make everything click was extremely hard," he said. Owens found a job at an open-pit copper mine, "an 8-year-old boy's dream come true." He got a chance to operate some of the largest equipment in the world and assist with blasts in the mine.

 

The constant activity eventually wore out Owens' wallet. As he sifted through its contents, he came upon a colored piece of tightly folded paper.

"After I found Stanley again and realized, 'Oh my gosh, I still have this thing,' it kind of took on a different, deeper meaning," Owens said. "It was almost like I had a mission I hadn't completed yet."

 

Stanley's return address was long gone, but Owens couldn't bring himself to throw him away.

"You read about all these fantastic coincidences, and I thought ... 'Maybe, one of these days, that'll happen to me,'" he said. "It was never a question: I was going to keep it until I died, or until I could find a way to get it back to who it belonged to."

 

Losing control

 

With Stanley in his pocket, Owens soon met the woman who would become his sons' stepmother. She brought with her a needed reality check.

Owens' love for his boys had kept him going in Iraq, but between the long days at work and late nights with his band, he'd lost sight of how much the three needed each other. About the same time, officials at Owens' job approached him, complimenting his performance at a morning safety meeting and his "keen eye for hazard awareness." Laughing, he corrected them, calling it "a keen preference for being alive."

 

They asked him to begin assisting with field audits and safety training, critical in an industry with huge equipment, acid lakes and explosions. The work "felt right and satisfied a passion I had felt for a long time," Owens wrote. In 2008, he officially became a health and safety specialist.His improved financial standing — plus the income of his new fiancee, an environmental consultant at the mine — allowed Owens to move the family to a larger house.

But three months later, the economy tanked, taking the price of copper with it. The mine closed, and so did Owens' window out.

 

Hitting bottom

 

The family relocated to the Phoenix area, where Owens and his fiancee thought they'd have a better shot at finding work. Nothing turned up.

"I looked at the situation, the economy, the bills; no matter which way I looked at it, it seemed dire," Owens wrote. He prepared to rejoin the military — his last resort — and swiftly married so the kids would formally have a stepmom when he left the country. He was turned down.

He enrolled full time in college, attempting to live off GI Bill benefits and credit cards. One month, he sold a guitar for one-third of what it was worth to try to make rent. A donation from a church committee covered electricity.

 

The local Veterans Affairs hospital officially diagnosed the post-traumatic stress disorder that had lurked under the surface since Owens' return. But instead of finding relief in knowing what he was up against, he felt typecast.

 

"I felt like it was a stigma that society had placed on me, something I'd been running from, something I did not want," he said. "When it caught up with me, I was really downtrodden."

 

So was his wife. They separated shortly thereafter, and Owens and his boys moved back in with his parents in New Mexico.

He grew depressed, bitter and forgetful. He began drinking.

 

One night, angrily speeding along a dark road, Owens totaled his Land Rover. Though his injuries were minor, he wished he'd died in the accident.

"One more brush with death, one more unexplained survival," he wrote. "The vehicle was trashed, but me and Stanley yet again walked away."

 

Loose ends

 

In early 2010, Owens and Stanley headed to Albuquerque for Owens' annual VA appointment. Discouraged, he recounted his downward spiral for the woman managing his case. Her reaction floored him.

 

"Let me get this straight," she said. "You suffer from hypervigilance, an overdeveloped sense of hazard recognition and situational awareness, and have an obsessive passion for making sure people are safe ... and you've figured out how to make a living out of it?"

 

When Owens offered a tentative "yes," the woman couldn't contain her laughter. "As you get worse over the years, you'll probably get raises and bonuses!" she told him.

"Look, I'm not making light of your circumstances, but you're onto something here," she said. "Most folks that have your symptoms self-implode and aren't successful with it at all. It gets in the way of their work functions. You, you've turned it into your work function."

 

The conversation helped loosen the grip of Owens' persistent pessimism. And after that, the scattered puzzle that his life had become began to piece itself back together.

The mine reopened, and Owens was called back to work. He found a university online, known for its occupational safety and health program, and it accepted almost all of his previous class credits. A few weeks later, he and his wife reunited. They returned to Phoenix in 2011, and Owens became the highest-ranking  safety official at an industrial-construction company in Apache Junction. In 2013, the couple had a daughter.

But Owens still had one piece of unfinished business to take care of.

 

Mission complete

 

Owens was searching for another piece of paper when the one with the key to Stanley's past appeared.

"I came across a box with a bunch of papers in it," he wrote. "As I glanced through the contents, I found a letter. ... It was a typed note from one 'Mrs. L. Wood.'"

Owens Googled the school and found Wood's email, firing off a "shot in the dark" message. Wood first thought the letter was a scam, though its "well-worded and polite" nature made her reconsider. She wrote back.

 

While Owens worked to finish the narrative letter chronicling Stanley's journey, Wood worked to coordinate the details of his return.

"My principal went with me, because he knew Alan," she said. "All his friends were there, taping it on their cellphones."

The package wasn't just for Alan, however. It also contained a thank-you letter for Wood, along with a flag Owens had carried during his service.

The surprise left Wood in tears.

"I think teachers and soldiers kind of have a lot in common," she said. "You go to work. You get criticized. But you just keep plugging away, because you're trying to make a difference."

 

Alan, blindsided by the surprise delivery, waited until he got home to study the full, "amazing" narrative. As he was applying to colleges and preparing for a major in computer engineering, the last few lines resonated particularly well.

 

"I know by now you are approaching the age when you will embark on your own journey," Owens wrote. "Might I make a suggestion?

"Pick up your adventures with Stanley where ours ended. Put him in your wallet," he wrote. "You will undoubtedly face hard times. You will experience lows and uncertainty. But, whenever you feel despair or emptiness setting in, remember a saying I learned in the Army — 'If you ever get to the point where it's hopeless and nothing more can be done, you've overlooked something.'

 

"And, if you need a second opinion, there silently, you will have a passenger, hanging out, folded up in your back pocket, that can vouch for me."

[Gfted1]

North Korean men must get Kim Jong Un’s haircut.

 

[Lexx]

North Korea is best Korea.

[Raithe]

Heh.

 

Wired - Homeopathic Remedy Recalled Because it Contains Actual Medicine

 

 

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recalled homeopathic remedies made by a company called Terra-Medica because they may contain actual medicine -- possibly penicillin or derivatives of the antibiotic.

 

Terra-Medica creates a range of homeopathic capsules, suppositories and ointments under clinical-sounding brand names including Pleo-Fort, Pleo-Quent and Pleo-EX. The FDA has found that 56 lots of the drugs may contain penicillin or derivatives of penicillin, which may have been produced during fermentation. This is a problem, because Terra-Medica says that its products don't contain antibiotics. Pleo Sanum range of products, for example, "can address acute and chronic inflammations and infections without the use of traditional antibiotics". Homeopathic remedies are generally highly diluted substances (in fact the more a substance is diluted, the more effective homeopaths deem it to be) that practitioners claim can cause the body to heal itself. A 2010 House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report found these remedies to perform no better than placebos.

 

Homeopathic medicines are regulated by the FDA in the same way that over-the-counter, non-prescription drugs are in terms of purity and packaging, but they aren't subjected to the same level of testing of effectiveness before they can be sold.

 

Terra-Medica is voluntarily recalling the batches after the FDA determined that the products may contain these antibiotics. "In patients who are allergic to beta-lactam antibiotics, even at low levels, exposure to penicillin can result in a range of allergic reactions from mild rashes to severe and life-threatening anaphylactic reactions."

 

Michael Marshall, the vice president of Merseyside Skeptics, the group behind anti-homeopathy campaign group 10.23, says that it's "comic to see homeopathic products recalled because, for a change, they actually contain some real ingredients" but, he adds, there's "real cause for concern here".

 

"People are often persuaded to try homeopathy by claims that homeopathic remedies have no side effects -- and that's true, albeit because they also have no beneficial effects. These so-called medicines are simply drops of water, put onto sugar pills, and no more than that."

 

This is not the first time that the FDA has had to recall homeopathic remedies for containing actual medicines. In 2009, it recalled the Zicam Cold Remedy products because they were causing people to lose their sense of smell -- some 130 people reported long-lasting loss of their sense of smell to the FDA, while 800 more people complained to Zicam. Zicam's parent company Matrixx ended up recalling all of the products -- the problem seemed to be caused by taking zinc intranasally. 

 

The FDA also explored importing products from Nelson's, one of the biggest homeopathy suppliers in the UK, which makes products for retailers like Boots.

 

'Their inspection found some incredibly worrying things," says Marshall. This included the fact that one out of every six bottles in one observed batch did not receive the dose of active homeopathic drug solution "due to the wobbling and vibration of the bottle assembly during filling of the active ingredient", the report -- written by the FDA's Steven Lynn -- explains.

 

"The active ingredient was instead seen dripping down the outside of the vial assembly. Your firm lacked controls to ensure that the active ingredient is delivered to every bottle," said the 2012 assessment. 

 

Glass fragments were also observed in an assembly line area where open glass vials were inserted into outer plastic sheaths. "Your firm failed to implement adequate measures to prevent glass contamination and had no documentation to demonstrate that appropriate line clearance and cleaning is conducted following occurrences of glass breakage, which has been a recurring problem."

 

Marshall says that cases in which trusting vulnerable consumers have believed the claims of homeopaths and "forgone real medicine" in place of "these overpriced sugar pills" are "too numerable to count" and "often with unnecessary and tragic consequences."

 

Our advice to the consumer is clear: leave sugar pills in the 19th century, where they belong."

[Serrano]

30,000 Sign White House Petition For Alaska To Secede To Russia

 

 

 So far 30,000 people have signed the petition, though it is not known whether the signatories are Alaskans wanting to secede, or the rest of America wanted rid of the 49th state and its most famous daughter Sarah Palin.

 

 

Edited March 27, 2014 by Serrano

[Elerond]

Pirate Bay Founder Peter Sunde to run for European Parliament from Finland

 

Finnish get to vote "real Swedish pirate" to represent them in European Parliament. And I am not even sure that he can't win.

[ShadySands]

Fourth Smart car found tipped in San Francisco

 

[ManifestedISO]

Smart Car tipping is straight up Funny Things thread. 

[Hiro Protagonist]

Nine Month Old Pakistani boy charged with attempted murder

 

This has to be the stupidest thing to ever come out of Pakistan in the last few years. And when the baby and his father were in court, instead of having the charges dropped against the baby, he was given bail to appear in court later on.

 

Just looking at the picture of the boy and he is a hardened criminal. You can see it in his baby brown eyes.

[Hiro Protagonist]

Police send SMS to stop speeding to driver's mobile phone. police end high-speed chase on St Kilda Rd with text request

 

Do you reckon she got fined for using a mobile phone while driving as well? I call entrapment, if so..

[Raithe]

Not so much weird as..

 

BBC News - Scramble over 'heartbleed' bug exploit

 

 

A bug in software used by millions of web servers could have exposed anyone visiting sites they hosted to spying and eavesdropping, say researchers.

The bug is in a software library used in servers, operating systems and email and instant messaging systems.

Called OpenSSL the software is supposed to protect sensitive data as it travels back and forth.

It is not clear how widespread exploitation of the bug has been because attacks leave no trace.

 

"If you need strong anonymity or privacy on the internet, you might want to stay away from the internet entirely for the next few days while things settle," said a blog entry about the bug published by the Tor Project which produces software that helps people avoid scrutiny of their browsing habits.

'Serious' vulnerability

 

A huge swathe of the web could be vulnerable because OpenSSL is used in the widely used Apache and Nginx server software. Statistics from net monitoring firm Netcraft suggest that about 500,000 of the web's secure servers are running versions of the vulnerable software.

 

"It's the biggest thing I've seen in security since the discovery of SQL injection," said Ken Munro, a security expert at Pen Test Partners. SQL injection is a way to extract information from the databases behind web sites and services using specially crafted queries.

 

Many firms were scrambling to apply patches to vulnerable programs and others had shut down services while fixes were being worked on, he said. Many were worried that with proof of concept code already being shared it would only be a matter of time before cyber thieves started exploiting the vulnerability.

Mojang, maker of the hugely popular Minecraft game, took all its services offline while Amazon, which it uses to host games, patched its systems.

The bug in OpenSSL was discovered by researchers working for Google and security firm Codenomicon.

 

In a blog entry about their findings the researchers said the "serious vulnerability" allowed anyone to read chunks of memory in servers supposedly protected with the flawed version of OpenSSL. Via this route, attackers could get at the secret keys used to scramble data as it passes between a server and its users.

"This allows attackers to eavesdrop [on] communications, steal data directly from the services and users and to impersonate services and users," wrote the team that discovered the vulnerability. They called it the "heartbleed" bug because it occurs in the heartbeat extension for OpenSSL.

 

The bug has been present in versions of OpenSSL that have been available for over two years. The latest version of OpenSSL released on 7 April is no longer vulnerable to the bug.

 

"Considering the long exposure, ease of exploitation and attacks leaving no trace this exposure should be taken seriously," wrote the researchers.

Installing an updated version of OpenSSL did not necessarily mean people were safe from attack, said the team. If attackers have already exploited it they could have stolen encryption keys, passwords or other credentials required to access a server, they said.

 

Full protection might require updating to the safer version of OpenSSL as well as getting new security certificates and generating new encryption keys. To help people check their systems some security researchers have produced tools that help people work out if they are running vulnerable versions of OpenSSL.

[Hiro Protagonist]

Poison Ivy & Two-Face have a baby.

 

The result: http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2014/03/20/3967676.htm

[Raithe]

Heh. Just for the point it makes..

 

If your friends ever say they have ADHD...

 

 

 

ADHD is about having broken filters on your perception.

Normal people have a sort of mental secretary that takes the 99% of irrelevant crap that crosses their mind, and simply deletes it before they become consciously aware of it. As such, their mental workspace is like a huge clean whiteboard, ready to hold and organize useful information.

ADHD people... have no such luxury. Every single thing that comes in the front door gets written directly on the whiteboard in bold, underlined red letters, no matter what it is, and no matter what has to be erased in order for it to fit.

As such, if we're in the middle of some particularly important mental task, and our eye should happen to light upon... a doorknob, for instance, it's like someone burst into the room, clad in pink feathers and heralded by trumpets, screaming HEY LOOK EVERYONE, IT'S A DOORKNOB! LOOK AT IT! LOOK! IT OPENS THE DOOR IF YOU TURN IT! ISN'T THAT NEAT? I WONDER HOW THAT ACTUALLY WORKS DO YOU SUPPOSE THERE'S A CAM OR WHAT? MAYBE ITS SOME KIND OF SPRING WINCH AFFAIR ALTHOUGH THAT SEEMS KIND OF UNWORKABLE.

It's like living in a soft rain of post-it notes.

This happens every single waking moment, and we have to manually examine each thought, check for relevance, and try desperately to remember what the thing was we were thinking before it came along, if not. Most often we forget, and if we aren't caught up in the intricacies of doorknob engineering, we cast wildly about for context, trying to guess what the hell we were up to from the clues available.

On the other hand, we're extremely good at working out the context of random remarks, as we're effectively doing that all the time anyway.

We rely heavily on routine, and 90% of the time get by on autopilot. You can't get distracted from a sufficiently ingrained habit, no matter what useless crap is going on inside your head... unless someone goes and actually disrupts your routine. I've actually been distracted out of taking my lunch to work, on several occasions, by my wife reminding me to take my lunch to work. What the? Who? Oh, yeah, will do. Where was I? um... briefcase! Got it. Now keys.. okay, see you honey!

Also, there's a diminishing-returns thing going on when trying to concentrate on what you might call a non-interactive task. Entering a big block of numbers into a spreadsheet, for instance. Keeping focused on the task takes exponentially more effort each minute, for less and less result. If you've ever held a brick out at arm's length for an extended period, you'll know the feeling. That's why the internet, for instance, is like crack to us - it's a non-stop influx of constantly-new things, so we can flick from one to the next after only seconds. Its better/worse than pistachios.

The exception to this is a thing we get called hyper focus. Occasionally, when something just clicks with us, we can get ridiculously deeply drawn into it, and NOTHING can distract us. We've locked our metaphorical office door, and we're not coming out for anything short of a tornado.

Medication takes the edge off. It reduces the input, it tones down the fluster, it makes it easier to ignore trivial stuff, and it increases the maximum focus-time. Imagine steadicam for your skull. It also happens to make my vision go a little weird and loomy occasionally, and can reduce appetite a bit.

Hope this helps and please do share this so that more people can learn what its really like to have ADHD.

 

[Walsingham]

Smart Car tipping is straight up Funny Things thread. 

 

It's funny until you understand that many insurance policies won't cover some **** comedian wrecking your way of getting to work, and quite possibly the most expensive thing you own. The car wasn't _driven_ away so they don't cover it as theft.

 

Friend of a friend had their car flipped onto its roof. Damage to bodywork so extensive that they wrote the bastard off.

[ManifestedISO]

Well that is disturbingly humorless irony, but what kind of insurance coverage doesn't provide for vandalism. I thought "acts of god" was the only real indemnity trapdoor.  

[ShadySands]

Google Glass available* in the US on Tuesday for the low, low price of all the money**

 

* limited availability

** $1500 + tax

 

https://plus.google.com/+GoogleGlass/posts/HaUCDHtRvcn