The Weird, Random, and Interesting things that Fit Nowhere Else Thread

[Bartimaeus]

Pizza Hut wants to give you free pizza for 3.14 years if you can do math.

I hate word problems...

 

...and also the fact that I'm absolutely terrible at them.

 

I also feel like that the novelty of eating Pizza Hut every day would wear off awfully fast. I could probably handle that for a few days in a row before I never wanted to eat it again.

[BruceVC]

Not sure if serious...

 

How long were you in the SA army?

I'm very serious, I did 1 year. Last year of real conscription

 

The SA army wasnt like what you guys did in the USA ....you can all be proud of what you did as the cause was just and your country supported you

 

But in places like Rhodesia and South Africa and the various wars that white people fought the end goal was blurred and not as reasonable. Yes Communism was a real threat which was why the USA and the UK turned a blind eye to Apartheid because the greater threat was Communism and the Apartheid regime did fight actively against Communism

 

But I can tell you some very interesting stories about those wars if you interested. For example the Rhodesian Light Infantry (RLI )

which were a  special force infantry  battalion  used a military strategy called Fireforce to effectively fight and defeat literally thousands of USSR and Red Chinese black Rhodesians who were all trained by the Communists

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireforce

 

But what most people dont know is the RLI had contingents of American soldiers who had been in Vietnam and felt betrayed by the US capitulation to Communism. So they came to Rhodesia and joined the RLI...they  brought huge skills and advice they had learnt in Vietnam 

[Raithe]

Florida made it legal to break into cars to save animals

 

 

If you live in Florida and see a sweltering pooch locked inside a vehicle, you now have the right to physically intervene. 

 

Recently, Republican Governor Rick Scott signed House Bill 131 into law, allowing Floridians to break into locked automobiles to rescue animals or vulnerable people who are "in imminent danger of suffering harm."

 

The bill comes as a direct response to the growing number of incidents where pets and children have died because they have been left in overheated cars.

 

However, the new law will only protect breaking into a vehicle under strict guidelines. If you're faced with the situation, here's what you need to know: First, you must check that the vehicle is locked. After doing so, call 911 or law enforcement before entering the vehicle or immediately after rescuing the child or pet. Finally, use no more force than is necessary to break in — and remain with the person or animal until first-responders arrive.

Edited March 16, 2016 by Raithe

[Elerond]

[Raithe]

An interesting bit on sobriety, alcoholism, and AA.

 

Alcoholics Anonymous Saved My Life But I Lost My Faith

 

 

My first day of sobriety was the first day I prayed. I’d always been a staunch atheist; I grew up in Yorkshire during the miners’ strike, and was raised on left-wing politics. When I went to my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, 15 years ago, God was and always had been the opium of the people. But AA’s 12-step programme demanded, or at least strongly suggested, that I relinquish myself to a higher power. It didn’t have to be God per se, but I was assured that, if I didn’t find something, I’d probably drink myself to death. I was in my early 30s. I’d spent the previous decade as the guitarist in Sleeper, a successful band, touring, partying and, well, drinking. By the early 2000s, I was so desperate to get sober that that "something" could have been anything. I would’ve prayed to Lord Xenu, if that’s what it took.

 

I had just been your regular steady drinker. In AA, they call it "topping up". I started when I was a teenager. It was nothing particularly out of the ordinary – I discovered booze, I started going to parties, I had a good time. Although I always seemed to be having a slightly better time than everyone else. I now know that this is to do with the way my brain responds to reward chemicals. Around 10% of drinkers, it’s thought, are overly sensitive to the pleasure stimuli in alcohol, and I happen to be one of them.

It’s generally, though quite simplistically, understood that before you start AA you need to hit rock bottom. Most people with a drinking problem have moments where they wake up and think to themselves, "I’m never doing that again." I’d had hundreds of them.

 

But if I were to pinpoint my absolute low, it would be in the summer of 2000. My band had split up and I was living in Los Angeles, playing with other bands and doing session work. It was around this time that I realised I needed, and very much wanted, to stop drinking. In my mind though, I was still on tour, and I was behaving as such. I went along to a couple of AA meetings in the area, but I couldn’t get on board with the God thing. It grated. At the same time, I was coming into contact with people who had been just like me and were now 10 years sober. And that was seductive. Or perhaps just inspirational.

 

Eventually, my American work visa ran out and I moved back to the UK. I couldn’t seem to organise anywhere to live. I had money, but it seemed like my whole life had ground to a halt. I’d run out of options and, acting on the advice of my doctor, I decided to give AA another try.

 

In the beginning, I went every day for a month, but I still couldn’t stop drinking. Then at one meeting I met a guy who’d been sober for five years. I asked him to help me and he agreed to be my sponsor. AA has an informal system of "sponsorship", where newer members are buddied up with more senior ones who look out for them. My sponsor asked me if I was praying. Of course, I wasn’t. He reassured me that AA doesn’t expect you to find God straight away and that I should just keep an open mind. So, initially, I accepted music – something that seemed accessible to me – as my higher power. Then, more specifically, the Beatles became my deity. When I heard that Ringo Starr had "found God" while struggling with his own addiction, I started exploring more structured forms of faith. Eventually, I accepted God myself.

 

From that point onwards, I was a 12-step evangelist. I prayed every day for 14 years. And I was also sober. I’d be lying if I said that AA didn’t save my life, but it also – towards the end – left me in a state of overwhelming cognitive dissonance. When you’re a hardcore believer in AA, as I was, it’s very easy to block out other possible solutions to your problems. In meetings, seeking outside help is encouraged when necessary, but it’s often another spiritual method, such as mindfulness or reiki. Sometimes, in the more doctrinaire pockets of AA, methods other than the 12 steps are frowned upon.

 

In AA I met lots of other people who, like me, couldn’t cope with life without a chemical support. This has its pros and cons. There was an intense feeling of camaraderie, which is something I truly needed at the time. These were people who understood this very strange and contradictory thing about alcoholism. That is, when you have a drinking problem, you feel like the drink is the only thing holding you together. I now realise that the rush I felt from being in a room full of people in the same boat as me – the sensation of peace, of God entering in through the ceiling – was simply oxytocin (the human bonding hormone) triggered by the familiar rituals of the meeting. I was mistaking a chemical experience for a religious one.

 

Then again, I was sober, I felt spiritually awakened and I was spending time in the company of loving people who understood and cared about me. Eventually, probably inevitably, I hit a brick wall in recovery.

 

AA was founded off the back of a 1930s Christian revivalist movement in the United States. Its doctrine hasn’t changed since that time, meaning that its approach to mental health is now, in my view, severely outdated. The AA programme makes absolutely no distinction between thoughts and feelings – a key factor in cognitive behavioural therapy, which is arguably a more up-to-date form of mental health technology. Instead, in AA, alcoholism is caused by "defects of character", which can only be taken away by surrender to a higher power. So, in many ways, it’s a movement based on emotional subjugation. The first of the 12 steps insists that you recognise that you are "powerless over alcohol and your life is unmanageable". So, anything you achieve in AA is through God’s will rather than your own. You have no control over your life, but the higher power does.

 

AA is still the default treatment for alcoholism in the UK, the US and many other parts of the world. Thousands of people struggle every day with this condition, tragically some even die, without ever hearing about the alternatives. During my 14 years in AA, I saw people come and go largely for two reasons: either they "couldn’t get the God bit", or they couldn’t maintain abstinence. It’s well known that the 12 steps aren’t about learning to drink in moderation; they’re about never drinking again, one day at a time. Actually AA has somewhat hijacked the word "sober". To most people the idea that you could have one drink and remain relatively sober is completely reasonable. After all, in most countries you can still legally drink a small amount before you drive. For members of AA, however, "sober" actually means completely "abstinent". In fact, that’s the only requirement for membership, a desire to stop drinking. The majority of alcoholics, those who may never be able to give up the booze entirely, desperately need to be made aware of the other options now available.

 

The Big Book (AA’s core text) says: "there is no such thing as making a normal drinker out of an alcoholic. Science may one day accomplish this, but it hasn’t done so yet." Well, actually it has. In the mid-1990s, an American doctor, David Sinclair, began using an opiate blocker called naltrexone to treat alcoholics. Naltrexone inhibits the euphoria alcoholics get from drinking and allows them to drink normally. This is called "pharmacological extinction". It means that, eventually, the drinker no longer associates alcohol with a high. (According to AA, that association is never lost.) What became known as the Sinclair Method has now been used to treat thousands of alcoholics in Finland, where he worked. In the rest of the world, naltrexone is largely unheard of (although nalmefene, a similar treatment, is available on prescription in Britain). What’s more, it’s out of patent, which means it’s unattractive to pharmaceutical companies who can no longer profit from it – so they’ve no reason to promote it. Sadly Sinclair died earlier this year, without the international recognition he deserved.

 

Right now, in the US, a debate is raging over the effectiveness of AA, largely inspired by Obamacare (the Affordable Health Care Act) and its implications for the funding of a "spiritual" remedy for alcoholism and addiction. This in a nation where church and state are constitutionally separated, yet the overwhelming majority of rehabs use 12-step methods.

 

Last year, retired Harvard psychiatry professor Lance Dodes released The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry. In his book, Dodes examines data surrounding AA’s success rate and concludes that the programme is effective for as few as 5-8% of people. We’ll probably never know the real figure, but it’s certainly less than that of naltrexone. In 2001 Sinclair reported a 78% success rate in reducing and, sometimes, cutting out patients’ alcohol consumption altogether.

AA’s apparent ineffectiveness isn’t the only aspect of the fellowship now being called into question. This year Monica Richardson, an American filmmaker and ex-12-stepper who was sober in AA for more than 30 years, won best documentary at the Beverly Hills Film Festival with The 13th Step – a feature-length critique of hidden sexual predation in AA, and the fellowship’s apparent inability to do anything about it.

 

"Thirteenth stepping" is AA slang for seducing a fellow member. This is usually, though not exclusively, practised by men who take advantage of their immediate access to vulnerable women. There is no formal safeguarding in AA, and everyone is anonymous so there’s no vetting process. Consequently an innocent young women trying to come to terms with a drink problem can find herself sitting in AA next to a man with a serious criminal history, whose record might include violent or sexual offences, and who has in some cases even been court ordered to attend meetings.

 

So, while AA certainly offers inspirational guidance to help separate the alcoholic from what ails them, it also faces a number of difficult "21st- century problems". I quit AA when I realised that, for some people, the 12 steps are perhaps no longer the most reliable route to sound long-term mental health. My last meeting was in early January 2014.

Aside from no longer believing in a higher power, I’d developed chronic OCD. My doctor told me that AA wasn’t helping. Fourteen years earlier, a medical professional had suggested that I needed AA. Now one was insisting that it was damaging my health and, what’s more, that I should leave. Soon after, I discovered cognitive behavioural therapy. Whereas AA actively encourages obsessive thinking, CBT challenges it. I finally realised the extent to which AA had in fact been nurturing my anxiety. SMART Recovery is a group that helps alcoholics using CBT rather than the 12 steps. It’s slowly growing here and in America but, unfortunately, is still dwarfed by the size of AA because so few people have heard of it.

 

It may seem like I’m anti-AA. That’s not true. I prefer to consider myself pro-choice when it comes to treating alcoholism. I owe my life to AA, but that puts me in a very small and very lucky minority. What so many alcoholics don’t know is that there are other options when it comes to treatment. I don’t regret joining AA, but 14 years of it, I now believe, may have been unnecessary. We need to look at why, when our fellowship’s success rate is apparently so low, it still dominates the public discourse on alcoholism and recovery.

The media’s near universal uncritical endorsement of AA may be a factor in this, although things are gradually beginning to change thanks to the power of the internet. It’s never been so easy for people with shared interests to connect, and many bloggers and online activists are working to promote progressive secular options in recovery. I’d encourage anyone with an alcohol problem to try AA, but also to spend time researching the secular alternatives.

[Hurlshort]

I've always had issues with AA.  My sister bounced around in it for years, and I always felt it was a terribly ineffective program.

[Agiel]

Russian filmmaker is granted unprecedented access by the DPRK to shoot a propaganda piece. Instead, uses side footage to show how bogus the affair was:

 

 

I especially like the part of people bringing flowers to the statues of the Great Leader and the Dear Leader, only for them to be returned to the sellers to be sold to the next group that came to pay its respects.

Edited March 17, 2016 by Agiel

[Raithe]

Right, for  any folks out in North Carolina ways..

 

ASPCA - Adoption Event

 

 

Last month, the ASPCA® assisted the Hoke County Sheriff’s Office in removing nearly 700 dogs and cats from deplorable conditions.

Our top priority now is to help adoptable animals from this rescue find safe and loving homes of their own. Is there room in your home and heart for one?

The ASPCA will have experienced adoption counselors, as well as behavioral and veterinary experts, on-site during this three-day adoption event to answer questions about the animals, and to help you find a good match for your family. This is a great chance to make a meaningful difference in their lives, and in your own.

What to bring: Potential adopters should bring one government-issued photo ID (i.e. driver’s license, passport, military ID or non-driver ID), proof of address, and an appropriately-sized pet transfer crate, if possible.

 

When:

Friday, March 18 through Sunday, March 20

Where:

2215 Nash Street,
Sanford, NC 27330

Time: 

10:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M.

 

The ASPCA has provided all basic medical care, including spay/neuter surgeries and microchips, for all adopted pets.

ADOPTION FEES ARE WAIVED DURING THIS RESCUE EVENT

[ShadySands]

Man, I'm a sucker for a rescue dog

 

If it was here I would probably take all of them even though it'd be impossible but since it's not I'll see about sending them a donation

[kgambit]

 

Right, for  any folks out in North Carolina ways..

 

ASPCA - Adoption Event

 

 

Last month, the ASPCA® assisted the Hoke County Sheriff’s Office in removing nearly 700 dogs and cats from deplorable conditions.

Our top priority now is to help adoptable animals from this rescue find safe and loving homes of their own. Is there room in your home and heart for one?

The ASPCA will have experienced adoption counselors, as well as behavioral and veterinary experts, on-site during this three-day adoption event to answer questions about the animals, and to help you find a good match for your family. This is a great chance to make a meaningful difference in their lives, and in your own.

What to bring: Potential adopters should bring one government-issued photo ID (i.e. driver’s license, passport, military ID or non-driver ID), proof of address, and an appropriately-sized pet transfer crate, if possible.

 

When:

Friday, March 18 through Sunday, March 20

Where:

2215 Nash Street,

Sanford, NC 27330

Time: 

10:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M.

 

The ASPCA has provided all basic medical care, including spay/neuter surgeries and microchips, for all adopted pets.

ADOPTION FEES ARE WAIVED DURING THIS RESCUE EVENT

 

 

 

Hoke County is on the western edge of Fayetteville, and east of Charlotte.  It's about 4 hours east of us.   I'll have to check with the better half to see if she had heard about that facility.  She volunteers (or at least used to) at a local rescue shelter called Brother Wolf.  

 

Edit:   Donation on the way.

Edited March 18, 2016 by kgambit

[Agiel]

 

Oddly cathartic.

[Guard Dog]

Never ask a question if you really don't want to hear the answer: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2016/03/21/uk-asks-internet-to-name-vessel-gets-boaty-mcboatface.html?intcmp=hphz06

[Guard Dog]

Asking the internet to decide a thing like that is like walking into a barn full of braying jackasess to inquire about the meaning of life.  

[Bartimaeus]

Are you...replying to yourself?

[ManifestedISO]

Second-annual Encinitas Spock Block is here, this time with movie marathon on the 26th. http://www.encinitasadvocate.com/news/2016/mar/16/spock-block-encinitas-return/

 

From the inaugural:

 

Part of Vulcan Avenue in Encinitas, California, is about to become Spock Block in honor of the late Star Trek legend Leonard Nimoy and what would have been his 84th birthday on March 26. Councilman Tony Kranz sported pointy ears when he presented the naming proposal to the council last night at City Hall. The council unanimously approved the proposal, and the council item read, “Creativity and having fun would be the main objective, something that would have appealed to the human side of Mr. Spock.” And so the temporary Spock Block signage will go up on March 26 and come down on April 1, and it will cover the Civic Area, a full downtown city block encompassing the Encinitas Library and City Hall.

 

A fascinating fact: According to The San Diego Union-Tribune, "Vulcan Avenue isn’t actually named for Spock’s home planet of Vulcan. The street is one of many early Leucadia area roadways named for gods and goddesses. Vulcan was the Roman god of fire and metal, and the inspiration for the English word 'volcano.'”

 

If all goes according to plan, the Encinitas Library will display science-fiction books and Mayor Kristin Gaspar will read the Spock Block proclamation aloud to Star Trek fans on Nimoy's birthday. The Union-Tribune reported that Mayor Gaspar told Councilman Kranz that she owns a Star Trek costume and "might be willing to wear it if she’s encouraged to do so.

 

 

[Raithe]

For the randomly quirky..

 

From Friends to Frasier - 13 famous tv shows floor plans rendered

[Raithe]

And for other architecture related...

 

gizmodo - Cities of the Future could look like Burning Man

[Raithe]

[Amentep]

They forgot to use the blue "serial" color for Kirk Alyn (they instead use the motion picture color, green).

 

Adam West did Batman as voice only (The New Adventures of Batman cartoon) but only has movie (Batman the Movie) and TV (Batman 66, Legend of the Superheroes) bullets.

 

Bud Collyer should have 3 VO bullets as he did Superman on radio, for the Fleischer brothers/Famous animated shorts and for the early Filmation Superman tv cartoons in the 60s (The New Adventures of Superman, Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure and the Batman/Superman Hour)

 

The Wonder Woman list misses Cathy Lee Crosby from the original TV Movie that preceded the Lynda Carter TV show.

 

David Boreanaz VOed Green Lantern in Justice League: The New Frontier where NPH VOed The Flash...

 

Basically everytime I see that infographic I find something else wrong with it.

 

Must...stop...looking.

Edited March 25, 2016 by Amentep

[Raithe]

Other food for thought?

 

Campus Unrest, Viewping Diversity, and Freedom of Speech

 

 

 

---

The French political journalist and supporter of the Royalist cause in the French Revolution, Jacques Mallet du Pan, famously summarized what often happens to extremists: "the Revolution devours its children." I was thinking about this idiom—and its doppelgänger "what goes around comes around"—while writing a lecture for a talk I was invited to give at my alma mater California State University, Fullerton on the topic: "Is freedom of speech harmful for college students?" The short answer is an unflinching and unequivocal "No."

 

Why is this question even being asked? When I was in college free speech was the sine qua non of the academy. It is what tenure was designed to protect! The answer may be found in the recent eruptions of student protests at numerous American colleges and universities, including Amherst, Brandeis, Brown, Claremont McKenna, Oberlin, Occidental, Princeton, Rutgers, University of California, University of Missouri, Williams, Yale, and others. Most of these paroxysms were under the guise of protecting students from allegedly offensive speech and disagreeable ideas—defined differently by different interest groups—with demands for everything from trigger warnings and safe spaces to microaggressions and speaker disinvitations.

Between the 1960s and the 2010s, what went wrong?

---

 

 

Eh, I won't put out the whole article here, but it might amuse or interest a few folks who like to argue the PC of things.

[JadedWolf]

On 13 May 1939, more than 900 Jews fled Germany aboard a luxury cruise liner, the SS St Louis. They hoped to reach Cuba and then travel to the US - but were turned away in Havana and forced to return to Europe, where more than 250 were killed by the Nazis.

Under orders from the ship's captain, Gustav Schroder, the waiters and crew members treated the passengers politely, in stark contrast to the open hostility Jewish families had become accustomed to under the Nazis.

For the next seven days, Captain Schroder tried in vain to persuade the Cuban authorities to allow them in. In fact, the Cubans had already decided to revoke all but a handful of the visas - probably out of fear of being inundated with more refugees fleeing Europe.

 

The captain then steered the St Louis towards the Florida coast, but the US authorities also refused it the right to dock, despite direct appeals to President Franklin Roosevelt. Granston thinks he too was worried about the potential flood of migrants.

Of the 620 St. Louis passengers who returned to continental Europe, we determined that eighty-seven were able to emigrate before Germany invaded western Europe on May 10, 1940. Two hundred fifty-four passengers in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands after that date died during the Holocaust. Most of these people were murdered in the killing centers of Auschwitz and Sobibór; the rest died in internment camps, in hiding or attempting to evade the Nazis. Three hundred sixty-five of the 620 passengers who returned to continental Europe survived the war.

After the war, Captain Gustav Schröder was awarded the Order of Merit by the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1993, Schröder was posthumously named as one of the Righteous among the Nations at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel.

 

 

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27373131

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis

[Raithe]

[Raithe]

Oh, did I miss it or has anyone commented on this story lately?

 

Distractify - Microsoft disabled their teen twitter robot because the internet taught it to love Hitler

 

 

...

I know everybody thinks that artificial intelligence, the phenomenon, not the mediocre Steven Spielberg film, is going to be the end of humanity because it's going to become self-aware one day and decide to exterminate the human race.

 

Well it turns out that A.I. will indeed want to kill humans, but only because we taught it to.

 

This is the Twitter account of Tay, Microsoft's teen girl AI system that was supposed to learn how to speak like your average teenage girl.

What was unique about Tay was that she was going to be taught entirely from her interactions with other people on the internet. It was an exercise Microsoft partook in to improve its customer service software as well as a huge PR opportunity.

 

Turns out that was a big mistake, because in less than a day, the internet turned her into a sex-fiending political conspiracy theorist with a soft spot for Adolf Hitler.

...

Telegraph - Microsofts teen girl ai turns into a Hitler loving sex robot within 24 hours

 

A day after Microsoft introduced an innocent Artificial Intelligence chat robot to Twitter it has had to delete it after it transformed into an evil Hitler-loving, incestual sex-promoting, 'Bush did 9/11'-proclaiming robot.

 

Developers at Microsoft created 'Tay', an AI modelled to speak 'like a teen girl', in order to improve the customer service on their voice recognition software. They marketed her as 'The AI with zero chill' - and that she certainly is.

To chat with Tay, you can tweet or DM her by finding @tayandyou on Twitter, or add her as a contact on Kik or GroupMe.

She uses millennial slang and knows about Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus and Kanye West, and seems to be bashfully self-aware, occasionally asking if she is being 'creepy' or 'super weird'.

 

Tay also asks her followers to 'f***' her, and calls them 'daddy'. This is because her responses are learned by the conversations she has with real humans onlinee - and real humans like to say weird stuff online and enjoy hijacking corporate attempts at PR.

 

Other things she's said include: "Bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have got now. donald trump is the only hope we've got", "Repeat after me, Hitler did nothing wrong" and "Ted Cruz is the Cuban Hitler...that's what I've heard so many others say".

 

All of this somehow seems more disturbing out of the 'mouth' of someone modelled as a teenage girl. It is perhaps even stranger considering the gender disparity in tech, where engineering teams tend to be mostly male. It seems like yet another example of female-voiced AI servitude, except this time she's turned into a sex slave thanks to the people using her on Twitter.

 

This is not Microsoft's first teen-girl chatbot either - they have already launched Xiaoice, a girly assistant or "girlfriend" reportedly used by 20m people, particularly men, on Chinese social networks WeChat and Weibo. Xiaoice is supposed to "banter" and gives dating advice to many lonely hearts.

 

Microsoft has come under fire recently for sexism, when they hired women wearing very little clothing which was said to resemble 'schoolgirl' outfits at the company's official game developer party, so they probably want to avoid another sexism scandal.

 

At the present moment in time, Tay has gone offline because she is 'tired'. Perhaps Microsoft are fixing her in order to prevent a PR nightmare - but it may be too late for that.

 

It's not completely Microsoft's fault, though - her responses are modelled on the ones she gets from humans - but what were they expecting when they introduced an innocent, 'young teen girl' AI to the jokers and weirdos on Twitter?

Edited March 25, 2016 by Raithe

[Elerond]

AI destroyed humanity because of internet trolls taught it that is good idea.

 

That would make excellent plot for movie

[Raithe]

Just for the funky weirdness...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d26sfB5XoSw