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Great story Dubi, it will be very interesting to see if anyone manages to win the $1M.
My children are vegetarians - but not Dad!
Still as a consequence, I do eat a lot more vegetarian meals now.
There are already some very good meat substitute products on the market, the biggest drawback (I think) is that they usually are very heavy on the sodium - not something I need more of.
And definitely from an environmental point of view, "test tube meat" would be very welcome.
Animal activists offer $1 million for test-tube meat
Animal rights group PETA steps up fight against eating meat, offers $1 million prize for anyone managing to produce mock meat successfully mimicking real thing
AFP Published: 05.01.08, 13:31 / Israel Activism
Coming soon to a menu near you – the test-tube steak. Fact or fiction? The animal rights group PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) announced recently that it will be offering a $1 million reward for anyone who by will be able to grow in-vitro meat that successfully mimics the look and taste of real meat, by 2012.
"In-vitro meat production would use animal stem cells that would be placed in a medium to grow and reproduce. The result would mimic flesh and could be cooked and eaten," said the group.
"Some promising steps have been made toward this technology," continued the PETA statement, "But we're still several years away from having in vitro meat be available to the general public."
The million-dollar reward will go to the participant who manages to put test-tube chicken into commercial production and successfully sell it in at least 10 US states at a competitive price – sometime in the next four years.
Chicken a-la lab
As said in the statement, teams of researchers around the world are already working on producing meat in a laboratory, but in-vitro meat for dinner is still years away.
The New York Times revealed Monday that the scheme almost triggered a civil war within the headquarters of the organization dedicated to fighting for animal rights. But PETA argued the move would help avoid unnecessary suffering.
"More than 40 billion chickens, fish, pigs, and cows are killed every year for food in the United States in horrific ways. In-vitro meat would spare animals from this suffering. In addition, in-vitro meat would dramatically reduce the devastating effects the meat industry has on the environment," said the group's statement.
As for selecting the winner, PETA is said to put together a team of 10 jurors who will be in charge of tasting each and every one of the synthetic entries, in order to make sure they match the texture and flavor of chicken. The winning specimen will have to score at least 80 out of 100 points to award its inventors with the a million dollars.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3537810,00.html
Central Washington offers the ultimate act of sportsmanship
By Graham Hays
ESPN.com
http://sports.espn.go.com/ncaa/columns/story?columnist=hays_graham&id=3372631&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab4pos1
Western Oregon senior Sara Tucholsky had never hit a home run in her career. Central Washington senior Mallory Holtman was already her school's career leader in them. But when a twist of fate and a torn knee ligament brought them face to face with each other and face to face with the end of their playing days, they combined on a home run trot that celebrated the collective human spirit far more than individual athletic achievement.
Both schools compete as Division II softball programs in the Great Northwest Athletic Conference. Neither has ever reached the NCAA tournament at the Division II level. But when they arrived for Saturday's conference doubleheader at Central Washington's 300-seat stadium in Ellensburg, a small town 100 miles and a mountain range removed from Seattle, the hosts resided one game behind the visitors at the top of the conference standings. As was the case at dozens of other diamonds across the map, two largely anonymous groups prepared to play the most meaningful games of their seasons.
It was a typical Saturday of softball in April, right down to a few overzealous fans heckling an easy target, the diminutive Tucholsky, when she came to the plate in the top of the second inning of the second game with two runners on base and the game still scoreless after Western Oregon's 8-1 win in the first game of the afternoon.
"I just remember trying to block them out," Tucholsky said of the hecklers. "The first pitch I took, it was a strike. And then I really don't remember where the home run pitch was at all; I just remember hitting it, and I knew it was out."
A part-time starter in the outfield throughout her four years, Tucholsky had been caught in a numbers game this season on a deep roster that entered the weekend hitting better than .280 and having won nine games in a row. Prior to the pitch she sent over the center-field fence, she had just three hits in 34 at-bats this season. And in that respect, her hitting heroics would have made for a pleasing, if familiar, story line on their own: an unsung player steps up in one of her final games and lifts her team's postseason chances.
But it was what happened after an overly excited Tucholsky missed first base on her home run trot and reversed direction to tag the bag that proved unforgettable.
"Sara is small -- she's like 5-2, really tiny," Western Oregon coach Pam Knox said. "So you would never think that she would hit a home run. The score was 0-0, and Sara hit a shot over center field. And I'm coaching third and I'm high-fiving the other two runners that came by -- then all of a sudden, I look up, and I'm like, 'Where's Sara?' And I look over, and she's in a heap beyond first base."
While she was doubling back to tag first base, Tucholsky's right knee gave out. The two runners who had been on base already had crossed home plate, leaving her the only offensive player on the field of play, even as she lay crumpled in the dirt a few feet from first base and a long way from home plate. First-base coach Shannon Prochaska -- Tucholsky's teammate for three seasons and the only voice she later remembered hearing in the ensuing conversation -- checked to see whether she could crawl back to the base under her own power.
As Knox explained, "It went through my mind, I thought, 'If I touch her, she's going to kill me.' It's her only home run in four years. I didn't want to take that from her, but at the same time, I was worried about her."
Umpires confirmed that the only option available under the rules was to replace Tucholsky at first base with a pinch runner and have the hit recorded as a two-run single instead of a three-run home run. Any assistance from coaches or trainers while she was an active runner would result in an out. So without any choice, Knox prepared to make the substitution, taking both the run and the memory from Tucholsky.
"And right then," Knox said, "I heard, 'Excuse me, would it be OK if we carried her around and she touched each bag?'"
The voice belonged to Holtman, a four-year starter who owns just about every major offensive record there is to claim in Central Washington's record book. She also is staring down a pair of knee surgeries as soon as the season ends. Her knees ache after every game, but having already used a redshirt season earlier in her career, and ready to move on to graduate school and coaching at Central, she put the operations on hold so as to avoid missing any of her final season. Now, with her own opportunity for a first postseason appearance very much hinging on the outcome of the game -- her final game at home -- she stepped up to help a player she knew only as an opponent for four years.
"Honestly, it's one of those things that I hope anyone would do it for me," Holtman said. "She hit the ball over her fence. She's a senior; it's her last year. … I don't know, it's just one of those things I guess that maybe because compared to everyone on the field at the time, I had been playing longer and knew we could touch her, it was my idea first. But I think anyone who knew that we could touch her would have offered to do it, just because it's the right thing to do. She was obviously in agony."
Holtman and shortstop Liz Wallace lifted Tucholsky off the ground and supported her weight between them as they began a slow trip around the bases, stopping at each one so Tucholsky's left foot could secure her passage onward. Even with Tucholsky feeling the pain of what trainers subsequently came to believe was a torn ACL (she was scheduled for tests to confirm the injury on Monday), the surreal quality of perhaps the longest and most crowded home run trot in the game's history hit all three players.
"We all started to laugh at one point, I think when we touched the first base," Holtman said. "I don't know what it looked like to observers, but it was kind of funny because Liz and I were carrying her on both sides and we'd get to a base and gently, barely tap her left foot, and we'd all of a sudden start to get the giggles a little bit."
Accompanied by a standing ovation from the fans, they finally reached home plate and passed the home run hitter into the arms of her own teammates.
Then Holtman and Wallace returned to their positions and tried to win the game.
Hollywood would have a difficult time deciding how such a script should end, whether to leave Tucholsky's home run as the decisive blow or reward the selfless actions of her opponents. Reality has less room for such philosophical quandaries. Central Washington did rally for two runs in the bottom of the second -- runs that might have tied the game had Knox been forced to replace Tucholsky -- but Western Oregon held on for a 4-2 win.
But unlike a movie, the credits didn't roll after the final out, and the story that continues has little to do with those final scores.
"It kept everything in perspective and the fact that we're never bigger than the game," Knox said of the experience. "It was such a lesson that we learned -- that it's not all about winning. And we forget that, because as coaches, we're always trying to get to the top. We forget that. But I will never, ever forget this moment. It's changed me, and I'm sure it's changed my players."
For her part, Holtman seems not altogether sure what all the fuss is about. She seems to genuinely believe that any player in her position on any field on any day would have done the same thing. Which helps explains why it did happen on that day and on that field.
And she appreciates the knowledge that while the results of Saturday's game and her senior season soon will fade into the dust and depth of old media guides and Internet archives, the story of what happened in her final game at home will live on far longer.
"I think that happening on Senior Day, it showed the character of our team," Holtman said. "Because granted I thought of it, but everyone else would have done it. It's something people will talk about for Senior Day. They won't talk about who got hits and what happened and who won; they'll talk about that. And it's kind of a nice way to go out, because it shows what our program is about and the kind of people we have here."
'Monotonous' page turning helps digitize books for Google
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/25/google.books.ap/index.html
ANN ARBOR, Michigan (AP) -- In a dimly lit back room on the second level of the University of Michigan library's book-shelving department, Courtney Mitchel helped a giant desktop machine digest a rare, centuries-old Bible.
Mitchel is among hundreds of librarians from Minnesota to England making digital versions of the most fragile of the books to be included in Google Inc.'s Book Search, a portal that will eventually lead users to all the estimated 50 million to 100 million books in the world.
The manually scanning -- at up to 600 pages a day -- is much slower than Google's regular process.
"It's monotonous," the 24-year-old said.
Then she knit her career hopes into the work.
"But it's still something that I'm learning about -- how to interact with really old materials and working with digital imaging, which is relevant to art history."
The unusually tight binding on the early-16th-century polyglot Bible made it hard to expose the portions toward the book's middle as Mitchel spread each pair of pages for the scanner. Librarians believe it is the oldest Bible in the world with Arabic type.
Google, the Internet's leader in search and advertising, says the process it developed and is using for scanning the majority of the books in Book Search is proprietary. Employees will not discuss it except to say it is much faster than what Mitchel is doing and it's not destructive.
"It took us quite a while to develop it so we do keep that confidential," said a library manager for Book Search, Ben Bunnell, who declined even to say where Google does the scanning.
Many libraries began digitizing books a decade ago to preserve them. Funding from Google allows the 28 libraries it's working with to cut their digitizing costs because they don't have to pay for scanning the books Google wants to include in Book Search.
Through Book Search, users can track down a book on any topic they're interested in and read a small portion. If the book's not protected by copyright, users can download the whole thing. If it is, or if they just want to read an original, they can use Book Search to find copies to buy or borrow.
More than 1 million rare or fragile books have been digitized through the Google-Michigan partnership since it began in 2004, with an estimated 6 million to go.
Book Search has the support of many publishers, authors and librarians, including Cambridge University Press and Wisdom Publications. But some publishers and authors have sued, claiming the service violates their copyrights. Google says Book Search is aboveboard because Web surfers can retrieve only snippets of copyright material through the service.
Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive at the Open Content Alliance, said Google may be trying to "lock up the public domain" by making proprietary copies of works whose copyrights have expired -- which includes the vast majority of the world's books.
Kahle said there's a core value in the project, in preserving material indefinitely and enabling broad access to it. But he questioned whether Google will share the works it digitizes with other search engines.
"We believe there should be many libraries, many publishers, many search engines, many types of users from different points of view," Kahle said.
John Price Wilkin, Michigan's associate university librarian, called Kahle's stance "theoretical."
"Our volumes are entirely open in the sense that people can find them, read them, use them, do all the things that they would do in scholarship or pleasure," Wilkin said.
In the room where Mitchel and colleague Chava Israel, an artist, work, the temperature is always in the 60s.
Each technician has a slightly angled table with a flexible middle that cradles books and holds them still while two overhead cameras photograph the pages. Sometimes the women play music or listen to news online, but they often work in silence, save the clicks of their computers and scanners.
Mitchel glides in a rolling chair forth and back between scanner and computer, computer and scanner, turning page upon page and clicking her mouse to shoot each pair. Once the images reach the computer, the women use the book scanning software Omniscan from Germany's Zeutschel GmbH to clean them up.
A final click of the mouse sends each digitized book to Google for optical character recognition processing, which makes the text searchable. Google then returns a copy of the images and data to the library and posts another to the Web.
Israel, 44, who has been scanning books for three years, takes a philosophical view of the project.
"My favorite part is working with older books and being able to preserve a lot of the knowledge and help bring more people access," Israel said. "I turn pages. It's kind of meditative."
Student 'Twitters' his way out of Egyptian jail
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/25/twitter.buck/index.html
By Mallory Simon
CNN
(CNN) -- James Karl Buck helped free himself from an Egyptian jail with a one-word blog post from his cell phone.
Buck, a graduate student from the University of California-Berkeley, was in Mahalla, Egypt, covering an anti-government protest when he and his translator, Mohammed Maree, were arrested April 10.
On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter.
The message only had one word. "Arrested."
Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt -- the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier -- were alerted that he was being held.
Twitter is a social-networking blog site that allows users to send status updates, or "tweets," from cell phones, instant messaging services and Facebook in less than 140 characters.
Hossam el-Hamalawy, a Cairo-based blogger at UC-Berkeley, was one of the people who got word of Buck's arrest.
"At first I was worried about his safety," el-Hamalawy said.
Then, el-Hamalawy took to the Web and wrote regular updates in his own blog to spread the information Buck was sending by Twitter. Nobody was sure how long Buck would be able to communicate.
But Buck was able to send updates every couple of hours saying he was still detained, he had spoken to the prosecutor, he still had not been charged, and he was worried about Maree.
"Usually the first thing the police go for is the detainees' cameras and cellular phones," el-Hamalawy said. "I'm surprised they left James with his phone."
Twitter is normally used to keep groups of people connected in less urgent situations. Video Watch how Twitter works »
But Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, said he and others knew that the service could have wide-reaching effects early on, when the San-Francisco, California-based company used it to communicate during earthquakes.
Stone said that as the service got more popular, they began to hear stories of people using Twitter during natural disasters with a focus on activism and journalism.
Buck's urgent message is proof of the value of Twitter, Stone said. Buck's entry set off a chain of events that led to his college hiring a lawyer on his behalf.
"James' case is particularly compelling to us because of the simplicity of his message -- one word, 'arrested' -- and the speed with which the whole scene played out," Stone said. "It highlights the simplicity and value of a real-time communication network that follows you wherever you go."
Initially, the Twitter message was a precaution -- something people could trace in case anything went wrong, Buck said.
"The most important thing on my mind was to let someone know where we were so that there would be some record of it ... so we couldn't [disappear]," Buck said. "As long as someone knew where we were, I felt like they couldn't do their worst [to us] because someone, at some point, would be checking in on them."
Buck began using Twitter as a way to keep up in touch with the bloggers at the heart of his project and the events going on in Egypt that he intended to cover. Buck was working on a multimedia project on Egypt's "new leftists and the blogosphere" as part of his master's degree thesis.
Buck found out from a Twitter message that a planned protest against rising food prices and decreasing wages in Mahalla had been shut down by Egyptian authorities April 6.
The next day, tensions rose as family and friends of protesters who had been detained took to the streets, eventually throwing Molotov cocktails and setting tires on fire, he said.
On April 10, Buck returned to Mahalla, where protests continued.
"I was worried about getting arrested, so I made sure to stay at a distance from the protest so there was no way I could be accused of being part of it," Buck said. "Mohammed and I had a bad sense; it was really tense."
When the men tried to escape, they were detained. That's when Buck thought of Twitter and sent out his message.
Buck and Maree were interrogated, released and then detained again by the same police officers.
"We are really worried that we are off the radar now," Buck said.
Eventually Buck was released, but Maree was transferred to another police station.
As he left the station, Buck reached into his pocket, as he did less than 24 hours earlier.
Another one-word blog entry said it all: "Free."
As happy as he was to be free, Buck said, his biggest frustration was leaving behind the translator who helped protect him during the riots.
Although the Twitter message helped him find contacts to get out of prison, he says it was more the power of the network he had as an American that enabled him to be released so quickly.
"Mohammed was sitting next to me," he said. "But he didn't have the network to call. I tried to use my network to shield him until they tore us apart."
Twitter may not have been able to secure Maree's release, but Buck hopes his initial reason for using Twitter will help find his missing friend.
"It was my big hope that people would get [the message] right away and at least put a thumbtack on the map as far as our location," Buck said.
There has been no official confirmation regarding Maree's whereabouts.
Attiya Shakran, press counsel for the Egyptian Consulate in San Francisco, said Maree was released April 13.
Maree's brother Ahmed Maree said that he had not heard from his brother and that he believes he is still in jail.
Government officials in Egypt could neither confirm nor deny Maree's release, despite repeated requests for comment.
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Buck is now using his story and Twitter page as a way to rally people looking for answers about Maree's status. He's gone as far as publishing the phone number of the press counsel of the Egyptian Consulate in San Francisco and posting a petition for Maree's release.
For Buck, the main story is no longer about his quest for freedom from jail; it's a quest to find answers and, eventually, find his friend.
Humans nearly wiped out 70,000 years ago, study says
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/24/close.call.ap/index.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Human beings may have had a brush with extinction 70,000 years ago, an extensive genetic study suggests.
Geneticist Spencer Wells, here meeting an African village elder, says the study tells "truly an epic drama."
The human population at that time was reduced to small isolated groups in Africa, apparently because of drought, according to an analysis released Thursday.
The report notes that a separate study by researchers at Stanford University estimated that the number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2,000 before numbers began to expand again in the early Stone Age.
"This study illustrates the extraordinary power of genetics to reveal insights into some of the key events in our species' history," said Spencer Wells, National Geographic Society explorer in residence.
"Tiny bands of early humans, forced apart by harsh environmental conditions, coming back from the brink to reunite and populate the world. Truly an epic drama, written in our DNA."
Wells is director of the Genographic Project, launched in 2005 to study anthropology using genetics. The report was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
Studies using mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down through mothers, have traced modern humans to a single "mitochondrial Eve," who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago.
The migrations of humans out of Africa to populate the rest of the world appear to have begun about 60,000 years ago, but little has been known about humans between Eve and that dispersal.
The new study looks at the mitochondrial DNA of the Khoi and San people in South Africa, who appear to have diverged from other people between 90,000 and 150,000 years ago.
The researchers led by Doron Behar of Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel, and Saharon Rosset of IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and Tel Aviv University concluded that humans separated into small populations before the Stone Age, when they came back together and began to increase in numbers and spread to other areas.
Eastern Africa experienced a series of severe droughts between 135,000 and 90,000 years ago, and researchers said this climatological shift may have contributed to the population changes, dividing into small, isolated groups that developed independently.
Paleontologist Meave Leakey, a Genographic adviser, asked, "Who would have thought that as recently as 70,000 years ago, extremes of climate had reduced our population to such small numbers that we were on the very edge of extinction?"
Today, more than 6.6 billion people inhabit the globe, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The research was funded by the National Geographic Society, IBM, the Waitt Family Foundation, the Seaver Family Foundation, Family Tree DNA and Arizona Research Labs.
Thanks Dubi, that's a new one to me - the results certainly look like fun.
Hopefully there are no dangers they didn't disclose!
I will put that on my list of things to do... update to follow.
Glow Lantern
http://www.metacafe.com/w/859146/
NFL Films is taking shots
Another one for football fans, especially anyone who has enjoyed NFL Films through the years. It's a sad story unfortunately. At least I can still clearly hear John Facenda's voice in my mind: "The frozen tundra of Lambeau field..." Aiming4
http://www.philly.com/philly/hp/sports/17043651.html
By PAUL DOMOWITCH
THE NATIONAL Football League wasn't always the enormously popular, Midas-touch monolith that it is today. Once upon a time, it was a struggling league that was running a distant third in popularity and TV ratings to baseball and even college football.
It is not overstating things to say NFL Films changed all that.
Forty-three years ago, then-commissioner Pete Rozelle summoned NFL Films founder Ed Sabol, and his son Steve, to his Manhattan office and gave them the formidable task of turning pro football into America's game.
Rozelle told them that the league needed a larger-than-life image, a mystique, a sense of magic that would attract the nation's sports fans. The Sabols took it from there.
They created a mythic image of pro football with their game-as-war filmmaking, and America absolutely ate it up. "We created a way of portraying the game," Steve Sabol said 2 years ago.
That "way" has helped turn the NFL into an $8 billion-a-year cash cow that has left baseball and college football and every other sport in its dust. That "way" has helped the Sabols and NFL Films win an impressive 92 Emmys over the years, with another 14 nominations announced earlier this month.
But the layoffs earlier this month of 21 NFL Films employees was the latest indication that many in the league may think that "way" has outlived its usefulness.
The league says the layoffs, which numbered 7.4 percent of Films' Mount Laurel, N.J., work force, were strictly part of a leaguewide belt-tightening. It also has pointed to HBO's recent decision to end its long-running show, "Inside the NFL," which relied heavily on NFL Filmsproduced work.
"We're in a time in America financially that's quite unique," New England Patriots owner Bob Kraft, the chairman of the league's broadcast committee, told the Daily News. "Everyone's trying to run their business soundly.
"I think what you're going to see in America in the next 6 to 9 months is, every company is going to look at redundancy. Whether it's newspapers or brokerage firms or insurance companies or retailers or professional sports leagues. We're in a period in our economy where people who want to be strong 10-15 years from now have to do that. If they don't, they won't be around."
Kraft and the league's other owners will discuss the Films layoffs, as well as the struggles of the 4-year-old NFL Network, next week at their annual March meeting in Palm Beach, Fla.
In downplaying the layoffs at Films, Kraft pointed out that the league has hired "many times what we laid off there" at its Web site, NFL.com. But that just buttresses the belief by many that the league is phasing out the quality filmmaking that NFL Films has become famous for over the years.
Steve Bornstein, the former ESPN chief who was brought in by the league to run NFL Media, which includes the NFL Network, NFL.com and NFL Films, has shown less and less interest in Films' signature programming, according to several league sources. He has indicated, the sources said, it's too expensive to make and that there isn't a market out there for it anymore.
"The shots that people associate with Films, those long, beautiful, super slo-mo shots of a spiraling football, the NFL Network people hate that," said a league executive familiar with the situation. "It's too slow for them.
"They're so into their mind-set. The people they've brought in [at NFL Network] are either from ESPN or 'Best Damn Sports Show.' And they have their idea of what's good television. It's a vastly different kind of thing than what NFL Films has produced."
Bornstein vehemently denies suggestions that he thinks NFL Films has become a dinosaur.
"I think NFL Films is a critical part of not only the mythology of the NFL, but a critical part of the success of the NFL Network," he said in a recent interview with the Daily News. "The people I know at Films thank the day that the NFL Network was created because they finally had an outlet for their product."
Truth be told, no one at Films right now is thanking the day the NFL Network was created. The company-wide sentiment is that the network's ongoing war with the nation's two largest cable operators, Comcast and Time Warner, which is costing the league an estimated $250 million a year in subscriber fees, along with Bornstein's disinterest in Films-produced programming, was directly responsible for the layoffs, though both Bornstein and Kraft said there is no linkage.
The league's impasse with Comcast and Time Warner over which tier the cable companies should place the NFL Network on is becoming a growing source of frustration to many in the league and is expected to be a hot-button issue in Palm Beach when Bornstein makes his report to the owners.
"I'm a little bit perplexed that they haven't been able to work this out," an NFL club president told the Daily News. "I do contracts and negotiations every day. Usually, you find a way to get it resolved with some give-and-take on both sides. But this has been going on for some time with no resolution in sight.
"The network is of interest to a large number of people. But I don't know if we can force it down the cable companies' throats. At least not at the financial level we've been talking about."
The league is charging cable distributors 70 cents per subscriber per month. Last year, Comcast moved the NFL Network from its general-interest digital tier to its sports tier, which requires digital subscribers to pay extra. The NFL Network lost 6 million customers when that happened. The network isn't on Time Warner cable systems at all.
Kraft said the league had hoped the NFL Network would be in 75 million to 80 million homes already. Instead, it's in just 31 million. It lost another 4 million subscribers recently when Dish Network dropped NFLN from its "America's Top 100" package to its "America's Top 200" package. The "Top 100" package reaches an estimated 12 million Dish subscribers. The "Top 200" package reaches 8 million.
"It's been frustrating," admitted Kraft, who also serves on the three-man operations committee that oversees the NFL Network. "But we have a long view of things. Over time, we'll find a way to get a resolution to this. One way or another, we'll do something that allows us to . . . we'll either do partnerships with media companies or partnerships with cable or something. We'll wind up getting the distribution we want."
In addition to the low subscription numbers, there also are growing complaints around the league about the quality of the programming on the NFL Network. Two weeks ago, the league put out a release trumpeting the fact that the NFL Network, NFL Films and NFL.com received 15 sports Emmy nominations. But 14 of them, including for last year's well-received "America's Game: The Super Bowl Champions" series, were earned by Films and the other by NFL.com.
Many feel the "America's Game" series, which aired on the NFL Network, may be one of the best things NFL Films ever has done. But when Steve Sabol approached NFL Network executives recently about doing another "America's Game" project, sources said he he was rebuffed. The explanation: We don't have the money for it right now.
The decision to nix an "America's Game'' sequel has only reinforced the feeling at Films that Bornstein and the other executives at NFL Network don't have much appreciation for what NFL Films is or has been.
The late George Halas long ago dubbed Films "the keeper of the flame" for the league, and the Sabols have taken that title seriously. They felt it was their obligation to preserve the history of the game and help educate new generations of fans to that history with their quality film-making.
But the people running NFL Network seem to view the history of the game the way high school sophomores do the history of the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution.
"Everything about the network is about what's happening right now," one Films employee said. "Some of the best stuff we've done over the years has been the historical stuff. But they just don't want to go there. They just don't think there's an audience for that. They think if people tune into the NFL Network and see black-and-white footage, they're on to the next channel."
Bornstein has ended much of Films' signature programming, which included the long-running "NFL Films Presents" series on ESPN and Films' Emmy-winning "Lost Treasures" anthology.
The "Game of the Week" show that Films used to produce for the NFL Network, complete with music, script and Films' unique camera work, has been replaced by much-cheaper-to-make "Instant Replay," which essentially is SportsCenter type highlights of games. Films ended up selling "Game of the Week" to the ION television network, whose primary programming is reruns of old shows like "Baywatch," "Who's The Boss?" and "Mama's Family."
The primary focus of the NFL Network now, with the exception of the eight late-season games it has televised each of the last 2 years, is its tough-to-watch studio show, "NFL Total Access," with Rich Eisen, which it shows on a loop several times a day.
"Editorially, we're very pleased by the content we're putting out there," Bornstein said. "The product has exceeded all of my expectations. Every week, our ratings seem to be growing. We think it's popular programming that the consumer wants."
Bornstein insists that Films has produced more product in the 4 years that NFL Network has been around than in any 4-year period in its history. While that may be true, most of the product Bornstein has them producing is nowhere near the quality of previous Films projects.
NFL Films spends most of its time assembling highlights packages that run on "Total Access" or putting together video streams for NFL.com. It's like having Picasso paint "Dogs Playing Poker."
Said Bornstein: "Has the product mix changed? I hope so, as we evolve and figure out what people want and what seems to be resonating with our consumer."
Kraft insists that NFL Films still has a vital role in the league's future.
"If NFL Films is a dinosaur, I'd like to be surrounded by dinosaurs," he said. "The film library, the asset base that's there, the programming . . . it's sort of like Beatles music or Beethoven's symphonies or Brahms. When you and I aren't here anymore, people will still love to watch it because of the quality of it and the uniqueness and the appeal. I think it's pretty special."
As for the NFL Network, which debuted in 2004, the league's owners had hoped it would immediately become a big revenue-producer. When commissioner Roger Goodell testified before the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet earlier this month, he called the network "an essential part of [the NFL's] long-term strategy for maintaining the health of the sport of football."
But the league's battle with Comcast and Time Warner has stunted the network's growth, and with it, the revenue it had hoped it would produce. According to league sources, the network isn't losing money, but it's not making very much either.
"The NFL Network was created for a bunch of different reasons," Bornstein said. "One of them was to market the sport. One of them was to make football information and product and programming available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And yes, being a source of financial strength also was an objective."
Said Kraft: "We haven't gotten the distribution we wanted. We got geared up hoping we would, but it didn't happen. But it will happen eventually. One way or another, we will accomplish what we need to.
"People who are football addicts will love the NFL Network." *
'Naughty Auties' battle autism with virtual interaction
By Nicole Saidi
CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/conditions/03/28/sl.autism.irpt/index.html
(CNN) -- Walk into Naughty Auties, a virtual resource center for those with autism, and you'll find palm trees swaying against a striking ocean sunset. Were it not for the pixelated graphics on the computer screen in front of you, you would swear you were looking at a tropical hideaway.
David Savill, 22, lives in Gloucester, England, in real life and created this spot within the virtual world of Second Life. Residents of this digital realm can represent themselves with 3-D images called avatars and connect with each other over the Internet.
Savill has Asperger's syndrome and said he wanted Naughty Auties to serve those with autism spectrum disorders and their friends and family.
Savill, who represents himself in the virtual world using an avatar named Dave Sparrow, said one benefit is that visitors can practice social interaction and find information about the condition. The graphical representations of real people create a "comfort zone" that can coax users out of their shells and get them communicating with others, he said.
"You're on your own computer, in your own room, your own space," Savill said.
"So you're not going out into the real world meeting people, you're going meeting people online and in your own home, so you're perfectly relaxed. It's just a fantastic tool to use to bring people together." VideoTake a video tour of Naughty Auties with Savill »
Autism, more precisely the autism spectrum, is a range of brain disorders that can cause difficulties in social interaction, communication and behavior. Asperger's syndrome is at the milder end of this spectrum. People with Asperger's are often high-achieving but can have difficulty in social situations.
CNN learned about Savill's Second Life place from an iReporter in England who has named herself Janey Bracken in Second Life. Bracken, who prefers not to share her real name, submitted stories to iReport.com describing Savill's resource center and providing information about other places where those with the condition can turn.
"[Savill] said that his life changed when his family decided to get the Internet," Bracken wrote. "He was able to use chat rooms and soon realized that people used symbols to express themselves: the smiley signs, the angry signs, hug signs, etc., to enhance the text. He went on to say that subconsciously his brain was learning about communication from these sessions of chat."
Second Life has its own economy and social scene, and Bracken and Savill hope it could become a haven for those seeking help for autism.
While many think such computer interactions could eventually be helpful in treating autism, scientists say more information is needed to truly assess their value. Dr. Fred Volkmar, a professor in Yale University's Child Study Center, said he would want more concrete studies done before he could be sure.
"Although not much research is yet available, there is clearly considerable potential in use of new technologies for fostering social skills," Volkmar said.
To answer this need, scientists are beginning to explore the possibilities in Second Life. One such researcher is Simon Bignell, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Derby in Derby, England, who is running a project that is evaluating teaching and research in Second Life.
Bignell, known in-world as Milton Broome, said Second Life is an uncharted but promising area for new applied psychological research. Virtual reality can be used to simulate new environments for people on the autistic spectrum, he said.
"For people with autism, we've found it's a very nice way of setting up situations they might come across in their everyday lives," Bignell said. "For people who have social, emotional, communicational problems ... we can get them familiar with an environment before they actually try it out in real life." VideoWatch more on autism research in a virtual world »
He started the "Autism Research" discussion group within Second Life to serve as an information-sharing tool for interested parties. He also has an office within Second Life and can sometimes be found working in SL-Labs, the university's in-world psychology lab space. The lab areas contain meeting spots, informational kiosks and games. A portion of these areas contain information about autism and Asperger's.
Savill said Second Life excels at minimizing geographical separations between people and bringing people from all over the world to meet together quickly and easily.
He added that he wanted to emphasize that virtual worlds are an emerging and important tool not just for autistic people, but for the people who know them.
"It's not just to help people with autism, it's to help people whose lives have been affected by autism, be they family or friends or employees of people who have autism," Savill said. "Naughty Auties is a fantastic meeting place for people."
French recording may be world's first
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080328/ap_on_hi_te/earliest_recording
By JASON DEAREN, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 4 minutes ago
SAN FRANCISCO - At first listen, the grainy high-pitched warble doesn't sound like much, but scientists say the French recording from 1860 is the oldest known recorded human voice.
The 10-second clip of a woman singing "Au Clair de la Lune," taken from a so-called phonautogram, was recently discovered by audio historian David Giovannoni. The recording predates Thomas Edison's "Mary had a little lamb" — previously credited as the oldest recorded voice — by 17 years.
The tune was captured using a phonautograph, a device created by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville that created visual recordings of sound waves.
Using a needle that moved in response to sound, the phonautograph etched sound waves into paper coated with soot from an oil lamp.
Giovannoni and his research partner, Patrick Feaster, began looking for phonautograms last year and in December discovered two of Scott's — from 1857 and 1859 — in France's patent office. Using high-resolution optical scanning equipment, Giovannoni collected images of the phonautograms that he brought back to the United States.
"What Scott was trying to do in 1861 was establish that he was the first to arrive at this idea," Giovannoni said. "He was depositing with the French Academy examples of his work."
"We took those images back to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and found that (Scott's) technique wasn't very developed," Giovannoni said. "There were squiggles on paper, but it was not recording sound."
So Giovannoni, who collaborates with many other audio historians, including scientists at Berkeley, asked the French Academy of Sciences to send digital scans of more of Scott's papers. Those scans arrived on March 1.
"When I opened up the file, I nearly fell off my chair," Giovannoni said. "We had beautifully recorded and preserved phonautograms, many of which had dates on them."
While Giovannoni was excited by the images, they still needed to be translated into sound.
Creating sound from lines scrawled on sooty paper was a job for Berkeley lab scientists Carl Haber and Earl Cornell. Haber and Cornell had previously created sound from phonautograms that Edison had created in 1878 of trains.
The scientists used optical imaging and a "virtual stylus" to read Scott's sooty paper. They immediately got sound, but because phonautograph was hand-cranked its speed varied and that changed the recording's pitch.
"If someone's singing at middle C and the crank speeds up and slows down, the waves change shape and are shifting," said Cornell. "We had a tuning fork side by side with the recording, so you can correct the sound and speed variations."
On March 3, Haber and Cornell sent audio back to Giovannoni, and another engineer further fine-tuned the recording to bring the voice out more from the static.
"When I first heard the recording as you hear it ... it was magical, so ethereal," said Giovannoni. "The fact is it's recorded in smoke. The voice is coming out from behind this screen of aural smoke."
Scott never intended for anyone to listen to his phonautograms, but the result of this work will be played in public on Friday at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University.
Study: Snowflakes may contain bacteria
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/02/28/snow.bugs.ap/index.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Those beautiful snowflakes drifting out of the sky may have a surprise inside -- bacteria.
Most snow and rain forms in chilly conditions high in the sky and atmospheric scientists have long known that, under most conditions, the moisture needs something to cling to in order to condense.
Now, a new study shows a surprisingly large share of those so-called nucleators turn out to be bacteria that can affect plants.
"Bacteria are by far the most active ice nuclei in nature," said Brent C. Christner, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Louisiana State University.
Christner and colleagues sampled snow from Antarctica, France, Montana and the Yukon and they report their findings in Friday's edition of the journal Science.
In some samples as much as 85 percent of the nuclei were bacteria, Christner said in a telephone interview. The bacteria was most common in France, followed by Montana and the Yukon, and was even present to a lesser degree in Antarctica.
The most common bacteria found was Pseudomonas syringae, which can cause disease in several types of plants including tomatoes and beans.
The study found it in 20 samples of snow from around the world and subsequent research has also found it in summer rainfall in Louisiana.
The focus on Pseudomonas in the past has been to try and eliminate it, Christner said, but now that it turns out to be a major factor in encouraging snow and rain, he wonders if that is a good idea. Would elimination of this bacteria result in less rain or snow, or would it be replaced by other nuclei such as soot and dust?
"The question is, are they a good guy or a bad guy," he said, "and I don't have the answer to that."
What is clear is that Pseudomonas is effective at getting moisture in a cloud to condense, he pointed out. Killed bacteria are even used as an additive in snow making at ski resorts.
Which raises the question, Christner said, of whether planting crops known to be infected by Pseudomonas in areas experiencing drought might help increase precipitation there by adding more nuclei to the atmosphere.
It has been known that microbes and insects and algae blow around in the atmosphere, Christner added, "but the atmosphere has not been recognized as a place where things are active. That has been changing in the last decade. In a cloud you've got water, organic carbon," everything necessary to support a microorganism.
Virginia K. Walker, a biologist at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, said other researchers have found bacteria serving as snow nuclei, but had not identified it as Pseudomonas.
"It's one of those great bacteria ... you can find them anywhere," said Walker, who was not part of the research team. "They are really interesting."
Charles Knight, a cloud physics expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., wasn't surprised by the finding, however.
At relatively warm temperatures of just a few degrees below freezing, bacteria are "remarkably effective" at attracting ice formation, said Knight, who also was not part of the research group.
The study was supported by a Louisiana State University research grant.
In a second paper published online by Science, researchers report that the amount of dust blown into the tropical Pacific over the last half-million years has varied widely between warm and cold periods.
Dust also has important impacts on weather and climate ranging from serving as nuclei for rain to blocking some incoming radiation from the sun, and it also delivers minerals like iron that increase growth of plankton in ocean areas.
Cores of seafloor sediment were taken from locations across the tropical Pacific covering a period of 500,000 years.
Researchers led by Gisela Winckler of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University found that dust deposited in the ocean peaked during cold periods and was less during warm periods. Using isotopes, the scientists traced the dust on the western side to Asia and that on the eastern side to South America.
They say the reasons for the change are complex but in general it tends to be windier in cold periods meaning more dust gets blown around.
They found that cold peaks occurred about every 100,000 years, with the last one at 20,000 years ago.
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
The Seeing Tongue
In-the-mouth electrodes give blind people a feel for vision
Peter Weiss
From Science News, Vol. 160, No. 9, Sept. 1, 2001, p. 140.
Blind since birth, Marie-Laure Martin had always thought that candle flames were big balls of fire. The 39-year-old woman couldn't see the flames themselves, but she could sense the candle's aura of heat.
Last October, she saw a candle flame for the first time. She was stunned by how small it actually was and how it danced. There's a second marvel here: She saw it all with her tongue.
The tongue, an organ of taste and touch, may seem like an unlikely substitute for the eyes. After all, it's usually hidden inside the mouth, insensitive to light, and not connected to optic nerves. However, a growing body of research indicates that the tongue may in fact be the second-best place on the body for receiving visual information from the world and transmitting it to the brain.
Researchers at the University of WisconsinMadison are developing this tongue-stimulating system, which translates images detected by a camera into a pattern of electric pulses that trigger touch receptors. The scientists say that volunteers testing the prototype soon lose awareness of on-the-tongue sensations. They then perceive the stimulation as shapes and features in space. Their tongue becomes a surrogate eye.
Earlier research had used the skin as a route for images to reach the nervous system. That people can decode nerve pulses as visual information when they come from sources other than the eyes shows how adaptable, or plastic, the brain is, says Wisconsin neuroscientist and physician Paul Bach-y-Rita, one of the device's inventors.
"You don't see with the eyes. You see with the brain," he contends. An image, once it reaches an eye's retina, "becomes nerve pulses no different from those from the big toe," he says. To see, people rely on the brain's ability to interpret those signals correctly.
With that in mind, he and his colleagues propose that restoring sight is only one of the many trajectories for their research. Restoring stability to those with balance disorders is another. So is bestowing people with brand new senses, such as the capability to use heat to see in the dark.
Restoring lost vision
First things first, however, and for the Wisconsin scientists that means restoring lost vision. Swapping the sense of touch for sight is not a new idea. In the 1960s, Bach-y-Rita, his colleagues, and other scientists began developing and testing devices that enable the skin of blind people to pick up visual information.
For Bach-y-Rita, the experiments also provided insight into the brain's plasticity. His more general goal has been to find out how well one sense can take the place of another.
Until the 1980s, "one of the axioms of neuroscience was that there was no plasticity in the adult central nervous system," says Edward Taub of the University of Alabama in Birmingham. Today, the field has turned around in response to many studies, including Bach-y-Rita's. Now, scientists view the brain as almost as malleable in old age as in youth, he adds.
The idea of tongue as eye evolved from the earlier skin-as-eye studies. Bach-y-Rita and his coworkers had been placing touch-stimulating arrays on areas of people's skin, such as the back and the abdomen. The scientists used either electrodes or little buzzers to excite nerve endings of the skin in a pattern that corresponded to visual images.
They found that after receiving training, blind people using these systems could recognize shapes and track motion. Some subjects could perceive the motion of a ball rolling down an inclined plane and bat it as it rolled off the plane's edge. Others could carry out an assembly-line task at an electronics plant. It required them to recognize glass tubes lacking solder and then to deposit some solder into those tubes.
These results impressed Bach-y-Rita and his colleagues enough to begin trying to apply their basic research toward designing aids for the blind, he says.
The researchers' early systems had the look and feel of what they were—experiments. The buzzers were noisy, heavy, and power hungry. Although electrodes could stimulate nerves quietly and efficiently, high voltages and currents were necessary to drive signals through the skin. That sometimes led to uncomfortable shocks.
Because of these drawbacks, Bach-y-Rita began thinking about the tongue. "We brushed him off," recalls coworker Kurt A. Kaczmarek, an electrical engineer and perception researcher, also at the University of Wisconsin. "He tends to be a bit ahead of his day."
In time, however, Kaczmarek was convinced. "One day, I said 'Okay, Paul. Let's go up to the lab and try it.' It turns out, it worked quite well," he says.
Tongue stimulation, however, isn't the only way to circumvent blindness. One competing approach, for example, is to implant microchips in the eyes or brain (SN: 4/12/97, p. 221). Another scheme, devised by a Dutch scientist, converts images to what he calls soundscapes, which are piped to a blind person's ears.
Tongue stimulation
To Bach-y-Rita, his team's switch from skin to tongue stimulation was crucial. "We now, for the first time, have the possibility of a really practical [touch-based] human-machine interface," he declares. He and his coworkers founded the Madison-based company Wicab, to exploit the potential. Kaczmarek points out the fledgling company may be in for some competition, since a German inventor already has been granted a U.S. patent for a tongue-vision system.
"Using the tongue for seeing is a whole new approach. . . . I think it has great promise," says Michael D. Oberdorfer, program director for visual neuroscience at the National Eye Institute in Bethesda, Md. His office has been funding some of the Wisconsin group's work.
The tongue is a better sensor than skin for several reasons, says Bach-y-Rita. For one, it's coated in saliva—an electrically conductive fluid. So, stimulation can be applied with much lower voltage and current than is required for the skin.
Also, the tongue is more densely populated with touch-sensitive nerves than most other parts of the body. That opens up the possibility that the tongue can convey higher-resolution data than the skin can.
What's more, the tongue is ordinarily out of sight and out of the way. "With visual aids to the blind, there are cosmetic issues," says Oberdorfer. "And you'd want something easy to wear that doesn't interfere with everyday activities."
Currently, the Wisconsin researchers' tongue-display system begins with a camera about the size of a deck of cards. Cables connect it with a toaster-size control box. Extending from the box is another cable made of flat, flexible plastic laced with copper wires. It narrows at the end to form the flat, 12-by-12, gold-plated electrode array the size of a dessert fork. The person lays it like a lollipop on his or her tongue. Stimulation from electrodes produces sensations that subjects describe as tingling or bubbling.
The Wisconsin researchers say that the whole apparatus could shrink dramatically, becoming both hidden and easily portable. The camera would vanish into an eyeglass frame. From there, it would wirelessly transmit visual data to a dental retainer in the mouth that would house the signal-translating electronics. The retainer would also hold the electrode against the tongue.
The tongue display still has a long way to go in terms of performance, the researchers admit. In the July 13 Brain Research, Bach-y-Rita and his colleagues Eliana Sampaio and Stéphane Maris, both of the Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France, report results from the first clinical study of the tongue display.
After an initial, brief training period, 12 first-time users—6 sighted but blindfolded and 6 congenitally blind, including Marie-Laure Martin—tried to determine the orientation of the E's of a standard Snellen eye chart. On average, they scored 20/860 in visual acuity. The cutoff for legal blindness is 20/200 with corrected vision.
"It's not normal sight," comments Taub. "It's like very dim shadows. But it's remarkable. It's a beginning."
One obstacle to better vision with the device is the low resolution of its 144-electrode display. Engineers on the team say they expect to quadruple the array density in the next few years.
A more serious problem is the range of contrast that can be replicated on the tongue, Kaczmarek notes. In a typical image, the eye may simultaneously see lighted regions that are 1,000 times brighter than the dimmest ones. But the ratio of strongest to weakest tongue stimulation can only be about 3 to 1. "That's one of the things we're struggling with," Kaczmarek says.
Visual sensations
Exactly how the tongue supplies the brain with images remains a focus of the Wisconsin team's research. In his 1993 book, The Man Who Tasted Shapes (Putnam), Washington, D.C.based neurologist Richard E. Cytowic made much of how flavors stimulating the tongue of a friend and, later, an experimental subject, would elicit visual sensations. However, that type of involuntary and poorly understood sensory blending, which is known as synesthesia, probably goes beyond what's needed to explain the operation of the tongue display, Bach-y-Rita says.
Instead, there's plenty of evidence, he says, that even those brain regions devoted almost exclusively to a certain sense actually receive a variety of sensory signals. "We showed many years ago that even in the specialized eye region, auditory and tactile signals also arrive," he notes.
Also, many studies over the past 40 years indicate that the brain is capable of massively reorganizing itself in response to loss or injury. When it comes to seeing via the sense of touch, reorganization may involve switching portions of the visual cortex to the processing of touch sensations, Bach-y-Rita says.
In that vein, the first clinical study of the tongue device showed that users got better with practice. Of the dozen subjects in the initial evaluation, two went on to receive an additional 9 hours each of training. When retested, they had doubled their visual acuity, scoring an average of 20/430.
The brain's apparent ability to shunt data for one sense through the customary pathways of another may enable the Wisconsin researchers to apply their device beyond vision replacement. "It's not just about vision," says Mitchell E. Tyler, a biomedical engineer with the group. "That's the obvious one, but it's by no means the only game in town."
The team began tests this summer of a modified system that's intended to assist people who have lost their sense of balance because of injury, disease, or reactions to antibiotics. The unit gathers signals from accelerometers mounted on a person that indicate when he or she is tilting and in what direction. By stimulating the tongue with patterns representing the degree and direction of tilt, such a device may act as an artificial vestibular system. Then, the person might be able to correct bodily position and avoid falling, Tyler explains.
Although the main emphasis of the Wisconsin research has been rehabilitation, the group also foresees using its technology to aid people who don't have sensory deficits.
Interest in enhancement of the senses has come primarily from the military. While Bach-y-Rita and his colleagues were using external skin as a receiver of light-derived images, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Arlington, Va., funded them to develop a sonar-based system to help Navy commandos orient themselves in pitch darkness. The prototype worked, Bach-y-Rita says.
Tyler proposes that ground soldiers could also receive data by means of infrared cameras or other sensors that would alert them, through the tongue, to the presence and positions of enemy troops or tanks. Civilian workers, such as firefighters, might also benefit from such interfaces.
That's pure speculation right now. Martin's bouts of vision; however, are much more than that. In a new film that aired on Canadian television in June, a smile spreads across Martin's face as she gets her first glimpse of a candle flame.
The film, Touch: The Forgotten Sense, highlights some of the Wisconsin work. Its message is this: Touch works in a thousand ways, often without people even being aware of its roles.
By taking this sense into new arenas, such as the tongue display, Bach-y-Rita and his coworkers intend to extend touch's repertoire even more.
References:
Sampaio, E., S. Maris., and P. Bach-y-Rita. 2001. Brain plasticity: 'Visual' acuity of blind persons via the tongue. Brain Research 908(July 13):204.
Further Readings:
2001. Tongue seen as portal to the brain. University of Wisconsin-Madison press release. March 26. Available at http://www.engr.wisc.edu/news/headlines/2001/Mar26.html.
Bower, B. 1995. Brain changes linked to phantom-limb pain. Science News 147(June 10):357.
_______. 1999. Ear implants resound in deaf cats' brains. Science News 156(Sept. 11):167.
Seppa, N. 1998. Do blind people track sounds better? Science News 154(Sept. 19):180.
_______. 2001. Gene therapy cures blindness in dogs. Science News 159(May 12):296.
Travis, J. 2000. Snap, crackle, and feel good? Science News 158(Sept. 23):204. Available at http://sciencenews.org/20000923/bob2.asp.
_______. 2000. Perfect pitch common among the blind. Science News 158(Nov. 25):344.
Wu, C. 1997. Solar cells may sub for retinal receptors. Science News 151(April 12):221.
For online information about the University of Wisconsin's tongue display, see http://kaz.med.wisc.edu/.
To learn about transforming light images into "soundscapes," see http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Peter_Meijer/. Be sure to check out the Java demo.
For more information about the film Touch: The Forgotten Sense, directed by Kun Chang, contact:
Max Films
518, Rue Sherbrooke Est.
Montreal, QC H2L 1K1
Canada
Sources:
Paul Bach-y-Rita
Department of Rehabilitation Medicine
University of Wisconsin-Madison
E3/348
600 Highland Avenue
Madison, WI 53792-3256
Richard E. Cytowic
4720 Blagden Terrace, N.W.
Washington, DC 20011-3720
Kurt A. Kaczmarek
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Department of Rehabilitation Medicine
Department of Biomedical Engineering
1300 University Avenue
Madison, WI 53706
Stéphane Maris
Laboratorie d'Etudes des Systemes Perceptifs et Emotionnels
Université Louis Pasteur
12 rue Goethe
67000 Strasbourg
France
Michael D. Oberdorfer
National Eye Institute
Executive Plaza South, Suite 350
6120 Executive Boulevard, MSC 7164
Bethesda, MD 20892-7164
Eliano Sampaio
Laboratorie d'Etudes des Systemes Perceptifs et Emotionnels
Université Louis Pasteur
12 rue Goethe
67000 Strasbourg
France
Edward Taub
Department of Psychology
University of Alabama at Birmingham
CPM 712
1530 3rd Avenue S.
Birmingham, AL 35294-0018
Mitchell E. Tyler
Department of Biomedical Engineering
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Room 268
1410 Engineering Drive
Madison, WI 53706-1608
From Science News, Vol. 160, No. 9, Sept. 1, 2001, p. 140.
Bing and Bowie: An Odd Story of Holiday Harmony
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/19/AR2006121901260.html
The song on YouTube:
Unearthed 1957 Belvedere set for a scrub
TULSA (AP) — A 1957 Plymouth Belvedere that was buried for 50 years and unearthed this summer in time for the state's centennial celebration will get some preservation work.
The car was put in a crypt beneath the courthouse lawn in 1957 to celebrate Oklahoma's 50 years of statehood. The years, however, hadn't been kind to the car: it was rusty and wouldn't start.
On Thursday, the car was shrink-wrapped on a wrecker and then sent on its way to New Jersey, where it will undergo treatments with a degreaser and an acid-free rust remover.
"We will not be restoring the car but preserving her for the future," said Dwight Foster, owner of Ultra One, which makes the rust remover. "We have to stop the rust, because if nothing is done, this car will be dust in two years."
Two elderly sisters became the vehicle's owners because their late brother had properly guessed the population of Tulsa in 2007 when the car was buried so many years ago.
The car became a sensation in the months leading up to its unearthing last June. Fans came from as far away as New Zealand and Australia to see the Belvedere lifted from its resting place. The vault had leaked, however, and the car spent a good part of its half-century entombment under water.
The owners are Levada Humbertson Carney, 88, and Catherine Humbertson Johnson, 93. Foster and Robert Carney, son of Levada Carney, say they intend to bring the Belvedere back to Tulsa after it is cleaned up.
If you're a football fan...
Here's one of my all time favorite plays.
I recommend not reading the text at the link before watching the video, just read the setup below, then watch it to preserve the surprise:
Down 24-16 with just over two minutes to go, Trinity scored to cut the lead to 24-22.
After a missed two point conversion attempt, Trinity's defense held Millsaps to a three-and-out without using any timeouts.
The Tigers were left with two seconds and 60 yards to go for a score.
Here's the final play of the game:
Things That Make Life Easier...Or Not
c/o Idit
Some creative items, I liked the
WHEEL-MOVING BENCH best
http://andfunforall.blogspot.com/2007/10/egg-holder-realy-cute-egg-holder.html
Harnessing hot peppers' burn to ease surgical pain
http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/10/29/peppers.pain.ap/index.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Devil's Revenge. Spontaneous Combustion. Hot sauces have names like that for a reason. Now scientists are testing whether the stuff that makes the sauces so savage also can tame the pain of surgery.
Doctors are dripping the chemical that gives chili peppers their fire directly into open wounds during knee replacement and a few other highly painful operations.
Don't try this at home: These experiments use an ultra-purified version of capsaicin to avoid infection -- and the volunteers are under anesthesia so they don't scream at the initial burn.
How could something searing possibly soothe? Bite a hot pepper, and after the burn your tongue goes numb.
The hope is that bathing surgically exposed nerves in a high enough dose will numb them for weeks, so that patients suffer less pain and require fewer narcotic painkillers as they heal.
"We wanted to exploit this numbness," is how Dr. Eske Aasvang, a pain specialist in Denmark who is testing the substance, puts it.
Chili peppers have been part of folk remedy for centuries, and heat-inducing capsaicin creams are a drugstore staple for aching muscles.
But today the spice is hot because of research showing capsaicin targets key pain-sensing cells in a unique way. California-based Anesiva Inc.'s operating-room experiments aren't the only attempt to harness that burn for more focused pain relief.
Harvard University researchers are mixing capsaicin with another anesthetic in hopes of developing epidurals that wouldn't confine women to bed during childbirth, or dental injections that don't numb the whole mouth. And at the National Institutes of Health, scientists hope early next year to begin testing in advanced cancer patients a capsaicin cousin that is 1,000 times more potent, to see if it can zap their intractable pain.
Nerve cells that sense a type of long-term throbbing pain bear a receptor, or gate, called TRPV1. Capsaicin binds to that receptor and opens it to enter only those pain fibers -- and not other nerves responsible for other kinds of pain or other functions such as movement.
These so-called C neurons also sense heat; thus capsaicin's burn. But when TRPV1 opens, it lets extra calcium inside the cells until the nerves become overloaded and shut down. That's the numbness.
"It just required a new outlook about ... stimulation of this receptor" to turn those cellular discoveries into a therapy hunt, says NIH's Dr. Michael Iadarola.
Enter Anesiva's specially purified capsaicin, called Adlea. Experiments are under way involving several hundred patients undergoing various surgeries, including knee and hip replacements. Surgeons drip either Adlea or a dummy solution into the cut muscle and tissue and wait five minutes for it to soak in before stitching up the wound.
Among early results: In a test of 41 men undergoing open hernia repair, capsaicin recipients reported significantly less pain in the first three days after surgery, Aasvang reported this month at a meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists.
In a pilot U.S. study of 50 knee replacements, the half treated with capsaicin used less morphine in the 48 hours after surgery and reported less pain for two weeks.
Ongoing studies are testing larger doses in more patients to see whether the effect is real.
There's a huge need for better surgical pain relief, says Dr. Eugene Viscusi, director of acute pain management at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, one of the test sites. Morphine and its relatives, so-called opioid painkillers, are surgery's standby. While they're crucial drugs, they have serious side effects that limit their use.
Specialists are watching the capsaicin research because it promises a one-time dose that works inside the wound, not body-wide, and wouldn't tether patients to an IV when they're starting physical therapy.
"It's in and it's done," Viscusi explains. "You can't abuse it. You can't misuse it."
"There's been an enormous effort to try and develop alternatives to opioids with the same strength but not too much success," adds Dr. Clifford Woolf of Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital. "We think we're moving toward it."
His team is trying a different approach: Standard lidocaine injections numb all the surrounding tissue. Woolf and colleagues slipped lidocaine inside just pain-sensing neurons, by opening them with a tiny dose of capsaicin. Rats given the injections ran around normally while not noticing heat applied to their paws, they reported in the journal Nature this month.
That's years away from trying in people, and would have to be done in a way to avoid even a quick capsaicin burn.
In a third approach, Iadarola and NIH colleagues hope to soon test a capsaicin cousin called resiniferatoxin in advanced cancer patients whose pain no longer is relieved by opioids. Injections into the spinal columns of cancer-riddled dogs did more than temporarily numb -- it severed some nerve connections.
‘Twas nothing at all.
I “borrowed” the link from someone named Steve on:
http://kimexplainsitall1944.typepad.com/
He said: “Copied (stolen) from a posting over at Tranterrestrial Musings.”
Ain’t the internet great? <g>
Id
Thanks Idit!
Courtesy of Dubi
Credit to Idit
Courtesy of Dubi, details on the "Spinning Dancer" image...
http://www.randominc.net/spinninglady/
Go to the the above link to see the images spinning in unison, it proved too time consuming to try and get them synced by coping them at the exact same position!... Aiming4
This animation set is based on the original work by ???*. The original image of a dancer in a perpetual spin can be interpreted two different ways - she can either be spinning in a clockwise direction, or in a counter-clockwise direction (imagine her spinning on a clock face). Some people's perception may favor one direction over the other, and some people may see her change directions from time to time. The fact is that the image is a constant 34-frame loop representing 1 full revolution of the dancer, and no trickery is used to make her seem to be spinning one way or the other at any point in time. The effect is entirely caused by the perception of the viewer as he or she interprets the ambiguous frames where the spinning dancer's body appendages (legs and arms) cross over each other.
To prove this, shown above are two copies of the original .gif animation, each having the same 34 frames representing 1 full revolution of the spinning dancer. The only difference between the left and right image is that on the left, I have added gray lines in the leg area to imply that the dancer is standing on her left leg and spinning in a clockwise direction. On the right, gray lines have been added in the leg area to imply that the dancer is standing on her right leg and spinning in a counter-clockwise direction. By adding this information to the animation, the variable of viewer perception is removed from the process, and when looking at only one image at a time (cover the other with your hand), it is believable that the dancer is only spinning in a single direction. Viewing both images together, side by side, will prove to you that it is the identical (original) animation.
*This original story, to the best of my knowledge, can be found at news.com.au, and courtesy of "AAP". I would very happily credit the individual(s) who constructed this animation, but i can find no such reference or record.
Editing of the original by Matthew Lewis for the benefit of a few friends who were loosing their minds.
Got'cha. When you view the image as spinning counter-clockwise, the right leg becomes the pivot leg.
>Is the left foot always the pivot foot for any dancer?<
It is if turning clockwise.
>Btw, looking at just the feet and legs (cover up the upper torso with your hand) makes it much easier to visualize the dancer spinning in either direction based solely on leg movement.<
When I do it, I can see counterclockwise movement for only a split second before it reverts back to clockwise, and the left foot is always the pivot foot! Go figure!
The Invisible War
Amazing that she is actually going out and "finding" these murders by looking for impromptu shrines, and that she then gets information from friends and family. A lot of times the comments the public posts with stories like these are worthless and rude, but the ones I've read are at the below link are insightful and thought provoking, especially the thank you msgs from family members... Aiming4.
http://potw.news.yahoo.com/s/potw/49321/the-invisible-war
Reporter Jill Leovy covers every homicide in Los Angeles County, giving names to otherwise anonymous casualties -- and some relief to their families.
By KEVIN SITES, SUN OCT 14, 8:34 AM PDT
Jill Leovy's war isn't thousands of miles away. In fact, without traffic, she can drive from her office to the front lines in about ten minutes.
It's being fought mostly in the tough, minority neighborhoods of Los Angeles County, where three people are killed each day on average — more than a thousand a year.
Leovy is the creator of The Homicide Report, a blogging project by the Los Angeles Times in which she is attempting to record every homicide in Los Angeles County over the course of a year. She has covered over 700 to date.
Because it is often the only public acknowledgement of the event, the blog has become a memorial for murder victims, with family members and friends posting responses adjacent to many of the entries, providing updates on children or expressing the pain of being left alone.
Most of the reports are just a sentence or two long, but they are filled with heartbreak, like the death of Michael Presley, 19, buried in the same grave as his father, who was also murdered years earlier.
Or the story of twin brothers Noel and Joel Velazco, both shot to death only a few feet from each other, but six years apart.
"After this pain, we can lose nothing more," Velazco's mother told Leovy.
Beyond the emotions of the victims' families, the Homicide Report illustrates the enormous toll violent crime has taken on the county's minority populations. "Murder stalks minorities," was a recent headline in Leovy's blog.
"If you really want to be serious about the homicide rate," she says, "you need to look at who these numbers represent."
The national homicide rate is roughly six deaths per 100,000 people. For adult Latino males in Los Angeles County it's 52 deaths per 100,000. For adult black males it's an eye opening 176 deaths per 100,000. The highest incidence of murder is in the poor neighborhoods southeast of downtown Los Angeles.
Remembering D'Angello Mizell
D'Angello Mizell was killed last November at the age of 36, after being shot three times. A member of a Crips gang set, he had been in and out of jail since he was a teenager.
His mother, Althea Mizell, is still mourning, even though he once rejected her, saying, "The Crips are my mom."
On a visit to Mizell's home, Leovy asks what she remembers of her son's last moments. Mizell begins to cry. "I saw my son's brains hanging out his head.... They executed my child.... They didn't have to do that to him."
Even as she recalls his death, Mizell concedes that her son was no angel. "My hair is snow white," she says, picking at the strands of her hair. "He gave me a head full of white hair."
Because of D'Angello Mizell's criminal history, his murder probably will never be solved. The mistakes of his life would have rendered him nearly invisible in death to all but his mother, if not for Leovy's work.
Leovy says American society has become selective about who can be called a victim. Often, she says, the term is ascribed only to the innocent or virtuous.
"For me, it's about just making sure his name is written down," Leovy tells the grieving mother.
"I just don't want him to be forgotten," says Mizell. "I don't want anybody to think he didn't matter. Because he did."
Making sense of violence
Leovy's desire to chronicle the effects of violence spring from 9/11, when she was sent to New York to cover the terrorist attacks. Violence, she says, isolates the people it happens to.
"We don't tell the truth" about violence, she says. "It's very difficult to be truthful about."
Her singular pursuit of that truth regularly takes her where many fear to tread. She spends a lot of time driving the gang-ridden streets of the Newton neighborhood in South Los Angeles. Half a dozen notebooks and extra pens are lashed with rubber bands to her car's sun visors.
On a recent reporting trip Leovy scanned the curbsides, looking for the makeshift shrines of photographs, candles and flowers often erected by family and friends over the spot where a loved one was murdered.
Spotting a shrine, she rushes out of the car. Soon she has located the wife, daughters, and brother of Isaias Vasquez, a migrant worker killed in a drive-by shooting.
Leovy speaks to the family in Spanish and gathers what facts she can. The wife hands her a small card from the memorial service. It has his photo on it. Leovy studies the picture carefully before returning it to the widow.
Leovy returns to her car and, with a wireless connection, updates the Homicide Report with news of Vasquez's death and a few details of his life: a hard worker, a good husband and father. "A happy person," she quotes his brother as saying.
It's not much, but it's something — a few sentences about a man whose very existence might otherwise go unnoticed in Los Angeles County's ongoing invisible war.
Is the left foot always the pivot foot for any dancer?
Btw, looking at just the feet and legs (cover up the upper torso with your hand) makes it much easier to visualize the dancer spinning in either direction based solely on leg movement.
Nothing's right in my left and nothing's left in my right :)
Clockwise is the only direction that makes sense because the left foot is the pivot foot and a dancer does not lead with the pivot foot.
Try blowing up and cropping the image to see only the feet and lower legs.
THE Right Brain vs Left Brain test ... do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?
I can almost guarantee that when you first look at this, you'll swear there's no way it could EVER be viewed as spinning in the opposite direction. My theory is when you first view it, your brain instantly makes a decision on which way it sees it spinning, and then that's the reality to your brain. Overcoming your brain's decision is quite a challenge. The best way I've found to do it is to look away so you only see the image in your peripheral vision. Then imagine it spinning in the opposite direction and you should be able to see it that way in your peripheral vision within a few seconds. Once you have your mind fixated on the new direction, slowly return to looking at the image, keeping the mental determination of which way it is spinning. I think this is fascinating stuff... Aiming4
If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.
Most of us would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction; see if you can do it.
LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses logic
detail oriented
facts rule
words and language
present and past
math and science
can comprehend
knowing
acknowledges
order/pattern perception
knows object name
reality based
forms strategies
practical
safe
RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses feeling
"big picture" oriented
imagination rules
symbols and images
present and future
philosophy & religion
can "get it" (i.e. meaning)
believes
appreciates
spatial perception
knows object function
fantasy based
presents possibilities
impetuous
risk taking
Talk amongst yourselves
On the one hand, proper spelling, pronunciation, and word usage are personally important to me - I just have a hard time not doing those things automatically. But on the other hand, I'm an extremely big fan of the evolution of language and the creation and usage of slang. I enjoy fun word play and seeing what other people come up with. It is kind of humorous how the author misunderstood the meaning and usage of Gnar in the final sentence. :^) Aiming4
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/10/04/talk_amongst_yourselves/
While teens still 'marinate,' slang travels faster these days with help of the Internet
By Taryn Plumb, Globe Correspondent | October 4, 2007
Much like a condiment, "gnar" can punch up almost any sentence.
Eighteen-year-old Casey Aylward employs the throaty derivative of "gnarly" in instances where everyday adjectives can't quite describe his shock, distaste, amazement, or admiration.
Example? The Groveland teen referred to a stylized skateboarding trick he witnessed recently with "That was gnar!"
"Gnar is its own entity," mused Aylward, standing on the Hampton Beach strip, shaggy thicket of brown hair corralled by a backwards baseball cap.
Other colorful expressions in his cache include "bunk," for disgust, "dank" in cases where "awesome" might normally apply, and "smash" for contentment.
"It's more or less just coming up with your own stuff," he said from behind mirrored sunglasses reflecting hordes of pedestrians, right hand flicking a half-smoked cigarette. He and his friends "take expressions that have been around for a while and make them our own."
Walk up to anybody anywhere - whether it's Hampton Beach's main boulevard, a swarming city street, or even a white-collar office building - and you'll get a notebook-full of slang. Everyone, the teen crowd especially, has a reservoir of witty, inventive, and sometimes crude sayings - so much so that it might seem like lingo has overrun formal American English. In some cases, it has, with terms such as "dis" and "phat" finding their places in modern dictionaries.
But while it's tough to quantify whether slang is, in fact, more prevalent these days, it's clear there's a growing effort to create, share, catalog, and foster it.
A Web search of "slang," for instance, yields an ecosystem of sites, covering anything from 1960s flower child lingo to Japanese jargon. The giant of those is urbandictionary.com, a wellspring of slang that contains more than a million entries - with at least 2,000 new ones a day - and allows users to vote on and contribute their own unique phrases. Since its launch in 2001, the site's popularity has skyrocketed, according to Alexa.com, a company that tracks Internet trends; site traffic has grown 7 percent in the past three months.
In addition, there are the traditional and continuing drivers of slang: hip-hop, linguistically creative TV shows like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," and hundreds of books, such as "Knickers in a Twist: A Dictionary of British Slang."
Noting its prevalence, some scholars and philologists - thought to be the traditional defenders of proper English - even call slang an essential component of speech.
"It enriches language," said Rod Kessler, a professor of English at Salem State College who pointed out that Geoffrey Chaucer used some risque slang in his landmark work, "The Canterbury Tales."
"You show creativity when you use slang. It's colorful, picturesque, imaginative, and shocking."
Poetic, too, says Michael Adams, an English professor at Indiana University Bloomington and author of the book, "Slang: The People's Poetry." For instance, slang is inherently metaphorical, he explains - take the perennial favorites "what's up" and "cool," which ultimately have nothing to do with gravity or temperature. Also, "it allows people to be inventive," he said. "Everybody has the capacity to make it up."
Madeleine Revill and her friends certainly do.
Their unusual way of speaking involves playfully clipping the endings from words - a technique they call "abbrevs."
The abbrevs most frequently peppering the Middleton 16-year-old's speech include "presh," "essench," "whatev," "ridic," "awk," "totes," and "obvi." To decode: precious, essentially, whatever, ridiculous, awkward, totally, and obvious.
As for using them in a sentence: Someone with "ish" ("issues") might create an "awk" (awkward) situation because they're acting like "a sketch."
"Why do I abbreve? It's just fun. People laugh at it," said Revill. "It sets me and my friends apart from other people. It's our own language."
Aylward and his crowd have similarly improvised their own dialect.
If they want to get going, for instance, they say "let's hit it" or "let's get hustlin'."
If they see a good-looking girl, she's "slammin" or "brutal." (Those with less luck in the beauty lingo department get hit with "haggard.")
If they're talking amongst themselves, they use "son" or "bro."
They occasionally pull out some retro terms, too, including "rad," "solid," "tubular," and "peace out."
"We try to keep it real sick," said Aylward, taking a cigarette break from his job emptying quarters from arcade games and loading piles of candy into claw machines at Hampton's Funarama.
Alyward's "bro," 19-year-old Ryan Jackson of Merrimack, N.H., agreed, "We try to bring West Coast back, with a lot of vintage slang."
Stratham, N.H., 16-year-old Ellie Willis's supply of maxims is also of the Cali persuasion.
"The cheese" refers to money, and "emo" is a qualifier for overly sensitive people, she explained as she prepared slushies and sugar-sprinkled gobs of batter at Blink's Fry Doe on the Hampton strip. And if she's bored? "I'm gonna commit."
Given that expanse of tastes - and the fact that slang comes and goes rather quickly - it's difficult to pinpoint trends or determine which phrases are ragingly popular and which are stale. "Cool can't be universal," noted Adams. "That's against the whole purpose of slang." Which is, he explained, to test social limits. "Slang is an instrument of rebellion."
While most teens didn't put it so bluntly, many did defend their freedom to speak as they choose.
"I don't want people telling me I can't say what I want," Kelly Sunderland, 18, who lives in Pepperell but "chills in Bedford."
"The way people talk shows how different they are."
Her most flavorful phrasings have to do with coming and going: For the former, she'll "post up"; for the latter, she "dips."
She admitted - none too regrettably - that her mother often responds to the way she talks with quizzical looks.
Naturally, though, not all adults are flummoxed by today's barrage of sometimes-indecipherable teen lingo.
John Walsh, a 41-year-old from Hampton, for instance, said it's important for each generation to have their own idiom. He compared language to branded clothing, noting, "It gives teenagers a way to be part of a group."
In some cases, adults, too. Greg Revill of Salem, for his part, found his daughter's pruned manner of speaking so catchy that he adopted a few phrases, including "whatev," "awk," and, for extreme instances of weirdness, "awk city."
"Color in any language is good," he said.
Madeleine shares that mindset. "If everyone talked the same way," she said, "everyone would be the same."
And that, as Aylward might say, would be gnar.
Pain and regret
I'm a big sports fan, in particular the NFL, but stories like this are terrible. It's unconscionable that with all of the money being made in the NFL, medical assistance for ex-players is handled so poorly... Aiming4.
By Jason Cole, Yahoo! Sports
September 18, 2007
http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news;_ylt=AnuYeU2t5sjEUPWdbsMGEOQ5nYcB?slug=jc-davepear091807&prov=y...
KING COUNTY, Wash. – Dave Pear's speech is halting and he stumbles through his thoughts even though he has a spiral-bound binder of notes in his hands to prompt him. He repeats himself at times and gets frazzled with a brain that simply won't cooperate after too many concussions from his days on the football field.
But there is one thing that can't be stopped as the 54-year-old Pear grapples with a life stunted by a game that has crossed the thin line from love of his youth to loathe of his middle age.
The tears. As they stream from his face, Pear's wife Heidi gently touches his leg. She flashes a consoling smile, her expression barely hiding years of anguish from watching her college sweetheart deteriorate in ways she couldn't understand until recently.
"The NFL destroys families," Pear said. "I wish I had never played."
Those 10 words, combined with the fact Pear wouldn't let his now-adult son play football, speak volumes from a far-reaching two-hour interview at Pear's home. It's a pretty house in the foothills overlooking Lake Washington in the suburbs of Seattle, the kind of place where anyone would be happy to retire.
The Pears are selling, downsizing in hopes of dealing with mounting medical bills to treat Pear's back and neck problems. Next to the reclining chair Pear sits in during the interview, while struggling to look comfortable all the while, there's a baking dish full of different medications.
Provigil, Neurontin, Lamictel, Trileptal, Baclofen, Vicodin and Ibuprofen are part of an alphabet soup of medications no one would dare sample if they weren't required. Depending on the time of day, Pear takes one pill to keep focused, another to calm him down and a bunch of them to keep the pain at bay.
There's also a list with the meds, laying out a regimen Pear must follow eight times a day as he swallows 38 pills a day. Even with samples that his doctors give him to defray the costs, the bill for the medications comes to approximately $1,000 per month.
Moreover, one doctor told Pear that in order for him to get the first of two hip replacement surgeries he will need soon, he must quit taking the Vicodin, which happens to be the best pain reliever. Unfortunately, the Vicodin has a side effect of interfering with the healing after joint replacements, Pear said.
With more medical bills to come, downsizing commences even as Heidi works two jobs. She teaches aerobics part-time while also maintaining a sales job. The flexibility allows her to tend to her husband as much as possible as he goes from one doctor's appointment to another.
Pear's fate is like many others who chose to play football for a living. From Pear to Conrad Dobler to Mike Mosley to Brian DeMarco, there's a litany of men who believed themselves to be gladiators for the NFL but ended up being chewed up more like Christians facing the lions.
Pear has spent more than 20 years bouncing from doctor to doctor. After being denied disability under the standards laid out by the NFL, he took sales jobs. He also made panicked financial decisions.
"As I was getting worse, I was thinking to myself, 'How much longer am I going to be able to work? How much longer am I going to live? I have to take care of my family,' " Pear said.
In the late 1990s, he risked a large portion of his wife's inheritance on high-risk stocks that crashed. He also took his pension at 45 (the NFL Players Association no longer allows that) to defray costs.
The pension doesn't go very far.
"My pension is a car payment," said Pear, who receives $484 per month from his six-year NFL stint (1975-80) with the Baltimore Colts, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Oakland Raiders.
The problem is that under federal law, someone who takes pension early is no longer allowed to get disability. That decision has potentially cost Pear hundreds of thousands of dollars because the disability benefit is so much greater than his pension.
Pear said he was duped into taking his pension rather than continuing to wait for disability. The NFLPA flatly denies that, but Pear emotionally contends otherwise.
"They cheated me and my family out of more than $1 million in disability payments we should have received over the years," Pear said.
"The law makes it so that you can't double dip," said Miki Yaras-Davis, director of benefits for the NFL Players Association. "I got involved in this because I wanted to help people. That's what we're trying to do, but there's a limit to what the law will allow me to do based on the decisions that people make."
The other issue for players such as Pear is that until recently, when the NFL and the NFLPA agreed to use the Social Security standard for disability to determine who gets benefits, the standard seemed unduly high.
In 1995, for instance, Pear was examined by Dr. Hugh Unger. Unger's report stated that Pear was suffering from "severe cervical and lumbar symptoms." Later in the form, Unger responded to the question, "In your opinion, is the patient totally disabled to the extent that he is substantially unable to engage in any occupation for any remuneration or profit?"
Unger answered no but had a telling explanation.
"I would only permit this patient to perform sedentary work, with no bending, no lifting of greater than 15 (pounds) and with the capability of frequent rest periods," Unger wrote.
Unger also stated on the report that Pear's back was "80 percent or more" disabled.
"What kind of job am I going to get under those conditions that's going to let me feed my family?" Pear said rhetorically. The report by Unger is consistent with similar reports by other doctors in 1983 and in 2002. In 2004, psychologist Kathi Morton evaluated Pear and concluded that it was "highly inadvisable" that he continue to drive a car and that he was "clearly experiencing grave memory" and "unable to manage his own funds."
For years, Pear worked as a salesman. He hid his deficiencies by working outside the office and driving. Pear would often pull over to the side of the road to take naps, sometimes waking up in the dark. The driving also exacerbated his back problems, which has resulted in surgery as recently as July.
Finally, in 2004, Pear qualified for disability from the Social Security Administration. He receives approximately $2,000 a month, about $7,000 less than what he would have received from the NFL plan.
It's all part of a laundry list of frustrations for Pear. When he was cut by Oakland in 1980, the Raiders said he "had lost his desire to play." Pear was an undersized nose tackle who made a Pro Bowl and started on Oakland's Super Bowl XV championship team.
Furthermore, he was a teammate of current NFLPA executive director Gene Upshaw. In 2003 and 2004, Pear and Upshaw traded emails over the issue. At one point, Pear offered to pay back all the pension money he had received so that he could receive disability. Pear also referred to Yaras-Davis as a "nightmare for me and my family" and that his "confidence in her is not there."
Yaras-Davis declined to respond to Pear's comments because she said she's not allowed to talk about players who receive benefits. In an email response to Pear, Upshaw said the union's hands were tied and supported Yaras-Davis.
"I know for a fact she is not in the business of giving wrong advice or advice that is not sensitive. She deals with problems like yours for thousands of players. Why would she treat you any different?" Upshaw wrote. "We are not in the business of telling players to take early retirement as you suggested to me. You decided to take early retirement at age 45. You made that decision, which only you can make.
"We feel so strongly about the early retirement benefit and the mistakes players make we removed that option in 1993. We can not undo the decision you made. And all Miki was trying to do is help. But I will suggest that your attitude toward my staff is not productive. We understand you have a disability."
Pear responded to that by saying, "If they're dealing with thousands of players like me … that's an epidemic."
The league and the union recently agreed to fund a $7 million joint replacement program. In the case of Pear, who has had surgery to both his upper and lower back, he will eventually need to have both hips replaced. One of the problems is that doctors have told him he has to quit one of his medications before they can operate.
"My body is a mess," said Pear, chuckling at the indignity.
Most days, he barely moves from the living room of his home. He finally quit driving about three years ago after he nearly killed two people on bicycles riding near his home.
"I fell asleep at the wheel and just barely snapped out of it in time," said Pear, who's still shaken by the memory. "I got out of the car and apologized to them. They asked me if I was all right, if I needed help getting home. With the way I talk, I think they thought I was drinking."
Pear shakes his head and his lower lip quivers. Three decades ago, he was a star defensive lineman at nearby University of Washington. Despite all his medical problems, he still looks relatively healthy, like a man who should be enjoying the beauty of the Northwest, perhaps walking by a lake or hiking a trail.
Instead, the only water he touches these days is the trail of tears he dabs off his face.
On Your Next Cab Ride, Flower Power May Be Included
September 12, 2007, 12:56 pm
By Sewell Chan
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/on-your-next-cab-ride-flower-power-may-be-included/?hp
It’s an idea that seems more like Woodstock, 1969, than New York City, 2007, but it has the Bloomberg administration’s blessing and the city is going ahead with it.
Starting today and extending through December, hand-painted, adhesive, weatherproof images of giant decorative flowers will be applied to the hoods, trunks or roofs of New York City’s yellow taxicabs. Ninety percent of the flowers were painted by children from the city’s public schools and hospitals; a fraction were painted by children in New Jersey, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Cleveland and Los Angeles.
The flowers “will soon transform the ubiquitous yellow icon into a mobile artistic canvas,” according to a news release from Portraits of Hope, the nonprofit program that is organizing the effort.
The vast public art project, known as “Garden in Transit,” originated with two brothers, Ed and Bernie Massey, who founded Portraits of Hope in 1995. The project was intended to provide creative therapy for seriously ill and disabled children, but has expanded to include children and adults participating through schools, after-school programs, hospitals and nonprofit groups. Portraits of Hope has decorated blimps, buildings, tugboats, airplanes and even Nascar racers; the taxicabs are the group’s latest effort.
Ed Massey conceived of the idea in spring 2000, and after preliminary meetings with the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, Bernie Massey, his older brother, led a team in developing educational and civic engagement elements for the project. The taxi commission unanimously agreed to support the project in July 2006, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced the event at a news conference.
“By unleashing the creative power and civic pride of New Yorkers, our city has come together for one of the biggest volunteer efforts we have ever seen,” the mayor said.
Bernie Massey, 46, said the flowers were chosen for the project because children everywhere — including the hospital wards the brothers visited — draw them. “It’s the one universal symbol of hope, beauty, life, joy, inspiration,” he said.
(The Massey brothers grew up in Los Angeles. When Bernie was asked whether he and Ed, 42, enjoyed flowers as children, he said, “We liked flowers, but they were no more special than anything else.”)
The cab owners and drivers do not have to pay for the flower patterns, and participation is voluntary. The vinyl flowers do not damage the cabs and are easily removed. The organizers hope to get a majority of the city’s 13,000 yellow cabs to participate. At a news conference today at Union Square, the organizers unveiled six cabs with the decals. Each cab can accommodate two or three panels; each panel has one to five flowers on it. About 27,600 panels have been painted, enough for each cab to have two.
“The kids have done their part,” Bernie Massey said. “Now it’s up to the taxicab industry. The mayor’s office and the T.L.C. are trying to rally the support of the industry.”
Garden in Transit is a privately financed effort that has included about $1.5 million in cash donations so far. Helen and Peter Bing, a California-based couple, and Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield have been among the donors to the project. Vornado Realty Trust provided about 20,000 square feet of studio space, while MACtac, a manufacturer of adhesive products, gave deep discounts on the flower decals.
turns 25
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/09/18/emoticon.anniversary.ap/index.html
Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes -- a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis -- as a horizontal "smiley face" in a computer message.
To mark the anniversary Wednesday, Fahlman and his colleagues are starting an annual student contest for innovation in technology-assisted, person-to-person communication. The Smiley Award, sponsored by Yahoo Inc., carries a $500 cash prize.
Language experts say the smiley face and other emotional icons, known as emoticons, have given people a concise way in e-mail and other electronic messages of expressing sentiments that otherwise would be difficult to detect.
Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on September 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly.
"I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: ," wrote Fahlman. "Read it sideways."
The suggestion gave computer users a way to convey humor or positive feelings with a smile -- or the opposite sentiments by reversing the parenthesis to form a frown.
Carnegie Mellon said Fahlman's smileys spread from its campus to other universities, then businesses and eventually around the world as the Internet gained popularity.
Computer science and linguistics professors contacted by The Associated Press said they were unaware of who first used the symbol.
"I've never seen any hard evidence that the sequence was in use before my original post, and I've never run into anyone who actually claims to have invented it before I did," Fahlman wrote on the university's Web page dedicated to the smiley face. "But it's always possible that someone else had the same idea -- it's a simple and obvious idea, after all."
Variations, such as the "wink" that uses a semicolon, emerged later. And today people can hardly imagine using computer chat programs that don't translate keystrokes into colorful graphics, said Ryan Stansifer, a computer science professor at the Florida Institute of Technology.
"Now we have so much power, we don't settle for a colon-dash-paren," he said. "You want the smiley face, so all these chatting softwares have to have them."
Instant messaging programs often contain an array of faces intended to express emotions ranging from surprise to affection to embarrassment.
"It has been fascinating to watch this phenomenon grow from a little message I tossed off in 10 minutes to something that has spread all around the world," Fahlman was quoted as saying in a university statement. "I sometimes wonder how many millions of people have typed these characters, and how many have turned their heads to one side to view a smiley, in the 25 years since this all started."
Amy Weinberg, a University of Maryland linguist and computer scientist, said emoticons such as the smiley were "definitely creeping into the way, both in business and academia, people communicate."
"In terms of things that language processing does, you have to take them into account," she said. "If you're doing almost anything ... and you have a sentence that says 'I love my boss' and then there's a smiley face, you better not take that seriously."
Emoticons reflect the likely original purpose of language -- to enable people to express emotion, said Clifford Nass, a professor of communications at Stanford University. The emotion behind a written sentence may be hard to discern because emotion is often conveyed through tone of voice, he said.
"What emoticons do is essentially provide a mechanism to transmit emotion when you don't have the voice," Nass said.
In some ways, he added, they also give people "the ability not to think as hard about the words they're using."
Stansifer said the emoticon was part of a natural progression in communication.
"I don't think the smiley face was the beginning and the end," he said. "All people at all times take advantage of whatever means of communication they have."
Yikes !!! No, probably not :)
Side-note:
Raised in Bulgaria, but having studied medicine in
Heidelberg University, Germany, his sense of humour
was nothing much to write home about.
He was a great doc exhibiting outstanding diagnostic abilities in seconds.(I could expand on that)
Had i shown him that pic, he would have either dismissed
it sternly as nonsense, or start digging into his books
in attempt of learning something about this bizarre creature.
I guess i'll never know :(
Dew - that pic certainly forces one to consider the possibilities.
I think Sci-fi comics from the 50's had all kinds of interesting speculation along those same lines as well.
Star Trek was good at that too.
Who would have guessed there were so many humanoid hotties out there?
Did gramps foresee this development: #msg-22886232 ?
... back then it was sort of easy to guess at flying cars and transmitting pictures through the air.
__________________________
I am not too sure about that, Aiming.
I still remember my gramps(born 1881) stories
about seeing crowds gathering around the first
horseless vehicle in his hometown in Sofya, Bulgaria
trying to find out where the horses were hidden <lol>
My gramps who was a doc shared the belief that a train
moving quicker than 25 mph would cause all its passengers
to all have heart attacks due to the extended pressure....
All memories came up, all seeming now as Urban Legends :)
However to try predict the inventions in another 100 years
needs creative thinking.
How about some device like a fax, only instead of putting paper in, a person is put in and sent to any destination ?
Dubi
Practical Joke - Yankee Stadium
As someone who appreciates a really good practical joke, I found the below series of pranks to be, for the most part, hilarious.
Humor is so interesting and subjective - to me a truly great practical joke must be as simple as possible, must not be mean spirited, must be clever, and usually takes advantage of elements of human nature that can be counted on to act in a certain way.
These 2 guys work for CollegeHumor.com, so that gives them a lot of opportunities for pranks.
They've apparently started a prank war, and each prank gets more elaborate.
I enjoyed watching all 6 of them in order, but if you don't want to spend the 5 or 6 minutes it takes per video, at least watch the last one (#6).
#6 truly is a classic and epic prank. Admittedly it's a little mean spirited in regards to the innocent bystander girlfriend so I don't condone that aspect of the prank.
But I laughed like hell none-the-less. :^)
Just the 6th prank (the one to watch if you're only watching one): http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1774718
If you have half an hour or so and appreciate good pranks, here's the complete series (to date) of all 6 pranks: http://www.collegehumor.com/tag:prank-war
Very interesting Dubi... the Correspondence Camera and the Electric Train were both very good predictions.
My favorite was the airplane rescuing the sailors on a stricken ship... I found it poignant that there were dreams of a future way of rescuing people from the ocean, since a disaster at sea back then was virtually certain to be a death sentence.
It seems even more challenging to guess at inventions that will exist 100 years from now... back then it was sort of easy to guess at flying cars and transmitting pictures through the air.
What the heck will we have in 100 years?
Maybe something truly crazy like M&Ms that change colors! :^)
The National Library of France (BnF) has an amazing collection of prints from 1910 which depict life in the year 2000.
http://paleo-future.blogspot.com/2007/09/french-prints-show-year-2000-1910.html
Some are actually pretty accurate...
Scientists hail ‘frozen smoke’ as material that will change world
Two thoughts on this one... Wow... and... Cool!... Aiming4.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2284349.ece
Some videos of Aerogel:
http://timesonline.typepad.com/video/2007/08/amazing-aerogel.html
A MIRACLE material for the 21st century could protect your home against bomb blasts, mop up oil spillages and even help man to fly to Mars.
Aerogel, one of the world’s lightest solids, can withstand a direct blast of 1kg of dynamite and protect against heat from a blowtorch at more than 1,300C.
Scientists are working to discover new applications for the substance, ranging from the next generation of tennis rackets to super-insulated space suits for a manned mission to Mars.
It is expected to rank alongside wonder products from previous generations such as Bakelite in the 1930s, carbon fibre in the 1980s and silicone in the 1990s. Mercouri Kanatzidis, a chemistry professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said: “It is an amazing material. It has the lowest density of any product known to man, yet at the same time it can do so much. I can see aerogel being used for everything from filtering polluted water to insulating against extreme temperatures and even for jewellery.”
Aerogel is nicknamed “frozen smoke” and is made by extracting water from a silica gel, then replacing it with gas such as carbon dioxide. The result is a substance that is capable of insulating against extreme temperatures and of absorbing pollutants such as crude oil.
It was invented by an American chemist for a bet in 1931, but early versions were so brittle and costly that it was largely consigned to laboratories. It was not until a decade ago that Nasa started taking an interest in the substance and putting it to a more practical use.
In 1999 the space agency fitted its Stardust space probe with a mitt packed full of aerogel to catch the dust from a comet’s tail. It returned with a rich collection of samples last year.
In 2002 Aspen Aerogel, a company created by Nasa, produced a stronger and more flexible version of the gel. It is now being used to develop an insulated lining in space suits for the first manned mission to Mars, scheduled for 2018.
Mark Krajewski, a senior scientist at the company, believes that an 18mm layer of aerogel will be sufficient to protect astronauts from temperatures as low as -130C. “It is the greatest insulator we’ve ever seen,” he said.
Aerogel is also being tested for future bombproof housing and armour for military vehicles. In the laboratory, a metal plate coated in 6mm of aerogel was left almost unscathed by a direct dynamite blast.
It also has green credentials. Aerogel is described by scientists as the “ultimate sponge”, with millions of tiny pores on its surface making it ideal for absorbing pollutants in water.
Kanatzidis has created a new version of aerogel designed to mop up lead and mercury from water. Other versions are designed to absorb oil spills.
He is optimistic that it could be used to deal with environmental catastrophes such as the Sea Empress spillage in 1996, when 72,000 tons of crude oil were released off the coast of Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire.
Aerogel is also being used for everyday applications. Dunlop, the sports equipment company, has developed a range of squash and tennis rackets strengthened with aerogel, which are said to deliver more power.
Earlier this year Bob Stoker, 66, from Nottingham, became the first Briton to have his property insulated with aerogel. “The heating has improved significantly. I turned the thermostat down five degrees. It’s been a remarkable transformation,” he said.
Mountain climbers are also converts. Last year Anne Parmenter, a British mountaineer, climbed Everest using boots that had aerogel insoles, as well as sleeping bags padded with the material. She said at the time: “The only problem I had was that my feet were too hot, which is a great problem to have as a mountaineer.”
However, it has failed to convince the fashion world. Hugo Boss created a line of winter jackets out of the material but had to withdraw them after complaints that they were too hot.
Although aerogel is classed as a solid, 99% of the substance is made up of gas, which gives it a cloudy appearance.
Scientists say that because it has so many millions of pores and ridges, if one cubic centimetre of aerogel were unravelled it would fill an area the size of a football field.
Its nano-sized pores can not only collect pollutants like a sponge but they also act as air pockets.
Researchers believe that some versions of aerogel which are made from platinum can be used to speed up the production of hydrogen. As a result, aerogel can be used to make hydrogen-based fuels.
Dubi - I see that the statue is of Jimmy Carter, my first assumption was that it was Clinton. :^)
Not always, Doug
CD celebrates 25th anniversary
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/ptech/08/17/cd.anniversary.ap/index.html
EINDHOVEN, Netherlands (AP) -- It was August 17, 1982, and row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany.
An engineering marvel at the time, today they are instantly recognizable as Compact Discs, a product that turned 25 years old on Friday -- and whose future is increasingly in doubt in an age of iPods and digital downloads.
Those first CDs contained Richard Strauss' Alpine Symphony and would sound equally sharp if played today, says Holland's Royal Philips Electronics NV, which jointly developed the CD with Sony Corp. of Japan.
The recording industry thrived in the 1990s as music fans replaced their aging cassettes and vinyl LPs with compact discs, eventually making CDs the most popular album format.
The CD still accounts for the majority of the music industry's recording revenues, but its sales have been in a freefall since peaking early this decade, in part due to the rise of online file-sharing, but also as consumers spend more of their leisure dollars on other entertainment purchases, such as DVDs and video games.
As the music labels slash wholesale prices and experiment with extras to revive the now-aging format, it's hard to imagine there was ever a day without CDs.
Yet it had been a risky technical endeavor to attempt to bring digital audio to the masses, said Pieter Kramer, the head of the optical research group at Philips' labs in the Netherlands in the 1970s.
"When we started there was nothing in place," he told The Associated Press at Philips' corporate museum in Eindhoven.
The proposed semiconductor chips needed for CD players were to be the most advanced ever used in a consumer product. And the lasers were still on the drawing board when the companies teamed up in 1979.
In 1980, researchers published what became known as the "Red Book" containing the original CD standards, as well as specifying which patents were held by Philips and which by Sony.
Philips had developed the bulk of the disc and laser technology, while Sony contributed the digital encoding that allowed for smooth, error-free playback. Philips still licenses out the Red Book and its later incarnations, notably for the CD-ROM for storing computer software and other data.
The CD's design drew inspiration from vinyl records: Like the grooves on a record, CDs are engraved with a spiral of tiny pits that are scanned by a laser -- the equivalent of a record player's needle. The reflected light is encoded into millions of 0s and 1s: a digital file.
Because the pits are covered with plastic and the laser's light doesn't wear them down, the CD never loses sound quality.
Legends abound about how the size of the CD was chosen: Some said it matched a Dutch beer coaster; others believe a famous conductor or Sony executive wanted it just long enough for Beethoven's 9th Symphony.
Kramer said the decision evolved from "long conversations around the table" about which play length made the most sense.
The jump into mass production in Germany was a milestone for the CD, and by 1982 the companies announced their product was ready for market. Both began selling players that fall, though the machines only hit U.S. markets the following spring.
Sony sold the first player in Japan on October 1, with the CBS label supplying Billy Joel's "52nd Street" as its first album.
The CD was a massive hit. Sony sold more players, especially once its "Discman" series was introduced in 1984. But Philips benefited from CD sales, too, thanks to its ownership of Polygram, now part of Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group.
The CD player helped Philips maintain its position as Europe's largest maker of consumer electronics until it was eclipsed by Nokia Corp. in the late 1990s. Licensing royalties sustained the company through bad times.
"The CD was in itself an easy product to market," said Philips' current marketing chief for consumer electronics, Lucas Covers. It wasn't just the sound quality -- discs looked like jewelry in comparison to LPs.
By 1986, CD players were outselling record players, and by 1988 CDs outsold records.
"It was a massive turnaround for the whole market," Covers said.
Now, the CD may be seeing the end of its days.
CD sales have fallen sharply to 553 million sold in the United States last year, a 22 percent drop from its 2001 peak of 712 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Napster and later Kazaa and BitTorrent allowed music fans to easily share songs over the Internet, often illegally. More recently, Apple Inc. and other companies began selling legal music downloads, turning the MP3 and other digital audio formats into the medium of choice for many owners of Apple's iPods and other digital players.
"The MP3 and all the little things that the boys and girls have in their pockets ... can replace it, absolutely," said Kramer, the retired engineer.
CDs won't disappear overnight, but its years may be numbered.
Record labels seeking to revive the format have experimented with hybrid CD-DVD combos and packages of traditional CDs with separate DVDs that carry video and multimedia offerings playable on computers.
The efforts have been mixed at best, with some attempts, such as the DualDisc that debuted in 2004, not finding lasting success in the marketplace.
Kramer said it has been satisfying to witness the CD's long run at the top and know he had a small hand in its creation.
"You never know how long a standard will last," he said. "But it was a solid, good standard and still is."
One of the many hazards of being a statue Dubi!
Giving a squirrel a close inspection,
Urban Legends Image Quiz: Is It Real or Fake?
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_image_quiz.htm
Calif. squirrels heat tails for defense
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070814/ap_on_sc/hot_tail
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer Tue Aug 14, 5:18 PM ET
WASHINGTON - California ground squirrels have learned to intimidate rattlesnakes by heating their tails and shaking them aggressively.
Because the snakes, which are ambush hunters, can sense infrared radiation from heat, the warming makes the tails more conspicuous to them — signaling that they have been discovered and that the squirrels may come and harass them, explained Aaron Rundus, lead author of a study in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The tail "flagging" places the snakes on the defensive, he said.
Adult squirrels are not the snakes' prey, Rundus said in a telephone interview. The adults have a protein in their blood that allows them to survive the snake venom, and they have been known to attack and injure snakes, biting and kicking gravel at them.
Rather, the snakes are looking for immature squirrels, which they can kill and eat, said Rundus, who did the research while at the Animal Behavior Graduate Group at the University of California, Davis.
Researchers are not sure just how the squirrels cause their tails to heat up, but they think it may be by shunting warm blood from the body core into the tail.
"It's such a new discovery that it leaves a lot of questions," he said.
But apparently it isn't just a reflex, because they only do it with rattlesnakes.
Confronted by gopher snakes, which can't sense heat, the squirrels wave their tails vigorously, but don't bother to heat them up.
So how did they discover that the squirrels heat their tails?
The researchers were studying how squirrels reacted to various predators and noticed that with rattlesnakes they waved their tails even more in dark conditions than in the light.
That prompted the researchers to view the encounters using an infrared camera, and they discovered the squirrels' tails were much warmer than normal when dealing with rattlesnakes.
Learning more about these complex communication methods among animals may help improve understanding of how complex human communications have evolved, Rundus said.
He said it serves as a reminder that to understand more about animal life, we need to pay close attention to how animals act. "There is potentially a lot going on out there that we're not aware of," he said.
Atout - sorry for the delayed reply, thanks for the Fortune article.
I'm not sure at what point I'll feel like I have a comfortable retirement set aside, a minimum I'm thinking is about $1.5M, which is perhaps a little high, but I'd like to help some friends and family along the way, so for me the more the better.
So I guess I agree with Mr. Skinner's "better safe than sorry" philosophy.
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