Darkoshi

awww... good doggy!

Mon, 19 Jul 2021 06:57:16 GMT

Family dog stops traffic in Ottawa neighbourhood to help owner during a medical emergency (March 19, 2021)

While I'm at it, I'll post these other old links I saved... meant to do a "Good Stuff" links post with them after accumulating enough of them, so now it is. Several of these were via andrewducker.

Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2020 finalists revealed

Near Donegal the trees are on the march (surreal video)
More: Watch: thousands of tonnes of peat and trees slide downstream in Donegal

Quest Sprout: 'The most wholesome thing on the internet'
More: Quest Sprout - webcomic archive, Swords - webcomic

2020 Bulwer-Lytton winning entries and dishonorable mentions

Online meeting, when everyone starts turning their cameras on (funny video)

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interesting links

Tue, 02 Dec 2014 04:37:23 GMT

How a Car Engine Works (animated diagrams)

Why Does Your Nose Get Stuffy One Nostril at a Time? (and why does your nose run when you cry)

via andrewducker

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and the sky full of darkness

Thu, 06 Mar 2014 03:37:29 GMT

If the Moon was only one Pixel - a tediously accurate scale model of the solar system. Wow. Just wow. I recall being similarly impressed by another scale model, which I thought I had also linked to, but I can't find that one any more...

Ah, here it is - an image showing the earth and moon, and distance between them, to scale.

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fake reviews

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:32:53 GMT

Opinion Spam Detection: Detecting Fake Reviews and Reviewers - another site with various info about fake reviews

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articles about fake reviews

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 21:25:37 GMT

The Consumerist : 30 Ways You Can Spot Fake Online Reviews (Apr 14, 2010)

The New York Times : A Rave, a Pan, or Just a Fake? (May 21, 2011)

Business Week : A Lie Detector Test for Online Reviewers (Sep 29, 2011)

Time : Now There’s Even More Reason to Distrust Online Reviews (Jan 27, 2012)

Time : 9 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Trust Online Reviews (Feb 3, 2012)

abc News : Yelp Outs Companies That Pay for Positive Reviews (Nov 19, 2012)

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neat links via andrewducker

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 03:10:24 GMT

slow motion baseball physics

life hacks - some of these are worth trying. Especially the wooden spoon the next time I'm boiling something frothy.

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U.S. drone strikes

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 04:27:55 GMT

U.S. drones targeting rescuers and mourners

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Premonition:
Someday, there will be drones as small and quiet as mosquitos. The mosquito drone will be able to suck the victim's blood and compare it against a database of DNA samples to determine if it's found the correct target or not. When the correct target is found, the mosquito will inject the person with lethal poison or perhaps with biochemical matter designed to kill that specific person.

No matter which candidate or party wins the presidency, does pretty much the same military, CIA, and FBI leadership stay in power? Exerting influence on whichever president is in place? Acting as though they have unlimited, unchecked power to do anything they feel is necessary to "protect the government against its enemies"?

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goths up trees

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 18:54:31 GMT

Goths Up Trees - the descriptions added under the photos are priceless

via andrewducker

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columbia / housing projects

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 06:36:50 GMT

I had come to expect that Google Maps' street-view was available for everywhere in Columbia. But I was surprised today to notice that there are quite a few streets where it is not yet available.

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This website: http://www.city-data.com/city/Columbia-South-Carolina.html
has a whole bunch of statistics about Columbia, and presumably other U.S. cities too.
The "Neighborhoods" section links to pages with statistics for individual neighborhoods within the city. It also has a map which shows the boundaries of the neighborhoods. The map also shows the city boundary/city limits, which isn't obvious on most other maps.

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I was curious about a housing area that can be seen while driving along I277 through town. It has a lot of identical looking houses/buildings spread out over a significantly large area. I thought that it must be some kind of housing project.

While driving by there, I often wonder about the people who live there, and how they ended up there. I don't know much about public housing, and how people qualify for it, other than obviously that they are poor and/or have special needs.

So I found the Columbia Housing Authority (CHA) website, which has this interesting page about the history of housing projects in the city. The site lists the areas in the city with public housing projects. 2 of the older projects, I recognized. But many of them, I wouldn't have recognized as public housing - some look like regular apartment complexes, and some are small but nice-looking houses.

The area I was curious about isn't a part of the CHA. It is listed on a page of non-CHA subsidized housing.. which seems to be federally based rather than city-based.

There are a lot more subsidized low-income housing areas around here than I was aware of.

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counting

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 03:58:05 GMT

www.languagesandnumbers.com - a neat site where you can look up how to count in many different languages.

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Japan earthquake / tsunami

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 03:00:43 GMT

Amazing video, showing the tremendous power of the tsunami surge.

Video of Skyscrapers swaying from the earthquake.

Straight-forward explanation of what happened at the Fukushima Nuclear Reactor.

via andrewducker

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Thu, 10 Mar 2011 05:03:53 GMT

Study identifies changes to DNA in major depression and suicide - interesting... I want to read more about this turning on and off of DNA somewhen; I've heard about it before but don't understand it well.
"We have about 40,000 genes in every cell and the main reason a brain cell is a brain cell is because only a small fraction of the genes are turned on. The remaining genes that are not expressed are shut down by an epigenetic process called DNA methylation."

via andrewducker

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insurance links

Sat, 26 Feb 2011 03:09:23 GMT

Insurers keep a secret history of your home
Insurers increasingly are using a huge industry database ... to drop or deny coverage based on a home's history of claims or damage reports.

Insurance companies are terrified of rising losses from water and mold damage. So a single report of water-related problems may be enough for insurers to shun your home.

Links to U.S. state insurance departments

SC Dept. of Insurance - See the link "Top 20 Homeowners Premium Comparison Guide" for a spreadsheet comparison of rates from several insurance companies.

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interesting articles related to birth control

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 06:49:53 GMT

How the inventor of the pill changed the world for women - about Carl Djerassi, one of the inventors of the Pill.

[regarding a male birth control pill] The first question a man would ask is: would it affect my potency? There have been clinical trials – it has no effect on potency. The second question is erection.

I can't figure out what the word "potency" means in that context. A male BC pill would obviously affect fertility, as that is the point of a BC pill. So potency doesn't seem to mean fertility. And it doesn't seem to mean the ability to get an erection, since that is the 2nd question, not the first. What does it mean?

"How many acts of sexual intercourse would you guess occur every 24 hours?" he asks. "I often do this with my students, and they say a billion. I say: 'No, no, no, you're dreaming. There are six billion people. Well, you need two for sexual intercourse, so there are only three billion. And some of them are five years old, so they're out.' So then they say a million. Well, now you're underestimating, because you're sitting here and you're not having sex. It's actually 100m, every 24 hours. And they produce about a million conceptions, about half of which are unexpected. Of the 500,000, half of them are unwanted. As a result, every 24 hours, 150,000 abortions occur; of these, over 50,000 are illegal."

Interview with Carl Djerassi

Some parts of this don't make sense to me. Having a male BC pill doesn't take away a woman's control over her fertility, it rather gives a man more control over his. But the comment about the female BC pill making men less willing to use condoms is intriguing.

Djerassi suggests that in the future we will freeze our sperm and eggs, get sterilised and check out our sperm and eggs from the bank when we want them later. 'Then you might as well forget about contraception'.

Interesting idea. Maybe the actual eggs and sperm won't even need to be stored in the future. Maybe their DNA sequences will be scanned and saved as data, and maybe it will be possible to re-create an egg or sperm using that data. It wouldn't even really be necessary to extract and scan actual eggs and sperm... one could take the person's DNA and have a computer randomly select half the chromosomes to make virtual gametes. It will surely be possible to check the DNA for hereditary diseases, and to make corrections to prevent those diseases.

Once all that is possible, it would theoretically be possible for people to decide that they want to have a child using someone else's DNA (a celebrity, for instance), rather than their own. Or using a combination of multiple people's DNA. I wonder how much legal control people will have over their own DNA... will it be similar to copyright, and after a certain length of time after a person dies, will other people will be able to use that person's DNA? Or will only people directly descended from that person be allowed to use it? Will you be able to sell your DNA sequence for specific uses?

Response - I never blamed the pill for the fall in family size ... I didn't know that the birth control pill wasn't legal in Japan until 1999.

Birth control in Japan - mostly via condoms.

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Sat, 19 Feb 2011 05:15:56 GMT

darn it - so that's how one darns a sock.

A fortune cookie today informed me "You should enhance your feminine side at this time". Ahem. heheh.

We finally got Serena spayed this week. The prior appointment was cancelled due to snow. Before that it was delayed due to her being in heat. And then it seemed like she was in heat again. Now we have to keep her from running around for ten days while she heals. 3 days down, 7 to go.

Very tired.

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Wed, 09 Feb 2011 00:35:50 GMT

I could never work here! - about attitudes towards people working in animal shelters. Warning: possible emotional trigger; discusses euthanasia.

The same website has several other interesting pages about dog psychology and training, including this: Nothing in life is free

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health care

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 03:08:37 GMT

What life under a socialized medical system is actually like. Interesting comments too.

via andrewducker

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