Darkoshi

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)

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.

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)

U.S. drones targeting rescuers and mourners

.

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"?

Gosh, I'm glad I'm not a cleaning-person in an Art museum. I can picture myself making a mistake like this one:
$1.1M German museum piece falls victim to cleaning lady

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

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

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.

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

Interesting article (long, but informative) about the birth control pill, the history of menstruation, and increased cancer risks due to the greater number of menses that modern women have during their lifetimes.


Dogon women menstruate about a hundred times in their lives. (Those who survive early childhood typically live into their seventh or eighth decade.) By contrast, the average for contemporary Western women is somewhere between three hundred and fifty and four hundred times.
...
the basic pattern of late menarche, many pregnancies, and long menstrual-free stretches caused by intensive breast-feeding was virtually universal up until the "demographic transition" of a hundred years ago from high to low fertility. In other words, what we think of as normal--frequent menses--is in evolutionary terms abnormal.
...
for most women, [], incessant ovulation serves no purpose except to increase the occurence of abdominal pain, mood shifts, migraines, endometriosis, fibroids, and anemia. ... Most serious of all is the greatly increased risk of some cancers.


link via montyollie