undead astronauts

Time to break out the flamethrower.

http://jalopnik.com/5271247/scary-caterpillars-attack-honda-civic

An interesting article on the imminent shortage of medical isotopes, via the canadians.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/chalk-river-shutdown-expected-to-last-three-months/article1156028/

“Nuclear medicine specialists say the crunch for patients is coming after it was announced yesterday that the Canadian reactor responsible for one-third of the world’s medical isotopes will be shut down for at least three months.

The 51-year-old NRU unit at Chalk River, Ont., will be offline though July when the reactor in the Netherlands, which produces another third of the world’s supply, is scheduled to shut down for a month of maintenance.

“That would be devastating,” said Robert Atcher, the president of the international Society of Nuclear Medicine, during a telephone interview yesterday from his office in New Mexico. “There is no way to make up for the loss of those two reactors at the same time.” ”

(more…)

The best part is when you find out how the modem intefaces with the phone.

A new 40K game, this time for ye old heroic console shooter format. Personally, I think they’re hamming up the whole “god of war” type wundermeleesquad too much instead of the “In the Future there is only WAR!”

Kiplinger, in all of their wisdom, has chosen a city we all know too well as their best city.  Any guesses?  :)

Kiplinger 2009 Best City
(more…)

“There has been much hand-wringing over the dangers of medical residents’ grueling schedules. Doctors-in-training often forgo sleep entirely, racking up as many as 30 work hours in a single stretch.”

Full article: Are residents overworked?

While there seems to be no easy solution or answer to the continuous hours that medical residents are on call, there still needs to be taken to consideration what life after residency is like.

Hours have been reduced to 80/week, and 30/shift; which I believe to  be agreeable. However, if plans to further reduce hours to is put into place, the rules will have unforeseen effects that could possible ripple through the entire health system. It could result in residencies taking longer to complete; 3 years coming 4, 4 becoming 5….which would result in a gap in graduating residents. And true, it is most likely that a person on hour 20 is less efficient than they were on hour 2. But life after residency, as a full fledged licensed physician, has hours that are also painstakingly long, without the controversy.

Will less hours cause less mistakes/less cost? Maybe..Maybe not.

No easy solution.

What you think?

A chinese man who was in debt 2 million yuan because of a failed construction project climbed onto a bridge and threatened to jump, tying up traffic for several hours in Guangzhou. After five hours of unsuccessful police entreaties to come down, a retired soldier broke through police lines, walked up to the man, shook his man in greeting, and proceeded to push him off onto the waiting police air cushion below. Said soldier, named Mr. Lai, “I pushed him off because jumpers like Chen are very selfish, their action violates a lot of public interests. They do not really dare to kill themselves. Instead, they just want to raise the relevant government authorities’ attention to their appeals.”

Source
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8064867.stm

so some dude named mancow volunteered to be waterboarded on air. he was certain he’d last 30-60 sec and come out saying it wasn’t torture.

he lasted 6 sec and says, it’s “absolutely torture.”

UPDATE: olbermann had offered to donate $1k a sec to a charity specified by sean hannity if he underwent waterboarding. he rescinded that offer and donated in name of mancow instead.

saw this at gnxp. some studies had shown that asians had perfect pitch much more often than other races. a new study shows that this is related to tonal language rather than genes.

“Perfect pitch for years seemed like a beautiful gift – given only to a few genetically endowed people. But our research suggests that it might be available to virtually everybody,” Deutsch said.

…

In 2004, she found that students at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, China, all of whom spoke Mandarin, were almost nine times more likely to have perfect pitch than students at the Eastman School of Music in New York. That last study, however, left open the question of whether perfect pitch might be a genetic trait – since all the Mandarin speakers were East Asian.

The present study looked at 203 students at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, all of whom agreed to take the test in class (so there was no self-selection in the sample). The students listened to the 36 notes that haphazardly spanned three octaves. They attempted to identify the notes, and they self-reported their musical, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds – including whether they were very fluent in an East Asian tone language, fairly fluent or not at all fluent. Deutsch and her colleagues found that students who spoke an East Asian tone language very fluently scored nearly 100 percent on the test, and that students who were only fairly fluent in a tone language scored lower overall. Those students – either Caucasian or East Asian – who were not at all fluent in speaking a tone language scored the worst on average.

time to invest in companies that teach mandarin, no? anyways, if u’re interested to know whether u have perfect pitch, go here and find out. i most definitely don’t have perfect pitch.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/05/20/alabama.police.beating/index.html

I think he deserved a beatdown.  Maybe not an unconscious beatdown though.

i actually have an itch to attend one of these things now.

somebody out there must agree w/ me that 28 weeks later is one of the best movies ever.

http://www.thelocal.de/society/20090514-19273.html

courtesy disgrasian:

I don’t know how to react to this. … still.. its getting posted.