Greyhound advertisement

Bet this gets pulled very quicky...

(Backstory explained here; warning - graphic language)

Commercials for auto dealership

Well above the norm (which isn't saying much...)

A modern feral child... in America

Warning - this is not easy to watch or read. Viewer discretion is advised.

False advertising

It's everywhere - most commonly on the labels of packaged and prepared food products, which commonly have only a tangential resemblance to the item pictured on he label or menu. The image above is from a Consumerist.com article which includes devastating reviews of the product posted at Amazon.com.

The box admonishes buyers "product may not be as appears on image;" a gross understatement for a gross distortion.

Police employing Versed during arrests

"For almost two years, Metro [Nashville] police have had the option of calling for a needle loaded with a strong sedative to control the most unruly people they encounter on the street.

One of the doctors who came up with the protocol said it's the safest option out there and that it is used all over the country. But many people said that the injection was news to them, and a top medical ethicist said it's a troubling precedent.

The drug is called Midazolam, which is better known as Versed. People who have had a colonoscopy have probably had a shot of the drug for the procedure...

"I woke up -- I don't know how much time had passed -- with a sergeant standing over me telling me to sign here... I just signed a piece of paper and was immediately right back out," he said...

The biggest side effect that is seen in more than 80 percent of those who are injected with Versed is amnesia. The side effect raises the question of a person being able to defend themselves in court if they can't remember what happened..."

More details at this link.

Man shoots his lawn mower

A 56-year-old man from the Midwestern US state of Wisconsin has been arrested after shooting his lawn mower in his garden because it would not start. Keith Walendowski was charged by police in Milwaukee with disorderly conduct and possession of a sawn-off shotgun.

He could face a fine of up to $11,000 and a maximum prison sentence of six-and-a-half years if convicted. Police officers said Mr Walendowski had told them: "It's my lawn mower and my yard, so I can shoot it if I want."

I hope it's a jury trial and the jury is comprised of lawnmower owners, because this story reminds me of an old joke:

Man selling lawnmower: "It has an old sparkplug and is difficult to start. You'll be cussing a blue streak by the time you get it going."

Buyer: "No chance of that. I'm a Christian minister and for the past 30 years I've been a man of the cloth. It's been so long since I cursed that I don't even remember the words."

Seller: "You just keep pulling on that cord. The words will come back to ya."

How humans reached the Americas

There has always been consensus that mankind first evolved in Africa, migrated to Europe and Asia, and then after many millennia eventually crossed to the Americas - but there has been disagreement on when and how the latter event occurred.

Traditional anthropology and archaeology taught that early man walked to North America across a landbridge between Siberia and Alaska about 13,000 years ago, when the presence of glaciers on the continents used so much of the world's water that sea levels fell and exposed the seabed between the continents. According to this worldview man accessed lower North America via an "ice-free corridor" between glaciers in what is now Canada and eventually migrated down to South America.

Others (myself included) believe that early man was more adventurous and innovative, and was capable of voyaging by sea, which would have allowed passage along the coast at much earlier times, either following the Aleutians and Pacific Amerian coast, or even crossing the Atlantic or Pacific directly. Excavations at the Monte Verde site in Chile support the latter view, and even some North American sites are suggested to be much older than believed by conventional theory.

An article in this week's US News and World Report online discusses at length the emerging use of DNA to analyse this controversy. I won't belabor the details here; those with an interest would be better served going to the link.

Interesting graph of US movie data

The image above doesn't do justice to the graphs, which you can access at this link. The graphs display the revenues of the top 25 movies on a weekly basis. Colors are coordinated to the opening week, so you can follow the progress of a given movie across time. Data are available for the past four years, and for the top ten movies of 1998 (Titanic etc) and 1988.

The New York Times has a similar (searchable) graph with data going back to 1986.

Instead of exercising... take a pill

"Can you enjoy the benefits of exercise without the pain of exertion? The answer may one day be yes — just take a pill that tricks the muscles into thinking they have been working out furiously.

Researchers at the Salk Institute report they have found two drugs that do wonders for the athletic endurance of couch potato mice. One drug, known as Aicar, increased the mice's endurance on a treadmill by 44 percent after just four weeks of treatment...

Dr. Richard Bergman, an expert on obesity and diabetes at the University of Southern California, said the drugs could become widely used if they prove safe. "It is possible that the couch potato segment of the population might find this to be a good regimen, and of course that is a large number of people," he said."

Big Pharma must be licking their collective lips...

Prehistoric rock art of Britain

The Archaeology Data Service in Britain has created a website to collect and disseminate information on prehistoric rock art in that country. The BBC featured a report on the subject yesterday. Credit to Uncertain Times for assembling the links, and to the Guardian for the image above, which is one of a gallery of about a dozen photos of these ancient creations.

Al Noor City

The video embedded above depicts a proposal to build de novo two metropolis-sized cities on each side of the Red Sea, then connect them by a bridge. As described in the Economist,

"Construction is supposed to begin next year, after the terms of sovereignty for the tax-free metropolises have been agreed. By 2025, says Mr Ahmed, Djibouti’s Noor City will have 2.5m people and its Yemeni twin 4.5m. Several million jobs will be created. An airport serving both cities will, he says, attract 100m passengers a year. A 29km bridge across the strait will connect Arabia and Africa by road, rail and pipelines, its towers among the tallest on earth. The cost? A mere $200 billion or so."

The whole project sounds impossibly megalomaniacal, with pie-in-the-sky unattainable goals. But it certainly is interesting.

Rally for the Republic

The American people have stopped paying attention to Ron Paul ever since John McCain won the Republican nomination for president. However, for three days beginning August 31 there will be a "Rally for the Republic" in Minneapolis. It was timed to coincide with the Republican convention because Dr. Paul and his supporters realized that he would not be invited to speak at the party's official convention. The rally will utilize the 15,000 seat Target Center, will be moderated by Tucker Carlson, and will feature in addition to Dr. Paul a presentation by the always outspoken former governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura.

The mainstream media will undoubtedly minimize or ignore the rally, but I will be covering it (remotely). It should be very interesting.

YouTube, as viewed by an anthropolgist

This is a curious video which I ran across late last night and decided to watch for a moment - and then wound up watching for the full hour! It shows a lecture given last month at the Library of Congress, discussing the "anthropology" not of the internet in general, but of the YouTube video-sharing site.

The topic sounds boring (and sometimes is), but at other times it is curiously fascinating. The speaker focuses on the topic of vlogs (video blogs), and how they are evolving into a system of social connections. I'm not a vlogger; if you are, this video will probably be of great interest.

Supercell

Those who live in the Midwest and Central U.S. often are fascinated by the supercells that accompany tornadoes. The images above come from a set of a couple dozen documenting a storm in Nebraska which did not result in tornadic activity, but presented truly awesome views of a supercell.

When I see pictures of supercells like the ones above, I am always reminded of that iconic scene in the movie "Independence Day" in which the alien spacecraft is hovering over the White House and then releases an energy beam which destroys the building.

I have been told (and believe) that when the movie was being shown in theaters, whenever it reached the point where that scene happened, the audiences invariably erupted in applause...

The Secret Curse of Expert Archers

When I first read excerpts of this report, I thought it must be a parody from the Onion, since the sexual innuendo was so strong. But it comes from the New York Times. Consider for yourself whether this doesn't sound like a prolonged double entendre...

"There is an affliction so feared by elite archers that many in the sport refuse to even say its name. Target panic, as the condition is known, causes crack shots to suddenly lose control of their bows and their composure. Mysteriously, sufferers start releasing the bow the instant they see the target, sabotaging any chance of a gold-medal shot. Others freeze up and cannot release at all...

Few admit to being sufferers themselves. “Most shooters will deny that they have it...”

While nearly everyone agrees that the problem is primarily psychological, the latest research suggests that, in some cases, the problem might also be neurological.., Even those with a neurological disorder can develop anxiety that makes the problem worse...

“It kind of gets into the mind that this could happen, and that’s where the anxiety and the stress come in... “I would start to bring the bow down, and as soon as it got anywhere near the target, I would click it right off, right then and there...”