While I have to wonder about the health benefits with so rapidly gaining and losing this weight, I think it's overall a good idea. We'll see how well it works and, who knows, maybe he'll learn a lot from this endeavor. It is a nice prospect, trying to understand your clientele by walking in their shoes, so to speak, to gain better insight to the trials and tribulations they face. Still, the rapid weight onset is a bit misleading, as most people don't get fat in a matter of a few months, but instead over a period of years. Nonetheless, if anything, it's a good publicity stunt. Fitness trainer Paul James wanted to understand his overweight clients better, so he decided to pack on a few pounds himself.
Well, not just a few pounds. The once svelte 32-year-old has ballooned from 212 pounds to 263 pounds and says he won’t stop until he weighs 340 pounds.
The Australian has cut down on his daily exercise regimens and has even started drinking beer at night.
^ Paul James before
^ Paul James currently
“It was difficult to relate to overweight gym members so I’m experiencing life as an overweight person,” James said.
In order to expand his waistline, James has been indulging on pasta, cream sauces, chocolate and carbohydrates.
James hopes to reach his target weight of 340 pounds by March and then eventually lose the weight by October to show his clients it can be done.
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Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Fitness trainer gets fat, slims down to show clientele it can be done.
Express your inner Neo-Nazi with iTunes.
You ever wanted to just rock out and scream "white is right!" along with your favorite tunes? Wish there was an easier way to get your racist-jam fix than having to drudge your way on out to your favorite, obscure supremacy music store? Well, worry no more. You can get all the white power you need right on iTunes. You're unlikely to find CDs by groups like Skrewdriver and Brutal Attack sold alongside the latest hits from Rihanna and the Jonas Brothers at your local retailer.
But the white-power punk bands' ballads are just a click away online.
With song titles like "Skinhead Superstar" and "White Warriors," white-power bands and other hate-music recording artists have found a home in places like Apple's iTunes and Amazon.com.
And with nothing more than a credit card, users can purchase — among other offerings — CDs by the proudly racist country singer Johnny Rebel, with songs such as the catchy little ditty "Coon Town."
Critics of hate music are appalled to see lyrics such as Skrewdriver's:
Are we gonna sit and let them come?
Have they got the White man on the run?
Multi-racial society is a mess
We ain't gonna take much more of this
What do we need?
or Johnny Rebel's:
Roses are red and violets are blue,
And n——-s are black.
You know thats true.
But they dont mind, cause What the heck?!
You gotta be black to get a welfare check!
But there is a market for it — which leads to the question of whether online music retailers should screen what they sell, or if it should be up to the buyer to decide what's suitable.
"There's always somebody out there who thinks something is politically incorrect," said Jeff Schoep, head of the National Socialist Movement and its affiliated record label, NSM88 Records. "But this is America. We have freedom of speech and expression. If people want to express political messages in song, they should be able to do that."
Schoep, who said his label has seen a recent "uptick" in sales despite a worsening economy, said the songs distributed by his label are no different from those of more popular acts like Rage Against the Machine.
"If you're going to be able to carry that hard-core Marxist stuff, what is the problem with someone saying, 'White pride, worldwide?'" Schoep asked.
"You can't have a double standard. If pro-white voices can't be heard, what about rap artists who say it's time to kill cops and drag them through the streets?"
Patti Smyth, a spokeswoman for Amazon.com, said the offensive tracks were offered by unidentified third-party companies.
She declined to elaborate and did not return repeated requests for comment on any plans to limit sales of objectionable music.
Apple declined comment.
Nora Flanagan, a spokeswoman for the activist group Turn It Down, which lobbies against objectionable music, said the companies have every right — and a social obligation — to remove the songs from being sold on their sites.
Citing a "tag system" on the retail sites that links them to mainstream bands like U2 and Motorhead, she said the purveyors of hate music have benefitted greatly from their online exposure.
"The racist right is really taking advantage of the room Amazon is giving them," Flanagan said. "We're not talking about a First Amendment issue here. They're a business and they have a right not to sell whatever they want. It's a business decision they're making ...
"It's absolutely their right to sell it," she said, "but it could be their choice not to — if they wanted to take a stand on it."
Schoep, who claims pro-white music is "going more mainstream," said removing bands like Skrewdriver and Brutal Attack would be "un-American" and would amount to outright censorship.
"The minute they start censoring, then we're not living in America anymore," he told FOXNews.com. "If people don't like it, don't listen to it, or don't buy it. But some people out there want it."
Chris Kennedy, director of the Cato Institute's Project on Criminal Justice, said the term censorship is "thrown around" too loosely.
"Censorship should only be applied when the government tries to censor someone," he said. "Otherwise, we're just talking about the choices that entrepreneurs and businesses make in a free society. When [companies] decide they're not going to accept their product, that's not censorship — that's just choices that they make."
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At first, I thought this hard to believe. So, I checked both the iTunes store and Amazon. Amazon's claim that they do not directly sell racist music, like Skrewdriver's, is complete bullshit. You can even get Amazon to gift wrap it for you. And it's there on Apple's iTunes store, too. Shit, you can even find Skrewdriver at Microsoft's Zune site. Nice to know that you no longer have to go to your out-of-the-way Neo-Nazi record store to get this shit, you can just download it from your favorite mainstream music provider.
The future of marijuana legalization.
According to some interesting figures over at FiveThirtyEight.com, it may not be too long before marijuana becomes legalized. Figures overwhelmingly show a massive shift towards support of marijuana-lenient policies. We all know that Michael Phelps was on something. But perhaps he was also onto something. Three recent polls show that Americans are more sympathetic to the idea of legalizing marijuana than ever before.
The first poll, conducted last week by Rasmussen Reports, has 40 percent of Americans in support of legalizing the drug and 46 percent opposed. The second, conducted in January by CBS News, has 41 percent in favor of legalization and 52 percent against. And a third poll, conducted by Zogby on behalf of the marijuana-rights advocacy group NORML, has 44 percent of Americans in support of legalized pot and 52 percent opposed.
That all three polls show support for legalization passing through the 40 percent barrier may be significant. I compiled a database of every past poll I could find on this subject, including a series of Gallup polls and results from the General Social Survey, and could never before find more than 36 percent of the population (Gallup in October, 2005) stating a position in favor of legalization:
Several cautions and caveats apply, however. Firstly, although support for legalization has grown, it remains the minority position. Secondly, although there has been a long, slow-moving upward trend in favor of legalization since roughly 1992, there is no guarantee that public sentiment will continue to move in that direction: support for legalization had grown to about 30 percent in the mid 1970s before dropping significantly during the Just Say No years of the 1980s.
Still, the position no longer holds the stigma that it once did. About as many Americans now support legalizing marijuana as do de-legalizing abortion. The past three Presidents have admitted, more or less, to marijuana use. Thirteen states have some form of decriminalization on the books, while fourteen permit medical use of the drug, although it is not clear how robust those provisions are as they are superseded by federal law.
The pro-legalization position may have some generational momentum as well. According to an AARP poll conducted several years ago, while just 8 percent of Americans aged 70 or older had ever tried pot, lifetime usage rates grow to 58 percent among 45-49 year olds.
This is probably not one of those issues, however, where Washington is liable to be on the vanguard. When Barney Frank introduced a bill last year to decriminalize pot, it got only eight co-sponsors, one of whom subsequently withdrew her name. And President Obama has steered clear of any suggestion that he might move to legalize or decriminalize pot, in spite of some earlier statements on his record to the contrary.
My guess is that we'll need to see a supermajority of Americans in favor of decriminalizing pot before the federal government would dare to take action on it. If the upward trend since 1990 holds (and recall my earlier caution: it might not), then legalization would achieve 60 percent support at some point in 2022 or 2023. About then is when things might get interesting. But I'd guess we'll see other some other once-unthinkable things like legalized gay marriage first.
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Michael Steele really is batshit crazy.
As Andrew Sullivan notes:
It is "crazy" to discuss civil unions; the GOP needs to have more "hip-hop" appeal; and any Republican senator who wants to cooperate with a Democratic president at a time of extreme national peril will be penalized. This is the face of Republican moderation? What would the face of extremism look like?
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My guess is, the face of Michael Steele.
nothing after the jump
more...
Omega 3-rich diet may help you live longer.
This is a rather long article, even though I've slimmed it down considerably. Still, it's very informative and incredibly interesting.At the end of a residential cul-de-sac in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, a driveway winds up a hill to the headquarters of Ocean Nutrition, a complex of buildings of mid-century vintage overlooking the tall-masted schooners and gray-hulled Canadian Navy destroyers in Halifax Harbour.
Down the road, semi-trailers loaded with drums of oily yellow liquid pull up outside a newly built factory. Inside cavernous galvanized-steel hangars, the oil is blended with deionized water in 6,500-gallon tanks. The resulting slurry of micro-encapsulated oil is then pumped through a five-story spray-drier to remove the moisture.
The final product is a fine-grained beige substance that looks like flour but is, in fact, a triumph of technology: smelly fish oil, transformed by industry into a tasteless, odorless powder. It will be used to spike everything from infant formula in China to the Wonder Bread and Tropicana orange juice on our supermarket shelves.
After seven years and $50 million of research, the company's 45 technicians and 14 Ph.D.s have found a high-tech way of getting a crucial set of nutrients back into our bodies — compounds that, thanks to the industrialization of agriculture over the past half century, have been thoroughly stripped from our food supply without, until recently, it being realized by anyone.
Now, an ever-growing body of research is showing that the epidemic of diseases associated with the Western diet — cancer, heart disease, depression, and much more — might be curtailed simply by restoring something we never should have removed from our diets in the first place: omega-3 fatty acids.
[...]
Omega-3 molecules are a by-product of the happy meeting of sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide in the chloroplasts of terrestrial plants and marine algae. Not long ago, these fatty acids were an inescapable component of our diet. Back in the early 1900s — long before the arrival of bovine growth hormone and patented transgenic seeds — American family farms were perfect factories for producing omega-3s.
Bucolic, sun-drenched pastures supported a complex array of grasses, and cattle used their sensitive tongues to pick and choose the ripest patches of clover, millet, and sweet grass; their rumens then turned the cellulose that humans can't digest into foods that we can: milk, butter, cheese, and, eventually, beef, all of them rich in omega-3s. Cattle used to spend four to five carefree years grazing on grass, but now they are fattened on grain in feedlots and reach slaughter weight in about a year, all the while pumped full of antibiotics to fight off the diseases caused by the close quarters of factory farms.
Likewise, a few generations ago, chickens roamed those same farms, foraging on grasses, purslane, and grubs, providing humans with drumsticks, breasts, and eggs that were rich in grass-derived omega-3s. Today, most American chickens are now a single hybrid breed — the Cornish — and are raised in cages, treated with antibiotics, and stuffed full of corn.
Our animal fats were once derived from leafy greens, and now our livestock are fattened with corn, soybeans, and other seed oils. (Even the majority of the salmon, catfish, and shrimp in our supermarkets are raised on farms and fattened with soy-enriched pellets.) So not only have good fats been stricken from our diets, but these cheap, widely available seed oils are the source of another, far less healthy family of fatty acids called omega-6s, which compete with omega-3s for space in our cell membranes. Omega-6s are essentially more rigid fatty acids that give our cells structure, while omega-3s are more fluid and help our bodies fight inflammation. Our ancestors ate a ratio of dietary omega-6s to omega-3s of approximately 1:1. The Western diet (the modern American and European eating pattern characterized by high intakes of red meat, sugar, and refined carbohydrates) has a ratio of about 20:1.
"The shift from a food chain with green plants at its base to one based on seeds may be the most far reaching of all," writes Michael Pollan in his prescriptive manifesto In Defense of Food. "From leaves to seeds: It's almost, if not quite, A Theory of Everything."
[...]
Okinawans, of Japan, once had the longest life expectancy in the world. But with postwar American administration, which didn't end until 1972, residents of the Japanese prefecture switched to a Western diet rich in meat and seed-based vegetable oils (think Spam, McDonald's hamburgers, and margarine). As a result, they experienced a precipitous rise in cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases. Western eating habits proved hard to shake, and 47 percent of Okinawan men are still considered obese, twice the rate of the rest of Japan.
According to a 2003 study published in the World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics, urban Indians who have adopted seed-oil-rich diets succumb to heart disease and chronic illnesses at a much higher rate than village dwellers who eat a "poor man's diet" that is high in mustard oil, which is relatively high in omega-3s. It is believed that, in the 1960s, Israelis enthusiastically adopted an ostensibly heart-healthy diet rich in polyunsaturated fats from vegetable oils; now heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes are ubiquitous, and rates of cancer are higher than in the United States.
In 1970, intrigued by reports that Eskimos rarely die from heart disease, two Danish scientists flew to Greenland and charmed blood samples from 130 volunteers. Hans Olaf Bang and Jørn Dyerberg discovered that the Inuit people still got most of their calories from fish, seal, and whale meat. Despite their high cholesterol intake, the Inuit had a death rate from coronary disease that was one-tenth that of the Danes, enthusiastic pork eaters who have been known to butter even their cheese. And diabetes was almost non-existent among the Inuit.
[...]
Among the Japanese, who each eat an average of 145 pounds of fish a year, rates of depression and homicide are strikingly low. Meanwhile, men who live in landlocked nations such as Austria and Hungary, where fish consumption is respectively 25 pounds and nine pounds per capita, top the global charts in suicide and depression. Despite the fact that the Japanese smoke like fiends, struggle with high blood pressure, and eat a hundred more cholesterol-rich eggs a year per person than Americans do, they boast enviably low rates of cardiovascular disease, as well as the longest life span on the planet, an average of 81 years... three years longer than that of Americans.
And while it's true that the Japanese consume soy in the form of tofu, miso, and soy sauce, the way it is prepared — precipitated or fermented — is far healthier than the raw, mineral-blocking phytate estrogen and omega-6-rich versions consumed by Americans.
Dr. Hibbeln is convinced that the key to the average Japanese citizen's longevity is omega-3 fatty acids; levels in Japanese bloodstreams average 60 percent of all polyunsaturates. After half a century of favoring seed-based vegetable oils, the level of omega-3s in American bloodstreams has fallen to 20 percent of polyunsaturates. "We have changed the composition of people's bodies and brains," says Dr. Hibbeln. "A very interesting question, to which we don't yet know the answer, is to what degree has the dietary change altered overall behavior in our society?"
Lately, the answers have been coming in thick and fast. In one study of 231 inmates medicated with fish oil in a British prison, assaults dropped by a third. Comparing homicide rates in five countries, Dr. Hibbeln found that the rising consumption of omega-6 fatty acids correlated with a hundredfold increase in death by homicide, even though access to firearms went down in all the countries surveyed except the United States. A paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that even a modest increase in the consumption of omega-3-rich fish reduced the risk of coronary death by 36 percent. A 2007 study by the National Institutes of Health found a positive correlation between mothers' consumption of omega-3s during pregnancy and the fine motor skills and verbal IQs of their children.
[...]
"Men in their forties and fifties can nearly reverse their risk of dying from sudden cardiac death by eating fish at least three times a week," says Dr. Hibbeln. "And if they want to live longer and happier lives, there's substantial data that they should increase their body composition of omega-3s." Your family doctor can test your ratio of omega-6 to omega-3, or you can do it yourself. (Your Future Health sells test kits on its Web site, yourfuturehealth.com.)
How could a simple change in dietary fat have such a huge impact on so many aspects of our health? The answer lies in the nature of two specific forms of omega-3s, docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), which are especially rich in seafood.
Not all omega-3 fatty acids, it turns out, are created equal.
[...]
While it's true that terrestrial plants are good sources of omega-3s, the fatty acid most present in land-based species is alpha-linolenic acid (ALA). Essential for good health, ALA can be found in fruits, vegetables, and some seeds, among them lettuce, leeks, purslane, kale, broccoli, blueberries, hemp, chia, and flaxseed. ALA is especially rich in plants that grow in intense light, and the fatty acid is thought to help the plants recover from sun damage. Though the human body is capable of turning ALA into DHA and EPA through a series of enzymatic reactions, it is not particularly good at it: Less than 1 percent of the ALA we get from vegetable sources ultimately becomes DHA and EPA. The ocean is the world's richest source of DHA and EPA, particularly from plankton-eating oily fish such as sardines, mackerel, and herring.
Recently discovered archaeological evidence suggests that around 2 million years ago, early hominids, the ancestors of modern humans, left the forests to live on the wooded edges of huge brackish lakes and estuaries in what is now Africa's Rift Valley. Prehistoric middens found in Kenya and Zaire are filled with shells and headless catfish skeletons, evidence that these proto-humans were taking full advantage of the easily gathered protein — and, incidentally, omega-3 fatty acids — at one of the world's first all-you-can-eat seafood buffets. Around the same time, hominid brains began to grow, swelling more than twofold from 650 grams in Homo habilis, the first tool-using hominid, to 1,490 grams in the early ancestors of Homo sapiens. "Anthropologists usually point to things such as the rise of language and tool making to explain the massive expansion of early hominid brains," says Cunnane. "But this is a catch-22. Something had to start the process of brain expansion, and I think it was early humans eating clams, frogs, bird eggs, and fish from shoreline environments."
[...]
Cunnane shows me a photo of an image carved into buff-colored sandstone. "This was found in a cave in France. It must have been one of the Sistine Chapels of the drawing world at the time." It is a highly naturalistic rendition of a salmon, down to gill flaps and hooked mandible. Evidence of early fish eating, jaw-dropping in its technical sophistication, the image is 22,000 years old. An interesting footnote to Cunnane's theory is that our seafood-eating Cro-Magnon ancestors, including the master sculptor responsible for this bas-relief, might well have been smarter than we are. Fossil evidence shows that the Cro-Magnons, though their bodies were smaller than those of Neanderthals, had brains about 200 grams heavier than modern humans'. Humanity's relatively recent creep away from seafood-rich shorelines, Cunnane believes, explains everything from the 20 percent of American women who are iron deficient to the dangling goiters of people living in mountainous regions. (If iodine hadn't been added to table salt 80 years ago, cretinism, a deficiency typified by severely stunted mental growth, would be endemic in most developed countries.)
Until the American Revolution, 98 percent of the population lived along rivers and oceans. Leaving the coasts might be a slow-motion public-health disaster. Deficiencies of DHA and the brain-selective minerals abundant on shorelines, speculates Cunnane, affect the performance of the modern human brain and, uncorrected, might eventually cause brains to shrink.
[...]
Colin Barrow, PhD, Ocean Nutrition's vice president of research and development, has any number of ways of getting omega-3s into his diet. He could, he points out, spread specially formulated Becel margarine onto DHA- and EPA-spiked Wonder Bread and wash it down with omega-3 supplemented Danone liquid yogurt. Instead, he prefers to take his omega-3s neat: He stirs a tablespoon of pure powdered fish oil into his morning juice.
A tall, soft-spoken New Zealander with a ginger beard and a long-toothed smile, Barrow has used the expertise gained from a PhD in chemistry and marine natural products to develop the process that allowed Ocean Nutrition to reintroduce omega-3s into packaged foods.
"The process is called microencapsulation," says Barrow, "and it was originally used for delivering ink in the cartridges of ink-jet printers." If you increased the size of a grain of Ocean Nutrition's microencapsulated powder to that of a basketball, it would be filled with Ping-Pong-ball-size agglomerations of oil encased in gelatin. Each particle is like a microscopic fish-oil capsule, allowing the powder to be added to food without changing the food's taste. Without a protective coating to prevent oxidation, the omega-3 in a glass of orange juice would stink like a sardine tin left out in the sun. Ocean Nutrition has taken any hint of fishiness out of fish oil — an essential move in the notoriously seafood-averse North American market.
The source of Ocean Nutrition's meticulously deodorized oil is, ultimately, a fish. Namely, Engraulis ringens, the Peruvian anchoveta, a small schooling species that lives in the relatively unpolluted waters off the west coast of South America. The process starts when fishing boats encircle the vast schools with purse-seine nets and bring the catch back to barges. Under the close supervision of rabbis, who are there to ensure that no squid, shellfish, or other nonkosher species remain in the nets, billions of fish are sucked through a pipe to onshore processing plants. There, the anchoveta are heated to 85 degrees Celsius, ground with an auger, and pulverized with a hydraulic screw to extract the oil. The oil is then distilled and filtered through clay to eliminate all traces of mercury, dioxins, and other persistent organic pollutants, those nasty toxins that can cause developmental and long-term neurological problems in consumers of tuna and farmed salmon. Transported by container ship through the Panama Canal, the oil arrives in Nova Scotia, where it is further concentrated and refined. Some of the oil ends up on the shelves of Walmart, Walgreens, and other major retailers that package it in their house-brand capsules. The rest, in powdered form, goes to the likes of PepsiCo and Unilever, who mix it into packaged foods. Ocean Nutrition now supplies 60 percent of the North American fish-oil market.
For anybody concerned about the future of the oceans, Ocean Nutrition's sourcing policies are good news. With big predatory species such as tuna, sharks, and swordfish already fished to 10 percent of their former abundance, and marine ecologists predicting the collapse of most major fisheries by the year 2048, conservationists have expressed concern about what kind of impact the widespread use of omega-3 supplements could have on the world's remaining fish stocks. Fortunately, the Peruvian anchoveta fishery — one of the world's largest — is in no imminent danger of collapse.
"These fish have been harvested in a highly regulated way, in very pristine waters, for more than 50 years," says Ian Lucas, Ocean Nutrition's executive vice president of marketing, "and the biomass is actually expanding." Fish oil is an industrial by-product of the fish-meal industry, which supplies feed for livestock and farmed shrimp and salmon. "It's going to take a long, long time before the fish-oil industry actually causes more fishing to happen," says Lucas. But according to Daniel Pauly, PhD, a leading authority on the decline of the world's fisheries at the Fisheries Centre at Vancouver's University of British Columbia, stocks of Peruvian anchoveta can fluctuate wildly; there was a temporary collapse in the 1970s and again in the 1980s. To forestall future problems, Pauly believes the fishery needs to be even more strictly monitored and regulated than it is today.
As word spreads of omega-3's benefits, so does fish-oil consumption. Lucas says that the share of omega-3 fatty acids in the supplement market has been growing by 30 percent a year for the past five years. Though alternative sources of fish oils exist, some are clearly more ecologically questionable than Peruvian anchoveta. A Virginia-based company called Omega Protein nets a schooling fish called menhaden off the mid-Atlantic coast; its -menhaden-based fish oil may now be added to 29 different categories of food. The fishery has been criticized because menhaden is a keystone species in the food chain of the East Coast; the fish feed by filtering algae from the water, and, in their absence, microscopic plankton have proliferated, creating the harmful algae blooms and dead zones that plague places such as Chesapeake Bay.
Barrow escorts me into a lab and shows me a 10-liter glass fermentation tank bristling with hoses and filled with a cloudy, swirling, foam-topped liquid. In its search for alternative sources of omega-3s, Ocean Nutrition has gathered a DHA-rich alga from an undisclosed location in Canada. In the United States, a company called Martek has already patented its own DHA-producing alga called Crypthecodinium cohnii, which is grown in massive multistory tanks in South Carolina; much of the infant formula in North America is now supplemented with Martek's patented Life's DHA.
"The product is good," says Barrow, "but it's really expensive, and they can't get their microorganisms to produce EPA. Our organism is a really good producer; we can get it to express about 8 percent EPA." This may be the future of omega-3s: an essential nutrient grown in tanks, sparing the world's fish stocks from overharvesting.
[...]
And now, full disclosure: As part of the research for a book I was writing about the sustainability of seafood in our world's oceans, I have radically increased my intake of omega-3s over the past two years. I've been taking three fish-oil capsules a day (a combined total of 1,800 milligrams of DHA and EPA), and having at least four fish meals a week. Early on, I saw a marked change in my alertness and capacity for sustained attention. But it wasn't until I started diminishing the amount of omega-6s in my diet that I started to lose weight. In the past year, I've shed five pounds and reversed the first swellings of a nascent potbelly.
The goal is not to "nix the six" completely, as the writer of one diet book puts it; after all, omega-6s are essential to good health. But getting an adequate supply is hardly a challenge; they are omnipresent in our food, and we would all be better off if our diets were closer to the 1:1 omega-6 to omega-3 ratio of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
[...]
Omega-3s aren't a quick fix like Advil, or even, for that matter, Prozac, which takes several weeks to change brain chemistry. Omega-3s take at least three months to harness themselves into heart cells, for example. I can't be certain about improvements in my cardiovascular health, but since I started loading up on DHA and EPA, I feel as if I've upgraded my brain. My energy is high, and I feel strangely unflappable, like I've gained some kind of unbeatable equilibrium. My body feels different too, as though my fat and muscle have been redistributed to more useful places. Navigating among the omega-6-fattened hordes, I feel lean and swift, like a tuna darting among sea cows.
So, by all means, keep swallowing those omega-3 capsules. But here's an even better idea: Seek out grass-fed beef, free-range chickens and their eggs, the best olive oil, canola oil, and butter you can find, and lots of fish and shellfish, preferably small wild-caught species from clean waters. In other words, if you are looking for a guiding principle, keep it simple and eat like your ancestors ate.
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Chemicals in food packaging and shampoos may cause infertility.
I've held the belief for quite some time that the high spikes in cancer rates and other diseases is probably going to wind up being attributed to all of the bizarre preservatives and other synthetic chemicals put into foods and various products. Seems that one could add infertility to that list as well.Food packaging, shampoo, clothes, and other household products contain chemicals that may make it harder for some women to get pregnant, suggests the first study on the subject.
It's still too early to recommend that women who want to conceive try to avoid these products, said lead researcher Chunyuan Fei, a Ph.D. student in epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. But her results are concerning enough to warrant further work.
"This is quite a new topic and lots of things are unknown," Fei said. "Because these chemicals are widespread, I think it's important to conduct more study."
The chemicals Fei and colleagues looked at belong to a group called perfluorinated chemicals, or PFCs, which appear in a variety of common products, from upholstery to pesticides. In particular, the researchers focused on perfluorooctane sulfonate and perfluorooctanoate, which are respectively called PFOS and PFOA.
Studies have linked PFOS and PFOA to toxic effects in the livers, immune systems, and reproductive systems of animals. In people, Fei and colleagues previously found that women with many children had lower blood levels of PFOS and PFOA than did women with fewer children.
In turn, the scientists wondered if these chemicals might affect fertility. Eight percent of women in the United States have visited their doctors for infertility-related reasons, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
To investigate, the team collected blood and surveyed more than 1,200 newly pregnant women who are taking part in the Danish National Birth Cohort, a long-term health study. All of the women had become pregnant on purpose.
About 30 percent of women tried for more than six months before conceiving, results showed. Half of those tried for more than a year.
There was an equally big range in chemical levels in the women's blood — with more than 40 times more PFOA in some women than others and more than 16 times more PFOS from the lowest to highest concentrations.
For analysis, the researchers divided the women into groups of high and low chemical levels. Their calculations showed that women with the most PFOS in their blood were up to 134 percent more likely to have needed six months or more to get pregnant. Women with the most PFOA were up to 154 percent more likely to have trouble conceiving.
The findings are important, said epidemiologist David Savitz, because PFOS and PFOA are virtually impossible to avoid. We all have at least low levels of them in our bodies. Yet, they haven't been studied extensively.
"That leaves them in the 'Who knows what we'll find' category," said Savitz, director of the Disease Prevention and Public Health Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
But he's not ready to jump to conclusions until further research comes along to support or refute it.
"It's well done but it still kind of sits there more or less in isolation," he said, adding that many companies are in the process of phasing out PFOS and PFOA anyway. "I would certainly urge suspending judgment or making any sort of behavioral response other than staying tuned."
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New species of frogfish approved, has "human-like" features?
Well, it certainly is clumsy, that's for sure. And it does somewhat resemble a human face. Still, pretty cool looking, and it's "psychedelica" name is certainly warranted. Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the EconomyMost fish have eyes on the sides of their heads, but a scientist now has confirmed a new and elusive species of carnivorous frogfish with eyes that face forward, like ours. The creature also has a fleshy chin and cheeks, adding to its strange appearance.
The bizarre new species, Histiophryne psychedelica, made a brief splash a year ago when sport divers about 30 feet offshore of Ambon Island, Indonesia, photographed a shallow-water fish not seen before in 20 years of diving there.
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^ Frogfish video
Square-Enix coming to Steam.
I'm not sure exactly what this means, as Square-Enix hasn't exactly brought many titles to the PC. Maybe this means that more will be coming to the PC, though?Adding to their ever-expanding list of publishers, Valve today announced a deal with Square Enix to bring their PC games to download service Steam.
Beginning April 9, The Last Remnant will be available for purchase via Steam. After the action role-playing game hits the service Square will continue to add to its roster of games on Steam. Prices will be announced down the line.
"We are excited to offer the millions of Steam customers online access to Square Enix titles beginning with our major action RPG, THE LAST REMNANT," said John Yamamoto, president and chief executive officer of Square Enix Inc. and Square Enix Ltd. "Square Enix is committed to delivering the best quality titles to PC gamers and distribution on Steam is one of the many steps we are taking to increase accessibility for fans in North America and PAL territories."
"Square Enix is a fantastic addition to the Steam lineup," said Jason Holtman, director of business development at Valve. "We are thrilled that Square Enix chose to bring its diverse portfolio of titles to Steam and know that our customers will be ecstatic to hear this news."
Seriously Microsoft, just ditch Games For Windows Live and go with Steam already. It's inevitable.
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I couldn't agree with that last statement more. There is no need for Games For Windows Live. It took them forever to make it even slightly worthwhile, and even then it's still not very good. Paying for a Gold subscription was a joke at the very onset, and it took MS forever to realize that and reverse their decision. The only thing that I do like about GFWL is the interface. It's much more polished looking than Steam's interface, which is kind of baffling. I mean, all Steam needs is some people to get cracking on making some decent skins in Photoshop. It's not hard to do, and their current skins look like fucking Win98 shit. Other than that, Steam has GFWL so beat that it almost makes me want to call the cops. There is honestly nothing that GFWL delivers that Steam does not have. Honestly, MS, just give up the ghost and accept that Steam has you completely whipped.
I don't even drink coffee, but I'd go to this cafe.
Topless cafe? Sure, why not.
VASSALBORO, Maine — Cup size has more than one meaning at a new central Maine coffeehouse.
Servers are topless at the Grand View Topless Coffee Shop, which opened its doors Monday on a busy road in Vassalboro. A sign outside says, "Over 18 only." Another says, "No cameras, no touching, cash only."
On Tuesday, two men sipped coffee at a booth while three topless waitresses and a bare-chested waiter stood nearby. Topless waitress Susie Wiley said men, women and couples have stopped by.
The coffee shop raised the ire of dozens of residents when it went before the town planning board last month. Town officials said the coffee shop met the letter of the law.
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Take that you fucking puritan bastards!
Google throws in on EU Microsoft anti-trust suit.
Personally, I think this is massive bullshit. No one uses Opera because it fucking sucks. Seriously, it fucking sucks donkey balls. A lot of people use Internet Explorer because it's a robust browser. It's not as bad as many claim it is, but I personally don't use. I'm a big fan of Firefox. I tried Google's Chrome browser, and I found it very "meh." Sure, it's usable, but it's not quite as rich as Firefox 3. Safari, is okay, but I would never recommend it due to its lack of phishing filters. Maybe the upcoming Safari 4 will include phishing filters, but I'm not entirely sure. Besides, after dealing with the massive amount of bloat that iTunes is, I'm not sure I'm willing to give Apple much a chance on Windows apps.
I still don't really get what the fuss is about. How in the fucking hell does Google think they're instantly get massive market penetration when they roll out a mediocre browser that is already being hotly competed by Firefox and Internet Explorer? And Opera needs to shut the fuck up and sit down. They haven't been relevant since the days of Prodigy.Google Inc. has added its voice to the case against Microsoft Corp. as the European Commission probes antitrust charges related to the software giant's Internet Explorer browser.
"Google believes that the browser market is still largely uncompetitive, which holds back innovation for users," Sundar Pichai, Google vice president product manager, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.
Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) introduced the Chrome browser last year, which has taken little market share.
The Internet company joins the Mozilla foundation, producer of the Firefox Web browser, and Norway's Opera, a privately held company. Google adds the voice of a significant and well-financed player in the case against Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500).
In January, European regulators brought formal charges against Microsoft for abusing its dominant market position by bundling its Internet Explorer Web browser with its Windows operating system, which is used in 95% of the world's personal computers.
If the preliminary views expressed in the EC's Statement of Objections are confirmed, Microsoft could be subject to a fine and an order requiring it to cease bundling its browser and operating system.
In 2007, European Union courts upheld the European Commission's finding that Microsoft violated antitrust law by bundling its Windows Media player with the Windows operating system. It also found Microsoft used illegal tactics against RealNetworks (RNWK) real player.
The company has been fined more than $2 billion for its violations and for failing to carry out remedies imposed by the Commission.
In 2000, a U.S. judge decided that Microsoft had broken the law after it combined its Internet Explorer browser and the Windows operating system.
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So, can someone tell me why Apple isn't getting in hot shit? They don't bundle any non-Apple apps with their OS, just like MS doesn't bundle any non-MS apps with theirs. And if MS were to bundle non-MS apps, you would just hear more people whine and complain that installation takes too long, there's too many menus, it's too complicated, too bloated, etc, etc.
Again, if we're going to be fair about this, if MS is to be forced to include 3rd party apps with their OS install, so should Apple.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Hang 'em high and stuff their throats with asbestos.
I've made my pro-death stance clear. And y'know, after watching Bill Maher's New Rules segment last weekend, I can't help but agree with him again.
In China, if the heads of this company were caught, they would be put to death. And they should be. Poisoning and killing hundreds and sickening thousands? How in the fuck are they only getting 15 years?A federal prosecutor told jurors Monday that a chemical company knew for years that its mining operation in a small Montana town exposed residents to asbestos, but it hid the risks from workers and government regulators.
W.R. Grace & Co. "and individual executives chose profits at the expense of people's health and chose avoiding liability over disclosing health hazards to the government," prosecutor Kris McLean told a U.S. District Court jury in Missoula in an opening statement.
Grace and five retired executives are charged with violating the federal Clean Air Act and obstructing an EPA investigation into the asbestos contamination. All face up to 15 years in prison and fines totaling millions of dollars.
The company mined vermiculite in the northwestern Montana town of Libby, but the mine was contaminated with naturally occurring asbestos mineral fibers, which can be inhaled and can cause mesothelioma, asbestosis and lung cancer.
Lawyers for area residents contend asbestos exposure killed more than 200 people and sickened some 2,000.
McLean said the company did its own research and learned that even low levels of asbestos in the vermiculite became dangerous when disturbed. Even so, Grace donated dangerous mine waste to Libby schools for use in building tracks for runners, he said.
"They endangered the health of hundreds, if not thousands," McLean told jurors. "This case is about holding this company and these executives accountable for very serious wrongs."
The legal issue is whether Grace, which bought the mine in 1963, and its co-defendants knew of the health risks associated with the mine for years before federal regulators arrived. The government contends the company and some of its managers conspired to hide health risks from its workers.
Lawyers for Grace, based in Columbia, Md., deny there was any conspiracy to knowingly release asbestos, and also contend that most of the releases occurred years before an applicable law was passed in 1990.
Grace lawyers were to give the jury opening statements later Monday.
After news reports of health problems, the Environmental Protection Agency in 1999 sent an emergency team to Libby to collect information about asbestos contamination, and the town was declared a Superfund cleanup site in 2002.
McLean said Libby suffers 40 to 80 times the national average in its rate of death from asbestosis, and lung-cancer mortality is 30 percent higher than health officials would expect the town to experience.
The trial is expected to last several months.
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^ Bill Maher's New Rules: "Death to Moochy"
Deep sea fish are crazy looking.
I love deep sea fish. Sure, some look hella creepy, like the anglerfish (which gave me nightmares as a kid), but some are little more harmless looking. However, just because they don't have massive spikey teeth and such doesn't mean they're any less weird.A bizarre deep-water fish called the barreleye has a transparent head and tubular eyes. Since the fish's discovery in 1939, biologists have known the eyes were very good at collecting light. But their shape seemed to leave the fish with tunnel vision.
Now scientists say the eyes rotate, allowing the barreleye to see directly forward or look upward through its transparent head .
The barreleye (Macropinna microstoma) is adapted for life in a pitch-black environment of the deep sea , where sunlight does not reach. They use their ultra-sensitive tubular eyes to search for the faint silhouettes of prey overhead.
Scientists had thought the eyes were fixed in an upward gaze, however. This would make it impossible for the fish to see what was directly in front of them, and very difficult for them to capture prey with their small, pointed mouths.
Bruce Robison and Kim Reisenbichler of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute use videos from the institute's remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to study barreleyes off Central California. At depths of 2,000 to 2,600 feet (600 to 800 meters), the ROV cameras typically showed these fish hanging motionless in the water, their eyes glowing a vivid green in the ROV's bright lights. The video also revealed a previously undescribed feature of these fish — its eyes are surrounded by a transparent, fluid-filled shield that covers the top of the fish's head.
Most existing descriptions and illustrations of this fish do not show its fluid-filled shield, probably because this fragile structure was destroyed when the fish were brought up from the deep in nets.
Robison and Reisenbichler were fortunate to bring a net-caught barreleye to the surface alive. Over several hours in an aquarium on the ship, they were able to confirm that the fish rotated its tubular eyes as it turned its body from a horizontal to a vertical position.
Barreleyes are thought to eat small fishes and jellyfish. The green pigments in their eyes may filter out sunlight coming directly from the sea surface, helping the barreleye spot the bioluminescent glow of jellies or other animals directly overhead. When it spots prey (such as a drifting jelly), a barreleye rotates its eyes forward and swims upward, in feeding mode.
The findings were detailed recently in the journal Copeia.
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Boy with the cat eyes.
This is just weird.
A Chinese boy who has eyes that glow in the dark has stunned doctors with his ability to see and read in complete darkness.
Doctors have studied Nong Youhui’s eyesight ever since his father took him to a hospital in Dahua, which is located in southern China.
Tests conducted in complete darkness concluded Nong can read perfectly without any light and can see as clearly as most people do during the daytime.
Experts believe the boy was born with a rare condition called leukordermia, which has left his eyes with less protective pigment and made them more sensitive to light.
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nothing after the jump
more...
Why scientists don't care to debate "Intelligent Design."
In a bit of intellectual smacktalk, Nicholas Gotelli, a Biology professor at University of Vermont, delivered a scathing rebuttal to a request for him to debate at the Discovery Institute. The DI is a conservative think tank (and I use the term "think" very liberally here) that is ardently seeking to institute creationism into the science curriculum of public schools. Gotelli explains why he, and many others in the scientific community, have no interest in such a public fiasco. Dear Professor Gotelli,
I saw your op-ed in the Burlington Free Press and appreciated your support of free speech at UVM. In light of that, I wonder if you would be open to finding a way to provide a campus forum for a debate about evolutionary science and intelligent design. The Discovery Institute, where I work, has a local sponsor in Burlington who is enthusiastic to find a way to make this happen. But we need a partner on campus. If not the biology department, then perhaps you can suggest an alternative.
Ben Stein may not be the best person to single-handedly represent the ID side. As you're aware, he's known mainly as an entertainer. A more appropriate alternative or addition might be our senior fellows David Berlinski or Stephen Meyer, respectively a mathematician and a philosopher of science. I'll copy links to their bios below. Wherever one comes down in the Darwin debate, I think we can all agree that it is healthy for students to be exposed to different views--in precisely the spirit of inviting controversial speakers to campus, as you write in your op-ed.
I'm hoping that you would be willing to give a critique of ID at such an event, and participate in the debate in whatever role you feel comfortable with.
A good scientific backdrop to the discussion might be Dr. Meyer's book that comes out in June from HarperCollins, "Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design."
On the other hand, Dr. Belinski may be a good choice since he is a critic of both ID and Darwinian theory.
Would it be possible for us to talk more about this by phone sometime soon?
With best wishes,
David Klinghoffer
Discovery Institute
Dear Dr. Klinghoffer:
Thank you for this interesting and courteous invitation to set up a debate about evolution and creationism (which includes its more recent relabeling as "intelligent design") with a speaker from the Discovery Institute. Your invitation is quite surprising, given the sneering coverage of my recent newspaper editorial that you yourself posted on the Discovery Institute's website:
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/02/
However, this kind of two-faced dishonesty is what the scientific community has come to expect from the creationists.
Academic debate on controversial topics is fine, but those topics need to have a basis in reality. I would not invite a creationist to a debate on campus for the same reason that I would not invite an alchemist, a flat-earther, an astrologer, a psychic, or a Holocaust revisionist. These ideas have no scientific support, and that is why they have all been discarded by credible scholars. Creationism is in the same category.
Instead of spending time on public debates, why aren't members of your institute publishing their ideas in prominent peer-reviewed journals such as Science, Nature, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences? If you want to be taken seriously by scientists and scholars, this is where you need to publish. Academic publishing is an intellectual free market, where ideas that have credible empirical support are carefully and thoroughly explored. Nothing could possibly be more exciting and electrifying to biology than scientific disproof of evolutionary theory or scientific proof of the existence of a god. That would be Nobel Prize winning work, and it would be eagerly published by any of the prominent mainstream journals.
"Conspiracy" is the predictable response by Ben Stein and the frustrated creationists. But conspiracy theories are a joke, because science places a high premium on intellectual honesty and on new empirical studies that overturn previously established principles. Creationism doesn't live up to these standards, so its proponents are relegated to the sidelines, publishing in books, blogs, websites, and obscure journals that don't maintain scientific standards.
Finally, isn't it sort of pathetic that your large, well-funded institute must scrape around, panhandling for a seminar invitation at a little university in northern New England? Practicing scientists receive frequent invitations to speak in science departments around the world, often on controversial and novel topics. If creationists actually published some legitimate science, they would receive such invitations as well.
So, I hope you understand why I am declining your offer. I will wait patiently to read about the work of creationists in the pages of Nature and Science. But until it appears there, it isn't science and doesn't merit an invitation.
In closing, I do want to thank you sincerely for this invitation and for your posting on the Discovery Institute Website. As an evolutionary biologist, I can't tell you what a badge of honor this is. My colleagues will be envious.
Sincerely yours,
Nick Gotelli
P.S. I hope you will forgive me if I do not respond to any further e-mails from you or from the Discovery Institute. This has been entertaining, but it interferes with my research and teaching.
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Matt Hazard: worthy of a comeback?
If you haven't heard of Matt Hazard yet, then shame on you! Matt Hazard has a been a hilarious romp of fictitious parodies as the press releases have been slowly romping up for the launch of Eat Lead: The Rise and Fall of Matt Hazard. The "Unofficial" webpage for Matt Hazard is hilariously low-tech, reminiscent of how nearly every webpage looked back in late 90s. Once you begin looking at the boxart for Hazard's previous works, the nostalgia begins setting in. At least, it should. The Doom parody, Mario Kart, Duke Nukem 3D... Even if the nostalgia factor isn't enough to draw people in, the announcement that Matt Hazard will be voiced by Will Arnett from Arrested Development and the villain will be voiced by none other than Neil fucking Patrick motherfucking Harris should be able to win a few people over.
If you haven't heard anything about the game, I suggest you hit the jump and check some of the vids to get yourself acquainted. Eat Lead: The Rise and Fall of Matt Hazard comes out March 3rd.
^ Early gameplay footage. Is that a Wolf3D level and Nazi guards? Yes. Yes, it is. :)
^ Behind The Games trailer.
Making sure to keep with the entire cheeky experience, even the achievements are hilarious.I'm still not entirely sold on the Eat Lead (as I haven't really seen it running), but there's a humor to the game's achievements that I can certainly appreciate. Xbox360Achievements has posted up a list, and here are a few that jumped out at me...
It's worth noting that aside from a secret 100 point achievement, that 60 pointer for the credits is the highest-scoring achievement in the game. That's pretty good. It'd be really funny, though, if that achievement was practically impossible to get. Like, maybe the credits are six hours long. Or maybe there's some stupid-hard gameplay associated with the credits. I'd be way into that.
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I am somewhat disappointed that this isn't coming to the PC, especially considering that many of the parodied games are PC-centric titles. It is coming out on the 360 and PS3, so owners of the 2 "hardcore" consoles can get a taste of Matt Hazard. Maybe the PC will eventually get a port, but I suppose that's mainly going to rely on whether the console versions sell at all. While we'll have to wait to see if the game is actually any good, it contains enough goofy elements and nostalgia moments that it seems at least worth a rental.
Andrew Sullivan on Mo Hassan and honor killings.
Andrew Sullivan hit the nail on the head. While many are trying to say that Hassan's beheading of his wife, while atrocious, was not an honor killing or had nothing to do with Islam, I and several others disagree. I see Andrew Sullivan, writer for The Atlantic, agrees on this matter.
Reading Sullivan's blog post on the matter, seems he has dug up some additional dirt about Hassan's hard-lined Islamic views against women.The founder of a television station dedicated to showing how Islam is a religion of peace reacts to his wife's decision to divorce him by beheading her, and calling the cops to inform them. I learned of the case for the first time on Bill Maher, which means the MSM must have been doing a very good job suppressing it. Now the AP has provided a basic story of reaction; and the NYT's blog has a useful piece. It may be an honor killing, reacting to the disgrace of being divorced; but it's more likely just one last atrocity by a man who has terrorized every woman he has lived with:
Asma Firfirey, the sister of the deceased, stated Aasiya suffered last year from injuries that required nearly $3,000 of medical bills – allegedly the result of spousal abuse.
According to Zerqa Abid, first cousin of Hassan's first wife, "Both of his earlier wives filed divorce on the same grounds of severe domestic violence and abuses … it took [my cousin] several years to get rid of the fear of living with a man in marriage."
Attempts to deny any connection between this kind of behavior and the brutal misogyny of much Islamic culture seem bizarre to me. Obviously, the abuse of women is no community's or religion's exclusive sin. Chris Brown, anyone? My own church maintains a completely irrational and blanket discrimination against women in the priesthood. But the cultural and religious norms that facilitate brutal and often violent patriarchy in Islam make it easier for men to abuse and harder for women to resist. And the woman was beheaded. Moreover, the man had the usual misogyny widely accepted in many Muslim countries:Nancy Sanders, the television station's news director for 2 1/2 years, remembers him asking her to move her feet during her job interview so he would not see her legs. She was wearing a skirt and stockings. He also would not let women enter his office unless his wife was there, and he blocked the station from airing a story about the first Muslim woman to win the title of Miss England in 2005, Sanders said.
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Sunday, February 22, 2009
Bioshock-esque case mod is huge! And awesome!
Apparently this thing is over 8 feet tall. That's a bit bigger than I'd want to ever have my computer case be, but if I was running a server rack I'd totally case it in this thing. It looks like something out of Bioshock with its abundant use of copper coils and old-timey gauges. And if all that by itself isn't cool enough, it has a bunch of green LEDs to glow in the dark!
Despite being a bit impractical due to its huge size, this case mod is still abso-freaking-lutely amazing.
Pics after the jump.
Great. So the terrorists have submarines now?
According to Jane's Defence, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam had small submersibles. Looking at the picture, it is obviously home-made and low tech, but still.A construction facility containing four underwater vehicles has been discovered by the Sri Lanka Army following the capture of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's (LTTE's) final urban stronghold of Mullaittivu on 28 January.
An armour-plated submersible, measuring about 35 ft (10.7 m) in length, and three smaller vessels were found at an LTTE base in Udayarkattukulam.
The smaller craft were "pedal-type suicide boats", according to the Sri Lanka Media Centre of National Security (MCNS). It is unclear whether the submersibles were used in operations. The Sri Lanka Navy lost two vessels to underwater explosions in 2008.
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Fixin' the glory days.
The good old days of the NES. Remember 'em? Sure you do! Curled up, playing away at Super Mario Bros. Those were the times. Remember the almost OCD-like rituals people would go through to get their NES games to work? Everyone had a different technique, but nearly every single one of them involved huffing a pressurized stream of air into the cartridges and/or the console. Sometimes it would work. If it didn't... well, you'd just keep on doing it until it eventually did work. Another popular technique was to rapidly push the cart caddy up and and down and then power it back up.
None of these little tricks actually ever fixed the real root cause of the flashing red light of despair, though. Often, people would think that it was dust inside the NES that was causing all of these problems. That is rarely ever the case.
The real culprit? There's a 72-pin connector inside the NES. This connector has loose, springy pins in it that make contact with the cartridges chipboard. You might remember how, when you first got your NES, the games would almost snap in there. A few years later, after heavy use, the games would loosely slide in and out with ease. That is the problem.
After a while, these pins would become depressed. No, not "sad" depressed, but bent down. These pins relied on having a bit of spring in them so that they would make a proper connection with the contacts on the cartridge chipboard. Over time, much like any kind of spring, these pins would get pushed down so often that they would lose their proper position and would no longer make solid connections with the cart contacts.
Now, there's a few solutions to this.
I'm not going to give you a rundown on how to do the final two solutions, as there is already a very well done video that can guide you through the whole process. If you have ever put RAM into your computer or even built an entire computer, then you'll be right at home. Even if you haven't done either of those, replacing the 72-pin connector is really easy to do. You just have to remove some screws, pop off the pin connector, pop on the new one, and then put the case back together. Just watch the below vid and you'll see.
^ Macrogeek tells you how to repair and replace the 72-pin connector and how to clean your carts!
One of the things you might encounter while putting your NES back together is accidentally locking the caddy. What I mean is, the caddy that slides up and down will either get locked in the up position and not lock in place when pushed down, or it will be locked down and will not slide up. This is because you have tightened the screws too tight. The screws you need to look for if this happens to you are the two front screws of the caddy where you insert the cartridge. See the pic below if you're confused as to which screws I'm referring to.
^ click for full scale image ^
If you wanted to get your NES back in action but kept getting the dreaded flashing red power button, hopefully this will help you solve your problem and get you back to enjoying some of those games of yore. Keep in mind that lifting the pins on the connector will only go but so far. Eventually they will get bent back down again, and will eventually just wear out altogether. When that happens, you'll have to get a replacement. However, in most cases the only problem is the pins being bent down from prolonged use. To help keep your system healthy and keep grime from building up on the connectors, I highly recommend you clean your games before playing them. I also recommend storing them inside those little black sleeves. These can be bought at places like the aforementioned Nintendo Repair Shop.
If you're looking to buy some old NES games, JJGames is a great place to order from. They have cheap prices, their games list tells you the condition, whether it has rental stickers on it, and if it includes the box and/or manual. Shipping is free if you order $25 or more worth of games, which is a nice bargain. They are kind of small, so their selection isn't as big as some of the others out there. If you're looking for a bigger selection, Videogame Central has a great stock of titles as does 8-Track Shack. My only personal experience is with JJGames, so I can't attest to the other mentioned two. However, they do have great ratings on Google Shopping. They are also highly regarded and came recommended to me by many retro gamers. Just remember, don't take their word that the carts are clean. Go ahead and clean it yourself before playing just to make sure. It only takes a second, is easy to do, and it'll help keep you from wondering what's wrong with your system.
More Penny Arcade D&D. Now with Wil Wheaton!
Penny Arcade did a D&D podcast a while back and they're back at it again. Gabe, Tycho, and Scott Kurtz (of PvP) are joined this time by Wil Wheaton. Y'know, Stand By Me and stuff.
Anyways, Part 1 is up.
nothing after the jump
Saturday, February 21, 2009
If you believe in the death penalty, then you should be forced to see this.
Personally, I do believe in the death penalty. I'm also for abortion rights. I'm pro doctor-assisted suicide. I borrow Bill Maher's joke on the matter, as he holds the same views, saying I'm essentially "pro death." The difference between being "pro death" and pro-war, you're either killing yourself or being killed directly because of your own actions. With war, it's innocent men and women dying for the sins of others. Although, one could argue that non are without sin, but I don't believe in original sin and only use the word "sin" loosely as synonymous with mean-spirited or evil ways. Actual biblical sin is a different. But I digress.
Often, many who support the death penalty are actually quite squeamish about death. They like the idea of being "tough on crime", but fold under the reality of just how damn depressing it is to someone afraid to die being forced to. A good example is a recent execution in Virginia.An inmate declared his innocence Thursday after he was forcibly carried into Virginia's death chamber, where he was executed for gunning down a police officer.
Edward Nathaniel Bell, who was convicted of killing the officer during a foot chase a decade ago, was pronounced dead at 9:11 p.m. Thursday at the Greensville Correctional Center.
When the door between Bell's cell and the death chamber opened, the inmate thrust his hips backward and wouldn't step toward to the gurney where the lethal injection was administered. Six stocky corrections officers pulled him through the doorway and lifted him onto the gurney.
"To the Timbrook family, you definitely have the wrong person," Bell said in the death chamber, addressing the victim's family. "The truth will come out one day. This here, killing me, there's no justice about it."
Bell's lawyer, who also witnessed the execution, said a sedative the inmate was given made it difficult for him to walk.
"Eddie's case is an example of how the system does not catch and correct errors," said attorney James G. Connell III.
Bell, 43, was condemned for shooting Winchester police Sgt. Ricky Timbrook as the officer chased him down a dark alley on Oct. 29, 1999. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine denied Bell's request for clemency earlier Thursday.
At least 10 current and former Winchester police officers witnessed the execution, including Winchester Sheriff Lenny Millholland.
"I can't say it's closure but it's another chapter in the life of Ricky Timbrook and it ends the chapter that included Eddy Bell," said the sheriff, who was on the police force in 1999 and investigated Timbrook's death.
Bell maintained that he did not shoot Timbrook, a 32-year-old popular police officer, SWAT Team Member and DARE instructor. Prosecutors, however, say Bell was a flashy drug dealer who held a grudge against Timbrook for arresting him two years earlier for possessing a concealed weapon.
Bell initially was scheduled to be executed last year, but Kaine pushed that back while the U.S. Supreme Court considered a Kentucky case challenging the constitutionality of lethal injections. The court upheld the method in April.
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Jazz cat, Socks, dead at 18.
We bow our heads to remember the Presidential feline, Socks. Socks died at the ripe old age of 18. His exact cause of death is unknown, but he had been battling cancer for a little over a year.Socks, the White House cat during the Clinton administration who waged war on Buddy the pup, has died. He was around 18.
Socks had lived with Bill Clinton's secretary, Betty Currie, in Hollywood, Md., since the Clintons left the White House in early 2001.
Currie confirmed Socks' death Friday evening and said she was "heartbroken." She did not give details, referring calls to the Clinton Foundation office.
The foundation released a statement from the Clintons:
"Socks brought much happiness to Chelsea and us over the years, and enjoyment to kids and cat lovers everywhere. We're grateful for those memories, and we especially want to thank our good friend, Betty Currie, for taking such loving care of Socks for so many years."
Socks had reached his late teens -- an advanced age for a cat -- when reports surfaced in late 2008 that he had cancer and Currie had ruled out invasive efforts to prolong his life.
"It's not a happy prognosis," presidential historian Barry Landau, a friend of Currie's, said at the time.
Socks was what feline-lovers call a tuxedo cat -- mostly black with white down the front and belly and on his feet, suggesting a fashionable dandy in a black satin evening jacket with a snowy shirt peeping out. He had markings that looked a bit like a mustache and goatee.
Chelsea Clinton's pet first appeared in the news in November 1992 after then-Gov. Bill Clinton won the presidency and the family was the still in the governor's mansion in Little Rock, Ark. Socks became an early symbol of privacy-vs.-media in the Clinton era when photographers got a little aggressive as he took a stroll outside.
Life changed for Socks in the White House, when his easy access to the out-of-doors was necessarily curtailed. One official conceded that, yes, Socks was on a leash while outside.
Things took a turn for the worse in late 1997, when then-puppy Buddy, a chocolate retriever, arrived. Relations between Socks and Buddy were cool from the beginning.
"I'm trying to work that out," Clinton joked at the time. "It's going to take a while. It's kind of like peace in Ireland or the Middle East."
A few weeks later, in early 1998, the two pets had an encounter on the South Lawn. "A very agitated Buddy approached the cat and began barking as the president restrained him with a green leash," The Associated Press reported. "Socks, hair raised high, stood his ground until Clinton and Buddy made their exit to the Oval Office."
But their pairing enchanted pet lovers, especially children. In 1998, then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton put out a book of children's letters to the two pets in "Dear Socks, Dear Buddy."
"Can you please send me a picture and a paw print," one youngster wrote Socks. "Do you have fleas? I think my cat has fleas."
In the book, the first lady wrote she had been taking daughter Chelsea to a piano lesson in spring 1991 when they spotted two kittens in the music teacher's front yard. "The black one with white paws -- Socks -- jumped right into (Chelsea's) arms," she wrote.
After the Clintons left in early 2001, Socks moved in with Currie. Buddy, meanwhile, made the move with the Clintons to Chappaqua, N.Y., but he was struck and killed by a car the following year.
Socks continued to live quietly with Currie, sometimes making appearances at programs held by pet welfare groups. Landau said Socks enjoyed sitting in the sun and that Currie doted on him, cooking him special chicken dinners.
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Y'know, oddly, I remember Clinton getting a lot of flack from cat-lovers when he gave Sock to Currie. I didn't know Buddy was struck and killed by a car, but, in hindsight, maybe it was a good thing that the Clintons gave socks to Currie. I mean, he did get to have some delicious home-cooked chicken dinners. As a cat, who can beat that!?
Suicide: You're doing it wrong.
That has to suck. Life's a bitch and so you decide to off yourself. In the end, you're such a fuck-up that you can't even do that right. What's even worse is when these people fuck up and manage to not only not kill themselves, but accidentally kill someone else. So is the case for a New Brunswick, NJ man who wound up killing a father of three.A man who allegedly tried to commit suicide last year by plowing his car into another vehicle — killing the other driver — has been indicted on murder charges.
Steven Osadacz of Spotswood, who survived the crash, also was charged Friday with causing death by auto in the Nov. 10 crash in East Brunswick that killed 46-year-old Stephen Fagbewesa of Old Bridge.
Authorities have said Fagbewesa — a married father of three young children — was stopped at a three-way intersection when Osadacz's sport utility vehicle hit the driver's side of his car. They also say Osadacz — driving on a suspended license — had been drinking and was speeding.
Osadacz remains jailed $1 million bail. It wasn't known if he has retained a lawyer.
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Way to go, moron. If you're going to kill yourself, buy a fucking gun. You can get them at Wal Mart. Can't afford that, then jump off a tall building. Can't stand heights, then take a bunch of pills.
Trying to kill yourself by crashing your car into something has to be dumbest fucking way possible to kill yourself. Maybe I need to do what Tender Branson did in Palahniuk's Survivor did and put up suicide prevention stickers with my number on it.Tonight, a girl calls me from inside a pounding dance club. Her only words I can make out are "behind."
She says, "asshole."
She says what could be "muffin" or "nothing." The fact of the matter is you can't begin to fill in the blanks so I'm in the kitchen, alone and yelling to be heard over the dance mix wherever. She sounds young and worn out, so I ask if she'll trust me. Is she tired of hurting? I ask if there's only one way to end her pain, will she do it?
My goldfish is swimming around all excited inside the fishbowl on the fridge so I reach up and drop a Valium in its water.
I'm yelling at this girl: has she had enough?
I'm yelling: I'm not going to stand here and listen to her complain.
To stand here and try to fix her life is just a big waste of time. People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
Most people who call me already know what they want. Some want to die but are just looking for my permission. Some want to die and just need a little encouragement. A little push. Someone bent on suicide won't have much sense of humor left. One wrong word, and they're an obituary the next week. Most of the calls I get, I'm only half listening anyway. Most of the people, I decide who lives and who dies just by the tone of their voice.
This is getting nowhere with the girl at the dance club so I tell her, Kill yourself.
She's saying, "What?"
Kill yourself.
She's saying, "What?"
Try barbiturates and alcohol with your head inside a dry cleaning bag.
She says, "What?"
You cannot bread a veal cutlet and do a good job with only one hand so I tell her, now or never. Pull the trigger or don't. I'm with her right now. She's not going to die alone, but I don't have all night.
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Gabe Newell's DICE keynote address.
Ah Gabe Newell. Smart man. I'm not a 100% fan of Valve, I never really liked Half Life all that much and didn't really care that much for Half Life 2 either. I do like Steam, though. It's a great service, definitely the best Digital Distribution Service (DDS) out there, and it's wonderful feature list just keeps expanding. (a web browser while playing games? oh hell yeah!) I also highly applaud Valve's long-term patching and free DLC support for their games like Team Fortress 2.
Back to the topic on hand, Gabe Newell was scheduled to give a keynote address at this year's Design Innovate Communicate Entertain (DICE) conference in Las Vegas. The address was entitled, "Entertainment as a Service" and dealt with a lot of great elements regarding piracy, which has been a very big issue with the widespread availability of high-speed internet access.
Keep in mind this was done by G4 as a moment-by-moment posting, so that's why it may seem kind of odd and unprofessional.Gabe beileves the old way of entertainment: Indirect customer relationships, product orientation. The new way of entertainment now: Direct customer relationships, service orientation. Valve aims to touch its customers in some way every three weeks, not every three years when a new game is shipped.
Through this perspective, Gabe and Valve have observed the following:
Gabe doesn't believe that pirates are really seeking to get things for free. They are people that spend thousands on their PC's and Internet service. He believes that pirates are beating companies on service. He cites TV shows not available in certain parts of the world. Pirates have TV shows up on the Web minutes after they have aired.
DRM decreases service value for customers. It also makes pirated copies of games look more appealing. Anecdotal evidence appears to suggest that DRM is increasing and not decreasing piracy.
As far as privacy goes, Gabe believes that people are willing to give up system and personal information if they feel it's being used to get a better service. Steam's hardware survey is an example of this. Rather than spying on users for nefarious reasons, Gabe believes things like its hardware survey helps with better sales of products and service. As long as companies are transparent, he feels that customers will accept this.
As far as the shrinking distance between Valve and its customers, Valve didn't find any service in existence so it made its own: Steam.
Steam stats time:
There are competitors, but they are all trying to do the same thing. These include services like Games for Windows Live, Direct2Drive, iPhone App Store, Stardock Impulse. Gabe was very modest , not mentioning that Steam is wildly more successful than any of the other services. But that's why he's giving the keynote. No need to brag.
From a customer's perspective, they want things like portability of content and files, anti-cheating, auto-updating & version control, new games, old games, indie games, 24/7 availability, and community tools. Yep, Steam has all of those. I still think the groups need an upgrade, but they are definitely functional enough to get the job done.
From a business perspective, developers and publishers want piracy protection, keeping customers current with the latest version, direct communication to customers for marketing and promotion, instant sales and promotional performance data, and being able to take advantage of new business models like DLC, subscriptions, and micro-transactions.
With Team Fortress 2, Valve shipped the game as a service and not a product. Valve uses "updates" to create more value for its customers. Updates can be bug fixes, new achievements, maps, and unlocks. There have been 63 updates to Team Fortress 2 since its release. This is also why the PC version is so much better than the Xbox 360 version.
Gabe now speaks about how important Web content creators and blog writers are for the future of games. It brings a tear to my eye! They'll be able to help market products with authority and knowledge.
Gabe brings up an excellent point that successful entertainment companies will realize that fans of properties like the property, not the specific product. They are Harry Potter fans, not just fans of the books. The team that's making the TF2 character videos (which are awesome!) are going to be working on comics.
He's now going showing the Sniper short film. Yay, I get to laugh all over again!
"It works because the people that built that [video] are the same people that built the game."
Valve has been using its existing customers to gain new customers. "There's no way to go into Circuit City to pick on the dead" and get a free weekend. Ouch, Gabe. Ouch.
Valve has seen a great turnaround rate on guest passes. Friends invite their friends to play a game they already own. Game invites that also walk a gamer through a purchase process are also effective.
Time to look at the sales of Team Fortress 2 to see the impact of the updates on revenue. Holy s#!%. The sales spike by huge amounts everytime there's a sale or major update. Steam sales went up 106% after a free update. Player minutes went up by 105%. Gifting has thrown a 71% sales increase. Surprisingly, sales from retail stores also went up by 28%. Finally, it saw 75% increase in new users. Knock knock. Who's there? Steam. Steam who? Steam is so successful it hurts.
Price changes in the retail world don't allow for much freedom. Steam and other services offer flexability. In fact, users apparently respond to pricing discounts within five minutes.
Valve was afraid that too many price changes would "confuse and anger" customers. It isn't the case.
Last weekend, Valve decided to do an experiment with Left 4 Dead. Last weekend's sale resulted in a 3000% increase over relatively flat numbers. It sold more last weekend than when it launched the game. WOW. That is unheard of in this industry. Valve beat its launch sales. Also, it snagged a 1600% increase in new customers to Steam over the baseline.
Worried retailers, fear not. The weekend sale didn't canabalize sales from retail. In fact, they remained constant. Well, constant isn't a 3000% increase, but it's still pretty good, right?
Looking at a third-party game, it saw increases of 36,000% with a weekend sale. Oh. Em. Gee. Okay, Gabe is starting to convince me that PC at retail is going to die very soon.
Oh, more data. I'm such a data nerd. Here's some data!
During the Holiday sales:
At 75% off, they are making 15% more money than they were at full price.
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Quake Live open beta coming soon.
How soon? Real soon. Like, Feb 24th soon.
In case you don't know, Quake Live is basically just Quake 3: Arena that runs in a browser. Well, sort of. You have to download the client, and it uses your browser as an interface to launch the matches. Since it's basically just Quake 3, it should be able to run great on just about any machine, even some of the old clunkers out there. Still, you may want to check the specs just to make sure.
I've been in the closed beta for a few weeks now, and it's pretty fun. It's weird because I keep having flashbacks to old Quake 3 maps. While the maps for Quake Live are similar, they are also slightly different. The jump pads look different and the layouts are tweaked a bit. Overall, though, it plays just like good old Quake 3.
Quake Live is completely free and the open beta is just what it means. A beta that is open to the public. Servers that I saw were available in Virginia, Washington state, Texas, New York, Chicago, and California. Which is good, because it means that you'll be able to find servers with good pings pretty much no matter where you live. So, go ahead, create an account and get fragging!
QAUKE LIVE
nothing after the jump
Giant snake photo obviously 'shopped.
Dude, this is so obviously Photoshopped. I mean, if you can spot some of the more obscure fakeries over at the fantastic Photoshop Disasters blog, then you can obviously figure out what is wrong with this photo. Is it a giant mystery river snake — or just a Photoshop job?
London's Daily Telegraph greeted readers Friday morning with photos of what appeared to be a gigantic serpent wending its way down a tropical river, said to be somewhere on the Southeast Asian island of Borneo, "sparking great concern among local communities."
But the rival Guardian refrained from jumping on the story — and instead declared it to be a fake that looked as if it had been "drawn by a pre-school child with their first green felt tip."
The Telegraph said only that the snake had been seen in the Baleh River, which is in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. It didn't mention who took the photo, or where and when it was taken.
We'll let you decide.
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Oh, come the fuck on!
For starters, according to the scale of that image, the snake must be roughly a 1,000 feet long. See those wave crests in the snake's wake? In order to make those, that snake must be moving about as fast as a speed boat. Also, to harp on the waves some more, they're at an improper angle. And to harp even more, the second set of waves shouldn't eve be there. They're not residual waves and that section of the snake is clearly underwater. Lastly, the water crests don't even look right. They look like Gaussian blurred white lines with a little bit of transparency tweaking.
Give me a fucking break. "Let you decide"? This has to be one of the shittiest Photoshop jobs I've seen. And I've seen some really shitty ones.
