Spontaneous and deliberate creative cognition during and after psilocybin exposure - "Creativity is an essential cognitive ability linked to all areas of our everyday functioning. Thus, finding a way to enhance it is of broad interest. A large number of anecdotal reports suggest that the consumption of psychedelic drugs can enhance creative thinking; however, scientific evidence is lacking. Following a double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group design, we demonstrated that psilocybin (0.17 mg/kg) induced a time- and construct-related differentiation of effects on creative thinking. Acutely, psilocybin increased ratings of (spontaneous) creative insights, while decreasing (deliberate) task-based creativity. Seven days after psilocybin, number of novel ideas increased. Furthermore, we utilized an ultrahigh field multimodal brain imaging approach, and found that acute and persisting effects were predicted by within- and between-network connectivity of the default mode network. Findings add some support to historical claims that psychedelics can influence aspects of the creative process, potentially indicating them as a tool to investigate creativity and subsequent underlying neural mechanisms."
Some drugs improve creativity
Pay Transparency: Will It Help or Hurt Workers? - "Many assume salary transparency will benefit employees, but research suggests downsides, too... Perez-Truglia, in a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper, studied the effect of people’s easy access to the incomes of friends, neighbors and co-workers. He found that as a consequence, Norwegians’ well-being and their income more closely aligned; low earners reported being less happy and less satisfied with their lives, while high earners reported being happier and more satisfied. Media accounts told of Norwegians’ online tax records being used to shame low-wage workers and bully their children. So, in 2014 Norway required people to register in order to search the tax records, meaning, anyone could learn at any time who had searched for them. Almost overnight, the number of searches dropped 88 percent. Most users of the database were now checking to see who’d looked them up. Narrower pay databases have also unsettled some. The Sacramento Bee created a website listing California state workers’ names and salaries, which are public record, including those from the University of California. A team of UC-affiliated researchers surveyed a random subset of university employees, first informing them about the website and later polling them about job satisfaction. Lower-paid employees who visited the site reported feeling less satisfied with their jobs and likelier to look for new ones... imagine a far more complex, if transparent world: You’re applying for a job precisely like thousands of others in a workplace where salaries are disclosed. Because every worker can be expected to demand the pay of the best-paid worker, the company negotiates fiercely. That’s the premise investigated in a working paper by Cullen and Brown University’s Bobak Pakzad-Hurson. The results of a model they built are surprising and not encouraging for transparency advocates or for workers: Pay in this model fell 7–8 percent and employer profits rose 28 percent. With wages low, employers hired more workers, which accounted for some of the increased profits in the model... The model, in addition to suggesting fierce negotiating by companies pre-employment, indicates workers looking to be hired would not be so tough. Knowing wages are transparent within the company, a worker would want to get hired and then, upon learning what others make, negotiate a raise. The combination of those factors depressed wages, Cullen and Pakzad-Hurson report. “Our analysis of equilibrium wages, hiring rate and profits under greater pay transparency reveals consequences that are counterintuitive and economically large in a market for low-skill tasks”"
The Salary Taboo: Privacy Norms and the Diffusion of Information - "The limited diffusion of salary information has implications for labor markets, such as wage discrimination policies and collective bargaining. Access to salary information is believed to be limited and unequal, but there is little direct evidence on the sources of these information frictions. Social scientists have long conjectured that privacy norms around salary (i.e., the “salary taboo”) play an important role. We provide unique evidence of this phenomenon based on a field experiment with 755 employees at a large commercial bank from Southeast Asia. We provide revealed-preference evidence that many employees are unwilling to reveal their salaries to coworkers and reluctant to ask coworkers about their salaries. These frictions are still present, but smaller in magnitude, when sharing information that is less sensitive (seniority information). We discuss implications for pay transparency policies and the gender wage gap."
Greta Thunberg: You Kill Fish! ‘What About Their Thoughts and Feelings?’ - "We can’t fact-check her sense of existential doom, but we can examine a few of her statements... The most easily verifiable claim we can check is a common one: that higher levels of prosperity mean the world will run out of resources, in this case, food and farmland. The extreme environmentalist movement, especially its population control wing, has made the same, baseless argument for decades... The weak link is the idea that human beings are simply another part of nature, so the “thoughts and feelings” of fish are equal to those of your relatives. Scientists have not established definitively that fish possess intelligence or emotions comparable to humans... Greta Thunberg stretches the truth at times, bends or breaks it at others, and downgrades the unique place of human beings in creation. Her overblown claims might provoke greater cases of “eco-anxiety,” but they don’t point the way to a brighter or more sustainable future."
Library books overdue: Man returns library book 84 years late, and pays the fine - "After 84 years, several generations and the bombing of an English family home, a remarkable library book is back where it belongs. When Paddy Riordan first discovered Richard Jefferies' Red Deer while cleaning out his mother's home last year, he knew it was too good for the skip bin. But he had no idea of the fuss his decision to return it, a mere 30,695 days late, would cause. On a trip back to Coventry on Tuesday, the father-of-two popped back into the Earlsdon Carnegie Community Library with the outrageously overdue book. But being a numbers man, the retired Lloyd's of London employee wasn't content to simply return the book, he also whipped up an Excel spreadsheet to work out how much he owed for the overdue fee. Luckily for him, the tardiness penalty was set at one penny per day, a weightier sum at the time but which when converted into decimal currency came to a grand total of just £18.27 ($32.68), which he donated to the library. "I've seen one or two people who've worked out that at the current rate of fines, if I was paying at the current rate, it should be over £7000 that I would be paying," he jokes... He thinks the book must have been hired for his mother, Anne, who was just six on October 11, 1938, when it was first checked out, but has no idea what "nefarious reasons" his grandfather, Captain William Southey-Harrison, may have had for not returning the book. "I'm not too sure why my grandfather didn't return the book but in 1940, during one night of the Blitz, the family lost the house"... "They did ask me when I returned the book as to whether it was that I'd read it and I had to confess I hadn't"... Dressed as a witch as she frantically juggles media requests with the day-to-day challenges of entertaining visiting children in the lead-up to Halloween, Winter tells 9News.com.au it's not only the longest overdue hire the library has ever had, but quite possibly its oldest book."
Soaring pipeline price tag underscores problems with government-run projects - "Cost overruns and schedule delays are common with large-scale government infrastructure projects. Oxford University scholar Bent Flyvbjerg co-authored a study involving 20 countries, which found that nine out of 10 government infrastructure projects incurred cost overruns. Simply put, large projects undertaken by government are not well-suited to minimize costs... government officials face markedly different incentives than people in the private sector. If a private company goes over budget, the owners and employees pay the price through lower rates of return and/or reduced compensation. In other words, the cost of missteps is borne directly by those responsible, which imposes a discipline on their behaviour and decisions. However, that discipline and accountability is not present in government. If the pipeline project goes over budget, no politician or government official loses their own money or even faces any meaningful consequences. It’s a basic principle in economics that people are more careful with their own money than other people’s money... Recent federal policies—personal income tax hikes, a high (and poorly designed) carbon tax, new subjective regulations for major infrastructure projects including pipelines—have contributed to a collapse in business investment and slower economic growth. Instead of trying to act like construction companies, governments should stick to improving incentives for investment through competitive taxes and reasonable and consistent regulations. Then, private companies will be more willing to invest and build much-needed infrastructure."
Nonreplicable publications are cited more than replicable ones - "We use publicly available data to show that published papers in top psychology, economics, and general interest journals that fail to replicate are cited more than those that replicate. This difference in citation does not change after the publication of the failure to replicate. Only 12% of postreplication citations of nonreplicable findings acknowledge the replication failure. Existing evidence also shows that experts predict well which papers will be replicated. Given this prediction, why are nonreplicable papers accepted for publication in the first place? A possible answer is that the review team faces a trade-off. When the results are more “interesting,” they apply lower standards regarding their reproducibility."
Trust the Science, even though there's a replication crisis
Totalitarian Scientists - "he compares the benefits of biases for individuals to those for totalitarian regimes and scientific theories. The main function of biases is to preserve either the ego of individuals, the organization of a totalitarian regime, or the integrity of a theory. The view of biases as beneficial has been challenged. Illusions about reality can have dramatic negative consequences for individuals. In fact, there is little evidence to support the claim that positive illusions are beneficial for well-being (Schimmack & Kim, 2020). The idea that illusions are beneficial for scientific theory is even more questionable. After all, the very idea of science is that scientific theories should be subjected to empirical tests and revised or abandoned when they fail these tests... cientists end up behaving like totalitarian societies. They will use all of their energy to preserve theories, even when they are false. Moreover, the biggest fools have an advantage because they have the least doubt about their theories, which facilitates goal attainment. The research program on implicit bias is a great example... psychology needs to find a mechanism to counteract totalitarianism in science. Fortunately, there are some positive trends that this is happening. The 2010s have seen a string of major replication failures in social psychology that would have been difficult to publish when psychology was prejudiced against null-findings"
How bad was army food in the days of NS cooks, & why was it so bad? - "The comment sections of posts about special meals in at the Basic Military Training Centres (BMTCs) are often rife with former NSFs regurgitating horror stories of unpleasant meals of National Service's past. And yes, of course, standards might have fluctuated throughout the years, but there seem to be one or two defining moments in cookhouse history — watershed moments for food quality... before the dawn of private caterers, the army cookhouses were squarely the domain of the National Servicemen. Like most vocations in the army, some recruits were selected for the role of cook, fresh out of BMT. These chosen cooks were then trained at the School of Army Catering (SAC). There, they underwent an eight-week "intensive course"... The cooks were mainly taught recipes during courses, and they could sometimes be called back to SAC to learn additional recipes. According to an article by Pioneer, the cooks in the Class 2 course learnt to whip up dishes like chicken stew, fried pak choy, fish lemak, fried turnip, egg sambal and tow hoo soup. The ones with more cooking experience enlisted in the Class 1 course and were taught how to make char siew, pak cham kai, chap chai, chee pau kai, roti prata and kueh dadar. The Class 1 course also ended with a real doozy of a final task. A 20-dish marathon where the candidate had to produce a selection of "Chinese dishes, stews, curries, pastries and desserts" in five hours. Even though cakes and pastries weren't standard SAF fare in the 70s, SAC included pastry making in some of their courses. However, these skills were not entirely wasted, as cakes and pastries were sometimes served during festive seasons. So even in the 70s, the food choices didn't seem too terrible. It wasn't Oliver Twist-ian levels of minimal gruel and maximum cruel, but more like a mediocre coffeeshop's menu. But as anyone who has talked to an older Singaporean about his army days would know, the food wasn't just mediocre; it was "talk passionately about how terrible it was nearly 50 years later" bad... "In the beginning there weren't many boys who were interested in being cooks"... unlike a vast majority of NS vocations, where the core components of their NS training are applied within active service (and pockets of reservist call-ups), some of these cooks had a bit of experience in the kitchen before coming into NS, and carried on as a cook afterwards... "...many of my ex-students after completing National Service have taken up jobs as cooks in leading hotels." In fact, the students would muse to Wong about how odd it was that they could "produce such lovely food in the hotel" but "fail dismally" when cooking for the army. The main culprit was sheer volume... cooks didn't just have to deal with mass catering. They were responsible for every step of the cooking process. From washing dishes to budgeting food... to serving as quality checkers for cookhouse ingredients during the army's earlier days... Notable personalities in the food scene like MakanSutra founder KF Seetoh, ieatishootipost's Leslie Tay and Daniel Ang of DanielFoodDiary have all given some measure of what they felt about the food back then. Seetoh described his first meal at BMTC as having to choose between "plain steamed horrible bread with flavourless egg" and fried bee hoon he described as "fried rubber bands"... Rice was too hard, vegetables sometimes had soil, and the chicken was either too hard or burnt... despite the relatively wide-ranging recipes mentioned above, quite a few of the meals were either fried mee or fried bee hoon. Praise of the food in reports from those days, when there were any, was quite tempered, usually toeing the lines of hardworking cooks giving it their all, with two rather notable exceptions. One was a glowing review by a British army chef comparing their standard of cooking to "some hotels in Singapore". The other was in 1982, during the opening of a S$6 million Singapore Food Industries coldroom and warehouse complex (more on this later), when then-Minister of State for Defence Yeo Ning Hong said that he had eaten meals "from the same pots" as the officers and men in the SAF. Yeo said, in his opinion, SAF food was comparable to that in many restaurants... The 80s was a time of significant change in how the army cooked their food... In 1985, tenders were called for pre-cooked food supplied by outside caterers... Caterers would cook the meal off-site. Meals would then be collected by personnel from various camps twice a day (once a day on weekends and public holidays). Dinner and night snacks were picked up in the morning, and the next day's breakfast and lunch were picked up in the afternoon. The food would then be stored in cold rooms and reheated before serving. The surveys at the camps where the new system was implemented apparently showed 56 per cent of the men favoured pre-cooked meals... by the end of 1998, every single cookhouse in the army was run by private caterers... Phrases like "last time the food was so much worse" might be technically true, but misses out on the more pragmatic forces that ultimately led to change. The most significant push behind the outsourcing of cookhouse food was manpower limitations."
The fact that professional caterers (including in the army) can do better with similar volumes suggests that that's not the main reason army food used to be so bad
China's 'mind-reading' porn detection cap takes censorship to new levels - "Researchers in China have come up with a new and elaborate way to detect porn for the purpose of censorship. The helmet-like device can detect spikes in human brainwave patters when the watcher is presented with pornographic imagery... It's able to detect pornographic imagery with high accuracy, and is even able to filter through potentially detracting brain waves caused by emotional states, low energy levels, and random thoughts... Researchers note that the technology worked almost every single time participants were presented with explicit imagery. However, it did trigger some false alarms. Researchers blame the 80% accuracy on inadequate levels of training material."
Need a Lawyer? Dick Law Firm Will Work Long + Hard For You - "Not many lawyers will tell you they're a dick, this lawyer however is proud of it. Meet Eric Dick, Texas lawyer and happy to probe through your case. Don't get mad at us, this guy took his name to a whole new level, take his commercial for example -- yes it is real! "Need a Lawyer? Hire a Dick!" states his TV commercial. Dick even goes as far as saying, "I'll work hard and long for you," and "I'll hound 'em, and pound 'em.""
Marjorie Taylor Greene's Georgia home reportedly swatted for 6th time - "Swatting is the act of making a hoax call to 911 to try and draw a response to law enforcement. Using technology that makes it appear that the emergency call is coming from a victim's home, suspects try to lure law enforcement to the residence by telling them a crime has either happened or is in progress - causing a response from police or a SWAT team."
Weird how the police didn't learn after the first 5 times
A Million Things I Haven't Done on Tumblr - "I think a common mistake people make about puns is that they often believe puns are meant to make people laugh. This is not so! The emotion that puns are meant to elicit isn’t joy, it’s rage."
Our world-class breakfasts are the one thing that truly unites this fractured country - "For all our cakes and buns and comforting stews, our pies and potatoes and mad fixation with putting everything and anything on toast, Britain is a country that runs on breakfast. Without wanting to get too Nigel Farage about it, our breakfasts are clearly world class – superficially celebrated yet rarely given the respect they deserve. It’s the one thing that truly unites this fractured country. However we vote, whichever team we support, even if we rarely eat before noon, we’re an island of breakfast worshippers next to a continent largely content with a coffee and a pastry on the hoof... Tempting as it is, however, to mistily imagine our forerunners on these islands tucking into a Viking Fry at their wattle-and-daub breakfast bars, the ‘full’ cooked breakfast is, like the cream tea and the ploughman's lunch, a relatively new creation. The term “full English” doesn’t pop up until 1933, in a cookery book that, with a brass neck typical of the period, declares it “the best breakfast in the world” and, less disputably, “the best meal of the day in England.” Yet there is clearly a history of gluttonous breakfasts. To read Victorian cookbooks is to goggle at the range of dishes suggested as suitable for the breakfast table in a country house. Ptarmigan, ‘curried bones’, rump steak, veal and ham pies, roast larks, devilled turkey, muffins, periwinkle patties, pickled oysters, and Russian caviar to name but a few. Foreigners were shocked. A letter home from the American ambassador in 1867 suggests that such ‘fabulous feasts’ were already a distinctively British phenomenon... it seems all but the poorest families breakfasted on eggs and bacon by the late 19th century, even if just once a week and for the man alone – the woman and children would probably have made do with bread and dripping... A 2020 survey found that almost one in five under-thirties claimed to never have even tried a full English, yet such is its place in the collective psyche that a British hotel provides a mere ‘continental’ version at its peril... many of us feel tied to red or brown sauce as we might a football team – as a marker of geographic or class solidarity."
Paycheck To Paycheck: Why Even Americans Who Earn $100,000 Struggle With Bills - "the paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle has long been a widespread affliction. Single mothers live it. Young professionals live it. Even college professors and retired tech workers live it, like the Lemieurs from Pennsylvania."
Even in November 2020 (pre-inflation), 16% of US adults earning $100,000-$199,999 a year reported having difficulties covering their basic expenses. Presumably the problem is that they don't earn enough - not that there's an American culture of instant gratification and living beyond their means, and that they can't budget
Obsessing about how certain expenses grow faster than wages is misleading - since other expenses would be growing more slowly, and others would even be falling
36% of high earners are living paycheck to paycheck - "Thirty-six percent of U.S. employees with salaries of $100,000 or more are living paycheck to paycheck — twice as many who said they were in 2019, according to a survey conducted by Willis Towers Watson, a consulting firm. That’s more than the 34% of workers who earn $50,000 to $100,000 a year who are living paycheck to paycheck... The findings are similar to a recent LendingClub survey that found 36% of people earning at least $250,000 a year live paycheck to paycheck."
Capitalism has failed!
How Putin Got Into America’s Mind - The Atlantic - "The first step in a campaign was to identify the target’s weak spots—health, family, finances—then strike them over and over. Stasi agents might break into a dissident’s apartment and move the pictures around or change the time on the alarm clock. They might mail a sex toy to a target’s wife or send postcards from an unknown woman demanding child support. They might enlist doctors to give false medical diagnoses or ensure that a manager halted the dissident’s career progress without explanation. The techniques were targeted, flexible, and above all efficient. Decomposition was designed to unglue a dissident’s psyche. A regime opponent would find himself trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare"
This ignores the fact that the US is very good at destroying itself already. Russia didn't start BLM, after all
They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen? - "We keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures. As a result, wildland fuels keep building up. At the same time, the climate grows hotter and drier. Then, boom: the inevitable. The wind blows down a power line, or lightning strikes dry grass, and an inferno ensues. This week we’ve seen both the second- and third-largest fires in California history. “The fire community, the progressives, are almost in a state of panic,” Ingalsbee said. There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.”... When I reached Malcolm North, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service who is based in Mammoth, California, and asked if there was any meaningful scientific dissent to the idea that we need to do more controlled burning, he said, “None that I know of.”... fire suppression in California is big business, with impressive year-over-year growth... A wildfire is categorized as an emergency, meaning firefighters pull down hazard pay and can drive a bulldozer into a protected wilderness area where regulations typically prohibit mountain bikes. Planned burns are human-made events and as such need to follow all environmental compliance rules... “One thing to keep in mind is that air-quality impacts from prescribed burning are minuscule compared to what you’re experiencing right now,” said Matthew Hurteau, associate professor of biology at University of New Mexico and director of the Earth Systems Ecology Lab"
Damn climate change!
Straight Talk About Soy - "Soy is a unique food that is widely studied for its estrogenic and anti-estrogenic effects on the body. Studies may seem to present conflicting conclusions about soy, but this is largely due to the wide variation in how soy is studied. Results of recent population studies suggest that soy has either a beneficial or neutral effect on various health conditions. Soy is a nutrient-dense source of protein that can safely be consumed several times a week, and probably more often, and is likely to provide health benefits—especially when eaten as an alternative to red and processed meat."
7 Modern Life Habits That Can Be Incredibly Bad For Your Brain Health - "1. The brain drain of inactivity
2. Think you’re multitasking? Think again
3. Information overload leads to unnecessary overstimulation of the brain
4. Sitting for too long is hurting you
5. All that screen time can negatively impact our mental and emotional wellbeing
6. It’s surprisingly easy for your headphones to damage the parts of the ear vital to healthy hearing
7. Sleeping poorly upsets your brain"
Meme - "Imagine getting t-boned and the fucking Terminator steps out in slippers and a leather jacket"
Meme - "Seacrets Dress Code Policy
No brimless headgear (bandanas, skullcaps, etc).
No thong suits. No white sleeveless undershirts.
No athletic jerseys (except during NFL events).
No long T-shirts hanging below pant pockets.
No extra-long shorts below the bottom of the calf.
No offensive, vulgar and/or inappropriate clothing.
No excessively ripped or torn clothing.
No excessively long collared/button-up shirts
No motorcycle colors. No blow-up props or laser pointers
Pants & shorts must be worn around the waist
Effective at 6pm upon entry:
Shirt and shoes must be worn.
No sleeveless shirts on men. No sunglasses after dark.
No plain white t-shirts (must have pocket or logo).
ATTITUDE COUNTS!"
Boss Cancels Interview After Applicant Asks For Virtual Meeting, Sparks Debate On Young Jobseekers - "For one employer, he appeared to draw the line at a virtual interview, even if it was for an internship position. He said he cancelled an interview after the student asked whether they could have a virtual meeting instead of a face-to-face one... a man named Jeffrey Koh related his experience with a student looking for an internship at his company."
The fact that a simple request got such a petulant response is a big red flag
From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad | The Economist - "We’re making Olivier salad, the centrepiece of New Year’s Eve, which in Russia is more important than Christmas. Russian salads, among which the Olivier is king, are not the leafy green creations the name evokes elsewhere. Typically rich in mayonnaise, root vegetables and some sort of protein, they hold their own as a main course and deliver the calories necessary to withstand a Russian winter. Ironically for a dish that became a favourite of the Soviet people, the Olivier started out as a delicacy reserved for the elite. It was invented by Lucien Olivier, head chef of the Hermitage restaurant in Moscow in the early 1860s... The secret dressing was replaced with Soviet mayonnaise. A triumph of mass production, it infused any dish with fat, protein and tangy flavour – a nutritious superfood designed to mitigate the effects of food shortages that often occurred under the command economy. It also had the benefit of disguising poor-quality ingredients. The government promoted the revamped Olivier salad, along with other mayonnaise-based recipes, in “The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food” in 1939, an aspirational work that fused nutritional advice with propaganda. The volume was a hit, possibly because it was the only cookbook people could buy. It launched Russia’s love affair with mayonnaise, a flame that still burns brightly."
Meme - "Une rue et ses noms
1705 rue du Bourg
1794 rue de la Liberté
1812 rue Napoleon
1815 rue Royale
1848 rue Nationale
1853 rue Impériale
1871 rue Nationale
1944 rue du Général de Gaulle"
Meme - Graeter's Ice Cream @graeters: "Giving you what you need today."
patricia: "Umm, HELLO??!! It's #AshWednesday thousands of Cincinnati Catholics FAST & certainly don't eat ice cream or appreciate your ice cream ad on this particular day. Didn't realize @graeters is anti Catholic, but I'll remember that next time I'm buying ice cream reddit"
This only works if you're a "minority"
Facebook - "From showing actual irl guro in r/all, the first site to ban the word “gr00mer” and banning people for making fun of corpos If Twitter is a cesspool, Reddit is an irradiated dump"
Meme - "I created a meta dog that devalues meta properties by shitting on their meta lawns"
"Sorry, this post has been removed by the moderators of r/funny"
Meme - "Never trust a friend who speaks..."
Quotes [channel]
Pythagoras Quotes you should know before you Get Old
"Never trust a friend who is silent."
Sun Tzu's Quotes which are better to be known when young to not Regret in Ol...
Quotes [channel]"
Meme - "MY SON GOT ANOTHER WONDERFUL RELGIOUS TATTOO! A POWERUL REMINDER OF THE CROSS!"
Meme - ""Humans feel affection for animals with juvenile features: large eyes, bulging craniums, retreating chins (left column). Small-eyed, long-snouted animals (right column) do not elicit the same response." -Konrad Lorenz"
A Student Died in His Sleep After Eating 5-Day-Old Pasta That Had Been Left Out - "the 20-year-old student used to prepare his meals for the week on a Sunday in an attempt to save time and money. He would boil pasta and then put it into Tupperware containers to be eaten during the week after adding a sauce and reheating it... The student, from Belgium, reheated spaghetti that had been prepared five days prior and left in the kitchen at room temperature... He attributed the odd taste to the new tomato sauce he put on his spaghetti, ate it all and headed out to play sports. Within 30 minutes of eating the pasta, he was experiencing intense abdominal pain, nausea, and a headache. After returning home, he immediately had intense episodes of watery diarrhea and vomited profusely, but did not seek medical attention and instead chose to stay in his house, drink water, and try to sleep it off... Examination of his body revealed he had died at 4am, roughly 10 hours after he ate the spaghetti... The autopsy revealed liver necrosis, indicating his liver had shut down, as well as possible signs of acute pancreatitis. Fecal swabs revealed the presence of Bacillus cereus, a bacteria responsible for "fried rice syndrome", food poisoning commonly caused by leaving fried rice dishes sitting at room temperature for several hours... Bacillus cereus poisoning is surprisingly common. In 2003 a family became extremely ill with Bacillus cereus-associated food poisoning after eating 8-day-old pasta salad during a picnic."
So much for the meme that Spider-man could only happen in the US because in other countries someone that sick would go to the doctor
