Pompeii Ruins Show That the Romans Invented Recycling - "We found that part of the city was built out of trash. The piles outside the walls weren’t material that’s been dumped to get rid of it. They’re outside the walls being collected and sorted to be resold inside the walls."
Meme - *Aunt cass by aerith franklin cosplay*
Scary animals : a new classification [study] - "Scary animals, a new study reveals, can be separated into five distinct clusters : “(1) non‐slimy invertebrates; (2) snakes; (3) mice, rats, and bats; (4) human endo‐ and exoparasites (intestinal helminths and louse); and (5) farm/pet animals. However, only snakes, spiders, and parasites evoke intense fear and disgust in the non‐clinical population.” The diagram below shows the ‘mean disgust rating’ plotted against ‘mean fear rating’ for a selection of creatures... “Having been bitten by a dog [also] decreased the mean disgust rating and the more serious the injury, the lower the rating was.”"
Describing the Relationship between Cat Bites and Human Depression Using Data from an Electronic Health Record - "Data mining approaches have been increasingly applied to the electronic health record and have led to the discovery of numerous clinical associations. Recent data mining studies have suggested a potential association between cat bites and human depression. To explore this possible association in more detail we first used administrative diagnosis codes to identify patients with either depression or bites, drawn from a population of 1.3 million patients. We then conducted a manual chart review in the electronic health record of all patients with a code for a bite to accurately determine which were from cats or dogs. Overall there were 750 patients with cat bites, 1,108 with dog bites, and approximately 117,000 patients with depression. Depression was found in 41.3% of patients with cat bites and 28.7% of those with dog bites. Furthermore, 85.5% of those with both cat bites and depression were women, compared to 64.5% of those with dog bites and depression. The probability of a woman being diagnosed with depression at some point in her life if she presented to our health system with a cat bite was 47.0%, compared to 24.2% of men presenting with a similar bite. The high proportion of depression in patients who had cat bites, especially among women, suggests that screening for depression could be appropriate in patients who present to a clinical provider with a cat bite. Additionally, while no causative link is known to explain this association, there is growing evidence to suggest that the relationship between cats and human mental illness, such as depression, warrants further investigation."
Decreased level of psychobiological factor novelty seeking and lower intelligence in men latently infected with the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii Dopamine, a missing link between schizophrenia and toxoplasmosis? - "Toxoplasma gondii, a parasitic protozoan, infects about 30–60% of people worldwide. The latent toxoplasmosis, i.e. life-long presence of cysts in the brain and muscular tissues, has no effect on human health. However, infected subjects score worse in psychomotor performance tests and have different personality profiles than Toxoplasma-negative subjects. The mechanism of this effect is unknown; however, it is supposed that presence of parasites’ cysts in the brain induces an increase of the concentration of dopamine. Here we search for the existence of differences in personality profile between Toxoplasma-positive and Toxoplasma-negative subjects by testing 857 military conscripts using a modern psychobiological questionnaire, namely with Cloninger's Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI). ANCOVA showed that Toxoplasma-positive subjects had lower Novelty seeking (NS) scores (P=0.035) and lower scores for three of its four subscales, namely Impulsiveness (P=0.049), Extravagance (P=0.056) and Disorderliness (P=0.006) than the Toxoplasma-negative subjects. Differences between Toxoplasma-negative and positive subjects in NS was inversely correlated with duration of toxoplasmosis estimated on the basis of concentration anti-Toxoplasma antibodies (P=0.031). Unexpectedly, the infected subjects had also lower IQ (P2=0.003) and lower probability of achieving a higher education (P2<0.0000). Decrease of NS suggests that the increase of dopamine in brain of infected subjects can represent a missing link between toxoplasmosis and schizophrenia."
Changes in the personality profile of young women with latent toxoplasmosis - "Latent toxoplasmosis is the most widespread parasite infection in developed and developing countries. The prevalence of Toxoplasma gondii infection varies mostly between 20 to 80% in different territories. This form of toxoplasmosis is generally considered to be asymptomatic. Recently published results, however, suggest that the personality profiles of infected subjects differ from those of uninfected controls. These results, however, were obtained on non-standard populations (biologists or former acute toxoplasmosis patients). Here we studied the personality profiles of 191 young women tested for anti-Toxoplasma immunity during gravidity. The results showed that the differences between Toxoplasma-negative and Toxoplasma-positive subjects exits also in this sample of healthy women. The subjects with latent toxoplasmosis had higher intelligence, lower guilt proneness, and possibly also higher ergic tension. The difference in several other factors (desurgency/surgency, alaxia/protension, naiveté/shrewdness, and self- sentiment integration) concerned changes in the variances, rather than the mean values of the factors."
The FCPA & Facilitating Payments - Whistleblower Justice Network - "In a number of our articles on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), we have touched on several exemptions and “affirmative defenses” in the law. (An affirmative defense is a defense where the defendant proves a set facts that mitigate or excuse otherwise unlawful behavior.) The two affirmative defenses permitted by the FCPA are very straightforward, but the major exemption- “facilitating payments”- warrants its own article. The first affirmative defense is the “local law defense”, which essentially makes a bribe legal if it is expressly permitted by local laws. In practice, however, this defense is rarely used because few countries have written laws legalizing bribery of public officials. In one of the rare instances a defendant attempted to use this defense, the US vs. Kozeny, a federal court ruled that the defendant could not use the local law defense- even though Azerbaijan’s laws forgive those who bribe officials if they report the bribe, the US court ruled this is not tantamount to legalizing bribes... Facilitating payments are an exemption to the FCPA, NOT an affirmative defense. This means that the accused company can claim an alleged bribe was a facilitating payment and the burden of proof is on the government to prove otherwise. But, as the DOJ’s Guide to the FCPA helpfully points out, “Labeling a bribe as a ‘facilitating payment’ in a company’s books and records does not make it one.” The DOJ calls facilitating payments a “narrow exception” that “applies only when a payment is made to further ‘routine governmental action’ that involves non-discretionary acts.” Furthermore, one should note that while the FCPA permits these payments, they may be illegal under local law- and the OECD has urged member countries to prohibit their government officials from accepting facilitating payments. OK, but what actually is and is not a facilitating payment? Let’s tackle the latter half of the provision first- “non-discretionary acts”. A non-discretionary act means that the government official does not have any decision-making authority over the act. For example, the clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles does not have any discretion in deciding if you can renew your car’s registration. If you meet all the requirements laid out by law and/or agency policy, the clerk must renew your registration- he or she has no discretion in the matter. But maybe the clerk works very slowly and it takes days or months for your registration renewal to be approved… unless you pay him or her a small fee to “grease the wheels”. While this would blatantly be misconduct if it occurred in the US, in many foreign countries it is an accepted practice. Such a payment might be considered a facilitating payment and therefore legal under the FCPA. At the least, it clearly meets the standard of “non-discretionary” acts."
Hippos Can’t Swim—So How Do They Move Through Water? - The Atlantic - "“Depending on water level they walk or they swim,” said Dagmar Andres-Bruemmer of the Frankfurt Zoological Society. Except the swimming isn’t really swimming per se, she said. Rather, it’s a kind of gallop. “For all intents and purposes the hippo does not swim,” said Douglas McCauley, an assistant professor in the department of ecology, evolution, and marine biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It almost always maintains some contact with the bottom and walks or bounces off the bottom using these bottom contact points as a source of propulsion.”"
Nintendo Switch game promises players can feel boobs that feel like pudding, water balloons - "Senran Kagura follows a group of busty ninja schoolgirls, as they battle each other for honor, revenge, or other excuses to get their clothing alluringly torn in hand-to-hand combat. Sometimes they also cook or have water gun fights. Really, the activity options are wide-open, as long as there are boobs bouncing about."
Senran Kagura producer: Small boobs need to be moved by hand - "“I think that characters like Ryoubi or Mirai are the hardest to deal with because they have small breasts,” he said. “Since the whole game is based on larger breast sizes, and that’s what the [physics engine] is built around, we actually have to customize the movement on [small breasted characters] to make it work.”"
Burger King now serves bacon in South Africa – but dropped ‘ham’ from the names of burgers ‘to be more respectful’ of halaal clients - "Burger King in South Africa is dropping the word "ham" from its menu, after adding bacon at some of its stores, in order to be respectful of Muslim customers. On Friday the chain confirmed it has changed the names of three of its products. What was previously known as a "Double Spicy Hamburger" will now just be a "Double Spicy Burger"; the "Triple Hamburger with Cheese" becomes the "Triple Burger with Cheese", and a "Hamburger King Jr" on the kids menu will now be just a "Kids Burger"... The word "ham" has featured on the Burger King menu since the chain opened its first store in South Africa in 2013. Up to September, all of its stores were fully halaal... The chain has had some queries from Muslim customers in the past on the "ham" part of the name, Klopper said, by way of Majlisush Shura Al Islami, the non-profit that certifies Burger King's remaining halaal outlets as being in compliance with Shari'ah law... 44 Burger Kings in South Africa are no longer halaal certified after the chain decided to introduce the line of bacon items that are popular for the brand in many other parts of the world."
From 2019. And their Muslim population is only 1.6%
Making a Static Website, 1995 vs. 2022
Facebook - "PSA: don’t ask Jewish people when Hanukkah is It’s triggering and offensive. Because we have no idea, either."
Late Power Ranger’s Wife Reveals What Happened In Final Moments Before The Star Took His Own Life - "Tammie Frank, widow of the late “Power Rangers” actor Jason David Frank, revealed in a recent statement what really happened in the hours leading up to him taking his own life in a Texas hotel room."
Twitter users solve baffling mystery of why an ant colony piled its dead members all over Trix cereal - "Twitter user OctopusCaveman presented a bizarre mystery to the social media platform late last month after noticing unusual behavior from the ants in his son's ant farm. In a thread that's now been liked more than 233,000 times and retweeted nearly 19,000 times, the artist revealed how his 5-year-old son decided to throw a handful of Trix cereal into his pets' habitat as a treat but was surprised by their reaction to his special offering. According to OctopusCaveman, instead of feasting on the sugary cereal, the ants enacted a bizarre ant funeral that left the family perplexed."
On the Death Rituals of Ants - "To the naked eye, ants deal with their dead much like humans. When a member of the colony dies, the carcass will lie where it fell for a period of roughly two days. In the fashion of a wake, this time period presumably gives the other ants time to pay their respects to their fallen comrade. After two days, the living ants take the dead ant to an ant graveyard in a respectful procession, honoring the good work it performed for the colony... the dead ant must lay there for two days because the other ants simply don’t realize it is dead. Two days after death, the tiny ant corpse begins emitting a chemical called oleic acid. To an ant, the smell of oleic acid equals death. The experience of death is not a sense of loss, not a dead body, not an ascent to ant afterlife- it is simply oleic acid. As soon as the living ants smell the oleic acid smell, they spring into action, carrying the tiny decaying intruder out of their midst and dumping it into the pile. Even more interesting, Wilson discovered that if you give a live ant a bath in oleic acid, it is as good as dead to the other ants. The still alive (but oleic acid covered) ant is carried off to the dead ant pile, trying to clean itself, flailing around, perhaps screaming “um, hey guys, I’m fine,” to no avail. If you smell like a corpse, sorry little buddy, you’re a corpse. Into the pile with you."
Man Sentenced To Death Over Disagreement With Customer Who Refused To Pay Bill - "Ashfaq Masih, 34, was arrested in 2017 in Pakistan for saying he believed in Jesus Christ, with a court deciding that he had ‘disrespected’ the Prophet Muhammad. The statement was made when the bike mechanic got into a verbal disagreement with a Muslim customer who refused to pay the full amount for a repair job at Masih’s shop in Lahore. Requesting the bill be reduced, the customer said he was a ‘religious devotee’ and that Masih should honour him... the mechanic refused the request, stating that Christians believe Jesus is the prophet. As they entered an argument, a crowd gathered before police were called to the scene to arrest Masih, with a court deciding he had committed an act of blasphemy... “The judges are aware that such cases are made to punish and settle personal grudges with the opponents, especially against the Christians. “Because of pressure from the Islamic groups, lower courts' judges are always hesitant to free the victims but make popular decisions to save their skin and shift their burden to the high court."
Islamophobia!
King Charles II Died a Horrible, Unfortunate Death - "By 1387, 54-year-old Charles was seriously ill and infirm and confined to his palace at Pamplona -worn out by his wicked life or so his critics claimed. Doctors were summoned, and the bedridden King was prescribed a ‘body wrap’ of linen soaked in brandy or aqua vita. The king was to be sewn into this alcoholic shroud at bedtime so that the supposed curative properties of the alcohol could work their magic. When she had finished her task, the maid charged with stitching the King into his wrappings looked for something to cut the thread. No scissors were at hand. So the woman used a candle flame instead. Unsurprisingly, the alcohol soaked cloth was immediately set ablaze. The maid, terrified by events as well as her own stupidity fled, leaving Charles the Bad to burn alive in his own bed."
Microsoft reveals Janet Jackson song had the power to crash laptops - even if it wasn't playing on them - "The music video for Janet Jackson's 1989 hit Rhythm Nation was a sensation in terms of its choreography and direction... the dystopian pop video had something else going for it too - the power to crash laptops according to Microsoft, and not just those that it was playing on... "It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used," explained Mr Chen. Advertisement The issue was similar to an opera singer being able to shatter a glass by singing a particular tone... Thankfully laptops today won't suffer from the same issue - Microsoft says the manufacturer added "a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback"."
Meme - No Context Brits @NoContextBrits: "Let's take a minute to appreciate 'cappuccino' in Welsh.
Coffi / Americano...
Ffrothi Coffi / Cappuccino"
Singapore’s powerhouses neglect local intellectual life | THE Features - "the NUS and NTU suffer from stunted development. Even as they rise in global rankings, their contribution to the country’s intellectual life is relatively modest. Particularly in the humanities and the social sciences, they are largely absent precisely when their expertise is most needed – when complex and controversial issues call for the clarity, context and research-based insight that we academics claim to be able to provide. This retreat from the public sphere has been so complete and enduring that it is no longer noticed. It doesn’t occur to most Singaporeans that our universities could be playing a much broader social role.... At the very least, universities should be able to serve as honest brokers, convening discussions on challenging topics. After all, they are the only institutions in our society that give their employees the time and resources – largely taxpayer-funded – to think differently. They are not pressed to arrive at policy positions. They are not required to be popular or profitable. They can examine problems deeply, challenge conventional wisdom, clarify issues, offer insights that are counter-intuitive and keep contrarian viewpoints bubbling on the back burner for future reference. One might even say that they have a moral responsibility to do all this... Consider, for example, the government’s move to amend the Constitution to reserve presidential elections periodically for candidates from Singapore’s racial minority groups. There were individual academics interested enough to make submissions to 2016’s Constitutional Commission, but the activity fell far short of what would be considered normal elsewhere, perhaps for want of a critical mass of such scholars. In a different setting, universities would have been falling over themselves to convene public events to discuss such a major move before the parliamentary vote. Legal scholars and political scientists would explore constitutional implications and issues concerning political representation. Sociologists might want to showcase their research into ethnic identity and politics. For anthropologists, this could be an opportunity to share their research on the construction of race. In a normal developed country, local universities might run a series of public seminars on such subjects. Not in Singapore... Just as our national orchestras give free concerts at the Botanic Gardens to help cultivate an appreciation for music, research universities need to be out there showing the public that their intellectual work is worth supporting. Furthermore, schooling that’s confined to textbooks and classroom learning, by professors who show no interest in the real world passing by their window, wouldn’t amount to much of an education... The most disappointing case of going regional and global at the expense of the local must be political science at the NUS. I’ve followed public forums on local politics for decades. In recent years, one thing that has become practically guaranteed is that none of the speakers on Singapore politics will come from the NUS department of political science. To understand why, visit the department’s website and study the faculty profiles. At the time of writing, of 29 full-time faculty members, only one – a veteran now in his sixties – claims Singapore’s domestic politics as a research interest. In contrast, 22 colleagues – including all seven assistant professors – do not have “Singapore” anywhere on their research profiles or publication lists. Just five of the department’s scholars list at least one published work with “Singapore” in the title, and only two of these publications are more recent than 2013. You have to go back to Chan Heng Chee in the 1980s to find an NUS political science don who has made a seminal contribution to our understanding of Singapore politics. It’s a situation that would be unthinkable in virtually all developed countries. Political science is an extreme but not unique case. If you scanned the research interests and backgrounds of faculty in NUS economics, for instance, you’d have a hard time guessing which country or even region the department belonged to. You might think it was based in Greater China, or perhaps in a US university with an Asia-Pacific focus... There are two fairly obvious reasons for our universities’ C-minus performance in Singapore studies: the lack of academic freedom and the absence of a Singaporean core in many departments. Political restrictions date back to the first decade and a half of independence from Malaysia, in the 1960s and 1970s, when the government cracked down on activism in what were then the University of Singapore and Nanyang University. From the ashes, the new NUS and NTU rose like phoenixes – with a permanent phobia of the fires of politics. In many fields, academics are also thwarted by a lack of access to government data. For this reason, one can hardly blame economists for choosing not to specialise in Singapore. Historians have a different problem. They know too much. Declassified British records in London offer a rich vein of evidence concerning Singapore’s pre-independence history – but mining this lode puts historians on a collision course with the government’s official narrative. Sadly, this has meant that young academic historians of Singapore are able to find work more easily outside the country. It would be simplistic, however, to blame only the government. The universities’ problems are partly own goals scored by administrators obsessed by the research productivity game. This rewards those who churn out papers in so-called top-tier journals, ignoring the fact that these journals are published in, by and for the West... The US and its concerns lie at the core of most disciplines; the rest of the world is peripheral. It is a frustration familiar not only to scholars of Singapore, but also to academics in Australia, the UK, Hong Kong and elsewhere. In these other societies, however, universities put up stiffer resistance to the imposition of key performance indicators that would undermine their core mission to study their own locales"
Whatever happened to John Thompson, the ND farm kid who had his arms ripped off in a 1992 farm accident? - "Thompson blacked out and awoke to his dog licking his face and the realization that his arms were gone... No one else was home, so he walked 100 yards to the house to call for help — turning the doorknob with his mouth to get inside and using a pencil to dial the phone. Then he sat in the bathtub to prevent blood from getting on his mom’s new carpet... “I was bleeding out,” he said. “By the time I got to the hospital, they said ‘You shouldn't be alive because there's no blood in you.’”... Thompson and his arms were eventually loaded onto a plane for Minneapolis where the arms would be reattached... After getting his arms reattached by surgeon Dr. Allen Van Beek (a 1966 University of North Dakota graduate) at North Memorial Hospital in Robbinsdale, Minn., he was put into a coma for four weeks so he could heal. Thompson nearly died of a blood infection and endured more surgery and intensive rehabilitation... Thompson says he had to take people to small claims court and was even threatened by someone who was offended that Thompson wouldn’t shake his hand. His reattached hands are unable to fully open."
Meme - "THANK YOU JESUS, FOR THIS MEAL."
"DE NADA"
Government surpluses and foreign reserves in Singapore - "Many Singaporeans think that the government can engage in massive, even “generous”, deficit spending to rescue citizens, businesses and the economy from the COVID-19 pandemic and its devastating economic aftermath, because of its past “prudence” in accumulating large foreign reserves that can be tapped in this emergency. If we delve more deeply, however, it becomes clear that the issue is far more complex. Indeed a strong case can be made that a slower pace of accumulating fiscal surpluses would actually deliver far better outcomes for the Singapore economy... given that—unlike in other countries and contrary to international transparency norms—the size of Singapore’s reserves is a state secret, it is difficult for investors to gauge how much they should figure into credit risk assessments. Disclosure of the reserves would remove this uncertainty, making borrowing even easier and cheaper, in addition to other benefits discussed below. Both reserve accumulation and borrowing involve inter-temporal, inter-generational transfers of financial resources, but their distributive consequences differ. Reserve accumulation is inherently regressive: it transfers resources from poorer earlier generations to today’s or tomorrow’s richer generations when reserves are eventually expended. Borrowing, on the other hand, must be repaid by future generations, who, given an expectation of positive economic growth, will be richer than today’s generation, so better able to afford repaying the debt. Only those with extraordinarily little faith in Singapore’s fundamentals and leadership would project a future of absolute economic decline, making debt repayment an issue more serious than that faced by most of the world’s troubled economies... The roughly 45 percent wage (labor income) share of GDP is also very low, and the nearly 50 percent share of profits (returns to capital) extremely high, by historical and international standards. Savings have been high (between 35 percent and 50 percent of GDP every year since 1981) because of mandatory CPF contributions, a weak social safety net (necessitating high precautionary savings), demographics (low dependency ratio or number of dependents to working-age population), and high income inequality (since the rich save more of their income than the poor)... the size and longevity of Singapore’s annual budget surpluses would be historically unprecedented worldwide in the post-feudal capitalist era. Budget surpluses feed into current account surpluses, the excess of Exports (X) over Imports (M), which in Singapore have averaged well above 10 percent of GDP every year since 1991, and over 20 percent since 2005. Such persistently large external surpluses make us vulnerable to international accusations of “mercantilism” and “currency manipulation”... Government budget surpluses (public sector savings) mean that Singapore wage-earners, consumers and private businesses have had less to spend on consumption and investment (both of which spur economic growth and create employment) than they otherwise would have. Consumer welfare and living standards have been lower than necessary for three decades. This is the (opportunity) cost of reserves... Don’t Singaporeans benefit from the investment income generated from these reserves? Yes, the reserves provide a “net investment returns contribution” or NIRC to the budget, accounting in fiscal year 2017 for close to 20 percent of total government expenditure. But the NIRC figure given in each budget is not the actual investment income earned each year; rather it is very conservatively defined as up to 50 percent of the long-term expected real returns (including capital gains) of the relevant assets. There is no particular rationale for the 50 percent figure, which is simply an arbitrary rule of thumb, while the term “relevant assets” suggests that not all assets are included... Even before the current pandemic, Singapore economists have argued for more government expenditure to fund an expanded social safety net. This is eminently affordable for a rich country that spends a lot less on social goods than others at the same income level. For example, Yeoh Lam Keong, former GIC chief economist, estimates that it will take just 0.5 to 1 percent of GDP to eliminate absolute poverty by bringing Singapore’s poor and elderly up to a basic income level. Notably, the latter group especially contributed to the build-up of reserves through their decades of high savings and low consumption... For thirty years, Singapore’s economic development strategy has relied heavily on supply-side policies of infrastructure provision, corporate subsidies (“investment incentives”), wage controls or subsidies, education and skills upgrading to attract foreign investment. Yet in the recent period topline GDP growth has inexorably slowed, the share of indigenous GDP in total GDP has been falling, and there has not been evolution of a self-sustaining indigenous productive capacity, let alone a cadre of domestic multinationals that can lead private sector growth. The economic challenge for Singapore then has been to find new sources of demand, made much more urgent with COVID-19 and likely future pandemics which devastate highly globalized sectors... In Norway, a small rich country with potentially hostile large neighbors, whose sovereign wealth funds are the world leaders in size, performance and governance, such long-term forecasts, including the size and growth of reserves, are public information."
