Builder rushed to A&E after turning blue ... but reason left him red-faced - "A builder was rushed to hospital after turning blue, only to discover that his skin had been dyed by his bedsheets. Tommy Lynch, 42, had bought navy blue bedsheets and slept in them for two nights when he woke up looking like “an Avatar”, the blue aliens from the hit movie. He felt “extremely tired” and a friend, who works as a carer, took one look at him before rushing him to the nearest hospital. Mr Lynch, from Castle Gresley, Derbyshire, was taken straight to see a doctor and was given a bed within minutes, while concerned staff put him on oxygen. When the doctor at Queen’s Hospital in Burton rubbed his arm with an alcohol wipe, the swab turned blue, causing Mr Lynch to realise that his skin had been dyed by his new, unwashed sheets... “The doctors said they’d never seen someone that colour before and still been alive. I looked like an Avatar.""
Babak Taghvaee - The Crisis Watch on X - "BREAKING: Disguised as opponents of Iran’s Islamic regime, two collaborators of the regime’s intelligence service assassinated an Iranian dissident in Canada almost 40 days ago. Canadian authorities in British Columbia have charged two individuals with first-degree murder in connection with the death of Massoud Masjoudi, a former university professor who lived in Burnaby. According to the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, Mehdi Ahmadzadeh Razavi (48) from Maple Ridge and Arezoo Soltani (45) from North Vancouver were arrested on Friday. Police said the charges were filed after Masjoudi’s remains were discovered just over a week ago, on March 5, in the city of Mission."
Damn Israel! Damn USA!
Nazanin Afshin-Jam MacKay on X - "Today is a painful day for Iranian-Canadians upon learning about the murder of long-time opponent of the Islamic Republic regime and mathematician, @MasoodMasjoody . The day before his trial was scheduled to begin, where he was expected to expose what he had learned about connections to the IRGC, he suspiciously disappeared. Homicide investigators later discovered his body in Mission, British Columbia, on March 6. Two individuals, Arezou Soltani of North Vancouver and Mehdi Ahmadzadeh Razavi of Maple Ridge have been arrested and charged in connection with his murder. Masjoody had previously reported to police that he believed his life was in danger from these two suspects. Investigators should continue their work to determine who else may be linked and a danger to Canadians. According to newspaper The Province, "In a letter to then prime minister Justin Trudeau in 2021, Masjoody said he had flagged Iranian regime programs that were involved in sensitive engineering and technology fields and warned that technologies developed in Canada could be brought back to Iran for nefarious purposes." He also identified students at SFU who could be connected to the regime's IRGC. https://theprovince.com/news/two-men-c harged-first-degree-murder-masood-masjoody/wcm/ff576c5d-3f23-4b96-bc62-0ce342dc1a29 This case should not close. Investigators should continue to examine his alleged findings. As an Iranian Canadian activist, I can say that many of us have never felt safe, and this tragedy only deepens those fears. For years, we have been warning Canadian officials to wake up to the export of the regime's Islamist extremist ideology here in Canada, as well as concerns about funding networks, safe haven for regime officials in Canada, billions of dollars in money laundering, and the possibility of sleeper cells. To @MarkJCarney @csiscanada @rcmpgrcpolice @Safety_Canada @gary_srp , please take our concerns seriously."
Meme - "Rank Order of Gender Hostility Factor Scores by National Setting (N = 27)
National Setting. Men's Hostility toward Women
Greece .42
India .19
United States .19
Taiwan .16
South Korea .11
Germany .08
New Zealand .06
China .06
Mexico .06
Great Britain .04
Australia .04
Russian Federation .02
Hong Kong -.02
Brazil -. 04
Lithuania -. 05
Portugal -. 06
Canada -. 08
Singapore -. 08
Israel -. 12
Switzerland -. 21
Romania -. 26
Guatemala -. 30
Hungary -. 34
Iran -. 36
Sweden -. 37
Belgium -. 47
Netherlands -. 87
National Setting. Women's Hostility toward Men
South Korea .53
India .51
Taiwan .48
Mexico .37
Lithuania .27
China .18
Russian Federation .18
Hong Kong .17
United States .15
Great Britain .15
Romania .12
Portugal .10
Brazil .10
Iran .08
Guatemala .07
Greece .04
Singapore .00
Germany -. 03
Australia -. 07
New Zealand -. 17
Israel -. 17
Canada -. 19
Switzerland -. 20
Hungary -. 22
Belgium -. 52
Sweden -. 53
Netherlands -. 89"
I can't find out where this is from, but it looks like women hate men more than men hate women, and other studies show similar rank orders for countries
Who will rid us of the password tyranny? - "Why, in the name of all things locomotive, do you need a password to buy a railway ticket? Is there a fear that otherwise the Chinese will secretly buy an Anytime Return to Grantham on your Trainline account? Heaven knows it is hard enough to travel by train already. Only a doctoral student in stochastics could understand the conditions for buying an Advance Supersaver to Tiverton Parkway. And when you’ve got in your hand a printed-out ticket for a reserved window seat in the quiet carriage, you find that the seat is next to a solid wall with no view even of a restricted kind... It’s not just trains. I’m afraid I lost my patience the other day when I was buying some soap – verbena as it happened – and the nice woman behind the till asked me my postcode. I humoured her until she wanted to “check” my surname. Has it come to this, that you have to give your name and address to buy a bar of soap?... The trouble is that you are now required to buy things online, not in a shop or at a booking office. The secondhand bookshops have closed and the streets are full of youths on bicycles delivering burgers at two in the morning. Even for a free exhibition at the National Gallery you are encouraged to purchase online a ticket for £0.00. Once the outlets have got you to open an account, it naturally has to be protected by a password. Never mind that in a hack of the Transport for London website in 2024 an estimated 10 million people had their names, email addresses, home phone numbers, mobile phone numbers and physical addresses taken. Not that we’d have minded a generation ago. We used to have our names, physical addresses and phone numbers published all the time, in a thing called a telephone directory. Very useful it was too. But now, in order to buy 100 metres of Gütermann black extra strong thick polyester button thread or a ticket for a performance of James MacMillan’s Stabat Mater, you have to remember your password for Amazon or Ticketmaster. You can’t remember them all, of course, which leads you into the temptation of using the same password for everything, exposing you to the immediate attention of Scattered Spider, the teenage hacking franchise that wants to extort a ransom to unfreeze your online activities. Despite the millions of data breaches, your bank still wants you never to darken its branch again but to do all your banking online. Then the bank can sell the branch. The need for passwords is largely illusory, giving at best an unreal sense of security. The identity cards that the Government keeps trying to force on us are just a way for it to be a Scattered Spider to our private information. The ID will be controlled by a password. For criminals that will be an opportunity for forgery and fraud. For honest citizens the thing won’t bloody work and we’ll all risk becoming non-persons."
easyJet passengers' outrage as elderly woman 'already dead' when wheeled onto flight - "easyJet passengers have alleged that an elderly British woman who was assisted onto a flight by her family was already dead before she got on the plane. The 89-year-old woman was helped onto the plane at Malaga Airport in Spain by five relatives, with onlookers stating that the family informed easyJet staff she was feeling unwell and had fallen asleep. However, just before take-off, the crew were notified of the woman's death. Consequently, the plane was halted before it could leave the runway, resulting in a 12-hour delay for the flight to London Gatwick... According to fellow travellers, the group managed to board the plane by assuring a staff member who questioned the woman's apparent ill health that she was 'merely tired'. One passenger even claimed to hear a member of the group reassure the staff member that they were "doctors"... According to easyJet, the elderly woman possessed a fit to fly certificate and was alive when she boarded the aircraft. However, passengers were convinced that something far more serious than fatigue was occurring."
Disabled woman cooped up for 42 days in a Virginia hotel room freed - "A Virginia woman in a wheelchair who had been stuck on the top floor of a four-story hotel for 42 days is finally able to go outside. Joy Patton, a disabled woman in a wheelchair, had been stuck on the fourth floor of the Woodspring Suites Extended Stay hotel, which had not had a working elevator since April 10, which is the last time she had been outside. The Pattons said the hotel’s local management told them their room rate would rise from about $600 per week to more than $1,000 per week after they called Nexstar’s WAVY."
Meme - "God when Satan kills someone *upset*
When he tells someone to kill his own child
Trollface: "it's just a prank, bro""
Inside the weird world of Toronto’s transit seat upholstery - "Other transit systems, most recently in Seattle, have shifted away from fabric seats, citing complaints about cleanliness. Toronto transit is in the midst of its own seat debate... "The advantages of the fabric seats are that they offer more comfort, warmth and friction [preventing sliding]," said Metrolinx spokesperson Lyndsay Miller in an email. "The fabric was chosen because it is extremely durable and easy to clean," she said... "We’ve done a lot of investigation into camouflage as well because it’s used to hide things, hide people, usually," Kerr said. "But this is used to hide dirt," she added, pointing at one of the busy seat patterns. "If you spill mustard here, it’s not going to show as much." Geneticist Christopher Mason swabs subway surfaces around the world, searching for microbial ecosystems, including on fabric and plastic seats. He started swabbing more than a decade ago, when his daughter licked a subway pole and he panicked. But his findings have "quantifiably soothed" him. "Almost everything we find are bacteria and viruses related to plants, related to what you would find on human skin," said Mason, a professor of systems and computational biomedicine at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. "Most of them are already around you to begin with." While Mason has found more kinds of microbes on fabric than plastic, he doesn't think sitting on one type of seat is worse than the other. "If an environment is too clean, it’s actually bad. Part of your immune system is you need training," he said. "Plastic often has less diversity. So if anything, I’d probably want more of these diverse surfaces on the subway." Mason says it's still vital the seats get cleaned though."
Siavash Safavi on X - "There is no "Islamic" golden age of science. Ibn Khaldun, Arab sociologist: "Only the Persians engaged in the task of preserving knowledge and writing systematic scholarly works. Thus the truth of the Prophet's statement becomes apparent, 'If knowledge was hanging from the highest stars in heaven, the Persians would attain it'..." Ibn Khaldun, the Arab father of sociology, continues: "It is a remarkable fact that with few exceptions, most Muslim scholars…in the intellectual sciences have been non-Arabs. Thus even the founders of (Arabic) grammar were Sibawaih and after him... all of them were of Persian… great jurists were Persians… ." Regarding the Islamic Golden Age of Science, Abbasid Caliph Mamun, who had an Iranian mother, defeated his brother Amin with an Iranian army and became the Caliph. He started the "Translation Movement", and science books from Persia, Greek Egypt, and conquered Roman territories were translated into one language, Arabic, which naturally caused a scientific boom. Not because of Islam, but because of Mamun, who fought the Abbasid nobility tooth and nail and defeated them. Go check the list of Islamic "fathers of sciences". Majority of them are Iranians, and a lot of the rest are Spanish. Kharazmi, Biruni, Avesina (Ibn Sina), Rhazes (Razi), Khayyam, Farabi, Majusi, Tusi, and Farabi, were all Iranians just to name a few. Not Islamic scientists. Most of them were actually labeled as Kafir by Islamists of their time. (If you don't recognize some of these names, add an "al" at the beginning of them and you might.) Also, there is no "Islamic architecture." What you have is Islam appropriating Iranian and Mesopotamian architecture. You see that dome on top of most mosques? That's signature Iranian architecture. And yes, the Taj Mahal is an example of Iranian architecture. The translation movement was immediately stopped by the Abbasids after al-Mamun and its effects died down in a few centuries. There was never another scientific boom in the Islamic world. I have searched every claim I made here and they seem to be well-established facts. I encourage you to research them and tell me if I'm wrong. This is not a flex about history. That's a stupid thing to do. I love my Arab friends and I hate tribalism. My issue is not even with Islam as a personal religion but with Islamism as a political and public force. I do believe in national identity, and I don't like lies, and Islamists have been spreading them for as long as I can remember. Islamists have one identity, Islam, no nationality exists under Islamism. If we are to step forward with open eyes, we have to recognize the false narratives we were fed for generations and know exactly where we come from.
Photo on the left: The Armenian Cathedral in Isfahan, Vank. An example of Iranian, and not Islamic, architecture.
Photo on the right: Inside the Taj Mahal, designed by an Iranian architect."
VKTR on X - "today i learned about the chinese circular gooner economy. delivery drivers work 12 hour shifts on meituan → tip their earnings to egirls livestreaming on douyin → girls are too exhausted from streaming to cook → order takeout on meituan → same drivers deliver it → tip again. 100% efficient monetary velocity. i expect this dystopian meta to hit the west soon"
blighter on X - ""Rufo attacked American programs promoting women's rights in Afghanistan" so fun to see this old chestnut trotted out again! reminder that we spent over *$2 trillion* on afghanistan over 20 years. more than $100 billion *per year* for *20 years*. on a country where the GDP at its max was ~$20B. so we were spending 5x the entire country's GDP. but it was all worth it and should have continued forever bc "programs promoting women's rights in Afghanistan". absolutely amazing. just incredible."
Morbid Knowledge on X - "A 52-year-old farmer in Lancashire, England, has been arrested after allegedly tying two young men, aged 17 and 20, to his quad bike and driving them four miles to the police station for trespassing on his land. Leland Hornby, 17, said his friend had been riding an electric bike on the property when they got locked in and decided to return the next morning. Upon returning, they found the bike missing, and the farmer confronted them and hogtied them to his quad bike. The farmer, arrested on suspicion of false imprisonment and assault, has been released on bail."
‘Mind the Grab’: London’s Most Famous Shopping Street Has a Controversial New Sidewalk Theft Warning - "On a stretch of one of London’s most famous streets, a new campaign is trying to raise awareness about rampant phone theft through bold purple sidewalk lines and a cheeky message: “Mind the Grab” — a reference to the iconic “Mind the Gap” warning used in the London Underground. The sidewalk warnings launched this summer amid a surge in thefts where people, often on mopeds or e-bikes, snatch phones from the unsuspecting hands of people in busy pedestrian zones. In 2023, Westminster recorded more than 34,000 phone thefts, roughly 94 per day"
The descent of the UK into a low trust society
LiorLefineder on X - "Modern Soqotra has rates of 35-40% cousin marriage but looking at the rate of inbreeding from ancient DNA in medieval Soqotra, there was no first cousin marriage, "ROH data also provide evidence for an absence of close kin unions, defined here as first cousins or closer"."
Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 on X - "Wow wow! An isolated, island-based Arab Christian population had rather little cousin marriage: until they converted to Islam."
Dystopia has arrived: a reality show where men compete to impregnate a woman - "Despite being pretty in a Getty-stock-image kind of way, and despite being a successful holistic health and beauty expert, Kristy has not yet found her fantasy husband. So she has turned to reality television programming to help her out. That’s the premise of the new show Labor of Love, in which 15 men compete to be the “one” honored with impregnating the show’s heroine. As I watched her journey toward motherhood unfold, I thought, finally. Finally, someone has found a way to make a buck off the fracturing of the American family."
Meme - Brian Krassenstein: "We have left the United States for Montreal. No corruption here."
"MACLEANS. Quebec: The most Corrupt province. Why does Quebec claim so many of the nation's political scandals?"
Meme - kelvin4pres: "I love you NTU thanks for giving me an education and now a job but that's not how acronyms work"
"gAmes for HeaLth InnoVations CentrE (ALIVE)"
Why petrol prices go up like rockets but fall like feathers – in S’pore and globally - "Experts believe the “rockets and feathers” phenomenon is also playing out. The term was coined by economist and researcher Robert Bacon, who observed that petrol prices in the UK took off like a rocket when crude oil prices increased, and fell slowly like a feather when crude oil prices decreased. He recorded “faster and more concentrated responses” by petrol prices to increases in the cost of oil, in findings published in the Energy Economics journal in July 1991. Mr Sam Chua, Rystad Energy’s principal for Asia-Pacific advisory, said: "When costs rise, retailers move fast to protect their margins. No business wants to absorb a loss. “But when costs fall, there is little urgency to be the first to pass on the savings.” Because fuel demand is barely sensitive to price changes, petrol stations “face less pressure to quickly lower prices when costs come down”, he added. This pricing scenario largely played out in Singapore when Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb 24, 2022. Back then, posted prices of 95-octane petrol ranged from $2.75 to $2.85 per litre, according to records from the Consumers Association of Singapore’s price tracker, Price Kaki, before climbing to a peak of $3.42 per litre. Months passed before oil prices eased, and prices of 95-octane eventually returned to pre-invasion levels... Even if the Middle East conflict subsides, consumers may face a harsh reality, as petrol station operators could hesitate to lower fuel prices ahead of their competitors. Mr Chua said: “With prices across retailers tending to move in tandem, no single player has a strong incentive to cut first.”"
What Ever Happened to Paul Ehrlich’s ‘Population Bomb’? - WSJ - "In his 1968 book “The Population Bomb,” Paul Ehrlich famously declares that unless countries engage in population control, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” in a “race to oblivion.” He was wrong (“The Paul Ehrlich Apocalypse Is Back,” Review & Outlook, Jan. 4). Sadly though, the Stanford University biologist’s claims helped drive human-rights abuses around the world, from forced sterilizations in India to forced abortions under China’s disastrous one-child policy. Interestingly, Sunita Narain, head of the Centre for Science and Environment, a New Delhi think tank, blamed government planning, not birthrates, for the extreme crowding that first inspired Mr. Ehrlich. “If you want to understand Delhi’s [population] growth,” she argues, “you should study economics and sociology, not ecology and population biology.” Similar lessons apply today. The danger is that global action responding to the risk of people starving to death due to climate change could be heightened by the unintended consequences of government policies. Happily, neither catastrophe needs to occur if market forces are allowed to leverage human ingenuity."
"I was a college student when I read Mr. Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb.” I took it to heart and now have no grandchildren, but 50 years later the population has increased to eight billion without dire consequences. I was gullible and stupid."
Trust the Experts! Even if they are always wrong
Guillaume Cabanac tracks fake science - "Each night, this tool’s Torture detector scrutinises the 120 million publications indexed by the bibliographical database Dimensions, in an effort to ferret out tortured expressions. This term refers to incongruous assemblies of words, which are symptomatic of misconduct and fraud, and unfortunately get past the filters of certain ineffective or even fraudulent journals, thereby corrupting a small fraction of the scientific literature. To understand why, we must put ourselves in the shoes of fraudsters. For them, simply cutting and pasting paragraphs from legitimate articles – the building block for creating a fake paper – is not possible due to plagiarism detectors. However, they can paraphrase the text with synonyms thanks to software designed for this very purpose, although this may generate the famous tortured phrases. Paste the result without checking it, and you get “kidney disappointment” instead of kidney failure. “Bosom peril” rather than breast cancer. “Nucleic corrosive” in place of nucleic acid. And “counterfeit consciousness” stands in for artificial intelligence!"
This was pre-AI too
The Oval walkways at Ohio State University were paved based on the students' desire paths. : r/interestingasfuck
User-centred design
Meme - "No one caught speeding here today but there was 81 crashes *blonde police officer with shapely butt with radar gun*"
More than 30 Canadian Army soldiers get frostbite in Arctic - "More than 30 soldiers based in Petawawa suffered frostbite injuries during a recent exercise in Alaska, prompting concerns about the quality of equipment military personnel are issued."
Time to send more aid to Ukraine!
👻🐌Jag🐌👻 on X - "In 1845, 79 people died in a bridge collapse over the River Bure because a large crowd had gathered to watch a clown in a bathtub be pulled upriver by four geese."
