August 2007 Entries

August 29, 2007

Technology will be the death of us

[from Ananova]
A new hi-tech toothbrush has been launched with built-in "satnav".

Maker Oral B claim that as you clean your teeth it transmits information by radio to a separate miniature display screen, telling you where you should clean.

It also tells you how long you should brush for and if you're brushing too hard or not hard enough, reports the Daily Mail.

The manufacturers are hoping their new gizmo - called Triumph with SmartGuide - is going to be this year's Christmas must-have in the bathroom.

It comes with a wireless LCD display which can be stuck on to the shaving mirror.

Oral B says its research suggests that people using the device are four times more likely to spend two minutes per clean than if using a manual brush.

The firm's dental expert Dr Surinder Hundle said: "We are dedicated to helping improve the way people care for their teeth and gums and taking a lot of the guesswork out of brushing.

"Triumph with SmartGuide does just that, guiding the user in real time to help improve his or her brushing habits."

The Triumph is on sale nationwide from next month and will be back with a big advertising campaign in the months running up to Christmas.

August 25, 2007

Yikes

[from Ananova]
Malaysian doctors performed a 30-minute operation to free the testicles of a nine-year old stuck in a metal pipe after the boy slipped while bathing, a newspaper has said.

In response to a call from his brother in an adjacent room, the boy climbed up a partition in the bathroom, but slipped and fell on an uncovered metal pipe, trapping his testicles in the narrow tube, the New Straits Times said.

Medical staff answering the emergency call at the boy's home on the northern island of Penang were unable to remove the L-shaped pipe and had to call in firemen.

They used a hydraulic cutter to open both ends of the pipe before the child could be taken to hospital, shrieking in agony.

He was discharged after doctors performed a half-hour operation.

August 24, 2007

Electricity + Water

[from El Reg]
A North Carolina teenager who decided the best way to cool his Xbox's overheating power supply was to stick it in a bowl of water was knocked unconcious by the resulting electric shock and earned himself a trip to hospital with "minor burns to his right hand and foot".

According to local news reports, the 14-year-old Brevard youth was having a spot of bother with his console which would shut down every five minutes. His mum told the press he "thought the problem was likely linked to overheating" and duly "tried to fix it on his own based on tips he found online".

This apparently involved wrapping the offending power supply in plastic and tape and dunking it in said bowl "while it was still plugged in". His mother explained: "When I left to go next door he was playing a game but when I got back he was laying on his back on the floor and unconscious."

The young man was subsequently detained overnight at the local Transylvania Community Hospital.

August 22, 2007

Buy my house, pt 2

As my regular reader will know, two years ago I put my house up for sale and it stayed that way for fifteen months before I finally gave up in an explosion of expletives.

Now, after having the garden completely remodelled, I am trying again.

The good news is that the theoretical value of my house has gone up by around 10% since I gave up nine months ago, so maybe all the hassle last year, and the frustration over a collapsed sale, will turn out for the good.

My plan is to have it sold within six weeks. Although I said that last time too.

August 19, 2007

Crime of passion?

[from BBC News]
Pet camel kills Australian woman

A woman in Australia has been killed by her pet camel after the animal apparently tried to have sex with her.

The woman was found dead at the family's sheep and cattle ranch near the town of Mitchell in Queensland.

The woman had been given the camel as a 60th birthday present earlier this year because of her love of exotic pets.

The camel was just 10 months old but already weighed 152kg (336lbs) and had come close to suffocating the family's pet goat on a number of occasions.

On Saturday the woman apparently became the object of the male camel's desire.

It knocked her to the ground, lay on top of her and displayed what the police delicately described as mating behaviour.

Young camels are not normally aggressive but can become more threatening if treated and raised as pets.

August 18, 2007

Monkey news

[found on NewScientist.com and confirmation that I will soon be out of a job]
It takes a smart monkey to do mathematics, and although Elsa Addessi insists her 10 capuchins aren't quite doing sums, she admits they must be pretty clever to be able to pass the tests that she has put them through. One can even handle multiplication.

Addessi, a researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies in Rome, Italy, tested whether her capuchins could understand the value of monkey money, and then use it to buy the greatest amount of food.

First, all ten capuchins successfully learned that a blue token would "buy" them one piece of peanut whereas a yellow token would get them three, and if offered the choice between one of each token, they would be better off choosing a yellow one.

But things became more difficult when they were asked to choose between one yellow and up to five blue tokens.

Two monkeys went for quantity, always choosing the larger stack of tokens on offer, regardless of the token's colour. Another four preferred colour over quantity, always choosing yellow tokens over blue, however many blue tokens were on offer.

Addessi thinks this may be due to the design of the experiment: the monkeys were given three peanuts all in one go in exchange for a yellow token, whereas they had to hand over five blue tokens one by one before they received five peanuts. "I think waiting for their reward made them upset, frustrated," she says.

However, "four capuchins were able to maximise their payoff," says Addessi. These monkeys could work out that four blue tokens bought more food than a single yellow token, whereas two blue tokens were of lesser value.

Addessi and her colleagues then tested the four "smart" capuchins and two others further. This time they were allowed to choose between two yellow tokens, worth six peanut pieces, and four or five blue tokens, worth four or five peanut pieces respectively.

One of the monkeys didn't understand the test at all. Three stuck to yellow tokens regardless, leaving just two monkeys that were able to maximise their payoff.

Addessi says the monkeys are not actually doing maths, but roughly estimating which lot of tokens is worth more. If they were doing maths, they would find it just as easy to discriminate, say, between six and five pieces of nut as between six and four pieces.

But the monkeys were better at discriminating between numbers further apart, for instance when they could choose between six and four pieces, represented by two yellow tokens and four blue, rather than between six and five, represented by two yellow tokens and five blue.

The ability to discriminate between "less" and "more" is important for most animals. Figuring out which tree has more berries on it, for example, or determining whether there are more friends than enemies in an area, are matters of life and death.

What is unique about Addessi's study is that the monkeys didn't just choose between quantities but also showed they were able to represent them using symbols – much as humans use coins to represent value.

"I find this quite surprising coming from an animal that diverged from us 35 million years ago," Addessi told New Scientist.

August 16, 2007

Darwinian cleansing

[from Ananova]
The show went on after a Serb and a Croat stabbed each other for real during a theatre performance.

Dozens of people walked out and one woman fainted after the incident at a theatre in the Croatian port of Zadar.

The actors, seated under their national flags, put their hands on the table and stabbed the woodwork between their fingers with real kitchen knives.

After five rounds the table was covered in blood, and one of the actors had part of a finger missing.

The actors, Croat Boris Kadin and Serb Kristian Al-Droubi, both needed to be hospitalised afterwards to have their wounds stitched, and Kadin had lost a part of one of his fingers.

The play, called Not Like Me, was being performed by the Via Negativa troupe. It focuses on the relations between Croats and Serbs in the troubled region.

August 13, 2007

Goat action

[from Ananova]
A German farmer lost 10,000 Euros when it was eaten by his goat.

But he got it back after having a vet carry out emergency surgery to recover the cash.

Martin Radlberger, 34, from Rosenheim in Germany left the 100 Euro notes that he planned to use to buy a tractor on the kitchen table when he went to answer the phone.

But when he returned he saw his nanny goat Steffi just finishing off the last crisp new note.

He said: "I know I shouldn't have left the cash on the table, but I was only gone for five minutes to answer a phone call. When I returned I saw how my goat had the last note in her mouth."

Radlberger immediately called a vet who performed an emergency operation on the animal.

"Now I have almost all my money back, and Steffi has had a hard lesson" the farmer says, adding that the vet had kept three of the soggy 100 Euro notes to pay for the surgery.

August 10, 2007

Retirement

I watched the movie About Schmidt last weekend and it got me wondering.

Oh, it was about Jack Nicholson retiring and having a late-life crisis. Or it was about a dude called Schmidt, played by Jack Nicholson, retiring, etc.

The thing is, I have been working for 20 years for a whole range of companies, big and small. I have worked with many hundreds of people, and I have never once seen a person retire.

Do the nearly-retired go to special companies to retire from? Is it like the elephants' graveyard, crawling on their knees with their final shallow breaths?

Or perhaps I have seen a bunch of people retire without ever realising it. They pretend they are going to another job, or just popping out for a sandwich, and disappear into the land where people read the entire newspaper every day.

It also made me wonder about my own retirement - it needs to be soon, obviously, and involve foxy handmaidens, whatever they might be, lots of money, and a butt-load of drugs for when either my mind or body hits the skids.

August 8, 2007

Quackers

Fire chiefs rushed 18 crew, three engines, a Land Rover and a rescue boat to a 999 call - to save a trapped duck.

Residents feared a child had drowned as teams raced up to 35 miles to the scene with blue lights flashing and sirens blaring, reports The Sun.

Locals were stunned to find the "casualty" was Daffy, a white Aylesbury, trapped in a drainage tunnel.

A woman called 999 after finding the duck stuck between sluices near Earlswood, West Midlands.

Residents blasted the three-hour operation to free the bird, which lives on a nearby lake, as a "waste of money".

Retired fireman Neil Guest, 54, said: "It was unbelievable.

"There were five men to each engine, an officer in charge and two with the dinghy. That duck got treated better than people did in the floods."

Warwickshire fire bosses said it was their "good deed for the day".

August 5, 2007

Awwww

A dog swims more than 4km every day to nurse her newborn puppies who are stranded on an island.

The dog, already a celebrity in Chongqing city, is called Huahua by local people.

She gave birth to four pups at Shanhuba, which has become an island in the Changjiang River due to the heavy rains this summer.

Huahua swims 1.2 km to the island every day to nurse her four babies. Then she returns to the Changjiang River, following the flow of the water, to swim another 1.1 km to another part of the city to feed herself.

Each day Huahua does the whole journey twice, once in the morning, around 7 am, and again at 7 pm, at which point she stays with her pups on the island and returns to the city the next morning.

Huang Pingren, a pensioner who swims to the island everyday, says he discovered the amazing dog a few weeks ago.

"I was resting on the island, and found the unprotected litter of dogs. Then in the evening, around 7 pm, I saw a dog swimming to the bank and then running to the newborns."

Huang even published a story on the internet, describing the great deeds of the dog mother, and leading to an outpouring of enthusiasm from readers.

"Many citizens found me and said they wanted to do something, like contribute food or money, but I told them not to, since I was afraid too many visitors may scare the mom away."

Two days ago, the water rose again, and the mother has moved her children to a higher point on the island, reports Chongqing Evening News.

August 3, 2007

Under the Knife

I had a DCR yesterday, which drills a new channel from the tear duct into the nose to make up for the faulty one that already exists.

It was not as unpleasant as it should have been, although the stitches and swelling mean I can't wear my glasses for more than a couple of minutes and without my glasses I am as a bat. Without the sonar.

The stitches come out next week. And if it all works okay (a 70% chance of success) I will get the other eye done.

Here are the photos - pre-op, post-op and de-bandaged: