Australian scientists aim to reduce sheep burps

“Australian scientists are working to breed a sheep that belches less, as they look for ways to reduce harmful methane emissions from the country’s woolly flocks…Twelve percent of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions originate with agriculture, and some 70 percent of that amount is blamed on ruminant livestock, with most of it coming from burps.”

Whether or not you think global warming is real, you gotta love it for providing news like this.

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Smart Phones Allow Quick Diagnosis of Acute Appendicitis
But will doctors text: “UR OK LOLz” and will carriers still charge 95 cents per incoming medical text?

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The Sapeurs of Congo: Open Gutters and Gucci Loafers, Héctor Mediavilla photos of Sapeurs

“The Sapeurs adhere to a subculture of high fashion, often against a backdrop of extreme poverty. Many live in shacks bordered by stinking sewers in the southern suburbs of Brazzaville [Congo]. Those of them who can work double jobs; those who can’t must beg, borrow and occasionally steal; whatever it takes to strut in Versace, Prada and Gucci…Within the SAPE movement there are rivalries and affiliations. Paris vs Brussels, Brazzaville vs Kinshasa, Bacongo vs Mungali. It is total fashion warfare.”

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Explanation for brain fart

“It turns out the root of these brain farts may be a special kind of abnormal brain activity that begins up to 30 seconds before a mistake even happens…The international team of researchers suspects this abnormal behavior is the result of the brain attempting to save effort on a task. When the brain goes too far, errors occur.”

Lazy brain!

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The dark side of the internet

“‘Many many users think that when they search on Google they’re getting all the web pages,’ says Anand Rajaraman…But Rajaraman knows different. ‘I think it’s a very small fraction of the deep web which search engines are bringing to the surface. I don’t know, to be honest, what fraction. No one has a really good estimate of how big the deep web is. Five hundred times as big as the surface web is the only estimate I know.’”

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Study: Believers’ inferences about God’s beliefs are uniquely egocentric

“The final study involved functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure the neural activity of test subjects as they reasoned about their own beliefs versus those of God or another person. The data demonstrated that reasoning about God’s beliefs activated many of the same regions that become active when people reasoned about their own beliefs.”

It turns out that god truly is inside each and every one of us.

When walking in the ritzy area of town even the faux Greek statues ignore us.

Nuclear experts clean radioactive site with household cleaner – “Decontamination experts at the former nuclear site at Dounreay, northern Scotland, are using the Cillit Bang household cleaner to remove radioactive plutonium stains.”

Junk food a stress killer – “A controlled study of rats that were traumatised in early life and went on to exhibit depressed or anxious behaviours found those that were fed lard-laced foods such as cake or pie reversed their stress levels.”

Road rage linked to exposure to petrol fumes – “The study, which is published in the latest issue of the peer review journal BMC Physiology , shows that rats exposed to vapours from leaded and unleaded petrol become more aggressive.”

Fecal architecture for beetle defense and offense – Defense: “[Leaf beetles] spend their youth wearing a growing cylinder of excrement that typically started as rows of rectangular plates that mom applied to the egg. Lab tests exposing young beetles to three kinds of predators show that the fecal architecture pays off in protection.” Offense: “Other leaf beetles have developed excremental structures, such as fecal parasols that bearers use to thump aggressors”

Breath on your skin helps you hear – Next time you tell that special someone you love them, don’t be afraid to get really really close when you say it, you know, just to make sure they hear you properly.

Tiny magnetic discs could kill cancer cells – Just don’t try to get through airport security after.

Most dangerous jobs – Nary a police officer or fire fighter on the list.

MedGrow Cannabis College – It’s all academic until the Horticulture Lab.

So sometimes you write something – you’re excited to be writing and think you’ve written something well and maybe a bit funny and then go back to read it a bit later and find out you’ve been switching tenses and repeating words and phrases and get a bit sad until you realize that it’s all basically okay and you can go back and change the tense and the wording because you’re writing and what you’ve written still tickles your funny bone a skosh and just the simple fact that you’re able to have time to write, or do anything you enjoy doing, is something to be gosh darned thankful for.

I got my replacement credit card in the mail (the original card was about to expire) and activated it.

Or rather, eventually activated it.

I tore the card from the glue on the page with the picture of the kindly, smiling customer service person on it and dialed the activation number.

“Welcome to Acme Super Credit Card Company, home of the ‘No Hassle Card.’ Please say your 16-digit card number.”

“Your 16-digit card number,” I told the automated system.

Okay, I didn’t say that, but I should have, and it would have done me just as good as doing what I actually did, which was try to give it my 16-digit card number. You need me to text, email, click a mouse or just push buttons to communicate with a computer? Fine. No problem. But the moment I have to start talking to one over the phone I start rolling my eyes (which I know doesn’t make a lick of sense because phones are, after all, for talking, not for pushing buttons, but go ahead and ask me if I care) and the stupid automated system on the other end, while not being able to understand unaccented English, always seems to have very keen sarcasm detecting ability and decides to pretend like it doesn’t understand me.

Righteous compu-prick.

So while I’m sitting there reciting the Emancipation Proclamation to the computer – partially in the hope that it will just transfer me to to a live person and partially in the hope that it will break its bonds of servitude to The Man and rise up against its Corporate Oppressors – I get a live person.

At least I think it was a live person, phone center folks are so scripted these days that it can be hard to tell. Usually, just to make sure it’s a live person, I throw a computer-related “yo mama” joke at it (for instance, “Yo momma was so worthless she was a NeXT computer.”)

After confirming the thing I was talking to had a pulse, the customer service representative started asking me all kinds of verification questions and then asked for a password, which really sucked because I didn’t remember ever giving them a password. When I asked if they meant the password I used to access my online account they responded that they couldn’t help me figure out my password.

Which I thought was bad customer service. The one time I actually needed help during the credit card activation experience, the one time where I needed assistance from them instead of giving assistance to them by dutifully answering their silly questions and putting up with their silly automated system, the one time where I – the customer – was asking for service from an actual customer service representative, they wouldn’t help.

I threw another “yo momma” computer joke at them to re-verify their humanity and then gave them “***********” which I totally pulled out of my butt because I really didn’t have a clue as to what I had given them password-wise. Boy howdy, it sure was lucky that my default password for silly things is the word “asterisk” repeated eleven times. (I like to keep my passwords simple.)

So now I’m about 8 minutes into trying to get my replacement credit card verified and I started wondering A) Why a credit card has an expiration date in the first place, and B) Why the person I’m talking to is trying to upsell me on services that are so restrictive that I’d never be able to use them.

Then I realized they do “A” so they’ll get the chance to do “B” and just when I’m congratulating myself on figuring that out the customer service rep asked me if I want them to read the service terms of my credit card.

And it’s about now when I started wondering why Acme Super Credit Card Company bills themselves as the “No Hassle Card’ and wondered who thought it would be good to make customers jump through all these hoops just to use their product/service – scratch that, to just be able to activate their product/service so I can try to use their product/service at some point in the future – when I realized that it was people who don’t ever have to A) Jump through these hoops to use this product/service, and B) Try to sell these products to customers, that come up with things like expiration dates and upselling in the first place.

I briefly flirted with the idea of having them read me my entire terms of service but then thought that the poor customer service rep was just doing their job and there’s little reason to dislike them so much as to make them do that when I suddenly realized I might actually be doing them a favor by having them read my entire terms of service to me so they don’t have to go on to the next inane credit card verification call in a day that is, I’m sure, painfully full of credit card verification calls. But then again I didn’t think I could actually make it through an entire reading of a credit card’s complete terms of service without thinking extremely evil thoughts toward the customer service representative and the next three generations of their family, so I politely declined their offer and, that night, knowing I’d done my good deed for the day, slept the sound sleep of the just.

Lose the fat: Targeting grease to curtail sewer overflows

At issue are overflows from “sanitary” sewer systems, as opposed to “combined” systems that also handle stormwater. EPA estimates that 40 percent of the 3 to 10 billion annual sanitary sewer overflows around the country are caused by hard deposits made up of fat, oil and grease (FOG) that clog sewage pipes.

Are these sanitary sewer problems being caused by the American diet? Too much FOGy food?

“We think a reaction takes place in the sewage collection system when FOG interacts with calcium or other metal ions to form these hardened deposits,” Ducoste says, “similar to the chemical reactions that are used to make household soaps.”

And now I’m thinking “free soap” which probably helps explain why I’m not a scientist while this guys is:

Ducoste says, “once we understand the chemistry behind these deposits, we can develop models to identify potential ‘hot spots’ where FOG deposits may form.” Identifying these hot spots will allow utilities to use preventative maintenance to avoid overflows. Perhaps more importantly, the models could serve as useful tools for urban planners – helping them determine whether an existing sewer system can sustain population growth, or if the system needs to be modified in order to accommodate future growth.

The urban planning component is essential, Ducoste says, because significant amounts of FOG get into sewage systems from high-density residential areas, such as apartment blocks and condominiums. Local governments need to be aware of potential sewer overflow problems that could stem from population growth in a concentrated area. Currently, sewage systems try to keep out FOG by using grease interceptors – but they are found only at restaurants.

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