Thursday, November 17, 2011

The world we live in is one big mystery…

photo source

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. --Albert Einstein

Jobless rate down, Marilyn Monroe memorabilia for sale, and it’s Guinness Record Day

             Good Morning Humboldt County!

C’mon inside on this rainy day and have a cup of coffee with me. I’ve searched out three stories for your reading entertainment this morning. Records are being set today as people from around the world try to get their name in the Guinness Book of World Records. So pull up a seat, relax, and read:

New jobless claims slide to 7- month low

New claims for unemployment insurance dropped to their lowest level in seven months, government data showed on Thursday, raising hopes that hiring may be picking up.

"The U.S. economy continues to show signs of strong momentum. The improvement in claims underscores that the gains in labor market activity over the past few months are being sustained," said Millan Mulraine, a senior macro strategist at TD Securities in New York.

Marilyn Monroe memorabilia going on sale at auction house

Leapin' leprechauns, it's Guinness records day

Irish leprechauns, tea-sipping Britons, Australian ABBA impersonators and the oldest yoga teacher on the planet were just some of the people setting world records Thursday.

More than 300,000 people around the world took part in the seventh annual Guinness World Records Day, in which a number of records have already been confirmed.

 

Time to walk on down the road…

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Does anyone know the consensus on Vitamin D? I’m hearing two different stories…

Image: Vitamin D

Earlier this year while getting my annual physical at the VA Clinic, my doctor told me I can’t take enough vitamin D and prescribed it for me in large daily doses. He gushed about how it was a miracle nutrient that would prevent me from getting prostate cancer.

I was sold until I saw another (civilian) doctor last week and he told me not to take vitamin D. I didn’t need it. It was just a fad among some less-informed doctors he suggested. I left his office understandably confused.

Two polar opposite opinions on the merit of taking vitamin D coming from two doctors. I’ve been waffling about taking vitamin D since my last visit. Then I read this article today about new research showing that higher than normal levels of it can make the heart beat too fast and out of rhythm (a condition known as atrial fibrillation). 

 The way I’ve always understood it is most people get at least some of their daily needs of vitamin D from sunlight. The research out of the Intermountain Medical Center in Murray, Utah warns that everyone absorbs supplements (like vitamin D) differently and should have their blood levels tested to be safe.

If I don’t take vitamin D will I get prostate cancer? If I do will my heart go into overdrive and crash? I hate choices like this. Maybe I’d have been better off not even hearing about these conflicting studies and mindlessly gobbled the controversial nutrient forever.

As It Stands, The only way I can make a decision, after giving this dilemma great thought, is to….flip a coin!

College coach blames loss on latest video game release

As It Stands list of “Stupid Things People Say,” has been expanded today to include the following story:

I’m going to chalk this excuse up under the heading of Creative Ways to Explain Losing a Football Game...

One week after crowd-surfing in the postgame locker room after beating West Virginia, Louisville coach Charlie Strong isn’t riding so high after his team’s 21-14 home loss to Pitt.

But Strong has a reason for the Cardinals’ sluggish follow-up to their big win: The release last Tuesday of the popular video game “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3″ distracted his players from their preparation. Yes, Strong was serious. “It’s young people,” Strong said. “That’s what we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with young guys who–all of the sudden there’s something new and they want to try it, and it just engulfs them.” Hmm, we know college kids tend to waste time playing video games, but this seems like the most-ludicrous excuse ever.” [Mike Rutherford on Twitter]

Opposition to fracking in Australia growing, America’s two-tiered society, suspect wanted for shooting at White House

Image: Farmer Clive Duddy sits in front of an access gate to a property owned by coal seam gas miner Santos.

    Good Morning Humboldt County!

Step right in, grab a cup of coffee, pull up a chair, and relax. The first of the three stories I have for you is on fracking (a mining procedure) in Australia. It’s becoming controversial in the states because of a recent study that shows fracking is polluting aquifers. My Times-Standard column will deal with this issue Sunday.

Opposition to fracking in Australia in Australia growing

Australia's coal seam gas industry is expected to grow into an $80 billion enterprise as demand for gas, particularly in Asia, drives rapid growth in the industry.

A big concern is a drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing, which involves blasting large amounts of water mixed with sand and chemicals into coal seams to free trapped gas.

The process, also known as "fracking," is used on about 8 percent of coal-seam gas wells in Queensland, although that will likely increase to 25 to 40 percent of wells as they age and the gas becomes more difficult to extract, according to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. Opponents say fracking could pollute groundwater beneath prime agricultural land, but the industry says safety precautions mean that water quality will not be impacted and that the industry can co-exist with farmers.

Image: People push a shopping cart loaded with items collected from the streets in the once middle-class Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia

Middle-class areas shrink as America divides into 'two-tiered society' of rich and poor

The portion of American families living in middle-income neighborhoods has declined significantly since 1970, according to a new study, as rising income inequality left a growing share of families in neighborhoods that are mostly low-income or mostly affluent.

The study, conducted by Stanford University and scheduled for release on Wednesday by the Russell Sage Foundation and Brown University, uses census data to examine family income at the neighborhood level in the country’s 117 biggest metropolitan areas.The findings show a changed map of prosperity in the United States over the past four decades, with larger patches of affluence and poverty and a shrinking middle.

Image: Oscar Ramiro Ortega

         Suspect hunted after bullet strikes White House

                                 UPDATE BELOW

The U.S. Secret Service is investigating whether a shooting incident in Washington on Friday night was a rash attempt to fire at the White House.

Initial police reports said the Friday shooting at around 9 p.m. involved two cars speeding along Constitution Avenue, the wide street south of the White House and the Ellipse. The shots were believed to have been fired from a moving car as it passed along the 1600 block, a little over a third of a mile from the White House, in an area between the White House and the Washington Monument.

The car from which U.S. Park Service police believe the shots were fired was found about seven blocks away, crashed into a barrier, with an assault-type rifle still inside. About 10 shell casings were also found in the car, indicating that the shots were fired from inside the vehicle, NBC News reported. The car has been traced to Oscar Ramiro Ortega, 21 (Photo left), who has connections to Idaho, Utah, and Texas, authorities said. He is also known by the name Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, according to the Secret Service.

The latest on this story:White House shooting suspect arrested

Time to walk on down the road…

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

As It Stands features Artwork by Nacho Diaz

 

This artist has a very unique style that I think you’ll appreciate…

Reason # 24 for living in Humboldt County: Nightmare roads identified in congestion study

The single most congested stretch of highway in the United States, according to the researchers, is on the Harbor Freeway in Los Angeles, specifically the three-mile stretch of northbound California Highway 110 near Dodger Stadium.

The report estimates more than 1.4 million person hours are wasted each year by people sitting in traffic at that one intersection, using 2.1 million gallons of gasoline. A person hour is an hour spent by one person; if six people are in a car stuck for an hour in a traffic jam, that's six person hours lost.

The second-worst stretch of highway is just a few miles to the south, where the Harbor Freeway intersects with Interstate 10 just south of downtown Los Angeles near the Staples Center. In that six-and-a-half-mile corridor, 1.1 million person hours are wasted and 3.6 million gallons of fuel are lost each year.

Six of the seven most congested stretches of highway in the country are in Los Angeles; the other is New York City’s Van Wyck Expressway just outside John F. Kennedy International Airport. (Article source)

Nightmare roads:
Farther down the list, it seems every big city has its nightmare road, including:

  • San Francisco: Eastbound Interstate 80 at the Bay Bridge.
  • Houston: Eastbound Interstate 10 at T.C. Jester Boulevard.
  • Chicago: The Stevenson Expressway at State Street.
  • Seattle: Southbound Interstate 405 at Coal Creek Parkway.

4 reasons songs get stuck in your head, oil boom in ND raises rents, pushes seniors out, and study links solvent to Parkinson’s disease

          Good Morning Humboldt County!

I’m glad you could make it today. I have some hot coffee on so grab a cup, pull up a seat, and check out the trio of headlines I picked to start your day.

    4 reasons a song gets stuck in your head

“Known as earworms, these random snippets of songs or melodies pop into our minds repeating themselves again and again like a broken record. For me, another one was that silly jingle from the McDonald's filet-of-fish commercial, which undoubtedly would delight advertisers but I found both amusing and mildly annoying.

So it helps to know that earworms are an incredibly common experience: Studies suggest that 90 percent of people get them at least once a week. Over the last decade, researchers have spent time collecting data to learn who gets earworms, how often they occur, how long they last and which songs won't budge from our brains.

Now, a new British study in the journal Psychology of Music has tried to understand their origins. They looked at how earworms, which psychologists call involuntary musical imagery, get started in the first place.”

Image: Seniors moving out of North Dakota

Oil boom raises rents in ND, pushes seniors out

After living all of her 82 years in the same community, Lois Sinness left her hometown this month, crying and towing a U-Haul packed with her every possession.

She didn't want to go, but the rent on her $700-a-month apartment was going up almost threefold because of heightened demand for housing generated by North Dakota's oil bonanza.

Other seniors in her complex and across the western part of the state are in the same predicament. "Our rents were raised, and we did not have a choice," Sinness said. "We're all on fixed incomes, living mostly on Social Security, so it's been a terrible shock."

A doctor examines the hands of a man with Parkinson's disease

                Study links Parkinson's disease to industrial solvent

Researchers found a six-fold increase in the risk of developing Parkinson's in individuals exposed in the workplace to trichloroethylene (TCE). Although many uses for TCE have been banned around the world, the chemical is still used as a degreasing agent.

In 1997, the US authorities banned its use as an anaesthetic, skin disinfectant, grain fumigant and coffee decaffeinating agent, but it is still used as a degreasing agent for metal parts.

Time to walk on down the road…

Monday, November 14, 2011

Alert Reader Warning: Your help is needed to protect the Internet

I received the following information from a reader, Jim Popenoe, and believe it’s important enough to share with you:

“The House Judicial Committee holds a hearing November 16 on new internet legislation called "SOPA".  So far the only people invited to participate have been the proponents.  I have a feeling that the normally busy, quiet, technical folks out there may not
get heard.  They may oppose SOPA, but they will be vastly over-spent.  So, in spite of their common-sense opposition, they simply will be shouted down, that is, unless there is a huge grass-roots effort.
We need that grass-roots effort right now.  I am personally trying to light a fire under it, and I pray that I am not the only person doing so.  Please view my link below.  If it looks okay to you, please forward to whomever you think may be interested enough to take action.  It is not so difficult.  But the only way to turn the
tide is if enough good people take the time to read, to tell their friends and colleagues, and to express their views to Congress.
  
http://pages.suddenlink.net/popenoe/SOPA/Action-Plan.htm” – Jim Popenoe

The Golden Age of opposition research, Russian military gets into badminton, and the expense of bringing water to the southland

                       Good Morning Humboldt County!

There’s a thin layer of fog rapidly disappearing outside as shafts of sunlight break through this morning. In other words, looks like another beautiful day. Pull up a seat and grab a cup of hot coffee and check out the trio of stories I’ve collected for your morning entertainment:

The golden age of opposition research

The sort of search tools that discovered presidential candidate Joe Biden's plagiarism in 1987 have become more sophisticated and the outlets to shop damaging information are now virtually unlimited. "This is a golden age" of opposition research, said Jeff Berkowitz, who dug dirt on Democratic candidates for the Republican National committee from 2002 to 2010.

Rick Perry was addressing a tiny audience of about 10 in New Hampshire last Friday. He told the story of a 38-year-old Occupy Wall Street protestor named Jeremy, who had complained that bankers got to work so early that he never managed to get out of bed in time to insult them face-to-face.

"I guess greed just makes you work hard," joked Perry, who said that his son had told him about the lazy protestor. What Perry didn't realize is that "Jeremy" was fictional, part of a satirical column by the Toronto Globe and Mail's Mark Schatzker mocking reactions to the Occupy movement.

Also in the small crowd at the Barley House was a "tracker" from American Bridge, a newly formed SuperPAC doing research for the Democratic Party. The tracker was videotaping Perry's every word and gesture, and even though the gaffe was a relatively minor one, the candidate was about to become a victim of the latest, state-of-the-art opposition research.

Your serve! Russian military takes up badminton

Forget nuclear missiles. Russia's military arsenal will soon be bristling with badminton rackets.

Hoping to keep soldiers and recruits in fighting form without great expense, the Defence Ministry plans to buy 10,000 badminton rackets and tens of thousands of shuttlecocks next year, the newspaper Izvestia reported on Monday. Call it military exercise.

California's precious liquid cargo

The energy, and expense, of bringing water to the Southland

The twin forces of power costs and climate-change regulations are threatening Southern California's long love affair with imported water, forcing the region to consider more mundane sources closer to home.

"It will further encourage retail water suppliers to use less imported water," said Edward Osann, a former federal water official who is a policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "It's that simple."

Time to walk on down the road…

Sunday, November 13, 2011

As It Stands: If you survive reading this column you’ll be better off

                      

"Out of life's school of war: what does not destroy me, makes me stronger."
Friedrich Nietzsche, from The Twilight of the Idols "Maxims and Arrows" sec. 8

                  By Dave Stancliff/For The Times-Standard
  “What doesn’t kill you, will make you stronger,” is a modern version of an old phrase I’ve always embraced. I don’t have the space here to list every time this philosophy has carried me through hard times. 
  Instead, to support this wise saying, I’m  going to talk about three deadly poisons that also save lives. 
  A few months ago my brother-in-law Tom was diagnosed with acute promyelocytic leukemia. It’s the deadliest form you can get, but also the most treatable if caught early enough.

  The treatment they gave him surprised me. Arsenic, which has a long and deadly history. Back in the 15th and 16th century it was the poison of choice for the infamous Borgias in Italy.
  I was aware that arsenic was used as a pigment, a pesticide, and a sure way to kill someone, but to learn that Tom was getting it in a series of infusions caught me off guard. “You’ve got to be kidding!” I told my wife when she called and told me about this treatment plan.  
   He’s still getting arsenic infusions and will continue to receive them for a year. The positive news is he’s now in clinical remission. His future looks good.
   The irony of something so deadly being a medical cure actually occurs with many minerals and plants.
    Take Foxglove (Digitalis) a summer flower which was unfamiliar as a medicine to people in ancient times, but is now used in a number of medicines highly valued by cardiologists and is irreplaceable for many patients.
   Unlike most poisonous plants used in medicine, Foxglove has no ancient myths or mysteries surrounding it. The first reports of it being used in medicine date back to 1542. A German physician and professor of botany, Leonard Fuchs, put together a list of herbs of the time and gave Foxglove it’s scientific name digitalis (meaning a small finger) because it’s blossoms were similar to a thimble.

  Foxglove (pictured left) is a perennial herbaceous plant with long leaves. It’s native to West Europe (Ireland) and flourishes in many countries around the world. This is a common wild flower in California, Oregon and Washington. The whole plant is poisonous because every part of it contains the cardiac glycosides digitoxin (the most important one), gitoxin, digoxin and also some saponins, according to Websters New World Dictionary.
   The Irish and the Scots both used the plant, but it first became officially noted in a London pharmacopoeia in 1722. Later it was recognized for it’s medicinal properties in Edinburgh in 1744, and Paris in 1756.
   It was a trial and error situation as far as how much to give, and was administered in enormous doses as a laxative drug that led to many severe poisonings and deaths. Needless to say, it got a bad reputation and fell out of use for a long time.
  Nowadays, Foxglove has been redeemed, and doctors know its safe limits.

  The third deadly plant used in medicine (and other applications) is Atropa belladonna (pictured right) commonly known as Belladonna, Devil's Berries, Death Cherries or Deadly Nightshade. It’s native to Europe, North Africa and Western Asia. The foliage and berries are extremely toxic, containing tropane alkaloids. These toxins include scoploamine and hyoscyamine which cause a bizarre delirium and hallucinations. Belladonna is also used as pharmaceutical anticholinergics. The drug atropine is derived from the plant.
  It has a long history of use as a medicine, cosmetic, and poison. Before the Middle Ages, it was used as an anesthetic for surgery; the ancient Romans used it as a poison (the wife of Emperor Augustus and the wife of Claudius both used it to murder contemporaries); and predating this, it was used to make poison tipped arrows, according to Wikipedia.
   As It Stands, it still strikes me as odd to think the same substance I once put out in our garage to kill rats is now saving my friend and brother-in-law’s life!

Trump's Lowest Grift Ever Saved for Holy Week

This is a story about how the devil's puppet, aka Donald Trump, mocked Christianity by selling a book combining the Bible, the Constitu...