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QED and his sister, QED, with Eniac
QED and his sister, QED, with Eniac
THIS DAY IN HISTORY: MAY 26TH- DRACULA
This Day In History: May 26, 1897
On May 26, 1897, Irish author Bram Stoker’s masterpiece Dracula was released for sale in London. Dracula was not only a sensation in its own right, but inspired a genre of horror that remains immensely popular today. But Bram Stoker certainly wasn’t the creator of vampire lore; the history of the blood-sucking undead spans back into the mists of pre-history.
Stoker based much of his novel on Romanian tales from medieval times, which became the basis for most interpretations of vampire characterizations that still exist today. For this reason, Stoker is lauded as the creator of the modern vampire novel (whether this is a compliment or not we’ll leave up to you). …
‘It’s beyond pain’: how Mormons are left vulnerable in Utah’s opiate crisis
Mormons, who shun drugs and alcohol, have fallen prey to addiction in Utah, where one-third of adults were prescribed an opioid pain medication in 2014
Maline Hairup was a devout Mormon. No alcohol, no coffee. She didn’t smoke. Until the day she died, she had never used illegal drugs. Yet she was an addict for most of her adult life.
“Maline never thought she had a problem,” said her sister, Mindy Vincent, a recovering addict. “She was a firm believer that because the doctor prescribed the pills it was OK. She didn’t see any shame in it. She didn’t think she was an addict. It wasn’t like taking drugs. But she was on the painkillers for 15 years until they wouldn’t give her any more.
“She eventually ended up getting some heroin because she couldn’t get any more pills. My sister used heroin one time and she died.”
In 2014, the year Hairup died at age 38, one-third of adults in Utah had a prescription for opioid painkillers, most notably a powerful opiate at the heart of the crisis, OxyContin. Many of them were among the 65% of state residents who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons. Sometimes, opioids take hold of several members of the same family. Hairup’s father is dependent on prescription painkillers and her brother’s addiction to prescription opioids set him on the path to heroin. …
The Opioid Epidemic: How Did We Get Here?
Welp, we’ve done it, folks. It’s finally come to this. There have been so many deaths from opioid overdose, so many addicts created, so many pills diverted, that the CDC is getting involved. Opioid pain medications, commonly prescribed to treat acute and chronic sources of pain, are a significant cause of morbidity (harm) and mortality (death) in America. In 2014, the CDC reported a total of 47,055 drug overdose deaths in the United States, 61% of which were attributable to opioids.
So how exactly did we get here? Like most things in medicine, there is not one simple answer. But it’s not that hard to trace things back a few decades and pinpoint some major influences.
Pain as the fifth vital sign. In an effort to standardize and improve pain treatment for patients, a national initiative called Pain as the 5th Vital Sign (P5VS) was rolled out in the late nineties. The well-meaning folks who began this initiative were trying to improve the health and well-being of the over 34 million patients in this country that suffer from chronic pain. Unfortunately, a study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in 2006 showed no improvement in pain control after this initiative. However, this practice still persists throughout medicine, despite there being little evidence to support it. …
The Opioid Epidemic: Where Do We Go From Here?
In my last post, The Opioid Epidemic: How Did We Get Here?, I outlined the many factors that contributed to the current state of affairs in this country in regards to opioid use. But now that we’ve established we’ve got a problem on our hands, what exactly do we do about it?
We need to stop placing blame. This is the least constructive thing I’ve witnessed so far when it comes to addressing the current crisis. It is not one person’s fault. Heck, it’s not even one group’s fault. The second we start acting like it is, we lose all sense of personal responsibility. And it’s hard to right what’s wrong if no one will take ownership. So, for the sake of this exercise, let’s just assume it’s everyone’s fault and get on with it.
We need to remember that we’re on the same team. Lately, it seems like the healthcare setting might as well be a season of Survivor. Doctors vs Patients: Who Will Prevail? Doctors feel rushed, taken for granted, and sometimes taken advantage of. And patients feel like they’re not being heard and their needs aren’t being addressed. But it’s important to remember that we both want the same things when it comes to chronic pain: to reduce pain and to increase function. Patients with pain want to feel better and doctors want to help them feel better. Honestly. But we may have different ideas about how to achieve that, so it’s more important now than ever that we are open about our concerns, our expectations, and the plan going forward. (If X doesn’t work, then we’ll try Y.) …
10 Mysterious Incidents From The International Space Station
The launch of the International Space Station in November 1998 has given the human race a permanent residence in space—something that only decades earlier was pure science-fiction. The amount of information and knowledge that we can obtain from its perpetual orbit around our planet is priceless. With that quest for knowledge, comes a lot of strange stories, discoveries and sightings.
10. The STS 114 ‘Boomerang’ Incident
The STS 114 mission on the space shuttle Discovery, was the first mission of its kind since the Columbia disaster two and a half years earlier in 2003. Since that tragic event, NASA had noticeably improved what were already tight safety procedures. Perhaps because of this, it was noticed almost immediately that a piece of foam had appeared to break away upon Discovery’s launch.
Discovery’s mission was to dock with the International Space Station and resupply the crew that were already on board. Before doing so, Commander Eileen Collins performed a maneuver that flipped the shuttle over, exposing its underside to allow photographs to be taken from the space station so as to search for any damage. When the pictures were studied, it was confirmed that this was the case, leading to astronaut, Steve Robinson, venturing out into space to carry out repairs. Following Robinson’s repairs of the shuttle, a strange object was caught on a NASA camera. …
Hiroshima and the Politics of Apologizing
It’s hard to say sorry. Especially when you’re doing it for a whole country.
Trees in Hiroshima, Japan, a month after the 1945 atomic bombing
When Barack Obama goes to Hiroshima on May 27, becoming the first sitting U.S. president to visit the site of the world’s first nuclear attack, he will not apologize on behalf of his country for carrying out that strike 71 years ago. He will neither question the decision to drop bombs on two Japanese cities, nor dwell on its results: the deaths of more than 200,000 people and the dawn of the atomic age. But he will affirm America’s “moral responsibility,” as the only nation to have used nuclear weapons, to prevent their future use. He will recognize the painful past, but he won’t revisit it. When it’s all over, we still won’t know whether or not he thinks there’s something about the atomic bombings to be sorry for.
But why is expressing remorse such a big deal in the first place? Setting aside the arguments for and against the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what makes apologizing different for countries than for people? When I put this question to Jennifer Lind, a professor of government at Dartmouth College who has studied these issues extensively, she gave me a one-word answer: “politics.”
She then elaborated: “I don’t have politics. If I was a complete jerk to my husband, then I tell my husband, ‘You know, I was thinking about it this morning. I was a jerk. I’m really sorry.’ And that’s the end of it, because I’ve decided I have a story of what happened and that’s my story and I move on. But if we’re in a collective entity where there are different groups involved and we’re speaking on their behalf, and we’re in a world, by the way, where a lot of people have this idea about the kind of image we need to project to the world, then it gets a whole lot more complicated.” …
Obama: World leaders are ‘rattled’ by Trump’s ignorance, love of tweets
President Obama said Thursday that world leaders have been surprised by Donald Trump’s emergence as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and remain uncertain “how seriously to take some of his pronouncements.”
After a day of meetings at the Group of Seven summit in Japan, Obama said his counterparts are “rattled by Trump — and for good reasons — because a lot of the proposals he makes display an ignorance of world affairs or a cavalier attitude or an interest in getting tweets and headlines instead of actually thinking through what is required to keep America safe and secure and prosperous.”
Obama’s assessment of the GOP standard-bearer, in response to a question at a news conference, comes as the president has become more forceful in his criticism and increasingly willing to wade into the 2016 election cycle. The president also questioned Trump’s readiness for office during a commencement address at Rutgers University this month, although he did not mention the business mogul by name. …
10 Surprising Modern Discoveries At Important Historical Sites
Every year, there are more discoveries that change the way we see history, and some of these are in places that were long considered to be fully documented. Whether it was a lack of knowledge or a finding completely out of the blue, our most well-known sites still yield discoveries that would have never been found if we hadn’t investigated further.
10. Acres Of Clothing In A Forest Outside A Concentration Camp
For 60 years, an enormous trove of concentration camp history remained missing. In 2015, a group of hikers in Poland made a shocking discovery: acres of discarded prison clothing and other articles related to a tragic location nearby. Near the forest where the unsuspecting tourists made their discovery was an infamous Nazi prison camp: Stutthof.
The most surprising part of the discovery was that most of the clothes were found in plain sight. The Stutthof death camp is now a museum and has a fairly large number of visitors and researchers who all overlooked the artifacts. No real sleuthing was needed; apparently, the forest was not explored since it became the sight of genocide during the Nazi reign.
All sorts of clothing articles were found: shoes, belts, pants, shirts, etc. Stutthof housed 110,000 prisoners throughout history, 85,000 of whom died there. Experiments on their body fat were used for soap production, which adds an ever more gruesome angle. …
This Is How a Revolution Ends
The Democratic insurgent’s campaign is losing steam—but his supporters are not ready to give up.
This is how a revolution ends: its idealism tested, its optimism drained, its hope turned to bitterness.
But if Bernie Sanders’s revolution has run aground in California, which will be one of the last states to vote in the Democratic primary on June 7, he was not about to admit it here, where thousands gathered on a sun-drenched high-school football field of bright green turf.
“We are going to win here in California!” Sanders said, to defiant cheers. In the audience, a man waved a sign that says, “Oh HILL no!”
This is Sanders’s last stand, according to the official narrative of the corrupt corporate media, and if there is anything we have learned in the past year, it is the awesome power of the official narrative—the self-reinforcing drumbeat that dictates everything.
Sanders continued: “I believe that if we win here in California, and if we win the other five states that are voting on June 7, we’re going to go marching to the Democratic convention with a hell of a lot of momentum. I believe that if we do well here in California, we’ll march in with momentum and we’ll march out with the Democratic nomination!” …
Paul Ryan is in another fight he doesn’t want, this time over LGBT rights
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan finds himself in the middle of yet another Republican civil war as the battle over LGBT rights has come to Congress, threatening to divide an already fractured GOP.
It is a fight the speaker does not want to have — especially in a competitive election year in which presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s candidacy is already tearing the party apart.
The fight escalated on Thursday when shortly before an expected vote over an energy and water spending bill, House Republicans held a private meeting in which many vented their frustrations over language passed late Wednesday to bar discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender employees of federal contractors, according to several people in the room. …
THIS DAY IN HISTORY: MAY 26TH- FIRST WITCH EXECUTED IN THE COLONIES
This Day In History: May 26, 1647
On May 26, 1647, Alse Young of Windsor, Connecticut had the dubious distinction of becoming the first person to be executed for the crime of witchcraft in the American colonies.
In the newly formed New England colonies, witchcraft was considered a capital crime by the Puritans (no big surprise there), and before 1662 just one single witness was sufficient to gain a conviction. The act of witchcraft technically required no damage to result of doing it, but in practice some sort of harm must have transpired to make it worth the time, effort and expense of putting on a trial. It would seem that these proceedings were well documented, but due to the ravages of time (and fires, floods and Indian raids) unfortunately most trial records no longer exist. …
I know who killed the Black Dahlia: my own father
Former Los Angeles police department detective Steve Hodel has spent the last 15 years cataloguing evidence that his dad killed Elizabeth Short – and others
Shortly after receiving the news of his death, Steve Hodel found himself sorting through his father’s belongings. Though Steve’s father, George Hodel, loomed large throughout his early childhood, their relationship had always been strained. George was a grandiose doctor with a distant personality who abandoned the family shortly after Steve’s ninth birthday, eventually moving far away to the Philippines.
As he went through his father’s possessions, Steve found a photo album tucked away in a box. It was small enough to fit in his palm and bound in wood. Feeling like a voyeur, he perused it. It was filled with the usual pictures – his mom, dad and brothers – as well as portraits of the family taken by the world-famous surrealist artist Man Ray, a family friend.
But towards the back, something caught his eye: two pictures of a young woman, her eyes cast downward, with curly, deep-black hair. Steve still doesn’t know why he had the idea, but as he looked at the images, he thought to himself: “My God, that looks like the Black Dahlia.” …
FOLLOW-UP: Mary Lou Bruner, Who Called Obama Prostitute, Loses Texas Education Race
A retired Texas schoolteacher who received national attention for her outrageous conspiracy theories and claimed President Obama was once a gay prostitute was denied a spot on the state board of education Tuesday.
Only several months ago, Mary Lou Bruner, 69, of Mineola, Texas, had been the front-runner for the powerful seat on the Texas State Board of Education, the second-largest school system in the nation.
But as conspiracy theories in Bruner’s old Facebook posts surfaced, her lead shrunk. Voters ultimately chose fellow Republican Keven Ellis, a local school board president, for the GOP nomination. Bruner lost by about 18 percent in the primary runoff.
Bruner’s Facebook posts, which have since been deleted, ranged from the biblical to bizarre. …
5 Bizarre Social Media Accounts Way Too Many People Follow
Social media is a powerful force in today’s world. We use it for everything from keeping up on the latest news to posting the address and phone number of people who dare to have opinions that differ from ours. Of course, that doesn’t mean every social media account is important. A lot of them are mostly useless garbage. Which makes it all the more confounding when a seemingly pointless account somehow garners thousands or even millions of followers. We talk about a few examples of that on this week’s Unpopular Opinion podcast …
… where I’m joined by comics and fellow Cracked co-workers Teresa Lee and Alex Schmidt. I’m also talking about a few in this column here today. Let’s get it!
#5. @hopeless
Being legitimately depressed is big business on the internet. Almost as big as pretending you’re depressed to get attention on the internet. No matter which of those two camps you belong to, @hopeless is the “Woe is me” Twitter account you’ve sought for the entirety of your miserable life.
What is it? Glad you asked, you mopey son of a bitch! Basically, @hopeless is like a factory that produces nothing but an endless stream of depressing words. There’s no face. There’s no identifiable personality at all. It’s just a bot that tweets sad things for sad people. So, it should go without saying that the account has a massive following. …
every time i put myself back together i watch myself fall apart again. and every single time is worse than before.
— insecure (@hopeless) May 25, 2016
How to make clouds from pine trees: a recipe from physicists
And what that means for climate change projections
Wanna make it rain? Try pine trees. It turns out that the delightful, Christmas tree scent may lead to precursors of clouds, according to two studies from CERN. And what’s more, it may mean that scientists have to slightly scale back their current climate change projections.
This is a little complicated, but here’s the short version: when vapors from pine trees combine with oxygen, the resulting particles can cluster together if they’re helped by high-energy particles from space that rain down on the Earth’s atmosphere, called cosmic rays. Scientists think cosmic rays may play an important role in determining our climate — and in experiments they found that these interactions can lead to the formation of aerosol particles, which can grow to become precursors to clouds, according to two studies published in Nature today.
For a long time, scientists speculated that skies were less cloudy before the Industrial Revolution because the air was less polluted. …
How I Designed a Practical Electric Plane for NASA
To win a competition, a Georgia Tech student devised a fuel-cell plane to rival today’s best-selling small aircraft
Submitted to a NASA competition for students, the design for this electric aircraft had to meet certain requirements, the most important of which was that it could be manufactured within five years.
If you fly one of today’s small piston-powered planes, you will burn many gallons of fuel per hour and suffer through the noise equivalent of a ride on a power mower. But unlike what you face while cutting your grass, if the engine quits, it means an immediate emergency landing at best and a crash at worst. Fortunately, it’s now possible to envision replacing those noisy gas guzzlers of the sky with electric airplanes, which would be considerably quieter, cleaner, safer, and more efficient than today’s aircraft. Indeed, electrification could transform the current small-airplane experience into something vastly more attractive to both pilots and the communities over which they fly.
Recognizing the possibilities—and hoping to spur innovation—NASA recently challenged students to design a four-seat, all-electric aircraft capable of entering service by 2020. After I read an announcement describing the contest, I came up with a design that ultimately won first place in the graduate division of NASA’s competition. My design relies on fuel cells for propulsion and uses an unusual motor placement to maximize efficiency. For me, working on its design was a window into the possibilities and also a vivid lesson about the significant challenges ahead for electric flight. …
10 Unimaginable & Horrific Botched Surgeries
For many, there are few things that can be as frightening as the moments leading up to surgery. In a perfect world, we’d expect that anxiety to subside, given the years of education and skill that surgeons have acquired. Patients should be able to wholeheartedly place their lives in their doctor’s hands. Unfortunately, surgical blunders, also known as “never events,” occur as often as 80 times a week, according to the American Medical News. The following 10 cases are perhaps some of the unluckiest individuals to ever go under the knife.
10. A Man’s Worst Nightmare
In November 1999, 67-year-old Hurshell Ralls underwent surgery at the Clinics of North Texas in Wichita Falls after a biopsy determined that he had bladder cancer. The operation consisted of removing Ralls’s bladder. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t be the only organ removed during the procedure. When Ralls awoke following the operation, to his horror, he found that his penis and testicles were gone.
Clearly, Ralls wasn’t consulted nor did he give permission for the amputation. The surgeons who performed the operation claimed that while removing Ralls’s bladder, they determined that the cancer had spread to his penis. However, they did not confirm their educated guess by taking tissue samples, stating that they felt that to do so wouldn’t be “worthwhile,” given their medical judgment. When a Dallas doctor examined cell slides of Ralls’s penis, he found that Ralls did not have penile cancer at all. Reconstructive surgery was out of the question, as not enough tissue remained. …
US military uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations
Maybe they use the ’80s flick “War Games” as a training film, too.
The U.S. Defense Department is still using — after several decades — 8-inch floppy disks in a computer system that coordinates the operational functions of the nation’s nuclear forces, a jaw-dropping new report reveals.
The Defense Department’s 1970s-era IBM Series/1 Computer and long-outdated floppy disks handle functions related to intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear bombers and tanker support aircraft, according to the new Government Accountability Office report. …
Awake in a Nightmare
From ancient demons to alien abductions, paranormal tales reveal that “sleep paralysis” may be as old as sleep itself.
“Le Cauchemar” (1894), by Eugène Thivier
Suddenly I’m awake. Something is on me. A shadow or a shape. Something nasty. I’m pinned to my bed and I can’t move a muscle. There are whispers, wicked whispers. I think I’m screaming but I make no sound. There’s a loud buzz, a whoosh, and I’m sucked out of myself, twisting, turning, then dragged. But through my ever-so-slightly-open eyes, I see my body is still motionless.
What I’m experiencing is literally a waking nightmare. It’s a state during which I’m awake but unable to move or cry for help, no matter what demons my mind conjures. The state has a name: Sleep Paralysis (SP), or more accurately in this case, Awareness During Sleep Paralysis (ASP). I’ve endured it hundreds of times before. And, as disturbing as it sounds, I’m far from the only one: People all over the world experience this terror. In fact, it’s as old as sleep itself.
Demonic imaginings aside, paralysis actually is an essential part of sleep. People dream when they’ve entered REM sleep, the near-conscious phase of slumber in which the eyes freely dart around but the rest of the body is immobile. There seems to be a clear utility to this: If our bodies could react to our nocturnal fantasies, who knows all the damage we’d do to ourselves and the people we sleep with. …
THERE AND BACK AGAIN- THE STORY OF ABLE AND MISS BAKER… IN SPACE
Over two decades before Buzz and Neil put their feet on the Moon, humans were already preparing for that day by sending other living organisms to space. In 1947, the United States blasted fruit flies into space in a captured Nazi V-2 rocket. Alongside packets of rye and cotton seeds, the original intention of the flies’ mission was to determine the effects of cosmic rays on living organisms. When the flies’ canister parachuted back to Earth, scientists were relieved to find the fruit flies still alive. In 1948, America took the next step and sent a monkey to space. This didn’t go as well. Albert I, a rhesus monkey, was anesthetized before even being put on the V-2 Blossom. While the rocket launched successfully, scientists later speculated that Albert probably wasn’t alive for the flight due to having likely suffocated in the very cramped capsule before takeoff. Even if he was alive for the trip, with the rocket only reaching 39 miles (62 km) in altitude, the parachute mechanism failed and the rocket had a violent crash landing, which would have likely killed him. At least the name “Albert” lived on because, from that point on, the proceeding tests involving monkeys in the United States were known as the “Albert project.”
Albert II’s fate was no better, though he was given more breathing room and survived the flight. But after reaching a maximum altitude of 83 miles, officially crossing the Kármán line becoming the first primate in space, he died upon impact when the parachutes failed. …
Video Goodnesses
(and not-so-goodnesses)
(and not-so-goodnesses)
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
At Ol Pejeta, children get an incredible chance to meet Ringo the rhino. They get up close and personal with him and learn about wildlife and conservation. Only if we teach our children to respect and appreciate animals will we be able to turn the tide of extinction. So bring your child to Ol Pejeta and teach them to be kind.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.