Catalan cops seized over 40 cannabis plants from a rooftop near Barcelona yesterday thanks to information from an unexpected source: a TV helicopter broadcasting this month’s Vuelta a España. Stage 8 of the race finished in the town of Igualada on Saturday, and as the race made its way through the city streets at the end of the stage, helicopter footage showed a whole bunch of (presumably) dank weed on someone’s rooftop.
Apparently, the cannibis was only noticed when the video hit social media, where rewinding is easier. The owner of the plants has not been found. -via Boing Boing
Looking forward to a vacation or holiday so that you can put down your phone? If your answer is yes, then you might be suffering from social media “technostress” — a type of stress that a person experiences due to his or her use of information systems.
The constant stream of messages, updates and content that social media apps deliver right to our pockets can sometimes feel like a social overload, invading your personal space and obliging you to reply in order to maintain friendships.
You might think that the correct (and obvious) response should be to put down or switch off your phone. But that might not be that easy.
...we have recently published research showing that, when faced with this pressure, many of us end up digging deeper and using our phones more frequently, often compulsively or even addictively.
Conventional wisdom implies that when people are faced with a stressful social situation, for example, an argument with someone – they cope with the stress by distancing themselves. They take a walk, go for a run, play with their kids. But when the stressful situations stem from the use of social media, we find people tend to adopt one of two very different coping strategies.
In 1951, a small 210-gram Wedderburn meteorite, edscottite, was found along the side of a road in a remote Australian gold rush town. It was named after a meteorite expert and cosmochemist, Edward Scott.
Such a confirmation is important, because it's a prerequisite for minerals to be officially recognized as such by the International Mineralogical Association (IMA).
Thanks to the new analysis by Chi Ma and UCLA geophysicist Alan Rubin, edscottite is now an official member of the IMA's mineral club, which is more exclusive than you might think.
There are several theories as to how this piece of natural edscottite ended up just outside of a rural town. We are uncertain, but one thing’s sure – our understanding of the universe gets richer and richer as the years go by.
At the age of eight, Hanzō began his training and proved his skills at an early age. He then became a samurai of the Matsudaira clan (later the Tokugawa clan) at age 18.
Outside of battle, Hanzō made a name for himself amongst the local battle leaders. Not only was he skilled in the ways of the samurai, he was also skilled politically. He had a strategic mind as sharp as his blades.
In battle, and indeed throughout his life, Hanzō was ruthless in both his battle tactics and loyalty to his leader. His prowess in battle earned him the nickname Oni no Hanzō, or “Demon Hanzō,” as he stalked those he intended to kill like a demon haunts its victims.
But in times of need, he was seen as a sort of Samurai Moses, for his inclination toward helping those in need across difficult terrain, especially future shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu and his family.
Though a fierce warrior, he still has a soft heart. As the old Japanese saying goes: “Even a demon can shed tears.” And even his legacy goes on.
Car Talk was a live radio show featuring MIT graduates, auto mechanics, and brothers Tom and Ray Magliozzi. It ran for 25 years on National Public Radio, after ten years on WBUR-FM. Since the Magliozzis retired from broadcasting in 2012, the show now consists of previously-aired clips edited together, called The Best of Car Talk. Car Talk combined humor with automotive advice, and relied on the entertaining banter between the Magliozzi brothers. They never took themselves, or the show, too seriously.
“They’re just machines,” Ray told The New York Times in 1988, after recently purchasing 1987 Dodge pickup. “This is not brain surgery. It falls apart, you get another one.”
All this time, Car Talk built a huge audience. Ray and Tom had a vague sense of this, but tried their best to stay oblivious.
“When we were sitting here, just us and [producer David Greene] and [producer Doug Berman] and the engineer it never came into my mind like, ‘Oh, I better do my best possible job because there are four or five million people listening,’ Ray says. “We tried to do our best anyway in whatever that was. We never went out of our way to try to be funny. We never went out of our way to try to give the right answer necessarily although we did try, but we didn’t go to extreme measures.”
Fans of Car Talk will want to read an interview with Ray Magliozzi about his automotive philosophy, his brother (Tom died in 2014), and their radio show at Jalopnik.
Officially, World War II began with Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. It had initially been a war between France, Germany, and Britain. However, other major players - Italy, Russia, Japan, and the USA - joined in the fray not long after. But it was only two years later that the US became more involved in the war.
In the beginning, the government and the general public had not wanted any direct participation. Things might have been different if America had not been provoked to join in WWII. But in the end, it was inevitable for the US to take part in it and the attack on Pearl Harbor only served to ignite the public and hasten America's participation.
In 2004, archaeology professor Robert Muckle was alerted to a site within the forests of British Columbia’s North Shore mountains. There were few old cans and a saw blade found. At first, he suspected the area was once home to a historic logging camp. Little did he know that he would spend the next 14 years unearthing sign after sign of a forgotten Japanese settlement!
It was one that seems to have been abruptly abandoned. There are more than 1,000 items unearthed including rice bowls, sake bottles, teapots, pocket watches, buttons and fragments of Japanese ceramics.
“There was very likely a small community of Japanese who were living here on the margins of an urban area,” Muckle tells Richter. “I think they were living here kind of in secret.”
The settlement is found within an area now known as the Lower Seymour Conservation Reserve, located around 12 miles northeast of Vancouver. Muckle have uncovered two other sites within the region that can be linked to Japanese inhabitants.
No records survive of the people who lived in the North Shore camp, and Muckle has yet to find an artifact that can be reliably dated to after 1920. But given that the inhabitants of the village seem to have departed in a hurry, leaving precious belongings behind, he tells Smithsonian that he suspects they stayed in their little enclave in the woods until 1942, when “they were incarcerated or sent to road camps.”
Find out more about this secret Japanese settlement at Smart News.
In 1964, then 49-year-old Norman Cousins collapsed in the middle of his living room floor. Cousins was rushed to the hospital, and he was diagnosed with sudden-onset degenerative collagen disease — a connective tissue condition which gave him severe back pain and almost left him quadriplegic. He was given by his doctor a one-in-500 chance to recover (that’s only 0.2%).
Cousins, however, decided that he will recover and beat the odds.
“He knew that there was research and evidence showing that negative emotion — fear, anger, anxiety — was bad for you,” said Anne Harrington, a professor of the history of science at Harvard University, as quoted in the book Fingerprints of God. “But he felt that there had been little study of whether positive emotions might have the opposite effect on your health, that it might be good for you. He felt he had nothing to lose, because he wasn’t going to get better through conventional means, and perhaps he had a lot to gain.”
Cousins checked himself into a hotel room and developed his own treatment. He hired a doctor to pump doses of vitamin C through his IV and prescribed himself a “laughter routine” in which he read funny excerpts by E.B. White and watched episodes of “Candid Camera” and Marx Brothers films.
According to Cousins, it worked.
He, however, is unsure of what happened to him, and he says that it is quite possible that what happened to him is an example of the placebo effect.
Cousins is not the first one to explore the idea of using laughter as medicine. It has its roots way back in the Middle Ages, in the early 14th century.
Know more about the history of laughter therapy over at Medium.com.
Despite many insurance companies accepting chiropractic as a treatment, a number of studies do not confirm whether it’s effective.
Over the years, chiropractic has been widely accepted in the U.S, and today there are over 70,000 chiropractors in the country. However, a number of scientific studies do not show that chiropractic is more effective than placebo of pharmaceuticals.
The history of chiropractic treatment goes way back in 1896 in an office building in Iowa.
D.D. Palmer, a fan of magnetic healing and anti-vaxxer, ran into the building's janitor, who was suffering from back pain; he was also deaf. It's not quite clear exactly how Palmer adjusted the janitor's vertebral subluxation—a term unique to chiropractic that implies an undetectable spinal misalignment—as, with all origin stories, details are murky. Supposedly, Palmer claims the adjustment cured him of deafness; the second patient he treated apparently left with no more heart disease.
Palmer was a metaphysics fan and correlated physical symptoms with spiritual phenomena; chiropractic is based on the idea that energy flows block the "innate," which manifests in things like back pain. Not only did he believe chiropractic had a religious and moral purpose, he also claimed he "received" it from a deceased physician. He called chiropractic a religion; he even tried to use the freedom of religion clause to circumvent the fact that he wasn't a licensed medical professional, a move that got him jailed and fined. He ended up selling his school to his son, who apparently killed him in 1913.
While Palmer's emphasis on the nervous system was an early contribution to an important physiological discourse that doctors are still uncovering today, chiropractic is still considered pseudoscience. Regardless, this is America, where suspect folk remedies and metaphysical interventions are commonplace. Within three decades there would be over 80 chiropractic schools established in the United States.
Despite scientific studies not showing the effectiveness of chiropractic treatment, it can alleviate pain, but only temporarily. As Derek Beres puts it, “chiropractors provided temporary relief without ever pointing to the cause of the pain.”
Know more about Derek’s experience on chiropractic over at Big Think.
Engagement photo shoots usually emit an intimate, peaceful and romantic vibe. This engagement photoshoot of couple Madison Moxley and Mason Whitis is different. Despite this being different, it is still intimate and romantic, but not peaceful — rather, it is highly spirited.
It should be noted, however, that the couple does not dress or look like this usually. They really just wanted their photoshoot to be fun.
See their photos and their story over at Bored Panda.
There are many stories about the exploits and adventures of William Kidd. He had been an experienced sailor long before he was at the helm of his own ship.
Time passed and his name spread around England, which later got him commissioned for various tasks. In the latter part of his life, one of those jobs was to hunt pirates which ended in failure.
Because Captain Kidd proved himself invaluable during the war between the English and French, he was commissioned to police the American waters. He was supposed to protect English interests, and attack any pirate ships in the area.
However, instead of cruising up and down along North America’s eastern coast, Captain Kidd sailed off to the Indian Ocean. He decided to become a pirate and began attacking ships. Word of Captain Kidd[']s deeds soon reached England and North America.
When he arrived back in North America, he was apprehended and brought to trial in England. He and his crew were found guilty of piracy, while Kidd was also convicted for the murder of William Moore, one of his crew. And so they were sentenced to the gallows.
Until the very end, Kidd maintained his innocence of the accusations hurled at him and even cited that the failed first attempt at hanging him was a sign from God about the fact. Read more about the execution of Captain William Kidd and the details of his life and death.
Have you ever wondered why Siri is called “Siri”? If you did, then you’re not the only one, and there’s already an answer for you, coming from none other than the co-founder of Siri Inc., Adam Cheyer.
Once Siri became the leading candidate, everyone on the team had their own favorite explanation of the meaning. Dag Kittlaus, our Norwegian-American CEO, once considered using Siri as the name of his child, and liked the Norse meaning: "beautiful woman who leads you to victory."
For me, Siri, which means "secret" in Swahili, was a tip of the hat to our pre-named days when we began as stealth-company.com. I also liked the fact that it was the reverse of Iris, a software system I helped build as part of the CALO project, which Siri spun out of. Some liked the resemblance to SRI, which was the research institute that ran the CALO project.
We knew that Siri [meant] "beauty" in Sinhalese, but missed that SHIRI [meant] "butt" in Japanese (they're not the same word, but the pronunciations are close).
And it was all a big surprise that Apple decided to keep the original Siri name for its launch as part of iOS. There were other candidates that were leading up until the final weeks.
Neo Bye was driving through Kruger National Park in South Africa when he happened on a curious scene. This young leopard would like to eat a slow-moving porcupine, but can't figure out how. He almost gives up when he gets a few spines in his mouth, but curiosity draws him back in. -Thanks, Bruce!
You choose to set goals, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. With organization, measure, and a good set of sticky notes you can turn that small step into a leap for mankind.
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