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WorldWeird: [Closed] NEWSTRANGE -- the Informus Thread (January 2013)
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Boat sinking time!
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- CommentAuthorKay Orchison
- CommentTimeFeb 27th 2013 edited
Clive Palmer also intends to trademark the words 'Titanic' and 'Gigantic'
Further, he has options on 'Hippopotamic', 'Porcine', 'Egotistical', 'Greedy', 'Plutocratic', 'Whale blubber', 'Insufferable', 'Arsehole' and 'Leaky bag of monkey shit' -
@ Kay
Didn't we already go through this sort of nonsense before with Paris Hilton trying (and failing) to trademark "That's hot?" -
- CommentAuthorKay Orchison
- CommentTimeFeb 27th 2013
Yeah, and didn't we sort of go through the ocean-liner-named-Titanic thing as well? I guess Clive's not a learner. -
Next thing some bozo will try and assert ownership of 'Space Marine'...
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Defend the Voting Rights Act by signing this petition.
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Repeat to yourself: "Well, that's it. We're fucked. No getting out of this. May as well give up now."
Pessimism About the Future May Lead to Longer, Healthier LifeFeb. 27, 2013 — Older people who have low expectations for a satisfying future may be more likely to live longer, healthier lives than those who see brighter days ahead, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.
"Our findings revealed that being overly optimistic in predicting a better future was associated with a greater risk of disability and death within the following decade," said lead author Frieder R. Lang, PhD, of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. "Pessimism about the future may encourage people to live more carefully, taking health and safety precautions." The study was published online in the journal Psychology and Aging. -
20 amazing facts about the human body
Including why you probably have eyelash mites, the evolution of goosebumps and why your DNA contains the genes of at least 8 retroviruses. -
- CommentAuthorScrymgeour
- CommentTimeFeb 28th 2013
@ foamhead
I just cried.... -
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CommentAuthorFoamhead
- CommentTimeFeb 28th 2013
Caught the author on The Daily Show a few nights ago and followed-up by finding the essay in question. It's a bit of a long one but definitely worth sticking with whether you're American or not.
Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us by Steven BrillWhen we debate health care policy, we seem to jump right to the issue of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question: Why exactly are the bills so high?
What are the reasons, good or bad, that cancer means a half-million or million-dollar tab? Why should a trip to the emergency room for chest pains that turn out to be indigestion bring a bill that can exceed the cost of a semester of college? What makes a single dose of even the most wonderful wonder drug cost thousands of dollars? Why does simple lab work done during a few days in a hospital cost more than a car? And what is so different about the medical ecosystem that causes technology advances to drive bills up instead of down?
For those without the time or inclination to plough through a 26,000-word article, here's a tl;dr summary from The Washington Post..Much of Brill’s piece focuses on the absurdly high prices that hospitals and doctors charge for the most mundane items. A single Tylenol tablet can cost $1.50 when “you can buy 100 of them on Amazon for $1.49 even without a hospital’s purchasing power.” One patient gets charged $6 for a marker used to mark his body before surgery. Another is billed $77 for each of four boxes of gauze used. One hospital, according to Brill’s math, bills $1,200 per hour for one nurse’s services.
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- CommentAuthorbadbear
- CommentTimeMar 1st 2013
Ah thanks Foamhead! I saw that interview too and was very intrigued. I might even try and make it through the whole thing. -
- CommentAuthorRenThing
- CommentTimeMar 1st 2013
You remember the robot Big Dog, the kind of creepy, four-legged robot?
Well, they went and gave it a horrible mouth/hand/brick-hurling thingie. -
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CommentAuthorWilliam Joseph Dunn
- CommentTimeMar 1st 2013
can we just call "Boston Dynamics" by it's real name? Skynet. -
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CommentAuthorjohnjones
- CommentTimeMar 1st 2013
Actually, wouldn't the company's "real name" be Cyberdyne? -
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CommentAuthorsneak046
- CommentTimeMar 1st 2013
Italian team hopes to find digital meaning in videogame riot simulator.
The game allows the player to play both sides of a riot where, as Menchiari explains it, "there is no such thing as victory or defeat." Still in development, Menchiari and his team plan to travel to Italy, Greece, and Egypt to document live riots where, to avoid bias, only footage and dialogue captured by them will be used in-game.
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CommentAuthorWilliam Joseph Dunn
- CommentTimeMar 1st 2013
@ johnjones - I stand corrected. -
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- CommentAuthorFlabyo
- CommentTimeMar 1st 2013
@Sneak - there's a whole field of AI / Simulation programming that's all about trying to model human behaviour in a crowd in order to make safer stadiums, office blocks etc...
The idea being that you can find out that shifting your exit a couple of feet might make the difference between 10,000 deaths and 100 deaths in the event of a fire.
It's fun stuff, and the kind of thing I'd love to be able to do real-time for videogames. So yeah, I'll be watching that one. -
- CommentAuthorgovernment spy
- CommentTimeMar 2nd 2013
Wasn't Massive Dynamics set in Boston? -
- CommentAuthorSteve Toase
- CommentTimeMar 2nd 2013