So what did I do for this year's Halloween?
It's ME!
THAT'll make the neighborhood kids think twice before knocking on the door for candy! :-P
People with a particular gene variant performed more than 20 percent worse on a driving test than people without it - and a follow-up test a few days later yielded similar results. About 30 percent of Americans have the variant.And we are now one step closer toward understanding my family :-P"These people make more errors from the get-go, and they forget more of what they learned after time away," says Dr. Steven Cramer, neurology associate professor and senior author of the study published recently in the journal Cerebral Cortex.
This gene variant limits the availability of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor during activity. BDNF keeps memory strong by supporting communication among brain cells and keeping them functioning optimally. When a person is engaged in a particular task, BDNF is secreted in the brain area connected with that activity to help the body respond.
Previous studies have shown that in people with the variant, a smaller portion of the brain is stimulated when doing a task than in those with a normal BDNF gene. People with the variant also don't recover as well after a stroke. Given these differences, the UCI scientists wondered: Could the variant affect an activity such as driving?
"We wanted to study motor behavior, something more complex than finger-tapping," says Stephanie McHughen, graduate student and lead author of the study. "Driving seemed like a good choice because it has a learning curve and it's something most people know how to do."
The driving test was taken by 29 people - 22 without the gene variant and seven with it. They were asked to drive 15 laps on a simulator that required them to learn the nuances of a track programmed to have difficult curves and turns. Researchers recorded how well they stayed on the course over time. Four days later, the test was repeated.
Results showed that people with the variant did worse on both tests than the other participants, and they remembered less the second time. "Behavior derives from dozens and dozens of neurophysiologic events, so it's somewhat surprising this exercise bore fruit," Cramer says.
In Monrovia, Liberia, there's a guy taking the matter of a lopsided, state-run media and reshaping it into a free-of-charge, independent news-aggregator—all accomplished with dry-erase board and couple markers. (Sorry, internet!) Each morning, at 10:45 AM, Alfred Sirleaf wakes up and heads down to his bulletin board to post the day's news, culling together a slate of stories his countrymen might otherwise never see. Grateful readers line up in droves, on foot and in cars, to read these updates, in what has been described as the country’s—and probably the world's—only analog blog.Hit the above link for video of Mr. Sirleaf and his unique "website"!
Be mindful of that before you click this link.
Remember: it's your choice. Consider yourself duly warned.
Crash here for the tale of Daniel East, his sister Tevyn, and how they inadvertently brought Tricky through a harrowing eight-hour scenic tour of the desert wasteland of Utah and Nevada.
Tricky not only lived, but he suffered just a few minor scrapes on his paws.
(And methinks Tricky should sign an endorsement deal with ACME while that iron is still hot.)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation - which many of y'all will remember came to the aid of Yours Truly two years ago during that very bizarre situation with Viacom - is now setting out to document "the worst of the worst" of bogus copyright complaints. Hit here for the Takedown Hall of Shame, featuring outrageous acts of DMCA abuse by Warner Brothers, the Nation Organization for Marriage and many more!
(By the way, in my opinion there are few finer organizations out there than the Electronic Frontier Foundation: those guys really go all-out to defend the rights of content creators. If you're feeling so led, ya might wanna consider making a contribution to 'em 'cuz they definitely more than earn it :-)
And you'll still have plenty of time for trick-or-treating, too!
And it looks like things have gotten even worse in the ten years since the events of BioShock...
BioShock 2 beckons us back under the sea on February 9, 2010.
Originally buried in Mt. Sterling in North Carolina, Popcorn's widow Pam Sutton cited "problems with vandalism" as the reason for moving and re-interring Popcorn's casket at Resthaven Memorial Gardens in Dandridge, Tennessee: not far from Popcorn's home in Parrotsville.
The move was scheduled for this past Saturday. A public memorial service was also held, attended by hundreds of people including country music legend Hank Williams Jr.
An old-fashioned horse-drawn hearse then brought Popcorn Sutton to his final resting place.
WBIR has more about the service for Popcorn Sutton, including a rather intriguing comment from Hank Williams Jr.
And here are three videos of the service, courtesy of aliciajose on YouTube (thanks aliciajose!)...
And if y'all wanna know why so many of your friends and neighbors have found Popcorn Sutton and his craft so endearing and enchanting, I cannot possibly recommend enough Neal Hutcheson's award-winning documentary The Last One. This has become the most-watched DVD of my collection in the past year (mostly 'cuz of all the people who keep asking to borrow it! :-)
The Nazi lizards from outer space invade again for the first time next week, November 3rd at 8 p.m. ET/PT on ABC.
Per the reckoning of a group of scientists being reported in a Dutch journal (link goes to English translation) the popularly-held belief that the Maya calendar predicts the destruction of the world in 2012 is a miscalculation and doesn't even have anything to do with the end times whatsoever. The real end of the Maya cycle of time, according to what these researchers have found, is around 2220... and then the calendar just goes back to the beginning, even as ours ends on December 31st and goes into January 1st.
So like Lt. Commander Susan Ivanova of Babylon 5 once said: "No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There is always boom tomorrow."
(But if this kind of thing floats your boat, we've still got Sir Isaac Newton's prediction of a 2060 apocalypse looming before us :-)
I can't remember the last time that I went to a GeoCities-hosted page. But once upon the time they glittered across cyberspace like sand on the seashore, mostly for "personal home pages". Those are dying out now, being supplanted by blogs like this one.
It can't be said enough though, that a lot of us today took our first steps into that larger world with GeoCities. Mark Milian writes a fine send-off for the service at the Los Angeles Times site and if you want a tribute to just about every GeoCities page that ever got created, click here.
And I have to report to all two of this blog's faithful readers that much to my surprise, I enjoyed Twilight more than I had anticipated. So far as vampire fiction goes I'm still going to consider Dracula to be the high bar, along with Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles (the first several books anyway). But in Twilight I found a satisfying fulfillment of something I hadn't realized there had been a dearth of: a thoroughly modern-day American vampire mythos.
And that's the thing that makes me want to read the other books in the Twilight series: Meyer does establish quite a deep and empathetic lore in her tale of Bella, Edward and the Cullen clan of vampires. Yeah, they're vampires. I can finally buy into that. Up 'til now, what little I'd known of the vampires in the Twilight books had caused me to muster up a "meh". I mean, "vampires" who aren't afraid of sunlight, aren't repelled by garlic or crucifixes, etc.? Those aren't vampires, those are people with severe eating disorders at most. But having the read the book I kinda like this updated take on the vampire physiology, just as I thought Anne Rice had a brilliant and even sensible basis for vampires in her literature.
In other aspects, Twilight reads much like any romantic novel aimed at adolescents and young adults... and that's fine too. Vampire fiction cuts across a huge swath of genre. In this case it didn't detract from my personal appreciation of the novel at all, and I don't foresee it being a hindrance in my reading the other installments of the Twilight series either.
So if, like me, you've been wandering the bookstore aisles and inwardly debating whether Twilight is a book worth sinking your teeth into (or at least sinking into your wallet and plunking down money for), I'll have to give it a good recommendation.
And maybe sometime I'll even draw up the courage to watch the movie...
What sort of funny are we talking here? Captain America was just on the phone while wearing a Confederate outfit, discussing the re-enactment he's on his way to: "Hey it's the Civil War, what's the worst that could happen?"
Looks like I've found something new to DVR (in addition to those reruns of Are You Being Served? on PBS :-)
That's the grim scenario envisioned by Cracked.com, which asked its readers to send in their Photoshop-ped submissions depicting an Internet-addicted society suddenly having to make do without things like Twitter, Nigerian scam e-mails and online porno. At the link you'll find the top twenty entries, each hysterically funny... and clever!
That's a helluva over-reaction to something that otherwise hasn't been inordinately differently from the typical garden-variety influenza. But to hear it from some people, it's already akin to the 1918 pandemic that killed millions in a very short period of time.
ComingSoon.net has just posted this pic (click to significantly embiggen) of Bradley Cooper as Lt. Templeton "Faceman" Peck, Quinton "Rampage" Jackson as Sgt. "B.A." Baracus, Sharlto Copley as Capt. "Howling Mad" Murdock, and Liam Neeson as John "Hannibal" Smith - along with the team's signature van - from the upcoming film adaptation of the beloved Eighties television series. The movie is out this coming June.
Maybe if we're good boys and girls we'll get a teaser trailer by Christmas :-)
