Wise man

via

 

What is life like after 100?

Hetty Bower and Peggy Megarry

Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian

 Peggy Megarry: Well, in the morning you hope someone will arrive to put your stockings on, and your bedroom slippers, and they take you to the loo and after that you wash, they help you, and after that you have breakfast, which is brought to me in my room I'm glad to say. I don't enjoy group meals, there's a lot of chatter. I try to get out every afternoon because one tends to put on weight here with the diet.
 Hetty Bower, 106, and Peggy Megarry, 100, discuss the reality of being very, very old .

It's behind me isn't it?

Picture: SPLASH NEWS

 

Jimmy Kimmel Spoofs Health Care Ruling

On Thursday night, Kimmel pledged to put on a ton of weight in honor of the Supreme Court’s ruling — and showed some never before seen video of the President’s press conference afterwards.

Obamacare

Croatian Economy Chief Convicted in Fatal Hungarian Car Crash

The Kaposvar County Court on Friday found Croatian Deputy Prime Minister Radimir Cacic guilty of causing a traffic accident with two fatalities in Hungary in 2010, and gave him a 22-month suspended sentence with a probation of three years. Commenting on Friday's Hungarian first-instance sentence against Croatian First Deputy Prime Minister Radimir Cacic for a traffic accident with two fatalities, opposition officials Jadranka Kosor and Dragutin Lesar said Cacic should resign, while Josip Leko of the ruling coalition said Cacic and his party should first state their opinion. Lesar (Labour Party) said he could comment on the sentence only in the context of the political responsibility of a state official. "He was found guilty. I want to believe that the bar which the prime minister set so high in the case of former minister Mirela Holy won't be lowered now." He said the Hungarian judiciary had realised that Croatia's first deputy PM was irreplaceable. Asked what he meant, Lesar recalled Cacic's statement that he would withdraw from politics only if convicted to an unconditional prison sentence. Commenting on Milanovic's statement that he would make a decision upon the final sentence, Lesar said "Milanovic will no longer be prime minister when that sentence becomes final."

My comment - Obviously,we are all equal, but some are more equal than others.

When the music is good

via

 

Doctor pulls 13cm live worm from man's eye in India

A doctor in India has pulled a live 13 centimetre-long worm from the eye of an elderly patient who was complaining of persistent pain in an operation reminiscent of a far-fetched alien movie plot. When Dr V. Seetharaman examined 75-year-old patient P.K. Krishnamurthy at Mumbai's Fortis Hospital this week, the eye expert was shocked by the highly unusual sight of the writhing parasite and had to operate speedily to remove it before serious damage was caused.

 

The world is about to get a well-earned long weekend but don't make big plans.

A so-called "leap second" will be added to the world's atomic clocks as they undergo a rare adjustment to keep them in step with the slowing rotation of the Earth. To achieve the adjustment, on Saturday night atomic clocks will read 23 hours, 59 minutes and 60 seconds before moving on to midnight Greenwich Mean Time.

 

Borderline

via

 

Japanese Names

A Japanese car manufacturer had designed a new model but could not come up with an appropriate name for it. Names are very important to the Japanese, for example ATOYOTA is spelled the same forward and backward. Believing the Germans had chosen well when they named the Volkswagen (the people's car), the Japanese firm sent a delegation to the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg, Germany, to ask for help. The VW president found that his people who invented model names were too busy to respond quickly. He asked the Japanese how soon they needed the new name. When they replied that the car was almost ready for production and they needed a name within two weeks, the German exclaimed: "Dat Soon!"

 

Wanna be the leader? You gotta have friends

Image: Tim Flach

 As ever, it's not what you know, but who: the structure of social networks, both online and off, seems to confer leadership on those with the most friends. Chains of command can form without members of a group – including the leader – ever needing to know who's on top. It is often suggested that the most influential individuals are also the best connected, but the idea has been difficult to test in a real-world setting. Cedric Sueur of the Free University of Brussels (ULB), Belgium, and colleagues instead looked at how two species of macaque – Macaca tonkeana and Macaca mulatta – reach group decisions, such as when and where to move on. They found that the leadership hierarchy in both species emerged via a simple rule-of-thumb: individuals followed the lead of their closest affiliates. Consequently, the individual with the most social connections becomes the leader in a self-reinforcing hierarchy.

 

Run out of batteries? Just spray-paint some new ones.

Researchers have created five sprayable paints that form a lithium-ion battery when layered together, letting you store energy on walls, tiles or even your favourite mug. Regular batteries contain a positive and negative electrode, both paired with a metal current collector, and a polymer separator sandwiched in the middle. These five layers are normally manufactured in sheets and rolled up into a cylinder, making it hard to create extremely thin batteries. Now, Neelam Singh and colleagues at Rice University in Houston have used a combination of existing metallic paints and custom materials to create sprayable versions of each layer, allowing them to make batteries just a fraction of a millimetre thick by airbrushing the layers onto a surface, one at a time.

 

Moments of Dejection

Picture: AP Photo/Armando Franca

 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau quotes

“The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: "Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!”
 ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and The Discourses  / more here

'I asked myself, how bad can it be?'

A hilarious video captures the devoted dad's screams as he braves an amusement park ride, knowing his daughter would not be allowed on without him.

Post-Texting World

via

 

Chuck Norris attacked over anti-gay scouts article

A lesbian mother who was ousted as a American boy scout leader because of her sexual orientation has slapped down 1980s action star Chuck Norris after he claimed gay people have no place in the scouting movement. Jennifer Tyrrell, the former leader of her son's boy scouts troop in Bridgeport, Ohio, accused Norris of being "out of touch" after he wrote a column that accused President Obama of encouraging attempts trying to impose a "pro-gay" stance on the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) by stealth. In a column for AmmoLand.com, a site dedicated to shooting-sports news, Norris, a well known gun-rights activist, suggested that the recent announcement by James Turley, a BSA national board member, that he will work to overturn a policy that bans gay scouts and gay scout leaders was an attempt to win favour with the Obama administration. But the BSA's rules have faced growing criticism in recent months after Tyrrell was removed form her post in April.

 

Yuck!

via

 

Real Chefs Don’t Use Gadgets

Somebody needs to tell the world how silly this is. No one needs any of these objects.
You won’t use them and you will actually feel bad about owning them. They are a daily reminder of the insufficiency of human enjoyments.
 Here is what a person needs to cook well: two high quality pans, one big and one little, with lids; two corresponding pots; a roasting pan; a big chef’s knife and a small- to medium-sized one, like a santoku; a spatula; a big spoon; a big fork; a grater; a cutting board; and three or four other necessaries, depending on what you like to cook. For Josh Ozersky, that means a microplane grater, for getting cheese onto spaghetti. It also means a heavy reinforced spatula, for pushing down hamburgers, and a can opener, for opening cans. That’s it. You may want three or four other things. But there should be a limit. And the limit should be what you actually use.
We need to stop giving ourselves a pass on buying stuff we don’t need.
 

The Floor is Lava

via

 

Google Builds a Brain that Can Search for Cat Videos

The Google X laboratory has invented some pretty cool stuff: refrigerators that can order groceries when your food runs low, elevators that can perhaps reach outer space, self-driving cars. So it’s no surprise that their most recent design is the most advanced, highest functioning, most awesome invention ever… a computer that likes watching YouTube cats?
 Okay, it’s a bit more advanced than that. 

 

Nora Ephron’s Sharp Wit

Nora Ephron, the celebrated filmmaker known for her romantic comedies, has passed away at the age of 71. With such films as When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, Ephron created indelible cinematic moments through lovable characters and witty dialogue, elevating the romantic comedy to new heights for a contemporary audience. Below, Slate highlights three prime examples of Ephron’s ability to handle comedy, romance, and many things in between.

Ridiculous Pictures Of Girls In Bikinis (59 pics)

Fishki.Net | more

Pug Hats For Babies

via

14 NASA Images of Space Things That Look Like Earth Things

 "The Horsehead Nebula, embedded in the vast and complex Orion Nebula, is seen in this representative-color image from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii. The dark molecular cloud, roughly 1,500 light years distant, is visible only because its obscuring dust is silhouetted against another, brighter nebula."

Credit: Jean-Charles Cuillandre (CFHT), Hawaiian Starlight, CFHT.
via The New Yorker / more

Cyanide & Happiness

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net