Blendor
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Archive for April, 2008
April 28, 2008 at 12:05 pm · Filed under Design, Health
French researchers have developed a potentially very useful set of graphical icons to depict disease and drug information:
Like road signs, the VCM graphical language uses a small set of graphical signs. The current dictionary contains about 130 pictograms displayed in 5 colors. For example, current conditions of a patient are shown as red icons while risks of future conditions are orange. The physicians who tested the system learned it in a couple of hours and think this system will reduce the number of errors in drug prescriptions.
I think a universal, simplified set of icons is a great idea. Of course they wouldn’t be a replacement for drug information sheets, etc., but they could allow doctors and pharmacist to quickly identify a substance and work more safely and efficiently.
April 24, 2008 at 3:20 pm · Filed under Austin, Music
I gotta admit, I’m a little sad. Austinist: Austin’s Backyard Ampitheater Announces Final Season
Direct Events and Backyard owner Tim O’Connor has announced the live oak amphitheater’s final season, calling it quits after sixteen seasons in the hill country.
The owner cited the massive Hill Country Galleria and other commercial expansion having “taken away from some of the venue’s magic” as the reasons for the closing. He’s not kidding. The last couple of times I went out there, the formerly serene hill country location was marred by bright blue and yellow Best Buy lights, as well as overall light pollution from nearby parking lots. Hopefully wherever they move it, it’ll be a little more insulated from strip malls.
April 24, 2008 at 1:00 pm · Filed under Books, People
Good news? Probably not, if you’re Nabokov’s ghost:
Having kept the literary world in a state of suspense for years over whether he was prepared to carry out his long-standing threat to burn his father’s last novel, Dmitri Nabokov has finally announced that he is prepared to save it from destruction.
Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura will now not be thrown onto the flames, the 73-year-old has told Der Spiegel magazine, arguing that his father, the creator of Lolita and Pale Fire who died in 1977, would not want his son to suffer any more over his most tortuous dilemma.
[Previously discussed here.]
April 24, 2008 at 12:17 pm · Filed under Health, Politics, Science
Orac has a nice rejoinder to David Kirby’s recent article, which contained the following disheartening, if not unsurprising news:
Senator Hillary Clinton, in response to a questionnaire from the autism activist group A-CHAMP, wrote that she was “Committed to make investments to find the causes of autism, including possible environmental causes like vaccines.” And when asked if she would support a study of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated children, she said: “Yes. We don’t know what, if any, kind of link there is between vaccines and autism – but we should find out.”And now, yesterday, at a rally in Pennsylvania, Barack Obama had this rather surprising thing to say:
“We’ve seen just a skyrocketing autism rate. Some people are suspicious that it’s connected to the vaccines. This person included. The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it.”
(Note: The Washington Post reports that when Obama said “this person,” he pointed to someone who had asked an autism question).
Orac contends (and I agree) that the problem isn’t the answers themselves, but rather that they answered at all (his notes and links, not mine):
In essence, both candidates accepted some of the major pillars of the mercury militia’s fantasies as being true. These include claims that:
- there is an autism “epidemic.” (Arguably, there is very likely not.)
- there is a scientific controversy over whether vaccines cause autism. (There really isn’t; it’s a so-called manufactured controversy. There is no good evidence that vaccines cause autism, David Kirby’s bloviations and pontifications otherwise notwithstanding. Multiple large epidemiological studies have failed to find even a hint of a convincing link, and the publicizing of the Hannah Poling case as some sort of “smoking gun” by antivaccinationists is nothing more than a rebranding of autism and more evidence of the incredibly shrinking vaccine claim.)
- that vaccines are somehow unsafe or that children are “overvaccinated” and eceive too many vaccines. (Again, there is no good evidence that either of these is the case.)
And of course, John McCain is even worse.
April 24, 2008 at 11:41 am · Filed under History, People
So this guy started a small hotel empire in Iran, and now he wants to bring Disneyland there, too. Most of his biggest ventures are on the island of Kish (just off the southern coast of Iran). I had no idea this island was so much more liberal (a relative term, to be sure) than the rest of Iran – apparently no visas are needed to visit, and some of Iran’s strict social rules are more relaxed. There’s even a dolphin show with dance music:
Mr. Sabet’s 18 Ukrainian dolphins have become the island’s darlings. They perform with Persian dance music, even though dance music was declared un-Islamic, and illegal, after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. It is produced only by Iranian expatriates in Los Angeles, and Kish is the only place in Iran where it is heard.
Islamic law, it seems, was powerless before the charms of the dolphins. “Even local authorities love them,” said an employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job. “The island’s cleric comes and visits them every week to make sure they are O.K. He keeps complaining that the music is not jolly enough and they might get depressed.”
I’m all for his attitude of bringing more of old Persia into Iran. I think there’s a big popular sentiment towards this movement, and hopefully there can be a gradual, peaceful, cultural revolution in Iran, rather than another violent, bloody one.
April 23, 2008 at 3:14 pm · Filed under Health
Meant for use in developing countries or in areas with few sources of clean water, the LifeStraw seems to be a promising product:
- Arrow Filters a minimum of 15,000 litres of water – provides safe drinking water for a family for more
than 2 years (calculated approximately on a family’s consumption of 20 litres water/day).
- Arrow Has a high flow rate.
- Arrow Removes minimum 99.9999% of all bacteria.
- Arrow Removes minimum 99.99% of all viruses.
- Arrow Removes minimum 99.9% of all parasites.
- Arrow No electrical power or batteries required.
- Arrow No spare parts required for the lifetime of the product.
- Arrow No running water required.
- Arrow Easy-to-clean pre-filter as well as purifier cartridge.
Sounds pretty ideal, and not as impractical as peddling for clean water. The design is simple and straightforward, with good water coming from the blue spout, and the remaining non-potable water coming from the red spout. It would be really great to see these offered for little to no money for those who really need it.
April 23, 2008 at 2:33 pm · Filed under Photography
This is such a cool project!
As you can see, people are submitting pics of themselves from when they were young, and in roughly the same poses today. You can submit your own, too. If only I could find that Snoopy London t-shirt…
April 23, 2008 at 12:03 pm · Filed under News
Apple Safari vulnerable to multiple attacks:
Safari users may be subject to crashes or interactions with an attacker’s malicious site, according to a warning posted on Tuesday on BugTraq .Researcher Juan Pablo Lopez Yacubian is credited with finding multiple vulnerabilities in Apple Safari 3.1.1 for Windows. Other versions of Safari may also be affected.
April 22, 2008 at 2:01 pm · Filed under Humor
You need to forgive that person today.
Just believe me.
April 22, 2008 at 9:56 am · Filed under Politics
(The links in this post are via this Metafilter post.) Some of these testimonies from Israeli soldiers are just stunning:
So they blew up two huge buildings and a police station. Because they blew up two buildings of 15-20 stories with a ton of explosives, so the whole nieghborhood had to be evacuated.The whole nieghborhood, it was an upscale neighborhood, and in the rich Palestinian neighborhoods there is one rule, they don’t shoot. Because if they shoot, then their home will be destroyed.Palestinians, Arabs are like Arabs, worry about their own ass. It was a nieghborhood of all the corrupt Palestinian Authority people. It was a nieghborhood, what can say, if you’ve ever been in north Tel Aviv, it’s the same.Villas and new cars.It wasn’t Gaza at all, I should only have such things. Huge houses, Villas, ofcourse they didn’t shoot at us even one bullet from there.
They blew up that area?
Yes, it was exploded. The story is that we had to evacuate 4000 people. Did you see Shindler’s list? When they evacuated the ghetto? although you have to make a thousand distinctions, it was an amazing picture. Really amazing, you see thousands of people. They pass in amored vehicles and big loud speakers shouting at them in Arabic,passing out leaflets, a special unit passes almost house to house and evacuates everybody, without shooting, nothing. But 4000 people, you can imagine. Those were very big buildings simply, the first thing that comes into your head is Shindler’s list. You see thousands of people with small children.
How were they evacuated?
How were they evacuated? They simply told them to go east. Just take everything and go east. 4000 people. In the middle of the night. You just see children, old people, women, all crammed into cars…on foot. Nothing, nothing an amazing sight….it just gives you the chills…as if, I just couldn’t…I just…I just….you can’t compare, but it was just like in the movie…ofcourse, you know it isn’t the same thing because you’re not a Nazi and you’re not killing them out of hatred or something. You’re even doing it for their own good, so that they don’t get hurt from the explosives, you understand. But I can’t help but not compare and not think about it.
One wonders if Nazi testimonials would sound much the same. This is from a new site called Breaking the Silence, which aims to reveal through soldier testimony the abuses suffered by the Palestinian people, “in order to force Israeli society to address the reality which it created.”
More discussion can be found in this Independent article:
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French researchers have developed a potentially very useful set of graphical icons to depict disease and drug information: