March 12, 2010 at 7:42 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Many people watched the Academy Awards last week and noticed that Best Actress winner Sandra Bullock never changed her expression. New York Magazine asks the question, if you can’t move your face, can you still act with it? Aging Hollywood stars have always resorted to plastic surgery, but Botox injections are faster, cheaper, and less invasive -and they have become almost required for an actress to look young enough for starring roles. How has this affected the art of acting?
Some actors appear to be underplaying their characters, consciously making them cool, without affect. If you can’t move your face, why not create an undemonstrative character? Others have taken the opposite approach: On two cable dramas starring actresses of a certain age, the heroines are brassy and expansive, with a tendency to shout and act out, yet somehow their placid foreheads are never called into play. Usually, when a person reenacts [...]
Original post by Miss Cellania
March 12, 2010 at 7:39 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
University libraries are sometimes the beneficiary of someone’s collect works, or collected obsessions. After all, when a relative doesn’t have use for 400-year-old glass eyeballs, wouldn’t the local college take them? Mental_floss takes a look at eleven such strange “special collections” you can read or see at our institutions of higher learning.
Yearning to learn more about your kidneys? Head to the University of North Carolina’s Carl W. Gottschalk Collection. The 12,400-item collection houses legendary medical professor Gottschalk’s passion: historical items related to the study of kidneys. Gottschalk’s medical research focused on the kidneys, and throughout his life he managed to collect texts, engravings, woodcuts, and other relics on the subject that dated back to the 16th century.
Shown is Dr. Gottschalk’s kidney-shaped desk. Other collections focus on bloodletting, witchcraft, puppets, and more. Link
Original post by Miss Cellania
March 12, 2010 at 6:22 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
When it comes to aliens, Hollywood really does not have much imagination. Most extraterrestrials that have appeared on the big screen look very much like us, or are at least some kind of four-to-six-limbed vertebrate, and this says more about out own vanity than anything else. It would be far more interesting, I think, to take the weird and wonderful organisms of the Cambrian as inspiration for alien life forms, and two new critters have just been added to the odd Cambrian menagerie.
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Original post by Brian Switek none@example.com
March 12, 2010 at 5:52 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
A woman in New Zealand sold two glass vials at auction for the equivalent of $1,983 USD. She claimed that they contained souls that she had exorcised from a house in the town of Christchurch:
The “ghosts” were put up for bidding by Avie Woodbury from the southern city of Christchurch. She said they were captured in her house and stored in glass vials with stoppers and dipped in holy water, which she says “dulls the spirits’ energy.”
She said they were the spirits of an old man who lived in the house during the 1920s, and a powerful, disruptive little girl who turned up after a session with a spirit-calling Ouija board. Since an exorcism at the property last July led to their capture, there has been no further spooky activity in the house, she said.
Link via io9 | Photo: flickr user Nancy Wombat, used under Creative Commons license
Original post by John Farrier
March 12, 2010 at 5:10 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Should the US ditch the classic red “exit” sign and replace it with a green man? There are arguments both for and against. For the red:
The contrast between the letters and the background renders it highly legible, the illumination stresses the importance of the message, and the color is evocative of both fire and fire-safety devices (fire extinguishers, fire engines, fire alarms, and the like).
But in other parts of the world, pictograms rule. The “running man” sign was designed by Yukio Ota and adopted internationally for exits a quarter century ago!
The sign’s wordlessness means it can be understood even by people who don’t speak the local language. And the green color, they argue, just makes sense. Green is the color of safety, a color that means go the world over. Red, on the other hand, most often means danger, alert, halt, please don’t touch. Why confuse panicked evacuees with [...]
Original post by Miss Cellania
March 12, 2010 at 3:45 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
The Miami-Herald is reporting today that food stamp use has more than doubled among Floridians in the last three years:
More than 2.5 million Floridians are on food stamps, up from three years ago where 1.2 million residents received assistance.
That’s according to records kept by the Department of Children and Families, which administers the program.
DCF Secretary George Sheldon told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel Tuesday that Florida’s food stamp rolls grew the fastest in the nation since 2007.
Some of this is due to increased efforts on the part of states to expand access, but it is also, I think, a compelling measure of the economic situation. But it is more than that - food stampls, as I’ve been arguing for many years, are important because as they become more universal (we’re already at 1-in-9 Americans using food stamps, next year’s numbers will probably be 1-in-8, and many states are at 1-in-6 [...]
Original post by Sharon Astyk none@example.com
March 12, 2010 at 3:35 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Gerard Vlemmings, whom you know as the Presurfer, recently retired from his real world job and is now devoting his time to blogging. He’s launched a new project called Popular Coffee News which is, unsurprisingly, devoted to coffee and the people who love it. Some of the early posts include coffee science, coffee art, coffee making tips, and a video of a bird stirring a coffee cup! Link
Original post by Miss Cellania
March 12, 2010 at 3:05 pm · Filed under 48204
My first big splash in the blogosphere will have occurred five years ago in June. That was when I first discovered the utter wingnuttery that is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. It was then that I wrote a little bit of that not-so-Respectful Insolence that you’ve come to know and love entitled Salon.com flushes its credibility down the toilet, a perfect description of an article by RFK, Jr. published in Salon.com and simultaneously in Rolling Stone entitled Deadly Immunity. As I look back, I realize that, as widely linked to and discussed as it was at the time, that post, arguably more than any other, was the one that established me as one of the go-to bloggers when it came to vaccines. Of course, it may also have been the gloriously Orac-ian verbiage I employed. As longtime readers may (or may not) recall, at the time, I referred to RFK’s article [...]
Original post by Orac none@example.com
March 12, 2010 at 12:52 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Waterfowl (or wildfowl, or anseriforms, or ducks, geese, swans and kin) are awesome. Last year saw the publication of a particularly freakish, recently extinct member of the group that’s been known to some of us for a while: the surreal Hawaiian duck Talpanas lippa Olson & James, 2009 from Kauai*. I’ll admit that I missed the memo (didn’t know about publication until Glyn Young sent me a pdf), even though Chris Taylor at Catalogue of Organisms wrote about Talpanas on its publication.
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Original post by Darren Naish none@example.com
March 12, 2010 at 12:02 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
This is a repost of my reflections on my father who passed away 13 years today. It took me 12 years to write the following eulogy and remembrance. While quite personal, I posted it here last year because I felt that my experiences were quite universal, shared by the families of the ten or twenty million alcoholics in the US and the hundreds of millions worldwide. Moreover, I wanted to provide a face for my colleagues who work in the area of substance abuse and a reminder for my clinical colleagues of the people behind those they may dismiss as drunks and junkies.
In becoming one my most most highly-read and highly-commented posts, I thought I would share it again this year, especially for the new readers who’ve come on board in the last twelve months.
Today marks 12 years since you died.
Well, it might have been today, possibly yesterday, I hope [...]
Original post by Abel Pharmboy none@example.com
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