From: Patrick Sky <patricksky@bellsouth.net>
Date: October 1, 2014 at 5:38:04 PM EDT
To: "R. Daniel Prentiss" <dan@prentisslaw.com>, "R. Daniel Prentiss" <dan@prentisslaw.com>
Subject: Fwd: Something's Gotta Be Arranged | Medical Expenses - YouCaring
Paul Geremia fund: Paul has had a stroke and is in dire need
http://www.youcaring.com/medical-fundraiser/something-s-gotta-be-arranged-/241689#.VCwrjOAJSqQ.mailto
Glass takes one
million years to decompose,
which means it never wears out and can be a recycled an infinite amount of times!
Gold is the only
metal that doesn't rust,
even if it's buried in the ground for thousands of years.
Your tongue is the
only muscle in your body that is
attached at only one
end.
If you stop getting
thirsty, you need to drink more water. When a human body is dehydrated, its thirst mechanism shuts off.
Zero is the only
number that cannot be represented
by Roman numerals.
Kites were used in
the American Civil War to deliver letters and newspapers.
The song, Auld Lang
Syne, is sung at the stroke of midnight in almost every English-speaking country in the world to bring in the new year.
Drinking water after
eating reduces the acid in your mouth
by 61 percent.
Peanut oil is used
for cooking in submarines because it doesn't smoke unless it's heated above 450F.
The roar that we
hear when we place a seashell next to our ear is not the ocean, but rather the sound of blood surging through the veins in the ear.
Nine out of every 10
living things live in the ocean.
The banana cannot
reproduce itself. It can be propagated only by the hand of man.
Airports at higher
altitudes require a longer airstrip due to lower air density.
The University of Alaska spans four time zones.
The tooth is the
only part of the human body that cannot
heal itself.
In ancient
Greece, tossing an apple to a girl
was a traditional proposal of marriage. Catching it meant she accepted.
Warner
Communications paid $28 million for the copyright to the song Happy Birthday.
Intelligent people
have more zinc and copper in their hair.
A comet's tail
always points away from the sun.
The Swine Flu
vaccine in 1976 caused more death and illness than the disease it was intended to prevent.
Caffeine increases
the power of aspirin and other painkillers, that is why it is found in some medicines.
The military salute
is a motion that evolved from medieval times, when knights in armor raised their visors to reveal their identity.
If you get into the
bottom of a well or a tall chimney and look up, you can see stars, even in the middle of the day.
When a person dies,
hearing is the last sense to go.
The first sense lost is
sight.
In ancient times
strangers shook hands to show that they were unarmed.
Strawberries are the
only fruits whose seeds grow on the outside.
Avocados have the
highest calories of any fruit at 167 calories per hundred grams.
The moon moves about
two inches away from the Earth
each year.
The Earth gets 100
tons heavier every day due to falling space dust.
Due to earth's
gravity it is impossible for mountains to be higher than 15,000 meters.
Mickey Mouse is
known as "Topolino" in Italy ..
Soldiers do not
march in step when going across bridges because they could set up a vibration which could be sufficient to knock the bridge down.
Everything weighs
one percent less at the equator.
For every extra
kilogram carried on a space flight, 530 kg of excess fuel are needed at lift-off.
The letter J does
not appear anywhere on the periodic table.
"We make a living by what we get;we make a life by what we give."
Sir Winston Churchill
 |
Obama Protects Huge Swath of Pacific OceanBy Bob Grant The president exercises his authority to expand an existing marine reserve, making it the largest in the world. |
In some situations, panic is a sign of clear thinking. Reality is reality, whether it’s tweeted or not. And the truth doesn’t always set you free.
I love great art, no matter the medium.
Obama Can Still Earn His Nobel By TIMOTHY EGAN Sep 25, 2014 You remember 2009 and the glow from Oslo — Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Prize winner. Wow. Less than a year into his presidency, he joined an elite group: Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama. And for what? As near as anybody could tell, it was the only Nobel ever given for future good intentions.
Now the president with the world’s most prestigious badge of nonviolence is forced to become the warrior again, killing religious extremists as he bombs his seventh Muslim country — one more, as Stephen Colbert noted with a rewards punch card, and he’s earned a free falafel.
But look ahead, with optimism, and you can see a design for long-term peace behind the president’s plan to simultaneously kill fanatics and force a religion to confront the sources of that fanaticism. With his blunt speech at the United Nations on Wednesday, Obama put on notice the Sunni Muslim nations that have allowed Sunni barbarians to spread.
He made it clear that it is a warped religious ideology — “the cancer of violent extremism” — that is behind the slaughtering of innocents, raping of young girls, beheading of aid workers and tourists. Yes, it was a lecture, with finger-pointing. It’s time for the duplicitous Saudis, the look-the-other-way Qataris, “those who accumulate wealth through the global economy and then siphon funds to those who teach children to tear it down,” to stop trying to have it both ways. He called out their “hypocrisy,” without naming names, because everyone knows who they are.
Sure, it’s just a speech. Words, following and preceding airstrikes. But as a speech, it was a stunning departure from the usual platitudes without a plan. The leader who didn’t have a strategy for dealing with Islamic State nihilists a few weeks ago just dropped an idea bomb on the rest of the world. The “Muslim” president — a falsehood still held by nearly 25 percent of Republican voters — gave the Muslim world a blueprint for saving itself.
Until this week, most Western leaders have been afraid to say what Obama said at the United Nations. Sunnis dominate Islam, a religion of 1.6 billion people. The worst terror in the world today is being waged on behalf of a small, violent cult of death that is nominally Sunni. By enlisting at least five Sunni-majority nations in his campaign against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, Obama has taken the first step to get Islam to do what it must do. (It would help to have Turkey, the only Muslim nation in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and a Shiite-majority country, fully aboard with the 50 countries in the campaign to quash ISIS.)
“No god condones this terror,” Obama said. “No grievance justifies these actions. There can be no reasoning — no negotiation — with this brand of evil.” There again, his language was unvarnished, without filter or diplomatic dither.
Many in Obama’s own party heard only the echoes of George W. Bush. “Evil-doers,” coming from Bush, was a punch line. Cue up Will Ferrell and Jon Stewart. O.K., parallels granted. But Bush’s war in Iraq was nation-toppling born of hubris, followed by nation-building born of ignorance. Obama’s direct action against ISIS is designed to keep entire communities of “infidels” from being slaughtered by a cult under a black flag. His actions will save Muslims, the primary victims of Middle East terrorism, from other Muslims. It’s also in America’s interest, for those isolationists who think we should never try to stop overseas massacres on our watch.
Obama, the peace prize winner, is the only person who could rally the civilized world against a caliphate of violence. Who else would do it? The pathetic, hapless and corrupt Iraqi Army, built with American tax dollars? The United Nations? The Kurds? They will fight, but only for their interests and their territory.
The military campaign, as always, is the easy part, and fraught with careful-what-you-wish-for peril. War crimes trials, the sooner the better, for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and any name that can be clearly linked to a face behind the mask of an ISIS executioner should proceed with the support of the coalition Obama has put together.
But to earn his Nobel, Obama has to follow through till the end of his presidency, to pressure the Sunnis to police their own. This is their cancer, now spreading to the rest of the world. No need to make it bigger than it is. The absurdly alarmist voices in our country — Lindsey Graham, with his fear that we’re going to “all get killed back here at home,” and the senate candidate Scott Brown, who said “radical Islamic terrorists are threatening to cause the collapse of our country” — are myopics, staring out at the world from holes in the blankets over their heads.
More succinctly, as Obama stated, this fight is about what happens when religion goes bad. “There should be no tolerance of so-called clerics who call upon people to harm innocents because they’re Jewish, or because they’re Christian, or because they’re Muslim,” he said. “It’s time for a new compact among the civilized peoples of this world to eradicate war at its most fundamental source, and that is the corruption of young minds by violent ideology.”
Of course it’s a long shot. Of course it’s a pipe dream. Of course it goes against all the backward trends in the Islamic world. But in one of the best speeches of his presidency, Obama has shown the world a path to a peace that may outlast him.
I love great art, no matter the medium.
 |
This Bug SucksAn assassin bug, which some researchers are using as living syringes to sample blood from birds and mammals, feeds on a bat |
Why the brain produces musical hallucinations
By Kerry Grens | September 1, 2014
ANDRZEJ KRAUZE
The first time Sven Vanneste, who studies tinnitus at the University of Texas at Dallas, encountered a patient with musical hallucinations, he noticed on her chart that it was her birthday. “Happy birthday,” he told her at the start of their visit, not knowing yet that “Happy Birthday” was the very song she was hearing over and over again in her head.
“Happy Birthday” is not a lovely song by any stretch, and the prospect of having it repeated ad infinitum is maddening. It’s no wonder, then, that musical hallucinations—typically incurable and chronic—can be so distressing. Such hallucinations, rare phenomena affecting one to three percent of people who seek treatment for tinnitus, are the perception that music is playing outside the body (as opposed to getting a song stuck in your head, colloquially an “earworm,” which you don’t perceive as having an external source). Recent studies of patients with musical hallucinations have supported the idea that the phantom tunes may actually reflect the hyperactivity of our brain’s normal, pattern-forming capability.
The human brain routinely fills in missing bits of information to form the perception of patterns—even when no such patterns exist. We may see a cat crouched on the sidewalk, when in reality it is the shadow of a mailbox. Or we think we hear our name, when it is only someone calling out for another. “The brain doesn’t like to have holes,” says Josef Rauschecker, a tinnitus researcher at Georgetown University.
Auditory hallucinations, however, are formed out of whole cloth. The brain doesn’t mistake one thing for another, it invents the perceived stimulus altogether. But our brains’ pattern-making tendencies may also underlie the formation of these phantom stimuli.
Vanneste prefers the term “musical hallucinosis” to describe the condition. Unlike people with schizophrenia, who are commonly convinced that their visual and auditory hallucinations are real, patients with hallucinosis are generally aware that the music is not really being played outside their heads, and the condition is typically not indicative of any deeper psychoses. Another clear distinction—and one that offered an early clue to the origins of musical hallucinosis—is that nearly all those who suffer from it have moderate to severe hearing loss.
Vanneste seeks to understand how, on a neural basis, musical hallucinations are different from tinnitus, which is the perception of phantom tones, buzzing, or hissing. He and his colleagues collected EEG recordings from 30 people: 10 with tinnitus, 10 with musical hallucinosis, and 10 normal participants. Perhaps not surprisingly, patients who perceived phantom sounds always had hyperactivity in the auditory cortex. But compared to patients with tinnitus, people with musical hallucinosis showed additional increases in activity in several brain regions, including those related to language and music (NeuroImage, 82:373–83, 2013).
Another region with increased activity was the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex—a gherkin-size chunk of brain residing a few centimeters behind the forehead—which is associated with filling in missing auditory information and with conscious perception. “One of the models [for musical hallucinosis] is that your brain is compensating for the hearing loss” by producing stimuli, says Vanneste. Because auditory stimuli are weakened by partial deafness, the brain fills in blanks with auditory memories. But why it’s music in particular, instead of barking dogs or lawn mowers, “we don’t know,” he says.
More recently, Timothy Griffiths, a neurologist at Newcastle University in the U.K., came across a patient with an interesting observation about her own musical hallucinations. For her, hearing actual music seemed to tamp down the phantom melody. Griffiths and his colleagues took advantage of this opportunity to manipulate the intensity of her hallucination—a snippet of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta H.M.S. Pinafore—by playing Bach. They recorded her brain activity using magnetoencephalography (MEG) with and without the real music playing.
Periods when the musical hallucination was most intense correlated with increased activity in a number of brain regions, notably the anterior superior temporal gyrus—thought to be involved in melody perception—and the posteromedial cortex, which may be involved in the retrieval of musical memories (Cortex, 52:86-97, 2014). “What we think this might represent is a form of melody retrieval that’s acting on the abnormal perception” due to the hearing loss, Griffiths says. He suspects that the two regions’ malfunctioning contributes to, firstly, an invented sound, and secondly, a lack of inhibition of that sound. The brain wasn’t receiving enough corrective sensory input to offset the invented perception and thus halt its processing into what the patient perceived as a real sound, Griffiths explains.
One of the reasons why the memory retrieved by that imprecise signal is music, Griffiths supposes, is because “music is something which is very familiar and predictable and overlearned.”
In the book Musicophilia, author and neurologist Oliver Sacks proposes the same idea: that musical hallucinations occur when the brain—to make up for missing auditory pieces—masks the silence of hearing loss with melodies. He explains how the human brain is inherently attracted to music because of its repetitions. Not surprisingly, then, “the balance sometimes shifts too far and our musical sensitivity becomes a vulnerability.”
Rolling Stone said Willie Nelson is "a hippie’s hippie and a redneck’s redneck.”
I love great art, no matter the medium.
