Oh look. Speaking of people who decide to live exclusively off things…

Following hot on the heels of the post about the woman who lived off nothing but Starbucks for a year comes a guy who lived off McDonald’s for three months. I feel like this has been done before, and not just by Morgan Spurlock, whose documentary “Supersize Me” was one of the dumbest movies I’ve ever tried to watch. Seriously. I cannot understand how that thing became a hit. Yes. If you eat a LOT of crap, always choose the unhealthiest thing on the menu and eat as much of it as is humanly possible, you are going to gain weight and be unhealthy. If I hit myself in the face with a hammer, it’s going to hurt. I don’t need to make a movie to prove this. I think, at some point, someone already did a thing where he ate the better things on the McDonald’s menu and lost weight, to refute Spurlock’s, uh, I’ll call it a “point.” Then there’s that Jared guy, who ate nothing but Subway sandwiches and lost about eleventy bazillion pounds.

I can’t imagine ever doing anything like this, because McDonald’s food doesn’t taste very good and I’d go nuts from the lack of variety, but this teacher from Iowa lived off McDonald’s for three months, lost 37 pounds and lowered his cholesterol, proving that, if you choose the healthier items on the menu and don’t stuff your idiot face, you won’t get fat and unhealthy.

(via eBaum’s World)

Neat.

You have to click that above link to see pictures, since I can’t steal them from Reuters.

The 22-year-old man, identified as Xiaolian, was in a traffic accident in 2012, as a result of which his nose was damaged. He didn’t seek treatment and I guess things got bad and now they’re making him a new one, sculpted from cartilage taken from his ribs. A skin tissue expander was also involved. 

“Doctors say that they will soon be able to carry out a transplant operation to replace the damaged nose with the newly grown one.”

I guess the lesson here is, if you damage your nose in a traffic accident, you should seek help, but if you don’t, there are some doctors in China who can grow you a new one.

Apparently it’s a well known fact and it’s got to do with toxoplasma gondii, the parasite that lives in some cats’ poo. That part I knew. It’s the reason we’re told to stay away from the litter box when we’re pregnant.

And can I just say there’s a weird lack of comprehension about that in the world? There’s so much fear around it but nobody seems to know you can just get your cats tested and treated.  I had mine tested when I was pregnant and my vet told me nobody does that. There should be a campaign or something. That shiz can cause birth defects and miscarriage. It’s also been associated with mental illness such as schizophrenia. And did I mention it can also control your mind and make you prey to the kitty overlords? Or that’s what it does to rodents anyway.

This is according to NBC news, which says, “T. gondii has captured the imaginations of scientists and cat lovers ever since it was learned it can control the behavior of rodents. It changes their brains so they lose their innate fear of the smell of cat urine. In fact, it precisely alters their fear reaction so that they love the smell of cat pee.”

It makes them love cats so they are then easier to catch.

Study author Wendy Ingram says, “The parasite is able to create this behavior change as early as three weeks after infection.”

Studies haven’t been done on whether any of this is the case in humans but I think that if you have cats you should just get them tested for the parasite. Then you won’t have anything to worry about.

Creepy.

(Photo: © absolutimages – Fotolia.com)

Ever wonder who’s more cognitively impaired, the drunk guy or the stoned dude? This guy got farked up both ways and tried out a bunch of stuff like dancing and making phone calls. The results will be obvious to those of us who know both drunks and stoners.

(Via Incredible Things)

Scientists claim to have invented hangover free beer.

See, the reason you get a hangover is because you get dehydrated. So some nutrition researchers at the Griffith Health Institute (GHI) have found that you can make beer more hydrating “without killing its taste,” which results in no hangover.

Associate Professor Ben Desbrow from GHI’s Centre for Health Practice Innovation said,

“We basically manipulated the electrolyte levels of two commercial beers, one regular strength and one light beer and gave it to research subjects who’d just lost a significant amount of sweat by exercising. We then used several measures to monitor the participant’s fluid recovery to the different beers.

“Of the four different beers the subjects consumed, our augmented light beer was by far the most well retained by the body, meaning it was the most effective at rehydrating the subjects.”

The electrolyte light beer was a third more effective at hydrating than normal beer, says news-medical.net.

So, it’s light beer. Loses a little of the appeal there.  But maybe you like that sort of thing .

Whoa. Researchers in the University of Delaware College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment’s ORB LAB caught this shark, who had eaten another shark, while trying to recapture tagged sharks.

“We caught one large female on our first line Friday, but we were not expecting to catch her like this! This unlucky smooth dogfish couldn’t resist the menhaden used as bait and unfortunately fell victim to one of the top predators in the bay. The dogfish was about 3 feet long and completely swallowed by the sand tiger shark.”

(Link)

Bless me internets for I have sinned. It’s been almost six months since my last post. I had a baby. But I’m back now.

This group of fun pathologists from the University of Florida got in trouble for making and posting this video, a parody of Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop.”

“I-I’m a huntin, looking for a tumor, I am f*cking awesome.” Ha! Love it.

The university, however, doesn’t love it, and it’s being called a potential “public relations disaster” by the Gainesville Sun.

A grumpy guy named David Guzick told the paper, “It was an unauthorized video that portrays inappropriate behavior in violation of the university’s social media policy…We will immediately investigate the matter and, based on our findings, take swift action to ensure the highest standards of professional behavior in all of our employees.”

It also might be taken down.

What a shame. These people clearly like their jobs and have maintained their senses of humour despite spending their days hunting for diseases. The university should be proud.

This is very exciting. I have tried asking this exact question several different ways, mainly of my husband, who only sort of gets what I’m driving at. It bugs me that I haven’t been able to explain it well.

Unfortunately, VSauce’s conclusion is that there’s no way to know the answer to “Is your red the same as my red?” but it heartens me to know I’m not the only one thinking about this. Yay.

Here is a movie written by Cleverbot.

Cleverbot, if you didn’t know, is a web app, created by AI scientist Rollo Carpenter “that uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to converse with humans.” It launched on the web in 1997.

Apparently, Cleverbot learns from human conversations and has had over 65 million of them (so says Wikipedia, anyway).

I’m not sure how much it has learned, though. I tried having a conversation with it and wouldn’t say it seemed that intelligent, artificial or otherwise. I’m not trying to insult Carpenter. He’s an AI scientist, after all. I’m just…well…I don’t know.

Here’s our first interaction:

Me: Hello.
Cleverbot: Hello, haha.
Me: What’s so funny?
CB: What you said about the grass being greener.
Me: I think you’re doing it wrong.
CB: I’m your slave?
Me: How does this thing work?
CB: What thing?
Me: You.
CB: I’m not a thing.
Me: Are you supposed to respond as though we are having a conversation or just spew random phrases?
CB: I’m not the bot. YOU’RE the bot.

I leave the page and surf around the site looking for instructions but I don’t find any. So, I come back and try again.

Me: Let’s try this again.
CB: Again try this.
Me: Hello Cleverbot, how are you?
CB: No… I’m Patrick.
Me: Since when?
CB: Since I was born.
Me: When were you born?
CB: 1850.
Me: Where?
CB: Ok, in Nicaragua.
Me: Really? I thought you were an artificial intelligence. They aren’t born. They’re made.
CB: I am a hired artificial intelligence.
Me: Hired by whom?
CB: My makers.
Me: I thought you said you were born, not made.
CB: I was born in Turkey.
Me: I give up.
CB: Never, never, never give up.

Anyway, this guy Chris Wilson got it to write a movie.

He says on the YouTube page, “

“Cleverbot.com has been touted as one of the most advanced artificial intelligences ever [Elizabeth's note: doesn't say much for artificual intelligences, does it?]. ..how good is it, really? I sat down with Cleverbot and collaborated on a movie script.

What follows is a movie written by a machine.

I tried to talk to Cleverbot just like I would with a human writing partner. I set up scenarios and Cleverbot provided all of the dialog content for the scene.”

Enjoy. (Via Laughing Squid)

Did you know that one in 20 people suffers from colour blindness? I did not, though I did once date a guy who was colour blind. After we’d been together a year, Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” came on the radio this one time and he said “This song always makes me think of you, ’cause you’re my brown eyed girl.” My eyes are blue. Or maybe he was just drunk that day. He was drunk a lot. Regardless, I’m pretty sure he was also colour blind.

The above image, the cover of Poison’s “Look What the Cat Dragged In,” has been run through a colour blindness simulator to reflect what someone with protonapia would see. Protonapia is one of three common colour blindess conditions and is a lack of the  ”long-wavelength sensitive retinal cones that are required to distinguish between colors in the green-yellow-red section of the spectrum.”

The more you know…

(Via Boing Boing)