After watching this video about a mom who gave birth 36 hours after finding out she was pregnant, I saw this article on CNN Health about some research, albeit with a small sample set, on a relationship between defective Serotonin nerve cells in the brain stemp and SIDS. (How’s that for a run-on sentence?) Basically, the study showed that there is a likelihood that the defect in the brain stem, when coupled with contributing factors (sleeping on the stomach) caused the SIDS. Serotonin is involved in breathing, and waking. Here is the link:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/10/31/sids.research.ap/index.html
Anyway, back to this mom who gave birth and didn’t know she was pregnant. This woman was 36 weeks into her pregnancy and had no idea! The kid was born healthy, which is more than we can say for the mother.
So maybe I wanna go somewhere where we know someone who can plug us into the Cloud Appreciation Society! Er, wait. Yeah, there actually is a Cloud Appreciation Society, and they have a gallery of cloud photos. Some cool, some boring, some silly, and some spectacular. The thing about this website, though, isnt so much the clouds, but the variety of places they’ve been taken. It really, really, makes me want to travel more. Such a big world, so little traveling.
Here’s the link: http://www.cloudappreciationsociety.org/gallery/
Maybe you didn’t know this, but there is a Ninja vs. Pirate war going on right now (primarily on the internet, I’ll grant you), and my money is on the Ninja. Here is one helpful ninja (oxymoron?) that distributes video advice and a good dose of tom-ninja-foolery. check it out:
AskANinja.com
Let me just say, I really like Mythbusters. Entertaining, informative, and they blow sh!t up. I was browsing my normal gadget websites, and I saw a you-tube (or something similar) with Adam and Jamie on it, so I had to investigate. Check out this video of Adam and Jamie defeating a fingerprint lock three different ways:
http://www.redferret.net/?p=7537
I’ve never personally assumed fingerprints to be very secure, and I’ve always refused to give Jewel my fingerprint because I don’t need big brother all up in my grill, but now that I’ve seen this, this is perhaps a better reason not to use it. True, someone could snatch my wallet and use my credit card, but I don’t leave my wallet everywhere. My fingerprint on the otherhand is probably all over the damn place.
Anyway, even if you don’t buy into the whole personal security/big brother thing, it is still pretty cool to see locks broken, eh?
Ok, not really _proud_, but you have to admire it when a nation of fatties manages to influence an international imaging company to release a ’slimming’ feature on their digital cameras. I’m not kidding, HP actually has a set of ‘artistic effects’ on their cameras, and some of them include an option to make your subjects look skinnier than they are.
You should check out this demonstration link while I go off to eat an entire pizza before 10am (I probably won’t finish it before 10, but still):
http://www.hp.com/united-states/consumer/digital_photography/tours/slimming/index_f.html
As I’ve talked about before, sometimes I’ll leave DVDs playing in the background when I work. I try to pick funny or upbeat movies when I need to be creative (studies have shown even very short comedy sequences improve creativity), or more serious movies when I need to knuckle down (heh heh). Anyway, I’m watching Charlies Angels (a guilty pleasure), and I think I have a new favorite scene in that movie. My old favorite scene used to be any scene with Lucy Liu, and my new favorite is no exception, but Lucy plays a smaller role.
The setup is this- the girls are putting a camera on Roger Corwin’s briefcase so they can track his movements around his company. So the girl from ET gets in Corwin’s limo to distract the driver while Lucy plants the camera on the briefcase which is conveniently in the trunk (why put a briefcase in the trunk). Anyway, so ET girl is putting her moves on the driver and Lucy’s doing her thing in the back (heh heh again), but Lucy slams the trunk down and the driver goes to look what happened. ET girl grabs the guys face, says a sleazy line, and then licks the steering wheel. Then comes my favorite part. The driver who’s watching all this says in a not-so-slightly distressed voice ‘Oh my god’. This one line says so much to me about the driver’s character, and is so close to life, that it cracks me up every time. This guy knows he’s in way over his head, and he’s freaking out. I just love it.
Drew Barrymore (that’s her name!) then gets out and walks off, the driver cleans off the steering wheel, and the scene quickly transitions into a chase, but damn, I like that scene.
Steve Irwin died today (or maybe tomorrow since he was across the dateline?). Say what you want about him, but K and I used to watch that crazy guy all the time, and we sure enjoyed it. We’re thinking about his family.
P.S. Ever see South Park where Cartman pretends to be the Crocodile Hunter? Classic.
Well the other day I awoke to a slightly runny nose. I figured this was just due to some excesive Air Conditioning in the apartment and that it would go away. Well it didn’t!! This morning when I woke up at 7:00am to get ready to go scuba diving with my rented dry suit I just reset the alarm clock to 10:00am and went back to bed. The cold has progressed and isn’t any better and surely wasn’t good enough to dive on.
So I took all of the rented gear back to the shop and hope to be able to go next weekend. It really screws up a lot of plans, damn cold.
Well this morning I rented a car and headed to a local dive shop in Kentucky, it’s just the other side of the river you know. The reason I went there is because I am going to be taking a dry suit class on Saturday and I needed to go in to try the suit on and get in the pool and make sure it fit.
For those of you who don’t know what a dry suit is I guess I had better start with a wet suit which is probably more widely known. A wet suit is generally made of neoprene rubber and what it does is allow a small portion of water in between the suit and your skin. Your body heat quickly warms up this small portion of water and then the Neoprene insulates that little bit of water from the larger body that you are diving or swimming in. This is great for most diving and can even be used in colder water but the colder the water, even with this insulation, you still get cold. Water has a greater heat capacity than air does so water absorbs the heat from your body 25 times faster than air. So unless you are diving in 93 degree water or warmer you still lose body heat to the point that eventually you will get cold and need to get out of the water.
I have dove in a two piece 7mm thick wetsuit while I was in Vancouver a couple of years ago. The two pieces means that on my chest there is actually 14mm of insulating neoprene rubber keeping me warm. My friend was diving in a dry suit. Well the water temperature for those two dives was a nipple freezing 47F or 8C. After the first dive I was literally blue and my friend was shocked that I was going back into the water. The reason my friend was shocked was because he was diving in a dry suit and was warm and toasty.
What a dry suit does differently than a wet suit, as the name implies, is that it keeps you dry. It is usually a shell of some sort that looks like a giant one piece jump suit with feet that has a big zipper and seals at the neck and wrists. It is the seals at the neck and wrists and the big waterproof zipper that keeps all of th water out and keeps you dry. As I said earlier air transmits heat slower than water so by insulating yourself with air you can stay warm longer, plus you can wear thermal underwear which allows you to stay down even longer.
So I went to this dive shop in order to try and see if one of the rental suits would fit me and to get in one before diving in a Quary for the first time. The first forray into the drysuit was interesting. Sticking your hands through the wrist seals is difficult and pulls a lot of your arm hair. The neck seal is just wierd because there is something tight around your neck. Add all of this to the fact that you are standing in a warm humid room and I think I was getting more wet inside of the suit than if I was wearing a wetsuit and in the water. Once I did get into the water I was much more comfortable. On my first submersion I felt a little bit of a leak down the front of my chest where water was getting in. I came up, we readjusted things and I went back down and again more water down the chest. By now the store owner had stopped in and asked me to hold on for a second while he went and got something.
Basically what he went and got was a tube of neoprene that I was to put over my head and onto my kneck to help the suit seal there. Well the first time on it came off almost immediately because I thought it was too tight and was going asphixiate. After calming down for a second the owner put the tube on, and his neck was definitely larger than mine, and he said it was okay. So I took a deep breath and calmly put it back on and let him adjust everything for me and in the end it wasn’t so bad once it was adjusted. Normally you don’t need this kind of thing but because it is a rental suit they have to adjust the seals to fit a larger group of people than if I was to own the suit myself. I went down again and this time it was just fine.
So now I have a scuba tank, a dry suit and thermal underwear in my rental car just waiting to go diving on this coming Saturday without getting the majority of my body wet. My head, face and hands will still get wet but that is manageable. I’ll let you all know how it goes on Saturday.
I hope you all were able to follow this…
Many months ago (before my break in guitar lessons), my teacher gave me a CD of songs to play along with. We started with Sheryl Crow’s ‘If It Makes You Happy’ because it is exceedingly simple. Well at my lesson yesterday, I managed to make it all the way through it along with the music. I probably botched about 1/4 of the song, but I was impressed and enthused by the progress. So to those of you who gave me lessons last Christmas, they’re starting to pay off!
As an aside, M absolutely LOVES playing my guitar. If I leave it out, she runs to it directly and starts trying to play it. She loves it. I see a guitar in her future!