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Condensed knowledge for 2007-09-19

A bit of a health theme to this edition of condensed knowledge:

  • A new CPR technique was discovered. It’s called OAC-CPR (Only rhythmic Abdominal Compression). As its name implies, you only press on the abdomen, eliminating the risk of broken ribs, mouth-to-mouth, and fatigue from pushing so hard. Definitely worth looking into this!
  • Prozac found in the drinking water in the UK. Apparently so many people are on the anti-depressant in England, that it can now be found, diluted, in the water supply, after having passed through their bodies, into the sewers, through the water treatment plants, etc. Although the “experts” are saying there’s no risk, I doubt it. I mean, this is a drug, found active, in the water supply!
  • WD40 turns out to be a great help for bad joints. Despite the precautions written on the cans, rubbing it into the skin was of tremendous help to a man suffering from joint pain. Not sure that I’d recommend this.
  • Aspartame is the behind the spike in suicides for teen and pre-teen girls. Apparently, it’s a powerful mood-changer — it causes depression. Something to think about the next time you buy your children something with Nutrasweet or Aspartame as the sweetener.
  • Exercising in traffic is bad for your heart. Now that’s something I’ve known was wrong for some time. It just didn’t make sense to me when I saw people running on the sidewalk, next to heavy traffic, breathing in all those noxious fumes. When I run, I want to breathe fresh, healthy air, not someone’s nasty car exhaust. I just couldn’t get why they’d put themselves through something that unhealthy. It turns out the particulates from vehicle emissions decrease our blood’s ability to clot, and restrict the amount of blood that reaches the heart immediately upon exposure.
  • Mobile phones are as dangerous as smoking. So reads a recent headline… People have gone back and forth on the safety of mobile phones for years. Now the EU has finally decided to pick a side and take action. The article’s in Romanian, but what it says is that governments are starting to take mitigating action, first by warning people of the risks, and then by looking at ways to minimize exposure to WiFi radiation. They’re recommending that people go back to using wired Internet connections instead of wireless ones.

Now for some funny stuff:

And some economic discussion:

  • Greenspan on Iraq war, oil link. He confirms what I’ve thought and said for some time. In his talk with Matt Lauer, he touches on the housing bubble and the fiscal irresponsibility of the current administration, but he has no compliments for the Democrats, either. Last, but no least, he says the dollar may be replaced by the euro as the reserve currency of choice.
  • Transparent Investing: what your broker doesn’t want you to know. Here’s a site that offers a purportedly frank discussion of index investing. Definitely worth a look.
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How To

Get smart about money in 135 minutes

Two easy steps are involved with this:

  1. Take 90 minutes to watch Dave Ramsey’s video entitled “Dumping Debt“. It was posted to YouTube in 10-minute segments. Here they are: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7 – Part 8 – Part 9. This was possibly posted without Mr. Ramsey’s permission, so please consider purchasing the DVD from his web store. (via Get Rich Slowly)
  2. Take 45 minutes to watch Paul Grignon’s video entitled “Money as Debt” on Google Video. Trust me on this. You will be shocked. You will have your eyes opened, and then you’ll realize what makes the world go ’round. (Cristina, thanks for pointing this out to me!)

Since both of these resources were posted online at full length, and I’m not sure if they were posted with or without their authors’ permissions, you’d be smart to watch them now, while they’re still available. I do not endorse use of copyrighted materials without permission — and to be fair, I don’t know that’s the case here — but I did want to share this information with you. If the videos should become unavailable for some reason, then please consider purchasing them. They are worth your time and money.

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Lists

Condensed knowledge for 2007-08-21

  • Knight News Challenge: Round 2 Launches. The Knight News Challenge, in which winners get grants ranging from tiny to huge, is in its second year. It awards big money for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news. The contest is run by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Last year’s winners won awards ranging from $15K to $5 million. If you’ve got a worthwhile idea that’s news-related, by all means, submit it!
  • ProBlogger.net has a great post that points out five WP plugins that can help with managing your comments and responding to readers.
  • Brian Auer of the Epic Edits Weblog has a post on the differences between exposing for highlights, shadows or midtones.
  • A couple of Russians put together a wry video where they demonstrate a new product, the Americanizer. Their English accent is a bit thick, so pay close attention.
  • On the same blog, English Russia, you’ll find another post with HDR photos of the Moscow sewers. These are pretty well done, and I do believe I spotted a crocodile in two of them…
  • The top tech blogs are revolting against Wikipedia’s “no follow” link policy by using the same rel=”no follow” tag in their outgoing links to Wikipedia. Alright! Wikipedia’s been getting a lot of link love for years, and I think they’ve been entirely ungrateful by not responding in kind.
  • Sal Marinello, writing for BlogCritics, has a few words to say about the famed “300 Workout”, the physical regime that prepared the actors for their roles in that movie. A lot of people got it wrong. Also very worth checking out is the site of the physical trainers that put together that workout and trained the actors, Gym Jones. Have a look at the Video section. Very different stuff from what you see in gyms today, but you can’t argue with the results.
  • Mental_Floss has a GREAT post on life before air conditioning. Why is it great? Because it points out why today’s construction is so horribly shoddy — our overreliance on air conditioning lets builders get away with using cardboard and plywood for what passes for homes in the DC area. The homes of old were built with thick insulation, out of stone or brick, and they could do just fine without A/C. If we’d be without A/C nowadays, we couldn’t live in our homes. Kind of makes me sad for all these people buying McMansions on River Road and Georgetown Pike and the like. I see the way they’re built, and it’s an insult to millenia of good building practices…
  • The Daily Mail has an article on spotting illness by looking at our faces.
  • On a similar note, Deputy Dog has a post on the 5 scariest medical mistakes. Don’t read it during lunch…
  • Have you ever wondered about the 100 Inuit words for snow? Here they are.
  • Hans Rosling gave a speech at TED this year, and they’ve posted it to their website. It’s really, really good stuff. You will not regret the 19 minutes spent watching it, I guarantee it. It’s about poverty and developing countries, but he’s got a very different take on things.
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Reviews

Some interesting documentaries

Here are seven interesting documentary-type videos found on YouTube:

You’ve probably heard that Geek Squad technicians snoop around on customers’ hard drives and copy photos and other files for their own use. But have you also heard that they overcharge ridiculously for simple little repairs? Have a look below:

The metro bridge over the river Tyne at Newcastle, UK, was recently outfitted with LED lights that are programmed to never shine in the same sequence. The result is a mesmerizing light show that goes on and on:

Bill Crosby did a documentary in 1968 called “A Boy Like Me”, where he pointed out racial inequalities between black and white children. But he did it in such a poignant way that it’s really, really hard to miss the point. Watch this segment in its entirety, it’s only 3:28 minutes long.

The Falkirk Wheel is an advanced bridge for boats. It connects two bodies of water that are separated by a great height in a very interesting way:

Whether you may or may not agree with this first part of the documentary entitled “The Great Global Warming Swindle” (the other parts can be found on YouTube as well), I think you’ll realize it raises some interesting and valid points. I watched the entire documentary, and if you’ve got the time, I would encourage you to do the same.

The next video is pretty geeky in its approach, but it was made to demonstrate how IT security works for non-techies, and it does a great job of it. It’s entertaining, so you won’t get bored, either.

This last video is controversial, and I don’t know what to make of it. It’s actual news footage aired immediately after the crash of United Flight 93. It shows the crash site and surrounding areas, but the strange thing is that the place looks very much unlike a plane crash site. There are no large pieces of fuselage, no bodies, nothing — just a small hole in the ground, and that’s what makes it unusual. It just doesn’t look like a plane crashed there at all.

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Lists

Cool science videos

The Japanese have come up with a swimming snake robot:

Ronald Mallett is a university professor and a physicist. He believes time travel is possible, has a theory about how it can be done, and is working on a time machine:

The first dynamically-balanced robot, Dexter, learns to walk:

Here’s another robot, called Murata Boy, that can ride bicycles:

A home-made anti-gravity kit. Could be a hoax, but then again, I haven’t tried it out for myself, so I don’t know:

A demonstration of the principle of atomic halving through noodle-making. Awesome!

The FLIP is a research vessel that can literally flip to a vertical position while in water. It’s designed so its stern submerges deep underwater. It becomes incredibly stable that way, and this allows scientists to perform very precise measurements at sea.

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