Occupy Davis: 'It's a Food Product, Essentially': Fox News Starts Spinning Pepper Spray Cops(via @Gawker)
nothing gets past your sharp minds, FOX.
hella called it today at the rally, right @graysleeves?
OccupyWallStreet - ‘The Marines are Coming to PROTECT the Protestors’
October 1, 2011 - TAMPA, FL - The Occupy Wall Street movement may have just received an unexpected surprise – United States Army and Marine troops are reportedly on their way to various protest locations to support the movement and to protect the protesters.…
Army serviceman Ward Reilly posted the following on Facebook: “I’m heading up there tonight in my dress blues. So far, 15 of my fellow marine buddies are meeting me there, also in Uniform.
…
My true hope, though, is that we Veterans can act as first line of defense between the police and the protester. If they want to get to some protesters so they can mace them, they will have to get through the Fucking Marine Corps first. Let’s see a cop mace a bunch of decorated war vets. A formation will be held tonight at 10PM.
how come I’m not seeing NEWS broadcasting these things? OHH YEAH
they don’t want us knowing. they don’t want us acting. they’re keeping us in the dark.
If MARINES are coming in to protect the protesters, you know something fucked up is going on.
(Source: diarrefpuckhookyplay-em-offs, via kdbp)
(Source: meme-meme)
Brainwave delay makes rats feel teleported
A bit of a long post, but definitely worth a read.
Snuffling around in a Plexiglas box that it knows well, a black and white rat catches a whiff of chocolate cookies. It scampers toward them—but suddenly, it finds itself teleported into another, equally familiar box. One could hardly blame the poor rat for being confused and disoriented for at least a fraction of a second, and researchers have now figured out why: cells in the memory center of its brain compete over where it is for exactly one-eighth of a second.
The “teleportation” effect in rats is similar to the momentary disorientation you feel when elevator doors open and you step out onto the wrong floor. It occurs because the place you expect to see and the place you actually do are “mutually exclusive,” says Edvard Moser, a neuroscientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Normally, the brain orients itself gradually as you move. The hippocampus, the brain’s memory center, contains neurons known as place cells, which record both your environment and your movement within it in order to form memories that ensure you always know where you are. To update the brain on your position, place cells fire in a rhythm called a theta oscillation, which repeats itself every 125 milliseconds and is especially prominent when you’re moving.
To teleport rats, Edvard Moser and his wife, neuroscientist May-Britt Moser, built two rat boxes connected by a tunnel. One box had a circle of white light-emitting diodes shining up through the clear floor, and the other had a row of green LEDs around the ceiling. The researchers let a rat run back and forth between the two boxes and forage for food until it became familiar with both. They also implanted an electrode array into the rat’s hippocampus and recorded firing patterns from individual neurons while the rat was in each box.
Then the researchers played a mean trick. They put the rat into the white box and placed some cookie crumbles at one end. While the rat was running toward the treat, they switched the light pattern, fooling the rat into thinking it was suddenly in the green box.
The rat still managed to find its cookies, but when the researchers looked at the recordings from the place cells, they saw a war going on. At the moment of “teleportation,” one group of cells was firing with the pattern that it had used in the white box, but another group fired with the pattern corresponding to the green box. The neurons sorted it out eventually: Within 125 milliseconds, they were all firing together, which is the amount of time that a theta cycle takes to complete, the researchers report online today in Nature. The fact that the two distinct patterns stuck around to fight it out rather than slowly drifting from one pattern to the other suggests that the brain puts memories into discrete, 125-millisecond packages, preventing itself from mixing them up.
i’m greatly enjoying these posts. keep it up, sciencecenter.
Scientists unveil plan to save Earth from killer asteroid
The headline seems like something ripped off of a thousand sci-fi plots, but the threat is legitimate.
Chinese researchers from Beijing’s Tsinghua University have revealed plans to divert the asteroid Apophis — which may well collide with Earth in a couple decades — by smashing a kamikaze solar sail into it.
The asteroid, 99942 Apophis to give it its full title, is a 46 million tonne, 1,600-foot-wide chunk of space rock that’s currently hurtling its way towards our planet. In 2029 it will soar safely past Earth, but we won’t be out of the woods just yet.There’s a possibility that it will pass through a slim gravitational keyhole — a tiny, 600 mile area of space — that would cause the asteroid to turn back on itself and strike Earth some seven years later in 2036.
In 2009, US space agency NASA said that there’s a 1 in 250,000 chance that the asteroid will strike Earth. For a little perspective, you have a 1 in 14 million chance of hitting the jackpot on the UK’s National Lottery.
oh 0_0
Cultural Differences National Geographic
or “The Most Fascinating 5 Minutes You’ll Experience Today.”
Bonus points for any teacher who manages to work this into their classroom.
(by fsali89)
I just want to add that so many thoughts and arguments (i.e., criticisms of our culture/society to the point of ridicule of our inherited characteristics) can be pulled from this video. In the end, though, I would say that the single most important thing to be learned from it is to make the most just judgement we can of this fact of reality and live true to it in hopes that it will better the situation.
“You cannot go to the house of somebody you don’t know, though you are all Americans. They call the police and say, “Why did this guy come to my house? I don’t know him.”
This man, James Verone, robbed a bank for one dollar.
Why only one dollar?
Because he knew that in prison he could get the medical care he could not afford with his part time salary as a convenience store clerk. He was approved for food stamps, but they did little to help his finances. Between his back problems, carpel tunnel, and arthritis, he simply couldn’t handle the pain any longer.
On June 9th, he sent a letter to his local paper, the Gaston Gazette, that stated: “When you receive this a bank robbery will have been committed by me. this robbery is being committed by me for one dollar. I am of sound mind but not so much sound body.”
He then took a cab to the RBC Bank, and handed the teller a note asking for one dollar and medical attention. He quietly took a seat in the lobby and waited for police to arrive.
Since Verone only stole one dollar, he was only charged with larceny. His bail, which he doesn’t plan to pay is set at $2,000, reduced from the normal $100,000. He’s scheduled to see a doctor this Friday, and hopes to get foot surgery, back surgery and to have a protrusion on his check treated.
To me, this is the perfect example of how disturbingly corrupt and unjust our health care system has become under HMO’s. For this man, or any person for that matter, feels that he needs to be imprisoned just to see a doctor, is ridiculous.
I honestly can’t even think of words. The story says it all.
well, okay. How come Mr. Verone wasn’t able to afford regular healthcare in the first place?
“Verone’s problems started when he lost the job he’d held for 17 years as a Coca Cola deliveryman, amid the economic downturn. He found new work driving a truck, but it didn’t last. Eventually, he took a part-time position at the convenience store.” Source
