Google Gears 0.5.21.0 Firefox WordPress Image Upload: Crash Crash Crash

Google Gears 0.5.21.0 crashes Firefox when I attempt to upload an image to WordPress. If this happens to you, just disable to Google Gears add-in for Firefox.
Google was having some problems this morning. This may be related.

Music as medicine: Docs use tunes as treatment

As Victor Fabry napped in his hospital bed, a quiet symphony filled his room. The steady pulse of a cardiac monitor marked the progress of his mending heart. Over that beat, the swaying strains of a Brazilian guitarist pumped nearly nonstop from a CD player on the shelf.

For nine days after his surgery at the Gagnon Cardiovascular Institute in Morristown, N.J., Fabry soaked up that tranquil, wordless strumming. And while he praised his surgeon, he raved about the musical score that accompanied his recovery.

His heart literally fell in rhythm with guitarist Tomaz Lima. The music became his medicine.

“Very restful, very soothing,” said Fabry, 68, now almost two years removed from the surgery. Immediately after his operation, a live harpist also played at his bedside. “The mind influences your recovery. Anything that quiets your anxiety is powerful.”

Listen carefully and you’ll hear the same refrain at a rising number of hospitals. From Massachusetts General to the Mayo Clinic, patients are hearing the first strains of a harmonious movement — the infusion and inclusion of music in the treatment of ailments, from brain disorders to cancer. This goes beyond the psychological smile favorite songs can induce.

Doctors are increasingly studying — and employing — the physiological dance music does with the body’s neurons and blood-carrying cells.

“We’re in the infancy,” said Dr. Ali Rezai, director of the Center for Neurological Restoration at Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic. During a surgery called deep brain stimulation — performed while patients with Parkinson’s disease are awake — Rezai and his team play classical compositions and measure the brain’s response to those notes. “We know music can calm, influence creativity, can energize. That’s great. But music’s role in recovering from disease is being ever more appreciated.”

via Music as medicine: Docs use tunes as treatment – Health care- msnbc.com.

I noticed that after an entire day of working on the same song in my studio that my heart was exactly synchronized to the beat. It startled me to realize this.

Former “TV ratings king” under arrest

He was mad as hell and he wasn’t going to take it any more.

So, police said Monday, an entertainer who used to be Israel’s most popular televison star hired thugs to beat up two TV network executives and an agent who shot down his pitch for a comeback.

Dudu Topaz, 62, was arrested Sunday on suspicion that he arranged assaults that left two men and a woman bruised and battered. His lawyer denied the allegations, in a case drawing banner, front-page headlines in Israeli newspapers.

Topaz used to be known as the “TV ratings king” in Israel. He lost his prime time slot five years ago when his network decided to drop his show.

via Former “TV ratings king” under arrest – Yahoo! News.

Nice plan. He could then hire even more thugs to beat up anyone who did not watch his show.

What’s Behind the Fear of Flying

Fear of flying is no joke. The sweaty palms and racing heart can be so intense that some travelers simply refuse to board airplanes.

And news of accidents, such as the presumable crash of Air France Flight 447 over the Atlantic Ocean on Sunday, have restimulated this fear in a lot of otherwise rational people who know that driving a car is statistically far riskier.

People who fear flying hear about air travel mishaps and disasters, and their worries start to take over.

“They don’t pay attention to other statistics,” said Barbara Rothbaum, professor in psychiatry and director of the Trauma and Anxiety Recovery Program at Emory University School of Medicine. Millions of people fly safely every day, and yet those who fear flying look at something like that accident as confirmation of their phobia, Rothbaum said. “They’re exaggerating the probability of danger.” In fact, all phobias, including weather phobia and fear of heights, involve such strong, irrational fears.

“Flying is actually one of the safer things we do probability-wise,” Rothbaum said. And research is showing that flying has only gotten safer in recent years.

In fact, the lifetime odds of dying in an air travel accident are 1-in-20,000 compared with 1-in-100 for an auto accident and 1-in-5 from heart disease based on 2001 statistics.

…

About 25 million people in the United States suffer from some form of flying fear, ranging from a little anxiety to mega fears (called aviophobia) that keep a person off airplanes at any cost, according to Rothbaum.

About half of the 25 million are afraid of plane crashes, she said, with the other half being claustrophobic and risking a panic attack when scrunched into a plane cabin.

Even experiencing safe flights might not calm flight fears. “People can get very superstitious about their fears,” Rothbaum told LiveScience.

She recalls patients who report not getting onto a flight because they thought they had a premonition that something bad was going to happen. Even if they were to find out that flight arrived safely at the destination, Rothbaum said such patients use their unsupported premonition to solidify their anxieties.

“I try to explain it wasn’t a premonition; it was anticipatory anxiety,” Rothbaum said.

Those who actually board the plane and land safely at their destination might view the experience as an anomaly in an otherwise risky situation.

“When they get off of an airplane it looks like they want to kiss the ground, like they just narrowly escaped losing their life,” Rothbaum said ….

via Yahoo! News

I was on one flight where we landed at SFO during a storm. We got tossed around so badly that people were just sitting in their seat rocking back in forth in shock after we landed safely. When the entire plane’s crew all came out to see us disembark the passengers applauded the pilot. I haven’t flown since.

I happen to think that some fears keep us alive. Remember the rumor that George Reeves took drugs, believed he could fly, and jumped off of a building?  I heard that as a kid, but I never looked into it. Turns out it was just a rumor. The TV actor who played Superman actually died of lead poisoning.

Xeno about The Daily Grail about Bad Astronomy about a Mysterious Flash

I think I’m in between the two of these guys on the open minded vs skeptical scale. I’m ready to accept odd things quickly, but I want proof before I’ll move from speculation to belief.

I don’t know what Phil saw, possibly a meteor flash, but the lesson is, unless you see it yourself, you can’t really shoot someone down for saying what they saw was highly unusual.

An amusing string of tweets from Phil ‘Bad Astronomy‘ Plait over the last few days. …

9:56 PM May 30th: Tired. Star party=win. Saw 6 meteors, 10 satellites, and a VERY bright flash I cannot identify, and wondering WTH it was. Others saw it too.

10:04 PM May 30th: Srsly, it was like a flash bulb. Draco, ~11p.m.,<1sec long, -8 or so mag, no satellite I could see. Wondering if Swift saw a GRB tonight…

10:27 PM May 30th: Too fast and bright to be meteor, I think. Satellite glint seems likely, though no satellite could be seen. Weird.

Don’t fret though, Phil’s been allowed back into the ‘reality-based community’ fold today with his latest tweet: “Also, that ‘flashbulb’ I saw in Draco was almost certainly an ‘unscheduled’ iridium flare, from either Iridium 22 or 3.” At least he gets to say he saw a UFO, even if it was just for a couple of days…considering that sort of thing isn’t meant to happen.

For the record, my first guess when I saw the tweets was an iridium flare, not extraterrestrial spaceship – though I don’t know whether that explanation is correct or not. I just enjoyed seeing the BA perplexed there for a while about something in the sky, given his own regular criticism of straw men UFO researchers. Shame some ‘skeptics’ didn’t shout him down and call him an obsessed UFO whacko for saying it was “weird”, and then investigating further to try and resolve the issue…

- TDG

Mixing, mixing, mixing … Everything Works Out Fine

New version of my “Works out Fine” song uploaded tonight.

Somehow the bass guitar was missing from the last few mixes. Added that back and finally found a reasonable balance for the lead vocal EQ.

Eat as much as you want. I’ll make more.

Mystery of Giant Ice Circles Resolved

Strange circles have once again appeared in the frozen surface of Lake Baikal in Siberia, as spotted by astronauts aboard the International Space Station this April. News reports described the ice rings as a puzzling phenomenon.

But experts say they can explain the mystery, and it’s not aliens — methane gas rising from the lake floor represents the likely culprit.

Methane emissions can create a rising mass of warm water that begins swirling in a circular pattern because of the Coriolis force, or the phenomenon caused by the Earth’s rotation that also helps create cyclones.

“Once the water mass reaches the underside of the ice on the surface of the lake, the warm water melts the ice in a ring shape,” said Marianne Moore, a marine ecologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts who has spent much time studying Lake Baikal with Russian researchers. The lake is the largest by volume and deepest fresh water lake on Earth.

The latest ring patterns included a circle of thin ice with a diameter of 2.7 miles 4.4 km, although the circular patch was becoming a hole of open water. Astronauts spotted similar ice circles in both 1985 and 1994, and satellites have also made sightings over the past years.

This phenomenon is nothing new to the Russian government, which has documented circle sightings on an official Ministry of Natural Resources Web site.

“Interestingly, the government is also warning people that abnormally high emissions of methane may occur in these areas in the summer and fall, posing risks for ships,” Moore told LiveScience.

- via Live Science

Methane is more frightening than aliens.

At the ocean floor lies a sleeping monster, one that millions of years ago devastated the Earth, causing a mass-extinction, and today could be released again. It is silent, invisible and deadly, and contains double the energy of the entire world’s fossil fuels combined. It is the frozen methane reserves at the bottom of the sea; capable of causing massive rises in global temperatures and igniting the atmosphere.

Has frozen methane ever been released before?
55 million years ago, 20% of the world’s frozen methane reserves melted. This sparked cataclysmic changes in the atmosphere: global temperatures rose by 13 degrees Fahrenheit, melting the ice cps and forcing many species to extinction. 80% of all deep-sea creatures became extinct, and there were severe consequences for land animals. If vast amounts of methane were released, the highly explosive gas would be ignited by lightning, scorching huge area in a fiery hell-on-earth.

- armageddononline