The Story of Dick Cheney’s Heart

… He is wearing a custom wool vest that holds a small computer near his abdomen and on either side two battery packs, about the size of video tapes. “They’re good for about 10 hours,” he says. “Put these in this morning.” The gear, connected to his chest via an insulated cable, powers something known as a left ventricular assist device, or LVAD, a turbine implanted near his heart’s major chamber that propels blood into his aorta and circulates it throughout his body.

“It’s not an artificial heart,” Mr. Cheney explains. “You still got to have a heart and it’s still got to be working,” but the pump helps delay congestive heart failure by relieving strain on a muscle too weak to function by itself. The average human heart beats 100,000 times a day, 2.5 billion times over a lifetime. The rotor in Mr. Cheney’s LVAD spins about 8,000 to 10,000 times a minute and muffles his natural heartbeat.

The vice president’s LVAD was implanted exactly a year ago, and the trauma of this major surgery lingers. He has lost a considerable amount of weight and, with it, some of his forbidding severity. He looks spry, almost relaxed.

“I’m not running any foot races,” Mr. Cheney says, “but I’m able to do virtually anything I would want to do.” He went quail hunting in south Texas this winter and is planning a fly-fishing trip to Montana’s Bighorn later this summer. “I can’t fall in,” he jokes, breaking into a lopsided grin. “Whatever you do, don’t fall in.”

*** Ironically, Mr. Cheney’s first heart attack—or myocardial infarction, when the heart is starved for oxygen because of restricted or blocked-off blood supply—may have aided his political rise. It struck in 1978, when he was 37, amid a three-way GOP primary race to stand for Wyoming’s only House seat. “At the time it was sort of hard to accept all of this, but on the other hand, as I looked back on it later, I became convinced it kind of helped. It significantly advanced my name identification. I got a lot of coverage. I even got sympathy donations,” he says. “It worked out.”

Both Mr. Cheney’s parents had a family history of heart disease, and he had been warned during a physical soon after he left the Ford White House that he was at risk. “I didn’t pay any attention,” he says. “And by then I’d smoked close to 20 years, and not only genetically predisposed, but I had a lot of bad habits: Drank a ton of black coffee out of the Navy mess in the White House, smoked a couple of packs a day.”

Mr. Cheney was campaigning in Cheyenne. “Woke up in the middle of the night with a tingling sensation in two fingers of my left hand, that was the only symptom I had,” he says. “I’ll never know why, but it seemed to me I better have it checked out.” A friend drove him to the emergency room, where he sat down and promptly passed out.

“When I came to, there was a lot of activity in the ER and I figured that was all focused on me,” he remembers. “And I’d had my first heart attack…

via The Weekend Interview: The Story of Dick Cheney’s Heart – WSJ.com.

Pakistan: US suspends $800m of military aid

US drone attacks have caused anger among many in Pakistan

The US says it is withholding some $800m in military aid to Pakistan.

White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley told ABC television that Pakistan had “taken some steps that have given us reason to pause on some of the aid”.

He said the US raid that killed Osama Bin Laden in May had affected ties but he insisted the relationship “must be made to work over time”.

The $800m (£500m) equates to about a third of the annual US security aid to Pakistan, US officials say.

In figures submitted to the International Monetary Fund last autumn, Pakistan’s defence expenditure in its 2010-2011 budget was put at $6.41bn – an increase of $1.27bn on the previous year. …

Speaking on ABC’s This Week programme, Mr Daley accepted that Pakistan had been “an important ally in the fight on terrorism. They’ve been the victim of enormous amounts of terrorism”.

He added: “It’s a complicated relationship in a very difficult, complicated part of the world. Obviously, there’s still lot of pain that the political system in Pakistan is feeling by virtue of the raid that we did to get Osama Bin Laden, something that the president felt strongly about and we have no regrets over. …

via BBC News – Pakistan: US suspends $800m of military aid.

Why would people in Pakistan mind us killing criminals in their country from our country by remote control?  Imagine if China had this drone technology and was exploding US citizens who they determined were a threat to China. We would thank them, I’m sure. The intelligence that goes into figuring out who gets a hellfire missile surprise is no doubt foolproof.

Research find new way to measure penis length

A shorter index finger may be an indicator…

Penis length cannot be determined by how big his hands or feet are — those and other supposed indicators have been widely discredited for years. But now a team of Korean researchers has produced what may be a more reliable guide: the ratio of the length of his index finger to that of his ring finger. The lower that ratio, the longer the penis may be, the researchers wrote Monday in the Asian Journal of Andrology.

Dr. Tae Beom Kim, a urologist at Gachon University in Incheon, Korea, and his colleagues studied 144 men over the age of 20 who were undergoing urological surgery for conditions that do not affect the length of the penis. One member of the team carefully measured the lengths of the index and ring fingers on the subject’s right hand before surgery — left hands are thought to be more variable. A second team member then measured penis length immediately after the subject had been anesthetized. The length was measured both when the penis was flaccid and when it had been stretched as much as possible. Stretched length is thought to correlate to erect length, the team wrote. The team found that, in general, the lower the ratio of the lengths of the two fingers, the longer the stretched length of the penis.

Although it may seem like the results are coming out of left field, they actually are not. A variety of studies suggest that the ratio of the two finger lengths is determined by prenatal exposure to sex hormones, both testosterone and estrogen. It is not unreasonable to assume that penis length might also be. …

Digit ratios are noninvasive and easy to measure and thus may provide a surrogate for studying prenatal development in men, wrote Dr. Denise Brooks McQuade of Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. in an editorial accompanying the study….

via Penis length: Research find new way to measure penis length – Los Angeles Times.

So, according to this research, the guy with the hand in the illustration above left is going to be better endowed. Gee, thanks Korea. Publishing this puts men everywhere at a disadvantage. Now women will be checking out our ratios and there is not a thing we can do about it. We obviously need some research into female finger shape and nipple type or something even better to balance this out. For some men, this could be embarrassing. Others, not so much. Okay, here is my hand. Now please send my $1.2 million and your photo to xeno735@yahoo.com.  (Ladies only, I’m straight. Research says you can not tell orientation from this ratio. Also see wiki entry). I nominate this as my most outrageous post ever.

Live long and prosper.

What happened to the American flags on the moon?

… CBS News correspondent Jim Axelrod reports that when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted the first flag on the moon, it was an act of pure symbolism. A U.N. treaty would not allow the U.S. or any other country to claim the moon as its territory.

Smithsonian curator Allan Needell says the flags planted by the crews of all the Apollo missions that landed on the moon were goodwill gestures to the world.

“By and large, the symbol was very much understood for what it was, as a symbol of pride, but also a symbol of humanitarian accomplishment,” Needell says.

As Tom Moser knows, it was also a politically sensitive symbol. An engineer on the NASA team that designed the first flag to go to the moon, Moser was told to keep it hush-hush.

“It was not a military, Department of Defense secret. It was just the fact that politically we didn’t want the word out before the event happened,” Moser says. …

But what happened to them is a question University of California Santa Barbara librarian Annie Platoff has been trying to answer.

Her research can account for four of the flags, including the one planted by the Apollo 17 mission. She believes the first two from Apollo 11 and 12 did not survive the ignition gases of the lunar liftoff.

“It wasn’t the intention for the flag material itself to last. It was just to be there during the, the event – the landing and departing from the moon. We didn’t have a requirement that the flag, the U.S. flag, had to withstand all the environments for eons,” Platoff says.

Made from nylon just like the ones at a dime store, though ordered off the shelf from a government supply catalogue, Annie Platoff’s theory is they are probably darkened and maybe more than a bit tattered.

“I would guess, over time, 40 years, the combination of sun-rot and micro-meteor impact is probably devastating. I mean it’s not a pretty picture to paint. The only way you’re going to test these theories is to go back to the Moon and look at the flag,” Platoff says. …

via What happened to the American flags on the moon? – CBS News.

Switch Lighting: Amazing new LED bulb to replace your others

.

Farhad Manjoo – … In the United States, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, whose light bulb-related provisions will go into effect next year, requires greater efficiency from all light bulbs on the market; the act effectively outlaws the traditional incandescent bulb by 2014. The phase-out has created a surprising political outcry, with some people even stocking up on bulbs. That’s because today’s main alternative, compact-fluorescent bulbs, are awful. They’ve got three main shortcomings: They’re ugly; they contain mercury, which can be extremely hazardous if the bulbs are broken; and most importantly, they put out harsh, white light that many people (myself included) find unbearable.

Switch Lighting claims to have solved all of those problems. When I arrived at Switch, Brett Sharenow, the company’s chief strategy officer, showed me two lamps. Inside one was a standard 75-watt incandescent bulb. Switch’s 75-watt replacement bulb, which uses only 16 watts of power, was plugged into the other. The lampshades prevented me from seeing the bulbs directly—I couldn’t tell which lamp contained which bulb. When Sharenow turned on the lamps, the light from each lamp looked identical. The moment was completely undramatic, and that was the point. Switch has spent years developing bulbs that produce something thoroughly unexceptional—light that looks exactly like what we’re used to.

Turned off, a Switch bulb looks like an incandescent from the future. It’s got the same pear shape as a standard bulb, but it’s divided into two sections. The bottom half is composed of a wavy metallic structure that looks like the wings of a badminton birdie. Above that is a thick glass orb filled with a cooling agent and a bank of LEDs, which are semiconductors that produce light. Because LEDs use a fraction of the energy required to light up the filament in an incandescent bulb, they’re seen as the next great advance in light bulbs. LEDs have advantages over CFLs, too—they don’t contain dangerous chemicals, and they can be used in lamps with dimmer switches (only certain CFLs are dimmable). A host of start-ups, as well as many of the giants in the lighting industry, are working on LED bulbs that mimic incandescents. At the lighting industry’s annual trade show in Philadelphia in May, several companies showed off their LED technology. Switch was among a handful that unveiled prototypes of a 100-watt-equivalent LED bulb, which is considered a kind of tipping point for LEDs—if someone can make an LED bulb that looks as great as a 100-watt incandescent, the LED bulb will have finally arrived.

That seems increasingly likely. Switch will release its 60- and 75-watt equivalent bulbs to retailers in October, and its 100-watt-equivalent bulb will go on sale in December. There’s a small hitch, though: At the moment, only the 60- and 75-watt alternatives are available in “warm white,” the yellowish color that we associate with incandescents; the 100-watt-equivalent bulb will put out “neutral white,” a bluer color that more closely resembles the light from CFL bulbs. Switch will release a warm 100-watt-equivalent bulb sometime next year, Sharenow says. …

via Switch Lighting: Dump your fluorescents and incandescents for this amazing new LED bulb. – By Farhad Manjoo – Slate Magazine.

After 168 years, that’s all she wrote

They helped build Rupert Murdoch’s media empire with screaming headlines and breathless reporting on some of the U.K.’s most salacious scandals. In the end, the News of the World became a victim – some would say the sacrificial lamb – of its own epic scandal.

After 168 years, Great Britain’s best-selling newspaper printed its 8,674th and final edition on Saturday. In recent weeks, it had been revealed that employees and contractors for the tabloid had been tapping the phones of sports stars, politicians, celebrities, dead girls and the families of dead soldiers and terrorism victims.

Despite its importance to Murdoch’s News International and the considerable influence it brings to bear, it couldn’t survive a scandal that reached almost every corner of English life.

…

The final edition had a headline that said simply: “Thank You & Goodbye.”

Inside, the paper ran an editorial saying:

“We praised high standards, we demanded high standards but, as we are now only too painfully aware, for a period of a few years up to 2006 some who worked for us, or in our name, fell shamefully short of those standards. Quite simply, we lost our way. Phones were hacked, and for that this newspaper is truly sorry. There is no justification for this appalling wrong-doing. No justification for the pain caused to victims, nor for the deep stain it has left on a great history. Yet when this outrage has been atoned, we hope history will eventually judge us on all our years.”The entire staff left the building late Saturday, posing for pictures and talking to reporters from other papers. There are reports that the entire newsroom will become a crime scene….

Many have openly wondered why Rebekah Brooks, the current CEO of Murdoch’s news empire who was editor of the News of the World at the time of the alleged hacking, has not been arrested, and also why she has received the full support of her boss.

The fate of the paper’s 200 staff members is still unclear, but many believe they have effectively been laid off by News International, even though most weren’t even working at the paper at the time of the alleged scandal. The Daily Mail reports many are set to sue the company for unfair dismissal, which could cost the company as much as $22,443,400.

Murdoch told the BBC on Saturday that it had been “a collective decision” to close the paper. …

via After 168 years, that’s all she wrote – World Watch – CBS News.

Related:

Of course, in 2006 we did have a police investigation – but we can now see that it was plainly inadequate.

This in itself requires investigation.

A separate allegation is that police officers took payments.

That specific allegation is now being investigated by senior officers at the Met – and with my full support they have brought in the IPCC [Independent Police Complaints Commission] into oversee this.

So for those worried about the police investigating the police, this has full and independent oversight.

via www.guardian.co.uk