Happy Halloween!

Enjoy this link to Google’s images of Halloween costume contest winners.

And here’s another little treat:

Extremely Painful Swallowing

I’ve been fighting a very painful sore throat. It hurts like hell every time I swallow. I have swollen glands in my neck and “a few white patches” in the back of my throat according to the nurse who saw me on Friday. Strep test is negative.

I feel like saliva is leaking into my windpipe at times and I have to fight to keep it out of my lungs. The best thing for the pain on the first two days has been lozenges with 3.6mg Menthol and 15mg Benzocaine. Eating is crazy painful for the past three days, every swallow a little torture session.

The pain is very far back in my throat, perhaps on the epiglottis. I was just reading about epiglotitis, but I have no difficulty breathing yet. I do feel like my swallowing mechanism is broken, not forming a good seal. When I swallow I feel a strange sensation, I hear a gurgling and air goes down my food tube.

This is the most pain I’ve ever experienced.

Update November 1, 2011: Now on my fifth day of severe swallowing pain. Yesterday I went to my doc and told him I haven’t been able to eat due to the pain. I’ve lost 5lbs and only forced down about 200 calories all day on Monday (Halloween 201). This morning the pain was as bad as ever, but I knew I had to eat. I tried a little swallow of soy milk… Holy begeeezus, pain like you would not believe. No way to power through it like I could and did the first two days. So, I decided to give the Vicodin a try. Actually the bottle I have says “Hydrocodone w/apap 7.5-500/15 ml solution”. The dose was 2 to 3 teaspoonfuls every 4 hours as needed. What I expected was to feel the same amount of pain, but to care less. I started slow, just 1/2 teaspoon with water. In about 2 minutes, I felt it hit me. Warm and a little disoriented, hard to describe. After another few minutes, I took my first cautious sip. Pain yes, but bearable this time! This stuff WORKS for me. I downed a yogurt, a banana and a full glass of water. And this, I suppose, will become the story of how minimal use of a narcotic drug saved my life. Not sure how bad the effects will be when it wears off.

Another thing I’d like to recommend that I just started last night are nasal cleanings with saline solution. Use this brand to get the solution just right every time.

It’s a strange feeling to shoot salt water up one nostril and let it come out the other, but when you do this you are washing away a reservoir of viruses and bacteria. You lean forward over a sink with your mouth open and blow out gently as you squeeze the bottle so the solution goes in one nostril then out the other. Then switch nostrils. Nasal cavity cleaning feels good.

Samsung overtakes Apple in smartphone shipments

Samsung overtook Apple to become the world’s biggest shipper of smartphones between July and September.

Research from Strategy Analytics showed that Samsung shipped 27.8 million smartphones in the three-month period, compared with 17.1 million from Apple and 16.8 million from Nokia.

The consultancy said Apple’s growth was hindered by customers waiting for the launch of the new iPhone 4S.

Apple’s number four slot in total handsets was taken by China’s ZTE.

Nokia was the top handset shipper with a 27.3% market share, followed by Samsung with 22.6% and LG with 5.4%.

ZTE took 4.7%, pushing Apple into fifth place with 4.4%.

The report came shortly after the release of Samsung’s third-quarter results, which showed profits falling 23% as strong growth in its mobile phone business was overshadowed by a poor performance in the memory chip arm. …

via BBC News – Samsung overtakes Apple in smartphone shipments.

Stars concoct complex molecules

Chemical factories around young stars may give rise to far more complex molecules than previously thought.

Relatively complex, carbon-containing molecules are found in comets and on nearby planets, thought to have been made elsewhere in our Solar System.

But a report in Nature suggests even larger molecules may be forged near young stars and flung outwards.

The find adds to a large body of often conflicting evidence about the origin of our Universe’s complex molecules.

The team behind the work says that “stellar organics” may have been delivered to the early Earth, but that suggestion remains to be confirmed by future observations.

Much of the chemistry that happens elsewhere in the cosmos remains mysterious, leaving astronomers to guess how nature assembles molecules.

It has until recently been assumed that fairly simple molecules could be assembled in the areas around young stars, while more complex materials form in cooler conditions.

Adding to the mystery, though, have been “unidentified infrared emissions”, or UIE, emanating from a range of sources in our galaxy and beyond.

This infrared light must come from molecular vibrations – the waggling of one atom relative to another within molecules that have absorbed light of higher frequencies from other sources. Light in the infrared is then emitted as the wagglings die out.

Like the strings of a piano, each molecular vibration has its own note, but the unidentified infrared emissions are a rich, dense “chord” of notes that makes the nature of the emitting molecules extremely difficult to unpick. …

via BBC News – Stars concoct complex molecules.

Google’s Maps Street View service pilots indoor photos

Google has started a pilot project allowing the public to look inside shops and other businesses found on its maps.

The feature is an extension of the firm’s Street View technology, which already lets users view 360-degree exterior images.

The existing service prompted some privacy complaints from people who claimed the technology was intrusive.

However, Google said the new scheme was completely on a volunteer basis.

“Building on the Google Art Project, which took Street View technology inside 17 acclaimed museums, this project is another creative implementation of Street View technology, to help businesses as they build their online presence,” said a company spokesman.

“We hope to enable businesses to highlight the qualities that make their locations stand out through professional, high-quality imagery.”

Initially the roll-out is limited to select locations including London, Paris and a number of cities in Japan, Australia, New Zealand and the US.

The US company said it was beginning the process by inviting the most searched types of businesses to request a visit by its photographers.

Google said these included restaurants, hotels, shops, gyms and vehicle repair workshops.

However, it has ruled out big-brand chains for the time being. Hospitals and lawyers’ offices have also been excluded.

Business owners are told they must warn their customers and employees about the photoshoot before it begins. Google has promised it will blur out or refuse to publish any images that include bystanders.

The photoshoots will produce 360-degree images using fish-eye and wide-angle lenses as well as stills. Business owners are also invited to upload their own pictures. …

via BBC News – Google’s Maps Street View service pilots indoor photos.

What are you doing to celebrate the end of the world today? (The Mayan Calendar ends today Oct. 28, 2011, or not)

Someone named Calleman fudged the Mayan calendar and came up with today as the date. The idea spread and many people who are more interested in spiritual growth than archaeology now believe it.

“… Calleman’s own made up period which he calls uaxlahunkin (13 x 18 days). This period does not exist in the real Maya calendar and it has been created by Calleman in order to replace two other periods in the Maya Long Count. Otherwise he would have ended up with ten levels and ten Underworlds (and that would not have worked with the prevalence of number nine in the Maya numerology).” - Johan Normark

Any excuse for a good end of the world party! Actually I’m home sick with a horrible sore throat… so my party will consist of mostly sleep. Here is a critique of the source from emergent-culture.com.

Mayan Calendar (2012-MC) studies is dominated by two major scholastic camps—mainstream university professor types (MUPTs) and independent researchers (INREs). This article is a critique and maybe considered an informal kind of peer review. …

Unlike the formal peer reviewed world of the MUPT’s, the INRE’s have no formal review process and therefore anything goes. Not that INRE’s can’t make significant contributions to Maya-Meso-American Calendrics (MMAC), but the lack of a formal peer review system has created a vast ideological quagmire for those following the 2012-MC phenomena. …

For starters there is no Mayan Calendar per se, but rather a Maya calendrical system and calendars map cyclical phenomena and therefore do not “end”. Calendars mark starting and restart points in a cycle. To say that a calendar ends is an oxymoron. The Maya kept track of at least 17 to 20 different calendrical cycles. Calleman is the only researcher to propose a different “end to the Mayan Calendar” and he has no backing for his October 28th, 2011 end date from either the MUPTs or other INRE’s. Not that that fact automatically disqualifies his assessment, but it should be noted. …

Johan Normark Exposes Calleman

The following critiques of Calleman’s work are presented by Johan Normark an archaeologist, traditional Maya scholar and postdoctoral researcher with the Department of Historical Studies at University of Gothenburg. I have included excerpts from his blog with links to the complete articles. My comments are interspersed in brackets.

Calleman: Get the simplest facts correct please

“Just a quick look through it (Callemans latest book) reveals  that it is littered with small mistakes (apart from his major distortions of the whole calendar which I shall focus on in other blog posts). One of them can be found on page 43. In the text below the photo of Temple I at Tikal you can read that it is the highest pyramid in the Americas. This is a statement from a person claiming to be an expert on the Maya.

Well, the simple fact is that Temple I is not even the highest pyramid at Tikal. Temple III, IV and V are all higher than this structure. Then we have other Maya sites with pyramids higher than Temple I, such as Calakmul and El Mirador. The Sun pyramid at Teotihuacan is also higher. These facts are basic knowledge to a Mayanist/Mesoamericanist. If he cannot even get these facts straight in topics that he himself is a self-proclaimed expert I wonder how accurate the rest is.[read more]

via Emergent Culture – The Mayan Calendar Does NOT end on Oct. 28, 2011: An Exposé of Carl Calleman, A Modern Day Charlatan.

Carl Johan Calleman… is a toxicologist as well as an author and speaker on the millenarianNew Age interpretation of the Mayan calendar known as Mayanism. He differs from professional Mayanists in seeing 28 October 2011 and not 21 December 2012 as a significant date. Calleman does not interpret the date as an apocalypse, Armageddon, or other cataclysmic event but a slow transformation of consciousness in which people experience a higher “unity consciousness.”^[1]

… Calleman’s beliefs differ from other interpreters of the Mayan calendar and the 2012 phenomenon in that he sees the crucial date for change as 28 October 2011–not 21 December 2012–which he posulates will see the culmination of a series of nine waves of increasing frequency which have influenced, and continue to influence, the development and evolution of both the physical universe and human consciousness.

via Wikipedia

Here are the first things that came to mind for my end of the world party: Burn some money, make love on a beach to the love of my life, eat fresh crab with garlic bread and butter, do a head stand, forgive everyone, forget everything, post a final blog entry, meditate with such intensity that I attain unlimited telepathic powers, read the mind of Dick Cheney to see if I was right about 9/11, then sit and play the guitar.

What are you or would you do to celebrate the end of the world?

 

Thailand floods: Thousands flee Bangkok

The government in Thailand has declared a 5-day public holiday to allow people to move to safety as flood waters reach the centre of Bangkok. …

-

Thousands of residents are rushing to leave the Thai capital, Bangkok, which is preparing for potentially severe flooding over the weekend.

Authorities have declared a five day holiday in more than 20 provinces, including the capital, to give people time to move, and stations and roads are jammed by crowds of people attempting to flee

via BBC News – Thailand floods: Thousands flee Bangkok.

Sussex Police begin 24-hour live video broadcast

A 24-hour live video stream has begun broadcasting the work of Sussex Police, allowing visitors to its website to follow officers via video links.

Chief Constable Martin Richards said the event would “lift the lid on policing in 2011″ and improve the force’s accountability.

By midday, the live footage had attracted 18,000 views and more than 500 comments had been posted.

The broadcast is thought to be the first of its kind in the UK.

From 08:00 BST, the force began hosting a webchat and streamed a briefing with the specialist search unit, which is trained to operate in challenging environments such as underwater or in confined spaces.

At first, technical problems prevented people from posting comments but the issue was later resolved.

The live stream has included a tour of the police helicopter, a training exercise with the diving team at Shoreham Harbour and a behind-the-scenes look at Crawley police station.

“We’re in a period of extraordinary change for policing with important questions being asked nationally about the transparency and accountability of police forces,” Mr Richards said.

“In the midst of this debate, it hasn’t always been easy to show the public what policing is really like or give them an easy way to talk to us and get more involved.”

The website will follow officers via video links as they undertake patrols in cars and on foot.

The live video streaming software has been provided at no cost to Sussex Police.

via BBC News – Sussex Police begin 24-hour live video broadcast.

Weird CLOUD falls To The GROUND

Weird CLOUD falls To The GROUND. – YouTube.

Not something you see every day … around here anyway.

Weird Cloud Shoots

Weird Cloud Shoots – YouTube.

What do you make of this? Video trickery? Cloaked alien ship? HAARP? Sun being focused by another moving cloud in different ways on that one place causing different patterns of ice crystals to light up?