Video: Magic Trick: Man sitting on nothing

Here’s another magician using the same trick.

Yes, of course I know how it is done. Don’t give it away. Let people have fun.

World’s oldest man celebrates 115th birthday

Jiroemon Kimura celebrates his 115th birthday with four generations of his family in Kyoto thanking “the sun above” for his longevity.

Born on in Japan on April 19 in 1897, Mr Kimura would have been 6-years-old when the Wright brothers flew the first-ever plane, and 64-years-old when Yuri Gagarin first flew into space.

The 115-year-old’s feat as the world’s oldest man has been recognised by the Gerontology Research Group, an international body that specifically deals in longevity research.

He is also undisputedly the third oldest man ever recorded.

At his home in Kyoto, he thanked all the guests, media and family who had joined him to celebrate his birthday.

“I’m delighted beyond words,” he said.

When asked what he attributed his long life to, he replied, “I don’t know exactly…maybe it’s all thanks to the sun above me.”

“I am always looking up towards the sky, that is how I am,” he added.

Mr Kimura has 14 grandchildren, 25 great grandchildren and 13 great great grandchildren, the youngest being an 11-month-old great great grandson.

via Video: World’s oldest man celebrates 115th birthday – Telegraph.

In the video last year from when he was 114, it says he credits his longevity to smaller food portions.

Strange Exits: Drinking Coke kills woman?

The sister of a woman whose partner claimed she died because she drank too much Coca-Cola says she does not hold the company responsible.

However, the woman’s partner and mother-in-law say warning labels should be put on the drink.

An inquest for mother-of-eight Natasha Harris was held in Invercargill yesterday. Harris died on February 25, 2010.

Otago-Southland coroner David Crerar did not make any preliminary findings after yesterday’s inquest, however pathologist Dan Mornin said he believed Harris died of cardiac arrhythmia and it was likely she was suffering from hypokalemia (low potassium) along with caffeine toxicity, which could have contributed to her death.

When asked by Crerar whether it was probable her consumption of Coca-Cola had caused the hypokalemia and arrhythmia, Dr Mornin said yes, along with poor nutrition and caffeine.

At the inquest, Harris’ partner, Chris Hodgkinson, said his partner consumed between 4.5 and 8 litres of Coke a day for several years before her death, and he believed this had contributed to her death.

His mother, Vivien Hodgkinson said after the inquest that warning labels should be put on Coke products.

However, Harris’ sister Raelene Finlayson yesterday said no-one had forced her sister to drink the Coke, and she did not hold Coca-Cola responsible for her death. “Nobody forced Tasha to drink all that … it’s like anything, we all know anything in moderation is okay,” she said.

The last time she saw her sister, about a week before her death, she had looked unwell, Finlayson said. She told her she should see a doctor, but her sister put her children before herself.

“They didn’t live the best lives, but Tasha always put those kids first. They never went without food or anything like that.”

In a statement issued after the inquest, Coca-Cola Oceania public affairs and communication manager Karen Thompson, who also attended the inquest yesterday, said the safety of the company’s products was paramount.

“We concur with the information shared by the coroner’s office that the grossly excessive ingestion of any food product, including water, over a short period of time with the inadequate consumption of essential nutrients, and the failure to seek appropriate medical intervention when needed, can be dramatically symptomatic.

“We believe that all foods and beverages can have a place in a balanced and sensible diet combined with an active lifestyle,” the statement says.

The company’s thoughts were with the Hodgkinson family, but as the coroner had not yet issued findings into Harris’ death, it was not appropriate for Coca-Cola to comment further, it says.

via Coke drinking linked to woman’s death, inquest told | NATIONAL News.

Preston Stevens, 9, Says Stray Bullet Missed Him Because God Pushed Him

A 9-year-old Boston boy says divine intervention saved his life when a bullet fired in the street outside his home came through his bedroom wall and left a smoking hole in the Boston Celtics jersey he was wearing.

Preston Stevens says he felt some sort of force push him before the bullet went through his Rajon Rondo jersey Tuesday afternoon, barely missing his torso. He says “it was like God” pushed him. He saw and smelled smoke.

The third-grader’s mother, Sharon Jackson, says she heard a series of pops at about 3 p.m. and yelled at her children to get down.

Police found a bullet in the boy’s bedroom and casings in the street but are still looking for the shooter.

Meanwhile, Preston’s bed has been moved away from the window.

via Preston Stevens, 9, Says Stray Bullet Missed Him Because God Intervened.

Hmmm.

 

Facebook Photo Sinks Man Who Stole Police Gas

A Kentucky man is facing a misdemeanor rap after he siphoned gasoline from a police car, a theft that came to the attention of cops after the perp posted a Facebook photo memorializing the crime.

As seen in the … photo…, as Michael Baker, 20, was swiping the gas last month from a Jenkins Police Department squad car, he made sure to flip the bird as his girlfriend snapped a picture.

After obtaining a copy of the photo (which began circulating in Jenkins) police arrested Baker Monday evening for theft by unlawful taking, according to an arrest warrant, which alleges that he “stole gas from a Jenkins City Police Cruiser” and then “posted a picture of his theft on facebook.”

Baker, pictured in the mug shot at right, is scheduled to be arraigned today in Letcher County District Court.

While the siphoning photo has been removed from his Facebook page, Baker yesterday updated his 380 friends on his legal problems. “just got out of jail,” he wrote in one post, adding later that “yea lol i went too jail over facebook.”

Responding to a friend who had not seen the image before it was yanked, Baker assured, “yea lol u would just have to seen it it was funny as hell tho.”

via Facebook Photo Sinks Man Who Stole Police Gas | The Smoking Gun.

Hope finding out if they would catch you was worth being caugth.

Sinking ship slide ‘in bad taste’

A council has been criticised over the presence of an inflatable, sinking ship in one of its parks on the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic.The slide was among a number of facilities provided to entertain children in Lough Shore park on Sunday.UUP councillor Adrian Watson said a number of people had complained to him that the timing was in bad taste.Antrim Borough Council said it had been provided by a private contractor and no offence had been intended.Mr Watson said he had contacted the council about the issue after receiving several complaints from the public.He said: “They thought it was a wee bit in bad taste. It was fair criticism.”In a statement, the council said: “Over the last three years during the spring and summer at Antrim Lough Shore Park, children’s activities have been provided by a private contractor.”These include a miniature railway and various inflatables including a giant slide designed to replicate a ship.”Last weekend the children’s activities were operating as normal.”Neither the contractor nor the council intended this to cause offence to anyone.”

via BBC News – Sinking ship slide ‘in bad taste’.

HP Report: More Attacks, Despite Fewer New Vulnerabilities Overall

For years, security vendors have been in an arms race with hackers. As the rate of discovery of new vulnerabilities continued to grow, attackers have enjoyed an ever-expanding menu of security flaws to exploit. But last year, something happened: The number of new vulnerability reports actually declined.

According to HP’s new Top Cyber Security Risks Report for 2011, there was a 19.5 percent decrease in the number of new publicly reported vulnerabilities over the course of last year.

But don’t start celebrating just yet, because attack volume still continues to increase. Attack data from HP TippingPoint shows approximately 475 million attacks in 2010 vs. 531 million in 2011 — an 11 percent increase.

So while the number of publicly reported vulnerabilities is down, the overall security risks have not actually declined. That’s according to Jennifer Lake, security product marketing manager at HP DVLabs, who told eSecurity Planet that a deeper analysis of the new vulnerabilities that were disclosed in 2011 shows that the proportion of high-severity vulnerabilities has actually increased. In 2011, high-severity vulnerabilities (those with a CVSS score of between 8 and 10) jumped by 24 percent. CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) vulnerabilities with an 8 to 10 score are items that are exploitable remotely and represent high immediate risk.

HP also found that many attackers are also still going after old (unpatched) vulnerabilities. Many attackers are now using exploit toolkits such as Blackhole which are packaged to include known vulnerabilities. That’s another reason why there isn’t as much of a need for attackers to find new vulnerabilities, because the old ones are still effective against so many systems.

“The old vulnerabilities should be well detected, but they are still successful,” said Jason Jones, advanced security intelligence engineer at HP DVLabs. “One of the things that makes them very successful is the obfuscation techniques.”

Additionally, Jones cited unpatched systems and a lack of user awareness as two key factors affecting the high frequency of attacks against known vulnerabilities. Attack data also showed that the frequency of SQL injection attacks increased during the year, even though that’s a well-known attack vector.

Jones noted that HP’s report did not include granularity on what specific databases were the most attacked. He added that HP TippingPoint’s database protections are database agnostic.

Looking to the future, Jones says he expects that the exploit toolkits will be a trend that will continue in 2012. He also expects the toolkits to add more recent vulnerabilities as users slowly patch their system and older vulnerabilities become less exploitable.

Java exploits have been generally very reliable for attackers due to a low patch rate, Jones said. For example, one recent exploit took advantage of a Java vulnerability for which a patch was available at the end of 2011 — yet Blackhole included the exploit in its toolkit even after the patch was made available. Jones noted that the Java vulnerabilities tend to have approximately an 80 percent success rate for infection. In contrast, with other technologies, the older vulnerability success rate is only approximately 13 percent.

Java is at the root of the recent Apple Mac OS X Flashback malware and has also been identified by multiple vendors as being the most vulnerable browser plug-in.

via HP Report: More Attacks, Despite Fewer New Vulnerabilities Overall – eSecurity Planet.

US backed dictator sterilizing women by non-consensual uterus removal

Uzbekistan’s President is forcing doctors to cut out women’s uteruses without their knowledge or consent to promote “birth control” across the country. It’s a vile and bloody crime against women being orchestrated by an odious dictator, and now is the time for it to end.

Uzbekistan’s Karimov is one of the world’s worst dictators, he’s even boiled opposition activists alive. Yet he’s propped up by millions of dollars from the US government who pay him for military transport across the country. This latest round of brutality, this time against his country’s women, has turned the global spotlight on this monster. Let’s use this awful moment to persuade his biggest backer to ditch him.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton can cut him off. She has already publicly condemned Karimov for human rights abuses and this most recent assault on women’s rights – a topic she champions – only ups the stakes. Sign the petition below calling on Clinton to end Karimov’s reign and stop the brutal attack on women:

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/uzbekistan_sterilisation_meme/?vl

Activists estimate tens or even hundreds of thousands of women were sterilised secretly when they went into the hospital for a routine procedure or to give birth — waking up with no idea that their uterus has just been removed. One Uzbek gynecologist admitted, ‘Every doctor is told…how many women are to be sterilised … my quota is four women a month’. The use of arbitrary arrest and torture is so widespread that women don’t speak out for fear of reprisals, and foreign journalists and human rights activists are routinely thrown out of the country.

It doesn’t have to be like this — the US could play hardball with Karimov, who relies on the steady flow of money from transit to Afghanistan to fund his lavish lifestyle. The human rights horror show in Uzbekistan has gone under the radar for years — but we have a real chance to break the silence now, using the explosive BBC report that details forced sterilisations, and stand with the brave Uzbek women who have dared to tell their stories in the face of stunning oppression.

Via email

Yolo causeway closed in both directions due to gunfire

April 20, 2012

Manhunt under way, closes I-80 causeway
8:30 a.m.

From Sgt. Steele from West Sacramento police Department:
“We are working both scenes. Harbor Boulevard is still closed and the highway is an active scene. We are calling in more resources, specialized units.”

Steele said that the initial call to his department was regarding shots fired. He said that employees of the auto repair business came to work about 6 a.m., entered the building and were fired upon.

Steele said he could not confirm reports that the gunman was a burglar surprised by arriving employees.

Police set up a perimeter, which was quickly followed by the report of a nearby car-jacking.

Offices pursued the suspect and were fired upon numerous times, Steele said.

7:40 a.m.

CHP Officer Wetzel said that officers are searching the marsh in the Yolo Bypass underneath the causeway for the suspect.
The I-80 causeway is shut down westbound at Enterprise Avenue and eastbound in Davis, Wetzel said. The suspect crashed his car approaching the causeway in West Sacramento.

7:17 a.m.

Interstate 80 on the Yolo Causeway is closed down in both directions as officers look for a West Sacramento shooting suspect.
The gunman crashed a stolen getaway car on the causeway after firing shots in West Sacramento about 6:30 a.m.

West Sacramento police spokesman Sgt. Nathan Steele said that officers responded to the report of shots being fired at B&R Head & Block Repair, 407 Harbor Blvd. When they arrived, a carjacking occurred around the corner.

Officers spotted the stolen car and pursued the vehicle. A gunman in the car fired at officers as he fled.

Shortly after the gunfire, the stolen car crashed in the vicinity of the causeway.

A helicopter crew, police dogs and officers on foot are looking for the suspect.

California Highway Patrol Officer Rich Wetzel said that the suspect is described as a white man in his mid-to-late-20s, balding and wearing a light shirt and dark pants.

Wetzel said motorists from Davis should take Highway 113 to Woodland and take Interstate 5 to Sacramento instead of I-80.

New brain-machine interface moves a paralyzed hand

A new Northwestern Medicine brain-machine technology delivers messages from the brain directly to the muscles — bypassing the spinal cord — to enable voluntary and complex movement of a paralyzed hand. The device could eventually be tested on, and perhaps aid, paralyzed patients.

“We are eavesdropping on the natural electrical signals from the brain that tell the arm and hand how to move, and sending those signals directly to the muscles,” said Lee E. Miller, the Edgar C. Stuntz Distinguished Professor in Neuroscience at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and the lead investigator of the study, which was published in Nature.

“This connection from brain to muscles might someday be used to help patients paralyzed due to spinal cord injury perform activities of daily living and achieve greater independence.”The research was done in monkeys, whose electrical brain and muscle signals were recorded by implanted electrodes when they grasped a ball, lifted it and released it into a small tube. Those recordings allowed the researchers to develop an algorithm or “decoder” that enabled them to process the brain signals and predict the patterns of muscle activity when the monkeys wanted to move the ball.

These experiments were performed by Christian Ethier, a post-doctoral fellow, and Emily Oby, a graduate student in neuroscience, both at the Feinberg School of Medicine. The researchers gave the monkeys a local anesthetic to block nerve activity at the elbow, causing temporary, painless paralysis of the hand. With the help of the special devices in the brain and the arm – together called a neuroprosthesis — the monkeys’ brain signals were used to control tiny electric currents delivered in less than 40 milliseconds to their muscles, causing them to contract, and allowing the monkeys to pick up the ball and complete the task nearly as well as they did before.

“The monkey won’t use his hand perfectly, but there is a process of motor learning that we think is very similar to the process you go through when you learn to use a new computer mouse or a different tennis racquet. Things are different and you learn to adjust to them,” said Miller, also a professor of physiology and of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Feinberg and a Sensory Motor Performance Program lab chief at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.Because the researchers computed the relationship between brain activity and muscle activity, the neuroprosthesis actually senses and interprets a variety of movements a monkey may want to make, theoretically enabling it to make a range of voluntary hand movements.

“This gives the monkey voluntary control of his hand that is not possible with the current clinical prostheses,” Miller said.The Freehand prosthesis is one of several prostheses available to patients paralyzed by spinal cord injuries that are intended to restore the ability to grasp. Provided these patients can still move their shoulders, an upward shrug stimulates the electrodes to make the hand close, a shrug down stimulates the muscles to make the hand open. The patient also is able to select whether the prosthesis provides a power grasp in which all the fingers are curled around an object like a drinking glass, or a key grasp in which a thin object like a key is grasped between the thumb and curled index finger.

In the new system Miller and his team have designed, a tiny implant called a multi-electrode array detects the activity of about 100 neurons in the brain and serves as the interface between the brain and a computer that deciphers the signals that generate hand movements.”We can extract a remarkable amount of information from only 100 neurons, even though there are literally a million neurons involved in making that movement,” Miller said. “One reason is that these are output neurons that normally send signals to the muscles. Behind these neurons are many others that are making the calculations the brain needs in order to control movement. We are looking at the end result from all those calculations.” …

via New brain-machine interface moves a paralyzed hand.