Category: Uncategorized

Here’s an unusual – and apparently effective – fundraising strategy: 

Tinker may be miniature — as in a miniature horse — but he’s a big money raiser for the Salvation Army.

He uses his mouth to hold and ring a red bell, and he picks up with his mouth a “Thank You Merry Christmas” sign. He can also bow and give kisses.

Major Roger Ross, a Salvation Army commander, said Tinker is one of their biggest money raisers in the area: He brings in 10 times the amount of a regular bell ringer.

“A good kettle for a couple of hours brings in about $250, and for the same time period (Tinker and his owners) have been known to bring in $2,500,” he said. “They line up to put money in the kettle.”

The 13-year-old horse, who’s brown, black, grey and white, has been ringing for four seasons.

I have to admit – if I were solicited by a horse, I would be hard-pressed to resist making a donation. You can read the full story here. 

In a fascinating development, neuroscientists at the University of Waterloo have built a functioning virtual simulation of a rudimentary brain:

Spaun, which stands for Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network, has 2.5 million simulated neurons organized into subsystems to resemble the prefrontal cortex, basil ganglia, thalamus and other cognitive machinery in the brain. It also has a simulated eye that can see, and an arm that draws.

Spaun can recognize numbers, remember lists and write them down. It even passes some basic aspects of an IQ test, the team reports in the journal Science.

The simplified model of the brain, which took a year to build, captures many aspects of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology and psychological behaviour, says Eliasmith, director of Waterloo’s Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience.

Here’s your daily odd tidbit, sourced by Wikipedia. Out in space there exists a giant bubble of nothing – huge, statistically-unlikely emptiness. Astronomers have dubbed it the Boötes

English: A map of the Boötes void. Credits: Powell, Richard. Atlas of the Universe Copyrights information: atlasoftheuniverse.com/copyright (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 void (after the constellation Boötes), or the Great Void. Read on: 

The Boötes void or the Great Void is a huge and approximately spherically shaped region of space, containing very few galaxies.  At nearly 250 million light-years in diameter 

(approximately 0.27% of the diameter of the visible universe), or nearly 236,000 Mpc³ in volume, the Boötes void is one of the largest known voids in the universe, and is referred to as a supervoid. The center of the Boötes void is approximately 700 million light years from Earth. According to astronomer Greg Aldering, the scale of the void is such that “If the Milky Way had been in the center of the Boötes void, we wouldn’t have known there were other galaxies until the 1960s.”

You can check out the original page here.

A Saudi woman. (Photo credit: Retlaw Snellac)

Saudi Arabia, already known for its staggering misogyny, just got a little more Orwellian (or, for the Margaret Atwood fans — Gileadean?):

RIYADH — Denied the right to travel without consent from their male guardians and banned from driving, women in Saudi Arabia are now monitored by an electronic system that tracks any cross-border movements.

Since last week, Saudi women’s male guardians began receiving text messages on their phones informing them when women under their custody leave the country, even if they are travelling together.

From the Daily Mail: 

A centre for ‘terminator studies’, where leading academics will study the threat that robots pose to humanity, is set to open at Cambridge University. 

Its purpose will be to study the four greatest threats to the human species – artificial intelligence, climate change, nuclear war and rogue biotechnology.

The Mail, of course, sensationalizes this, as it tends to do: the actual name for the think tank is the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. At any rate, I’m glad we have top minds thinking about these issues.

Bad news for those who claim to be afflicted with lycanthropy: 

Contrary to popular belief, there is no connection between lunar phases and the incidence of psychological problems. This is the conclusion reached by a team of researchers directed by Professor Geneviève Belleville of Université Laval’s School of Psychology after having examined the relationship between the moon’s phases and the number of patients who show up at hospital emergency rooms experiencing psychological problems.

Read the rest here.

A South Pacific island, shown on marine charts and world maps as well as on Google Earth and Google Maps, does not exist, Australian scientists say.

The supposedly sizeable strip of land, named Sandy Island on Google maps, was positioned midway between Australia and French-governed New Caledonia.

But when scientists from the University of Sydney went to the area, they found only the blue ocean of the Coral Sea.

The phantom island has featured in publications for at least a decade.

You can read the rest of the story here. Apparently, incidents like this aren’t as uncommon as one might think: Wikipedia has a long list of other “phantom islands” that have been debunked throughout history. (My favorites from this list include Antillia, the mysterious Isle of Seven Cities, and the sinister-sounding Isle of Demons, a legendary land once believed to exist near Newfoundland.) 

An all-new season of Adverbly is coming to internets near you, later this November. Stay tuned!

Indonesia’s health care system is not the best in the world, and given the country’s widespread poverty and traditions of mysticism, it is perhaps unsurprising that some are turning to “alternative treatments.” From medicalxpress.com:

(AP) — Ignoring the red-and-white danger sign, Sri Mulyati walks slowly to the train tracks outside Indonesia’s bustling capital, lies down and stretches her body across the rails.

Like the nearly dozen others lined up along the track, the 50-year-old diabetes patient has all but given up on doctors and can’t afford the expensive medicines they prescribe.

In her mind, she has only one option left: electric therapy.
[…]She turned to train track therapy last year after hearing a rumor about an ethnic Chinese man who was partially paralyzed by a stroke going to the tracks to kill himself, but instead finding himself cured.

It’s a story that’s been told and retold in Indonesia.

Until recently, more than 50 people would show up at the Rawa Buaya tracks every day. But the numbers have dropped since police and the state-run railroad company erected a warning sign and threatened penalties of up to three months in prison or fines of $1,800.

No one has been arrested yet, and none of the participants in train track therapy has died.

You can read the whole story here.