Atheist, technopagan and vegan.

But that's not all you can find here.

Paul

Suspended coffee

This story will warm you better than a coffee on a cold winter day: "We enter a little coffeehouse with a friend of mine and give our order. While we're approaching our table two people come in and they go to the counter - 'Five coffees, please. Two of them for us and three suspended' They pay for their order, take the two and leave. I ask my friend: 'What are those 'suspended' coffees ?'…

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Paul

Soundscraper - energy from noise.

No, I'm not drunk. A soundscraper is a serious thing in the race towards clean energy. As found on Inhabitat: An entry in the 2013 eVolo Skyscraper Competition, the Soundscrapers would be constructed near major motorways and railroad junctions, prime locations for capturing ambient vibrations. A sound-sucking material would cover the exterior of the tower with a double-skin layer, held away from the façade on a metallic frame. For each Soundscraper, 84,000 electro-active lashes would cover the…

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Paul

On heart attacks

How many folks do you know who say they don't want to drink anything before going to bed because they'll have to get up during the night!! Interesting....... Something else I didn't know ... Why do people need to urinate so much at night time? Answer from a Cardiac Doctor - Gravity holds water in the lower part of your body when you are upright (legs swell). When you lie down and the lower body…

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Paul

Salt linked to autoimmune diseases

Found on nature.com: Nanowires show sodium chloride may cause harmful T-cell growth. The incidence of autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and type 1 diabetes, has spiked in developed countries in recent decades. In three studies published today in Nature, researchers describe the molecular pathways that can lead to autoimmune disease1 and identify one possible culprit that has been right under our noses — and on our tables — the entire time: salt2, 3. To stay healthy, the…

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Paul

Magdalene Laundries

When Singer Sinead O’Connor tore a picture of the Pope on SNL, Americans were never told why.....In Ireland, they knew. For crimes as petty as being too beautiful or talking back.....girls found themselves in a living hell. Catholic Church enslaved 30,000 Irish women as forced unpaid labor in Magdalene Laundries until 1996 What a horrific story. The Irish Prime Minister gave a partial apology today for the government’s role in a 74-year scandal in which,…

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Paul

COBOL will outlive us all

This may sound odd but it probably is truth. I found this headline on "itworld.com". Being a COBOL programmer myself I wanted to know more of course: In the early 1980s, I was told that COBOL was going away and that I should quickly move toward other programming languages. Well, thirty years later, COBOL is alive and well and living in large companies everywhere. Yes, most of the smaller COBOL programs written in the 1970s,…

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Paul

Could a computer save lost languages of the ancient world?

Could a computer save languages from extinction? (found on ScienceRecorder) Until now, saving languages from extinction largely depended on whether computer scientists could create algorithms able to capture samples before individuals speaking the language died off. Now, it seems living speakers of ancient languages may not even be a requirement. According to a new report, a Canadian scientist suspects that advanced computer programs could be used to recreate dead languages. The research team, comprised of Alexandre Bouchard-Cote at the University of…

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Paul

When you spent 29 years in prison.

I read a story about a man in the USA, about a Mr. Randolph Arledge who in 1984 was convicted to 99 years in prison for the aledged murder of a woman in Texas. After 29 years new DNA tests proved that he was innocent and he was released from prison. He is now 58 years old, meaning that he spent half his life in prison. Innocent. That is serious, very serious. When I read that,…

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