- Attention Pakistanis: Your phone service may be even
sh*ttier than usual this weekend? Why? Because your government is suspending
phone coverage in many cities after a series of bomb attacks on Shi'ites
triggered by mobile phones. With the weekend being an important one in the
Shi'ite Muslim calendar, authorities worry that hardline Sunnis will follow
through on their threats for more attacks as the Shi'ite mourning month of
Muharram comes to a climax. With more than a dozen people already killed this
week attending Muharram processions, Pakistan’s Ministry of the Interior fears
more attacks could be triggered remotely using cell phones. "All the
blasts that occurred in the last 15 days were mobile phone-based,"
Interior Minister Rehman Malik explained. The most recent attack occurred
Friday when a suicide bomber killed himself and wounded two police officers
near a Shi'ite procession in the northwestern city of Lakki Marwat.
Intelligence information suggests the capital city of Islamabad, Karachi and
Quetta are likely targets for additional attacks over the next few days. To
take away one potential means of staging those attacks, mobile phone service
will be suspended for hours in the three cities and dozens of others over the
weekend. While they’re busy not being able to make calls, text their friends or
post pictures to Facebook, residents of Karachi can get out and mingle with the
more than 5,000 police who are expected to patrol the streets during Muharram
events over the next two days "The army is on standby. If any untoward
incident occurs, we will call them, if need be," Malik added. For the
Pakistani-culture-ignorant, Muharram marks the anniversary of the Battle of
Karbala, where the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad and his family members were
killed. Extremist groups are using the occasion to amp up their push for a
Sunni-led theocracy in the country……..
- The Detroit Lions playing a Thanksgiving Day has been a
tradition in the NFL for decades. Lions
defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh assaulting opponents outside the confines of the
rules is becoming one as well. Last year, Suh was ejected from the Lions'
Thanksgiving Day loss to the Green Bay Packers and was suspended two weeks
after he stomped on the arm of offensive lineman Evan Dietrich-Smith. This year,
his foot somehow ended up colliding with Houston Texans quarterback Matt
Schaub’s groin with 6:49 to play in the first quarter. The supposedly
inadvertent foot to the junk happened after Suh split right guard Ben Jones and
right tackle Derek Newton on a pass rush. Newton spun Suh to the ground as
Schaub threw a pass short to tight end Owen Daniels and from his spot on the
turf and with his face planted squarely in the artificial surface, Suh extended
his left foot into Schaub’s groin region as the QB fell to the ground. No
penalty was called on the play, but NFL executive vice president of football
operations Ray Anderson said on Friday that every form of discipline will be
considered against Detroit if next week's planned review of Suh's kick to the
groin determines that he made the contact deliberately. "When you consider
the history, everything is on the table," Anderson said. After watching
the game in the NFL command center at the league offices in New York, Anderson
admitted his initial reaction after seeing the play live and from various
network television replay angles was that "it didn't look good." Suh wasn’t
in a chatty after the game and left the locker room before reporters were
allowed in. Schaub, despite his team winning in overtime, wasn’t eager to take
about the play either. "I really don't have anything to say about that
play or that person," he said. Anderson, conversely, was more than happy
to speak about the incident and didn’t mind invoking a quality DUI analogy to
describe the situation. "Repeat offenders are going to run out of benefit
of the doubt faster than someone who is a first-time offender," Anderson
said. "If I were a judge in the courtroom, and you're in for a third-time
DUI, I'm going to look at that differently than if this is your first DUI --
even if you didn't maim anybody." Well said, indeed……….
- If scientists create a brand new small in a lab and the
general public can't smell it without going to said lab, does it still make a
smell? Neurobiologist Noam Sobel
from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and his colleagues have
unearthed a new smell dubbed "olfactory white," so named because it
is the nasal equivalent of white noise. White noise is a mixture of many
different sound frequencies and olfactory white is a mixture of many different
smelly compounds. The key to its existence lies not the compounds themselves, but
in the fact that there are a lot of them, according to Sobel and his team. “[T]he
more components there were in each of two mixtures, the more similar the smell
of those two mixtures became, even though the mixtures had no components in
common," they wrote in their research report. While most smells come from
a mixture of compounds and humans are good at telling these mixtures apart,
most people are not proficient at identifying individual compounds within a
mixture. To test this phenomenon, researchers exposed participants to hundreds
of equally mixed smells, some containing as few as one compound and others
containing up to 43 components. The 56 participants then compared mixtures of
the same number of compounds with one another. In the experiment, the more
components two mixtures had in common, the worse participants were at telling
them apart. Based on these findings, Sobel’s team conducted a second experiment
in which they created four 40-component mixtures and gave one of the mixtures
to 12 participants, who were told that it was called "Laurax," a
made-up word. Three of the participants were told one compound was Laurax,
three others were told a second compound was the substance, three more were
told it was a third compound and the final three were told that a fourth
compound was Laurax. Three days later, all 12 were given four new scents and
four scent labels, one of which was Laurax, and were asked to label each scent
with the most appropriate label. The label "Laurax" was most popular
for scents with more compounds and the more compounds in a mixture, the more
likely participants were to call it Laurax. After conducting another similar
experiment, the research team concluded that olfactory white is a distinct
smell, caused not by specific compounds but by certain mixes of compounds. What
mattered most was that the compounds were of equal intensity and spanned the
full range of human smells. The results of the study suggest that the human
brain treats smells as a single unit, not as a mixture of compounds to break
down or analyze. So what does olfactory white smell like? "The best way to
appreciate the qualities of olfactory white is to smell it," the
researchers wrote……….
- Life is all about finding the silver linings in cloudy
situations. For example, one could view a sleeping ferry boat captain snoozing
his day away about a boat crossing the Puget Sound as cause for alarm. On the other
hand, that same person could choose to look at a sleeping captain being discovered
on board one of the boats crossing the Puget Sound and the resulting delay of
another boat that captain was supposed to pilot as a positive because at least
that sleep-deprived skipper wasn’t at the helm of a moving boat while he napped
it out. The ferries were both scheduled to depart from Clinton, Wash. early Wednesday
morning, but both the Kittitas and Cathlamet were delayed for the
Clinton-Mukilteo run after a ferry captain who boarded the Cathlamet was
discovered sleeping midway between Clinton and Mukilteo. Washington State
Ferries spokeswoman Marta Coursey explained that it is not uncommon for crew
members to board a ferry overnight as preparation for their upcoming workday,
but she did not know why the captain overslept or who discovered him on the ferry.
Once the nappin’ captain was discovered, the working ferry captain then had to
turn the ferry around and go back to Clinton, so that his narcoleptic
counterpart could get off to pilot the Kittitas ferry. A number of passengers
were reportedly livid about the delay as the ferry mishap made them late for
work. Regardless of the reason for the delay, the number of ferry delays and
cancellations at the port has skyrocketed in recent weeks due to staffing
issues. Despite the minimal effects of this incident, Coursey said there will
be a formal investigation by the Port Captain’s Office………
- Ask, and ye shall receive…..a chance to drop acid with The
Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne and Beatles-wrecker Yoko Ono. That golden
opportunity has befallen an unidentified air traveler who missed his or her
flight on Nov. 10 at Will Rogers airport in Oklahoma City because Coyne caused a major
hullaballoo at a security checkpoint when a dead grenade in his hand luggage
set off alarms. Coyne calmly explained to the authorities that he had been
given the explosive weapon as a joke and was released once TSA officials
decided the grenade was harmless, but one of Coyne’s fellow travelers posted a
lengthy blog on The Lost Ogle lamenting
the fact that he had lost $1,000 due to hold-ups at the airport. "All we
could see was Wayne standing by the security checkpoint with a bunch of agents
around his bag. I was stuck near the food court, wasn’t able to cross the
airport to get to my gate. Flight left without me, all because of Wayne Coyne,"
the agitated air traveler wrote. However, this ingenious man or woman saw
opportunity where others may have merely seen a chance to vent their rage and
suggested, “I think Wayne Coyne should reimburse me, at a minimum I want to drop
acid with him and Yoko Ono.” Coyne, the freest of free spirits in the crazy
world of rock and roll and a man who has likely dropped more than his share of
acid during his life, quickly acceded to the request. “That sounds like fun. I can't speak for Yoko, but I would say
yes, let's do that,” Coyne said. Recalling the scene at the airport, he said, “It
was an actual grenade that was now missing its explosive parts and painted
gold. I just threw this gold grenade in my bag and had not quite thought about
it.
They all believed what I was saying; they all believed it was just a dumb
accident.” A dumb accident, maybe, but in the end it could lead to a wonderful
experience for a Flaming Lips fan………
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