January 21, 2015

A terrified shopper was bitten on the head by a snake at a Lowe's in Mississippi

A terrified shopper was bitten on the head by a snake at a Lowe's store in Mississippi.

The customer was opening a cabinet at the Corinth outlet 2:30 p.m. Saturday when the chicken snake suddenly jumped out, reports WTVA.

The nonvenomous critter locked its fangs onto the unidentified victim's head.

It's unclear how the victim managed to dislodge the serpent, which is also known as a black rat snake, corn snake or pilot snake.

But the shopper was rushed to Magnolia Regional Health Center for treatment. The patient's current condition is not known.
<snip>
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/snake-bites-customer-head-lowe-store-article-1.2086391

There's a video at the link.

It bit him between the eyes and wouldn't let go. My Mama would have died on the spot.
I've seen a 7 foot chicken snake.

January 21, 2015

84-year-old activist nun imprisoned in Brooklyn jail hellhole for breaking into nuclear facility

84-year-old activist nun imprisoned in Brooklyn jail hellhole for breaking into nuclear facility, exposing security flaws

Sister Megan Rice and two other activists broke into the facility outside Knoxville, Tenn., in 2012 to bring attention to the dangers of unimpeded nuclear proliferation. They also exposed gaps in national security by showing how easy it was to get in. Now, Sister Megan lives in horrifying conditions in a single room with 111 other women in the Metropolitan Detention Center.
<snip>
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/exclusive-nun-84-brooklyn-jail-hellhole-activism-article-1.2083481

Many people who break laws get sent to medium-security prisons.
The authorities are just mad because she and the others embarrassed them.
Smh.....

January 21, 2015

Loafers

@shannynmoore

And the memes are endless.

January 20, 2015

Learn how to self-apply the Heimlich maneuver.

A student at a Pennsylnania college apparently choked to death on gum.
Here I'd one link about self-applying the Heimlich maneuver:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001983.htm

FYI

If you are thinking 'Well duh.', you shouldn't. People really panic and having a plan in mind could save you.

January 20, 2015

162-2

162-2
This score is obscene for any game. It is especially obscene for a high school girl's basketball game. It so far from the realm of good sportsmanship that it is a sad lesson. It is a lesson in what not to do.

I have played, coached, refereed, and had just about every other job that relates to basketball in 50 years. I played in the dark ages before it was 5 on 5 and beyond. I have seen and played on pitiful teams. I have seen great teams and played on one excellent one in high school. I have never seen a score remotely like this.

Neither team learned much if anything from it. The better team certainly didn't sharpen any skills on this type of 'opposition'. In fact, they may have picked up one bad habits from easily running over and around the other kids. What they were able to do this time won't be so easy the next time.

It is not so easy to dismiss the other team finishing. I don't know about the mindset, but finishing a game may be some kind of victory for them. They didn't quit. That may be a goal. They certainly don't want to be pitied or condescended to. That's makes this tricky under the rules of the league. And yes, some teams do have goals that we know nothing about.

I looked up some information about this league. This is a 1A game which is the lowest division. Each state has their own designations so that matters. This league is located in inland California. One note about this league said that lopsided scores have been occurring more and more. That should be a clue for someone that something is wrong with their classification system. They also don't have a 'mercy rule' and they don't allow a running clock until the fourth quarter. A mercy rule and a running clock agreed to by the refs and both teams would have provided a more merciful end to this game that applies to all teams. One team wouldn't feel singled out.

The winning coach applied a full-court press for the entire first half. Why he kept it up that long is beyond me. He had beaten them to a pulp well before the end of the half. In the second half he did tell his team to run the shot clock down to the last few seconds. He also should have confined them to 3-point shots at the end of that time. That would have given them a real chance to work on a needed skill. Unless the entire team is made up of remarkable shooters, that would have kept the score down.

I know some people were saying it's the other team's job to stop the scoring. Hogwash! If they had players with decent skills that might apply. In this case it was literally impossible for that team to stop anybody. This was like shooting fish in a barrel.

I hope the suspended coach thinks long and hard about how to handle a situation like this. Winning isn't everything and that is a misquote. It was 'Wanting to win is everything.' The second motto is one I agree with. Learning to win gracefully is also a needed value. That can be harder to absorb than learning not to be a sore loser.

I can't find the article but I read one in the past that highlighted a different approach. Two teams were mismatched in skills and in the resources provided to each team. Before they played again, the coaches worked something out that turned the game into a clinic where the better players coached the others one to one. They also brought badly needed equipment to the other team. This was a very tricky situation because nobody wants to feel like they are a charity players who need help. It worked because the players on both teams handled it with great sensitivity. They continued this on other occasions they arranged.

Here is a story about a girls team that does get the brakes beat off of them, but the records and the scores are not the point. It is a special case, but you can see what a team can mean.

'It's Not About The Record’
By JOHN BRANCH
HUNTINGDON, Tenn. — It was early on a Friday morning, and there was an emergency in Carroll Academy’s Room 5. A student named Destiny was sitting alone, crying. With cameras in every classroom, she could be seen on the monitor in the security office.

The girls basketball team at Carroll Academy had lost the night before, 69-9, at home to University School of Jackson, a private college-preparatory school about 45 minutes away.

Destiny, a 17-year-old senior with a crossover dribble, a silky shooting touch and a habit of drug use, was the only one of the nine Carroll Academy players with any previous high school basketball experience. There were games this season when Destiny scored all the team’s points. There were times in every game when her passes, delivered at the velocity of someone playing dodge ball, bounced off teammates’ hands, leaving Destiny in a quiet fit of grimaces and upturned palms.

On the court the previous night, her street-tough persona boiled toward reckless anger. Defended tightly, often by two opponents, she was all elbows and sneers.

Coach Tonya Lutz did not like what she saw and benched Destiny in the second half. Randy Hatch, the school administrator, did not like what he saw, either.

He had a hunch. And he had a tip. He ordered a drug test for Destiny the next morning.

That was why she was crying in Room 5.

“I’m not going to be able to pass my drug screen,” she said when Lutz, Hatch and the school’s security director, Patrick Steele, came into the room. And before she was escorted to the restroom to urinate into a cup, she pressed her face into Lutz’s shoulder and sobbed.

Learning to Be Survivors

Carroll Academy is in Huntingdon, about 100 miles east of Memphis and 100 miles west of Nashville in West Tennessee. It is a strictly run day school with about 80 students operated by the Carroll County Juvenile Court, filled with teenagers trying to work their way back to their home schools with the velvet-hammered guidance of parole officers and people like Lutz, Hatch and Steele.

Among the nine girls on the Carroll Academy basketball team, only one lives with both her mother and her father. A seventh grader, she lived with her parents and two younger siblings at a grandmother’s house, having been evicted from one trailer and waiting to move into another.

A few of the players moved more than once during the season. A couple have lived for weeks or months in abandoned houses without water, electricity or heat. Few of the parents have steady jobs, and at least one is in jail.
<snip>
Much more and it's worth the read:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/sports/carroll-academy-basketball-it-aint-about-the-record.html

January 18, 2015

A man in a Silverado was crushed between 2 semis and he had minor injuries.(Photo)

Sometimes a picture says it all.

For Kaleb Whitby, the picture says a little too much.

He'd rather not think about it — the semi-trucks flattening his Chevy Silverado like a panini press.

Amid the tangled steel after the predawn crash near Baker City sat Whitby: intact, trapped and full of questions.

"Thank God that I'm still alive," Whitby said. "Now I've got to go figure out why."
***
More than 100 people were involved in the Saturday morning pileup on Interstate 84, about 33 miles east of Baker City. At least three separate collisions involving more than 20 vehicles, most of them semi-trucks, injured a dozen people.

All 12 were initially treated at Saint Alphonsus Medical Center in Baker City. The most severely injured was transferred to OHSU Hospital in Portland and listed in critical condition. Six others remained hospitalized Saturday afternoon: Two were in stable condition in Baker City, and four were transferred to a sister hospital in Boise.

Black ice, heavy winds, fog and cold weather combined into what were extremely hazardous conditions.
<snip>
http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2015/01/interstate_84_semi-truck_crash_1.html

Jeebus!

January 18, 2015

2 people took a photo of same lightning bolt (by chance) & someone reconstructed 3D model of it!

<snip>
Now we need to do some maths... except I don't like doing complicated maths and it turns out there is a big simplification you can make! If both pictures are taken from a long way away from the lightning bolt (i.e. the object has quite a small angular size in the image) then the shift in position between the images is proportional to the distance from the camera. Bigger shifts mean that bit of the bolt is closer to the camera. This approximation is pretty accurate for the majority of cameras, so I used it here.
Both images side by side:

The other problem is the proportionality factor. If one part of the lightning bolt shifts twice as much between the two images as another part that means it is twice as close. But twice as close as what? Without knowing exactly where the cameras were positioned that means only the relative distance, not absolute distance, can be calculated. Oh well, close enough!

So what does the lightning bolt look like in 3D? I plugged the coordinates into Blender and this is the result:
Check out the image here at the bottom:
http://calculatedimages.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/3d-lightning.html

Wow!

January 18, 2015

Protect and serve......and sing to Taylor Swift?

I haven't laughed so hard in a long time. The facial expressions and hand gestures were priceless.

January 16, 2015

BREAKING:SCOTUS will hear cases about same sex marriage ban.

Ruling in June probably.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisgeidner/supreme-court-will-hear-four-cases-challenging-same-sex-marr

And we're off.....

January 16, 2015

A UPI photo of the Pope making an announcement was hacked at it was epic!

@AdamSerwer:
Sorry here it is in screenshot form. (This is not actually happening, the account has been hacked).

Ha!