No doubt you have seen people walking around carrying little dumbbells in their hands (no I’m not referring to their children). Others have weighted ankle-bracelets. Both of those help tone specific muscles and incidentally contribute a slight increment to calories burned when walking.
Now the talk is about Walkvest, which shifts this idea up to the center of the body. A heavy (and hot) looking vest is worn while walking or exercising, and it has little pockets where you can put weights. They claim it will help you lose weight. In fact, they say:
In our studies, individuals who walked on a treadmill for 45 minutes without the WALKVEST (and with no coaching by Debbie) burned from 150 to 230 calories. Those same individuals walked on the same treadmill while wearing the WALKVEST with 4 to 6lbs. and they burned 250-330 calories in 45 minutes. When they walked on the treadmill wearing the WALKVEST with 4 to 6lbs. and working out with Debbie on CD, they burned between 370-540 calories in 45 minutes.
Now most people burn about 50-60 calories per mile walking for each 100 pounds they weigh. So for simplicity, say a person weighing 100 pounds walked three miles in those 45 minutes on the treadmill (a fast pace but it keeps the math simple, for illustration sake), and burned the 150 calories given as the low-end example. Add six pounds of weight, and the same walk, and they should burn 159 calories — but here they claim 250 or even 370!
Of course, the only difference, besides the weight, is the “coaching by Debbie”, which apparently accounts for the other 91 calories burned. Hmmm. Vest adds 9 extra calories burned, coaching adds 91. I think I’d skip the $60 vest and just take the $15 coaching CD (that is if I really believed these figures).
In a new report from the US Geological Survey, it is possible that the invasive Burmese pythons, now found in the Everglades and other parts of south Florida, could spread across the entire souther United States. According to maps accompanying that article, there is no reason to think they won’t eventually also reach Mexico and spread southward from there.
Once a popular pet among reptile fans, the Burmese pythons grow far too large to be a safe house guest, so they have been released into the wild — wouldn’t want to hurt Oscar now would we? So many such pets were released in southern Florida, and the region is so ideally suited to the snakes, that there are now feral breeding populations. Naturally enough, they are spreading out into new territory all the time. They may not be as prolific as Kudzu, but they are just as persistent, and somewhat more aggressive.
Just one more example of people tampering with Mother Nature in mindless self-indulgence. As with so many other instances, this one is likely to turn about and bite them in the ass. Global warming will only make a larger area attractive to these pythons. Watch for them as the coastal waters rise to flood New Orleans.
In a new study out of the University of Helsinki, Music therapy was proven an effective aid in recovery from the effects of stroke. A group of 60 patients who had suffered strokes and who were under age 75 were each assigned to one of three test groups at random. The first group received the usual treatment. The second group, in addition to the usual treatment, listened to recordings of audio books. The third group listened to music.
Testing after three months showed the verbal memory of the music-listeners increased by 60% while those of the audio book listeners increased only 18% and the control group by 29%. There was no explanation mentioned for why the audio book group should fare worse than the control group, but the fact that the music listeners did much better than the control is certainly encouraging. The music group also showed a 17% improvement when tested for their ability to focus attention, while the other two groups showed no change.
The subjects were allowed to choose which type of music they listened to; it would be interesting to know if the type of music they chose had different levels of effectiveness. My bet is that Classical was more effective than the Sinatra fans. I doubt any of the group was listening to Rap — no doubt that would set them back.
The American Civil War — fought 1861-1865 — has claimed its first Twenty-First Century victim, Sam White of Sam White Relics. Visit his website to see a photo of Sam. On that site he offers to “disarm, clean, and preserve your Civil War period and earlier military ordinance” for $20 to $35, depending on they type of weapon. He obviously recognized the danger involved, as he said:
I’ve done approx. 500 artillery projectiles and still have all my fingers (I must be doing something right, knock on wood)!
Well, he must have gotten careless, because he lost more than his fingers. News reports suggest he was killed when one of his war relics exploded, possibly a cannon-ball. The ATF, in a typical over-reaction, evacuated dozens of surrounding houses and began blowing-up all the remaining 140 year old weapons. Yes, they can still go off, but the black powder cannon balls are hardly powerful enough that you need to clear several blocks of homes, or handle them like dynamite or nitroglycerin — a real expert could have been called in to disarm them.
On the other hand, this shows that amateurs have no business digging-up, let alone trying to disarm, war artifacts. Leave it to the archaeologists boys.
There have been a lot of fossils mentioned in the news lately, and I mean other than G W Bush. The beginning of this month the 80 million year old crocodile ancestor Montealtosuchus arrudacamposi was described as ‘a missing link to prehistoric crocodiles,’ and was found in Brazil.
Then there were reports of the ‘tiny pterodactyl’ Nemicolopterus crypticus, who hung out in the Ginko forests of China 120 million years ago, chowing down on bugs. At about eight inches long it was only tiny in relation to its fossil relatives, which could have wingspans of 20 to 40 feet.
Next came news from Wyoming that a bat fossil found there shows that bats evolved their flight ability before they developed echo-location, a subject of some debate prior to this find. Onychonycteris finneyi had a one-foot wingspan and claws on all five ‘fingers’, but lacked the bony features associated with echo-location. The fossil was almost complete, and dated to about 52 million years ago.
Now in today’s news we see the Goliath Frog from Madagascar. This critter, dubbed Beelzebufo or ‘the frog from Hell,’ lived about 70 million years ago, and was almost 16 inches long, weighing in at about 10 pounds. The interesting thing is that it was related to modern ‘horned toads’ which are found only in the Americas, and were previously thought to have evolved there.
Well at last enough people are fed-up over the inane voice mail hell machines that some are taking action.
- Press 1 to report an alien abduction
- Press 2 to find out why your checks are bouncing
- Press 3 to report your neighbor to Homeland Insecurity
- …
- Press 9 to hear this list over, and over, and over
Little wonder that people are exasperated, these things never have the option you need, and when you do choose something the next list is even less relevant. By the time you get to the 32nd level of choice selection you are either told that you called the wrong number to begin with, and they provide that number again and say you should have used it; or you are graced with a half hour of elevator music before the line goes dead (the latter, of course, is always the case if you call long-distance).
So in protest the GetHuman people have posted a list of tricks that will cause many of the voice mail systems to turn you over to a real operator. Of course, they won’t work if there are no real operators, as is often the case.
In case you need them, here are two of the most reliable options: 1) simply do nothing — make believe you have a dial-tone phone and can’t press a button ’cause you got a dial. If that doesn’t work — the initial choices keep repeating indefinitely — 2) try pressing zero for every response. Write those on the back of your Get Out of Jail Free card. Good Luck.
The U.S. Military has revealed the the non-functioning spy satellite that is going to come crashing back to Earth soon, has about 1,000 pounds of hydrazine propellant on board. The odds of the small satellite hitting anyone on re-entry is slight, but factor in the possibility that it might explode in the atmosphere over a populated area, spreading the hydrazine far and wide — and it suddenly becomes a serious situation.
Symptoms of acute short-term exposure to high levels of hydrazine may include irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat, dizziness, headache, nausea, pulmonary edema, seizures, and coma in humans. Acute exposure can also damage the liver, kidneys, and central nervous system in humans. The liquid is corrosive and may produce dermatitis from skin contact in humans and animals.
So the bright lights at Military Intelligence have decided to shoot down the satellite, rather than wait for it to fall to Earth on it’s own. They think (or hope?) they can better control where it explodes that way, and spread the hydrazine at high enough elevation to dissipate before it reaches ground level. Sounds a bit like a movie plot I once saw … things didn’t work out exactly as planned in the movie.
Baltimore Police Officer Salvatore Rivieri was suspended after getting caught on video verbally abusing a teenager for calling him ‘dude’. I didn’t know dude was a derogatory term. Or maybe as a cop Rivieri things he should be addressed as ‘your Holiness’?
Besides threatening the youth, Rivieri put him in a headlock and forced him to the ground, so I suppose some of the viewers will cry physical abuse too — though since the boy was unhurt I don’t think that was abuse so much as stupidity. Oh, and telling the kid ’someone’ was going to kill him if he didn’t learn to show respect wasn’t too good a move either.
If you want to see the video, watch it here. Not exactly a Rodney King event, but enough to serve as a warning to authorities — Big Brother may be watching, but Little Brother is looking back.
In much ado about nothing, someone seems to have shot himself — whether accidentally or as a suicide attempt is not known yet — and then drove on to the Seton Hall campus, looking for a friend for assistance. The person who was shot was not himself a student there.
So the shooting did not actually occur at Seton Hall, the single victim was not a student, and there is not, as of yet, any evidence the gun involved was ever on campus. Yet it has already been dubbed the Seton Hall Shooting. Sometimes the Internet works too fast.
The campus was in lockdown, briefly, while police searched for the weapon. The South Orange, NJ, campus has since been opened again. Students are free to resume their normal activities, and no weapon was ever found, though the victims car was impounded and could contain the weapon.
I have done a lot of genealogical research — that’s family history stuff for those of you who don’t like big words — and noticed that most people know the details about their parents and grand-parents, but few can go further back than that. Now a study out of Iceland gives some explanation for this social phenomena — it is better to marry your third cousins! (Biologically speaking, that is.)
Don’t believe me? You can read the study here. Third cousins who marry have more children and grandchildren than those more distantly related. In small communities, if you can manage to forget who your great-grandparents were, you can enjoy the fiction that the third-cousin you just met is not related to you.