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Brain Feed

“I expose to men the origin of their first, and perhaps second, reason for existing.” Leonardo da Vinci wrote these words above his drawing “The Copulation” in about 1493. [His] sketch shows a transparent view of the anatomy of sexual intercourse as envisaged by the anatomists of his time. The semen was supposed to come down from the brain through a channel which can be seen in the spine of the man.

Da Vinci - The Copulation

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Fiat Tenebrae

This Hubble Space Telescope composite image shows a ghostly 'ring' of dark matter in the galaxy cluster Cl 0024+17. The ring-like structure is evident in the blue map of the cluster's dark matter distribution.

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Barack Obama, Another Irish-American

Church documents … along with census, immigration and other records tracked down by U.S. genealogists, appear to show that Obama’s great-great-great-grandfather, Fulmuth Kearney, was reared in Moneygall [Ireland], then left for America in 1850, when he was 19 … Kearney sailed to New York aboard the S.S. Marmion at a time when legions of Irish were leaving their famine-stricken island. The shoemaker’s son made a life in America, and his family line eventually produced Ann Durham, who was born in Kansas … Durham married a Kenyan, also named Barack Obama, who was studying in Hawaii, and in 1961 they had a son, now a leading candidate to become president of the United States.

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Apple Interface Prior Art

Internet comment, 2005

The clickwheel is the sticking point. If Apple wants to make a larger-screen iPod without making the device itself larger, then there are two very simple choices. It could copy Archos, which moved from the iPod-shaped MMJB video player in 2002 (small screen, very annoying) to the current larger AV format (controls along the side). Or it could move the entire control interface to the reverse of the device, leaving one entire side for the clickwheel and controls, and perhaps a secondary small screen (but more cost).

Apple Patent Filing, 2007: Back-Side Interface for Hand-Held Devices

One of the surfaces (e.g., the bottom) includes a force-sensitive touch-surface through which a user provides input (e.g., cursor manipulation and control element selection). On a second surface (e.g., the top), a display element is used to present information appropriate to the device’s function (e.g., video information), one or more control elements and a cursor. The cursor is controlled through manipulation of the back-side touch-surface. The cursor identifies where on the back-side touch-surface the user’s finger has made contact.

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Craiglist PNP Casualty

Thirty-one-year-old Nicole Faller, a former exotic dancer from Pleasanton was caught on tape using methamphetamine and having sex with an unidentified man. During the act, the man suffered a heart attack and died, and it was all caught on camera … During the time of the incident, Faller was married to someone else with a child and was having an affair with the man who she knew he had a bad heart.

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Bad News Day

A common virus, believed to be transmitted during oral sex, is the cause of a rare throat cancer in both men and women … Patients whose blood or saliva samples indicated that they had prior HPV infection were 32 times more likely to develop oropharnygeal cancer … those people who had had more than six oral sex partners were 8.6 times more likely to develop the HPV-linked cancer..

The public health implications of our findings are underscored by the annual increases in the incidence of tonsillar and base-of-tongue cancers in the United States since 1973. The widespread oral sexual practices among adolescents may be a contributing factor in this increase. Our results and those of other studies provide a rationale for HPV vaccination in both boys and girls — since oropharyngeal cancers occur in men and women. If vaccination is as effective in preventing oral HPV-16 infection as it is in preventing cervical infection, a substantial reduction in the incidence of oropharyngeal cancer in vaccinated populations would provide the ultimate evidence of causality.

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Who Watches The Watchmen?

So we went to San Diego to check it out to see if moving there for UCSD was a good idea. And walking back from the car one evening we happened to pass by a streetlight and I felt something and looked up. Right there, right above me, a huge owl was gliding by, maybe 3 metres away. A completely silent ghost with huge, extended wings ending in talons and a weird, superheroish face. I could see it checking us out, looking straight at us, its precise little brain computing our threat/food ratio. Calculations done, it flicked its head and looked away, scanning the ground in front of it, behind us. I watched it pass into the darkness. If I was superstitious I might take this as an omen, but I believe that this rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces.

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