Some dude hid in his attic and used Facebook to contact friends during a home invasion / armed robbery to call for help. As dumb as that sounds….it worked.
“I don’t think [Facebook] is really meant as a lifesaving tool, but it’s the only way I could think of contacting someone immediately to call for help,” he said. So, as the intruders rifled through the home, Bhakta updated his Facebook status: “HELP, ROBBERS, NO PHONE.” In all caps, naturally.
Paging Dr. Xbox, paging Dr. Xbox, please report to surgery with your Kinect.
Surgeons at a Toronto hospital are using Microsoft’s Xbox 360 motion sensor Kinect to save time calling up images during operations. The Winnipeg Free Press reports that surgeons at Sunnybrook Hospital are using open-source Kinect drivers for PC to allow them to manipulate images of medical scans – something which normally involves a meticulous cleanup operation to ensure sterility around the patient, taking around 20 minutes each time.
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Speaking of GM and electric cars, here’s an ad from 1969 that shows a series hybrid powered by a stirling engine. The underlying concept isn’t actually so different from the upcoming Chevy Volt, and while at the time the technology probably wasn’t there to make this a commercial success, we can wonder what happened to this concept in the years between then and now.
But how serious are they? The International Atomic Energy Authority ranks them using a special International Nuclear Events Scale (INES) – ranging from ‘anomaly’ to ‘major accident’, numbered from 1 to 7.
The events at Fukushima are level 5, so far and there has only been one 7 in history: Chernobyl in 1986. You can see the full ranking system below and on the attached spreadsheet
WoW! At least we know that celebrities get treated like crap by retail electronics stores too.
So I’m in Best Buy… literally trying to buy iPod shuffles for orphans and they won’t sell them to me because they’re saving them for other customers. Thank you Best Buy for all of your help. They wouldn’t let my friend buy the rest either haha! What the hell is wrong with y’all?!
Being unemployed is generally regarded as detrimental to your mental health, with the prevailing wisdom being that gainful employment will fix you right up. Unfortunately, according to research published in Occupational and Environmental Medicine, a crappy job can be just as bad — if not worse — than unemployment.
Analyzing more than 7,000 working-age Australians across a great number of data points, the researchers found that people defined good jobs as ones that provided a defined social role and purpose, friendships, and structured time (among other things). Being hired into these kinds of jobs resulted in an overall improvement in mental health. Conversely, those in jobs that offered little control, were very demanding, and provided little support and reward lead to a general decrease in mental health.
