"Donkey, your days are numbered. The knackers' yard awaits you." - Martin Amis's 1982 book about video games.
"One of the peculiar syndromes, which we have studied recently, is called apotemnophilia. It's in fact so uncommon that many neurologists and many psychiatrists have not heard of it. It's in a sense a converse of phantom limbs. In a phantom limb patient an arm is amputated but the patient continues to vividly feel the presence of that arm. We call it a phantom limb. In apotemnophilia you are dealing with a perfectly healthy, normal individual, not mentally disturbed in any way, not psychotic, not emotionally disturbed, often holding a job, and has a family."
Photopic Sky Survey, 37,440 images of the night sky combined into 5,000-megapixel rotatable/zoomable image. Includes star maps overlay function.
John Fairfax is dead:
In 1969, after six months alone on the Atlantic battling storms, sharks and encroaching madness, John Fairfax, who died this month at 74, became the first lone oarsman in recorded history to traverse any ocean.
In 1972, he and his girlfriend, Sylvia Cook, sharing a boat, became the first people to row across the Pacific, a yearlong ordeal during which their craft was thought lost.
[...]
At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.
At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate.
Greg Cochran writes:
For now, one example. We know that gastric and duodenal ulcer, and most cases of stomach cancer, are caused by an infectious organism, helicobacter pylori. It apparently causes amnesia as well. This organism was first seen in 1875 - nobody paid any attention.
Letulle showed that it induced gastritis in guinea pigs, 1888. Walery Jaworski rediscovered it in 1889, and suspected that it might cause gastric disease. Nobody paid any attention. Krienitz associated it with gastric cancer in 1906. Who cares?
Around 1940, some American researchers rediscovered it, found it more common in ulcerated stomachs, and published their results. Some of them thought that this might be the cause of ulcers - but Palmer, a famous pathologist, couldn't find it when he looked in the early 50s, so it officially disappeared again. He had used the wrong stain. John Lykoudis, a Greek country doctor noticed that a heavy dose of antibiotics coincided with his ulcer's disappearance, and started treating patients with antibiotics - successfully. He tried to interest pharmaceutical companies - wrote to Geigy, Hoechst, Bayer, etc. No joy. JAMA rejected his article. The local medical society referred him for disciplinary action and fined him.
Speaking of guts, digestion filmed using swallowed pill-sized camera
