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Now we’re like our pets

 

Francisco Javier Martinez, arcebispo de Granada, Espanha, deu conselhos às mulheres crentes evitarem cair em pecado ao praticarem sexo oral com seus parceiros.

 

“As mulheres podem praticar felatio com seus maridos sempre que eles pedirem. Mas quando o fizerem, devem pensar em Jesus para não se tornarem pervertidas. “Recorda que não és uma pervertida”, disse a sumidade.

 

O prelado já tinha provocado polêmica com o livro Cásate y sé sumisa (Case e seja submissa), lançado em dezembro passado na Europa. Mulheres, não deixem de ler!

 

Fonte: Revolución

 

Lagarbicha =X

The post Vida de lagartixa não é fácil appeared first on DrPepper.com.br.

More cat adventures.

A pie for Pi Day!

Metamaterials are already being used to create invisibility cloaks and "temporal cloaks," but now engineers from Duke University have turned metamaterials to the task of creating a 3D acoustic cloak. 

In the same way that invisibility cloaks use metamaterials to reroute light around an object, the acoustic cloaking device interacts with sound waves to make it appear as if the device and anything hidden beneath it isn't there.

Steven Cummer, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and his colleagues at Duke University constructed their acoustic cloak using several sheets of plastic plates dotted with repeating patterns of holes. The plastic sheets, which were created using a 3D printer, were stacked on top of each other to form a device that resembles a pyramid in shape. 
 
The geometry of the sheets and the placement of the holes interact with sound waves to make it appear as if the device and anything sitting underneath it isn't there. (more)

Mescaline is one of the oldest known hallucinogens, and is found in peyote as well as San Pedro cacti (shown here.) Intrepid psychonauts can buy the cactus legally as “ornamental plants” and chug a blender full of cactus pulp, which may be less sacred than a desert ritual at dawn, but seems to work nonetheless.

Users of “technically legal” hallucinogens usually tiptoe around the methods and usage of their recreational compounds, like the “elves and gnomes” referenced in the customer reviews of root bark used to make DMT. The nudge-and-wink reviews continue with Heavenly Blue Morning Glory, a plant whose seeds contain lysergic acid amide, a relative of LSD. But that was not the case with C. Hall, the author of this cactus review, where he straight-up admitted to extracting the active ingredient and “tripping balls.”

It may be brazen, but at least it’s not bath salts.

dezeen has the story on this wearable sensor that could help save the lives of those living with epilepsy.

The Dialog device, developed by American technology company Artefact, would use a wearable sensor and an iPhone app to help monitor patients’ vital signs and keep a log of conditions leading up to, during, and after a seizure.

“There are currently three million epilepsy sufferers in America, and it is the third most common neurological disorder after Alzheimer’s and stroke,” said Matthew Jordan, the project leader…

The Dialog would deal with the problem by creating a digital network that connects the person living with epilepsy to caregivers, doctors, and members of the public who have installed the Dialog app with data and instructions on how to give assistance.

The user attaches a nodule to the skin, which can be done either using transparent adhesive paper or by wearing it in a bracket that looks like a watch.

Using a series of sensors that monitors hydration, temperature, and heart rate, it gathers information on the wearer and stores the data on a smartphone.

Additionally, the sensor would prompt the wearer to take medication and record mood through the sensor’s touchscreen, and logs information about local climate conditions that could increase the likelihood of a seizure.

In the event of a fit, the wearer simply grasps the sensor, which alerts a caregiver and anyone within close proximity of the sufferer who has downloaded the app.

“It helps possible first responders be notified that a patient who is nearby is having a sustained seizure, directs the bystander to the patient, gives instructions on how to help the patient through the emergency, and affords a direct line of communication to the family caregiver,” said Jordan.

When the seizure ends, information about the length of the seizure, along with other contextual information, is displayed on the user’s smartphone to help reorient themselves.

Read more.

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Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!

Former Wall Street Journal reporter Yukari Iwatani Kane's highly anticipated book, Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs, debuts tomorrow with the goal of examining Apple's transition following the death of Steve Jobs.

While the book includes some interesting tidbits such as Jobs' comments on TV at a 2010 company retreat, Haunted Empire will likely not sit well with many Apple fans given Kane's thesis that the company is entering a period of decline without Jobs' guidance. That may indeed be the case, but the impression Kane gives readers is that she reached her conclusion before even embarking on the project, proceeding to selectively choose anecdotes to support her predetermined view.

Haunted Empire has relatively little praise for Apple, offering a rather disjointed series of chapters jumping from one topic to the next in an effort to show how dysfunctional Apple has become without Jobs. The book begins with a prologue setting the stage for Apple's transition with a description of the company's celebration of Steve Jobs following his death in October 2011. The first few chapters then focus on Jobs' earlier decline in health, including inside details on his 2008 conversation with New York Times reporter Joe Nocera regarding his health issues.

As Jobs began to move to the sidelines with several medical leaves of absence, Tim Cook's star began to rise with his handling of Apple's day-to-day operations, and his so-called "Cook Doctrine" shared on an earnings conference call in January 2009 offered the first good look at the executive's philosophy. Apple was flying high at that point on strong iPhone growth, but Kane alleges that Jobs resented Apple's success under Cook's stewardship:

Jobs returned to Apple at the end of June [2009] just as had said he would. On his first day, he threw a series of tantrums, ripping people apart and tearing up marketing plans. When Jobs heard about the press's sterling evaluation of Cook's performance, he hit the roof. Cook had done an excellent job, but the leadership and skill he showed in doing so was unsettling. He was also still sore about the "Cook Doctrine." Jobs chewed him out in a meeting with other executives.

"I'm the CEO!" Jobs yelled.

In support of her argument that Apple has been on the decline for some time now, Kane proceeds to cite a series of events dating back to Jobs' final years, including the lost iPhone 4, "Antennagate", and a Daily Show segment in which Jon Stewart took Apple to task for its handling of the lost iPhone 4 situation. Even Apple's dispute with Adobe over Flash is painted as a losing situation for Apple:

[T]he victory cost Apple. The fight with Adobe enforced the perception that Apple was turning into an eight-hundred-pound gorilla. Despite Jobs's justifiable reasons to exclude Flash from the iPad, Apple came across as an oppressor. The controversy tarnished the empire's sterling brand image.

Once Jobs stepped down as CEO for good in August 2011 just six weeks before his death, Cook was better able to assert himself and Kane notes that Cook got off to a good start by promoting popular services chief Eddy Cue to a senior vice president position and instituting a matching program for employees' charitable gifts.

But Cook soon faced a number of new problems, including a lukewarm reception to the new Siri personal assistant introduced on the iPhone 4S, issues with working conditions at manufacturing partner Foxconn and other suppliers as highlighted in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of "iEconomy" articles from The New York Times, and the wide-ranging patent wars with Samsung, HTC, Nokia, and others.

Kane spends several chapters addressing the patent battles and the Samsung dispute in particular, arguing that while Apple has seen some victories in court, the effort has ultimately proven fruitless given judges' unwillingness to issue injunctions that would prevent Samsung from selling any of its most popular models of smartphones and tablets over infringement issues.

Beyond the growing patent battles, other issues continued to mount for Cook, including the Maps iOS app debacle that led to the ouster of iOS chief Scott Forstall, the e-book pricing investigation, criticism from Chinese state-run media, and tax issues.

Kane gives Cook relatively high marks for his U.S. Senate committee testimony on the tax issue, but otherwise argues that Cook has been unable to make his mark on Apple, with his low-key demeanor and a lack of significant product releases generating little excitement around the company. Even Apple's effort to bring Mac manufacturing back to the United States is played off as a minor development, with Apple's $100 million investment a "pittance compared to its $137 billion cash hoard" and the company having to partner with Flextronics on Mac Pro assembly because the project was "too insignificant for Foxconn to care."

The last several chapters bring readers close to the present time, including a critical look at Cook's May 2013 appearance at the D11: All Things Digital conference in which Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher peppered Cook with a series of hard questions about Apple's product plans, competition from Android, and the weight of the patent wars.

The performance was a disaster. Cook came across as delusional and painfully out of touch. If he was truly unfazed by the host of problems facing Apple, if he actually believed that everything was going well, then the company was really in trouble.

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference 2013 and the introduction of iOS 7 are also addressed, with Kane taking exception to executives' repeated efforts to dismiss much of the previous design work led by Scott Forstall.

Fathoming the motives behind the ridicule required the skills of a Kremlinologist. Why was Apple's leadership wasting its time tearing down someone they'd already shoved out into the cold? Why so much animus over fake green felt? Did they really believe that the world recoiled under the tyranny of skeuomorphism? The putdowns may have been a kind of chest thumping, intended to trumpet the alpha ascendancy of Cook and Ive, who led the overhaul of the mobile software. Maybe they wanted to underscore that they had won that Forstall had lost. Even more intriguing was the possibility that the real target might not have been Forstall, but their visionary founder. [...] Was this Apple's odd way of declaring independence from his legacy?

In an epilogue written in November, Kane leaves no doubt of her belief that Apple is on a downward slide, led by "a man laboring at an impossible task" with "no spark" and "no fire" in the way he presents his company to the world.

The truth is, Apple used to be exceptional. Not necessarily in its behavior, which was often predatory. But certainly in its ability to inspire. Those days are waning. Outside the echo chamber of Apple's headquarters, the notion of the company's exceptionalism has been shattered.

Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs debuts on Tuesday, March 18 and is available from a variety of outlets including Amazon and Apple's iBooks Store.

Apple's Mac Pro only supports installations of Windows 8 or later with Boot Camp, according to an updated Apple Support document that lists versions of Windows compatible with the 2013 Mac Pro.

Boot Camp Assistant on the Mac Pro also specifies that it only includes support for Windows 8 or later, as evidenced in a screenshot from Twocanoes Software (via MacWindows) indicating that users are not able to install earlier versions of Windows. The 2013 Mac Pro is the first Mac that does not include support for Windows 7 with Boot Camp 5.

It is unclear why Apple has chosen to drop support for Windows 7 on the Mac Pro, but it could be a sign that the company intends to discontinue support for the operating system in future Macs given its advanced age.

This decision may not sit well with users, as Windows 8, released in 2012, has not been particularly popular. As of this month, Windows 8 and 8.1 only represented 10.68 percent of total worldwide OS market share, while Windows 7 represented 47.31 percent. Combined, Windows is installed on 90.84 percent of the world's computers.

Keep bracing, folks…

Witty FB commentary (Which usually consists of bad puns and dad jokes from both us and readers) here.

An anonymous reader writes "Smithsonian Magazine has an article about one of the non-obvious effects of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown: dead organisms are not decomposing correctly. 'According to a new study (abstract) published in Oecologia, decomposers—organisms such as microbes, fungi and some types of insects that drive the process of decay—have also suffered from the contamination. These creatures are responsible for an essential component of any ecosystem: recycling organic matter back into the soil. Issues with such a basic-level process, the authors of the study think, could have compounding effects for the entire ecosystem.' The scientists took bags of fallen leaves to various areas around Chernobyl and found that locations with more radiation caused the leaves to retain more than half of their original weight after almost a year. They're now beginning to worry that almost three decades of dead brush buildup is contributing to the area's fire risk, and a large fire could distribute radioactive material beyond Chernobyl's exclusion zone."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit writes "A 40 micrometer crystal trapped inside a diamond unearthed by magma in Brazil could help settle a long-standing debate about the amount of water in Earth's mantle. Spectroscopic analysis reveal that the crystal contains hydrogen-oxygen bonds, which suggests it's composed of at least 1.4% water. The place where the diamond was produced--Earth's lower mantle--may not be typical of the entire lower mantle, but if it is then there could be a lot of water down there. This would be important, as changes in the temperature in the mantle could cause it to expel highly pressurized steam, which could lead to volcanic eruptions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rambo Tribble writes "Ultraviolet light flashes, or "corona", may be scaring animals and altering behavior. An international scientific team, first studying behavioral anomalies in reindeer near power lines, have found that sporadic flashes of UV from the lines are probably responsible. As most mammals can see into the UV spectrum, this has broad implications for the disruption of animal behavior. From the BBC article: "Since, as the researchers added, coronas 'happen on all power lines everywhere,' the avoidance of the flashes could be having a global impact on wildlife.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

KentuckyFC writes "The 13th century thinker Robert Grosseteste is sometimes credited with predicting the Big Bang theory of cosmological expansion some eight centuries ahead of modern cosmologists. His theory, written in about 1225, is that the Universe began with a Big Bang-like explosion in which light expands in all directions giving matter its three-dimensional form. The expansion eventually stops when matter reaches a minimum density and this sets the boundary of the Universe. The boundary itself emits light towards the center of the universe and this interacts with matter, causing other nested spheres to form, corresponding to the fixed stars, the elements of earth, fire, water and so on. Now a team of physicists and experts on medieval philosophy have translated Grosseteste's theory into the modern language of mathematics and simulated it on computer. They say Grosseteste's theory produces universes of remarkable complexity but that only a tiny fraction of the parameter space corresponds to a universe of nested spheres like the one he predicted. What's interesting is that modern cosmologists face exactly the same problem. Their models predict many different kinds of universes and have to be fine-tuned to fit the universe we actually live in. 'The sensitivity to initial conditions resonates with contemporary cosmological discussion and reveals a subtlety of the medieval model which historians of science could never have deduced from the text alone,' conclude the team."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

E no último “herói” que ganhou o BBB?

 

O post Mentirinhas #599 apareceu primeiro em Mentirinhas.

cartechboy writes "What's $50 billion among friends, right? At least Felix Kramer and Gil Friend are thinking big, so there is that. The pair have published an somewhat audacious proposal to spend $50 billion dollars to buy up and then shut down every single private and public coal company operating in the United States. The scientific benefits: eliminating acid rain, airborne emissions, etc). The shutdown proposal includes the costs of retraining for the approximately 87,000 coal-industry workers who would lose their jobs over the proposed 10-year phaseout of coal. Since Kramer and Friend don't have $50 billion, they suggest the concept could be funded as a public service and if governments can't do it maybe some rich guys can — and the names Gates, Buffett and Bloomberg come up. Any takers?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.