Monthly Archives: November 2013

November 21, 2013 · 6:22 am

Nurse reveals the top 5 regrets people make on their deathbed

By Sina Anvari | November 11, 2013

For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives. People grow a lot when they are faced with their own mortality.

I learnt never to underestimate someone’s capacity for growth. Some changes were phenomenal. Each experienced a variety of emotions, as expected, denial, fear, anger, remorse, more denial and eventually acceptance. Every single patient found their peace before they departed though, every one of them.

When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
This was the most common regret of all. When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.

It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.

2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.
This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.

By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Manydeveloped illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.

We cannot control the reactions of others. However, although people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly, in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way,you win.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.

It is common for anyone in a busy lifestyle to let friendships slip. But when you are faced with your approaching death, the physical details of life fall away. People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible. But it is not money or status that holds the true importance for them. They want to get things in order more for the benefit of those they love. Usually though, they are too ill and weary to ever manage this task. It is all comes down to love and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks, love and relationships.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again. When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying.

Life is a choice. It is YOUR life. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness

– See more at: http://www.karenstan.net/2013/11/11/nurse-reveals-top-5-regrets-people-make-deathbeds/#sthash.KgPlwfG7.dpuf

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November 20, 2013 · 3:15 pm

Are Kia Soul Ads Racist?

Is it only me that finds the Kia Soul commercials racist? First, they name it the Soul, then they had rats driving around an urban hood, dressed with hoodies and backward caps, listening to rap music. The recent commercials show them working out, then putting on the ritz. I don’t know…If I named a car Soul, and made it all about being cool in the hood, I would NOT use rodents to depict the people. And people had a problem with a Chihauhua as spokesman for Taco Bell? Just saying.

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November 20, 2013 · 2:43 pm

We Used to Be Tougher

We used to be tougher people. I like looking at old movies, books and pictures to get a feel for how things were. It is hard to get rid of our own lifestyles in our head and put ourselves in earlier times. In 1893 the Industrial Revolution was well under way, America was connected by railroads across the continent, the Civil War had ended 28 years earlier, so it was the last generation’s war. Oil, steel, and the Industrial barons were on the scene and big cities sprung up with hazardous conditions.

Still, you wore proper outfits. Princeton, an Ivy league school of prestige, even then, was where gentlemen went to become the leaders and even Presidents of tomorrow. But we were not a people who settled our quarrels through attorneys or played video games. A man was expected to fight and take his licks. The following is a picture of college students following a Freshman vs. Sophomore snowball fight. It is remarkable to me because if you saw this picture today on TV with the caption – Princeton students after snowball fight – imagine the lawsuits, the TV coverage, the outrage, etc. Back then, it was a picture they probably kept and showed their families with a chuckle.

Princeton students after a Freshman / Sophomore snowball fight. Princeton, NJ, 1893.

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November 20, 2013 · 6:10 am

Deformed, pointy skull from Dark Ages unearthed in France

By Tia Ghose

Published November 18, 2013

LiveScience

A woman’s deformed skull was found in one of the tombs, which dates to around 1,650 years ago. (© DENIS GLIKSMAN, INRAP)

The skeleton of an ancient aristocratic woman whose head was warped into a deformed, pointy shape has been unearthed in a necropolis in France.

The necropolis, found in the Alsace region of France, contains 38 tombs that span more than 4,000 years, from the Stone Age to the Dark Ages.

Rich valley
The Obernai region where the remains were found contains a river and rich, fertile soil, which has attracted people for thousands of years, Philippe Lefranc, an archaeologist who excavated the Stone Age burials, wrote in an email.

‘These deformed skulls appear in tombs rich in objects.’

– Archaeologist Philippe Lefranc

Archaeologists first found the tombs in 2011 while doing a preliminary excavation of the area prior to the start of a big industrial building project. This year, Lefranc and his colleagues went back to do a more in-depth excavation.

They found that the tombs were well preserved by the limestone rock in which they were buried. One of the burials contained 20 tombs of men, women and children. [See Images of the Tombs & Deformed Skull]

“The corpses are lying on their backs, with outstretched legs and heads turned westwards,” Lefranc said.

The tombs, which date to between 4900 B.C. and 4750 B.C., also contained a few stone vases and tools, along with ornaments such as mother-of-pearl elbow bracelets and collars. The small group may have been a family from a Neolithic farming and animal-herding culture that lived in long houses and buried their dead in cemeteries, Lefranc said.

Eastern transplants
In the second burial, which was in a separate area, they found 18 tombs from either the late Roman period or the early Dark Ages, about 1,650 years ago. One of the tombs held a woman, likely an aristocrat, who had a deformed, flattened forehead.

“The deformation of the skull with the help of bandages (narrow strips of cloth) and small boards is a practice coming from central Asia,” Lefranc said in an email. “It was popularized by the Huns and adopted by many German people.”

In those times, the deformed, alienlike skull was a privilege reserved for the aristocracy after death.

“In France, Germany and eastern Europe, these deformed skulls appear in tombs rich in objects,” Lefranc said.

The wealthy lady’s tomb also contained gold pins, belts known as chatelaines, pearls, a comb made of a stag antler, and a bronze mirror that likely came from the Caucasus region of central Asia, he said.

The team speculates that the 1,650-year-old graves held mercenary soldiers from the East and their families, who were employed by the Roman Army during the waning days of the Roman empire.

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November 19, 2013 · 1:19 pm

For College Students – Welcome to Cynicism 101

I know a lot of you young college students were all excited when President Obama was elected and re-elected on a message of hope and change. I also know many of you were excited about “free health care coverage for all Americans” after all we live in such a rich country, why not? You were probably also excited when President Obama decided to take over student loans and not allow banks to rip you off any more on the rate increases.

[I plan to post a few cynicism lessons from time to time and promise to skewer all political parties, etc. I am not an anarchist but I believe in personal freedom and a small government. Unfortunately, those concepts are under attack by all parties.]

Cynicism is an attitude or state of mind characterized by a general distrust of others’ apparent motives believing that they are selfish in nature and/or displaying that themselves.

I am sorry to start your long descent into the never ending layers of cynicism, but here is what really happened:

1) Banks were making about $57 Billion per year off student loan interest.

2) Student loans were federalized (taken away from private banks) as a clause in the Affordable Healthcare Act (AHA), not to help you, but to get that $57 Billion to help pay for “free health care” coverage.

3) The Obama Administration put in automatic escalator calculations in your student loan rates that would have raised them to 7.5% from their former 1-2% range, raising the federal income off student loans from $57 Billion per year to about $350 Billion.

4) When students became outraged, Congress cut this percentage to 3.86 to 6.41% depending on the category of loan, basically still tripling the private bank rate, but telling you they ‘saved you money’ by a temporary one year cap. (http://studentaid.ed.gov/types/loans/interest-rates)

5) The evil banks meanwhile get loaned money from the federal reserve at the fed funds rate of 8/100 ths of a percent. That’s right. You pay at least 3.86% to get your education, while the evil banks get money from the Obama administration at 0.08%. (http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h15/current/)

6) The evil banks were bailed out and posted record profits this year.

7) Your current $54 per semester policies to cover your health while you go to college are now illegal under ACA. Your new plans will cost you $1,800 per year, a 1500% increase, even though you are not going to be sicker than you were before. This is so you can pay for the healthcare of older people through your premium, along with your higher cost student loans. (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/11/18/students-suffer-sticker-shock-from-obamacare/)

8) So you are going to tell them to take a hike? Sorry, the IRS will cut off your student loans, bill you a fine and withhold your refunds if you do not participate.

9) So far, less than 200,000 people have made it into AHA while over 15 million have had policies canceled. Some estimates show up to 100 million policy cancellations this year, due to regulations put in place by Secretary Sebelius under AHA.

10) Evil insurance companies no longer have to take risk, sell you plans, or price things individually. They just put three offerings on the exchanges and let the enrollees and profits roll in.

11) The Obama Administration spent over $600 million on Healthcare.gov and it still does not function.

12) The Obama Administration spent $4.4 Billion giving money to states for exchanges that do not work either.

Welcome to government run programs. This is how bad and costly it is just to get started. Just wait until they run short of money for the actual treatment of patients and see what happens then with waiting times and restriction of access to care and drugs.

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November 19, 2013 · 10:56 am

Zebra Carriages – 1890s all the Rage

Zebra Carriages – 1890s all the Rage

c.1890s-> : Zebra Carriages

Sources: Shopkins Fossick / Natural History Museum / Popular Science

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November 19, 2013 · 10:11 am

Ancient city discovered beneath Biblical-era ruins in Israel

By Tia Ghose

Digging History

Published November 19, 2013

LiveScience

Burned ruins and fired mudbrick collapse, as well as smashed pottery, reveal the late Bronze Age destruction at the city. On the left is the room where several pottery vessels, a scarab of Amenhotep III, a cache of cylinder seals, as well as s (SAMUEL WOLFF, TEL GEZER EXCAVATIONS)

Archaeologists have unearthed traces of a previously unknown, 14th-century Canaanite city buried underneath the ruins of another city in Israel.

The traces include an Egyptian amulet of Amenhotep III and several pottery vessels from the Late Bronze Age unearthed at the site of Gezer, an ancient Canaanite city.

Gezer was once a major center that sat at the crossroads of trade routes between Asia and Africa, said Steven Ortiz, a co-director of the site’s excavations and a biblical scholar at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

The remains of the ancient city suggest the site was used for even longer than previously known. [The Holy Land: 7 Amazing Archaeological Finds]

Biblical city
The ancient city of Gezer has been an important site since the Bronze Age, because it sat along the Way of the Sea, or the Via Maris, an ancient trade route that connected Egypt, Syria, Anatolia and Mesopotamia.

The city was ruled over many centuries by Canaanites, Egyptians and Assyrians, and Biblical accounts from roughly the 10th century describe an Egyptian pharaoh giving the city to King Solomon as a wedding gift after marrying his daughter.

“It’s always changed hands throughout history,” Ortiz told LiveScience.

The site has been excavated for a century, and most of the excavations so far date to the the 10th through eighth centuries B.C. Gezer also holds some of the largest underground water tunnels of antiquity, which were likely used to keep the water supply safe during sieges.

But earlier this summer, Ortiz and his colleague Samuel Wolff of the Israel Antiquities Authority noticed traces of an even more ancient city from centuries before King Solomon’s time. Among the layers was a section that dated to about the 14th century B.C., containing a scarab, or beetle, amulet from King Amenhotep III, the grandfather of King Tut. They also found shards of Philistine pottery.

During that period, the ancient site was probably a Canaanite city that was under Egyptian influence.

The findings are consistent with what scholars suspected of the site, said Andrew Vaughn, a biblical scholar and executive director of the American Schools of Oriental Research, who was not involved in the study.

“It’s not surprising that a city that was of importance in the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah would have an older history and would have played an important political and military role prior to that time,” Vaughn told LiveScience. “If you didn’t control Gezer, you didn’t control the east-west trade route.”

But once the location of that major road moved during the Roman period, the city waned in importance. It was later conquered and destroyed, but never fully rebuilt.

“Just like today when you have a ghost town where you move the train and that city goes out of use,” Ortiz said.

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November 18, 2013 · 6:17 pm

Top 25 Most Amazing Abandoned Corners of Earth

OCTOBER 10, 2013 BY KITY LEAVE A COMMENT

It doesn’t matter how beautiful are the new tourist destinations, those that are curious will always go to visit some historical places, and when those are abandoned and not touched by the human hand for a long time, they become a mysterious riddles.

Abandoned Isle, Netherlands

Abandoned City Near Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Ukraine

Boat from 2nd World War, Homebush, Australia

Railway Station in Poland

Mysterious Road Kerry Way, Ireland

Abandoned Castle from 15 Century, Black Forest, Germany

Asunción, Paraguay

“El Hotel del Salto”, Columbia

Underwater Bronze Statue of Jesus Christ, Mediterranean Sea, Italy

Hall, West Welsh

Abandoned Building for Distillation, Barbados

Abandoned Domes in South-West Florida

Body of Crashed Plane, Antarctica

A Structure in Cambodia

Fishermen House at Lake, Germany

Bodiam Castle, East Sussex, England

Abandoned House in Namib Desert

Sea Supervisory Houses in England

Mill in FranceBulgarian Communist Party HouseAbandoned Mill from 1866, Sorento, Italy

Part of Olympic Object for Olympic Games 1984 in Saraevo

Old Factory for Russian Rockets in Russia

Abandoned Tunnel of Love in Ukraine

Abandoned Theater in Chicago

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November 18, 2013 · 4:13 pm

‘Biohacker’ implants chip in arm

If you are under 20 I am pretty sure you will see full on Trans-humans in your old age, in fact, you might become one. The world has come along ways with prosthetic devices, biofeedback, joint replacements, transplants, blue tooths, hearing aids, and brain controlled robotics. The synthesis of what we know as machine and human will not be the androids we have viewed in science fiction movies. Instead, it will be humans ‘upgrading’ themselves both before and after birth. Genetic tampering will produce a new type of human while flaws can be corrected in vitro or post partem.

Currently, roughly 50% of Americans will die of heart failure. Why keep your current heart if you could get a cybernetic alternative that you never have to worry will skip a beat? Why not have two hearts if we can make them small so you have a back-up? Early pioneers in this ‘trans-human’ change have already started. The following story may be disturbing, but I find it more predictive than anything else. – Michael Bradley

‘Biohacker’ implants chip in arm

By Marc Lallanilla

Published November 04, 2013

LiveScience

Biohacker Tim Cannon had a battery-powered electronic device installed in his arm. (MOTHERBOARDTV/YOUTUBE)

Kids, don’t try this at home: A self-described “biohacker” had a big electronic chip almost as large as a deck of cards inserted beneath the skin of his arm. Without a doctor’s help. And without anesthetics.

Tim Cannon is a software developer from Pittsburgh and one of the developers at Grindhouse Wetware, a firm dedicated to “augmenting humanity using safe, affordable, open source technology,” according to the group’s website. As they explain it, “Computers are hardware. Apps are software. Humans are wetware.”

The device Cannon had inserted into his arm is a Circadia 1.0, a battery-powered implant that can record data from Cannon’s body and transmit it to his Android mobile device. Because no board-certified surgeon would perform the operation, Cannon turned to a DIY team that included a piercing and tattoo specialist who used ice to quell the pain of the procedure. [Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]

Now that the device is inserted and functioning, Cannon is one step closer to achieving a childhood dream. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been telling people that I want to be a robot,” Cannon told The Verge. “These days, that doesn’t seem so impossible anymore.”

The Circadia chip isn’t particularly advanced: All it does is record Cannon’s body temperature and transmit it to his cellphone over a Bluetooth connection. While this isn’t a huge improvement over an ordinary thermometer how analog! it does represent one small step forward in what will undoubtedly be a continuing march toward greater integration of electronics and biology.

Cannon is hardly the first individual to have technology implanted into his or her body just ask former vice president Dick Cheney (who had a battery-powered artificial heart implanted), or any dog with a microchip.

Some are referring to biohacking as the next wave in evolution. “I think that’s the trend, and where we’re heading,” according to futurist and sci-fi author James Rollins.

“There’s a whole ‘transhuman’ movement, which is the merging of biology and machine,” Rollins told LiveScience in an earlier interview. “Google Glass is one small step, and now there’s a Japanese scientist who’s developed the contact lens equivalent of Google Glass. And those are two things you put right on, if not in, your body. So I think we’re already moving that way, and quite rapidly.”

Cannon sees future refinements as being able to do more than just passively transmit information. “I think that our environment should listen more accurately and more intuitively to what’s happening in our body,” Cannon told Motherboard. “So if, for example, I’ve had a stressful day, the Circadia will communicate that to my house and will prepare a nice relaxing atmosphere for when I get home: dim the lights, [draw] a hot bath.”