Laugh Together

 

Tired as Usual

 

A Few GIF's

 

Unusual - Curious - Entertaining

 

Our Right To Repair

DURING AN OPEN commission meeting Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission voted unanimously to enforce laws around the Right to Repair, thereby ensuring that US consumers will be able to repair their own electronic and automotive devices.

The FTC’s endorsement of the rules is not a surprise outcome; the issue of Right to Repair has been a remarkably bipartisan one, and the FTC itself issued a lengthy report in May that blasted manufacturers for restricting repairs. But the 5 to 0 vote signals the commission’s commitment to enforce both federal antitrust laws and a key law around consumer warranties—the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act—when it comes to personal device repairs.

The vote, which was led by new FTC chair and known tech critic Lina Khan, also comes 12 days after President Joe Biden signed a broad executive order aimed at promoting competition in the US economy. The order addressed a wide range of industries, from banks to airlines to tech companies. But a portion of it encouraged the FTC, which operates as an independent agency, to create new rules that would prevent companies from restricting repair options for consumers.

“When you buy an expensive product, whether it's a half-a-million-dollar tractor or a thousand-dollar phone, you are in a very real sense under the power of the manufacturer,” says Tim Wu, special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy within the National Economic Council. “And when they have repair specifications that are unreasonable, there's not a lot you can do."

Wu added that Right to Repair has become a "visceral example" of the enormous imbalance between workers, consumers, small businesses, and larger entities.  READ MORE

Hang On Snoopy

Our Health

Top 10 Most Common Health Issues

Physical Activity and Nutrition
Overweight and Obesity
Tobacco
Substance Abuse
HIV/AIDS
Mental Health
Injury and Violence
Environmental Quality
Immunization
Access to Health Care

Physical Activity and Nutrition
Research indicates that staying physically active can help prevent or delay certain diseases, including some cancers, heart disease and diabetes, and also relieve depression and improve mood. Inactivity often accompanies advancing age, but it doesn't have to. Check with your local churches or synagogues, senior centers, and shopping malls for exercise and walking programs. Like exercise, your eating habits are often not good if you live and eat alone. It's important for successful aging to eat foods rich in nutrients and avoid the empty calories in candy and sweets.

Overweight and Obesity
Being overweight or obese increases your chances of dying from hypertension, type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, gallbladder disease, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea, respiratory problems, dyslipidemia and endometrial, breast, prostate, and colon cancers. In-depth guides and practical advice about obesity are available from the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health.

Tobacco
Tobacco is the single greatest preventable cause of illness and premature death in the U.S. Tobacco use is now called "Tobacco dependence disease." The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that smokers who try to quit are more successful when they have the support of their physician.

Substance Abuse
Substance abuse usually means drugs and alcohol. These are two areas we don't often associate with seniors, but seniors, like young people, may self-medicate using legal and illegal drugs and alcohol, which can lead to serious health consequences. In addition, seniors may deliberately or unknowingly mix medications and use alcohol. Because of our stereotypes about senior citizens, many medical people fail to ask seniors about possible substance abuse.

HIV/AIDS
Between 11 and 15% of U.S. AIDS cases occur in seniors over age 50. Between 1991 and 1996, AIDS in adults over 50 rose more than twice as fast as in younger adults. Seniors are unlikely to use condoms, have immune systems that naturally weaken with age, and HIV symptoms (fatigue, weight loss, dementia, skin rashes, swollen lymph nodes) are similar to symptoms that can accompany old age. Again, stereotypes about aging in terms of sexual activity and drug use keep this problem largely unrecognized. That's why seniors are not well represented in research, clinical drug trials, prevention programs and efforts at intervention.

Mental Health
Dementia is not part of aging. Dementia can be caused by disease, reactions to medications, vision and hearing problems, infections, nutritional imbalances, diabetes, and renal failure. There are many forms of dementia (including Alzheimer's Disease) and some can be temporary. With accurate diagnosis comes management and help. The most common late-in-life mental health condition is depression. If left untreated, depression in the elderly can lead to suicide. Here's a surprising fact: The rate of suicide is higher for elderly white men than for any other age group, including adolescents.

Injury and Violence
Among seniors, falls are the leading cause of injuries, hospital admissions for trauma, and deaths due to injury. One in every three seniors (age 65 and older) will fall each year. Strategies to reduce injury include exercises to improve balance and strength and medication review. Home modifications can help reduce injury. Home security is needed to prevent intrusion. Home-based fire prevention devices should be in place and easy to use. People aged 65 and older are twice as likely to die in a home fire as the general population.

Environmental Quality
Even though pollution affects all of us, government studies have indicated that low-income, racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in areas where they face environmental risks. Compared to the general population, a higher proportion of elderly are living just over the poverty threshold.

Immunization
Influenza and pneumonia and are among the top 10 causes of death for older adults. Emphasis on Influenza vaccination for seniors has helped. Pneumonia remains one of the most serious infections, especially among women and the very old.

Access to Health Care
Seniors frequently don't monitor their health as seriously as they should. While a shortage of geriatricians has been noted nationwide, URMC has one of the largest groups of geriatricians and geriatric specialists of any medical community in the country. Your access to health care is as close as URMC, offering a menu of services at several hospital settings, including the VA Hospital in Canandaigua, in senior housing, and in your community.

From The Graves of Children

Unearthed from the graves of children, ceramic baby bottles from thousands of years ago would look perfectly at home in nurseries today. Some have little feet, and one bottle’s spout juts from a ceramic critter’s bottom like a tail. These itty-bitty Bronze and Iron Age vessels smack of whimsy. But they, like many other everyday items used for feeding and food preparation, are providing scientists an unprecedented taste of how people ate long ago.

An examination of fatty molecules called lipids, for example, tucked into the pores of three ceramic bottles from Bavaria suggests that mothers living between 1200 BCE and 450 BCE were weaning or supplementing their kids’ diets with animal milk, Julie Dunne and her colleagues reported in 2019.

Dunne, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Bristol in England, speculates that the bottles’ creators may have been inspired to amuse their children. “They make us laugh today,” she says. More importantly, studying them “gives you such a close connection to the past.”

There aren’t many ways to study the feeding of infants in ancient times, Dunne says. Ancient bones have yielded insights about when infants were weaned, but “we know very little about how mothers brought up their babies.” The same is true of the eating lives of the ancients in general — much of the evidence has been indirect.  READ MORE

Enjoy the Vids

 

Hiding Hermit King

A British cave dwelling has been identified as the refuge for an exiled Anglo-Saxon king, according to archaeologists.

Anchor Church Caves, located by the River Trent in a secluded part of the countryside in central England, was long considered to be an 18th-century "folly" — an extravagant building made solely for ornamentation or as a joke.

But a new study has revealed that the cave house is the real deal. The 1,200-year-old structure was built during the tumultuous life of the Northumbrian king Eardwulf, who was hounded from his throne to live as a hermit, and later became a saint.  

Local legend said Eardwulf, or St. Hardulph as he was later known, lived inside the cave dwelling after he was deposed and exiled for mysterious reasons in A.D. 806. A fragment from a 16th-century book states that Eardwulf ''has a cell in a cliff a little from the Trent,'' and the banished king was buried in A.D. 830 at a location just 5 miles (8 kilometers) from the cave.  READ MORE

Cool Shape

 

Scars

 

Truth & Honesty

OOPS

More Vids

 

HDTV Antenna

By February 2009, nearly all U.S. television stations had transitioned from analog over-the-air transmissions to digital signals; today, the only way to receive these HDTV signals is by using a digital antenna. Here's how to choose and use the best antenna(s) for HDTV.

You would think you could drive down to your local WalMart, purchase any digital antenna and start watching free HDTV. Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple.

There are a number of OTA antennas available, and the one you choose depends on how far you live from the transmission towers, what direction the towers are from your location, and which channels you're hoping to receive.

The best starting point is to create an OTA antenna map for the channels you're hoping to receive with your new antenna.

To do this, head over to the FCC's website and type in your ZIP or click Go To My Location.

CLICK HERE TO FIND THE BEST HDTV ANTENNA FOR YOUR AREA BASED UPON ZIP CODE...

Rain

 

New Dune Trailer

Eight long months ago, we got out first glimpse of Denis Villeneuve's "Dune" and now we have a second, more longer look ... and it looks every bit like the epic space opera we've been hoping for.

It begins very much from the perspective of Chani, played by Zendaya.

"My planet Arrakis is so beautiful when the sun is low, rolling over the sands, you can see the spice in the air," she says in a new trailer revealed today (July 22). "The outsiders ravage our lands in front of our eyes. Their cruelty to my people is all I've known. What's to become of our world?"

We get good looks at most of the main characters, including, Timothée Chalamet (as Paul Atreides), Charlotte Rampling (Reverend Mother Gaius Mohiam), Josh Brolin (Gurney Halleck), Jason Momoa (Duncan Idaho), Rebecca Ferguson (Lady Jessica) and Oscar Isaac (Duke Leto Atreides), plus fleeting glimpses of Javier Bardem (Stilgar), Dave Bautista (Glossu 'Beast' Rabban) and Stellan Skarsgård (Baron Vladimir Harkonnen).  READ MORE

Just Cats

Without Sense of Self

In the context of meditation practice, meditators can experience a state of “pure awareness” or “pure consciousness”, in which they perceive consciousness itself. This state can be experienced in various ways, but evidently incorporates specific sensations as well as non-specific accompanying perceptions, feelings, and thoughts.

These are just some of the findings of the most extensive survey of meditators ever conducted on the experience of pure consciousness.

The findings of the survey recently have been published in PLOS ONE. The study was conducted by Professor Thomas Metzinger from the Department of Philosophy at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and Dr. Alex Gamma from the Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Zurich.

They designed an online questionnaire comprising more than a hundred questions and asked thousands of meditators worldwide to answer it.

“The goal of our research was not to learn more about meditation. We are interested in human consciousness,” said Metzinger. “Our working hypothesis was that pure consciousness is the simplest form of conscious experience. And our goal was to develop a minimal model explanation of human consciousness experience on the basis of this hypothesis.”  READ MORE