halfacanuck

From Doctor Feelgood, the Observer magazine, regarding George "Dr Nick" Nichopoulos, personal physician to Elvis Presley:

This petulant hunger for drugs was such that, when Dr Nick thought Elvis was claiming symptoms he didn't have, he began to administer placebos.

'On the road,' he says, 'he was so afraid that he wouldn't get enough sleep to do a good show the next night that he would end up asking you for an extra pill or two. So those extra pill or twos would be placebos.'

Dr Nick and the guys would while away their spare hours on tour by making counterfeit pills for the King. 'We'd sit around,' he says, 'and, instead of playing cards, we'd make placebos. Ha!' Using syringes, they'd suck the liquid out of capsules and refill them with saline solution. When Elvis asked for a shot that he didn't need, Dr Nick would wait until his back was turned, squirt the liquid on the floor, and then 'inject' his patient with the emptied syringe. Tablets were trickier. Eventually, Dr Nick managed to persuade Knoll, the manufacturers of Dilaudid, Elvis's favourite painkiller, to press a special batch of a thousand pills without any active ingredients. It took a year of letter-writing and legal wrangling. But they looked just like the real thing. They cost him $5.98 apiece.

Very interesting research out of Princeton University: a computer's RAM can be dumped up to an hour after it is shut down, allowing keys for encrypted drives, passwords, etc. to be correctly recovered. They even have a fully automated proof-of-concept against one particular encrypted drive product, as can be seen in this pretty cool video:

(And in case you were wondering, here's how two of the co-authors celebrated submitting their paper.)

In 2002 President George W. Bush did solemnly sign into law the Notification and Federal Employee Anti-discrimination and Retaliation (No FEAR) Act (which, given the grammatical and semantical crime scene that is its title, makes me wonder whether he also had a hand in naming it), requiring every federal agency to publish, quarterly, a lengthy report of statistics relating to complaints filed against it under some Equal Employment Opportunity program or other. Complaints are grouped into thought-provokingly specific categories ("appointment/hire", "termination", "reinstatement", "medical examination", etc.).

Check out this example from the Department of Agriculture. Is this governmental accountability in action or is this a rampantly scandalous waste of taxpayers' money? I don't know whether to laugh, cry, or sexually harass a Negress. Which should it be? You decide!

It is not my intention to go on at tiresome length, but your last post has opened so many doors to the winds of unreason that I can't resist running from room to room trying to settle things down. – Sam Harris

A wonderful "blogalogue" between pugnacious atheist Sam Harris and gay Catholic libertarian Andrew Sullivan on the validity of faith-based religion.

The Smoking Gun has obtained a copy of a one-act play written by VTech shooter Cho Seung-Hui in which a teen boy simmers with resentment at his step-father whom he believes murdered his father in order to nail his mom. Thank god Shakespeare didn't have access to semi-automatic handguns.

In case you've not seen it already, here's the BBC/Discovery Channel documentary Blue Planet: The Deep. The ubiquity and tenacity of life never fails to leave me breathless, and some of these creatures are so exquisitely repellent it's almost a shame that we never get the chance to fear them. Watch it before YouTube gets sued out of existence.

Part one
Part two
Part three
Part four
Part five

So you think erotic asphyxiation is kinky? Check out what this guy was into.

Thomas Cranmer ... had believed, with a fervor that many people today will find hard to understand, that it is the duty of every Christian to obey the monarch, and that "the powers that be are ordained of God" (Romans 13).

As long as the monarch was ordering things that Cranmer thought good, it was easy for Cranmer to believe that the king was sent by God's providence to guide the people in the path of true religion, and that disobedience to the king was disobedience to God. Now Mary was Queen, and commanding him to return to the Roman obedience.

Cranmer five times wrote a letter of submission to the Pope and to Roman Catholic doctrines, and four times he tore it up. In the end, he submitted. However, Mary was unwilling to believe that the submission was sincere, and he was ordered to be burned at Oxford on 21 March 1556.

At the very end, he repudiated his final letter of submission, and announced that he died a Protestant. He said, "I have sinned, in that I signed with my hand what I did not believe with my heart. When the flames are lit, this hand shall be the first to burn." And when the fire was lit around his feet, he leaned forward and held his right hand in the fire until it was charred to a stump. Aside from this, he did not speak or move, except that once he raised his left hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead.

From Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley, & Thomas Cranmer.

UK retail chain Marks & Spencer is more than just dramatically reviving its flagging financial fortunes: CEO Stuart Rose says the entire company is going to be carbon-neutral within five years. That's equivalent, they say, of taking 100,000 cars off the roads each year.

Continue reading "Businesses are starting to get it"