Philosophy

Monday, December 30, 2013

Bizarre Gifts



Here are 11 bizarre gifts you (probably) didn't get this holiday season:
 
 
 
 
 Image: Imgur, hgmmalick
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 Image: Imgur, HHHannah
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 Image: Imgur, Divebomb_Dan
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 Kim Kardashian's Birkin Bag from Kanye West

Hand painted by artist George Condo...It's definitely one of a kind.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Sunday, December 29, 2013

Space Images


Our gallery of the most stunning space images of 2013
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View this content on The New York Times's website

Fears of Social Breakdown as Gambling Explodes in Italy

Critics blame the concentration of gambling machines for an increase in chronic gambling — and debt, bankruptcies, depression, domestic violence and broken homes — recorded by social service workers...
 
 
 
 
 
 

​Woman Accused of Stabbing Beerless Man With Ceramic Squirrel

Gawker

​Woman Accused of Stabbing Beerless Man With Ceramic Squirrel

 

South Carolina woman accused of stabbing her beerless husband with a ceramic squirrel


This remarkable brooch epitomizes the decorative luxuries of the Art Nouveau style.






RT : An 1815 principal decrying modern technology




















Saturday, December 28, 2013

The "Radium Girls"


The Radium Girls

By Charlie Hintz on December 15, 2010
Radium Girls at work in a US Radium Corporation factory
Radium Girls at work in the US Radium factory in Orange, New Jersey

The Radium Girls were a group of female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning from painting watch dials with glow-in-the-dark paint at the United States Radium factory in Orange, New Jersey around 1917. The women, who had been told the paint was harmless, ingested deadly amounts of radium by licking their paintbrushes to sharpen them; some also painted their fingernails with the glowing substance.
 Five of the women challenged their employer in a court case that established the right of individual workers who contract occupational diseases to sue their employers.
From 1917 to 1926, U.S. Radium Corporation, originally called the Radium Luminous Material Corporation, was engaged in the extraction and purification of radium from carnotite ore to produce luminous paints, which were marketed under the brand name ‘Undark‘. As a defense contractor, U.S. Radium was a major supplier of radioluminescent watches to the military. Their plant in New Jersey employed over a hundred workers, mainly women, to paint radium-lit watch faces and instruments, believing it to be safe.
The U.S. Radium Corporation hired some 70 women to perform various tasks including the handling of radium, while the owners and the scientists familiar with the effects of radium carefully avoided any exposure to it themselves; chemists at the plant used lead screens, masks and tongs. US Radium had even distributed literature to the medical community describing the “injurious effects” of radium. The owners and scientists at US Radium, familiar with the real hazards of radioactivity, naturally took extensive precautions to protect themselves.


An estimated 4,000 workers were hired by corporations in the U.S. and Canada to paint watch faces with radium. They mixed glue, water and radium powder, and then used camel hair brushes to apply the glowing paint onto dial numbers. The going rate, for painting 250 dials a day, was about a penny and a half per dial. The brushes would lose shape after a few strokes, so the U.S. Radium supervisors encouraged their workers to point the brushes with their lips, or use their tongues to keep them sharp. For fun, the Radium Girls painted their nails, teeth and faces with the deadly paint produced at the factory. Many of the workers became sick. It is unknown how many died from exposure to radiation. The factory sites became Superfund cleanup sites.

Many of the women later began to suffer from anemia, bone fractures and necrosis of the jaw, a condition now known as radium jaw. It is thought that the x-ray machines used by the medical investigators may have contributed to some of the sickened workers’ ill-health by subjecting them to additional radiation. It turned out at least one of the examinations was a ruse, part of a campaign of disinformation started by the defense contractor. U.S. Radium and other watch-dial companies rejected claims that the afflicted workers were suffering from exposure to radium. For some time, doctors, dentists, and researchers complied with requests from the companies not to release their data. At the urging of the companies, worker deaths were attributed by medical professionals to other causes; syphilis was often cited in attempts to smear the reputations of the women. One of the workers, Peg Loone, died from radiation poisoning at the age of 24.
Radium death headline about the Radium Dial Co. of Ottawa, IL
   
The story of the abuse perpetrated against the workers is distinguished from most such cases by the fact that the ensuing litigation was covered widely by the media. Plant worker Grace Fryer decided to sue, but it took two years for her to find a lawyer willing to take on U.S. Radium. A total of five factory workers, dubbed the Radium Girls, joined the suit. The litigation and media sensation surrounding the case established legal precedents and triggered the enactment of regulations governing labor safety standards, including a baseline of ‘provable suffering’.
 The Radium Girls saga holds an important place in the history of both the field of health physics and the labor rights movement. The right of individual workers to sue for damages from corporations due to labor abuse was established as a result of the Radium Girls case. In the wake of the case, industrial safety standards were demonstrably enhanced for many decades. Nonetheless, management and the US Government were again guilty of lax standards in the handling of asbestos during WWII ship building.

The case was settled in the fall of 1928, before the trial was deliberated by the jury, and the settlement for each of the Radium Girls was $10,000 (the equivalent of $127,589.47 in 2010 dollars) and a $600 per year annuity while they lived, and all medical and legal expenses incurred would also be paid by the company.

The lawsuit and resulting publicity was a factor in the establishment of occupational disease labor law. Radium dial painters were instructed in proper safety precautions and provided with protective gear; in particular, they no longer shaped paint brushes by lip, and avoided ingesting or breathing the paint. Radium paint was still used in dials as late as the 1960s, but there were no further injuries to dial painters. This served to highlight that the injuries suffered by the Radium Girls were completely preventable.

Robley D. Evans made the first measurements of exhaled radon and radium excretion from a former dial painter in 1933. At MIT he gathered dependable body content measurements from 27 dial painters. This information was used in 1941 by the National Bureau of Standards to establish the tolerance level for radium of 0.1 ?Ci (3.7 kBq).

The Center for Human Radiobiology was established at Argonne National Laboratory in 1968. The primary purpose of the Center was providing medical examinations for living dial painters. The project also focused on collection of information, and, in some cases, tissue samples from the radium dial painters. When the project ended in 1993, detailed information of 2,403 cases had been collected. No symptoms were observed in those dial painter cases with less than 1,000 times the natural 226Ra levels found in unexposed individuals, suggesting a threshold for radium-induced malignancies.

Radioactive dials found wide use in military aircraft in World War II, and radium watches were manufactured into the 1950s.


Monday, December 23, 2013

Faces

Troll-Haired Bug

This "troll-haired" bug is one of the coolest-looking insects we've ever seen.
The tiny unidentified creature, which is only 5 millimeters long, was found in the Suriname rainforest by ecologists who discovered 60 new species on a research expedition last year. A photo of the planthopper was featured on National Geographic Tuesday.
(Story continues below)
troll doll bug

The little planthopper is thought to be partway through metamorphosis in this photo.
The bug's wild "hairdo" is actually waxy secretions from its abdomen that are thought to be a defense mechanism to distract predators from its more vulnerable parts, according to conservation biologist Trond Larsen, who discovered the bug on a trip to the South American rainforest last year.
"It could be that they fool a predator into attacking the wrong part of the insect, and the wax breaks off while the insect jumps to safety," Larsen wrote in a blogpost for Conservation International, the environmental nonprofit that organized the expedition.
It may not be surprising that Larsen and his team discovered 60 new species not previously known to science. The rainforest in southern Suriname is "among the most remote and unexplored tracts of rainforest left on Earth," Conservation International notes.

Source: Huffington Post



Two dragons chasing a flaming pearl





http://thesecretofthegoldenflower.com/image/image77.jpg


Two dragons chasing a flaming pearl
 
Reality is so subtle that the ancient immortals called this reality a tiny pearl. In reality it has no such shape; they call it thus because there is a point of conscious energy hidden in the center, and because that point of awareness contains the whole cosmos, space, and the universe.
-- Liu Yiming


 




Link: http://thesecretofthegoldenflower.com/




Tuesday, December 17, 2013

The Art of David Shanahan




















David Shanahan
Having been raised in southern Ireland, the world I grew up was dominated by two powerful stories. The primary one was of course Catholic, with its stories of angels and passivity, of repressed sexuality and the possibility of resurrection. The other stories tended to be much more earthy, late night tales, full of talking birds and animals, of shape shifters, lonely ghosts, nature goddesses and dying Kings. The resulting tension between Christian and Pagan, myth and reality, past versus present, made a deep impression on me as a boy, and as a result, they continue to inform my work, providing me with a rich, iconic feast of subject matter.



 




David Shanahan





 Source:  http://artodyssey1.blogspot.ca/2013/12/david-shanahan.html





Sunday, December 15, 2013

Nestle Sells Products Up Amazon River

   Nestlé's first floating supermarket


  Inside the floating supermarket                        Dusk falling over the Nestlé Até Você a Bordo

Nestlé to sail Amazon tributaries to reach consumers

Nestlé, the world's largest food company, is sending a boat with 1,000 square feet of supermarket space to 18 small cities and 800,000 potential consumers on the Pará and Xingu rivers in Brazil, before starting the journey again. The vessel will carry 300 different goods including chocolate, yogurt, ice cream and juices.
Bloomberg News
The world's largest food company is sending a boat with 1,000 square feet of supermarket space to 18 small cities and 800,000 potential consumers on the Pará and Xingu rivers in Brazil, before starting the journey again. The vessel will carry 300 different goods including chocolate, yogurt, ice cream and juices.

"Direct distribution gives them a competitive edge over regional competitors who don't have the resources to do this kind of thing," said James Targett, an analyst at Consumer Equity Research in London.

Nestlé expects as many as 1 billion people in emerging markets to exit poverty and be able to afford its products in the coming decade. The food maker has adapted its products in such regions by offering smaller, cheaper versions of items such as Alpino ice cream and Ninho milk powder through direct distribution, making them more accessible to low-income shoppers.
Unilever has also been building a distribution network into Brazil's shantytowns.

River streets
"Rivers act as streets and avenues," said Nestlé Brazil President Ivan Zurita. People's "daily lives here are linked to fishing, to the region they live in. They don't have the time or money to get to the capital."

Nestlé has invested $560,000 in products and partnerships with local suppliers for the project, Zurita said. If successful, it may expand in Brazil or to other countries such as the Philippines, he said.

Supermarket purchases in Brazil's impoverished northern and northeast regions have outpaced growth from richer states in the south and southeast for the past two years as social programs and a higher minimum wage increased disposable income for the poor, said Sussumu Honda, head of the national supermarkets association.
Brazil's supermarket sales rose a record 15 percent in March from a year earlier, according to data from the country's statistics agency. The increased demand means supermarkets in remote areas have had difficulty keeping products on the shelves as suppliers are unable to meet orders, Honda said.

Link:

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/28056346@N06/sets/72157624176917131/detail/

 http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2012174654_nestleamazon22.html



Friday, December 13, 2013

Pictures from all over the World





A baby anteater being weighed at the Halle Mountain ZooPicture: BARCROFT MEDIA



 
 England's tallest Christmas tree fitted with new low-energy light bulbs at Wakehurst Place, near Haywards Heath, West SussexPicture: ANDREW HASSON/REX FEATURES

 

 Kashmir, a white Bengal tiger, catches a piece of meat underwater at the Six Flags Animal Park in northern CaliforniaPicture: KRISTI HARPER/HOTSPOT MEDIA


 
 A time lapse photo showing skier Rory Bushfield jumping from Mamquam Falls in Squamish as white water kayaker Ben Marr descends in his kayak, in British ColumbiaPicture: BARCROFT MEDIA


 The bears and the bees: Photographer Terry Cervi from Buffalo, New York took this photo of a Kodiak bear trying to chomp a bee in the bear den at Buffalo Zoo

The bears and the bees: Photographer Terry Cervi from Buffalo, New York took this photo of a Kodiak bear trying to chomp a bee in the bear den at Buffalo ZooPicture: Terry Cervi/Caters News

 A barn owl owl and a kestrel fight over a field vole in midair. Police Constable Chris Armstrong of Thames Valley Police, was out bird-watching at Moor Green Lakes, Finchampstead on his day off when he witnessed the dramatic moment a kestrel swooped down on an unsuspecting owl and tried to make off with his lunch.
 A barn owl and a kestrel fight over a field vole in midair. Police Constable Chris Armstrong of Thames Valley Police, was out bird-watching at Moor Green Lakes, Finchampstead on his day off when he witnessed the dramatic moment a kestrel swooped down on an unsuspecting owl and tried to make off with his lunch.Picture: Chris Armstrong/MEDAVIA.CO.UK


 A diver dressed as Santa Claus embraces a zebra shark as he swims with fish inside the Sunshine International Aquarium in Tokyo
 A diver dressed as Santa Claus hugs a zebra shark as he swims with fish inside the Sunshine International Aquarium in TokyoPicture: AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi










 Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/picturesoftheday/10512870/Pictures-of-the-day-12-December-2013.html?page=2&frame=2763828











Thursday, December 12, 2013

Strange Pictures

Embedded image permalink Abandoned doll factory in Spain

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 An abandoned Leopard I Tank, Vlieland, Netherlands


 

 Frozen, partially eaten deer



 


 

 Horses frozen to death in the heart of a blizzard

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 A woman hanged from a beheaded Lenin statue


 

 Abandoned Psychiatric Hospital, Germany



 

 abandoned library