what is that

"Seven healthy test subjects were given each of three drinks,two weeks apart: blood-orange juice containing 150 milligrams of vitamin C, fortified water containing 150 milligrams of vitamin C, anda sugar and water solution containing no vitamin C. Blood samples were collected immediately before the drink was consumed, then every hourfor 8 hours, and finally 24 hours after consumption of each drink.

"Blood samples were exposed to hydrogen peroxide, and freeradical damage to DNA was evaluated at 3 and 24 hours. Only when orangejuice was consumed was any protective effect seen. After drinking orange juice, DNA damage was 18% less after 3 hours, and 16% less after 24 hours. No protection against DNA damage was seen after consumption of the vitamin C fortified drink or the sugar drink."

http://www.peertrainer.com/DFcaloriecounterB.aspx?id=42608

I wonder if there would likewise be a difference between synthetic vitamin C supplments (which contains both the l- and r- forms I believe, even though in nature it's only l-), and supplments derived from foods (like rose hips).

Anyway, this is pretty surprising -- I'd have expected supplements to perform worse than the food, but not be completely identical to sugar-water in terms of effects.

ASCII demo -- it's all made though colored text.

A lot of people say he (Whitman) is one of the best poets, and this convinces me of that. He might not be the best in terms of technique or composition (though he's competent enough), it's more the topics and content that make him one of the best.

Found via cowboywerewolf

procedural graphics / demoscene video. none of this was modeled in 3d programs, it's all created through other weird techniques on the fly. this one won the 2007 contest for this sort of thing.

Undead, zombie bacteria found hundreds of feet under the bottom of the ocean.

Microbes that metabolize so slow that it'd take them hundreds or thousands of years to double their numbers. And perhaps much of life on earth are these deep barely-living cells that exist on time scales far slower than any other form of life; it's unknown how or even if they ever die. They can survive so long because they consume and use almost no energy at all. They could survive most any disaster, so even if something wiped out all other life on earth, they'd still be there.

I've been eating a lot of berries recently. A pound of raspberries yesterday, and two pounds of blueberries today (which was only 500 calories -- I'd have to eat 8-10 pounds of blueberries a day if that were my only source of calories!). Too bad they're so expensive (the 2 pounds of blueberries was $6), it'd be nice to eat only nuts and berries all the time.

(16:26:45) rinkuhero@gmail.com/Home: http://www.plaync.com/us/games/
(16:27:13) rinkuhero@gmail.com/Home: city of heroes, dungeon runners, guildwars, aion something, lineage 2, exteel, and tabula rasa
(16:27:26) rinkuhero@gmail.com/Home: all mmorpgs i think?

(16:28:08) Atheism God: Oh
(16:28:16) Atheism God: The creators of City of Heroes were bought out by NCSoft
(16:28:24) Atheism God: I don't remember the name of the actual company
(16:28:40) Atheism God: But they're making another superhero game called Champions Online

(16:29:18) rinkuhero@gmail.com/Home: someone should create a mmorpg based in real life
(16:29:25) rinkuhero@gmail.com/Home: rather than fantasy, sci-fi, or comics
(16:29:28) rinkuhero@gmail.com/Home: might be interesting
(16:29:46) rinkuhero@gmail.com/Home: although i suppose 'the sims' is somewhat like that
(16:29:51) rinkuhero@gmail.com/Home: although that's not mmo

(16:30:10) Atheism God: Sims
(16:30:12) Atheism God: But
(16:30:17) Atheism God: Inevitably it becomes fantastic

(16:30:27) rinkuhero@gmail.com/Home: yeah
(16:30:34) rinkuhero@gmail.com/Home: perhaps they could base it in a historical period
(16:30:40) rinkuhero@gmail.com/Home: like the 1920s or something
(16:30:51) rinkuhero@gmail.com/Home: you could be a member of the mafia
(16:30:53) rinkuhero@gmail.com/Home: a milkmaid
(16:30:56) rinkuhero@gmail.com/Home: or whatever there was back then

(16:30:57) Atheism God: Hehehe
(16:31:37) Atheism God: People like to feel empowered in an MMO
(16:31:40) Atheism God: Milkmade won't do it

(16:32:10) rinkuhero@gmail.com/Home: they could be empowered in ways
(16:32:20) rinkuhero@gmail.com/Home: they could flirt with lawyers to gain prestige and money
(16:32:25) rinkuhero@gmail.com/Home: and hold parties to gain popularity
(16:32:45) rinkuhero@gmail.com/Home: or have children and raise them to be fundamentalists
(16:32:59) rinkuhero@gmail.com/Home: or work in the woman's liberation movement
(16:33:09) rinkuhero@gmail.com/Home: try to get women the right to vote, etc.

Lying to the young is wrong.
Proving to them that lies are true is wrong.
Telling them that God’s in his heaven
and all’s well with the world is wrong.
They know what you mean. They are people.
Tell them the difficulties can’t be counted,
and let them see not only what will be
but see with clarity these present times.
Say obstacles exist they must encounter,
sorrow comes, hardship happens.
The hell with it. Who never knew
the price of happiness will not be happy.
Forgive no error you recognize,
it will repeat itself, a hundredfold
and afterward our pupils
will not forgive in us what we forgave.

-Yevtushenko

http://digg.com/playable_web_games/Evil_game_customize_your_disease_and_wipe_out_mankind

A Flash game where you control an infectious disease and have to mutate it in order to wipe out all humanity. As that comic implies, it's *very* hard to infect people in Madagascar. It's kind of a terrible idea for a game, but it's redeemed a bit in that it might get people thinking more about how dangerous epidemics can be, how fast they could spread, etc.

"The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. For example, in the family, husband and wife, mother and child do not get along; who defines whom as troublesome or mentally sick?...[the one] who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; [the one] who defines thus dominates and lives; and [the one] who is defined is subjugated and may be killed." - Thomas Szasz

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.

Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.

And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.

To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.

And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.

In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.

They are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.

Whose fate is to survive.
But what has gone is also not nothing:

by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.

Whom we knew as faulty, the earth's creatures.
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?

Brother of a brother? Friend of friends?
Lover of lover?

We who knew our fathers
in everything, in nothing.

They perish. They cannot be brought back.
The secret worlds are not regenerated.

And every time again and again
I make my lament against destruction.

- Yevtushenko

I found a Yahoo! Group about internet addiction a few weeks ago and have been following along with their discussions. Most of them have it far worse than I do; there was a guy who had to be hospitalized because of it, people who it broke up the marriages of, etc. None of them are ever cured, it seems (or if they are cured, they never announce it in that group).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuK2A1ZqoWs

Embedding is disabled, otherwise I would embed it; it's a pretty good music video (animated).

EDIT: Found an embeddable version of it: