tingilinde

$2.50 per refill

A $50 'EpiPen' ... a simple, refillable auto-injector. No rocket science needed. (via the New York Times)

There should be ways to deal with greedy monopolies.

 

 

 

heating failure in finland - the downside of the internet of things

Having important devices on the Internet is becoming increasing hazardous - heating in some Finnish buildings failed. With a good chance the US is moving towards being a provocative state and the ease of such attacks it makes sense to consider what items you have that have a connection.

 

 

tourist photos

Rich McCor's addition of a well placed prop or two to popular landmarks snapshots...

his Instagram page has much more

a tip of the hat to Bjarne

 

too simple english - now with trump mode

Inspired by Randall Monroe's Thing Explainer, Morten Just threw together a simple text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common English words (there will be quibbles just what that means, but...).

He's enhanced it with Trump mode..

 

 

making use of binder clips

you may want to turn off the sound



a tip of the hat to Jheri

There are stainless steel binder clips if  you worry about rust 

 

alan abel

The story behind this and other inspired hacks

a tip of the hat to Sukie

on beating writer's block

An interesting idea...  it might work for some people.  (via The New Yorker)

 

rings and the emergency room

Titanium is sometimes too strong to remove from a swelling finger.  The BMJ offers a simple method.

a tip of the hat to Sean

 

can you train your brain to counter hearing loss?

Just how plastic is your brain?  

perhaps...

snip

...

The idea that the brain is behind this kind of hearing loss opens up a whole new way of treating it. Instead of cranking up the volume with a hearing aid, why not train the brain to process the ear’s signals better? A number of computer programs now promise to enhance the brain’s auditory machinery from the comfort of your home. Curious and a little sceptical, I had to try it.

To understand how such an idea might work, let’s start with what happens to our hearing as we age. We are born with about 11,000 hair cells in each ear. These delicate cells convert sound waves to electrical signals, but they are easily damaged by ageing and excessive noise. Hearing aids and cochlear implants are designed to treat this kind of impairment, and they can be very successful.

But in recent years, Liberman and his colleagues have turned their attention to the next step in sound processing – the auditory nerve fibres that pass the hair cells’ signals to the brain. Their work has revealed that loud noises can cause a shocking amount of damage to these nerves (see “Silent epidemic“). More specifically, it’s the connections, or synapses, between the hair cells and the auditory nerves that are destroyed, a problem known as synaptopathy. The hair cells themselves remain.

Synaptopathy doesn’t show up in audiograms because these only test the effect of hair-cell loss. “The whole domain of hearing assessment has systematically ignored the fact that the brain is a participant,” says Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist and creator of a brain-training program called BrainHQ. Perversely, the nerve fibres that are most damaged by noise are those we rely on to understand speech in a noisy environment – up to 90 per cent of these synapses can be damaged, yet you can still perform normally in a hearing test.

...

 

flying lawn chairs

There have been more than a dozen flying lawnchairs since Larry Walters soared into the Southern California sky and the imagination in 1982 ...   The 1998 New Yorker piece is a classic.

Here's a new one.