How long does it take to digest food

How long does it take to digest food

‘You’re not special’ graduation speech sparks buzz

By Pueng Vongs | The Lookout – Fri, 8 Jun, 2012

Social media was buzzing about a Boston-area high school teacher's blunt commencement speech that told students they "are not special."

Wellesley High English teacher David McCullough Jr. told graduates "You are not special. You are not exceptional," quoting empirical evidence:

"Across the country no fewer than 3.2 million seniors are graduating about now from more than 37,000 high schools. That's 37,000 valedictorians ... 37,000 class presidents ... 92,000 harmonizing altos ... 340,000 swaggering jocks ... 2,185,967 pairs of Uggs," he said in the speech published in the Boston Herald.

He added: "Even if you're one in a million, on a planet of 6.8 billion that means there are nearly 7,000 people just like you."

McCullough makes a statement on parents who overdo it in a modern society focused on collecting achievements. "You've been pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, bubble wrapped ... feted and fawned over and called sweetie pie." But he adds in a video on Wellesley Channel TV YouTube page, "You see, if everyone is special, then no one is. If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless. ... We have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement."

McCullough's address does push students to recognize real achievement: "The fulfilling life, the distinctive life, the relevant life is an achievement," and he encourages graduates "to do whatever you do for no reason other than you love it and believe in its importance."

Many expressed their approval of the message on Twitter:

This is awesome. I don't remember my HS commencement speech. I think I would remember this one. — S.L. Gray

Fantastic speech which sums up the neglected duty of so many Americans in 1 phrase: "Be worthy of your advantages." — Benjamin Yee

the greatest commencement speech ever. — Neil Raden

My new hero. Tells grads "You're not that Special ... when everyone gets a trophy, the trophy doesn't mean anything." — Jason Dobrolecki

The Boston Herald also reported that McCullough's words were very well received by attendees. The teacher, a father of four, admitted he's guilty of the actions he pokes fun at in his speech.

[Related video: Tornado crashes graduation?]

But near the end of the address he says, "The sweetest joys of life, then, come only with the recognition that you're not special. Because everyone is."

http://en.canoe.autonet.ca/auto-news/automotive-industry-news/2012/06/18/worlds-most-expensive-cars/

World’s most expensive cars

June 18th, 2012 - AutoNews

Prices are based on approximations. Sources include Forbes.com and Thesupercars.org.

Next

1- Bugatti Veyron Super Sports $2,400,000

Next

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Richmond diver's GPS marine-radio invention saving lives at sea

Richmond diver's GPS marine-radio

invention saving lives at sea

 

 

BY ALAN CAMPBELL, RICHMOND NEWS JUNE 22, 2012

• STORY
• PHOTOS ( 3 )

 

 

A diver demonstrates use of the Nautilus Lifeline in a promotional video.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: ONLINE , NAUTILUSLIFELINE.COM

He’s spent years of his life devoted to finding a way to save others and watched thousands of dollars disappear down the drain in the process.

Even after finally inventing the tool that’s now used to rescue countless souls lost at sea, he refuses to charge the Earth, despite having cornered the global market.

No, Richmond’s Mike Lever — or Capt. Lever to those who know him best — dismisses any suggestion of nobility for creating the Nautilus Lifeline, the world’s first two-way marine radio with a GPS tracker.

It’s a remarkably simple device that’s already saving hundreds of divers who have strayed off course or have been left behind on trips.

“I would say I’m more stubborn, determined and stupid … not noble,” said Lever, whose office is on Horseshoe Way in south Richmond.

“When you’re the owner of the only product of its kind out there, you could charge just about anything you wanted. But people need this unit and I want to get it into the hands of as many divers and people at sea as possible,” said Lever, who is a boat pilot by trade and an experienced diver himself.

The Lifeline is simplicity itself: if you’re in any kind of trouble, you press the green button to call your own diveboat; the orange button to call any boat around you with the channel 16 hail and distress frequency; and the red button will send an automatic alert and your GPS co-ordinates to any modern radio within 18 kilometres.

It can operate at up to a depth of 130 metres and works anywhere in the world.

It went on the market last October at a cost of just $299 — a small price to pay when you’re stranded at sea and no one knows where you are.

It’s been so successful, in fact — selling more than 7,500 units already — that it has attracted the attention of a nomination for the prestigious Canada-wide Manning Innovation Awards.

Lever said he was humbled to be in the company of the other nominees at a recent reception held in Vancouver to launch the event.

“It was very intimidating,” said a modest Lever.

“There’s a guy there who has devised a way to take the waste heat out of sewage in an office building and use that energy to power the building.

“And there’s an invention on the market for a blood store, which sits in operating rooms and kind of looks like a vending machine. It recognizes and cross references the bracelets when they’re inserted to dispense the right kind of blood.”

The awards themselves are held in October and only involve nominees whose creations are actually on the market and are turning a significant profit.

The nomination caps a torrid few years for Lever, who admitted he’s made several “errors of judgment” along the way.

“I started working on this three years ago and it’s been a long, difficult struggle to get this far,” he said.

“This is not my area of expertise to design this and there were some tough battles, not least with a company I was working with in Ohio. That didn’t end well and it cost me a lot. There were a lot of expensive mistakes made.

“The learning curve wasn’t really steep, it was more vertical. But I finally found my own team, and here we are.”

The Lifeline has sold almost three times what Lever and his team had forecast for the first nine months on the market. “Nothing like this has ever been done before,” he added.

“Dozens of people at trade fairs have come up to me and said they were planning on doing something like this, though.”

Lever said he was driven to succeed in his creation, knowing that about 50 people die every year while diving and another 10,000 or so get left behind at sea and are usually found after frantic searches.

“I spent 17 years trying to figure out a way to deal with these situations,” he said.

“The real simplicity of this is that every boat out there uses the same frequency in cases such as this — channel 16.

“Flares and rockets and such have been used for decades, yet we have channel 16 right there. All the diver needs to do is use channel 16.

“Two to three people per week now call us to say thanks for saving their lives.”

© Copyright (c) Richmond News

Read more:http://www.richmond-news.com/diver+tests+Lifeline/6820434/story.html#ixzz1yaB6sgzq

Soldier's mystery illness solved in 15 minutes

Soldier's mystery illness solved in 15 minutes By Doug Hempstead, QMI Agency Eric Bertrand goes for a run in Ottawa Tuesday, June 19, 2012. (Tony Caldwell/QMI Agency) OTTAWA - Eric Bertrand never thought the solution to his debilitating ailment would be found above a Kanata strip mall. He travelled from Halifax to find it, assuming doctors here were superior to the ones back home. This was also one of few places the Naval lieutenant could work from home. For seven years, he saw dozens of doctors and had upwards of 30 hospital visits or appointments -- including surgery to both calves, cutting open the tissue to relieve the growing pressure. But the surgery was the result of a misdiagnosis of compartment syndromes, which happens when a muscle becomes too big for the sheath that surrounds it. The surgery helped but the pain eventually came back. Something was making the calf muscles overdevelop -- even though he was hardly active at all any more, forcing the former Acadia football star into a desk job. Bertrand's pain became unbearable three years ago -- he would walk a few feet and get sick to his stomach, break out in hot and cold sweats and have enough pain to warrant a morphine prescription. He couldn't climb stairs and the only way he could buy himself any relief was to spend hours lying down. His wife Ashley was left to do everything. Once in Ottawa, Bertrand's parents began pestering him to see an alternative medicine practitioner. He wasn't for it. "I thought it was all just a money-making scheme," he says. Naturopaths and the like were filed away in his mind under witch doctors and quacks. Three months ago, he made his way up the stairs to Tony Brunelle's office with two canes and left with a prescription for something called pink root -- an herbal remedy used to treat intestinal worms. Brunelle did something called muscle reflex testing. Bertrand was told to keep an outstretched arm held strong while answering questions about various organs in his body. He was to reply that the organ in question was healthy and if Brunelle couldn't easily budge the arm, that would prove it. When the doctor asked about Bertrand's liver, the arm slid down with ease. He repeated the process, listing different liver ailments until the arm once again slid down. Diagnosis: liver parasite. Seven years of painful mystery, solved in 15 minutes. Five days later it was as though he was never ill. "I know it sounds crazy," says Brunelle. "But it can be just that fast." He said, like Bertrand, many of his patients come to him as a last resort. Bertrand still has the disabled parking sign from his car windshield but he's preparing to tear it up. He runs 5 kms and 10kms easily. The best part, though -- his wife stayed, and now they're expecting.

Magic Potion Magically Transforms Vodka Into Any Liquor You Like

Magic Potion Magically Transforms Vodka Into Any Liquor You Like

HAPPY HOUR

You have tons of vodka lying around. Maybe your friends left it. Maybe it was on sale. Maybe you bought it because it's cheap and you heard you could make it into whatever booze you want. What?

Sounds like bullshit, right? We thought so, too. But that's what Still Spirits claims its magical little flavor pouches can do. Just add vodka! The results were shocking.

It's Friday afternoon, you've made it through the long week, and it's time for Happy Hour, Gizmodo's weekly booze column. A cocktail shaker full of innovation, science, and alcohol. Alcohol + chemistry = alchemy!

Still Spirits Top Shelf are little sachets or bottles of flavorings. They're intended to enhance neutral spirits, because neutral spirits, well, they don't taste like anything. If you want real bourbon, you have to age those spirits in charred barrels for years. Who has that kind of time? So Still Spirits made it easy. You just take your neutral spirit and you add one of their flavor pouches, and voila, instant bourbon. Or gin. Or dark rum. Or tequila. Or absinthe. There are literally dozens of flavors.

FLAVOR SCIENCE

How these flavors are made, though, is no easy process. Still Spirits start with a popular brand of booze—for the Tennessee Bourbon, the model is Jack Daniels, for Blue Jewel Gin, it's Bombay Sapphire. The reference spirits are run it through a gas chromatograph, a machine that can analyze a substance down to its chemical component parts. The results show various compounds as spikes on a graph. In a whiskey, there may be as many as 1,300 spikes—the wood of a charred oak barrel may add as many as 20 compounds on its own. But not all the spikes are significant. So Still Spirits determines which compounds are critical to the flavors, tweaks the recipe, and works with a flavor manufacturer to dial it in. "We're rebuilding molecules from scratch," says Adam Southard, who works for Still Spirits U.S. distributor, Brewcraft.

They're really intended for home distillers, but home distilling is illegal in the U.S. (wink wink). That's okay, it works with vodka, too. We tested the results with Tito's Vodka—a very good Texas type—which we thought would give the grab bag of flavors a fighting chance. We were expecting a train wreck. Here's how it played out.

TENNESSE BOURBON

Gizmodo HQ is full of bourbon drinkers, so this was going to be a tough test. The first problem was that there wasn't enough room at the top of the bottle for the full flavor packet. Had to shake it up, pour some out, then then add some more. The color was just way too light, as you can see in the video, and the flavor was too light, too. It tasted bourbon-ish while you were drinking, but then it finished like a vodka. Very dry and very little aftertaste. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't bourbon.

What you don't see in the video, though, is that we later added another half a pouch. It made the color right and really brought out the flavors. There was more smokiness, but holy crap there's a lot of vanilla in it. A blind test was in order, so I took a glass over to some of our friends at Gawker, and asked them if they could guess what brand of bourbon it was. They couldn't. But three out of four of the tasters dug it—including one who doesn't normally even like bourbon. It still has that vodka finish, but with a second packet stirred in, it's really not bad at all.

BLUE JEWEL GIN

If any of them were going to be decent, we figured it'd be this one. See, gin doesn't go through any extended aging process. It's just a neutral spirit with botanicals added at the end of the distilling process. Indeed, this was a pretty close approximation. It certainly smells like gin, with heavy juniper up front. The flavors are a bit mild once it's on the palate, and again, it's got that vodka finish with virtually no aftertaste. It tasted fine poured neat. We added ice and tonic water, and it was certainly drinkable. If you ordered a gin and tonic at a sports bar, and that's what you got, you'd never bat an eye. We even poured ourselves another couple of these. Thumbs up.

IRISH CREAM

There was bound to be a dog in there somewhere, and holy hell, this was it. For this one, you had to add a "cream liqueur base"—a large bag of what I assumed was sugar and powdered milk. Wrong. It was a non-dairy milk substitute. The liqueur tasted like a chemical refinery. It coated your mouth, it made your stomach unhappy. Tweaking the amounts of vodka and water did not help. But how good is Irish cream, ever, anyway?

CONCLUSION

These were way, way better than we expected. Sure, you could just buy a real bottle of bourbon or gin. But a lot of folks want to experiment with other liquors without investing in a whole bottle. And other people might wind up with a handle of leftover vodka and no idea what to do with it. If that's the case, then the pouches, at about $5 each, are totally worth it. Drinkers who want to take it further can dive into individual flavors like Cedar Oak, and Peat Smoke.

Still Spirits Top Shelf are available at U.S. brewing supply stores, and online atHomebrewing.org, Baderbrewing.com, and elsewhere. [Still Spirits]

Where White Man Went wrong