CAROLINA NATURALLY: Apr 5, 2014

Saturday, April 5, 2014

The Daily Drift

It's Open Season

Now you know ...

Carolina Naturally is read in 196 countries around the world daily.

Karma it does find it's way around ... !

Today is - Tangible Karma Day

Don't forget to visit our sister blog: It Is What It Is

Some of our reader today have been in:

The Americas

Montreal, Saint John's, Pikangikum, Ottawa, Britannia, Quebec, Winnipeg, Fort Nelson, Toronto, Moncton, Delta and Mississauga, Canada

Coeur D'Alene, Albuquerque, Artesia, Yorba Linda, Haddonfield, Muskogee, Skokie, Shrewsbury, Alpena, Cullowhee and Highlands, United States

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

Merida and Mexico City, Mexico

Managua, Nicaragua

Rio De Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Alta Floresta, Brazil

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Medellin, Colombia

Fernando De La Mora, Paraguay

Europe

Minsk, Belarus

Kharkiv and Zhovti Vody, Ukraine

Mol, Belgium

Le Harve, Roubaix an Bordeaux, France

Kista and Stokholm, Sweden

Bucharest and Slatina, Romania

Bilbao, Madrid and Magala, Spain

London, Slough, Bristol and Leicester, England

Moscow, Vladivostok and Ryazan, Russia

Kerpen, Hamburg, Nuremberg, Ludenscheid and Dresden, Germany

Oslo, Norway

Sofia, Bulgaria

Riga, Latvia

Stara Pazova, Serbia

Nicosia, Cyprus

Rome, Ravenna and Terlizzi, Italy

Dublin, Ireland

Reykjavik, Iceland

Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Mamak, Turkey

Groningen, Netherlands

Copenhagen, Denmark

Asia

Delhi, Cuttack, Patna, Mumbai, Surat, New Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore, Shillong and Indore, India

Cukai, Bayan Lepas and Temerluh, Malaysia

La Dagotiere and Quarte Bornes, Mauritius

Umm Salal Muhammad and Doha, Qatar

Jakarta, Indonesia

Karachi, Pakistan

Beijing, China

Tehran, Iran

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Africa

Tunis, Tunisia

Calabar, Nigeria

Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa

The Pacific

Cebu City, Philippines

Sydney and Mackay, Australia

Auckland, New Zealand

Today in History

1242		Russian troops repel an invasion by Teutonic knights.
1614		Pocahontas marries English colonist John Rolfe.
1792		George Washington casts the first presidential veto.
1843		Queen Victoria proclaims Hong Kong a British crown colony.
1861		Gideon Wells, the Secretary of the Navy issues official orders for the
1865		As the Confederate army approaches Appomattox, it skirmishes with Union forces at Amelia Springs and Paine's Cross Road.
1908		The Japanese Army reaches Yalu River as Russians retreat.
1919		Eamon de Valera becomes president of Ireland.
1930		Mahatma Ghandi defies British law by making salt in India instead of buying it from the British.
1941		German commandos secure docks along the Danube River in preparation for Germany's invasion of the Balkans.
1943		The British 8th Army attacks the next blocking position of the retreating Axis forces at Wadi Akarit.
1951		Americans Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are sentenced to death for espionage.
1955		Winston Churchill resigns as British prime minister.
1986		A bomb explodes in a West Berlin disco packed with American soldiers.

Gulf War Illness Not in Veterans’ Heads ...

Gulf War Illness Not in Veterans’ Heads, But in Their Mitochondria

Researchers at the UC San Diego School of Medicine have […]

We spend WAY too much on our military

Death penalty still popular among whites ...

... but support declining

Nearly two thirds of white people support the death penalty, with evangelical protestants bloodthirstiest of all. Black Americans favor it the least, with only 36 percent in favor of executing murderers. The findings are part of the 2013 Pew survey, in which 55% of Americans say they favor the ultimate punishment for murderers. It's falling fast, though, down from 78% twenty years ago. But it is because of changing beliefs about the morality of killing people, or because there are simply too many appalling mistakes?

Sweden, home of modern pop music

America, #1, has the largest pop music business, and #2 spot holder Japan the weirdest. Third-place Britain is famous for punching above its weight, but #4 will surprise you: Sweden, the pop music powerhouse. It all comes down to the Swedish Pop Mafia.

‘Cyberasociality’

‘Cyberasociality’: Sociologists find emerging condition

Not every single user – among the billions collecting friends […]

Black Markets for Hackers Are Increasingly Sophisticated ...

Black Markets for Hackers Are Increasingly Sophisticated, Specialized and Maturing

Black and gray markets for computer hacking tools, services and […]

Electricity Decentralization

... here we come

Small-scale, rooftop solar power is starting to seriously destabilize the future of electric utility business plans. What will be the utility's role? Will we even need an electric grid? At Scientific American, David Biello reports on how companies and customers are navigating the shift to a different model of energy production.

Controlling Light

A new angle on controlling light

System could provide first method for filtering light waves based […]

Northwestern University Football Players Win Bid To Form Union

The Chicago regional chapter of the National Labor Relations Board has approved the petition from a group of Northwestern University football players seeking to form a union, a preliminary but unprecedented victory for college athletes that could lead to the formation of the first players' union in college sports history.

The College Athletes Players Association, led by former Northwestern quarterback Kain Colter and National Collegiate Players Association director Ramogi Huma, himself a former college football player, argued in front of the NLRB that college athletes fit the definition of employees under federal labor law and as such should have the right to organize and bargain with their employer, in this case Northwestern University. That university and the NCAA argued that the players are students first, not employees of the university, and shouldn't have that right.

The NLRB examiner agreed with the players.

"[P]layers receiving scholarships to perform football-related services for the Employer under a contract for hire in return for compensation are subject to the Employer's control and are therefore employees," the decision said.

Football Players Win Bid To Form Union

ZZ Top Perform Music For A Prom In 1970

“Dusty Hill, Frank Beard, and Billy Gibbons (ZZ Top) playing the Senior Prom in May, 1970 at Little Cypress-Mauriceville High School in Orange, Texas. Apparently sometime between signing the contract to play and the actual prom itself, the band broke-out big. They tried to get out of the prom, but the school couldn’t find a replacement on such short notice so ZZ Top still performed…people were climbing through the windows, crashing the prom, just to hear the band play. This was all at a really small school with a graduating class of around 100, maybe less.”

‘Sweat the small stuff’ to get healthier

Consumers should ‘sweat the small stuff’ to get healthier

International researchers say even one small act, such as failing […]

Rates of blindness, partial sight plummet in developed world

But macular degeneration has become leading cause of blindness in […]

Mentally challenging jobs may keep your mind sharp long after retirement

A mentally demanding job may stress you out today but […]

The bad science behind brain training

Why Lumosity.com (and other workouts for your brain) are unlikely to actually make you smarter or help you think better.

A Beautiful Mind

Visualizing a beautiful mind

How does an autistic child take in information when he […]

Arrested Development

Arrested development: How brain damage impairs moral judgment

Would you lie on your income tax return to save […]

Ziggy

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Famous paintings help study the Earth’s past atmosphere

A team of Greek and German researchers has shown that […]

A recipe for glue and other hidden images

16th-Century Masterpiece Reveals Cheese Glue Recipe

Sticky cheese might be the secret behind one of the most intriguing Mannerist paintings.

Painting Restoration Reveals Glue, Hidden Images: Photos

As restorers work to revitalize a painting by 16th-century Mannerist Jacopo Pontormo, surprising details emerge.

Life on the frozen-food-tasting line

Matthew, an odd-jobbing freelance artist, took a job as a frozen-food taster ("trained sensory panelist"), spending long days stuffing fried food in his mouth and rating it on 50-100 attributes, swirling mashed potatoes around his mouth, getting mouth-blisters from all the salt. If you've ever wondered how frozen food manufacturers decide how much cardboard taste is too much, here is your answer:

Matthew: I’d come home with huge blisters in my mouth from the salt. Yeah, fried food doesn’t have the same appeal anymore. And the other amazing thing is seeing the whole world behind literally every product we consume. Every aspect of the foods, taste, appearance, texture, is so insanely focus grouped and tested. Every major food company has a similar testing process.
Mike: Does this mean you were eating many different versions of the same curly fry?
Matthew: Yes, there’d be slight variations in spices, in cooking time, in the kind of potato. We’d test them at different intervals to see how the taste changed once they were taken out of the fryer, or how micro-waving them would affect their texture. One aromatic that was fun to pick out was “cardboard”—an actual aromatic on the ballot—and to compare we had cups of water with brown paper towels in them.
Matthew: Oh, and another weird thing I learned: To cut corners with cheese products companies sometimes use the acids from cheese production instead of the more expensive cheese products, and these acids are basically bile from different animals (a food scientist might have a more nuanced view). So sometimes we’d be spitting out these inexpensive cheese products all day, and your mouth would just be full of this vomit bile taste.

What It’s Like to Work as a Professional Frozen Food Taster

The anti-suicidal properties of ketamine

Researchers find anti-suicidal properties of ketamine

In patients with treatment resistant depression who were experiencing suicidal […]

Beer Money And Babe Ruth

Why The Yankees Triumphed During Prohibition

One of the best beer-and-baseball stories comes from the dry years of Prohibition, 1920-1933, when the New York Yankees made it to seven World Series and won four.

Their rise began in 1915, when the team was purchased for $1.25 million by Tillinghast Huston and Jacob Ruppert, Jr. The Yankees had never won a pennant until the Colonels, as they were known, got a hold of them. Their masterstroke was to add a Boston Red Sox pitcher to the roster in 1920. That player's name was Babe Ruth.

Daily Comic Relief

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Little Red Riding Hood Was A Jerk

Yes, the Big Bad Wolf is the villain of the story, but only because he's just a bit worse than that little brat. She's come all this way just for the pleasure of insulting her own grandmother! Go ahead and eat her.

FDA rules make it nearly impossible for beer makers to give their grain to farmers for feed

"There's a new FDA rule that will make it nearly make it financially impossible for small craft brewers to give their grain away to farmers for animal feed. I work for a small brewery and all of us there are very upset about this and the general disregard for sustainability. At the end if the article linked there's direct FDA links that cover their proposal."
Leftover brewing grains have been fed to livestock since the dawn of agriculture, so this is a pretty radical shift. The proposed new requirements for animal feed handling stipulate that the feed has to be dried, analyzed and packaged before being donated to farmers (the spent grains are generally given away at the end of the brewing process), at substantial expense.
It's clear that food safety is important, but I'm not convinced that the stringency of this rule is commensurate with the risk.

Brandon Mazer is legal counsel for Maine’s largest brewer, Shipyard, which produces 400-600 tons of spent grain per week during its peak production seasons. Those grains are dumped onto a truck trailer and go to farms as feed.
“It’s a very big umbrella, and we got sucked under it,” Mazer said of the proposed FDA rule change. He said that no brewers in Maine, and few in the country, are equipped with the machinery, personnel or money to meet the requirements outlined by the FDA.
The Brewers Association, Beer Institute, American Malting Barley Association and other brewing organizations have voiced strong opposition to the new restrictions, calling for an exemption for brewers.
The Beer Institute says that in 2012 alone, U.S. brewers produced about 2.7 million tons of spent grain.
The FDA has extended the public comment period on this set of rules until March 31, and brewers and farmers that work with them say they are watching closely.

New FDA rules may cut long-standing ties between beer makers, farmers