MaxRedline

Online Match

A 25 year-old woman in southern France met her One True Love online. He lives in Monaco, so she booked a five-star hotel room there and went off on a date with him. Things did not go well. 

They were probably getting on okay, as she went to his house. But...

According to reports, Mina El Houari was a diabetic and collapsed at the man's house, and he thought she had died.

So, well, gosh - he did what anyone might do: he hauled her outside and buried her in his garden. 

Relatives got suspicious when El Houari never returned home or contacted them. They called the police, who found muddy pants and a shovel at the suspect's home.

In his confession, he claimed to have had no idea that she was still alive. Apparently, it never occurred to him to call paramedics. These things happen, you know.

Find your soulmate at Match.com. We guarantee a memorable first date.

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Don't Even Try

Chances are, your doctor already knows about those late-night pizza deliveries, as HMOs and other medical facilities are increasingly data-mining your credit/debit and other purchases and tying them into your health record number. Not that it matters to me; I do most of the grocery shopping, and after my Bride had gall-bladder removal surgery a couple of months back, she's on a low-fat diet. So my purchses are going to come up squeaky-clean, health-wise.

They don't know that I paid cash at the Dairy Queen on my way back....

Sun's Not Involved In Climate Change

But large solar flares can cripple the power grids, leaving hundreds of millions not only without power, but medical facilities, food, and water.

Perhaps the most formidable megastorm on record happened in 1859. Known as the Carrington Event, it lit up night skies from Hawaii to Australia and led to telegraph outages around the world.

Telegraph. How quaint. Of course, today, we drive cars with computers in them. We have refrigerators, sewage pumps, and in many places, water pumps. None of which will work when - not if - the next Carrington Event strikes.

The sun doesn't have anything to do with man-made global warming, so you need to recycle, and your energy bills must "necessarily skyrocket". But it's just doing your part to Save The Planet™.

Trust us on this: we don't need to do anything to harden our infrastructure, because what are the odds of the sun influencing anything like that?

Millennials Stink

Millennials are famously unemployed and underemployed, but the reason may not entirely be the so-so job market. Or gaps in their college education.

It could be their body odor.

On the other hand, it could be their tats, their piercings, or a generalized lack of work ethic. But in a recent survey, 93% said their smartphone is very important - making it the most important thing in their lives. Things like toothbrushes and deodorants are further down on their list of things that are important in their daily lives.

Certainly, that smartphone/social media emphasis matches the experiences I've had when having to work around them (and that is literal; many times it was necessary to move around them as they punched keys while staring at screens). The concept of arriving at work and actually going to work in many cases was a completely foreign concept to them; they'd arrive, make breakfast, do social media, chat, and after maybe an hour or so actually begin doing something job-related.

It's so nice to not have to deal with that any longer.

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Conscious And Unconscious

In a serendipitous discovery, it appears that a pair of doctors have found the "on/off" switch for consciousness.

In a study published last week, Mohamad Koubeissi at the George Washington University in Washington DC and his colleagues describe how they managed to switch a woman's consciousness off and on by stimulating her claustrum. The woman has epilepsy so the team were using deep brain electrodes to record signals from different brain regions to work out where her seizures originate. One electrode was positioned next to the claustrum, an area that had never been stimulated before.

Obviously, determining what's really going on there is going to take a lot more work, as a sample size of one is hardly definitive. Still, it has some interesting aspects, not the least of which is that the patient remained awake but unconscious and could be immediately returned to an awake and conscious state. As a rule, we associate unconsciousness with sleep or coma or anesthesia - all of which involve changes relating to the state of wakefulness.

This is quite different, and potentially useful: when a patient is in a persistent vegetative state, for example, might it be possible to stimulate his claustrum and thus turn his consciousness on?

Of course, the potential for nefarious use is at least as strong as its potential for good: let's say you're sent to prison, where in addition to your orange jumpsuit, you receive an electrode implant and a receiver. If you're deemed uncooperative or otherwise regarded as problematic, you aren't sent to the hole; the push of a button simply turns off your consciousness. 

Doubtless, governments around the world would find such technology useful.

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Opium, Whiskey, Or Mallet?

Easy Encryption

Pretty Good Privacy is just that - pretty good. The encryption tool is, however, a pain to use. There's a new plugin coming out that should make encryption an on-the-fly kind of thing. MiniLock's in beta at the moment, but from the looks of it, file encryption is about to get a whole lot easier.

The NSA's not going to like this development any more than they like TAILS and TOR, and their XKeyscore program's probably already "fingerprinted" this post. Although as the Electronic Freedom Foundation notes, privacy is a fundamental human right and the USA tacitly admits that, NSA doesn't see it that way. They kind of view Orwell's 1984 as a manual.

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Dude, You Got A Dell!

A 72 year-old woman in Pennsylvania was injured when her Dell laptop computer exploded.

Langhorne-Middletown Fire Company Chief Frank Farry has been fighting fires for 25 years and says he’s never seen anything like it. Farry says the evidence has been collected, but it appears the battery pack inside the computer went off like a bomb, sending debris six to eight feet away.

Of course, this could likely have been avoided if she'd just been using the right operating system - if it'd been running Windows 8, she'd still be waiting for it to boot up.

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What Is It With These Guys?

The latest Democrat to be associated with sexual escapades is Joe Morrissey, a Viginia state delegate who's been indicted on four felonies and a misdemeanor related to boinking a 17 year-old girl who was employed by his law firm. He maintains that he's innocent, and claims that his phone and the girl's phone were hacked, which is how incriminating texts turned up on the respective phones.

Clearly, Joe's not nearly as crafty as our own Democrat icons, Neil Goldschmidt and Sam Adams, when it comes to hiding sexual exploits perpetrated on minors. Joe's more like Anthony Weiner.

Another $19 Million To Cover Oregon

It's only money. As KATU notes, Cover Oregon can't even quit right. The latest report indicates that their attempt to move to the federal exchange is "at a high risk of failure", likely jeopardizing the ability of the 80,000 or so people who managed to enroll in a health insurance plan (eventually) through the Cover Oregon system to re-enroll this coming November. Reenrollment is required as part of the shift to the federal exchange.

A decision on hiring a Systems Integrator, considered crucial to success, was three months overdue, although today the state gave the go-ahead to Deloitte Consulting to the tune of nearly $19 million. Nonetheless, the lengthy delay virtually assures failure.

Maximus also reported that Cover Oregon was badly lagging on long-term planning – a complaint it made for years during the project’s failed launch, and one that was likely a root cause for the website’s failure.

They have yet to make any progress on that front. Nonetheless, it seems all but certain that Portland will once again elect gov. Retread because, hey - if they keep doing the same thing over and over again, eventually something's bound to change.

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Meat Print

Researchers have just overcome one of the big hurdles to 3-D organ printing: functional blood vessels. Now if they can just get those pesky nerve bundles to print out aprropriately, they may actually be able to generate replacement organs with a computer and printer.