Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Some Links

Promising new treatment for leukemia. I hope this one pans out, but I do wonder about the patients who didn't have a positive response to it.

Here's a creepy tale of a mysterious body found after the Blitz in Liverpool.

Ancient Engineering So Advanced It Is Like Magic. I'd read about these before, but this Metafilter post brings the links together nicely. Ancient Peruvian wells served as part of an irrigation system to use wind power to drive water where it needed to go. Wow.

Atlas Obscura looks at some folks on American money. There are definitely some interesting individuals whose portraits were on currency!

Check out this way cool tale of Victorians who nearly got themselves killed by flying too high in a balloon. In their defense, they really had no clue what they would face up there.

How about a bit of girl power before I get into depressing topics?



Once again, anti-vaxxers are risking the lives of their children from complications of measles because they think they understand science better after 20 minutes of Googling than people who have been studying it all their lives. Measles was eradicated from the U.S. more than a decade ago, but because of anti-vaxxers, it keeps being brought back. If they knew what vaccines were preventing - if they only knew the pain and suffering of "childhood diseases" - those anti-vaxxers would be ashamed of themselves. But they don't, and the only way they are going to learn is when their own children suffer and die from preventable diseases, which is horrible and unfair to the innocent children. It's a pity the anti-vaxxers, who were vaccinated by their parents, won't be the ones to suffer instead.

And my other pet peeve: a woman is forced out of a hotel's public bathroom by male police officers (youtube link) because she doesn't fit their stereotype of "female" (warning, strong language in the video). She should sue that hotel. I spent half my life being told I looked like a boy because I wore baggy clothing and kept my hair cut short. Having a security guard throw me out of the bathroom while I was waiting in line would have been an absolute nightmare for me. This woman said, in comments on a post of the video, that this happened at the Freemont Hotel Lobby bathroom, "not the casino" (so I'm assuming it's in Las Vegas, maybe?) and that she wasn't expecting to have to show ID to use the restroom. Usually she just assures people she's female and that's enough. In addition, she had friends with her, so no one would be stupid enough to just assume she was male, right? Ha. The security guard with his "papers, please" attitude was disgusting. Her word alone should have been enough, but with several other women vouching for her, the fact that they threw her out is obscene. We aren't Nazi Germany and people are NOT required to carry ID with them everywhere. At least not yet. And, by the way, she looks and sounds female to me.

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