Photic sneeze reflex - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Photic sneeze reflex - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"Photic sneeze reflex (also referred to as sun sneezing, photogenic sneezing, or whimsically called ACHOO, a backronym for Autosomal dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst) is a medical condition by which people exposed to bright light sneeze. The photic sneeze reflex can also cause one to sneeze many times consecutively. The condition occurs in 17% to 25% of humans with more common occurrence in Caucasians than other human races. The condition is passed along genetically as an autosomal dominant trait.

The first mention of the phenomenon is probably in the later work attributed to Aristotle (Problems, book XXXIII).

The probable cause is a congenital malfunction in nerve signals in the trigeminal nerve nucleus. The fifth cranial nerve, called the trigeminal nerve, is apparently responsible for sneezes. Research suggests that some people have an association between this nerve and the nerve that transmits visual impulses to the brain. Overstimulation of the optic nerve triggers the trigeminal nerve, and this causes the photic sneeze reflex."

I have it, my father has it, my wife and children have it -- now I know why.

South Park Revealed

Instapundit.com -: "We can do whatever we want to Jesus, and we have. We've had him say bad words. We've had him shoot a gun. We've had him kill people. We can do whatever we want. But Mohammed, we couldn't just show a simple image."

Center for Information Technology Policy » Voting Study

Center for Information Technology Policy » Voting Study

Go to this Princeton website and watch the video ... awesome. As I've said before, Diebold voting machines are trash.

Find entire albums - using Google

Just replace the word "band" (keeping the quotes) with the band or artist you want to find. Should give you entire folders of music. Yes, I know--it's an old trick, but I've lost this link many times and figured many others had, too.

click here to find mp3s

Finding an Edge: Sports betting markets

Techcrunch:

"PicksPal is a free sports site where people “bet” on upcoming games. No money is involved. If they win, their point total goes up and they have bragging rights around the office. Since launching about a year ago over 100,000 people have joined the site, making daily picks on just about every kind of sporting event in the U.S. ...

Recently, however, the PicksPal team noticed that a very small percentage of users tend to be correct in their picks significantly more often that they should be statistically. When they grouped these special users they found them to be a powerful predictive force.

Sports betting (both legal and illegal) is a massive worldwide business. Participants are always looking for an edge and are willing to pay for picks by “experts”...

Tom and his team figured out pretty quickly that there was a potentially massive business here. And next Tuesday they are going to start tapping into that business when they launch what they call “Genius Picks”. For $10, users can get access to the collective wisdom of the 30 best PicksPal players over the previous five weeks in a given sport, and get five predictions on upcoming games."

Makes me wanna get into the sports betting thingie.

Piled Higher and Deeper

Nature of modern science:

Gun Rights victory in Brazil

Instapundit.com:

"The notion that an individual right to arms might be included within international human rights law is, of course, a compelling one."

Instapundit has a nice pull quote from the NYT -- the funny thing is how the Times implicitly takes the argument that "the bearing of arms is a right" as some kind of devious NRA ploy, a shady tactic to oppose the holy purposes of anti-gun activists.

The Club For Growth

Jeff Flake on Earmark Reform Nice video showing my new favorite politician, Jeff Flake, speaking on the recently passed earmark reform.

AL-DURA: THE TRIAL (PART ONE)

Politics Central:

"France’s newspaper of record accuses the Israeli army of deliberately firing at journalists and destroying media property (including the Al Manar studios). France’s state-owned television network produces, broadcasts, and distributes worldwide a blood libel against Israel. A cameraman employed by France 2 films staged news. And somehow French society can accommodate all of these attitudes and practices. But when a media watch site calls for the dismissal of those responsible for producing, broadcasting, and defending a falsified news report that accuses Israeli soldiers of the cold blooded murder of a Palestinian child, the director is sued for defamation, for sullying the honor of the plaintiffs.
How will this case be pleaded, tried, and judged in a French court?"

Too much info in this article to summarize. If you're interested in state-sponsored oppression of freedom to think in good ole France, then follow the link for an unbelievable attack on the liberty to question state media.

Burning Man: Our Review

Tim’s Blog:

"After a two-hour traffic snarl at the gate, we arrived at our camp: exhausted, surly and coated with a fine layer of dangerous alkali dust. If the founder and King Rat of Burning Man, Larry Harvey, had been present we would have gladly taken turns shocking his balls with a car battery, Abu Ghraib-style. We were that pissed. Larry was likely in St. Bart’s spending our money, or perhaps in a fabulous underground lair built by enslaved hippies from previous burns, or maybe just laughing from his Lear jet above in his trademark white Stetson."

OK backrgound information: Burning Man is a one week celebration held in the middle of the desert in Nevada every year, mainly attended by SanFrancisco new-age hippie types. Its in the news annually being plugged by the Web 2.0 shills in places like Wired and BoingBoing.
Anyway, this is a totally hillarious review. I laughed my head off reading it because it sort of vindicated what I had already supposed Burning Man was all about. Note that the article is R-rated for vulgar language, so don't read it if colorful language offends you.

Sullivan Smackdown

Protein Wisdom:

"How a reminder by the President of his administration’s long-standing position and strategy for fighting the War on Terror comes to be characterized as “cynical” is beyond me—though perhaps for Sullivan it is somehow unfair, two months before an election, for the President to make his case for the administration’s ongoing war strategy in order to clearly differentiate his policies from those of his political and ideological opponents, who use any and every opportunity to second guess and criticize."

Read the whole thing. Via Instapundit.

more pictures ...

Hack the vote

Engadget:

"Black Box Voting found that given $12 in tools, four minutes, and a little determination, you can access a Diebold voting machine's memory card, remove and replace it without a trace. This new development really isn't all that surprising given that it's been shown that these machines can be hacked in more than one way, even by monkeys. Concerned citizens, just switch to absentee paper ballots from now on -- it may be low-tech, but it's a hell of a lot more secure going the 'old-fashioned' way."

Diebold's technology sucks, plain and simple.

Who should replace Kofi Anan at the UN?

The Bullwinkle Blog » Blog Archive » Time Asks, I Answer.:

Tony Soprano. He’d steal less. He wouldn’t take any shit from anybody and a UN Resolution would be enforced, or else. They’d need a new sign though…

(Via Instapundit.) Go check out the proposed new logo of the UN -- friggin' hilarious.

Global Warming's Real Inconvenient Truth

RJ Samuelson at Wapo:

"Al Gore calls global warming an 'inconvenient truth,' as if merely recognizing it could put us on a path to a solution. That's an illusion. The real truth is that we don't know enough to relieve global warming, and -- barring major technological breakthroughs -- we can't do much about it. This was obvious nine years ago; it's still obvious. Let me explain."

Here's the thing enviro nut-jobs are loathe to admit: there's a finite amount of oil in the earth -- some say we've already passed "peak oil", the point of highest annual production, but all agree that we'll eventually run out.
Question: What is the probability that we, as a global economy, will not use all of the oil?
Answer: Zero. Someone will use it. Its cheap and we have trillions of dollars worth of equipment that requires it to function. We could pass Kyoto, pass even more draconian legislation -- America could stop using petroleum all together and STILL the oil would be burned by someone, by some struggling poor economy desperate for cheap energy.

The upshot is that all of the carbon contained in the oil will be put in the atmosphere -- there's just no question about it. So let's all stop whining about global warming and stop pretending that punishing american consumers is going to produce anything positive.