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8623 Krekka
|TECHNIC → BIONICLE → Titans8622 << 8623 >> 8624
|Item №:
8623 Krekka is a BIONICLE set released in 2004. It features Krekka, which can be combined with 8621 Turaga Dume and Nivawk and 8622 Nidhiki to form the combiner model "Ultimate Dume".
History[edit | edit source]
Pre-Dark Hunters[edit | edit source]
Prior to his recruitment into the Hunters, Krekka worked on Stelt as a guard (his species were considered to be of the lower class on the island). His job was to convince intruders to go away from whatever place he was posted at, often through very painful means.
This continued until he tried to "turn away" Makuta Gorast, sending her through a wall and starting a fight between the two, which resulted in the loss of his right eye. Shortly afterwards, Krekka left the island of Stelt.
He journeyed from island to island, often getting into bad situations due to his stupidity, but able to get out of them due to his massive strength. This attracted the attention of the Dark Hunters, and they recruited Krekka.
Dark Hunter[edit | edit source]
During his time as a Hunter, Krekka was part of a team trained by Nidhiki, a Toa who had recently joined, for a mission. Nidhiki was ready to pass them all except Krekka, whom he thought of as too stupid. However, the Shadowed One did not trust Nidhiki due to his history as a traitor, and assigned Krekka as his partner, something the former Toa was none too pleased about. Krekka's stupidity and blind loyalty to the Shadowed One made him the perfect choice, as he would keep an eye on Nidhiki to make sure he would not attempt to disobey their leader.
Some time prior to their assignment to Destral, Krekka, Nidhiki and Lariska were assigned to search for and bring to the Shadowed One a mysterious prototype launcher from the island of Nynrah. They succeeded, and when Nidhiki wanted to keep two for himself (offering Krekka one as a bribe), Krekka insisted that they give all three to the Shadowed One. Krekka's loud refusal attracted the attention of the local residents, and he and Nidhiki made a hasty escape.
Some time later, Krekka and Nidhiki were hired to guard the Kanohi Avohkii on Destral, but the mask was stolen by the Toa Hagah. When Norik and Iruini came back for the other four Toa Hagah that were later captured, Krekka attempted to stop Iruini, but was defeated by the Toa.
Legends of Metru Nui[edit | edit source]
Krekka, Nidhiki, and a third Dark Hunter, Eliminator, were hired by Teridax to eliminate Lhikan's Toa team. They eventually succeeded in killing off Lhikan's entire team and then headed into Metru Nui to dispose of Lhikan. They captured him, but not before he created Toa Stones for the Toa Metru. Nidhiki and Krekka followed Vakama, Nokama, and Matau out of the Coliseum.
When they learned the Toa escaped, they followed in hot pursuit, and traveled to Le-Metru to find the three Toa Metru in an Airship in battle with a squad of Vahki Nuurakh, and joined in, Krekka freezing Vakama with a freezing Kanoka disk. After a brief struggle, Vakama teleported Krekka out of the ship with a Kanoka of teleportation, and Nidhiki left the ship in order to search for him.
When they reunited, they found out the three Toa were traveling through use of Chutes, they traveled to a Chute Station at the edge of Le-Metru in order to threaten Kongu, the attendant, into reversing the flow of the Chutes. They succeeded, however the Toa escaped in time. They found the Toa again in an abandoned Po-Metru Assembler's Village. The battle that followed was ended by a herd of Kikanalo stampeding. Krekka attempted to climb an abandoned carving to safety, but one of its support beams was snapped by a Kikanalo rampaging past, causing the support beam with him still on it to crush Nidhiki, stunning the two temporarily while the Toa fled yet again. Krekka and Nidhiki found the Toa in the Canyon of Unending Whispers, where Matau used the shapeshifting power of his Kanohi Mahiki to trick Krekka into attacking Nidhiki. When the Toa found the entrance to Lhikan's prison, the Kikanalo sealed the entry so Krekka and Nidhiki could not follow. During the Great Cataclysm, the two Dark Hunters found the six Toa Metru escaping the Coliseum in a Vahki Transport with six Matoran Spheres on board. The Dark Hunters boarded the craft, and Krekka distracted Matau from driving while Nidhiki tried to attack Lhikan. Onewa used his mask power to get Krekka to grab Nidhiki and jump off the ship. Both Dark Hunters met their end when they were sucked into Teridax's essence soon afterwards.
Abilities and Traits[edit | edit source]
Krekka's sheer, raw power complimented Nidhiki's cunning and intelligence. Just his presence could fill an opponent's heart with fear. If his target hesitated for a moment, all was lost when Krekka's energy web wrapped and trapped opponents. Many opponents made the mistake of underestimating him due to his low intelligence, but Krekka was a veteran of many battles, and knew how to use his power to his advantage. He also had the ability of flight.
Tools[edit | edit source]
Krekka could hurl Kanoka from his launcher. He also carried a device which allowed him to launch energy webs.
LEGO.com Description[edit | edit source]
This is a description taken from LEGO.com. Please do not modify it. (see an archive of the product's page) Raw power and brute strength!
What Krekka lacks in intelligence he makes up for in sheer power. His energy nets are strong enough to snare a Toa Metru and his shoulder-mounted Kanoka disk launcher makes sure they stay defeated. This Dark Hunter is a menace to everything that lives on Metru Nui! Includes Kanoka disk.
Gallery[edit | edit source]
External links[edit | edit source]
- Brickset
- Rebrickable
- Lugnet
- Peeron
- See a price and investment guide on BrickPicker.com
- See products for sale on Brick Classifieds
- Bricklink
|This page uses content from BIONICLEsector01. The original article was at Krekka. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Brickipedia, the text of BIONICLEsector01 is available under the GNU Free Documentation License, however please help to make this a unique article to Brickipedia in any way you can.


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STATE COLLEGE, Pa. – Playing at Beaver Stadium in front of loyal blue-and-white fans would seem to be the last place where Penn State would have a problem with noise.
It turns out that support was louder than even the Nittany Lions offense expected, leading to problems for the up-tempo offense against Ohio State's front seven.
So quarterback Matt McGloin and the offensive line are focusing in part this week on improving communications when things get rough as Penn State (5-3, 3-1 Big Ten) looks to get back on track with a visit Saturday to struggling Purdue.
"We've tried to really work on that with the music, and with the loud noise during practice," O'Brien said Wednesday at Beaver Stadium. "It really starts with me and coaching ... we've tried to coach it better and be more detailed with it this week."
Some perspective might be in order first, though, between Penn State, Purdue and their respective venues.
Until Saturday's sellout crowd of more than 107,000 for the 35-23 loss to No. 6 Ohio State, Penn State had averaged about 97,000 this year — and that's considered low. Beaver Stadium can be one of the loudest venues in the country.
"Saturday was probably the only place in the country where at home you use a silent cadence," McGloin said. "We really weren't expecting that."
Contrast this to Purdue, which hasn't had a crowd at Ross-Ade Stadium larger than the 50,105 fans who showed up for a 44-13 loss Oct. 6 to Michigan. It was the start of a four-game losing streak that seemingly has the Boilermakers desperate. Coach Danny Hope might be under even more pressure to get things turned around.
The Nittany Lions are determined to avoid becoming Purdue's first Big Ten victim.
"We know it's going to be a tough environment going out there. They could easily have a few more wins than they've had," McGloin said. He was probably referring to the 29-22 overtime loss to the Buckeyes two weeks ago.
"We have to continue to move forward and match their intensity."
There's no real magic fix to communications issues. In Penn State's own loss to Ohio State, that miscommunication up front in part led to poor protection of McGloin, the Big Ten's leading passer (264.4 yards). That, in turn, disrupted Penn State's high-scoring offense.
So at practice, the Nittany Lions will continue to practice with loud music and work on silent counts. It was part of a broader problem of uncharacteristic unforced errors that tripped up Penn State against the Buckeyes, which also included penalties.
Right guard John Urschel said part of the problem for him may have been being too excited for the big game against the Buckeyes. He's not using any of it as an excuse, though.
"The burden is on us to get things done," Urschel said. "We need to make sure that we communicate with each other ... and make sure that we're precise about these things."
Actually, Penn State has been playing well away from home of late. After a one-point loss to Virginia in September, the Nittany Lions have built big leads in back-to-back conference road wins in October at Illinois (35-7) and Iowa (38-14).
Sophomore defensive back Adrian Amos said the leadership established by seniors like linebackers Michael Mauti and Gerald Hodges have helped keep the close-knit team focused on the road.
"It might be easier for us away from home," Amos said. "You don't know anybody but your teammates."
NOTES: Tight end Kyle Carter is listed as probable on the injury report after injuring his left ankle late in last week's game against Ohio State. O'Brien said Wednesday that Carter was day-to-day and coaches would check later in the week on how well he could cut in the open field to determine if his availability. The 6-foot-3 Carter (35 catches for 441 yards, 2 TDs) has turned into a top target in the passing game. ... K Sam Ficken (quad) has been limited in practice in recent weeks. "We have had to monitor his leg over the last couple of weeks, so that's what we're trying to do here leading into this game, too and hopefully by the end of the week we will have a better idea of what his range can be," O'Brien said. ... Penn State has several players from the New York City area and New Jersey, which were hard hit by this week's storm. O'Brien said he thinks the families of players from those areas are doing OK. "Our thoughts and prayers go out to all of those who dealing with the storm," he said. "It's a brutal deal." Penn State practiced indoors earlier this week and pushed back it normal media availability back a day to Wednesday because of the storm.
Follow Genaro Armas at http://twitter.com/GArmasAP

subset: commoncrawl


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Map Unavailable
Date(s) - 11/11/2020
1:30 pm - 7:00 pm
Reedsville Fire Company
Categories No Categories
You have the opportunity to save someone's life in your community. The American Red Cross is hosting a blood drive at Reedsville Fire Company on November 11. This drive will take place from 1:30 to 7PM. Come out and donate your time and blood and help save lives in the process! Please call 1-800-RED-CROSS or visit redcrossblood.org to schedule an appointment.


text:
This spring, I took a month-long road trip across a country that we - you, me and everyone we know - are killing. One day, not long into my journey, I travelled over tiny ridges and groaning bridges on the back of a motorbike to reach the remote village of Munshigonj. The surviving villagers - gaunt, creased people - were sitting by a stagnant pond. They told me, slowly, what we have done to them.
Ten years ago, the village began to die. First, many of the trees turned a strange brownish-yellow colour and rotted. Then the rice paddies stopped growing and festered in the water. Then the fish floated to the surface of the rivers, gasping. Then many of the animals began to die. Then many of the children began to die.
The waters flowing through Munshigonj - which had once been sweet and clear and teeming with life - had turned salty and dead.
Arita Rani, a 25-year-old, sat looking at the salt water, swaddled in a blue sari and her grief. "We couldn't drink the water from the river, because it was suddenly full of salt and made us sick," she said. "So I had to give my children water from this pond. I knew it was a bad idea. People wash in this pond. It's dirty. So we all got dysentery." She keeps staring at its surface. "I have had it for 10 years now. You feel weak all the time, and you have terrible stomach pains. You need to run to the toilet 10 times a day. My boy Shupria was seven and he had this for his whole life. He was so weak, and kept getting coughs and fevers. And then one morning..."
Her mother interrupted the trailing silence. "He died," she said. Now Arita's surviving three-year-old, Ashik, is sick, too. He is sprawled on his back on the floor. He keeps collapsing; his eyes are watery and distant. His distended stomach feels like a balloon pumped full of water. "Why did this happen?" Arita asked.
It is happening because of us. Every flight, every hamburger, every coal power plant, ends here, with this. Bangladesh is a flat, low-lying land made of silt, squeezed in between the melting mountains of the Himalayas and the rising seas of the Bay of Bengal. As the world warms, the sea is swelling - and wiping Bangladesh off the map.
Deep below the ground of Munshigonj and thousands of villages like it, salt water is swelling up. It is this process - called "saline inundation" - that killed their trees and their fields and contaminated their drinking water. Some farmers have shifted from growing rice to farming shrimp - but that employs less than a quarter of the people, and it makes them dependent on a fickle export market. The scientific evidence shows that unless we change now, this salt water will keep rising and rising, until everything here is ocean.
I decided to embark on this trip when, sitting in my air-conditioned flat in London, I noticed a strange and seemingly impossible detail in a scientific report. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - whose predictions have consistently turned out to be underestimates - said that Bangladesh is on course to lose 17 per cent of its land and 30 per cent of its food production by 2050. For America, this would be equivalent to California and New York State drowning, and the entire mid-West turning salty and barren.
Surely this couldn't be right? How could more than 20 million Bangladeshis be turned into refugees so suddenly and so silently? I dug deeper, hoping it would be disproved - and found that many climatologists think the IPCC is way too optimistic about Bangladesh. I turned to Professor James Hansen, the director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, whose climate calculations have proved to be more accurate than anybody else's. He believes the melting of the Greenland ice cap being picked up by his satellites today, now, suggests we are facing a 25-metre rise in sea levels this century - which would drown Bangladesh entirely. When I heard this, I knew I had to go, and see.
1. The edge of a cliff
The first thing that happens when you arrive in Dhaka is that you stop. And wait. And wait. And all you see around you are cars, and all you hear is screaming. Bangladesh's capital is in permanent shrieking gridlock, with miles of rickshaws and mobile heaps of rust. The traffic advances by inches and by howling. Each driver screams himself hoarse announc-ing - that was my lane! Stay there! Stop moving! Go back! Go forward! It is a good-natured shrieking: everybody knows that this is what you do in Dhaka. If you are lucky, you enter a slipstream of traffic that moves for a minute - until the jams back up and the screaming begins once more.
Around you, this megalopolis of 20 million people seems to be screaming itself conscious. People burn rubbish by the roadside, or loll in the rivers. Children with skin deformities that look like infected burns try to thrust maps or sweets into your hand. Rickshaw drivers with thighs of steel pedal furious-ly as whole families cling on and offer their own high-volume traffic commentary to the groaning driver, and the groaning city.
I wanted to wade through all this chaos to find Bangladesh's climate scientists, who are toiling in the crannies of the city to figure out what - if anything - can be saved.
Dr Atiq Rahman's office in downtown Dhaka is a nest of scientific reports and books that, at every question, he dives into to reel off figures. He is a tidy, grey-moustached man who speaks English very fast, as if he is running out of time.
"It is clear from all the data we are gathering here in Bangladesh that the IPCC predictions were much too conservative," he said. He should know: he is one of the IPCC's leading members, and the UN has given him an award for his unusually prescient predictions. His work is used as one of the standard textbooks across the world, including at Oxford and Harvard. "We are facing a catastrophe in this country. We are talking about an absolutely massive displacement of human beings."
He handed me shafts of scientific studies as he explained: "This is the ground zero of global warming." He listed the effects. The seas are rising, so land is being claimed from the outside. (The largest island in the country, Bhola, has lost half its land in the past decade.) The rivers are super-charged, becoming wider and wider, so land is being claimed from within. (Erosion is up by 40 per cent). Cyclones are becoming more intense and more violent (2007 was the worst year on record for intense hurricanes here). And salt water is rendering the land barren. (The rate of saline inundation has trebled in the past 20 years.) "There is no question," Dr Rahman said, "that this is being caused primarily by human action. This is way outside natural variation. If you really want people in the West to understand the effect they are having here, it's simple. From now on, we need to have a system where for every 10,000 tons of carbon you emit, you have to take a Bangladeshi family to live with you. It is your responsibility." In the past, he has called it "climatic genocide".
The worst-case scenario, Dr Rahman said, is if one of the world's land-based ice-sheets breaks up. "Then we lose 70 to 80 per cent of our land, including Dhaka. It's a different world, and we're not on it. The evidence from Jim Hansen shows this is becoming more likely - and it can happen quickly and irreversibly. My best understanding of the evidence is that this will probably happen towards the end of the lifetime of babies born today."
I walked out in the ceaseless churning noise of Dhaka. Everywhere I looked, people were building and making and living: my eyes skimmed up higher and higher and find more and more activity. A team of workers were building a house; behind and above them, children were sewing mattresses on a roof; behind and above them, more men were building taller buildings. This is the most cramped country on earth: 150 million people living in an area the size of Iowa. Could all this life really be continuing on the crumbling edge of a cliff?
2. 'It is like the Bay is angry'
I was hurtling through the darkness at 120mph with my new driver, Shambrat. He was red-eyed from chewing pan, a leaf-stimulant that makes you buzz, and I could see nothing except the tiny pools of light cast by the car. They showed we were on narrow roads, darting between rice paddies and emptied shack-towns, in the midnight silence. I kept trying to put on my seatbelt, but every time Shambrat would cry, "You no need seatbelt! I good driver!" and burst into hysterical giggles.
To see if the seas were really rising, I had circled a random low-lying island on the map called Moheshkhali and asked Shambrat to get me there. It turned out the only route was to go to Coxs Bazar - Bangladesh's Blackpool - and then take a small wooden rowing boat that has a huge chugging engine attached to the front. I clambered in alongside three old men, a small herd of goats, and some chickens. The boat was operated by a 10-year-old child, whose job is to point the boat in the right direction, start the engine, and then begin using a small jug to frantically scoop out the water that starts to leak in. After an hour of the deafening ack-ack of the engine, we arrived at the muddy coast of Moheshkhali.
There was a makeshift wooden pier, where men were waiting with large sacks of salt. As we climbed up on to the fragile boards, people helped the old men lift up the animals. There were men mooching around the pier, waiting for a delivery. They looked bemused by my arrival. I asked them if the sea levels were rising here. Rezaul Karim Chowdry, a 34-year-old who looked like he is in his fifties, said plainly: "Of course. In the past 30 years, two-thirds of this island has gone under the water. I had to abandon my house. The land has gone into the sea." Immediately all the other men start to recount their stories. They have lost their houses, their land, and family members to the advance.
They agreed to show me their vanishing island. We clambered into a tuc-tuc - a motorbike with a carriage on the back - and set off across the island, riding along narrow ridges between cordoned-off areas of sand and salt. The men explained that this is salt-farming: the salt left behind by the tide is gathered and sold. "It is one of the last forms of farming that we can still do here," Rezaul said. As we passed through the forest, he told me to be careful: "Since we started to lose all our land, gangs are fighting for the territory that is left. They are very violent. A woman was shot in the crossfire yesterday. They will not like an outsider appearing from nowhere."
We pulled up outside a vast concrete structure on stilts. This, the men explained, is the cyclone shelter built by the Japanese years ago. We climbed to the top, and looked out towards the ocean. "Do you see the top of a tree, sticking out there?" Rezaul said, pointing into the far distance. I couldn't see anything, but then, eventually, I spotted a tiny jutting brown-green tip. "That is where my house was." When did you leave it? "In 2002. The ocean is coming very fast now. We think all this" - he waved his hand back over the island - "will be gone in 15 years."
Outside the rusty house next door, an ancient-looking man with a long grey beard was sitting cross-legged. I approached him, and he rose slowly. His name was Abdul Zabar; he didn't know his age, but guessed he is 80. "I was born here," he said. "There" - and he points out to the sea. "The island began to be swallowed in the 1960s, and it started going really quickly in 1991. I have lost my land, so I can't grow anything... I only live because one of my sons got a job in Saudi Arabia and sends money back to us. I am very frightened, but what can I do? I can only trust in God." The sea stops just in front of his home. What will you do, I asked, if it comes closer? "We will have nowhere to go to."
I was taken to the island's dam. It is a long stretch of hardened clay and concrete and mud. "This used to be enough," a man called Abul Kashin said, "but then the sea got so high that it came over the dam." They have tried to pile lumps of concrete on top, but they are simply washed away. "My family have left the island," he continued, "They were so sad to go. This is my homeland. If we had to leave here to go to some other place, it would be the worst day of my life."
Twenty years ago, there were 30,000 people on this island. There are 18,000 now - and most think they will be the last inhabitants.
On the beach, there were large wooden fishing boats lying unused. Abu Bashir, a lined, thin 28-year-old, pointed to his boat and said, "Fishing is almost impossible now. The waves are much bigger than they used to be. It used to be fine to go out in a normal [hand-rowed] boat. That is how my father and my grandfather and my ancestors lived.
"Now that is impossible. You need a [motor-driven] boat, and even that is thrown about by the waves so much. It's like the bay is angry."
The other fishermen burst in. "When there is a cyclone warning, we cannot go out fishing for 10 days. That is a lot of business lost. There used to be two or three warnings a year. Last year, there were 12. The sea is so violent. We are going hungry."
Yet the islanders insisted on offering me a feast of rice and fish and eggs. I was ushered into the council leader's house - a rusty shack near the sea - and the men sat around, urging me to tell the world what is happening. "If people know what is happening to us, they will help," they said. The women remained in the back room; when I glimpsed them and tried to thank them for the food, they giggled and vanished. I asked if the men had heard of global warming, and they looked puzzled. "No," they said. We stared out at the ocean and ate, as the sun slowly set on the island.
3. No hiding place
Through the morning mist, I peered out of the car window at the cratered landscape. Trees jutted out at surreal angles from the ground. One lay upside down with its roots sticking upwards towards the sky, looking like a sketch for a Dali painting. Shambrat had spat out his pan and was driving slowly now. "There are holes in the ground," he said, squinting with concentration. "From the cyclone. You fall in..." He made a splattering sound.
It was here, in the south of Bangladesh, that on 15 November last year, Cyclone Sidr arrived. It formed in the warmed Bay of Bengal and ripped across the land, taking more than 3,000 people with it. Like Americans talking about 9/11, everybody in Bangladesh knows where they were when Sidr struck. For miles, the upturned and smashed-out houses are intermixed with tents made from blue plastic sheeting. These stretches of plastic were handed out by the charities in the weeks after Sidr, and many families are still living in them now.
There have always been cyclones in Bangladesh, and there always will be - but global warming is making them much more violent. Back in Dhaka, the climatologist Ahsan Uddin Ahmed explained that cyclones use heat as a fuel: "The sea surface temperatures in the Bay of Bengal have been rising steadily for the past 40 years - and so, exactly as you would expect, the intensity of cyclones has risen too. They're up by 39 per cent on average." Again I circled a cyclone-struck island at random and headed for the dot.
The hour-long journey on a wooden rowing boat from the mainland to Charkashem Island passed in a dense mist that made it feel like crossing the River Styx. The spectral outline of other boats could sometimes be glimpsed, before they disappeared suddenly. One moment an old woman and a goat appeared and stared at me, then they were gone.
The island was a tiny dot of mud and lush, upturned greenery. It had no pier, so when the rowing boat bumped up against the sand I had to wade through the water.
I looked out over the silent island, and saw some familiar blue sheeting in the distance. As I trudged towards it, I saw some gaunt teenagers half-heartedly kicking a deflated football. From the sheeting, a man and woman stared, astonished.
"I was in my fields over there," Hanif Mridha said. "I saw the wind start, it was about eight at night, and I saw everything being blown around. I went and hid under an iron sheet, but that was blown away by the wind. The water came swelling up all of a sudden and was crashing all around me. I grabbed one of my children and ran to the forest" - he pointed to the cluster of trees at the heart of the island - "and climbed the tallest one I could reach. I went as high as I could but still the water kept rising and I thought - this is it, I'm going to drown. I'm dying, my children are dying, my wife is dying. I could see everything was under water and people were screaming everywhere. I held there for four hours with my son."
When the water washed away and he came down, everything was gone: his house, his crops, his animals, his possessions. A few days later, an aid agency arrived with some rice and some plastic sheeting to sleep under. Nobody has come since.
His wife, Begum Mridha, took over the story. Their children are terrified of the sea now, and have nightmares every night. They eat once a day, if they're lucky. "We are so hungry," she said. The new home they have built is made from twigs and the plastic sheet. Underneath it, they sleep with their eight children and Begum Mridha's mother. The children lay lethargically there, staring blankly into space over their distended bellies.
Begum Mridha cooks on a lantern. They eat once a day - if that. "It's so cold at night we can't sleep," she said. "The children all have diarrhoea and they are losing weight. It will take us more than two years to save up and get back what we had."
If cyclones hit this area more often, what would happen to you? Hanif looked down. He opened his mouth, but no words came.
4. Bangladesh's Noah
In the middle of Bangladesh, in the middle of my road trip, I tracked down Abul Hasanat Mohammed Rezwan. He was sitting under a parasol by the banks of a river, scribbling frenetically into his notebook.
"The catastrophe in Bangladesh has begun," he said. "The warnings [by the IPCC] are unfolding much faster than anyone anticipated." Until a few years ago, Rezwan was an architect, designing buildings for rich people - "but I thought, is this what I want to do while my country drowns? Create buildings that will be under water soon anyway?"
He considered dedicating his life to building schools and hospitals, "but then I realised they would be under water soon as well. I was hopeless. But then I thought of boats!"
He has turned himself into Bangladesh's Noah, urging his people to move on to boats as the Great Flood comes. Rezwan built a charity - Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha, which means self-reliance - that is building the only schools and hospitals and homes that can last now: ones that float.
We clambered on to his first school-boat, which is moored in Singra. In this area there is no electricity, no sewage system, and no state. The residents live the short lives of pre-modern people. But now, suddenly, they have a fleet of these boats, stocked with medicines and lined with books on everything from Shakespeare to accountancy to climatology. Nestling between them, there are six internet terminals with broadband access.
The boat began to float down the Curnai River, gathering scores of beaming kids as it went. Fatima Jahan, an unveiled 18-year-old girl dressed in bright red, arrived to go online. She was desperate to know the cricket scores. At every muddy village-stop, the boat inhaled more children, and I talked to the mothers who were beating their washing dry by the river. "I never went to school, and I never saw a doctor in my life. Now my children can do both!" a thin woman with a shimmering heart-shaped nose stud called Nurjahan Rupbhan told me. But when I asked about the changes in the climate, her forehead crumpled into long frown-lines.
I thought back to what the scientists told me in Dhaka. Bangladesh is a country with 230 rivers running through it like veins. They irrigate the land and give it its incredible fertility - but now the rivers are becoming supercharged. More water is coming down from the melting Himalayan glaciers, and more salt water is pushing up from the rising oceans. These two forces meet here in the heart of Bangladesh and make the rivers churn up - eroding the river banks with amazing speed. The water is getting wider, leaving the people to survive on ever-more narrow strips of land.
Nurjahan took me up to a crumbling river edge, where tree roots jutted out naked. "My house was here," she said. "It fell into the water. So now my house is here -" she motioned to a small clay hut behind us - "but now we realise this is going to fall in too. The river gets wider day by day."
But even this, Nurjahan said, is not the worst problem. The annual floods have become far more extreme, too. "Until about 10 years ago, the floods came every year and the water would stay for 15 days, and it helped to wet the land. Now the water stays for four months. Four months! It is too long. That doesn't wet the fields, it destroys them. We cannot plan for anything."
When the floods came last year, Nurjahan had no choice but to stay here. She lived with her children waist-deep in the cold brown water - for four months. "It was really hard to cook, or go to the toilet. We all got dysentery. It was miserable." Then she seemed to chastise herself. "But we survived! We are tough, don't you think?"
We sat by the river-bank, our feet dangling down towards the river. I asked if she agrees with Rezwan that her only option soon will be to move on to a boat. He is launching the first models this summer: floating homes with trays of earth where families can grow food. "Yes," she said, "We will be boat-people."
I clambered back on to one of the 42 school-boats in this area. Young children were in the front chanting the alphabet, and teenagers at the back were browsing through the books. I asked a 16-year-old boy called Mohammed Palosh Ali what he was reading about, and he said, "Global warming." I felt a small jolt. He was the first person to spontaneously raise global warming with me. Can you tell me what that is? "The climate is being changed by carbon dioxide," he said. "This is a gas that traps heat. So if there is more of it, then the ice in the north of the world melts and our seas rise here."
I asked if he had seen this warming in his own life. "Of course! The floods in 1998 and 2002 were worse than anything in my grandfather's life. We couldn't get any drinking water, so the dirty water I drank made me very sick. The shit from the toilet pits had risen up and was floating in the water, but we still had to drink it. We put tablets in it but it was still disgusting. What else could we do?"
Mohammed, do you know who is responsible for this global warming? He shakes his head. That answer lies a few pages further into the book. Soon he, and everybody else on this boat, will know it is me - and you.
5. The warming jihad
What happens to a country's mind as it drowns? Professor Philip Jenkins of Pennsylvania State University believes he can glimpse the answer: "The connection between climate change and religious violence is not tenuous," he says. "In fact, there's a historical indicator of how it could unfold: the Little Ice Age."
Between the ninth and 13th centuries, the northern hemisphere went through a natural phase of global warming. The harvests lasted longer - so there were more crops, and more leisure. Universities and the arts began to flower. But then in the late 13th century, the Little Ice Age struck. Crop production fell, and pack ice formed in the oceans, wrecking trade routes. People began to starve.
"In this climate of death and horror, people cast about for scapegoats, even before the Black Death struck," he says. Tolerance withered with the climate shocks: the Church declared witchcraft a heresy; the Jews began to be expelled from Britain. There was, he says, "a very close correlation between the cooling and a region-wide heightening of violent intolerance."
This time, there will be no need for imaginary scapegoats. The people responsible are on every TV screen, revving up their engines. Will jihadism swell with the rising seas? Bangladesh's religion seems to be low-key and local. In the countryside, Muslims - who make up 95 per cent of the nation - still worship Hindu saints and mix in a few Buddhist ideas, too. In the Arab world, people bring up God in almost every sentence. In Bangladesh, nobody does.
But then, as we returned to Dhaka, I was having a casual conversation with Shambrat. He had been driving all night - at his insistence - and by this point he was wired after chewing fistfuls of pan, and singing along at the top of his voice to the Eighties power ballads. I mentioned Osama bin Laden in passing, and he said, "Bin Laden - great man! He fight for Islam!" Then, without looking at me, he went back to singing: "It must have been love, but it's over now...."
I wondered how many Bangladeshis felt this way. The Chandni Chowk Bazaar - one of the city's main markets - was overcast the afternoon I decided to canvass opinions on Bin Laden. I approached a 24-year-old flower-seller called Mohammed Ashid, and as I inhaled the rich sweet scent of roses, he said: "I like him because he is a Muslim and I am a Muslim." Would you like Bin Laden to be in charge of Bangladesh? "Yes, of course," he said. And what would President Bin Laden do? "I have no idea," he shrugged. What would you want him to do? He furrowed his brow. "If Osama came to power he would make women cover up. Women are too free here." But what if women don't want to cover up? "They are Muslims. It's not up to them."
A very smartly dressed man called Shadul Ahmed was strolling down the street to his office, where he is in charge of advertising. "I like him," he said. "Bin Laden works for the Muslims." He conceded 9/11 "was bad because many innocents died," but added: "Osama didn't do it. The Americans did it. They are guilty."
As dozens of people paused from their shopping to talk, a pattern emerged: the men tend to like him, and the women don't. "I hate Bin Laden," one smartly dressed woman said, declining to give her name. "He is a fanatic. Bangladeshis do not like this." As the praise for Bin Laden was offered, I saw a boy go past on a rickshaw, stroking a girl's uncovered hair gently, sensuously. This is not the Arab world.
The only unpleasant moment came when I approached three women selling cigarettes by the side of the road. They were in their early thirties, wearing white hijabs and puffing away. Akli Mouna said, "I like him. He is a faithful Muslim." She said "it would be very nice" if he was president of Bangladesh. Really? Would you be happy if you were forced to wear a burqa, and only rarely allowed out of your house? She jabbed a finger at my chest. "Yes! It would be fine if Osama was president and told us to wear the burqa." But Akli - you aren't wearing a burqa now. "It's good to wear the burqa!" she yelled. Her teeth, I saw, were brown and rotting. "We are only here because we are poor! We should be kept in the house!"
I wanted to track down some Bangladeshi jihadis for myself, so I called the journalist Abu Sufian. He is a news reporter for BanglaVision, one of the main news channels, who made his name penetrating the thickets of the Islamist underground. He told me to meet him at the top of the BanglaVision skyscraper. As the city shrieked below us, he explained: "In the late 1980s, a group of mujahideen [holy warriors] who had been fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan came back to launch an Islamic revolution here in Bangladesh. They tried to mount an armed revolt in the north and kill the former Prime Minister. But it didn't come to much."
Islamic fundamentalism is hobbled in Bangladesh, because it is still associated for most people with Paki-stan - the country Bangladesh fought a bloody war of independence to escape from.
But Sufian says a new generation of Islamists is emerging with no memory of that war. "For example, I met a 21-year-old who had fought in Kashmir, whose father was a rickshaw driver. He said it was his holy duty to establish an Islamic state here through violence. Most were teenagers. All the jihadis I met hated democracy. They said it was the rule of man. According to them, only the rule of God is acceptable."
He said it would be almost impossible to track them down - they are in prison or hiding - but my best bet was to head for the Al-Amin Jami mosque in the north-west of Dhaka. "They are fundamentalist Wahhabis, and very dangerous," he said. Yet when I arrived, just before 6pm prayers, it was a bright building in one of the nicer parts of town. Men in white caps and white robes were streaming in. An ice-cream stall sat outside. I approached a fiftysomething man in flowing robes and designer shoes. He glared at me. I explained I was a journalist, and ask if it would it be possible to look inside the mosque? "No. Under no circumstances. At all."
OK. I asked a few polite questions about Islam, and then asked what he thought of Osama bin Laden. "Osama bin Laden?" he said. Yes. He scowled. "I have never heard of him." Never? "Never." I turned to the man standing, expectantly, next to him. "He has not heard of Osama bin Laden, either," he said. What about September 11 - you know, when the towers in New York fell? "I have never heard of this event, either." Some teenage boys were about to go in, so I approached them. Behind my back, I can sense the Gucci-man making gestures. "Uh... sorry... I don't think anything about Bin Laden," one of them said, awkwardly.
I lingered as prayers took place inside, until a flow of men poured out so thick and fast that they couldn't be instructed not to speak. "Yes, we would like Osama to run Bangladesh, he is a good man," the first person told me. There were nods. "He fights for Islam!" shouted another.
The crowd says this mosque - like most fundamentalist mosques on earth - is funded by Saudi Arabia, with the money you and I pay at the petrol pump. As I looked up at its green minaret jutting into the sky, it occurs to me that our oil purchases are simultaneously drowning Bangladesh, and paying for the victims to be fundamentalised.
After half-an-hour of watching this conversation and fuming, the initially recalcitrant man strode forward. "Why do you want to know about Bin Laden? We are Muslims. You are Christian. We all believe in the same God!" he announced.
Actually, I said, I am not a Christian. There was a hushed pause. "You are... a Jew?" he said. The crowd looked horrified; but then the man forced a rictus smile and announced: "We all believe in one God! We are all children of Abraham! We are cousins!" No, I said. I am an atheist. Everyone looked genuinely puzzled; they do not have a bromide for this occasion. "Well... then..." he paused, scrambling for a statement... "You must convert to Islam! Read the Koran! It is beautiful!" Ah - so can I come into the mosque after all? "No. Never."
6. The obituarist?
In a small café in Dhaka, a cool breeze was blowing in through the window along with the endless traffic-screams. The 32-year-old novelist Tahmima Anam was inhaling the aroma of coffee and close to despair.
She made her name by writing a tender novel - A Golden Age - about the birth of her country, Bangladesh. When the British finally withdrew from this subcontinent in 1948, the land they left behind was partitioned. Two chunks were carved out of India and declared to be a Muslim republic - East Pakistan and West Pakistan. But apart from their religion, they had very little in common. The gentle people of East Pakistan chafed under the dictatorial fundamentalism imposed from distant Islamabad. When they were ordered to start speaking Urdu, it was enough. Her novel tells how in 1971, they decided to declare independence and become Bangladesh. The Pakistanis fought back with staggering violence, but in the end Bangladesh was freed.
Now Anam is realising that unless we change, fast, this fight will have been for the freedom of a drowning land - and her next novel may have to be its obituary.
Anam came to Bangladesh late. Her Dhaka-born parents travelled the world, so she grew up in a slew of international schools, but she always dreamed of coming home. Her passion for this land, this place, this delta, aches through her work. About one of her characters, she wrote: "He had a love for all things Bengali: the swimming mud of the delta; the translucent, bony river fish; the shocking green palette of the paddy and the open, aching blue of the sky over flat land."
"You can see what has started to happen," she says. The vision of the country drowning is becoming more real every day. Where could all these 150 million people go? India is already building a border fence to keep them out; I can't imagine the country's other neighbour - Burma - will offer much refuge. "We are the first to be affected, not the last," Anam says. "Everyone should take a good look at Bangladesh. This story will become your story. We are your future."
It is, she says, our responsibility to stop this slow-mo drowning - and there is still time to save most of the country. "What could any Bangladeshi government do? We have virtually no carbon emissions to cut." They currently stand at 0.3 per cent of the world's - less than the island of Manhattan. "It's up to you."
Anam is defiantly optimistic that this change can happen if enough of us work for it - but, like every scientist I spoke to, she knows that dealing with it simply by adaptation by Bangladeshis is impossible. The country has a military-approved dictatorship incapable of taking long-term decisions, and Dutch-style dams won't work anyway. "Any large-scale construction is very hard in this country, because it's all made of shifting silt. There's nothing to build on."
So if we carry on as we are, Bangladesh will enter its endgame. "All the people who strain at this country's seams will drown with it," Anam says, "or be blown away to distant shores - casualties and refugees by the millions." The headstone would read, Bangladesh, 1971-2071: born in blood, died in water.
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper. To read more of his articles, click here or here.


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AARP Eye Center
Caregiving may be one of the most important, and challenging, roles you'll ever take on. No matter where you are in your caregiving journey — starting to plan; taking care of a family member in your home, in a facility, or from a distance; or managing end-of-life caregiving responsibilities — having resources at your fingertips will make the process easier.
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To order a print copy of this online guide, call the toll-free AARP Family Caregiving Resource Line at 877-333-5885 and indicate which state(s) you would like to receive. A copy will be mailed to you.
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If you have thoughts about how AARP can improve this resource guide, we invite you to go to aarp.org/preparetocaresurvey (en español: aarp.org/encuestacuidador).


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How I Explained Hackathons to My ParentsSendGrid Team
As a developer evangelist, I end up attending a lot of hackathons. I have a ton of fun at these events, helping attendees get their apps working and writing code of my own. My parents were very excited to learn about SendGrid and what Developer Evangelism is, but telling my parents, that "I love going to hackathons" elicited a more alarmed response.
You what?!
I love going to Hackathons. They're one of the most fun parts of my job! Getting to hack on things with other developers is rewarding and I always get to learn something new.
But, honey, hacking is illegal, we don't want you to get arrested.
Mom, it's not that kind of hacking. The term hacking comes from the early days of computers, really it just means working with and creating cool code and apps. At some point, it came to mean breaking into systems. Today, it really has two meanings: (1) coding and loving it and (2) breaking into things. When I say hackathon, I'm referring to the first definition.
Alright, so what are those hackathons, then anyway?
Hackathons are events put together to bring the coding community together. They're typically over a weekend. "Hackers" get together and pitch ideas. People then split up into teams and work on turning the ideas into apps. At the end of the weekend, every team presents their apps. There's usually some judging and prizes, but if you ask me that's the least exciting part.
What good are these apps?
That's actually a really good question! Most of the time, they're pretty useful, because someone had a problem and made a solution at the hackathon. Sometimes, hackathons are organized to solve a problem, and better society. The apps that come out of those are fantastic as they usually help solve larger problems.
What are some apps that have come out of hackathons?
Well, there are a bunch, but you probably haven't heard of a lot of them, as they're small or fit very specific niches. I know we've used GroupMe to communicate, that came out of TechCrunch Disrupt. You may have heard of Zaarly, which lets you hire local experts, that was the result of LA Startup Weekend.
Can I go to a hackathon?
Yeah! You can and you should! I think everyone can be useful at a hackathon. You could propose people work on that idea you've been trying to get me to build with the Arduino Lilly Pad and heart rate monitor. Colorado GiveCamp and Hack4Colorado are two great hackathons where participants might be willing to do that for your nonprofit.
You can follow both my mom and dad on Twitter where they complain about me writing about them on the internet.


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"Auditory cheesecake" is how famed cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker once described music. He called it an "exquisite confection crafted to tickle" the spots in the brain that leave us feeling happy and relaxed.
That rings true for music that's akin to, say, Mozart—but what about Metallica? Lil' Wayne? It's harder to think of noisy, bass-heavy music as "cheesecake," let alone accept that it's tickling neurons.
Apparently it is. New research shows (pdf) that music with heavy bass makes people feel far more confident. Not only do they act more powerfully and decisively; that kind of music also improves their abstract thinking. The study's findings suggest some big practical implications, says Derek Rucker, professor at Kellogg School of Management and one of the co-authors.
"Just as professional athletes might put on empowering music before they take the field to get them in a powerful state of mind," Rucker told Kellogg Insight, "you might try [listening to bass-heavy music] in certain situations where you want to be empowered."
The study, which was just published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, was based on a series of experiments conducted as participants listened to a "high power" playlist—containing Queen's "We Will Rock You," 2 Unlimited's "Get Ready for This" and 50 Cent's "In Da Club"—and a "low-power" playlist featuring songs similar in style but with less bass (Fatboy Slim's "Because We Can," Baha Men's "Who Let the Dogs Out," and Notorious BIG's "Big Poppa").
It turned out that those listening to the "high-power" playlist were much more focused on power and control. In a word-completion exercise, they came up with more power-related words (e.g. when presented with "p–er," they tended to write "power" instead of "paper," as the other group did).They also volunteered to go first in a debate twice as often as those who'd been tuned into the "low-power" mix (35% vs. 20%). In an experiment offering participants $5 for correctly predicting the outcome of a die roll, they were more likely to hog the die, instead of letting someone else do it, which the researchers took to indicate their "illusion of control." They also messed up less often than the low-power crew in a categorization task that measured abstract thinking.
Bass was the critical factor, the researchers discovered. To figure this out, they conducted power-gauging experiments that stripped out the bassline from the high-power songs and, in another, conducted the word-completion test after playing bass-heavy and bass-light instrumental music for different study groups. Throughout the experiments, the researchers controlled for the influence of positive emotions—that "auditory cheesecake" thing—as well as lyrics.
So that's the science. But what about how to use it?
Rucker suggests it could be useful prep before important client meetings, job interviews, negotiations or critical meetings with your boss.
"One thing we know from prior research is that people who feel powerful tend to make the first offer in negotiations. Essentially, power is a propensity to act, to take charge of the situation," explains Rucker, who notes that retailers, managers and advertisers should probably also take note of what their music choices are doing to their target customers' brains.


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I think one of the basic premises I acknowledge in my essays is one that even some of the more 'enlightened' Men of the 'community' don't entirely grasp. This is the presumption of a feminine reality. Sometimes I refer to this as the female imperative, other times I might colloquially express it in terms of it being "The Matrix" for an ease of understanding, but I always presume my readers (even of my comments on other blogs or forums) have a basic understanding of this.
I think I may be a bit mistaken in this.
Everything a man experiences, every social conditioning he receives from the earliest age, every accepted social norm and every expectation of him to qualify as the definition of a mature adult Man in contemporary society is designed to serve the female imperative. Moralist wallow in it, absolutists and defeated white knights existentially depend upon it, and even the better part of relativists still (often unwittingly) feed and serve the feminine purpose. In fact, so all encompassing is this reality that we define our masculinity in the terms of how well we can accommodate that feminne influence.
Our media celebrates it, and brooks no dissent. There is very little dissent, since to peel back the veneer is to be at odds with a reality defined by the female purpose. You feel lonely because you can't understand it's influence, and the conditioning you've been subjected to defines the objective solution to curing that feeling. You base the decisions of your future, your education, your career, your religious beliefs, even where you'll choose to live, to better accomodate the feminine influence either in the present or in preparation of accommodating it in the future.
You get married, out of fear for not being found acceptable of it, or from social shame for not yet having accepted your role in service to the imperative. Your children are offered in tribute to it, while in turn you unknowingly perpetuate it in them. You pay tribute in alimony, in divorce proceedings, in the expected sacrifices your career demands to maintain its influence in your own life and in society at large. You exist to facilitate a feminine reality.
We can excuse it with moralisms, we can attach notions of honor and stability to it, we can even convince ourselves that the feminine imperative is OUR own imperative, but regardless, men still serve it.
Sexual Strategies
For one gender to realize their sexual imperative the other must sacrifice their own. This is the root source of power the feminine imperative uses to establish its own reality as the normative one. From this flows the rules of engagement for dating / mating, operative social conventions used to maintain cognitive dominance, and laws and legalities that bind society to the benefit of the feminine. From this is derived men's default status as the 'disposable' sex, while women are the protected sex. It's this root that the imperative uses to excuse (not apologize for) the most blatant inconsistencies and atrocities of women.
Monogamy and fidelity are only useful when paired with an optimized hypergamy. Without that optimization, they're inconvenient obligations to the the feminine reality.
In order to effect this reality men must be convinced of a degree of more control than the feminine imperative exerts. They must believe that it is they who are the masters of a reality defined by the feminine, while remaining dependent upon the systems that the feminine reality outlines for them. So they are told they are Kings, brutes, savages, patricians, intellectuals, anything that might convince them that the reality they exist in is privileged and expressly serves their purpose. Already the 'protected sex', this all encourages the default presumption of victimhood for the feminine.
The crowning irony of the feminine reality is that men should be accused of patriarchy while enabling the very framework of the feminine imperative. The feminine sexual strategy is victorious because even under the contrived auspices of male oppression, it's still the female goal-state that is agreed upon as the correct effort. Satisfying the feminine imperative, achieving the ends of the feminine sexual strategy is still the normative condition. Men's goals are aberrant, women's are beatific.
Forgive me if I've waxed a bit too poetic here, but it's important to see the Matrix for what it really is. The next occasion you lock horns with even the most well-meaning woman's (or mangina's) opinions about life, relationships, marriage, having babies, religion, etc. understand that her perceptions are based in this reality. She's correct because her beliefs line up with what the framework of her reality reinforced in her as correct. Any other frame of reference is either utterly alien to her at best, wicked and evil at worst.
Morpheus: The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.


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|Oracle Subqueries
Version 21c
|General Information
|Library Note
|Subqueries, in Oracle, are nothing more than queries within queries and they can be present in the SELECT, FROM, WHERE, GROUP BY, HAVING, and ORDER BY clauses.
Subqueries can not only be used essentially anywhere they come in a wide number of variations many of which are named such as SIMPLE, CORRELATED, SCALAR, INLINE, and NESTED.
Examples of subqueries can be found throughout the Library but the following links point to places in the Library where you are going to find specific examples of subquery usage that should acquaint you with most of the constructs.
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If the scallion bread is really from Shanghai, or what the one in Shanghai looks like, sorry I can't tell. But it is what Hongkong people like to call, and this is how the vendors like to make: a bit flaky, quite chewy, very aromatic and so highly addictive!
In the 80s and 90s in HK, vendors selling Shanghai/northern-style food were used to be everywhere, sort of like pizzerias in Roma or hotdog carts in NYC. But later, they one by one disappeared, is it due to the (bad) nature of HK people who always keep changing their taste, or due to the ridiculously high rent that killed their business? My husband and I are so sad that now we only find scallion bread at fancy restaurants. In order to charge a higher price, the bread is always overdone (creating excessive flaky layers and adding some lard bites), it is more like a pastry rather than a down-earth bread...
So a few years ago I decided to make my own... started from searching the recipes on internet, testing a few, improvised a bit here or there (no need for too much as the ingredients are so simple!). Since I have been making it many times, I can just estimate the amount. So when you make it based on my recipe, please do count on your eye-n-hand judgment as well.
You know how happy for a kid when the mom hands him/her a big lollipop? I saw the same happy face on my husband when I put down a plate of scallion bread :D
- 320g flour
- 1/4 tsp of baking powder
- 1/4 tsp of salt
- 2 tsp of vegetable oil (but not olive oil)
- 220 - 230 ml water, boiling hot
- about 6 stalks (or more) of scallion
- a small bowl of oil, set aside. With a brush
- a small bowl of fine sea salt, set aside
Finely chop the scallion, I use the whole including the white part (but not the root though), but try to chop the white even finer as its taste is more pungent than the green part. Set aside.
Well combine the flour, 1/4 tsp salt and baking powder in a mixing bowl, set aside.
Boil the water, add in oil. Then pour most of the hot liquid into the flour mixture, stir very quickly and see how the texture goes, then pour the rest of hot liquid. The dough should be slightly sticky (it will dry up a bit when you work on it later), knead it a few minutes or until it looks smooth.
Place dough in a bowl, pre-greased, cover and rest for an hour.
Evenly divide the dough into 12 or 13 portions. Remember to cover those doughs that you are not working on.Coil the roll-up. Gently press down the coil with your palm. Then roll it flatter to the thickness close to 1 cm. Pre-heat a 9cm skillet, drizzle one teaspoon oil, place 3 slices of bread, cook for 3 or 4 minutes over medium heat. Then cook the other side for another 3 minutes.


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An essential piece for any jewellery box! With a slim silhouette, this delicate rhodium-plated ring is refined and easy-to-wear. One half is adorned with sparkling crystals. Combine it with jewellery in silver tones or wear it together with the gold-plated Rare ring for a trendy stacked look.
1121066/ 1121065


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Advances in electronic medical record systems and health information exchange are shifting efforts in public health toward greater use of information systems to automate disease surveillance, but a study from the Regenstrief Institute has found that these technologies' capabilities are underutilized by those on the front lines of preventing and reporting infections.
The new study measured the awareness, adoption and use of electronic medical record systems and health information exchange by hospital-based infection preventionists to report and share information critical to public health. Infection preventionists are often responsible for reporting information on patients diagnosed with healthcare-acquired infections like Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), as well as sexually transmitted diseases such as chlamydia.
Prior research at Regenstrief and other academic institutions has shown that health information exchange can increase the completeness and timeliness of infection reporting to local and state health agencies. In this study, the researchers found that half of the infection preventionists surveyed were unaware of whether their hospital or health system participated in a health information exchange. Only 10 percent of infection preventionists indicated that their organizations were formally engaged in health information exchange activities.
While 70 percent of infection preventionists surveyed reported access to an electronic medical record system, less than 20 percent were involved in the design, selection or implementation of the system. Without such involvement, those surveyed indicated the information systems often did not include modules or components that supported infection control activities.
There is a push from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to reduce hospital-acquired infections and increase the use of electronic health record systems, says lead author Brian Dixon, MPA, PhD, Regenstrief Institute investigator and assistant professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are encouraging local and state health departments to use health information technologies to improve infectious disease reporting and prevention activities. We found that while hospital-based infection preventionists -- the people on the front line -- may have access to health information technology, they lack specially designed computer tools needed to sift through the massive amounts of data in electronic medical records.
We learned that hospital infection preventionists are frustrated with inefficient lists of patients whose electronic medical charts they must examine individually," says Dixon, who is also a health research scientist with the Richard Roudebush Veterans Affairs Medical Center. "They say they want electronic alerts and reminders when the system detects something of potential importance. There needs to be concerted R&D to meet this gap in decision support."
In addition to Dixon, co-authors of the study are Josette Jones, PhD, of the School of Informatics and Computing; and Shaun Grannis, MD, MS, of the Regenstrief Institute and the IU School of Medicine. The Regenstrief Institute is the home of internationally recognized centers of excellence in biomedical and public health informatics, aging, and health services and health systems research.
Infection Preventionists Awareness of and Engagement in Health Information Exchange to Improve Public Health Surveillance was published online on Feb. 18 in the American Journal of Infection Control. The study was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Well-designed and supported electronic medical records systems and health information exchange can provide tools that can help prevent and halt the spread of infection among hospitalized patients," Dixon says. "But to do so effectively, infection preventionists must be made part of the selection and implementation of health information technologies.


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Bloodlines, the latest long player from Rhode Island audio arsonists, HOWL, drops in North America today courtesy of Relapse Records! Recorded at the infamous Planet Z Studio in Hadley, Massachusetts with Chris "Zeuss" Harris (Soulfly, Crowbar, Municipal Waste, 3 Inches Of Blood et al), Bloodlines belts out 40 unforgiving minutes of deliciously lead-footed, brutalic dirgery.
Described by the band simply as, "the child of sweet southern riffs and a dirty gorilla with big dirty gorilla balls," Bloodlines continues to raise eyebrows globally for its thunderous riffing and primal urgency. "Bloodlines features enough powerful riffs and angry attitude to sate the mainstream, while the underground will dig the overall feeling of doom and hatred. Did I mention the utterly stellar songwriting?," gushes Ghost Cult in an 8/10 review of the record while Decibel notes, "This is the type of galloping, growling, grot-filled effort you expect from a Motörhead shirt wearing metal band. No hyphens necessary." American Aftermath says Bloodlines, "is the equivalent of being punched repeatedly in the gut with brass knuckles and then pushed down the mouth of an active volcano," Metal Kaoz raves, "HOWL do an amazing work moving from heavy to doom metal never crossing to another genre such as death metal due to the vocals, and as such they avoid the detrimental choices of other American bands that mix genres and eventually fail," and The Sludgelord declares, "If you are looking for ten tracks of superior metal, incorporating doom, trad, modern southern styles and more, don't hesitate to pick this one up. Good band, great album." Elsewhere Terrorizer commends the record for packing,"… an almighty punch and features an ever-changing dynamic within track tempos," Nefarious Realm gushes, "Bloodlines is genre defying, doom laden, thrashy, and filled with groove," Alternative Control boasts , "If [debut album] Full of Hell was a tsunami, this album is a sniper attack," while The Bone Reader concludes, "The passing of time has not dulled the blade, but it has altered its course. After lashing out wildly with their previous works, HOWL now strike boldly with surgical precision."
In related news, the latest Relapse Records podcast features song picks and a special interview with HOWL throat Vincent Hausman. Check it out via Metal Injection HERE.
Team HOWL is currently putting the finishing touches on a new music video for "Demonic," directed by Connor Owens . In the meantime, sever your ears to Bloodlines, currently streaming in its entirety at MetalSucks HERE. Order your copy of Bloodlines HERE.
"…deliciously vicious…" – MetalSucks


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Trafalgar Square Crowd
Wednesday, 4th October 2006 by Alex Turnbull
Man, there's a whole heap of people in Trafalgar Square since the latest image update. Does anyone know what they're all doing?
Update: dda worked it out – this is the 29th of January 2006, and we're seeing several thousand Chinese celebrating the first day of the Year of the Dog. See my comment for photo links.
Thanks to Patryk.


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As a recent experiment, I wanted to try something that was unconventional for most homebrewers, and is widely considered to be clown-crap crazy. I wanted to ferment a beer topless, without a lid. I settled on ten gallons of a Belgian Dubbel, split into two batches, one went into a better bottle with bung and airlock, the other half in a bucket without a lid for the first ~48-72 hours. For those who haven't tried this, I'd highly recommend it at least once, as it is amazing, being able to look into the beer closet/fridge and seeing the yeast snap, crackle, and pop while you look down on it during fermentation.
Due to space constraints in the keezer, I could only get one of the two on tap at a time, so I opted for the closed fermentation half first, during which time I cold crashed the other half in the lagering fridge. The closed fermentation tasted very similar to what I would expect for a commercial Dubbel; subdued yeast character, dark fruit, a little clove, hardly any banana, quite malty, a very calm, typical Belgian ale. I just kegged off and drew a sample of the topless fermentation half, and the best way of describing it is: Woah! Completely different flavor and aroma. I get a very profound banana flavor, some clove, some dark fruit, all of it overpowers any malt flavor. It's almost undesirable, it's so intense.
What is the scientific explanation behind open fermentation leading to more ester formation during fermentation? I assume it has something to do with the CO2 pressure blanket over the wort, so I wonder if similar results can be seen if using a carboy with a more confined hole in lieu of a wide open a bucket. Can anyone explain this?


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Saturn's Colorful Aurora (annotated)
While the curtain-like auroras we see at Earth are green at the bottom and red at the top, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has shown us similar curtain-like auroras at Saturn that are red at the bottom and purple at the top. This is how the auroras would look to the human eye.
The color difference occurs because Earth's auroras are dominated by excited nitrogen and oxygen atoms and molecules, and Saturn's auroras are dominated by excited forms of hydrogen. Within each element, colors can differ because of atmospheric density, the levels of the atomic version of an element versus the molecular version, and the energy of impacting electrons.
The height of this particular part of the aurora is about 870 miles (1,400 kilometers).
This image from Cassini's imaging cameras shows particularly bright auroras on Nov. 29, 2010. Star tracks appear in the clear sky due to the spacecraft's motion. Color was derived from the measurements in red, green and blue filters. In the annotated version, the longitude and latitude are marked on the planet with white dashed lines. An unannotated version is also available.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov or http://www.nasa.gov/cassini . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute


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The appeal is dismissed for want of a substantial federal question.
Mr. Justice WHITE, with whom Mr. Justice BRENNAN joins, dissenting. [434 U.S. 989 , 990] In 1929 this Court held that Connecticut's guest statute did not violate the Equal Protection Clause, because it could not be said that "no grounds exist[ed] for the distinction" between gratuitous passengers in automobiles and those in other classes of vehicles. Silver v. Silver, 280 U.S. 117, 123 (1929). While that decision for a while foreclosed federal equal protection challenges to the guest statutes of the various States, in recent years the issue of the constitutional validity of these statutes has been frequently litigated in state courts with conflicting results. Since 1971 the highest courts of no fewer than 6 States have concluded that their guest statutes violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,2 while during the same period similar statutes [434 U.S. 989 , 991] have been upheld against federal constitutional attack in 10 States. 3 Typical of those decisions striking down the guest statutes is Brown v. Merlo, 8 Cal.3d 855, 106 Cal.Rptr. 388, 506 P.2d 212 (1973), in which the California Supreme Court concluded that the classifications created by the challenged statute between those denied and those permitted recovery for negligently inflicted injuries did not bear a substantial and rational relation to the statute's purposes of protecting the hospitality of the host driver and of preventing collusive lawsuits. Silver v. Silver was expressly distinguished as involving different equal protection considerations. In contrast,, the Oregon Supreme Court, among others, has held that the hospitality rationale does support the distinctions drawn by the State's guest statute. Duerst v. Limbocker, supra.
As could be expected from the frequency of the consideration of this question by the state courts and from the contradictory results, the issue has been presented here several [434 U.S. 989 , 992] times in recent years. In each of the last three Terms, we have been asked to consider whether a state or federal court had correctly determined that a state guest statute did not violate the Equal Protection Clause, and on each occasion we declined to grant plenary consideration of the question. Sidle v. Majors, 536 F.2d 1156 (CA7), cert. denied, 429 U.S. 945 (1976); White v. Hughes, 257 Ark. 627, 519 S.W.2d 70, appeal dismissed for want of substantial federal question, 423 U.S. 805 (1975); Cannon v. Oviatt, 520 P. 2d 883 (Utah), appeal dismissed for want of substantial federal question, 419 U.S. 810 (1974).
It is significant that on two of these occasions the issue was presented here by means of appeal and that the constitutional grounds urged for invalidity were similar to those relied upon by those courts that have invalidated state guest statutes. We nevertheless dismissed in these two instances for want of a substantial federal question, thus ruling on the merits of the equal protection issue, Hicks v. Miranda, 422 U.S. 332 (1975), and rejecting the challenge to the statutes.
Such dismissals, however, may not serve their intended purpose, for on at least three occasions since our decision in Cannon v. Oviatt, supra, state courts have invalidated guest statutes on the same or very similar equal protection grounds found to be insubstantial in Cannon. Because the significant division among state courts persists despite Silver v. Silver, supra, and despite our more recent relevant dismissals, I would note probable jurisdiction and set this case for oral argument.
[ Footnote 1 ] Section 30.115 reads as follows:
[ Footnote 2 ] In the following cases guest statutes were declared invalid on federal constitutional grounds: McGeehan v. Bunch, 88 N.M. 308, 540 P.2d 238 (1975); Laakonen v. Eighth Judicial District Court, 91 Nev. 506, 538 P.2d 574 (1975); Primes v. Tyler, 43 Ohio St.2d 195, 331 N.E.2d 723 (1975 ); Thompson v. Hagan, 96 Idaho 19, 523 P.2d 1365 (1974); Henry v. Bauder, 213 Kan. 751, 518 P.2d 362 (1974); Brown v. Merlo, 8 Cal.3d 855, 106 Cal. Rptr. 388, 506 P.2d 212 (1973). In each of these cases, the statute was also invalidated on state constitutional grounds, but it is apparent that various equal protection cases in this Court, such as Jimenez v. Weinberger, 417 U.S. 628 (1974); Reed v. Reed, 404 U.S. 71 (1971); Glona v. American Guarantee & Liability Ins. Co., 391 U.S. 73 ( 1968), were read as requiring a different federal constitutional result from that announced in Silver v. Silver and were influential factors in arriving at the state-law conclusion.
Additionally, in two cases guest statutes were invalidated on state constitutional grounds: Manistee Bank & Trust Co. v. McGowan, 394 Mich. 655, 232 N.W.2d 636 (1975); Johnson v. Hassett, 217 N.W.2d 771 (N.D.1974).
[ Footnote 3 ] In the following cases guest statutes were upheld: Sidle v. Majors, 536 F.2d 1156 (CA7), cert. denied, 429 U.S. 945 (1976); Behrns v. Burke, 89 S.D. 96, 229 N.W.2d 86 (1975); White v. Hughes, 257 Ark. 627, 519 S.W.2d 70, appeal dismissed for want of substantial federal question, 423 U.S. 805 ( 1975); Richardson v. Hansen, 186 Colo. 346, 527 P.2d 536 (1974); Duerst v. Limbocker, 269 Or. 252, 525 P.2d 99 (1974); Cannon v. Oviatt, 520 P.2d 883 (Utah), appeal dismissed for want of substantial federal question, 419 U.S. 810 (1974); Keasling v. Thompson, 217 N. W.2d 687 (Iowa 1974); Justice v. Gatchell, 325 A.2d 97 (Del.1974); Tisko v. Harrison, 500 S.W.2d 565 (Tex.Civ.App.1973); Delany v. Badame, 49 Ill. 2d 168, 74 N.E.2d 353 (1971).
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There is no evidence supporting claims that cooking or heating food in the microwave can give you cancer or food poisoning.
Senaka Ranadheera, Victoria University; Duane Mellor, University of Canberra; Nenad Naumovski, University of Canberra, and Robyn McConchie, University of Sydney
Today every kitchen would seem "under-equipped" without a microwave, with its efficient ability to cook, defrost and reheat a variety of different foods. The handy appliance uses microwave radiation to do so. This is a type of electromagnetic radiation similar to radio waves and infrared light.
Although generally recognised as safe, the internet is awash with articles about the dangers microwave radiation poses to your food. Some claim using microwaves can cause "cataracts and cancer". Other posts says it "zaps the nutrients right out of your food".
If you believe this, the "killer" oven in your kitchen must be a terrifying sight, but there is actually no research to support the supposed dangers of microwave cooking. Hopefully we can allay your fears by checking some common danger claims against the evidence.
Does it zap the nutrients out?
Putting raw foods through any type of process – including heating and cooling – leads to changes in their physical properties, chemical composition and nutritional profile.
If nutrients are lost from foods cooked in microwaves, this would be because too high a temperature was used, or they were cooked for too long. The correct combination of time and temperature can help preserve most nutrients while also improving the foods' taste, texture and colour.
The time and temperature required depends on the type of food. High risk foods such as meat, fish and eggs need to be heated to at least 60℃ to be safe.
Rapid cooking helps preserve beneficial chemicals in green vegetables. from shutterstock.com
Microwave cooking is unlikely to negatively affect vitamins and other compounds associated with improved health. For instance, rapid cooking actually helps preserve a group of beneficial chemicals, the polyphenols – that increase the total antioxidant activity of foods – in green vegetables.
One study compared microwaving or steaming vegetables, such as cabbage, carrots, cauliflower and spinach, to pressure cooking. It found vegetables that were pressure cooked lost more insoluble fibre, which is good for gut health, than those that were microwaved or steamed.
A key nutrient usually destroyed when cooking vegetables is vitamin C, a severe lack of which can lead to conditions like scurvy. But boiling vegetables accounts for greater nutrient losses than microwaving them. This is because water soluble nutrients are readily leached into water when they are boiled, while very little water is used in microwaving.
Short bursts of heating, such as used in microwave cooking, can retain most of a vegetable's vitamin C.
Can it give you cancer?
Some of the best studied cancer-causing compounds are the heterocyclic aromatic amines (HCA). These are formed naturally in protein-rich food such as meat and fish during cooking, and are more likely to form if the meat is cooked for a long time and at higher temperatures.
The method of cooking is a major factor affecting HCA formation. Some researchers have reported HCA are formed in chicken at higher levels when cooked in a microwave, compared to when pan-fried, barbecued or baked.
Barbecued fish has higher levels of HCA than microwaved fish. from shutterstock.com
But no research has claimed or shown an association between regular consumption of microwave-cooked poultry and cancer.
A recent study has revealed barbecued fish contains more HCA than microwave-cooked fish, while HCA could not be detected at all in microwaved beef. Also, thawing beef and re-heating previously-cooked meat or fish in a microwave just for a few minutes, does not produce any extra HCA.
What about the packaging?
There is some evidence to suggest chemicals in plastic packaging can migrate into foods when microwaved, which has been associated with increased risk of cancer.
If your packaging has a microwave safe symbol, it is safe to use in the microwave. from shutterstock.com
But most of today's plastic containers, packages and wraps are specially designed to withstand microwave temperatures.
If packaging is marketed as microwave safe, has a microwave symbol or provides instructions for proper microwave use, it is safe for microwave cooking or heating.
Leaching of harmful toxins or "cancer-causing" compounds from appropriately packaged products during microwaving is highly unlikely in Australia, although this area could benefit from more research.
Does it kill bad bugs?
Cooking food significantly reduces the risk of food-borne illness.
A major challenge in microwaving is the unevenness of temperature distribution due to the shape of the food. You may notice when you heat food in a microwave that there are often hot and cold spots. This poses a potential safety issue.
Microwave cooking can only kill disease-causing bugs when the correct temperature and time combination is achieved throughout the food portion. Cooking to temperatures above 60℃ will kill most bugs known to cause food-borne illness, but the toxins produced by them may be heat-tolerant.
Stir food during the microwaving process so the heat is evenly distributed. Lachlan Hardy/Flickr, CC BY
If the food is already contaminated with bugs that produce toxins, microwaving might kill the toxin-producing bug but not destroy the toxins, despite the correct temperature and time combination. This can also apply to other cooking methods. Appropriate food storage is the key to minimising such risks.
Minimising risk
Avoid overcooking vegetables to minimise nutrient losses
Before microwaving, check the labelling on the package and follow the instructions
If the package is not marked as being microwave-safe, switch to a suitable microwave container
Rotate and stir foods during cooking to spread the temperature of heating equally and as such minimise potential for food-borne illness. Check the temperature of food before consumption
Remember microwaving cannot magically make contaminated food safe. So if in doubt, throw it out.
Senaka Ranadheera, Early Career Research Fellow, Advanced Food Systems Research Unit, College of Health and Biomedicine, Victoria University; Duane Mellor, Associate Professor in Nutrition and Dietetics, University of Canberra; Nenad Naumovski, Asistant Professor in Food Science and Human Nutrition, University of Canberra, and Robyn McConchie, Professor, Faculty of Agriculture and Environment, University of Sydney
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.


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Manufacturer: Lixus Labs
Category: Orale steroider
Substance: Oral Turinabol (4-Chlorodehydromethyl Testosterone)
Package: 100 tabs, 10mg per tablet
Lixus Turinabol is a potent derivative of dianabol. This oral steroid is structurally a cross between methandrostenolone and clostebol (4-cholorotestosterone)
It has the same base structure as Dianabol with the added 4-chloro alteration of clostebol. In essence it's a cousin of Dianabol displaying no estrogenic and less androgenic activity that Dianabol.
Lixus Turinabol you will get good hard gains and also does not create risk for estrogenic side effects, so there is limited water retention or risk for gynecomastia.
In studies done on male athletes that were given 10 mg every day over six weeks, no negative health effects or side effects were reported.
It is also used in low doses to reduce the binding of SHBG to other steroids. Oral Turinabol has the ability to reduce SHBG and allow testosterone to be more readily used.
Recently, Lixus Turinabol has found its way back into the hands of athletes all over the world. Turinabol became a steroid of infamy during the 1990's when it was revealed that it had been one of the closely held secrets inside the "East German Doping Machine" This is referring to the state-sponsored doping program called "State Plan Research Theme 14.25" that operated in East Germany between 1974 and 1989 that had one goal – to cheat the Olympics
Jenapharm discontinued Turinabol in 1994 however Lixus has recreated the chemical structure.
Most users do fairly well with doses between 40 and 60 milligrams per day, taken in divided doses.
Lixus Labs Turinabol tubs contains 100 tablets 10mg Chlorodehydromethyltestosteron
Androgenic: 38
Anabolic: 200
Estrogenic: None
Progestational: Low
Active Half life
16 hours
An effective daily dose of 40mg taken every day in cycles lasting no more than 6 – 8 weeks to minimize hepatoxicity. This level is sufficient for measurable increases in lean muscle mass and strength. Lixus Turinabol is often applied as a pre-contest or cutting steroid as it does not convert to estrogen. You get a strong anabolic steroid where you get hard lean gains with the added benefit of not having to carry around any extra weight or fat.
Studies have shown that taking an oral anabolic steroid with food might decrease it's bioavailability. This is caused by the fat-soluble nature of steroid hormones which allow some of the drug to dissolve with undigested dietary fat, reducing it's absorption from the gastrointestinal tract. For maximum utilization Lixus Turinabol should be taken on an empty stomach.