Free, easy charity donations

Click on the ”Help Strike Out Sun Damage” banner and Coppertone will donate $1 (up to $30,000) to the National Foundation for Cancer Research: http://www.coppertone.com/coppertone/index.jsp

Intel will donate 25¢ per click to support Kiva and Save the Children (one click per visitor per web session).  In other words, you can click this one every day: http://www.smallthingschallenge.com/

Ponyo is on a boat. Take a good, hard look at it.

[video source]

New type of breathalyzer detects lung cancer with 86% accuracy

Via Psyorg:

Scientists in Israel have devised a portable breath tester that detects lung cancer with 86 percent accuracy, according to a study released Sunday.
The device could provide an early warning system that flags the disease before tumours become visible in X-rays, the researchers reported in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
“Our results show great promise for fast, easy and cost-effective diagnosis and screening of lung cancer,” they said.
The sensor uses gold nanoparticles to detect levels of so-called volatile organic compounds (VOC) — measured in a few parts per billion — that become more elevated in cancer patients.
Early detection of lung cancer dramatically increases the odds of survival. Currently, only 15 percent of cases are discovered before the disease has begun to spread. [...]
Lung cancer claims some 1.3 million lives worldwide each year, accounting for nearly 18 percent of all deaths from cancer, according to the World Health Organisation.

Epic Amazon.com reviews: fresh whole rabbit

Product HERE, user-submitted pictures HERE, reviews HERE. 

Some examples:

A real time saver, February 9, 2007
By  Elvis_Nixon (Oil Trough, Arkansas)
How many weekends have I spent, in the loincloth, knife clenched in my teeth, running through the fields trying to find a rabbit? (A bunch, trust me on this, a bunch.) All so I can have something to sacrifice on the altar once I get to the cave.
Now, with this, home, fix a cocktail, go through the day’s mail, finish my drink and drive over to the cave, yank this carcass out of the box and offer this at the feet of my dark lord and master, boom, done. I’m happy, my dark lord and master is happy, everybody wins.
What a time saver.

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Baal-Hammon rejects it!, December 4, 2007
By  V. Zhirinovsky “Vlad the Mad” (Virginia, USA)
I am Director of Unholy Sacrifices for a prominent pagan bloodcult. Since our traditional sacrifical practices have been banned in 189 countries and the moon, we are now allowed only to use animal carcasses purchased on the internet. Let me warn you, Baal-Hammon will NOT be appeased by this offering. The Dark One will only accept sacrifices of mammals larger than a badger. If he is displeased, he will, depending on his mood, incinerate you, disembowel you, or turn you into an American. I hope this review helps, because I incurred his wrath and now live in Virginia.

That might work.

[picture source / direct link]

WANT.

Via dailymail.co.uk:

[...] an enterprising design student has come up with a folding plug that tucks away snugly to a quarter of the size of a standard one. [...]

It is intended to be used with laptops, mobile phones and digital cameras, where the normal size would be too bulky and the pins could scratch the device.

The plug is just 1cm thick compared with the standard 4.5cm size.

Designer Min Kyu Choi, from Bayswater, West London, came up with the idea after a plug damaged his laptop. [...]

He has also created an adaptor that allows three of the plugs to fit into one standard socket.

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

“So we started the day at a town hall meeting where people who have health care were enraged that Barack Obama was Hitler and a socialist and a fascist, and then we came here, where people lined up at two, three, four o’clock in the morning because they didn’t have access to even the most fundamental of health care. I don’t understand why the people who have stuff are enraged, and the people who have nothing are warm and hopeful. This is Dana Gould saying, ‘What the fuck?’”

Here is Remote Area Medical’s website, by the way.  Another charity doing this work is Direct Relief International’s safety-net program.

Of course you want to see a cat floating in simulated zero gravity

Source: Lyn Hagen via ohhaveyouseenthis

The cat’s not actually in zero gravity; it’s a camera trick.

Full House Opening Credits: Improved Version

Source: “The Oh Shit Show” via warmingglow

OBVIOUS: shopping locally keeps twice as much money circulating in the community

Via The Economist:

In 2002 the city of Austin planned to extend about $2m in incentives to a developer who wanted to build a new Borders bookstore on a prominent downtown corner. This was an unpleasant prospect for the owners of two local independent businesses, BookPeople and Waterloo Records. If the deal had gone through they would have faced a big competitor located directly across the street. Steve Bercu, the owner of BookPeople, says that he always assumed that local businesses were better for Austin for sound economic reasons. But in the circumstances, he wanted to test the proposition.

So BookPeople and Waterloo called in Civic Economics, a consultancy. They went through the books and found that for every $100 spent at the two locals, $45 stayed in Austin in wages to local staff, payments to other local merchants, and so on. When that sum went to a typical Borders store, only $13 went back into circulation locally.

[...] Dan Houston, a partner at Civic Economics, says that in recent studies he has found that locally-owned businesses put about twice as much money back into the community as the chains do, not three times, as the Austin study found.