Interesting facts you'd rather not know: Fetal Urination

I learned the other day that fetuses urinate in the womb. Apparently the amniotic fluid is primarily composed of fetal urine (after 11-12 weeks), which is swallowed and re-urinated by the fetus. Luckily for the mother (and the fetus, I guess) this urine is totally different from normal urine. Still, this makes me glad I'll never be pregnant.

Convict whines that he can't use Linux while on Probation

TorrentFreak has the story of a man (alias Sk0t who was convicted of copyright infringement, and who is now serving probation, who claims the Department of Justice is making him switch from Linux to Windows. The terms of his probation are that he can't use the Internet without special DOJ monitoring software, and this software only runs on Windows. "Why should I conform to them when I am consenting to the software… they should have software that conforms to me." Sk0t says. As expected, the knee-jerk reaction from the TorrentFreak website and many other sites is condemnation of this criminal and... no wait, it's the other way around. Many people seem to think the convict is right when he expects the government to have monitoring software that works on every single computer. Frankly that's ridiculous. I can name, without googling, over two dozen operating systems off the top of my head, and that's by compressing similar OSes together:

Windows NT/2000/XP/Visa
Windows 64-bit
Windows 95/98/ME
Windows 3.1
Dos
Windows NT for Aplha, PPC, MIPS
Linux (hundreds of variants)
OS/2
Mac OS classic
Mac OS X
NextStep
BeOS
Atheos
QNX

FreeBSD
NetBSD
OpenBSD
Solaris
Aix
HP-UX
Irix
Sco OpenUnix
Sco Xenix
Sco Unixware
System/390
CP/M

Most of these OSes are real commercial products with lots of users world-wide. Is it reasonable for the government to have convict-monitoring software for each of these? Never mind that Linux itself is available in dozens of versions, for dozens of platforms, and with countless variations of distributions. Heck, just supporting the Windows family would be a big enough task, and some commercial software companies can't keep up with them all, nevermind every OS out there.

The dumb thing about this is that the convict is crying that the government is infringing on his freedom of choice. Guess what Sk0t? YOU'RE A CONVICT! Your rights were abridged when the sentence was passed. And you can't tell me that being convicted of this crime is a complete surprise: you uploaded a major motion picture (Star Wars III) to the Internet before the theatrical release! That's bound to attract attention from Hollywood, and in this day and age people are getting caught, and sued or tried for copyright infringement, and everyone knows it. Yet Sk0t went ahead and uploaded it anyway, knowing full well the wrath he'd incur if caught. And now he's allowed to walk free, with certain conditions, but he's still not satisfied. Well, tough. STFU and next time don't commit a crime.

Strange bugs

Sometimes, as a software developer, you have to debug very odd problems. One strange one that I worked on recently was that, after deploying a new version of a website, logins spiked to crazy volumes. It was as if every user was logging into the site again and again. Clearly they weren't doing that, but there didn't seem to be anything wrong with the site.

We tracked down the issue by logging all URLs visited and found that, when Internet Explorer visited certain pages, a request for "/" was made. For you non-technical people, this is the home, or landing, page of the site, the page you get when you visit http://www.google.com/ as opposed to a specific page at Google, such as http://www.google.ca/intl/en/about.html. On the website in question, requesting the main landing page will log the user in if they selected "remember me" the first time they logged in.

But why was IE requesting the landing page? The real page we wanted was showing up fine, but you could see that IE was, in the background, requesting the landing page. It turned out to be an empty image tag:

<img src="">

This tag, which on Firefox does nothing, causes IE to request / as the source of the image. Seems pretty odd since I've never come across a website that uses images as a landing page, but what can you do? We changed the page and removed this empty tag and the problem went away.

For those of you wondering what we wanted an empty tag for, rest assured, we had a reason: JavaScript on the page was dynamically setting the src for that image under certain conditions. The full solution to the problem was to remove the img tag entirely and dynamically create it using JavaScript.

EpiPens

I read a press release recently that discussed an issue I am familiar with: The EpiPen. The authors of the release, King Pharmaceuticals in collaboration with Anaphylaxis Canada, claim that only one in five allergic individuals carry an EpiPen and 40% of the population would be unable to administer an EpiPen dose if someone was having an allergic reaction. I'm surprised that that second figure isn't higher, but in the interest of my and every allergic individual's safety, I am going to go over the procedure for administering the EpiPen.

1. Remove the EpiPen from its carrying tube. Take off the grey safety cap.
2. Hold the EpiPen firmly in your fist, with the black tip near the patient's outer thigh.
3. Jab the black tip of the EpiPen firmly into the patient's thigh at a 90 degree angle. Hold for 10 seconds.
4. After 10 seconds (the EpiPen's window will show red) the injection is complete. Remove the EpiPen and massage the injection site.
5. CALL 911.
6. Put the used EpiPen into the storage tube. The exposed needle will be protected in the tube. Do not touch the needle.
   

It's very straight-forward. But there are some people who've seen too much TV and think they need to jab it into the heart or some other nonsense. This is not Pulp Fiction. There is only one good injection site, which is the thigh. The reason is there can be reduced blood-flow at the injection site and if it's injected somewhere else (say, the hand) you can get necrosis. That's latin for death of the tissue.

I know some of you out there are thinking of some funny wise-crack about this process but I urge you to stifle it and consider these instructions carefully. Knowing this could save someone's life.

The EpiPen website has a PDF with more detail.

--
Images courtesy of www.epipen.com

From the embarrassing ways to die dept

There are many ways to die in this world. Some of those ways are violent or gory, like being eaten by a shark. Some of those ways are stupid, like the guy who cut of his own head with a chainsaw. And some of those ways are just plain embarrassing, like a woman who was smothered to death by a horny camel. A 60-year old Australian woman suffered this fate when her 10-month-old pet camel knocked her down and made his move. This just goes to show that you should always spay or neuter your pets.

New study confirms even researchers can be idiots

Ben Goldacre, a doctor, writer for The Guardian and blogger at badscience.net, writes about a study by some researches in the Messina University in Italy, that compares Down's Syndrome patients to Oriental people. In 1866 John Langdon Down wrote “Observations on the Ethnic Classification of Idiots”, which was the first paper to describe Down's Syndrome patients. In that paper Down compared various "idiots" and classified them according to which ethnic group he felt they belonged in, arguing that mental retardation was really a genetic throwback to the less-evolved, non-white races. Down described (what's now known as) Down's Syndrome patients as Mongoloid.

Fast forward to today when an Italian university publishes a paper with such gems as:

Another aspect of Down person that remind [us of] the Asiatic population, are alimentary characteristics. Down subjects adore having several dishes displayed on the table and have a propensity for food which is rich in monosodium glutamate (a salt of glutamate), such as parmigiano, beef broth, tinned food, etc.. The Chinese food abounds in monosodium glutamate that seems to be responsible for the fifth taste or ‘‘umami taste’’ and of the ‘‘Chinese restaurant syndrome’’.

But it gets worse:

The tendencies of Down subjects to carry out recreative–reabilitative activities, such as embroidery, wicker-working ceramics, book-binding, etc., that is renowned, remind [us of] the Chinese hand-crafts, which need a notable ability, such as Chinese vases or the use of chop-sticks employed for eating by Asiatic populations.

Fascinating. I can't wait for their next paper, which will compare black people to chimpanzees. The full text of the paper is available on Dr. Goldacre's website, or here.

Identical Quadruplets

A woman in Calgary just gave birth to identical quadruplets. This is very rare, about as unlikely as winning the lottery. It poses certain problems for the parents, such as finding four girls names instead of only using one name. Well, these proud new parents did what any sensible person would do: name the kids A, B, C, and D.