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I've visited a lot of medical folk for recurring back and neck problems and sports injuries, and this has been my experience too, although a bit more expensive -- though perhaps it's a Canberra thing -- something like $90 for an hour. I've seen physiotherapists, sports physiologists, chiropractors, osteopathists, remedial massage therapists, occupational therapists and even a kuatsu specialist. For the past couple of years, I've settled on a combination of monthly remedial massage and physiotherapy with more visits if needed due to injury. My experience is that many of my skeletal problems can be managed with muscular treatments, and I haven't found chiropractors or osteopaths to be helpful, to be honest. I do a lot of self-management with resistance exercises and stretching which I learnt from my physio which is helping a lot. Neurophen is good for inflammation, and I like to use tiger balm patches to keep injured sites warm to increase bloodflow and aid healing. If you're dealing with a chronic problem, you might be interested to know that the government offers a chronic disease management (CDM) program which helps with the cost of visiting specialists if you need to do that often. I got my GP to put me onto this and it reimburses much of the cost of visits through Medicare. Good luck dude, it's tricky to find a formula that works...

I'm sure I've seen something like that before... (...sorry for being 'cydonic' *snort* )

Because it's a precursor? You could be right, but then again so are a bunch of other things like peudoephedrine which are otherwise considered safe. Who knows, even if it is carcinogenic, perhaps it's no more than, say, breathing second-hand cig smoke, but I don't know... I'm no biochemist either! Sure sounds adventurous...

Hmmm, because s. albidum contains safrole which is a hepatocarcinogen (I was reminded of this again recently), I wouldn't use it. Even though it looks like safrole was found to be that way by ingestion in rats (niggles found this in a paper), I doubt the roa you're suggesting (which is direct to the bloodstream) would metabolise it differently, so be careful!!

Haha, it's mesmerizing, hey. I've often thought this before too. The same kind of thing was taken off in a Family Guy episode years ago too, in one called "Not All Dogs Go to Heaven", right at the ending, but I can't find a link to the video...

Do you mean you can train yourself to do it? How?

Haha, this happens to me, but only when I'm busting and realise I can't just go... often at the point when I've dreamed I've walked right up to the stalls, unzipped and I'm ready to go... I'll be like nah, I'd better wake up now unless I want a water bed

I'd wondered this myself a while ago, and came across the International Fragrance Association (IFRA) which produces MSDS-like reports on compounds, including those found in essential oils. Their website is a bit hard to navigate, and the search function works mainly on exact compound names, but if you know what they are (or can figure them out), you can look up safety info. For example, yellow and brown camphor have high concentrations of safrole, for which the IFRA note (in their standards booklet): "Safrole as such should not be used as a fragrance ingredient; essential oils containing safrole should not be used at a level such that the total concentration of safrole exceeds 0.01% in consumer products." However, finding a list of common essential oil ingredients and their concentrations was difficult, but other sites seem to have distilled such info, like this one, which says: "IFRA gives these oils strict proportion controls and of those used in aromatherapy they include angelica root, baume de Perou, bergamot, cinnamon cassia, cumin, sassafras and verbena. ... In addition to those oils restricted by IFRA, I consider the following to be worthy of close and careful attention: anise, aspic, basil, clove, coriander, hyssop and sage." So, I'd be wary of vaping any essential oil containing these ingredients without doing more research, like what concentration levels are acceptable. In fact, if you don't know the exact ingredients, which are often hard or impossible to tell as they're not often listed, I'd err on the side of caution!

What's old is new again

Why is there anything as opposed to simply nothing at all? Perhaps in the same vein, I could ask how do I even exist as opposed to not? Along these lines, perhaps the answer is that something/anything, like myself, anyone else or anything tangible, exists because we/it 'occurred' as a result of some other things, like our parents, or going back to the very 'beginning' of everything as we know it, the big-bang + gravity + energy + matter + time. Further down this path, why wasn't all matter created in the big-bang eliminated by anti-matter, resulting in 'nothing'? This is the baryon asymmetry problem in physics, and is unresolved to this day, modulo some mathematical quibbling. On the other hand, some might suggest it's because God made it so, end of discussion!

Oh lordy....

Some great spacey-psy... https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9Ll8uh78-ak I love Shulman!

Sure, why, I'll try it right now... Why do gorillas have big nostrils?

I was just thinking that Riley's story reminded me a bit of Christopher McCandless, although not quite that extreme! Watch what bush tucker you eat, dude... Into the Wild is one of my favourite films, not least of all because I'm a bit of a fan of Catherine Keener...

Max Cavalera's My Bloody Roots, From Sepultura to Soulfly and Beyond: The Autobiography while listening to all the Soulfly instrumentals. Magic... but have to wait until April 15th for the English version! Eu não entendo português... Favourite card game?

I found a very cool presentation describing how Bitcoin works, if anyone is interested.

This is something which I find strange too, albeit only now with the benefit of hindsight, and a little more understanding of how Mt. Gox operated. Most users just wanting to dabble (and undoubtedly more serious users too) probably simply found using Mt. Gox easy. Hey, I even signed up for an account, and considered buying some Bitcoins to keep in an account there, without understanding how the whole thing actually worked. Good thing I'm a lazy fucker. It makes much more sense to maintain your own wallet for the sake of security. Using a so-called "web-wallet" like Mt. Gox might be convenient, but as we keep seeing, unsafe.

Interesting, I hadn't realised that transactions could be performed "off-chain". Thanks! It's pretty unnerving that Mt. Gox and all the funds it held in trust are now gone, all 480 million USD, that's nuts. If that had happened to a traditional bank (someone might remember the failure of the Pyramid Building Society back in the 90s), we'd probably hear more about it, but as it happens, it seems coverage of the failure of Mt. Gox has been relatively tame. EDIT: Actually, I was wrong.... the 'net is still flush with ongoing news stories about the Mt. Gox failure. I suppose because it's an "international" event, and not strictly an Australian one, I don't see it more often in local news.

I think this is right, although now it seems that Bitcoin wallets alleged to be owned by Mt. Gox are being emptied in very many small transactions, making it hard (but not altogether impossible, I would guess) to track where the funds are going. See: http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/37360/so-where-are-mt-goxs-stolen-bitcoin-millions/ The transactions appear to be so numerous and regular that it is thought that automated code is performing the splitting. I'm guessing this isn't beyond the capabilities of a clever cracker. No, I think it's more complicated than that. I'm guessing it's actually quite hard to detect real fraud because Bitcoin wallets are anonymous. For example, consider what happens to some Bitcoins from a Mt. Gox. wallet (A), which are transferred to some anonymous wallet , and then to [C], ... etc., ..., [X], [Y], and finally to [Z]. We can't simply assume that if the account holder of wallet [Z] cashes some Bitcoin out as real dollars that they are the thief, as transaction [G] -> [H] somewhere along the line may have been a purchase for goods/services from a legitimate business [H], for which [G] was partly using stolen funds some of which originated from [A], the rest from other sources. What business [H] does with it's Bitcoins from then on may be completely legitimate/legal. Also, perhaps [G] was also a legitimate business/law-abiding entity, and they received their Bitcoins from some other transaction which included some of the stolen Bitcoins, from [F] -> [G]. Because of the anonymity of the accounts, I don't think we can never be certain. So, these Bitcoins will probably just disappear into the vast network of transactions between anonymous accounts...

I've been following this too. I suspect the DDoS attacks on Mt. Gox leading up to the theft event were an organised diversion from those who knew how to crack the system. Unless I've misunderstood how Bitcoin works, I wonder why Mt. Gox's funds can't be traced by inspecting the blockchain for transactions from their accounts to see where all those Bitcoins got to after the theft. Although, if the Sheep Marketplace theft is anything to go by, they're probably all long gone. Makes me wonder, if Mt. Gox's failure was an inside job, as the Sheep Marketplace was alleged to have been. Surely it mustn't be easy to launder 480 million USD in Bitcoins. Dreamwalker, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the attack wasn't undertaken by individuals but by some government organisation wanting to quash another financial system they can't control... although it's probably more likely that some smart crackers just make themselves very very rich, not to mention very very wanted...

Sweet as, glad to know she got enough responses, good work. Looking forward to seeing the results!

Yeh, even osmocote which sometimes has blue ones (see this), the shells turn clear-ish after they've been in the soil for a while...

These are fascinating, great find! I also like Heavens Above for real-time tracking info: http://www.heavens-above.com/ It can predict the location of the ISS for any location down to the minute!