My choices of some recent pics from the photos of Topleftpixel

From plate to final matte....

Here

Everyone in the field knows how this goes.....Source.....Story from a Louisianian Paramedic....

P.S. Some naughty words,integral for verite. If your delicate sensitivies just can't withstand that sort of thing, stop here and GET OFF MY BLOG.

Punitive Advanced Life Support

"Aaaaauuuggggh! I'm dyin'! You muhfuckas got to help me!"

"Easy enough to do," I sigh. "All you have to do is stop screaming and tell me what's wrong."

"My muhfuckin' chest hurt, Goddamnit! Auuuuuuggghhhh! Mommmmmaaaa!"

"Tell me more about this chest pain," I prompt, but he ignores me, writhing on the stretcher and crying piteously. For someone insisting that he can't breathe, he sure has a good set of lungs on him. For a man whose heart is threatening to explode, his skin signs and color certainly don't reflect it. His blood pressure is better than mine.

"So tell me the story again," I order the guard perched on the squad bench beside me, watching the entire scene with resigned indifference.

"He'd just been brought in for processing," the guard explains. "busted by the SO on possession of drug paraphernalia and resisting by flight. We brought him through the south sally-port, and it was kinda busy, and he asked to use the bathroom."

"And you let him?" I ask incredulously. "Unescorted?"

"Hey man, we were busy and there was no place he could go," the guard protests. "So we hand him a jumpsuit and tell him to have at it. Anyway, he's back from the bathroom about ten minutes and he starts breathing funny and grabbing his chest. Then he fell out on the floor having a fit."

At the mention of the word fit, the prisoner's eyes immediately close, and his limbs start bucking. His back arches, and he writhes against the handcuffs and leg chains. He whuffs like a dog and spits foamy white sputum all over the front of his orange jumpsuit. I ignore him and casually put my hand on his chin, directing his head - especially the spitting part - away from me.

"And what makes you think he swallowed the drugs?" I ask, rolling my eyes.

"Told us he did. All the time he was rolling around on the floor having the fit, he kept saying, 'I swallowed the whole bottle.' That's all he'd tell us."

"Didn't anybody fucking search him before you turned him loose?" I explode. By way of reply, the guard shrugs in embarrassment, and then his eyes widen in fear.

"Holy shit, he's pissing on himself," he moans in disgust, backing away down the bench seat. "It must be the real thing, then. They say you piss yourself when you're really having a seizure."

"Not this time," I grunt. "Most seizure patients don't have the capacity to work a zipper and whip it out of their jumpsuit first, much less aim it. They don't usually close their eyes in a real seizure, either." I pick up the stethoscope - the unit scope, not mine - and whack the guy firmly on the dick with it. He yelps in pain and drops his talleywhacker and resumes calling for his momma at the top of his lungs.

I strap a non-rebreather mask to the kid's face, intending it as a dual purpose oxygen delivery device/spit-shield, and he snaps at my fingers as I cinch the straps tighter.

"Get over here and re-position these cuffs," I order the guard. "Don't give him enough slack to do that shit again."

"Uh uh," the guard demurs, holding up his hands. "I got no gloves."

"There's a box of extra-large gloves on the seat right behind you," I tell him mercilessly. "Put a pair on and help me out." Again the guard shakes his head, no.

"Dude," I threaten quietly, "either you fucking help me out with this guy, or so help me God, I'll aim his dick for him. And I hope he pisses all over those action adventure britches you're wearing."

Swearing under his breath, the guard gloves up, gingerly tucks the prisoner's johnson back into his jumpsuit, and moves the handcuffs to a point further down the stretcher frame, glaring at me all the while.

"Mommmmaaaa! The muhfucka's killin' meeeeeee! Mommmmaaaaaa! My muhfuckin' chest hurt! You gotta give me somethin'!" The prisoner kicks his legs, finding enough slack in the leg chains to make contact with the guard's left elbow as he kneels on the foot of the cot.

"Sonofabitch!" the guard swears, clamping one hand on the kid's shin and another on his thigh. He knees the kid viciously several times in the side of his thigh, just above the knee in a perfect common peroneal strike, and just like that the kid stops kicking. Even though his leg is dead for a few seconds, it does nothing to slow down his mouth.

"Muhfucka stop kickin' me! I need muhfuckin' help, and these muhfuckas beatin on me! Mommmmaaaaa! Mommmmaaaaaa! I ain't resistin'! I ain't resistin'!" the kid screams at the top of his lungs, all the while resisting like wildcat getting a turpentine enema. "I'm gone die, and these muhfuckas ain't did nothin' to help meeeeee..."

"FOR THE LOVE OF PETE, SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY!" I bellow, my temper getting the best of me.

The kid doesn't shut up, but he does quiet down enough that I can hear myself think.

"Last chance, kid," I offer, leaning over him, speaking softly in his ear. "Man up and tell me what the fuck you took, so I'll know what medicine to use to make it better."

"Don't know what it was," he moans, shaking his head wildly. "My bro just said, 'throw it out the car', but I couldn't even get da fuckin' window down, man! I didn't want 'em to find it on me!"

"So you swallowed the whole bottle while you were in the bathroom, is that it?"

"And I flushed the empty bottle down the commode," he confirms, tears streaming down his face.

"Jesus," I shake my head, "and it didn't occur to you to just flush the pills, too? What's your name, dumbass?"

"Dontrelle," he answers, panting like a Saint Bernard in August. "Man, you muhfuckas gotta help me! My chest be hurtin', man!"

"No shit, really?" I ask, feigning astonishment. "You think that might be because you swallowed a whole buncha pills? What were they, speed? Come on man, be honest. Your life might depend on it."

"Don't know," Dontrelle shakes his head. "Mighta...mighta been crack."

"Mighta been, or was?" I press. "Come on, Dontrelle. Pretty easy to tell the difference between a crack rock and a pill."

"Crack rocks, man," Dontrelle whimpers. "Bunch of 'em."

"Like how many?" I ask, eyeing the cardiac monitor. His heart rate is 160, but his blood pressure is still 130/88 - not bad for someone who swallowed a handful of crack twenty minutes ago. Dontrelle mumbles something I can't quite make out between the moans and pitiful whimpers. I lean close over his head and lift up the oxygen mask so that I can hear what he is saying...

...and the little bastard horks up a big loogie and spits it right on the side of my neck.

I recoil in disgust, and try to pull away, but he has managed to grab my right hand where it rests on the stretcher rail, and he clamps down, viciously digging his fingernails into the back of my hand.

Gritting my teeth, I calmly sit up, fish around with my left hand on the suction shelf and pull an antiseptic towelette from its canister, and wipe the loogie off my neck. Then, I reach over with my left hand and grab Dontrelle's right hand, thumb planted firmly in the back of his hand, fingers buried in his palm.

I twist counter-clockwise, and keep twisting until his grip loosens and he starts squealing like a little bitch. I keep twisting, holding his hand there, taut against the handcuffs, and nod to the guard. "If you're through sitting there with your thumb up your ass," I tell him solicitously, "perhaps you'd like to take the slack out of the cuff on this arm, too. We've got another five minutes before we're at the hospital, and I'm thinking little Dontrelle could use some medicine."

Flashing me a dubious look, the guard grabs Dontrelle's wrist and moves the other end of the cuffs down the stretcher frame to a position matching that of his left arm. I dig through my ALS bag and pull out the EZ IO - a little drill that we use to insert a large needle into a patient's tibia, in the event that all of their veins have collapsed. Putting the needle in isn't all that painful - I've volunteered for it myself - but flushing the fluids through it will make you suck the stretcher sheets right up your ass. We normally deaden it with lidocaine to blunt that pain, but I'm thinking I'd rather not risk it.

Dontrelle's not the most reliable historian, after all, and he might be allergic to lidocaine.

"Hey Dontrelle," I call cheerfully, "help is on the way, man." I lean over him and rev the drill several times, giving him my best sadistic dentist leer. "I'm gonna give you some medication that will make it all better - for me, anyway."

"Hey man, I'm sorry," he whimpers. "I di'int mean nuthin' by it, man. I can't do needles."

"That's okay," I assure him, "because I do needles very well. Just lie back and try not to scream too loud."

"Hey man, please don't...aaaaaaauuuggghhh!" he screams as I bury the spinning intraosseous trocar into the bone just below his knee.

"Did that hurt?" I ask. "Scale of one to ten, how bad?"

"TEN!"

"My friend," I assure him, "you're about to experience a new frame of reference for what a ten is." I attach a saline lock and flush the intraosseous line with twenty milliliters of saline.

"Aaaaaaaaaaauuuugggghhhhhh, Gawdamighty please stop!"

"I'm guessing we have a new record on Dontrelle's personal Worst Pain Ever scale," I observe mildly. "If you want sympathy, Dontrelle, you can find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary."

"Please man, don't do this to me!" he begs. I'm an evacuee, man! You can't be treatin' no evacuee like this!"

"Waaaaaaahhhh," I sneer. "Mean old Gustav and Ike turned me into a dumbass crack dealer. The hurricanes made me do it! I can't collect my FEMA check in jail! Waaaaahhhhh...."

"Man, make him stop," Dontrelle begs the guard, who is suddenly engrossed in studying his fingernails. "You can't let him do this to me, man! He violatin' my civil rights!"

"By rendering medical care?" the guard yawns disinterestedly. "I ain't seen nothin'."

"You got any next of kin, Dontrelle?" I ask idly, drawing up 100 milligrams of succinylcholine into a syringe. "A mother who'd miss you?"

"Yeah, I got family, man! I got a girlfriend and a baby on the way!," he blurts, eyes widening in terror. His voice rises into a high-pitched, desperate scream, "I got a baby on the way, man!"

"Then that makes this much easier," I tell him as I inject the succinylcholine. "Better to have no babydaddy than to have one at home slinging rock." I reach for a vial of Versed, but think better of it. I want him to be wide awake for this.

Dontrelle's scream dies in his throat, and the muscle fasciculations start a few seconds later. His arms and hands twitch and the muscles of his thighs writhe like snakes, then go altogether limp. His chest stops its desperate heaving, and he exhales his last breath in a long, gentle sigh.

I lean over his face and stare at the peaceful expression. Only his eyes have life now. The paralytic has denied him the use of his extraocular muscles, as well as all of his skeletal muscles and his diaphragm. He lies there, eyes staring straight ahead, limp as a dead man.

But he's not dead. He's still wide awake.

I watch the heart rate rise inexorably on the cardiac monitor, no doubt due to fear and hypoxia. Perhaps pain, too. If he really was having chest pain, it has to be excruciating now, what with no breathing to suffuse his blood with life-sustaining oxygen.

"Dontrelle Mayeux," I intone softly, mockingly. "Twenty-three years old, died of sudden cardiac arrest secondary to cocaine-induced excited delirium. Paramedics tried heroically to revive him, but to no avail. Toxicology results showed high levels of cocaine metabolites, along with a slightly elevated serum potassium and elevated myoglobin levels indicative of skeletal muscle damage - all due no doubt to Dontrelle's physically combative state immediately prior to his arrest. Dontrelle is survived by a mother, girlfriend and an unborn child, and will be missed by...absolutely fucking no one."

I lean over him and stare into his eyes, dangling a bag-mask resuscitator just over his face. "You're probably really wishing you could breathe now," I muse. "You're probably wondering how, if you had a second chance, you could avoid being such a worthless asshole. Well, I got your second chance right here, Dontrelle. One second chance to..."

"...worthless little bastard would have never gotten a second chance with me," Bitchy Partner is saying. "I don't see how you keep your temper, AD."

"Huh?" I blink. "Sorry, I didn't hear what you were saying."

"I was saying how I don't know how you keep your cool when those little thugs are screaming and acting out like that," she repeats, rolling her eyes. "They get only one chance to behave themselves with me. I don't give second chances. But you roll them into the ER like that punk, cursing you like a dog, and you don't even act like it bothers you."

"Uh huh."

"You weren't even paying attention, were you?" she accuses. "You've been sitting there this whole time, staring off into space with that goofy grin on your face, and you haven't heard a word I said!"

"Sorry, BP," I smile apologetically, absently massaging the claw marks in my right hand. "I was just doing a little daydreaming. You were saying how much you admired how I can keep my cool?"

Hits home. I was a paramedic for a few years. You get to see the best and the worst of people night after night. Usually the worst. Glad I'm out.

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

George Carlin

Imagine a 747 is sitting on a conveyor belt, as wide and long as a runway. The conveyor belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction. Can the plane take off?

I say no. Both Newton and Bernoulli theories about flight require a flow of air over the wings, meaning if the groundspeed of the plane is zero, nothing happens.

Which is best for describing how aircraft get the needed lift to fly? Bernoulli's equation or Newton's laws and conservation of momentum? This has been an extremely active debate among those who love flying and are involved in the field. If the question is "Which is physically correct?" then the answer is clear -- both are correct. Both are based on valid principles of physics. The Bernoulli equation is simply a statement of the principle of conservation of energy in fluids. Conservation of momentum and Newton's 3rd law are equally valid as foundation principles of nature - we do not see them violated. This physical validity will undoubtedly not quell the debate, and this treatment will not settle it. But perhaps it can at least indicate the lines of the discussion.

Those who advocate an approach to lift by Newton's laws appeal to the clear existance of a strong downwash behind the wing of an aircraft in flight. The fact that the air is forced downward clearly implies that there will be an upward force on the airfoil as a Newton's 3rd law reaction force. From the conservation of momentum viewpoint, the air is given a downward component of momentum behind the airfoil, and to conserve momentum, something must be given an equal upward momentum. Those who prefer to discuss lift in these terms often invoke the Kutta-Joukowski theorem for lift on a rotating cylinder. The lift on a spinning cylinder has been clearly demonstrated, and its discussion includes a vortex in the circulating air. Many discussions of airfoil lift invoke such a vortex in the effective circulation of air around the moving airfoil. Conservation of angular momentum in the fluid requires an opposite circulation in the air shed from the trailing edge of the wing, and such vortex motion has been observed.

Those who advocate the Bernoulli approach to lift point to detailed measurement of the pressures surrounding airfoils in wind tunnels and in flight. Such pressure measurements are typically done with Pitot tubes. Correlating the pressures with the Bernoulli equation gives reasonable agreement with observations.

Those who argue against modeling the lift process with the Bernoulli equation point to the fact that the flow is not incompressible, and therefore the density changes in the air should be taken into account. This is true -- the ideal gas law should be obeyed and density changes will inevitably result. This does not render the Bernoulli equation invalid, it just makes it harder to apply. But the pragmatic success of modeling the lift with Bernoulli, neglecting density changes, suggests that the density changes are small. Pragmatic difficulties exist also for those who would model the lift from Newton's third law -- it is difficult to measure the downward force associated with the downwash because is is distributed in the airstream leaving the trailing edge of the airfoil.


Physics gobbledlygook source

I've loved this pic ever since I'd seen it in one of the bike mags months ago. WSB Ducati factory rider Reuben Xaus having a little fun on Ducati's streetgoing Hypermotard. Kneedown, backing it in, only needing one hand, so I'll throw a thumbs up to the camera guy. Madskilz.

Grand opening of Dubai mall threatened as sharks in display aquarium turn on each other with 40 killed so far....

Shark fights in one of the world's biggest aquariums are threatening the opening celebrations of Dubai's flagship new mall.

Over ten per cent of the sharks in Dubai Aquarium's 10 million-litre tank have been killed in attacks that have marred the build-up to its grand opening on October 30.

Sand Tiger sharks have killed at least 40 smaller reef sharks and been aggressive towards divers working on final preparations in the giant tank.

The aquarium features the world's single largest school of sharks and the world's largest viewing platform. It is the centrepiece of the new 5.9 million sq ft Burj Dubai Mall.

Built to showcase one of the world's most diverse and exotic collections of marine animals, the aquarium is home to more than 33,000 living specimens.

A total of 85 species is represented, with over 400 sharks and rays considered the main attraction.

But the concentration of such a large number of sharks in a small space has led to what some might have considered predictable problems for the Dubai Mall's management.

General manager Yousuf Al Ali admitted the world's most feared ocean predator had caused teething problems.

"It is inevitable that aquatic species die - sometimes out of natural causes or out of injuries inflicted by bigger fish species," he said.

"Sand Tiger sharks, by nature, are fish-eating. However, all sharks and other animals in the Dubai Aquarium & Discovery Centre at The Dubai Mall are currently on a monitored feeding schedule in order to subdue their naturally opportunistic behaviour and appetite."

Divers carrying out tasks in the tank have also been attacked by the naturally aggressive sharks.

Several have had their equipment damaged and experienced minor injuries due to the behaviour of the sharks, according to UAE daily Khaleej Times.

Mr Ali said: "During the stages of setting up the aquarium, two cases of minor injuries were reported and were immediately attended to by the on-site medical team."

The aquarium features a 270-degree acrylic walk-through tunnel designed to give shoppers close encounters with some of the most diverse marine life on the planet.

Hopefully they will not be witnessing the world's greatest shark fight.

Yeah... "I know! Lets put 400 sharks from 80 different species all together in a big glass tube in the mall! That'd be so cool."

Really?

You crazy Dubaiians.

Source

"Slippery Slope"....

As much as I want to stay out of the political "soap opera/reality show" that's happening, I recently ran across this clip of Palin and the resultant justified disgust that this could be the president of the United States....(2:26)





Now, I'm no genius, but I'm far from an idiot. What was that incomprehensible mishmash of keywords and soundbites that she somehow thought qualified as an answer?

Tina Fey for governor of Alaska.

Obama for president. Please. Otherwise I'm going home to Canada to watch the implosion from afar.

Edit.... so, Tina Fey reprises her role as our Governor Palin and takes aim at this clip. Scary how much dialogue is actual lines taken DIRECTLY from the actual interview....

Found art... I really wish I had a system where I could give credit to the artist, but.... I don't. Filenames are "Aly" if it helps.

SBK Superpole - Kiyonari in Donington

Slipping and sliding in the rain...impressive riding. (2.25)....

Some recent XKCD nuggets....

DENVER -- The Denver police union is selling T-shirts that poke fun at protesters at last month's Democratic National Convention, but the main target isn't laughing.

The back of the shirts reads, "We get up early to beat the crowds" and "2008 DNC," and has a caricature of a police officer holding a baton.

The front has the number 68 with a slash through it, a reference to the Recreate 68 Coalition, which organized several demonstrations during the convention.

Recreate 68 organizer Glenn Spagnuolo called the shirt appalling and tasteless.

Spagnuolo released a written statement Thursday saying members of the police union "clearly have no respect for the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution."

Detective Nick Rogers, a member of the Police Protective Association board, said police often issue T-shirts to commemorate big events.

Rogers said each Denver officer was given one of the shirts free and others are on sale for $10 each at police union offices.

He said the union expects to sell about 2,000 of them.

Rogers said he hadn't received any previous complaints about the shirts.

Police arrested 154 people before and during the Democratic convention. There were few reports of violence.

In one incident, an officer was videotaped pushing a protester to the ground with his baton and telling her, "Back up, b----."

The district attorney declined to prosecute the officer, saying the woman had disobeyed warnings to back away and had grabbed the officer's baton.

Source

This is a KTM Xbow.....

Site

One recently tried to escape it's confines at the 'Ring....

Ouch.

But I think the best part is the headline....

Barrier grief

Random Oddness award......