cat - a drunken mule ruining an offered bribe

"marika" wrote in message news:...
"Cat acne" is a real thing (though it's not realy acne per se- it's not
adolescent, it's not hormonal, and it's not from PMS or eating
chocolate, or whatever the hell else they say causes acne these days)
Male cats have overactive sebaceous glands on their chins. Look under a
male cats chin someday, you'll see like thickened skin with big pores
there.... they rub stuff to leave a scent with their chins. When the
pores get clogged and irritated, they get like broken looking irritated
skin, like pimples there- voila! cat acne. Treated with 2x daily scrub
with benzoyl peroxide type soap and antibiotics.
You learn something every day on the internet!

----- Original Message -----
From: "marika"
Newsgroups:
alt.td.d.bv.mde.ych.s.lrhtpdsba.ei.aazt.pmuqc.pj,a lt.usenet.legends.lester-mosley
Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2007 10:23 AM
Subject: global warming deniers find comfort would be presidents dilemma

How come when newspapers first report this stuff, they always use words
like "amazing" and "breakthrough" and "science". Have seen it before,
lots of times- research on paralysis, diabetes, cancer- the first news
story always heralds these findings as "research/medical miracles". And
then people read it and use words like "Cool!" and "Neat" and "Wow" and
"Possible cure"..
Then as soon as PETA gets a hold of it, you suddenly start to hear words
like "cruel" and "torture" and "vivisection", and all the good
possibilities- cures and milestones- all flies out the window. And
everybody wants all the work stopped, dead in its tracks. Where did all
the "cures" and "miracles" go?

Where/When exactly is the turning point for these stories?

By BBC News Online Science Editor Dr David Whitehouse

In what is bound to become a much debated and highly controversial
experiment,
a team of US scientists have wired a computer to a cat's brain and
created
videos of what the animal was seeing.

According to a paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Yang
Dan, Garret
Stanley and Fei Li of the University of California at Berkeley have
been able
to "reconstruct natural scenes with recognizable moving objects."

The researchers attached electrodes to 177 cells in the so-called
thalamus
region of the cat's brain and monitored their activity.

The thalamus is connected directly to the cat's eyes via the optic
nerve. Each
of its cells is programmed to respond to certain features in the cat's
field of
view. Some cells "fire" when they record an edge in the cat's vision,
others
when they see lines at certain angles, etc. This way the cat's brain
acquires
the information it needs to reconstruct an image.

The scientists recorded the patterns of firing from the cells in a
computer.
They then used a technique they describe as a "linear decoding
technique" to
reconstruct an image.

To their amazement they say they saw natural scenes with recognisable
objects
such as people's faces. They had literally seen the world through
cat's
eyes.

Other scientists have hailed this as an important step in our
understanding of
how signals are represented and processed in the brain.

It is research that has enormous implications.

It could prove a breakthrough in the hoped-for ability to wire
artificial limbs
directly into the brain. More amazingly, it could lead to artificial
brain
extensions.

By understanding how information can be presented to the brain, some
day,
scientists may be able to build devices that interface directly with
the brain,
providing access to extra data storage or processing power or the
ability to
control devices just by thinking about them.

One of the scientists behind this current breakthrough, Garret
Stanley,
now
working at Harvard University, has already predicted machines with
brain
interfaces.

Such revolutionary devices should not be expected in the very near
future. They
will require decoding information from elsewhere in the brain looking
at
signals that are far more complicated than those decoded from the
cat's
thalamus but, in a way, the principle has been demonstrated.