SciTechBits – Interesting Bits of Science & Technoglogy Served For You!

Can a toilet save your life? It might be able to if you have health problems. From Japan, the land of high-tech toilets, a new toilet provides the benefits of a doctor’s visit every time you use it.

According to ChinaDaily, the newest Japanese high-tech toilet “offers its users an instant health check-up every time they answer the call of nature.” The “Intelligent Toilet” was designed by Daiwa House with the elderly in mind. It “provides urine analysis, takes the user’s blood pressure and body temperature, and measures their weight with an inbuilt floor scale.” The readout comes up on a wall-mounted computer screen next to the smart toilet. It also has an armband to monitor blood pressure.

“Google Suggest” is a feature which suggests search queries as you type — based on the spelling and the search frequency of potential matching search terms.  There is one other feature “Searches Related to” which is displayed in the bottom of the search page. This feature is not based on the spelling, and is usually referred to as query refinement; much similar to Amazon’s “people who bought X also bought Y & Z”. This main difference of using the spelling and search frequencies to generate suggestions and other metrics to generate related searches helps Google expose quite an array of other possible searches the user could be doing.

Now, here is what Google thinks is related to a couple of interesting search terms.

Erica Goldson graduated from Coxsackie-Athens High School (Coxsackie, NY). Like a very few others, she got an opportunity to make a valedictorian speech. She understood the power of the opportunity in front of her and made a fabulous speech — filled with passion, lashing the whip against the whole educational system, which is a fine mess.

Embedded below is the video of her speech, followed by the full transcript.

Catnip a member of the mint family popular for getting cats high, much like medical marijuana is often confused with marijuana. Big Cat Rescue, a non profit has recently released a video which shows how Tigers, Lions and the like respond to catnip.



Catnip reaction consists primarily of a unique combination of body rolling and face rubbing and is found to be independent of sex. Cats are usually found to return to the source of catnip about once every two hours to get a new dose. While not every cat reacts, interestingly reacting cats show an increase in attention paid to catnip while showing a decrease to rats. Research has shown that the chemosensory stimulus evoking the catnip reaction is mediated through the main olfactory system. Catnip activates behavioral elements associated with several species-specific behaviors, including sniffing and chewing as associated with oral appetitive behavior, rolling and rubbing characteristic of female sexual behavior, batting the catnip source characteristic of play behavior, and a type of kicking associated with predatory behavior. These behavioral reactions have been said to occur randomly and intermittently.

While it has been documented at several sources that most members of the cat family react to catnip, this is the first time there is a single video (embedded below) which shows the reaction of several members of the cat family reacting to catnip.

Intellectually, you know better than to do something stupid like surf for porn while at work. Just the same, some people do it like the dozens of NSA, DARPA, DoD, and other Pentagon officials who possess security clearances, but allegedly purchased and downloaded child pornography over the Internet.


According to a report in The Boston Globe, the porn downloaders represent a “small percentage” of the Pentagon’s massive staff. It is however concerning since it puts the Pentagon “at risk of blackmail, bribery, and threats, especially since these individuals typically have access to military installations.’’

The knowing possession of child pornography is a federal felony. Accessing or purchasing porn on a government computer is beyond stupid as well as a misuse of government property. Some of the porn downloading was done by people who deal with the most sensitive intelligence and defense work. Two of the cases were contractors with top NSA secret clearances; their work involves eavesdropping on foreign communications. One of those contractors was indicted two years ago and fled the country. He’s believed to be hiding in Libya.

Dell ’s quality control seems to have been smoking the same weed as the Dude, you’re getting a Dell guy did. The Texas based computer manufacturer shipped server system boards with infected and embedded malware code.


If you’ve heard about scammers calling customers as if they are Microsoft technicians, there is little wonder why the Dell customer was confused and posted on a Dell support forum:

“I just got a telephone call from a service scheduler informing me that the replacement R410 motherboard I received several weeks ago contains spyware in its embedded systems management firmware, and wanting to schedule an additional service call for a tech to come clean it off.

Unfortunately since the person calling was non-technical, she was unable to provide a lot of details. But I do believe the call to be legitimate as she had the service tag of one of my systems which did indeed receive a motherboard replacement recently.”

A Dell support technician, DELL-Matt M, replied via a post to the customer: “The service phone call you received was in fact legitimate. As part of Dell’s quality process, we have identified a potential issue with our service mother board stock, like the one you received for your PowerEdge R410, and are taking preventative action with our customers accordingly. The potential issue involves a small number of PowerEdge server motherboards sent out through service dispatches that may contain malware. This malware code has been detected on the embedded server management firmware as you indicated.”

DELL-Matt M later posted again as if recanting his previous post. “The W32.Spybot worm was discovered in flash storage on the motherboard during Dell testing. The malware does not reside in the firmware.”

Meanwhile, yet another seemingly stoned to the bone Dell employee confused another customer artadams, who then posted a question to DELL-Matt M: “Will you please post your employee number? In a phone call to Dell this morning I was told that no Dell employee wrote this….”

The infection hit replacement PowerEdge 310, 410, 510 and T410 boards. The direct seller said less than 1% of boards were affected and complete new server systems were quite safe. Dell is still not admitting how the W32.Spybot worm got into its systems and onto its hardware.

Interestingly enough, a Dell spokesman said the problem was worldwide but all infected motherboards had now been removed from the supply chain and it was already shipping clean boards. He added that only people running unpatched versions of Windows without any anti-virus would be infected.

What was Dell thinking? Or were they not thinking, like they had been toking some pretty potent weed, when they apparently decided to run no antivirus software and unpatched Windows OS in their factories?

Dell FAIL!

The horrible teachings these kids are exposed to – does damages well beyond many generations to come. The ending question posed by a student “How can an African American person evolve from a white person… we are different skin?” shows how messed up their thought lines are. They can’t even agree to evolution between different races of human beings.

What would Steve Jobs and Bill Gates talk, if they met now. Here is the imagination of a netizen.