Wal-Mart Tartare - The Computer Feels Your Pain

So I have a bit of the bizarre for you this morning.  First I want to follow up on a stat I posted yesterday.  22% of kids live in poverty in the US.  That's $22,314 a year for a family of 4.  I found the stat after I read a letter from the local children's shelter.  The letter told a story of a 10 year old girl who was so malnourished and under educated, they thought she was 5.  That is not what this country is about, but apparently that is what it is turning into.  It's time for REAL change.  The status quo isn't going to cut it anymore.  To everyone who voted for CHANGE a few years ago, here's what you got.  The Wall Street Journal reports: "The income of the typical American family—long the envy of much of the world—has dropped for the third year in a row and is now roughly where it was in 1996 when adjusted for inflation. 

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That was my rant for the day.  Now to the bizarre. 

Carlisle man accused of eating raw meat at Walmart

A Carlisle man is accused of eating raw meat at the borough's Walmart and putting the opened packages back on the shelves.

Employees told police they saw Scott T. Shover, 53, of the 100 block of Noble Avenue, eat from several packages without paying about 2:40 p.m. Monday. The meat was valued at $24.53, police said.

Loss prevention staff and a manager followed Shover out of the store and notified a nearby police officer.

Shover was taken into custody, police said. Because of four prior retail theft convictions, Shover was charged with felony retail theft.

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Umm, ouch...

Eel removed from man's bladder after entering penis during beauty spa

Zhang Nan was bathing with live eels to cleanse his skin when one rogue serpent took a liking to his manhood.  The eel treatment in question is a similar concept to the popular London spas that offer fish pedicures.  Thinking that the eels would make him look ten years younger, Nan dived into the water and let them feast upon layers of dead skin.  But after laying in the spa bath, Nan felt a sharp pain and realised a small eel was working its way up his urethra and into his bladder.  'I climbed into the bath and I could feel the eels nibbling my body. But then suddenly I felt a severe pain and realised a small eel had gone into the end of my penis,' the 56-year-old from Honghu, Hubei province said.
'I tried to hold it and take it out, but the eel was too slippery to be held and it disappeared up my penis.'


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All I can think of is HAL 9000 from 2001 a Space Odyssey.  "Stop Dave, I'm afraid."

Feeling pain? The computer can tell

(Reuters) - Can a computer tell when it hurts? It can if you train it, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

A team at Stanford University in California used computer learning software to sort through data generated by brain scans and detect when people were in pain.

"The question we were trying to answer was can we use neuroimaging to objectively detect whether a person is in a state of pain or not. The answer was yes," Dr. Sean Mackey of the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, whose study appears in the journal PLoS One.

Currently, doctors rely on patients to tell them whether or not they are in pain. And that is still the gold standard for assessing pain, Mackey said.

But some patients -- the very young, the very old, dementia patients or those who are not conscious -- cannot say if they are hurting, and that has led to a long search for some way to objectively measure pain.

"People have been looking for a pain detector for a very long time," Mackey said.

"We're hopeful we can eventually use this technology for better detection and better treatment of chronic pain."

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