???? - Diary of a Growing Boy: The punishment

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Earlier this year I was hanging out with the Tiggers when I accidentally committed a "crime". ?We were on our way to lunch and I was opening the passenger side door to Mrs. Tigger's Mercedez AMG C63 Black Series. ?This being a two-door sports car, it's understandable that the doors are slightly elongated and therefore swing out farther when they open. ?Well, I got a little distracted as I was deep in conversation while opening the door, and... managed to put the tiniest of dents in the door. ?To be honest, given the car is white in color, you can't even notice the dent unless you got up real close and looked for it...

Tigger, of course, made a big deal out of this. ?Posts with pictures went up on Facebook pages immediately, and Tigger went about soliciting ideas for a suitable "punishment". ?Within 10 minutes, Tigger's old college roommate Vitz - living halfway around the world - came up with an idea out of the blue: make me eat MREs for a week.

Actually, I thought that was a fantastic idea.

For the uninitiated, "MRE" stands for "Meal, Ready-to-Eat". ?They are basically field rations for the US military - something that you can consume in the battlefield while you are miles away from a kitchen. ?They come in plastic pouches and include a main course, snacks and a drink. ?Food contained inside the plastic pouch is heated by a chemical heater pack, where the pack reacts with water to give off heat that "cooks" the food in the pouch.

This stuff is designed to deliver lots of energy, as soldiers in the battlefield are meant to burn off a lot. ?Each meal contains about 1,200 calories. ?What I don't think they are designed to be is tasty, even though MREs have come a long way over the years, and there are now some 24 "menus" offering a good variety. ?It's meant to be edible sustenance and not much more. ?How "gourmet" can you get when it comes in plastic pouches, has a shelf life of 3 years, and among its prerequisites are the ability to withstand being air-dropped via parachute?

Tigger put in a call to Vitz immediately, and Vitz promised to get some MREs and ship them over. ?Weeks passed and no MREs showed up at Tigger's door. ?When I got tired of waiting, I decided to get in touch with my college roommate Eric who, coincidentally, works in the Supply Corps of the US Navy. ?Eric very kindly promised to send some over, but these would be the "civilian" versions instead of what the US military gets, since it is illegal for military personnel to resell MREs - even though he would be giving them to me as a gift. ?Apparently they come from the same supplier, and the difference is that civilian versions contain fewer snacks for in-between meals, resulting in about 400 less calories.

So I was pretty ecstatic when I found a box of MREs showing up at my door a couple of weeks ago. ?I've scheduled a week of dinners to try one meal a day, starting next Monday. ?I'll be snapping some pictures and posting my tasting notes here.

Meanwhile it was also suggested that I pair the MREs with wine. ?Given the non-gourmet nature of the meals, I decided that it wouldn't make sense to pair them with Grand Crus from France or that sort of thing. ?No, they would be more along the lines of Two Buck Chuck, although I didn't think I could find any here in Hong Kong. ?I went to my local supermarket and found 7 different wines to go with my 7 meals - all costing USD 10 or less a bottle. ?Needless to say, this ain't my usual stuff...

So let's see how this turns out...

Source: http://www.diarygrowingboy.com/2013/06/the-punishment.html

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Men who can't produce sperm face increased cancer risk

June 20, 2013 ? Men who are diagnosed as azoospermic -- infertile because of an absence of sperm in their ejaculate -- are more prone to developing cancer than the general population, a study led by a Stanford University School of Medicine urologist has found. And a diagnosis of azoospermia before age 30 carries an eight-fold cancer risk, the study says.

"An azoospermic man's risk for developing cancer is similar to that for a typical man 10 years older," said Michael Eisenberg, MD, PhD, assistant professor of urology at the medical school and director of male reproductive medicine and surgery at Stanford Hospital & Clinics. Eisenberg is lead author of the study, published online June 20 in Fertility and Sterility.

Diagnoses of male infertility and azoospermia are surprisingly common in the United States. About 4 million American men -- 15 percent of those ages 15-45 -- are infertile. Of these, some 600,000 -- about 1 percent of those of reproductive age -- are azoospermic. "There is evidence that infertility may be a barometer for men's overall health," Eisenberg said, "and a few studies have found an association of male infertility with testicular cancer." The new study, he said, not only assigns the bulk of infertile men's increased cancer risk to those with azoospermia, but also suggests that this risk extends beyond testicular cancer.

Eisenberg conducted most of the analysis for the study at Stanford, using data gathered from the Texas Cancer Registry and the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where he completed his medical training. The study's senior authors are Larry Lipshultz, MD, and Dolores Lamb, PhD, professors of urology at Baylor.

The study population consisted of 2,238 infertile men who were seen at a Baylor andrology clinic from 1989 to 2009. Their median age was 35.7 when they were first evaluated for the cause of their infertility. Of those men, 451 had azoospermia, and 1,787 did not. There were otherwise no apparent initial differences between the two groups.

Azoospermia can arise for two reasons. Obstructive azoospermia is caused by a blockage that prevents otherwise plentiful, fit sperm produced in the testes from reaching the ejaculate. But a screen of about one-fourth of the azoospermic men in the study population indicated that the vast majority suffered from the non-obstructive variety: Their testes didn't produce enough sperm for any to reach their ejaculate, most likely because of genetic deficiencies of one sort or another. Fully one-fourth of all the genes in the human genome play some role in reproduction, Eisenberg noted, so there are a lot of ways for the capacity to sire offspring to go astray.

After undergoing a semen analysis, the men were followed for an average of 6.7 years to see which of them turned up in the Texas Cancer Registry. (Fortunately for the analysis, most people tend to stay in the state where they've grown up, said Eisenberg.) Their rates of diagnosed cancer incidence were then compared with age-adjusted cancer-diagnosis statistics of Texas men in general.

In all, a total of 29 of the 2,238 infertile men developed cancer over a 5.8-year average period from their semen analysis to their cancer diagnosis. This contrasted with an expected 16.7 cases, on an age-adjusted basis, for the male Texas population in general (which, Eisenberg said, closely reflects cancer incidence rates for the entire U.S. population). This meant that infertile men were 1.7 times as likely to develop cancer as men in the general population. This is considered a moderately increased risk.

But comparing the cancer risk of azoospermic and nonazoospermic infertile men revealed a major disparity: The azoospermic men were at a substantially elevated risk -- nearly three times as likely to receive a diagnosis of cancer as men in the overall population. Infertile men who weren't azoospermic, in contrast, exhibited a statistically insignificant increased cancer risk of only 1.4 times that of men in the overall population.

By excluding men whose cancer diagnosis came within two or three years of their infertility evaluation, the researchers were able to rule out the possibility that azoospermia caused by an undiagnosed cancer had affected the statistics.

While the study wasn't large enough to delineate which specific types of cancer pushed azoospermic men's incidence rates up, the diagnoses they received covered a wide range of cancers: brain, prostate and stomach tumors, as well as melanoma, lymphoma, testicular cancer and cancer of the small intestine. The findings suggest that genetic defects that result in azoospermia may also broadly increase a man's vulnerability to cancer, Eisenberg said, supporting the notion that azoospermia and cancer vulnerability may share common genetic causes.

The study, which was funded by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, is the first to examine the cancer risk of azoospermia in particular, or to link it to non-germ-cell cancers. Previous studies have failed to consistently identify any increased risk for nontesticular cancers in infertile men, whether azoospermic or otherwise. In those previous studies, however, azoospermic men couldn't be separately examined because sperm analyses weren't available.

Most striking of all, said Eisenberg, was the cancer risk among azoospermic men who first had their semen analyzed before age 30. They were more than eight times as likely to subsequently develop cancer than Texas males in the general population of the same age. In contrast, there was no relationship between age of semen analysis and risk of cancer for nonazoospermic men.

The good news, Eisenberg said, is that while the cancer risk among young azoospermic men was quite large compared to their same-age peers, their relative youth means that their absolute risk of contracting cancer during the follow-up period remained small. The bad news, he said, is that men in their 30s often don't have a primary health-care provider. He advised that young men who are diagnosed as azoospermic should be aware of their heightened risk and make sure to get periodic checkups with that in mind.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/fdzhd_2xLmQ/130620214033.htm

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Chrissy Teigen Is Nude For GQ Magazine (PHOTO)

Chrissy Teigen is a free spirit who rarely seems to hold anything back.

That's why it comes as no surprise that the 27-year-old model didn't let a little thing like clothing come between her and the camera for her GQ photo shoot.

Teigen posed completely nude for the magazine (save for a pair of Marc Jacobs heels), and was totally game to offer readers some dating advice -- she's engaged to John Legend, so we'd say she knows what she's talking about.

Though it's Teigen's Sports Illustrated bikini photos that made her famous, it's her Twitter account that keeps people talking about her -- and she admits she sometimes wishes she thought before she typed:

"All the time! But not really a regret that I thought it, just that I said it," she told GQ, explaining that the nude photo she shared on Instagram in March is a prime example. "My naked-spray-tan thing comes to mind. What no one knows is that my mom took it! My mom frickin' threw me under the bus!"

For more with Chrissy Teigen, click over to GQ.

Also on HuffPost:

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/20/chrissy-teigen-nude_n_3473681.html

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Cracking the iOS 7 icon superellipse formula

Not only does iOS 7 seem to ever-so-slightly increase the size of iPhone icons, it seems to move away from the more common rounded-rectangle shape to the more complex superellipse. Hopefully Apple will provide tools to make generating curves of this type easier for developers and designers, but in the meantime Marc Edwards of Bjango has been doing a lot of maths (his spelling, not mine!) and has come up with something that seems to match up very well.

He's also working on Bjango's own interface design tool, Skala and I'd be shocked -- shocked, I say -- if he's not already got superellipses, and likely tesseracts and other geometric wonders, well under way.

Check out the formula and the image proof via the link below.

Source: Marc Edwards

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/iXSTXr6sCcQ/story01.htm

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Advani aide Sudheendra Kulkarni calls Modi 'autocrat', Rajnath 'foxy president'

Former BJP member and party patriarch L.K. Advani's close associate Sudheendra Kulkarni has attacked party chief Rajnath Singh and its likely prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi terming them as "foxy president" and "autocrat" respectively.

The war within the BJP seemed far from over as Kulkarni, who was once also a close aide of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, fired a fresh salvo at the BJP top brass in a terse letter.

In his scathing remarks for the sole emerging face within the BJP -- Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi -- Kulkarni compared him to Advani, stating, "An autocrat is sought to be enthroned, and a perfect democrat is being marginalised and humiliated. A self-centered leader who has shown that he cares two hoots for the party organisation and longtime party colleagues in his own state has suddenly become all powerful in the BJP's national scheme of things, whereas a selfless leader who toiled for many decades to build the party brick by brick is being cast aside as a useless relic."

Doubting his leadership qualities, Kulkarni further writes: "There is no evidence of Modi being a collaborative team worker within his own state party unit and government; how then can he be expected to manage a coalition?"

Kulkarni also pointed fingers at the all important Sangh parivar. He wrote that the party patriarch was debilitated by the Sangh, which no longer believed in him and which, moreover, stoked the leadership ambitions of some in the so-called "second generation functionaries of the BJP".

Kulkarni had no kind words for Rajnath Singh either as he went to call him a "foxy president" of the party who has his own "astrologically-induced delusions of becoming India's prime minister and has allowed himself to be prodded and dictated by vested interests to undermine Advani's position in the BJP".

Concluding his letter, Kulkarni underscored the "decay that has begun within the BJP" which would only, according to him, would "accelerate if Advani was further humiliated and forced either to retire or to rebel".

Source: http://indiatoday.feedsportal.com/c/33614/f/589699/s/2d7d5260/l/0Lindiatoday0Bintoday0Bin0Cstory0Csudheendra0Ekulkarni0Ecalls0Enarendra0Emodi0Eautocrat0Erajnath0Esingh0Efoxy0Epresident0C10C2841580Bhtml/story01.htm

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