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Thread: Good News!

  1. #46
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    Ever had a package delivered, then stolen from your place? An engineer designed a trap for the thieves. Watch and be amazed.


    Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoxhDk-hwuo


    This could totally go in the laugh thread as it gets real funny at around 7 minutes in.

    Last edited by Dreamtimer, 12th January 2019 at 07:25.

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    On the subject of Good News, the ongoing illumination of where evil is able to lie unchallenged is occurring. Along with that, there is good news of heros/heroines who are helping people heal from generations of trauma.


    Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boiJ5_A6_uA


    Miss Val on the crisis of abuse in US gymnastics

    Katelyn Ohashi went to UCLA where she met Miss Val (a GREAT coach who is retiring this year.). Katelyn (along with many other atheletes) was beaten down by an abusive system that only cares for wins and not the atheletes. She lost her joy.


    Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9b1KAoYz9s


    The UCLA Bruin gymnastics spirit is one of a safe haven where these atheletes can experience trust worthy care and concern. It exemplifies what sports is supposed to promote IMO. Miss Val is a wayshower who loves the Light. People who do, are fun, creative, lovable AND successful.

    Whenever I get a bit petrified of the unknown, I always turn toward the Light, the Light that is inside of me and the light outside that I can physically see.

    Rather than instructing myself to “find the Light,” I realized I’ve just naturally done this for years. I find a quiet place where I can think without distraction and tap into my inner Light. That energy is my North Star, my internal barometer of my contentment, fulfillment and happiness. So many people impose their definition of those words on us, and when we follow their definitions, we are often left empty and unfulfilled.

    When I get internally flustered, I also seek out physical light. I don’t drop to my knees in prayer, I literally go find light. Even if it’s looking out a window on a cloudy grey day, I seek where the sun is behind the grey. That light is what God created, and I’m always drawn to distinguishing the juxtaposition of what was Created and what man has assembled. Even as I look outside at a building or the freeway, I am amazed by the beautiful canvas of nature that gives background to these structures.
    In the 28 seasons that Miss Val has been head coach, UCLA hasn’t always been on top of the nationals podium, but the one constant—from the high drama of Yvonne Tousek in the early 2000s to Angi Cipra’s crowd-favorite “iPhone routine” in 2016, to this season’s “escaped asylum inmate” performance-art piece from Gracie Kramer—has been the Bruins’ multifaceted, high-concept, complex floor and beam choreography. It is only fitting that in her final season—Miss Val announced her impending retirement this past September—every exercise in the UCLA catalog is Val to the max. (In Ohashi’s case, it’s Val to the power of Val, on a triple espresso.)

    This is all so fun! It really, really is. Man, college gymnastics is fun. And I bet you’re wondering: If gymnastics can be this fun, why do most Olympic floor routines look like awkward misery? Why don’t the Bruins go to the Olympics and show them all how it’s done?

    One word: difficulty. The NCAA—where many elites go after they’ve “retired” from international competition—has different rules than Olympic-style gymnastics. Remember that infuriating open-ended scoring system in Rio? That system means that there is literally not a limit to how much elite gymnasts can tumble, and because they get extra points the more difficult those tumbling runs are, and because the routine length is still the same 1 minute 30 seconds it’s been since the days of Nadia and the piano, that means that on the rare chance these (sometimes very) young women get to stop defying death for four seconds, they have to do über-difficult “dance” elements like full-twisting switch leaps and quadruple pirouettes. There’s no time to moonwalk.

    In her teens, Ohashi wasn’t just one of these elites—she was the best in the world. (She is, in fact, one of the last people to have ever beaten her good friend Simone Biles in a major competition.) Check out her floor exercise from the 2013 American Cup, which features much more difficult tumbling, and lots of it. (Or her legendary 2013 beam routine, still considered one of the most difficult the world has ever seen.) But in 2015, nursing a serious shoulder injury, Ohashi found that her body and her spirit were broken and dropped out of elite competition. It was only after joining the Bruins in 2015 that her joy in the sport returned. And lucky us!

    Most college floor-ex routines are peppy and cocksure; many employ what I am pretty sure young people call the Hot Dance Moves of Today.
    You see, in the NCAA world, there are rules more befitting the humans of Earth. Instead of being pegged to the international elite level, the difficulty and execution code of points comes from what’s called JO Level 10 (in fact, the majority of most college teams are recruited out of the Level 10 ranks). On floor, this means exactly three tumbling passes and a maximum start-value of 10. And because of this emphasis on execution rather than difficulty, NCAA gymnasts have the time and incentive to train in dance. Simultaneously, because elite gymnasts don’t really dance anymore as NCAA choreography has become more dynamic, with few notable exceptions (such as Dutch wood sprite Eythora Thorsdottir), elite choreography has become … belabored, which is the official gymnastics term for eeeeeeeeeech. The days of Bolshoi-trained masters of the avant-garde such as Svetlana Boginskaya or Olga Strazheva are as forgotten as a Yakov Smirnoff set.

    Additionally, because gymnastics culture, and especially American gymnastics culture, is conservative by nature—most elites are underage, homeschooled, and forbidden from dating or going to parties—the choreography, especially in the American tradition, has always been kinda cutesy. It is unlikely that even in 2019, an elite American floor routine will, like UCLA’s Margzetta Frazier, werk it in tribute to drag legend Kevin Aviance. But just because the gymnasts of NCAA are allowed to be playful and slightly bananas on floor doesn’t mean they all can be. Most college floor-ex routines are peppy and cocksure; many employ what I am pretty sure young people call the Hot Dance Moves of Today—but as of yet, nobody but Miss Val can conjure that je ne sais quoi (or perhaps I should say je ne sais shamon) that makes the internet lose its collective mind.

    With Miss Val’s encroaching retirement, you may fear that the days of hyper-expressive (or at any rate, hyper-viral) NCAA floor choreography will end, and this is a valid concern. Though other top teams are often stepping up their choreo game—Trinity Thomas of the 2019 Florida Gators is looking particularly wow—nobody has ever come close to Val-era ’zazz. (The closest any non-UCLA squad has yet come is BYU junior Shannon Hortman-Evans’s Super Mario Bros. routine. It has flossing in it. Really.)

    We’ll have to see what the Bruins squad brings out in 2020, the first year of their new epoch. (If you hear the dulcet strains of Madonna, Bell Biv Devoe, or literally any Jackson whatsoever, that’s the tell that Miss Val banked a few routines before she left.) Maybe the Bruins will come out looking more like their competitors’ perky cheerleader-types, and we can all mourn together. For now, at least, at least you can bask in the frenetic joy of Katelyn Ohashi—if the whiplash doesn’t get you. https://slate.com/culture/2019/01/ka...ise-video.html

    Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_yeP-JwzwU



    Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_pAVBKAocs
    Last edited by Maggie, 15th January 2019 at 19:30.

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    This story is so beautiful and moving it made me all tear up...

    https://www.pulse.ng/bi/lifestyle/hu...aid-he/ren3260


    Hundreds of people turned up to a Holocaust survivor's funeral after a rabbi said he was afraid no one would be there

    - A rabbi was worried that no one would show up to the funeral of Holocaust survivor Eddie Ford, who died from cancer aged 85.
    - Zeke Newman asked on Facebook for volunteers, and said he expected no more than 10 people to show up. Instead, around 200 did.
    - Ford was taken from his parents at age six and raised by a Christian family that hid him during the war. He died with few family or friends left.
    - "Im not a mushy guy, but I went home and cried for an hour," Newman told The Washington Post after the funeral.


    Around 200 strangers showed up at the funeral of Holocaust survivor Eddie Ford after a rabbi said he was afraid that there would be almost no one there.

    Ford, 85, died alone from cancer with few family and friends left, The Washington Post reported. He was raised by a Christian family in Budapest who hid him during the war, but he told a rabbi visiting his hospital that he wanted a Jewish funeral.

    But to hold such a burial, 10 men need to attend.

    So Zale Newman, a volunteer rabbi who visited Ford in hospital in Toronto, looked for volunteers to attend the funeral on Facebook. In the post, seen by INSIDER, Newman asked for help saying goodbye to "a sweet Holocaust survivor who passed away leaving no relatives other than a nephew in a US city"

    "Can you come escort a Hero of the Holocaust for his final journey," he asked.

    Just three people replied to say they were coming, Newman said in a follow-up post. "I was hoping for at least ten in total," he said.

    But on the day, he couldn't almost couldn't enter the ceremony because there were so many cars. " I assumed there was another funeral taking place at the same time and I wondered how we would find Eddie's resting place."

    Instead, hundreds of people had arrived in freezing temperatures for Ford's funeral.

    "There was so much purity," Newman told The Washington Post. "There was no recognition, no way to get paid back. Im not a mushy guy, but I went home and cried for an hour."

    Ford can be seen in this photo, shared by Global News Toronto's Caryl Lieberman:

    Newman told The Post that Ford had told him his life story in hospital. He was taken from his parents at age six and put with a family who raised him until the war ended. He later reconnected with his mother and brother, who he barely knew, but his father had died.

    Newman said that Ford loved to sing and tell stories.

    "No one should die alone," Newman told The Post. "No one should be alone while theyre alive. We have to find the elderly and visit them."

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    That happened recently here with a Vietnam War veteran. It is very touching indeed.

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    Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_pAVBKAocs
    [/QUOTE]

    Speaking of chauvinism...she looks 'kinda' meaty for a gymnast...There was a push a few years ago for the gymnastic competition be held in the nude...really. I was on board...

    Last edited by Emil El Zapato, 9th February 2019 at 14:11.
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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    Your video is already down.

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    In the movie "Saving Private Ryan" the cemetery scene took my breath away...I felt foolish, but there you have it.

    My dad got the 21-gun salute at his funeral. The 1st salvo scared the hell out of me, even though I knew it was coming. His best friend was the American Legion representative.
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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    Metallica Donates a Quarter-Million Dollars to Help Build First Children’s Hospital of Its Kind in Romania

    It has been 20 years since Metallica played in Romania—and they are celebrating their return to the European nation by making a particularly noteworthy contribution to its medical community.

    The iconic heavy metal band has already been doing charity work for every city they visit on their WorldWired global tour. Thus far, the group has made headlines for donating thousands of dollars through their All Within My Hands Foundation to community food banks they pass along the way.

    Now as a means of kicking off the final leg of the European chapter of their tour, Metallica says that they are donating $277,000 (€250,000) to help build the country’s first pediatric oncology and radiotherapy hospital and equip it with the latest medical technology.
    “When completed, this will be first state-of-the-art hospital that will have been built in Romania in over 30 years, while also being the only project funded exclusively by private donors.”

    The hospital, which has been funded by about 260,000 individuals and 2,000 companies, is projected to open to the public in 2020.


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    A little birdie said...

    Tree-Filled City Parks Make People as Happy as Christmas Day, Says New Study of Twitter Posts

    The first-of-its-kind study from the University of Vermont shows that people who visit urban parks use happier words and express less negativity on Twitter than they did before their visit—and that their elevated mood lasts, like a glow, for up to four hours afterwards.

    In fact, the scientists discovered that the effect is so strong, the increase in happiness from a visit to an outpost of urban nature is equivalent to the mood spike on Christmas, which has been shown to be by far the happiest day each year on Twitter.
    In other words, it’s not just getting out of work or being outside that brings a positive boost: the study shows that greener areas with more vegetation have the biggest impact. It’s notable that one of the words that shows the biggest uptick in use in tweets from parks is “flowers.”

    The new study relied on the hedonometer. This online instrument—invented by a team of scientists at UVM and The MITRE Corporation—has been gathering and analyzing billions of tweets for more than a decade, resulting in numerous scientific papers and extensive global media coverage. The instrument uses a body of about 10,000 common words that have been scored by a large pool of volunteers for what the scientists call their “psychological valence,” a kind of measure of each word’s emotional temperature.

    Wait, hedonometer?


    To make the new study, the UVM team fished tweets out of this huge stream—from 4,688 users who publicly identify their location—that were geotagged with latitude and longitude in the city of San Francisco. This allowed the team to know which tweets were coming from which parks. “Then, working with the U.S. Forest Service, we developed some new techniques for mapping vegetation of urban areas—at a very detailed resolution, about a thousand times more detailed than existing methods,” says Jarlath O’Neil-Dunne, director of UVM’s Spatial Analysis Laboratory in the UVM Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and a co-author on the new study. “That’s what really enabled us to get an accurate understanding of how the greenness and vegetation of these urban areas relates to people’s sentiment there.”

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    These Sustainable Fireproof, Weather-Proof Domes Provide Revolutionary Housing Solutions

    As the world endures more and more hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and other natural disasters, architects are starting to feel more and more like the protagonists in the tale of the “Three Little Pigs”.

    Thankfully, an eco-friendly architectural company in Seattle called Geoship may have come up with the perfect design to protect millions from the huffing and puffing of today’s wolfish weather conditions.
    A young engineer, Morgan Bierschenk,...started to question a basic premise: “Why we’re still pounding nails in wood, like people were doing 100 years ago.”

    He then began to ponder why houses are still designed with right angles and whether there was a better way—and that’s how Bierschenk turned to the architectural revolution of the geodesic dome, promoted in the 1970s by Buckminster Fuller, with his Geoship startup.
    Rather than being made out of wood or typical housing materials, the homes are made of bioceramic: a resilient substance made from minerals that can be sourced from urban waste-stream activities like water treatment plants—but so nontoxic, it’s been used in bone and tooth replacements for decades.

    These dome houses are not only chemical-free, resilient in strong winds, unlikely to fall apart in earthquakes, and burn-resistant up to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit (1482 C). They are chemically inert, self-venting and carbon-dioxide sequestering. Geoship aims to help regular people start land trusts to create dome “villages” and even offers co-op part-ownership of the company to the buyers.


    The startup has caught the attention of Zappos, the Las Vegas-based online shoe retailer. Because the company felt spurred to address the crisis of homelessness in their city, Zappos is teaming with Geoship to build prototypes to serve as durable, affordable housing. The companies will release more information about the project at a later date.

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    This isn't new. This woman's fearless approach to life has helped to inspire many others.

    When Aimee Mullins was little, the grown-ups told her that it would be inappropriate if she ever uncovered her prosthetic leg in public. To them, it was most important that other people were never made to feel uncomfortable by her condition.

    Thankfully, she didn’t let that stop her. As she grew up, she worked with engineers, designers, and medical professionals to come up with all sorts of designs and styles for new prosthetics—all of which she wore. Multicolored. Glass. Plastic. Feathered. Stiletto. Titanium steel.

    Those unique legs would be an asset, taking her from athletic competitions to fashion runways to movie sets.

    And this would prove to motivate a six-year-old girl who, inspired by Aimee’s zesty way of flaunting her unique limbs, decided to take her own first steps into boldness.



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    At 11:39 Aimee talks about being told she might have "too many accomplishments".



    This year, Republican women are being told by political consultants they might be "seen as a trouble maker" if they run for office. Republican operatives say they don't want to play "identity politics".

    There are 21 Republican women in both the House and Senate as compared to 106 Democratic women.



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    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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    Greenland and Iceland from the air

    These spectacular images show the stunningly beautiful landscapes of Iceland and Greenland from a birds-eye perspective.

    The breathtaking locations were captured by freelance photographer Ben Simon Rehn as he soared above the scenery inside a small plane.



















    Rehn said he finds locations to photograph by doing an initial flight over the landscapes and asking the pilot know to loop back around for some pictures.

    “I began taking pictures like this by coincidence,” said the 32-year-old photographer. “I was flying with a friend and saw a glacier and just thought it was absolutely beautiful.

    Over the course of a 4-hour flight, Rehn says he will sometimes take up to 5,000 pictures of the scenery.

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    In this groundbreaking new study, scientists are shocked to discover that a combination of common medications might help people to reverse their biological age.

    Nine male participants between the ages of 51 and 65 were recruited for the small clinical study at the University of California, Los Angeles. The participants were given a growth hormone and two forms of diabetes medication over the course of one year in order to study the safety and efficacy of the drug combination in restoring tissue in the thymus gland, which is essential for powering a healthy immune system.

    Consistent blood samples were collected from each of the patients before, during, and after the study. Not only did the samples reveal that the drugs had worked in helping to regenerate thymus tissue, it also showed that the cocktail had reversed the “epigenetic clocks” of the patients.

    “This is to our knowledge the first report of an increase, based on an epigenetic age estimator, in predicted human lifespan by means of a currently accessible aging intervention,” say the researchers.

    The “epigenetic clock” refers to the body’s biological signs of age. The authors of the study, which was published this week in Aging Cell, say that although “epigenetic age does not measure all features of aging and is not synonymous with aging itself, it is the most accurate measure of biological age and age‐related disease risk available today.”

    “I’d expected to see slowing down of the clock, but not a reversal,” says geneticist and lead researcher Steve Horvath told Nature. “That felt kind of futuristic.”

    These are only the results of a small trial and further research will need to be conducted in order to study the treatment’s efficacy on a larger group of participants—but the findings still “have huge implications” for treating age-related disease.
    Last edited by Dreamtimer, 11th September 2019 at 12:40.

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