My dad was born without a sense of smell. He has 3 smoke detectors and turns on a series of lights when he is cooking (so that he doesn't forget and burn the house down). One interesting thing is that the sense of smell is closely associated with taste(notice how bland things taste when your nose is stuffed up) so Dad likes to douse things in hot sauce or lemon juice so he can get some flavor. Over the years he has chugged a few containers of spoiled milk that would gag a crocodile. There are real dangers though. Someone carelessly tossed an empty container of a chemical into a trashcan next to his workstation. Without a sense of smell he simply breathed it in for hours whereas anyone else would have detected it in seconds. He ended up with chemical pneumonia. Other symptoms include being paranoid about BO and wearing too much cologne that was recommended to him by the pretty girl behind the perfume counter at the mall.

Take a couple of those old thumb drives or flash memory cards you never use anymore, fill them with as many pictures as they can hold and then drop them in the mail when you come into port.

I actually did a paper about red light cameras a few years back. They do decrease the incidence of "T-Bone" crashes at intersections but they increase the rate of rear-end collisions even more.

Imagine that there are 3 zones as you approach an intersection. A "Must Stop" zone, a zone of decision and a "Must Go" zone. If the light turns yellow while you are in the "Must stop" zone then you have to stop, if it turns yellow while you are in the "Must Go" zone then you must keep going and if the light turns yellow in the zone of decision the driver must make a judgement call. What these damn cameras do is shrink the "Must Go" zone and expand the zone of decision toward the intersection. The result is more people slamming on brakes and getting rear-ended because they are more worried about getting a ticket than whether or not they can stop safely.

I also found instances of the yellow light time at red light camera intersections being mysteriously shortened as if to catch more people running red. And looking at accident statistics in my local area showed that they weren't putting the cameras at the most dangerous intersections which one would suspect if the point were really to decrease accidents.

For months after my mom died I used to "see" her out of the corner of my eye in public places. Then I would turn to look and it would just be someone that resembled her (same body type, or hair or shape of the face). I just assumed that it was due to the fact that she was on my mind. Later I started to think about the brain's pattern recognition system. The one that lets us see faces in electrical outlets and the grills of cars. It allows us to get a pretty good sense of something without complete information. And for all of my life whenever I saw someone from a distance, or in poor light or out of the corner of my eye that vaguely resembled my mother it probably was my mother. That shortcut to recognition usually serves us well. Its just that it doesn't turn off instantly when someone dies. Its that flash of pain you get when you remember "oh yeah she's gone" that makes these misidentifications memorable. That being said, when you start having conversations with dead loved ones outside of a dream its time to call in a professional.

To anyone who may have misunderstood my point...
Duke is fighting vigorously to protect people from charges of downloading but when the Duke Lacrosse team was falsely charged with gang rape they were completely thrown under the bus.

The more serious the accusation, the more important the presumption of innocence.

So the Duke administration demands proof of downloading but accepts rape accusations at face value? Nice priorities.