Author: Jeff Milner

So I went to the funeral last week and I have to say, though sometimes funerals can bring you down, this one was very nice.

I don’t know how appropriate it is to joke about funerals after just having been to one, but I cannot resist:

Found on the web:

A bereaved woman goes into a funeral home to make arrangements for her husband’s funeral. She tells the director that she wants her husband to be buried in a dark blue suit. He asks, “Wouldn’t it just be easier to bury him in the black suit that he’s wearing?”

“No,” she insists. “It must be a blue suit.” She then gives him a blank check to buy one. When she comes back for the wake, she sees her husband in the coffin and he is wearing a beautiful blue suit. She tells the director, “That is absolutely perfect! I love it! How much did it cost?”

He says, “Actually, it didn’t cost anything. The funniest thing happened. As soon as you left, another corpse was brought in, this one wearing a blue suit. I noticed that they were about the same size, and asked the other widow if she would mind if her husband were buried in a black suit. She said that was fine with her. So, I switched the heads.”

Scientists are calling for a plan to deflect a 1200-foot asteroid named Apophis which has about a 1 in 5,500 chance of hitting Earth in 2036 (based on current observations) with its impact causing damage equivilent to 100,000 Hiroshima bombs.

They say there isn’t much time left to decide what to do, as it could take decades to design, test, and build the needed technology.

Granted the odds are strongly in our favour but it gives one pause to think what will happen when the earth does get hit – because we know the earth has been hit before and we know it will be hit again. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.

For the heartbroken I’ve found a report that indicates your “psychological” pain is just as real as if were physical: Pain of Rejection (transcript).

So what we’re looking at. This activation this red block here is in the anterior cingulate cortex. And this is basically the same part of the brain that’s involved in physical pain. So when we feel distressed or when we feel bothered by some kind of physical pain, that’s the same activation that you’ll see.

So you’ve got a broken heart and clearly you already know it’s no different than physical pain, but what you may not know is what to do about it.

According to the transcript the brain also has a kind of safety valve that protects the brain against feeling too rejected:

We also found in out study that this area, the right ventral prefrontal cortex which is sort of right in over my eyebrow, we also found activation here. …/… and this area has typically been shown to be associated with regulating people’s distress …/… And so people who had more activity in this area actually reported feeling less badly after they were rejected.”

So perhaps this safety valve that is the key to mending a broken heart.

And I think this is part of the reason why people tend to write poetry or write in diaries more when they’re sad than when they’re happy, because there’s something about turning on this region of the brain that helps turn off the parts that produce the distress itself.

If you’re not a poet/artist/blogger, (or if you’ve been forbidden from writing on the subject) it also mentions that a drop of alcohol can help ease the pain.

“The demolition of a 200 foot building in Sioux Falls, SD didn’t go so well today. Demolition experts blasted the bottom of the tower expecting it to tip over. Instead, the building sank into it’s basement. Great video!”

Check out the botched building demolition (1.7Mb QT) and here is a mirror link.

(via BoingBoing.net)

I uploaded the new International Centre for Student website earlier today. You can see the old version and the current version.