BC TECH
Saved by @jay_millerjay

Butt plugs were originally sold as a miracle cure for headaches, acne, and insanity

Thread, article here and h/t: @qikipedia :
https://t.co/Ts84xnmWKJ

 For a long time, medicine was pre-occupied with the question "can this be solved by putting something in the butt?"
Take, for example, tobacco smoke enemas, in which 18th Century physicians saw drowning victims and attempted to de-deadify them by blowing tobacco smoke up their rectums with a pipe.
Despite having no medical benefit whatsoever, the practice was popular, and enema kits lined the Thames like lifebelts, ready to be used as one final humiliation for somebody who was crap at swimming.
This practice ended sometime after 1800 when it became apparent that it didn't really work, given how the anus famously isn't really connected to the lungs, but doctors weren't quite finished with having a poke around in the old anus to see what happens just yet.
In short, as a Valentine's Day tweet from QI put it: butt plugs were marketed as a headache remedy.
Dr Young's Ideal Rectal Dilators, created in the 1890s, were not marketed as a sexual object, but as a serious medical tool – and we're sure they were used as such.
The instructions told users – who were encouraged to self-prescribe and administer – to begin with the smaller dilator and work their way up, rather than begin with the monster on the right.
"First warm dilator in warm water; then lubricate outside of dilator with Dr Young’s Piloment (or if it is not available, with vaseline) and while in a squatting position – or while lying on the side with knees drawn up – gently insert in the rectum as far as the flange or rim."
"Hold in place a minute and the anal muscles will close and retain it. Sit or lie down and allow it to remain for half an hour or an hour to get the best results. Ten minutes will accomplish much."
“When ready to go to the next larger size, it is best first to use for a few minutes the same size you have been using, inserting and withdrawing It several times. This is very beneficial and should not be overlooked.”
The packaging noted that they should not be used by anyone under the age of 8, before ruining this obviously good sense point by adding "without doctor supervision".
Dr Young admitted that people would often panic when they saw the sheer girth of the largest size, but assured them that by moving their way through the sizes they would be able to accommodate it, and may want to take on an "Extra Length" dilator five, which was quite quite thick
Some of the theory behind it made sense, or at least weren't a huge leap in the imagination. For instance, it was promised that they would help with defecation by "strengthening and toning the muscles controlling defecation", and were mainly marketed as a tool for constipation.
Customers using it for this purpose seemed satisfied, including Reverand Cook and S.F Loughborough, who said that they would not sell their butt plugs for any price under $100 and $10,000 respectively. That's one satisfied vicar.
Then the claims went off-piste, stating that the product promoted more refreshing sleep, could relieve foul breath and bad tastes in the mouth, sallow skin, acne, anemia, lassitude, mental hebetude, insomnia, anorexia, headaches
diarrhea (which you can see might be true if you just leave it in), hemorrhoids, prolapse, flatulence (see diarrhea), indigestion, nervousness, irritability, and cold extremities.
You'll notice that when somebody says "I've had a bad night's sleep" people rarely respond "I'll go fetch the gigantic butt plug." This is, of course, because the claims were far from the medical truth, as a court case with an amazing name would attest.
In the court case named "U.S. v. 67 Sets of Dr. Young's Rectal Dilators and 83 Packages of Dr. Young's Piloment" the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ruled that not only were the claims not backed up by evidence, but that the device "would be dangerous to health when used with
the frequency and duration prescribed, recommended, or suggested in the labeling."
The products were ordered to be destroyed before they even found out that Dr Young had also claimed in a medical journal that the rubber sex toys for putting up your ass (let's face facts here) would be effective in curing insanity.
As always, if you like this dumb thread you’ll love my dumb (and cheap) books
https://t.co/OFbeVkVGWl
Tanking followers for the butt plug thread, you all need to grow up.
Btw I am 100 percent sure people were buying these for fun, whether or not that went against the inventor’s “ram this up your arse to cure your eczema” ethos

More from Tech

foone
foone
@Foone
I went looking for a remote-controlled power switch (the wireless christmas kind, not the modern IoT kind) and didn't find it, but I did find this thing I bought just to figure out why it exists.
It's a timer outlet, but you program it from your phone... but it's not wireless.


Yeah instead it plugs into your phone's HEADPHONE PORT


I got it on sale.
probably because iphone dropped the headphone port and they had to get with the 21st century and make it bluetooth


So inside the box is the device. it's got a little 2-prong polarized outlet with no ground.


on top is the only controls: on/off/timer.
TECH
Novid Houellebecq (That's Hollaback)
Novid Houellebecq (Tha...
@GarouGothic
Ok, here is a thread for you.
What happens when you have:
Netflix
Apple
Amazon
WarnerMedia +
Disney+
SonyCrackle (Reboot)
Verizon All Access (after they buy CBS/Viacom)
UniversalSkyMedia
By 2021
Answer? Internet Slows To A Craw and Dies.
Why?
Bandwidth.

Netflix's gets 35% of all internet traffic.
Now we all know Apple Coming to Netflix Corner.
We know that WarnerMedia Planning One
We Know about Disney+
Now how will the net handle 8 Streaming Platforms all at once?
Answer - IT CANT.

But Novid, the speed, the 4K the all everything?
NOOOOO BUDDY.
Even if you could do it and even if AWS ran six million clouds, The Net Will still slow to a crawl. 35%, goes to nearly 90% if any of the 8 or all of the 8 eat at netflix's numbers.

Oh, they wouldn't be running at once.
FOOL. You forget how bad things were when game of thrones season premieres came around. HBO SERVERS FALL DOWN GO BOOM!

Now see if a season like 2021 come around and they air shows on a same day. It gets crazy. AT&T and others gonna realize they cant build out forever. Something will give and it might be your entertainment consumption big time.
TECH
Advertisement
Tom MacWright
Tom MacWright
@tmcw
it's done.

a visual enigma machine simulator: https://t.co/eLE4Sb97HW
TECH
Darkroom
Darkroom
@usedarkroom
Following up last year’s surprisingly popular "10 things you likely didn’t know about Darkroom" and your many requests for more tips, we put together a second edition that focuses on workflows in Darkroom. Click through to read it all right here in this thread.

1/10 Copy & Paste your Edits in Batch. Skip the hassles of re-applying each edit over and over again by copying your edits from the tap-and-hold library menu, History tool, or the Actions (•••) menu. Go to your other photos, and paste your edits onto them.


2/10 The joy of seeing your wonderful shot in motion is why we love Live Photos so much, and why we fully support editing and exporting them! While editing, Tap the “LIVE” button at the left top when viewing a Live Photo for playback.


3/10 Turn your iPhone to landscape for an iPad like editing experience, bringing some iPad exclusive functionality to iPhone. In the library grid we show the Library Sidebar, when viewing or editing we show the Photo Strip, and in the color tool we show our Color Histogram.


4/10 Manage while editing with the Photostrip. With the photo strip available on all devices in landscape orientation, you can skip & hop through your library while editing, or quickly compare multiple photos to find the one with the perfect expression or the perfect light.
TECH
Radek Osmulski
Radek Osmulski
@radekosmulski
THREAD: How is it possible to train a well-performing, advanced Computer Vision model 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗣𝗨? 🤔

At the heart of this lies the most important technique in modern deep learning - transfer learning.

Let's analyze how it


2/ For starters, let's look at what a neural network (NN for short) does.

An NN is like a stack of pancakes, with computation flowing up when we make predictions.

How does it all work?


3/ We show an image to our model.

An image is a collection of pixels. Each pixel is just a bunch of numbers describing its color.

Here is what it might look like for a black and white image


4/ The picture goes into the layer at the bottom.

Each layer performs computation on the image, transforming it and passing it upwards.


5/ By the time the image reaches the uppermost layer, it has been transformed to the point that it now consists of two numbers only.

The outputs of a layer are called activations, and the outputs of the last layer have a special meaning... they are the predictions!
TECH

You May Also Like

Aron Hyman
Aron Hyman
@aron_hyman
THREAD: The following tweets are for the purposes of stories that will appear in Sunday Times Daily. The videos and images depicted may be upsetting but are deemed to be in the public interest. This is the story of the Ayanda "Borhey" Mtila as far as we were able to verify it.


On 13 October Mtila as defacto overlord of the Boko Harram gang, allegedly carried out his penultimate cash-in-transit robbery. Sources say he sustained a head wound in a shootout with security guards. Some friends believe he was killed by a fellow

He died two days later, on 15 October, after allegedly being in a coma for more than a day. His funeral was a spectacle, held on Nyanga Sports fields on 24 October and attended by hundreds of people. Sources say it was made possible by Paarl businessman Lukhanyo "Spur" Mangena.
CRIME
Andrey \uf8ff Azimov
Andrey  Azimov
@AndreyAzimov
The best way to know if people like your product is NOT:

- Have a lot of emails in the waiting list
- Become #1 on PH
- Become #1 of HN or Reddit
- Have people that saing "I'll pay"
- Have a lot of free users

The best way to know if they're actually pay for it.

The only thing that matters is your product providing a value, and you can't know this until people will pay money for it.

We can have a first signal of a product/market fit after the launch by check how many sales we've got in the first 24h. Some scale:

200+ This has a high potential.
100+: This has a potential.
50+: Some people need it.
10+: People almost don't need it.
0+: People don't need it.

This is for a single time payment product. For a subscription probably it should be less because people hate subscription.

And obviously, you should have a lot of traffic like 3-5k+.

Here is a stat for my products (macOS apps) for the first 24h after the launch:
STARTUPS
Advertisement
Patrick Chovanec
Patrick Chovanec
@prchovanec
I'm going to do two history threads on Ethiopia, one on its ancient history, one on its modern story (1800 to today). 🇪🇹

I'll begin with the ancient history ... and it goes way back. Because modern humans - and before that, the ancestors of humans - almost certainly originated in Ethiopia. 🇪🇹 (sub-thread):


The first likely historical reference to Ethiopia is ancient Egyptian records of trade expeditions to the "Land of Punt" in search of gold, ebony, ivory, incense, and wild animals, starting in c 2500 BC 🇪🇹


Ethiopians themselves believe that the Queen of Sheba, who visited Israel's King Solomon in the Bible (c 950 BC), came from Ethiopia (not Yemen, as others believe). Here she is meeting Solomon in a stain-glassed window in Addis Ababa's Holy Trinity Church. 🇪🇹


References to the Queen of Sheba are everywhere in Ethiopia. The national airline's frequent flier miles are even called "ShebaMiles". 🇪🇹
CULTURE
Anu Satheesh \U0001f1ee\U0001f1f3
Anu Satheesh 🇮🇳...
@AnuSatheesh5
Cherthala Karthyayani Kshetram
#Alappuzha, Kerala
#KeralaTemples 🚩

Cherthala Karthyayani Temple Prathishta was done by Vilwamangalam Swamy. Chertala Pooram is very famous. Devi is Mangalya Dayini here removes obstacles relating to marriages. Sthala Puranam says that, once 👇


Vilwamangalam Swamiyar was passing this area after Prathista of Padmananbhaswamy Temple, he felt Devi chaitanyam and recognized as Karthyayani Devi. But Devi seeing Vilwamangalam went inside the pond. Swamy searched for Devi continously for 6 days and on 7th day Vilwamangalam


got hold of Devi's hair. Thus only Devi's head is Prathishta here. Devotees do Kozhi parathal ( offering cock) here as an offering to Karthyayani Devi.

Karthyayaniamme Sharanam
🙏🕉🙏
ALL
Eric
Eric
@ericbahn
1/ Recently, I learned about the concept of ‘struggle porn’. This refers to the fetish of sacrificing nearly everything (health, relationships, time) for your startup. I fear that this label is creating more harm than good.

2/ @nateliason wrote a fabulous article about this topic, which first introduced me to this concept. Everyone should read it:

3/ @alexisohanian also recently spoke about struggle porn, though referring to it as ‘hustle porn.’ (as the co-founder of @hustlefundvc, obviously I take issue with this pejorative definition of ‘hustle’, but that’s another topic)

4/ Struggling in itself isn’t necessarily bad. Let’s be real here--if you’re going to start a startup, you will struggle. Founders should expect to work harder generally than employees. You will be challenged in many ways and also be super rewarded in others. This is normal.

5/ However, if you are over-indexing on hard work without clear purpose and degrading your mental health/relationships in the process--then this is very bad and we obviously should not celebrate this behavior.
STARTUPS