Brain Damaging Habits

1. No Breakfast
People who do not take breakfast are going to have a lower blood sugar level. This leads to an insufficient supply of nutrients to the brain causing brain degeneration.

2. Overeating
It causes hardening of the brain arteries, leading to a decrease in mental power.

3. Smoking
It causes multiple brain shrinkage and may lead to Alzheimer disease.

4. High Sugar consumption
Too much sugar will interrupt the absorption of proteins and nutrients causing malnutrition and may interfere with brain development.

5. Air Pollution
The brain is the largest oxygen consumer in our body. Inhaling polluted air decreases the supply of oxygen to the brain, bringing about a decrease in brain efficiency.

6. Sleep Deprivation
Sleep allows our brain to rest. Long term deprivation from sleep will accelerate the death of brain cells.

7. Head covered while sleeping
Sleeping with the head covered, increases the concentration of carbon dioxide and decrease concentration of oxygen that may lead to brain damaging effects.

8. Working your brain during illness
Working hard or studying with sickness may lead to a decrease in effectiveness of the brain as well as damage the brain.

9. Lacking in stimulating thoughts
Thinking is the best way to train our brain, lacking in brain stimulation thoughts may cause brain shrinkage.

10. Talking Rarely
Intellectual conversations will promote the efficiency of the brain

The main causes of liver damage are:
1. Sleeping too late and waking up too late are main cause.
2. Not urinating in the morning.
3. Too much eating.
4. Skipping breakfast.
5. Consuming too much medication.
6. Consuming too much preservatives, additives, food coloring, and artificial sweetener.
7. Consuming unhealthy cooking oil. As much as possible reduce cooking oil use when frying, which includes even the best cooking oils like olive oil. Do not consume fried foods when you are tired, except if the body is very fit.
8. Consuming raw (overly done) foods also add to the burden of liver. Veggies should be eaten raw or cooked 3-5 parts. Fried veggies should be finished in one sitting, do not store.

Health - Recognizing a stroke!

The follwing is an email receied from a friend of mine. Hope this would be of some help for every one.

Maybe you are in perfect Health to bother about this. But then, you may have an opportunity to save a family member, friend or stranger.

During a outdoor dinner at a seaside resort near Chennai, a friend
stumbled and took a little fall - she assured everyone that she was fine and just tripped over a brick because of her new shoes. They got her cleaned up and got her a new plate of food - while she appeared a bit shaken up, Lakshmi (name changed) went about enjoying herself the rest of the evening.

Her husband called later telling everyone that his wife had been taken to the hospital - (at 6:00 pm, Ingrid passed away). She had suffered a stroke at the dinner- had they known how to identify the signs of a stroke perhaps Lakshmi would be alive today.

It only takes a minute to read this:

A neurologist says that if he can get to a stroke victim within 3 hours he can totally reverse the effects of a stroke...totally. He said the trick was getting a stroke recognized, diagnosed and getting to the patient within 3 hours which is tough. There is nothing more life saving than getting the patient to the hospital in the FIRST ONE HOUR! The Golden Hour it is now known as to Doctors and emergency attendents alike!

RECOGNIZING A STROKE

Remember the "3" steps. Read and Learn!

Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness spells disaster. The stroke victim may suffer brain damage when people nearby fail to recognize the symptoms of a stroke.

Now doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple
questions:

1. *Ask the individual to SMILE.

2. *Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.

3. *Ask the person to SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE (Coherently) (i.e. . . It is sunny out today). If he or she has trouble with any of these tasks, call emergency immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher.

After discovering that a group of non-medical volunteers could identify facial weakness, arm weakness and speech problems, researchers urged the general public to learn the three questions. Widespread use of this test could result in prompt diagnosis and treatment of the stroke and prevent brain damage.

A cardiologist says if everyone who gets this e-mail sends it to 10 people; you can bet that at least one life will be saved.
BE A FRIEND AND SHARE THIS ARTICLE WITH AS MANY FRIENDS AS POSSIBLE, you could save their lives.

Keyboard-Mouse & shoulder Muscles

I was suffering from a kind of shoulder pain for past few days. I thought this might be happening following stress the due to exercise. Even though i stayed away from exercise for couple of days the pain in shoulder did not cure. I cleaned up the mouse though i did not have much dust accumulated on the rollers to induct uneasiness in using it. I searched the net to get some tips about better arm, shoulder and wrist positions while using mouse and keyboard. I came across the following docs, hope this will be of some help for all of us.

Tips for Using a Computer Mouse

Posture Issues with Keyboard/Mouse Use

Rotate a Word :)

I was looking for a way to print text on user control with vertical alignment. I thought i can easily achieve it. But the challenging part of the job was that the text need to be rotated 90 degrees or 270 degrees rather than just printing each character in text one below the other.

Any way i could reach the goal using the Windows API, CreateFontIndirect. Primarily this function creates a logical font that has the characteristics specified in the specified structure. The font can subsequently be selected as the current font for any device context.

A text can be rotated through any angle using this API. A really useful one while you print text on user controls with vertical alignment.

The function declaration is as follows:

Private Declare Function CreateFontIndirect Lib "gdi32" Alias "CreateFontIndirectA" (lpLogFont As LOGFONT) As Long

pLogFont Points to a LOGFONT structure that defines the characteristics of the logical font.

If the function succeeds, the return value is a handle to a logical font. If the function fails, the return value is NULL.

Create a type as below.

Private Type LOGFONT
lfHeight As Long
lfWidth As Long
lfEscapement As Long
lfOrientation As Long
lfWeight As Long
lfItalic As Byte
lfUnderline As Byte
lfStrikeOut As Byte
lfCharSet As Byte
lfOutPrecision As Byte
lfClipPrecision As Byte
lfQuality As Byte
lfPitchAndFamily As Byte
lfFaceName(LF_FACESIZE) As Byte
End Type


Then change the Escapement to rotate font (too bad they did not call it rotation so it could be found in a search). Then create a new font the same as current font but rotated. Now select the font n the Form's device context and now the texts printed will be rotated through angle set at lfEscapement.

Bresenham's Line Algorithm

On a computer screen, the pixels indicating a slanted line are selected with Bresenham's algorithm, developed in 1962 while at IBM.

Couple of useful links are here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bresenham
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/group/goa/mallinnus/lines/bresenh.html