- China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission
Does this strike anyone else as really weird? I mean, the government’s official stance is that things like reincarnation don’t exist, and yet they pass a law regulating it? How would they even enforce that? What would be the penalty?
Bizarre.
- Users trash Wal-Mart on its Facebook site
Walmart’s Facebook page, intended as a place for hip young students to talk about decorating their rooms with Walmart products, has instead become a place where people come to discuss Walmart’s sinister employment and business practices. Of the 100-plus comments, none relates to dorm decorating as Wal-Mart had originally envisioned.
I don’t use Facebook at all, but this is still some great schadenfreude.
(Hat tip: Linkbunnies.org)
- Vancouver ranked #1 most livable city in the world
For five years in a row! And I get to move there in just under 6 months!
- Why humans love water
It’s no coincidence, Crawford claims, that human brain growth began to increase exponentially once we left the woods and headed for the beach.
- Huge hole found in the universe
The hole is nearly a billion light-years across. It is not a black hole, which is a small sphere of densely packed matter. Rather, this one is mostly devoid of stars, gas and other normal matter, and it’s also strangely empty of the mysterious “dark matter” that permeates the cosmos. Other space voids have been found before, but nothing on this scale.
The universe keeps getting curiouser and curiouser!
- The Cult That Spawned the Tough-Love Teen Industry
By the ’90s, tough love had spawned military-style boot camps and wilderness programs that thrust kids into extreme survival scenarios. At least three dozen teens have died in these programs, often because staff see medical complaints as malingering. This May, a 15-year-old boy died from a staph infection at a Colorado wilderness program. His family claims his pleas for help were ignored. In his final letter to his mother, he wrote, “They found my weakness and I want to go home.”
- Google Video Debacle Demonstrates the Need for Consumer Protection Laws
Imagine the outrage that would occur if one day every commercially manufactured DVD suddenly stopped working. The media would have a field day interviewing parents with crying children, upset because they can’t watch Finding Nemo for the 200th time. Congressional hearings would be scheduled to solve the “DVD problem”. Consumer rights advocates would mobilize urging media companies to do the right thing and either fix the problem or provide consumers with a full cash refund for every DVD purchased.
It’s an unthinkable scenario that is highly improbable in a world of physical media products like DVDs. And yet, it is exactly the sort of thing that can happen in a world of digital media products protected by proprietary Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes. In fact, it’s a scenario that’s playing out right now. Late last week consumers who had purchased videos from the marketplace on Google Video received notice that their videos will become unplayable on August 15th.
- Lawyerbots: Transform And Roll Out!
According to Arlington County District Court, the Michael Bay adolescent action-packed orgasm Transformers is worth $30,672. Precisely how they derived this figure I’m not certain, but they’ve just ruled that one Jhannet Sejas, a 19 year old college sophomore, must pay for the unthinkably heinous crime of wanting to do, for free, what advertising and marketing firms get paid obscene amounts of cash to do: promote a movie.
On the eve of her 19th birthday, Sejas and her boyfriend were taking in the giant robot free-for-all at a local theater. Sejas loved the movie, and thought that seeing a few seconds of the action might convince her heretofore recalcitrant younger brother into paying full price. So she whipped out her pocket-sized Cannon PowerShot, engaged the video mode, and filmed 20 seconds of one particularly brutal battle, the better to whet the little bugger’s appetite for mechanized destruction.
Before the movie ended, she was under arrest. That 20-second clip cost her a $71 court-ordered fine, the birthday photos in her PowerShot, the right to ever set foot in that movie theater again, and a clean police record.
And when you’re done reading that article, go check out The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America.
- White House manual details dealing with protesters
Not that they’re worried or anything. But the White House evidently leaves little to chance when it comes to protests within eyesight of the president. As in, it doesn’t want any. ‘A White House manual that came to light recently gives presidential advance staffers extensive instructions in the art of “deterring potential protestors” from President Bush’s public appearances around the country.
Among other things, any event must be open only to those with tickets tightly controlled by organizers. Those entering must be screened in case they are hiding secret signs. Any anti-Bush demonstrators who manage to get in anyway should be shouted down by “rally squads” stationed in strategic locations. And if that does not work, they should be thrown out.
- The top 50 least religious countries
High levels of organic atheism are strongly correlated with high levels of societal health, such as low homicide rates, low poverty rates, low infant mortality rates, and low illiteracy rates, as well as high levels of educational attainment, per capita income, and gender equality. Most nations characterized by high degrees of individual and societal security have the highest rates of organic atheism, and conversely, nations characterized by low degrees of individual and societal security have the lowest rates of organic atheism.
I heartily recommend reading the whole thing. Then go check out The God Delusion, just for good measure.
(Hat tip: Wesa)
- Sharks Have Genes for Fingers and Toes
“We’ve uncovered a surprising degree of genetic complexity in place at an early point in the evolution of appendages,” study leader Martin Cohn of the University of Florida said in a statement.
- Dinosaurs with jetpacks
By letting Apple have online distribution rights, which Apple quickly built into an empire, the record labels burnt one bridge (CD replication) and gave one to Apple (Apple being the world’s most popular online distribution channel). This shift, which everybody but the record labels have been expecting since 1996, has left the labels with their suits and advertising dollars. The suits are a dime a dozen and things like myspace have begun to erode the importance of corporate backed ad-money.
- Nine Inch Nails to become TV stars?
The futuristic show is said to centre around a time when the US is ruled by a right wing, religious dictatorship, reflecting the record’s themes.
Could be interesting. My confidence in Trent Reznor is pretty high, though — I think he could pull it off.
- Fire torches film sets at Rome’s historic Cinecitta
A fire ripped through part of Italy’s Cinecitta film studios late Thursday, destroying sets at the famed production complex where directors from Martin Scorsese to Federico Fellini have shot films.
That’s a damned shame, but at least they were able to stop the fire from spreading to the rest of the studio complex.
- A conversation with cult filmmaker Lloyd Kaufman
The mainstream media brainwashes the public. The media puts the Kool Aid in the water. They brainwash people into going to see Transformers and then heading to Burger King right after — just like zombies. These movies are just like fast food: they feel good going down, and then later you get the diarrhea or worse. What a great image. I’d never made a zombie movie, so I thought, why not make a Troma satire about it?
- Tony Wilson has died of cancer
Fuck.
- Minesweeper: The Movie
I’m not sure if I should be ashamed of the fact or not, but I’d actually go see this movie.
- The Benefits of Brain Damage
Money quote:
It is an irony of economic theory that it only excels at predicting the behavior of patients with serious brain injuries.
- Jeffrey Zeldman: King of Web Standards
A pretty good article about Jeffrey Zeldman. I can definitely say that Zeldman’s work has had a tremendous influence on me, and indeed the world as a whole. It’s nice to see him getting some of the limelight, although I think that the article could have easily been twice as long.
- 8-Foot-Tall Lego Man Washes Ashore In Netherlands
So that’s where it went! I’ve been looking all over!
(Hat tip: Wesa)
- New Fossils Support Deep-Sea Origin of Life
Geologists have discovered 1.43 billion-year-old fossils of deep-sea microbes, providing more evidence that life may have originated on the bottom of the ocean.
- Jump-starting the brain
Scientists have jump-started the consciousness of a man with severe brain injury in a world-first procedure in which electrodes were inserted deep into his brain.
The 38-year-old, who had been in a minimally conscious state for six years after an assault, could only move his fingers or eyes occasionally and was fed through a tube.
Now he can chew, swallow and carry out movements like brushing his hair and drinking from a cup, say the US neuroscientists who carried out the procedure, known as deep brain stimulation.
Well, that settles it: if I’m in a vegetated state, it is not okay to pull the plug: instead, I opt for this procedure.
(Hat tip: Wesa)
- List of what the BBC considers “swear words,” in order of severity
I just want to know who these people are who consider ‘cunt’ worse than ‘nigger.’
- Smarter people have less sex
Depending on the specific age and gender, an adolescent with an IQ of 100 was 1.5 to 5 times more likely to have had intercourse than a teen with a score of 120 or 130. Each additional point of IQ increased the odds of virginity by 2.7% for males and 1.7% for females. But higher IQ had a similar relationship across the entire range of romantic/sexual interactions, decreasing the odds that teens had ever kissed or even held hands with a member of the opposite sex at each age.
So that’s why I was a virgin until I was out of high school!
- Hypothermia key in preventing brain death after cardiac arrest
This is a story about what happens when your heart stops: about new research into how brain cells die and how something as simple as lowering body temperature may keep them alive—research that could ultimately save as many as 100,000 lives a year. And it’s about the mind as well, the visions people report from their deathbeds and the age-old questions about what, if anything, outlives the body. It begins with a challenge to something doctors have always been taught in medical school: that after about five minutes without a pulse, the brain starts dying, followed by heart muscle—the two most voracious consumers of oxygen in the body, victims of their own appetites. The emerging view is that oxygen deprivation is merely the start of a cascade of reactions within and outside the cells that can play out over the succeeding hours, or even days. Dying turns out to be almost as complicated a process as living, and somehow, among its labyrinthine pathways, Bondar found a way out.
This is an incredibly fascinating article, and is well worth a read. It’s especially poignant for me in light of my uncle dying over the weekend of a heart attack.
- Australia to introduce carbon trading
Carbon trading is a means of reducing emissions by capping them, and allowing emitters to buy and sell the rights to emit. That puts a price on emissions, and enables efficient emitters to sell rights to emit that they don’t need.
It’s a really promising idea, but I think that they’re going about it in maybe not the best way.
- Evolution in the blink of an eye
A population of butterflies has evolved in a flash on a South Pacific island to fend off a deadly parasite.
The proportion of male Blue Moon butterflies dropped to a precarious 1 percent as the parasite targeted males. Then, within the span of a mere 10 generations, the males evolved an immunity that allowed their population share to soar to nearly 40 percent—all in less than a year.
- How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense
So why has Twitter been so misunderstood? Because it’s experiential. Scrolling through random Twitter messages can’t explain the appeal. You have to do it — and, more important, do it with friends. (Monitoring the lives of total strangers is fun but doesn’t have the same addictive effect.) Critics sneer at Twitter and Dodgeball as hipster narcissism, but the real appeal of Twitter is almost the inverse of narcissism. It’s practically collectivist — you’re creating a shared understanding larger than yourself.
I haven’t used Twitter yet, but I think that if a good client were created for the iPhone, I would probably take the dive. It sound interesting, but at the moment it doesn’t look like something I’d really get much use out of.
- HIV vaccine ready for clinical trials
A vaccine that is capable of delivering a double whammy against AIDS-causing human immunodeficiency virus by both providing immunity against the infection while at the same time destroying cells infected by the virus is ready for clinical trials, a group of Russian researchers announced today.
This is huge! I hope it proves to work!