‘A new study into the mental skills required to read a map has handed blokes new ammunition and dealt heterosexual women a final indignity.
The research, from the University of Warwick in the UK, suggests that not only are straight women worse at map reading than straight males, they are also outperformed by bisexual men, gay men, gay women and bisexual women – in that order.
The study looked at what’s called mental rotation. This is our ability to mentally visualise an object from different perspectives.
Applied to real life, the most practical example of mental rotation is map reading, says Dr Michael Tlauka, an expert in gender differences and spatial ability from Flinders University. ‘
‘Doom9, the forum that made headlines last year by extracting and publishing a “processing key” used to lock HD-DVD discs, has published a new key. [..]
The last processing key leak created an Internet firestorm when the AACS licensing authority sent hundreds of legal threats to sites that published the key. The strategy backfired: within days, more than a million pages had published the key, ensuring that more people knew how to break HD-DVD players than owned the devices.
AACS has the capacity to “revoke” a processing key. When they do this, all HD-DVD players are unable to play new discs unless they get an update (woe betide you if your DVD player is on your boat, in your cottage, or at your grandparents’ place where there is no Internet access). The big question is whether the AACS can revoke keys faster than hackers can extract them.
It’s a race. AACS is losing.’
‘The Memorial Day holiday means it’s a day on the water with the family.
Chuck Singleton does what he can to makes sure his kids are safe out here. The concern is who else is out there.
“You don’t know where they come from,” said Singleton. “You know, they could load up with a bomb or whatever and come right out here.”
With thousands of boats on the waterways, the worry is the recreational boat is now a Homeland Security threat.’
‘Twenty-seven illegal immigrants spent a day at sea holding on to buoys around a giant tuna net as the Maltese and Libyan governments argued over who should save them from drowning.
They were picked up eventually by an Italian patrol vessel. The men – Africans of various nationalities – had paid for a passage from Libya to Europe in an open boat that foundered on Saturday.
Soon after their boat went down they were spotted by the Maltese tug Boudafel, which was towing a huge tuna-breeding plant towards Spain.
The men said the tug threw them a line and began towing them, ahead of the plant.’
Apparently she got tangled in some cord that holds the boats in place before the start of the race.
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‘A bleary-eyed researcher who normally sleeps like a log went to bed yesterday claiming a world record after staying awake for more than 11 days and nights.
But when Tony Wright, 43, finally regains wakefulness today after catching up on his sleep, he could be in for a cruel awakening. The human guinea pig will discover that he may have given up ten hours too early to claim the crown.
The record that he broke – of 11 days, or 264 hours – was set by Randy Gardner, an American, in 1964 and is recognised in psychiatric textbooks.
But that is 12 hours shorter than the record which used to be included in The Guinness Book of Recordsbefore being removed from the book in 1989. It was deleted on the grounds that it could encourage records harmful to health and was unverifiable because of the claims of insomnia sufferers.’
‘Wrongly jailed after a woman cried rape, Warren Blackwell applied for compensation for his three wasted years in prison.
Torn from his family and sent to languish in jail as a convicted sex attacker, the innocent father-of-two imagined he was due a hefty sum for the miscarriage of justice.
Instead, he was flabbergasted to learn the Home Office now intends to charge him nearly £7,000 for “board and lodging”.
The money is for the cost of food and accommodation while he was behind bars, and will be deducted from whatever compensation he receives for wrongly imprisonment.’
‘You’re paying for that.’
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‘Australians are slogging their guts out working overtime and most employees don’t get much thanks, with the bulk of overtime done being unpaid. [..]
A survey of 2931 NEWS.com.au readers revealed 91 per cent of those employed worked overtime in the week before the survey was conducted, with an average 9 and a half hours spent working extra.
While most people said they are required by their employer to put in additional hours beyond their standard working week, a whopping 74 per cent of those employed did not get paid.’
‘Not fake – He’s dead. It happened Wednesday 1 April 1981, in Hawaii.
This is the news report of the incident:
Australian stuntman Jim Bailey, known as ”The Human Torpedo,” fell 500 feet to his death from an airplane while making a film for television Wednesday, authorities said.
Initially, authorities said Baily was performing for ABC-TV’s ”That’s Incredible,” but the show’s producer denied having any connection with the accident.
Witnesses, including members of the Maui Fire Department and the rescue unit, said Bailey, a resident of Brisbane, Australia, was suspended underneath a single-engine Ballanca by a strap and belt when the belt broke. He hung onto the strap for a few seconds before falling.’
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‘While these maintenance workers in Croatia fix a freeway sign, a coach bus comes speeding towards the crew and crashes straight into a crane which one man was standing in.’
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‘In 1934, top Nazi party official Hermann Goering received a seemingly mundane request from the Reich Forestry Service. A fur farm was seeking permission to release a batch of exotic bushy-tailed critters into the wild to “enrich the local fauna” and give bored hunters something new to shoot at.
Goering approved the request and unwittingly uncorked an ecological disaster that is still spreading across Europe. The imported North American species, Procyon lotor, or the common raccoon, quickly took a liking to the forests of central Germany. Encountering no natural predators — and with hunters increasingly called away by World War II — the woodland creatures multiplied and have stymied all attempts to prevent them from overtaking the continent.
Today, as many as 1 million raccoons are estimated to live in Germany, and their numbers are steadily increasing. In 2005, hunters and speeding cars killed 10 times as many raccoons as a decade earlier, according to official statistics.’
‘A Lakewood, Ohio, landlord has been ordered by a judge to house arrest in one of his derelict buildings until he makes the proper repairs.
Lakewood Municipal Judge Patrick Carroll ordered Richard Naumann to live in his Lake Avenue apartment building — which has no heat, hot water, operable stoves or ovens — until proper repairs are made to the two buildings he owns, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported Tuesday.
Naumann, who will only be allowed to leave the building between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. for work, will also be outfitted with an electronic monitoring device on his ankle to ensure he abides by the judge’s command, the newspaper said.’
This TV presenter starts to complain about her production staff on air. They very quickly get their own back.
see it here »
‘A driver was killed when a van carrying welding equipment exploded in a County Durham market town.
Windows in shops and homes were left shattered and wreckage was strewn across the centre of Wolsingham, near Bishop Auckland.
The 33-year-old local man, who worked as a welder near Durham, was in the van when the oxy-acetylene cylinders exploded.
Homes near the scene were evacuated after the incident on Saturday.
It is not yet known what caused the blast but Durham Police said there did not appear to be any suspicious circumstances.’
With photos of the scene./a>
‘A police campaign to crack down on pickpockets has come too late to help the capital’s top crime fighter.
Police Chief Anstein Gjengedal’s wallet was snatched by a pickpocket as the campaign was set to begin, the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet reported Friday.
The police chief was on the Oslo airport train Monday when a group of people jostled him. When he checked a few minutes later, his wallet was gone.
“I didn’t have much money with me,” he was quoted as saying. “But it still wasn’t very nice.”
Gjengedal said he had followed police advice by having the wallet in the inner pocket of his jacket, but the thieves got it anyway.’
‘The little boy spotted the pile of colored sand and couldn’t resist. Slipping under a protective rope, he danced all over the sand, ruining the carefully crafted picture.
Never mind that it was the creation of Tibetan monks who had spent two days on the floor of Union Station, meticulously pouring the sand into an intricate design as an expression of their Buddhist faith.
They were more than halfway done with the design — called a mandala — on Tuesday when they ended their work for the day and left. The little boy showed up later with his mother, who was taking a package to a post office in the hall.
”He did a little tap dance on it, completely destroying it,” said Lama Chuck Stanford.’
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‘An intoxicated patient filed a complaint with the city after a Denver Health Medical Center doctor issued discharge instructions telling her to not “get drunk and fall, causing harm to your head or body.” [..]
Howe, who had cut the back of her head, was “acutely intoxicated,” according to hospital records, with a breath alcohol level measured at 0.216. The reports show Howe was uncooperative with emergency department personnel and was tied down.
But according to Howe’s complaint, she was not seen by a doctor until 7:50 a.m., more than five hours after she arrived. She was eventually examined by Sooch, but Howe says the doctor did not order X-rays, an MRI or a CT scan of her head, nor was she admitted to the hospital. Sooch treated the cut on her head and in his discharge instructions, prescribed Tylenol, facts verified by medical records. Dr. Sooch, on the hospital discharge sheet, had these instructions for Howe:
“Do not abuse alcohol. Do not get drunk and fall causing harm to your head or body. Apologize to your family, friends and ED (emergency department) faculty for your extremely inappropriate behavior and rudeness while intoxicated. Be a great mother to your kids.”‘
‘Lest anyone suspect that my standards for women are too high, let me allay those fears by enumerating in advance my three criteria for the match. First, the potential girlfriend must be approximately my age–let’s say 21 plus or minus three or four years. Second, the girl must be beautiful (and I use that term all-encompassingly to refer to both inner and outer beauty). Third, she must also be reasonably intelligent–she doesn’t have to be Mensa material, but the ability to carry on a witty, insightful argument would be nice. So there they are–three simple demands, which I’m sure everyone will agree are anything but unreasonable.
That said, I now present my demonstration of why the probability of finding a suitable candidate fulfilling the three above-noted requirements is so small as to be practically impossible–in other words, why I will never have a girlfriend. I shall endeavour to make this proof as rigorous as the available data permits. And I should note, too, that there will be no statistical trickery involved here; I have cited all my sources and provided all relevant calculations in case anyone wishes to conduct their own independent review. Let’s now take a look at the figures.’
The odds don’t look good. 🙂
‘A 38-year-old man has had part of a finger bitten off in a bizarre suspected road rage incident in Adelaide.
Police say the man was driving in East Terrace, Black Forest, yesterday when he stopped to check on a trailer he was towing.
As he did, he exchanged words with a group of men standing on the side of the road.
“For unknown reasons the exchange developed further and blows were traded with one of the men from the group,” a police spokesman said.
“During the altercation the victim had the top of his left middle finger bitten off down to the first knuckle.”‘
‘Here’s the thing, you have to get a license to drive a car but they let anyone be a parent. And, more pertinent to this conversation, they let anyone, may I repeat, ANYONE name their kid. So, while that might have some VERY unfortunate consequences for a few unlucky kids, it provides serious entertainment for those of us with parents who actually put some thought into naming us. With that in mind, here are 10 of the worst names ever. Seriously, these parents should be locked up… (and what the hell is wrong with Missouri?)’
Mike Huntsucker. 🙂
‘In front of hundreds of people this third degree black belt attempts to break a wooden bat. He continues to fail and the bat finally rolls off the box. He stands up and people start clapping but Im pretty sure that doesnt count.’
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‘What a day for Apple investors. The stock started off strong today on a lot of pre-market buying, despite news that Amazon will finally start competing on sales of DRM-free music.
Then, whoops, at 11:49 AM EST Engadget posted saying that the iPhone and Leopard operating system launches would be seriously delayed. They based the story on an internal Apple email that was forwarded to them. [..]
Apple’s stock promptly tanked on massive selling, going from $107.89 to $103.42 in six minutes (11:56 – 12:02). This wiped just over $4 billion off of Apple’s market capitalization. A lot of people lost a lot of money very quickly.
Well, it turns out that the email was a hoax. [..]’
‘A couple of weekends ago, Diana Getson took her nine-year-old son to a Child Find event in Charlottetown. Treat bags were on sale for $1.
In the bag she bought for her son was a bright yellow bracelet with the Child Find logo and an invitation to win great prizes by visiting a website called getrealfruitminis.com.
But the prize turned out to be a surprise when Getson’s son typed in the address. The site offered “hard-core nudity and dirty porn pictures,” Getson said. [..]
Coincidentally, Child Find PEI has an information session coming up soon to warn parents to keep watch over what their children find on the internet.’
‘Paula Abdul broke her nose over the weekend after she fell while trying to avoid stepping on her Chihuahua, her publicist said Monday.
Abdul was recovering from the mishap and will appear on “American Idol” Tuesday and its season finale Wednesday, publicist David Brokaw said.
“She’s a little sore, but is doing fine,” he said.
Abdul told the syndicated entertainment TV show “Extra” she tore cartilage in her nose and fractured her toe.’
‘With scarcely a mention in the mainstream media, President Bush has ordered up a plan for responding to a catastrophic attack.
Under that plan, he entrusts himself with leading the entire federal government, not just the Executive Branch. And he gives himself the responsibility “for ensuring constitutional government.” [..]
It defines a “catastrophic emergency” as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government function.” [..]
The document emphasizes the need to ensure “the continued function of our form of government under the Constitution, including the functioning of the three separate branches of government,” it states.
But it says flat out: “The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government.”‘
‘A Californian man who tried to kill his girlfriend by leaving her in a car parked across railway lines was himself killed when an oncoming train hurled the car into him as he fled.
His girlfriend survived, the Associated Press reported.
The man drove the car to the head of a line of traffic stopped at a level crossing in the San Fernando Valley neighbourhood of Sunland on Monday, police spokesman Mike Lopez said.
The man, who was seen arguing with the woman, then parked the car on the tracks and jumped out, leaving her behind, Mr Lopez said.’
‘A New Zealand city has unofficially renamed the local garbage dump after John Cleese following the British actor’s remark during a visit last year that he hated the place.
A sign bearing the title “Mt. Cleese” appeared recently at the Awapuni Landfill in Palmerston North after a local satirist suggested it be renamed “John Cleese Memorial Tip,” with the tag line: “All manner of crap happily recycled.”
Cleese, famous for being a member of the Monty Python comedy group, as well as the 1970s TV comedy “Fawlty Towers” and Hollywood hit “A Fish Called Wanda,” drew local ire during a show last year when he called Palmerston North the “suicide capital of New Zealand” and said he hated it.
