Tag: news

Tap tap tap it’s the newswire

  1. Here’s how to dissuade Iraqis from suicide bomb and IED attacks: we’ve gone and made a television commercial urging them not to. I especially like the description of the group that funded it: I call them an independent, non-governmental group of scholars, non political people,” says Plotkin. “Some may live in Iraq, some may live abroad. For a variety of different reasons—from safety concerns to wanting the focus to remain on the issue itself, they decided to remain anonymous.”
  2. In other War Pigs news, the fighter jets are going to have IP addresses now.
  3. NEOLOGISM ALERT: “Bro Job.”
  4. Here’s a bright idea. If you’re painting lots of things, capture the fumes and use them for power.
  5. Headline of the day! NUDE WORM TEMPTS WORLD CUP FANS
  6. Sure, it’s an oppressive technology that’l be used to disrupt free expression, but I still want a Ghostbusters-style slimer for Christmas.
  7. SMS isn’t just for teen hookups. It’s for desperate cries for help sent to aid organizations, too.
  8. There’s a good summary of the net neutrality problem from Joan Blades via an interview on Feministing.
  9. Congresscritters here are trying variations on the captcha to keep bots and other automation from emailing them, with predictably comic effect.
  10. You may insert your own “Dude, you’re…” punchline to this exploding Dell laptop story and photo.
  11. Wouldn’t it be a larf if we overfished so much that we ran out of fish oil and all got real stupid? Alarmist, I know, but…
  12. Now the Sheriffs Dept is in on the action using tiny drone airplanes to spy on us. Extra points for the name of the company making them: “Octatron”.
  13. Typos can be embarrassing or confusing. At times they can also result in massive litigation!
  14. Louisiana is still trying to find a way to get money from nutria somehow even though no one wants to eat them, make coats out of them, or even really meet one.
  15. You know that guy who volunteers a lot, runs for local office a lot, thinks pretty highly of himself, is always not only a vet but a Special Forces combat vet? Turns out he’s a multiple murderer instead. (Reg. required, use bugmenot etc.)

The news

This morning my phonepagerthing beeped with a message from emergencyemail.org: Bird flu in Canada, second case. That seemed appropriate. Their mission is to send me things like fire and flood warnings, DHS freakouts, declarations of war, and other items of urgent and frightening interest, and I think bird flu on the same continent as me is a good call.

I then went to my email and saw a CNN News Alert in my inbox. I figured it was the same thing and clicked. Nope: Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger to be cited for failure to wear a helmet, not having a proper license at time of his June 12 accident.

I looked at CNN’s home page. Nothing at all about bird flu there. I went to Google’s News home page: nothing about bird flu on the home page. A search came up with ~130 stories, most of them about exactly what the emergency email people paged me with: two cases of bird flu in North America.

I wonder if there were actually direct threats from poultry producers to news organizations, or just the implied one of advertising loss? Because this kind of thing doesn’t happen by accident.

Inland Empire Update: Homemade Mining Operation Considered Harmful

Montclair gold hunter digs 60-foot-deep hole in front yard

MONTCLAIR, Calif. (AP) A homeowner digging for gold in his front yard said he got “carried away” and ended up with a 60-foot-deep hole, authorities said.

Henry Mora, 63, began digging two weeks ago after his gold detector picked up a signal near his front patio.

“I figured, well, maybe there’s something down there you would logically conclude, right? So I started digging,” the semiretired musician said Wednesday.

Mora said he only intended to go down 3 or 4 feet, but he started finding gold dust in the dirt and the detector kept hinting that he was getting closer.

“It was still beeping, and that just gave me the idea to keep digging,” he said. “I think it’s a normal human reaction, especially when you think there might be gold down there.”

A neighbor who saw the mound of dirt growing on Mora’s lawn became concerned and called authorities Tuesday. Fire officials responding to the home found two men inside the unreinforced hole, using a bucket and rope to remove dirt. Mora had hired the two men to help him.

“We told him, ‘You’re done,”’ Montclair fire Capt. Rich Baldwin said. “It’s amazing no one got killed.”

Authorities fenced off Mora’s property and ordered him to hire an engineer to safely pack the dirt back into the ground.

Mora acknowledged his search for buried treasure was getting “totally out of hand.” Yet when asked whether he regrets starting the dig, Mora was conflicted.

“In a way yes, and in a way no,” Mora said, “because I think there’s still gold down there.”

Attention area pervo predators

Holding the puppy in your arms does not cancel out the ski mask and endear you to potential victims. This guy is probably not going to be hard to catch.

Police seek help finding man Irvine girl said accosted her
The incident in which the man reportedly wore a ski mask and held a puppy happened at about 2:45 p.m. Wednesday.

By JOHN McDONALD
The Orange County Register

IRVINE – Police are asking for the public’s help in finding a man a 12-year-old said accosted her while wearing a ski mask and holding a puppy on a leash.

The incident occurred at about 2:45 p.m. Wednesday in the area of Deer Spring. He made no attempt to pull her into his car, police said. Two similar incidents took place May 18.

The man was described as 5 feet 7 inches tall, 160 to 180 pounds, wearing a black long-sleeve shirt with the word “Hurley” across the front, dress black pants and brown work boots. He was driving a tan four-door Honda.

Anyone with information is asked to call 949-724-7172.

Reverse engineer your brain

More than 40 years ago, my father wrote a short story called “Dr. Pettigott’s Face.” The eponymous doctor of the story has a theory that pushing the face into happy expressions will make people happy, and has constructed a machine to do this. I remember that for years he had a correspondence with some neuro researcher who was interested in facial expressions because the guy liked the story so much. The title has been a shorthand in our family for people trying to reverse engineer things in weird ways.

The polyvagal theory and some of its implications suggest that there may be a grain of truth in this. The connections between emotion and facial expression are very tight and it’s possible that it “goes both ways”. This story from the LA Times on Sunday is fascinating:

botox for a better brain?