"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious." - Oscar Wilde

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Apple fans burned by hot Airs - "Apple has released a software patch for the MacBook Air, hoping to fix overheating issues that have plagued the super-thin laptop since launch... Apple has long faced problems with the first generations of its products. Early iPods were prone to scratching; previous MacBook models suffered staining, whining noises emanating from their innards and random shutdown errors, to name a few."
It's okay. They can just look at it.

Gender Differences in Body Weight Perception and Weight-Loss Strategies of College Students - "Gender differences in college students' perceptions and satisfaction with body weight were examined. Females tended to perceivev themselves as overweight when they were not, failed to see themselves as underweight when they were, and many of those who did not see themselves as even slightly overweight wanted to lose weight. Although males reported some dissatisfaction with their bodies, they tended to want to gain rather than lose weight. Females dieted more frequently than did males, and nearly one-third of the females reported either self-induced vomiting or laxative use as a weight-loss strategy. The relationship between social pressure for female slenderness, dieting, and eating disorders are discussed. "
If a girl says she’s fat, she’s probably not. If a girl says she’s thin, she is.

Smell my fart and DIE: My Last Post as an NSF... - "My skin grew worse and so did my eyes, they were red and in pain all the time, i reported sick until people told me,
my officers were angry... In December, I woke up. Blind. Couldnt see clearly at all,
i went to my eye doctor. He panicked, telling me that my eye pressure was dangerously high."

'Hole, The' by Wash West (2003) - "A mock horror gay porn based on the popular 2002 hit movie The Ring (Ringu). The story centers around a mysterious videotape and anyone who sees it has seven days before they turn totally gay. When the time is up, even the most all- American jock becomes a friend of Dorothy. The story follows a reporter, who is investigating the tape to find the source of its mysterious power... "
Dorothy?

The sermons of the Dog Whisperer - ""With a timid dog, you need to talk in a soft, soothing language such as French," he says. "With a bold, tough dog, you're better off talking in German because of its authoritative tone and curt-sounding words. I've got one dog that responds to me when I talk in a North Wales dialect, another that I always address in a South Wales accent... Tell dogs off in Arabic or Japanese; both have the right tone."

Throw Dawn Yang out of STOMP Petition - "Her blog (ClapbangKiss) contains intimate poses of herself in her bra and panties which could easily be mistaken as a potential porn site and proves to have negative impact on young children who may happen to browse her page. To be precise, she is creating a public disturbance and negative influence by appearing in events with close and intimate poses with old men, allowing them to touch her all over and she does not seem to mind. The overall impression of her fondling with middle age old men gave a public message to all that it is fine getting touched all over if they drove luxurious cars."
'Where got... She never lah. She never even show her sugar daddy. Maybe it's some ugly girl who's jealous that she has the money to go for plastic surgery'

STDs hit fourth of teenage U.S. girls - "One in four teenage girls in the United States — and nearly half of African-American girls — has at least one sexually transmitted disease, according to a study released Tuesday.
I know why more African-Americans are infected. It must be RACISM!!!

Squall Line - Weird News Story Archive - "California’s coast is being hit hard by storms blamed on the “El Niño” ocean current. Locals can hardly hear a weather report without being told El Niño is at work. The phone rings a lot at Al Nino’s house. Nino, 74, who is listed in the Nipomo, Calif., telephone directory, says people call at all hours. “It’s always something like, Why are you doing this?’,” Nino says. While the retired Navy man doesn’t enjoy being awakened in the middle of the night, “I usually joke around with them a bit,” he says, telling callers he controls the weather because “I didn’t really have nothing else to do.”"

'I Have Killed Them All' Call Leads to Arrest - "Authorities arrested Thomas Ballard, 29, of Delhi, early Monday after a woman reported receiving a late-night call from someone saying, "I have killed them all." Ballard's number showed up on the woman's caller ID; he'd called by mistake, meaning instead to get a buddy to talk-up his success in an Xbox game... in the process of identifying Ballard, that he had a 5-year-old warrant out of Baton Rouge, charging him with failure to appear on a possession of cocaine charge."

A Lingering Image - "Stephanie Pochron, 30, must spend six months in jail after a drunk driving accident, but she has something to come home to: the smashed car she was driving. The car was ordered towed to her Wanatah, Ind., front yard by the judge in the case, and he has ruled that it must stay there during her entire three-year probation. Pochron caused the crash, hitting a vehicle that then went out of control and crashed into a third car, which rolled with a family inside. One man was seriously injured. This was Pochron's third conviction for drunk driving. "I'm never going to drink again," she said."
It includes the picture.

Man hands in machine gun . . and is jailed - "A YOUNG man was praised by a judge for handing in a sub-machine gun to police, and then jailed for two-and-a-half years... At Liverpool crown court yesterday, Judge Sean Duncan described his decision as “brave”, but handed him a reduced term for possessing a prohibited weapon... Judge Duncan added: “If people are brave enough to come forward and hand in guns, the courts will acknowledge that bravery.”"
Well done. This is almost as bad as the 'oral sex is okay if it's followed by intercourse' judgment.

From Eliza to A.L.I.C.E. (A.L.I.C.E. AI Foundation) - "Weizenbaum tells us that he was shocked by the experience of releasing ELIZA (also known as "Doctor") to the nontechnical staff at the MIT AI Lab. Secretaries and nontechnical administrative staff thought the machine was a "real" therapist, and spent hours revealing their personal problems to the program... What Weizenbaum found specifically revolting was that the Doctor's patients actually believed the robot really understood their problems. They believed the robot therapist could help them in a constructive way. His reaction might be best understood like that of a western physician's disapproval of herbal medicines, or an astronomer's disdain for astrology. Obviously ELIZA touched something deep in the human experience, but not what its author intended... Weizenbaum perceived his own program as a threat. This is a rare experience in the history of computer science. Nowadays it is hard to imagine anyone coming up with an original idea for a software program and saying, "no, this program is a dangerous genie and needs to be put back into the bottle." His first reaction was to shut down the early ELIZA program."

For Scientists, a Beer Test Shows Results as a Litmus Test - "According to the study, published in February in Oikos, a highly respected scientific journal, the more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely the scientist is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher, a measure of a paper’s quality and importance. The results were not, however, a matter of a few scientists having had too many brews to be able to stumble back to the lab. Publication did not simply drop off among the heaviest drinkers. Instead, scientific performance steadily declined with increasing beer consumption across the board, from scientists who primly sip at two or three beers over a year to the sort who average knocking back more than two a day... Though the public may tend to think of scientists as exceedingly sober, scientific schmoozing is often beer-tinged, famous for producing spectacular breakthroughs and productive collaborations, countless papers having begun as scrawls on cocktail napkins... as Dr. Mike Webster, an ornithologist and a beer enthusiast at Washington State University in Pullman, said, maybe “those with poor publication records are drowning their sorrows.”"