"Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them." - Arnold Lobel

***

How I’d Hack Your Weak Passwords - "If you invited me to try and crack your password, you know the one that you use over and over for like every web page you visit, how many guesses would it take before I got it?... Statistically speaking that should probably cover about 20% of you. But don’t worry. If I didn’t get it yet it will probably only take a few more minutes before I do…"

You Can Be Anything You Want, Says Fictional Character - "If you work hard, believe in yourself, and never lose sight of your dreams, you can achieve anything you want, the make-believe children's-book character Chipper Chipmunk said Tuesday... According to Dr. Roland Gibson of the American Council For Literature & Ethics, Chipper's core message—that people can be or do anything they want—is a fallacy widely perpetuated in children's books. "Chipper's unshakable faith in success through hard work and persistence isn't something we typically encounter in our daily lives," Gibson said. "This groundless assumption that an individual's capacity for achievement is limitless is a particular failing of children's literature."... Gibson said that, with the exception of certain celebrities and politicians, statements like Chipper's are almost always made by talking animals, superheroes, omniscient narrators, anthropomorphic trains, wandering magicians, friendly dragons, sentient heavenly bodies, Jesus, and other characters subject only to the rules of narrative causality."

Apocalypse now - "Twenty-nine developing countries will lose 20 percent or more of their current farm output to global warming, while agriculture in the already rich north is likely to receive, on average, an 8 percent boost."
Global Warming is a conspiracy, engineered by the West!!!

Profile of a Suicide Bomber - "What does his chart reveal about the inner workings of this man who became a destructive underground bomb? A solar chart (below) for mid day on 15th December 1982 (source of birth data :a photo of his birth certificate on front page of Daily Mail) shows a self-contained character (bowl shape). Four planets in Sagittarius show us the sportsman for whom truth and religion would be important (his moon, ruler of the Cancer north node, was in Sagittarius unless he was born in the last 45 minutes of the day), along with overseas connections, and a penchant for big statements."

'Public' online spaces don't carry speech, rights - "Rant all you want in a public park. A police officer generally won't eject you for your remarks alone, however unpopular or provocative. Say it on the Internet, and you'll find that free speech and other constitutional rights are anything but guaranteed. Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content that's controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors... Rules aren't always clear, enforcement is inconsistent, and users can find content removed or accounts terminated without a hearing. Appeals are solely at the service provider's discretion... Service providers say unhappy customers can always go elsewhere, but choice is often limited. Many leading services, particularly online hangouts like Facebook and News Corp.'s MySpace or media-sharing sites such as Flickr and Google Inc.'s YouTube, have acquired a cachet that cannot be replicated. To evict a user from an online community would be like banishing that person to the outskirts of town... LiveJournal suspended hundreds of blogs that dealt with child abuse and sexual violence, only to find many were actually fictional works or discussions meant to protect children."

Prius 'to be part solar-powered' - "Toyota is planning to add solar-powered air conditioning to high-end models of its Prius hybrid cars, a report says... There has been some scepticism about whether the solar panels would generate a useful amount of electricity. "Even if you laid solar panels out on the entire roof of a house, you only generate enough energy to run two hairdryers," said Kentaro Endo, a specialist on renewable energy from Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry."

Panty-Raid - Ooh, a Pam wannabe.

Toddlers who dislike spicy food racist, say report - "Toddlers who turn their noses up at spicy food from overseas could be branded racists by a Government-sponsored agency... This could include a child of as young as three who says "yuk" in response to being served unfamiliar foreign food."

If the Theory of Evolution Makes You Mad, So Will This Blog - "I'm mad because they're open on Sundays (the Christian Sabbath). If you're going to literally interpret the Bible, you need to do so for the entire thing, not just the parts you especially like. And if God created the world in six days by fiat, He most definitely said, "Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy." That's in Exodus. I could see how they got confused, getting so hyper-focused on Genesis that they didn't keep reading on to Exodus (it's the next one, kids, keep turning those pages). Um, running your business the same as every other day is not remembering your Sabbath, nor keeping it holy."

Teenager finds bat asleep in bra - "Abbie Hawkins, 19, of Norwich, had been wearing the bra for five hours when she plucked up the courage to investigate. When she did, she found a baby bat in padding in her 34FF bra. The hotel receptionist said she was shocked but felt bad for removing the "cuddly" bat."

The battle for Tbilisi's soul - ""Don't destroy the building," pleaded a placard held by a young demonstrator outside a late 19th Century block in the centre of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. But it was already too late. As the small group of conservationists held their protest, construction workers were standing nearby, preparing to start knocking it down... Tbilisi's Deputy Mayor Mamuka Akhvlediani told the BBC he also believes that far too many buildings in the city have been classified as historical monuments. Mr Akhvlediani said he wants the number to be reduced from 1,700 to 500, and suggested that some will inevitably be demolished."
After Tallinn, I can't say I am not sympathetic to him.

Rabbit ripper shocks Germany - ""It's always the same," Officer Schuette explains. "Detectives find the rabbit lying dead in a hutch. An unknown person has cut off the head and drained off the blood in a box or a bottle. So we find no blood and no head."... It has raised the possibility that the killer has been using satellite images on the internet to find houses with rabbit hutches."