"If you're choking in a restaurant you can just say the magic words, 'Heimlich maneuver,' and all will be well. Trouble is, it's difficult to say 'Heimlich maneuver' when you're choking to death." - Eddie Izzard

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Women are getting more beautiful - "The researchers have found beautiful women have more children than their plainer counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female. Those daughters, once adult, also tend to be attractive and so repeat the pattern. Over generations, the scientists argue, this has led to women becoming steadily more aesthetically pleasing, a “beauty race” that is still on. The findings have emerged from a series of studies of physical attractiveness and its links to reproductive success in humans. "

Swimming pool ban on doing lengths - "Swimmers have been banned from doing lengths in a pool because it is easier for lifeguards to supervise people swimming widths."

Chimps born to appreciate music - "The discovery comes from experiments showing that an infant chimpanzee prefers to listen to consonant music over dissonant music. That suggests the apes are born with an innate appreciation of pleasant sounds, say scientists in the journal Primates. Until now, this was thought to be a universal human trait, but the new finding suggests it evolved in the ancestors of humans and modern apes."
Even baby chimps can tell the difference between good and bad music. So much for ethnomusicology.

An intrepid, ragged band of bloggers - "The British Chiropractic Association has been suing Singh personally for the past 15 months, over a piece in the Guardian where he criticised the BCA for claiming that its members could treat children for colic, ear infections, asthma, prolonged crying, and sleeping and feeding conditions by manipulating their spines... It is possible in healthcare to do great harm, while intending to do good, and so medicine thrives on criticism: this is how ideas improve, and therefore how lives are saved. The three most highly rated articles in the latest chart from the British Medical Journal are all highly critical of medical practice... it is a ragged band of science bloggers who has done the most detailed work. Fifteen months after the case began, the BCA finally released the academic evidence it was using to support specific claims. Within 24 hours this was taken apart meticulously by bloggers, referencing primary research papers, and looking in every corner."

Police: SC man charged with having sex with horse - "A South Carolina man was charged with having sex with a horse after the animal's owner caught the act on videotape, then staked out the stable and caught him at shotgun point, authorities said Wednesday. But this wasn't the first time Rodell Vereen has been charged with buggery. He pleaded guilty last year to having sex with the same horse... She said she thought about shooting Vereen both times, but didn't want to go to prison. "Everyone around here has horses," Kenley said. "And they all said the same thing. You should have shot him.""

Old School Anger | Emails From Crazy People - "I am assigning him to detention... Alex consistently defied me... he contradicted me numerous times when I insisted that the length of one kilometer was greater than that of one mile. Every other student in class accepted my lesson... Although he was correct, Alex's actions show a blatant disregard for authority... Alex would be better off simply accepting my teachings without resistance"

Why beautiful people are more intelligent - "Empirical studies demonstrate that individuals perceive physically attractive others to be more intelligent than physically unattractive others. While most researchers dismiss this perception as a ‘‘bias’’ or ‘‘stereotype,’’ we contend that individuals have this perception because beautiful people indeed are more intelligent. The conclusion that beautiful people are more intelligent follows from four assumptions. (1) Men who are more intelligent are more likely to attain higher status than men who are less intelligent. (2) Higher-status men are more likely to mate with more beautiful women than lower-status men. (3) Intelligence is heritable. (4) Beauty is heritable. If all four assumptions are empirically true, then the conclusion that beautiful people are more intelligent is logically true, making it a proven theorem. We present empirical evidence for each of the four assumptions. While we concentrate on the relationship between beauty and intelligence in this paper, our evolutionary psychological explanation can account for a correlation between physical attractiveness and any other heritable trait that helps men attain higher status (such as aggression and social skills)."