Meet the 20st Sugar Plum Fairy, ballet's new big thing - "There is a long tradition of big foreign stars treading the boards in Britain. But the latest imports are the biggest this country has ever seen. They are members of The Big Ballet, a unique Russian dance troupe (average weight 20 stone) whose month-long UK tour started last night in Hull."

Federal Court Reaffirms Immunity of Bloggers from Suits Brought Against Commenters - "Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides that "[no] provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider," and that "[n]o cause of action may be brought and no liability may be imposed under any State or local law that is inconsistent with this section." A recent decision of the First Circuit has reaffirmed the broad protection this statute provides to bloggers and message board administrators."

Have Researchers Found Jesus Christ's Tomb? - "With the help of statisticians, archeologists, historians, DNA experts, robot-camera technicians, epigraphers and a CSI expert from New York's Long Island, Jacobovici puts together a case in which he argues that the bones of Jesus, Mary and Mary Magdalene, along with some of their lesser-known relatives, were once entombed in this cave. James Charlesworth of the Princeton Theological Seminary consulted with Jacobovici on the project and is intrigued: "A very good claim could be made that this was Jesus' clan." Faced with the controversial theological and historical implications of what he calls his "rediscovery," Jacobovici is sanguine. "People will have to believe what they want to believe," he says."

Brown Daily Herald - Facebook 'poke' leads to awkward one-nighter - "A March 31 "poke" on Facebook.com led to an encounter over the weekend between two seniors that "can only be termed an extraordinarily awkward one-night stand," according to participant Ethan Gold '06. The chain of events that led to the uncomfortable, no-strings-attached sex in Eva Larson '06's Young Orchard dorm room began last Friday. Sitting at her Rockefeller Library carrel, Larson, a modern culture and media concentrator who stayed in Providence over spring break to finish her senior thesis on "Deconstructing the Meta-Narratives of Postmodern Celebrity Weeklies," was procrastinating on Facebook.com."
Uhh

Cats compete on TV reality show - "Ten cats are competing to find their perfect owner on a reality TV programme being shown in the US... As on Big Brother, the cats will have to complete tasks, and will be graded on purring and catching toy mice."

YouTube - Singapore 新加坡宣傳片 - "TV advertisement - through which Singapore attempted to attract Hong Kong emigrants after 1989."
FLCH says it's just a travel ad.

Backward induction - Wikipedia - "The unexpected hanging paradox is a paradox which arises with backward induction. Suppose a prisoner is told that she will be executed sometime between Monday and Friday of next week. However, the exact day will be a surprise (i.e. she will not know the night before that she will be executed the next day). The prisoner, interested in outsmarting her executioner, attempts to determine which day the execution will occur. She reasons that it cannot occur on Friday, since if it had not occurred by the end of Thursday, she would know the execution would be on Friday. Therefore she can eliminate Friday as a possibility. With Friday eliminated, she decides that it cannot occur on Thursday, since if it had not occurred on Wednesday, she would know that it had to be on Thursday. Therefore she can eliminate Thursday. This reasoning proceeds until she has eliminated all possibilities. She concludes that she will not be hanged next week. To her surprise, she is hanged on Wednesday."
Ah, Game Theory!

carnal sociology - "Despite my having a zillion pressing things to do, a friend set me off on the digression of reading Erich Goode's article "Sexual Involvement and Social Research in a Fat Civil Rights Organization." (Qualitative Sociology, 2002, pp. 501-534)... "To be accepted in NAAFA, I had to prove my lust for fat women, and I had to prove it by having affairs with them. At the same time, I realized only much later, by having affairs with NAAFA women, I became entangled in the emotional complexities such affairs entailed, making my job of gathering information problematic.""

Disumbrationist School of Art - "In 1924 Paul Jordan Smith, a Los Angeles-based novelist and Latin scholar, painted a blurry picture of a South Seas islander holding a banana over her head. The picture was intended to be a spoof of abstract styles of modern art such as Cubism, and as a joke he entered it into an art exhibition, claiming that it was a work by the Russian artist Pavel Jerdanowitch (a name he had invented), who was the founder of the Disumbrationist School of Art (another invention of his)... To his chagrin, but not really to his surprise, the work was praised instead of being laughed at."

True art or a fake? - "Some of the images displayed below are True Masterpieces of Abstract Art, created by Immortal Artists. They carry profound meanings, which are, however, beyond the apprehensions of the vulgar. The rest were produced by the author of the quiz. They mean nothing."
I got 67%. A follow-up: Properly Prescribed: Scandalous Results of the True art or a fake? Quiz - "For the elite analysis I chose Ivy League schools and Oxbridge (if not for any other reason, than because I did time in both). The average elite score is 8.4/12 or 70% correct. Figure 2 shows the distribution of the scores received by 81 choice quiz-takers, and Table 1 shows their distribution by elite schools. When comparing the averages and the distributions of scores, shown in Figures 1 and 2, we see that there is no significant difference between the elite and the crowd."