Remember this picture I took at BiCon this year?
Looks like as a concept it’s going to become not-so-strange, according to a report in Metro: University students open trans-gender toilets.
Downloaded your copy of Mozilla Firefox 3 yet to help them make the world record? I’ve been using Firefox 3 since the early betas and I’ve got no qualms about recommending it wholeheartedly. The awsomebar is simply that: awesome, the speed and memory usage have become far better than the previous version, and the care and attention that have gone into the little things - like the fact that it now asks you if you want to save passwords after you’ve seen if they were correct, not before - really do make this the best web browser I’ve ever used.
Go download it already.
Does food ever go missing in your house and you don’t know who’s eaten it? You probably ought to check all of your cupboards, then, in case you’ve had a small Japanese woman living in one of them for the last year and you hadn’t noticed.
Go read a mind-bloggling study about the effect of names on happiness, success, and lifespan! Just brilliant, and only slightly scary.
A recent article from Psychology Today talks about human nature, sex, and the best theories on why we act like we do. From the article:
Women often say no to men. Men have had to conquer foreign lands, win battles and wars, compose symphonies, author books, write sonnets, paint cathedral ceilings, make scientific discoveries, play in rock bands, and write new computer software in order to impress women so that they will agree to have sex with them. Men have built (and destroyed) civilization in order to impress women, so that they might say yes.
Now go read it.
Just read a great article on brain activity during sexual stimulation and specifically upon orgasm: scanning people’s brains while they’re engaged in sexual activity with their partners has lead to some fascinating results. From the article:
In men, greater activity was seen in the insula, which deals with emotion, and particularly in the secondary somatosensory cortex, which rates the significance of physical sensations. This suggests that the sensory input coming from the genitals is being judged highly important and pleasurable by the brain.
Women, however, show very little increased brain activity, and only in the primary somatosensory cortex - which registers purely that a sensation in the genitals is there.”In women the primary feeling is there, but not the marker that this is seen as a big deal,” Dr Holstege said.”For males, touch itself is all-important. For females, it is not so important.”
I fascination turned to amusement when I read about some of the difficulties the participants had under experimental conditions, though:
The experiments also revealed a rather surprising effect: both men and women found it easier to have an orgasm when they kept their socks on. Draughts in the scanning room left couples complaining of “literally cold feet”, and providing a pair of socks allowed 80 per cent rather than 50 per cent to reach a climax while their brains were scanned.
I read a really great article over on the Interesting People mailing list today: On The Implausability Of The Explosives Plot. It’s well-written, only slightly cynical, and - crucially - exhibits a knowledge of chemistry and basic security policy that seems to be beyond the entire research teams of the scaremongering governments of today’s Western world. Plus, it’s amusing. Enjoy.
On a not-unrelated note, if you didn’t see The Power Of Nightmares when it was broadcast and haven’t seen it since, you’ve missed out. Follow the link.
Pity. From a BBC report:
A young woman’s naked table-top dance in a cattle shed at the Royal Welsh Show has led to an official inquiry… One witness, who did not want to be named, said security guards rushed to the scene late on Tuesday, but had difficulty grabbing the woman because the water had made her skin slippery.
The Royal Welsh Show is certainly trying out some different entertainments these days. Last time I was there the highlight was the Dancing Diggers (which were great, it’s true, but they’re not strippers by any stretch of the imagination).
Saw a news story today that made me smile: it seems that this guy had problems with his Comcast cable modem and, after a fair amount of hassle, finally managed to get them to send an engineer around to look at it. The engineer proceeded to fall asleep on the guy’s couch, which he caught on video and posted online.
Comcast, somewhat distressed by this bad publicity, sent a whole team of engineers around to fix our amatuer filmmaker’s internet connection, and report that the engineer in question is no longer working for them.
One can make all kinds of comments about the behaviour of the engineer on call, but the easily-overlooked point is that the engineer fell asleep after spending over an hour in a telephone queue to Comcast’s engineering department… something tells me that firing the engineer won’t fix Comcast’s customer service problems…
…when a man in Aberystwyth threw up to £20,000 into the air in a free-for-all on Alexandra Road.
Strange.