A page for randomness

Tondan / The 4 Branches of The US Government

White House rejects subpoenas - Politics - MSNBC.com
WASHINGTON - President Bush, moving toward a constitutional showdown with Congress, asserted executive privilege Thursday and rejected lawmakers’ demands for documents that could shed light on the firings of federal prosecutors.

Bush’s attorney told Congress the White House would not turn over subpoenaed documents for former presidential counsel Harriet Miers and former political director Sara Taylor. Congressional panels want the documents for their investigations of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ stewardship of the Justice Department, including complaints of undue political influence.

The Democratic chairmen of the two committees seeking the documents accused Bush of stonewalling and disdain for the law, and said they would press forward with enforcing the subpoenas.

ULL retires Cajunbot; robotics challenge now city, not desert - NewsFlash - NOLA.com
The Associated Press

LAFAYETTE, La. (AP) — A six-wheeled robot that twice made the finals in a hot national competition was officially retired, then cannibalized for parts.

The robotics team at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette marked Cajunbot’s retirement with balloons and cake. Then members hauled out socket wrenches to remove sensors, computer equipment and other items that helped Cajunbot make its way through the Mojave Desert in finals of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Grand Challenge.

Ray Majors, who donated the amphibious vehicle on which Cajunbot was based, said he’ll take the now stripped all-terrain vehicle, patch some of the holes to which equipment had been attached, and use it to hunt again.

The Defense Department is holding another challenge to spur innovation in unmanned, autonomous vehicles for warfare. But this one is the Urban Challenge — rather than a desert course, entrants must safely navigate city streets with traffic.

ULL’s Jeep-based Cajunbot II is among 50 entries, which will be whittled down to 30 or 40 in August, with finals in November, said team leader Arun Lakhotia, a professor at the university’s Center for Advanced Computer Studies.

A Defense Department team was in town Tuesday to check out Cajunbot II; Lakhotia said tests went flawlessly. A private team from Metairie was coming to town Thursday for a friendly competition. The teams figure they will both benefit from the practice, Lakhotia said.

The Daily Advertiser - www.theadvertiser.com - Lafayette, LA

“Change lanes.”

“Looking very nice.”

Arun Lakhotia almost whispers the commands to the bright red Jeep Wrangler navigating a stretch of asphalt at Cajun Field.
But it’s not Lakhotia’s words that guide the vehicle or the hands of a driver behind the wheel.

The Jeep is CajunBot II, the autonomous vehicle designed by a team of students and researchers at UL for the Department of Defense’s DARPA -Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

On Wednesday, CajunBot II showed DARPA officials what it could do. The officials will decide in a few weeks which teams will compete in its Urban Challenge on Nov. 3.

The challenge was created three years ago to promote the development of autonomous vehicles that could perform defense duties - from scouting and armed defense to delivering supplies in war zones.

The team was one of 53 that DARPA officials are visiting to see which 30 will move on to the qualification event at the end of October. Those who qualify will then move onto the actual race where the top prize is $2 million, with $1 million and $500,000 going to the second- and third-place finishers.

UL’s team likely won’t have an answer until August, but will continue to work perfecting the vehicle’s systems, said Lakhotia, a UL associate professor with the Center for Advanced Computer Studies. But the vehicle performed well for the federal visitors, he said.

“I feel our runs were pretty much flawless. I don’t know what reasons they could find to disqualify us now. Until we get a response we can’t open the champagne. We’re going to continue working and there’s more capabilities that need to be developed before the challenge.”

The selection was narrowed down from 100 teams, said Scott Wilson, another veteran CajunBot team member.

DARPA officials checked the vehicle’s ability to follow the rules of the road - proper lane changes, four-way stops, following vehicles within a safe distance.

“Safety is one of the hardest things to plan for,” Wilson said. “You have to assume that the other vehicle will be safe.”

To see if the robot could hold its own on the road, officials set up obstacle courses at Cajun Field. The robot had to first drive in a lane and stay in the lane without swerving in and out of the lined path.

It did.

Next, parked vehicles blocked its path. Cajunbot had to maneuver around each parked truck and move back into its lane.

It did.

Then, CajunBot showed how well it could obey the rules when at a four-way stop. Time after time, CajunBot waited its turn and allowed the first vehicle that arrived to make its turn before turning and continuing to drive.

After each successful pause and turn, onlookers applauded.

And a camera crew captured every frame of it.

The small production crew is filming the team’s success as part of a Discovery Channel Science series on the technology and teams behind these driverless vehicles.

The UL team is one of 10 who will be featured for the series. Another Louisiana team - Team Gray of Metairie, a private sector team that includes some students from Tulane University - will also be featured.

Team CajunBot was a shoo-in for inclusion in the series, said Mark Marabella, whose production company is filming the series for the network.

“We fell in love with Arun,” Marabella said. “He was really funny.”

For the team’s tape submission to be a part of the series, Lakhotia jumped out of the slow moving vehicle and proclaimed, “Look Ma I’m not driving!”

But after spending its first day with the team, it wasn’t only the team’s quirky leader that made UL’s team so interesting, Marabella said.

“They have so many undergrads who are part of the project. It’s like a David and Goliath story,” he said.

Marabella said one worry he had with doing the series on these high-tech teams would be that their stories would be too similar, but after visiting a few already he said it’s clear that each has their own personality and quirks.

“We were just at MIT. They were so stoic and it was all business. But they’re (UL) are very relaxed. They’re very communal,” Marabella.

Robotics team turns from desert to Urban Challenge

By KEVIN BLANCHARD
Advocate Acadiana bureau
Published: Jun 28, 2007 - Page: 1BA

LAFAYETTE — When a local hero retired Wednesday, there was no gold watch or bonus check, just some balloons, a cake — and then the retiree was unceremoniously dismantled.

Cajunbot, the little six-wheeled amphibious robotic vehicle that twice made the finals of the ultra-competitive Grand Challenge, was officially retired Wednesday, making way for the younger, sleeker Cajunbot II.

The University of Louisiana at Lafayette team took some time from eating cake Wednesday to put some socket wrenches to the little robot that could, removing the sensors, computer equipment and other items that helped Cajunbot navigate its way through the Mojave Desert during the Grand Challenge.

This year’s event is called the Urban Challenge. It’s again sponsored by a research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense as a way to spur innovation in the development of unmanned, autonomous vehicles for warfare.

While Cajunbot was designed to make it from point A to point B on a desert course, Cajunbot II is designed to safely navigate city streets with traffic, said team leader Arun Lakhotia, a professor at ULL’s Center for Advanced Computer Studies.

On Wednesday morning, a Defense Department team was in town to put Cajunbot II through the motions, to determine whether the Jeep-based robot will be invited to the semifinals at a yet-to-be-announced site.

The 50 teams that have made it this far through the process will be whittled down to 30 or 40 in August, Lakhotia said.

Fewer still will make it through to the finals. Because all robots will be on the course at the same time for the finals, judges are being quite selective. One robot’s mistake can end up crashing a lot of hard work for other teams, Lakhotia said.

Wednesday’s testing went “flawlessly,” Lakhotia said.

This morning, a private team from Metairie will be in town with its entry — Team Gray — to have a friendly competition with Cajunbot II.

The teams figure they will both benefit from the practice, Lakhotia said.

The Urban Challenge is scheduled for November.

Ray Majors, co-owner of MedExpress Ambulance Service, watched while the team stripped Cajunbot down to its original six-wheeled all-terrain vehicle.

Majors donated the amphibious vehicle to the team — he uses it to go duck hunting — back in 2003. He said he’ll patch up some of the holes drilled to attach all the necessary equipment and bring it out hunting again.

The little vehicle has had quite an interesting life, Majors said.

Cajunbot has met the governor on the Capitol steps. The team drew national attention during the Grand Challenge by competing with the quirky little machine when other larger universities were entering Hummer SUVs and large trucks.

The team also made friends in the desert when it shipped in live crawfish and hosted a crawfish boil for all the other teams from across the country.

Wednesday was no different, with the Discovery Channel on site taping an upcoming show that will feature Cajunbot, Cajunbot II and some of the other prospective entries in the Urban Challenge, Lakhotia said.

CajunBot : Evil Genius Chronicles

(From 2004)
On the plane trip I brought some of my magazines that have been stacking up for a while. I only brought ones I didn’t want to archive, so I could read them and then trash or recycle them as I finished. One of the ones I had was a few months old La Louisiane. It had a cover story about the UL-Lafayette entry in the DARPA Grand Challenge - an impressive looking piece of machinery called CajunBot! As I read the article, I saw a photo and realized that the guy behind the project was one of my professors in grad school - Arun Lakhotia and another one, Tony Maida is also involved. It’s all interesting stuff and there is even a CajunBot weblog (no RSS that I can tell, though.) Even though it was knocked out relatively early, I’m sure that with another year of tweaking it will kick some ass next year. Go Arun, go CajunBot!

Professional Porn Sales Down | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source
Sales and rentals of adult DVDs are down 30 percent due to the rise in homemade Internet porn. What do you think?

Giant microwave turns plastic back to oil - earth - 26 June 2007 - New Scientist Environment
A US company is taking plastics recycling to another level – turning them back into the oil they were made from, and gas.

All that is needed, claims Global Resource Corporation (GRC), is a finely tuned microwave and – hey presto! – a mix of materials that were made from oil can be reduced back to oil and combustible gas (and a few leftovers).

Key to GRC’s process is a machine that uses 1200 different frequencies within the microwave range, which act on specific hydrocarbon materials. As the material is zapped at the appropriate wavelength, part of the hydrocarbons that make up the plastic and rubber in the material are broken down into diesel oil and combustible gas.

GRC’s machine is called the Hawk-10. Its smaller incarnations look just like an industrial microwave with bits of machinery attached to it. Larger versions resemble a concrete mixer.

“Anything that has a hydrocarbon base will be affected by our process,” says Jerry Meddick, director of business development at GRC, based in New Jersey. “We release those hydrocarbon molecules from the material and it then becomes gas and oil.”

Whatever does not have a hydrocarbon base is left behind, minus any water it contained as this gets evaporated in the microwave.

TV-10 story that ran at 10pm.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMy47RnIJ0k

TV-3 6pm story on Cajunbot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET-RK79aV-Q

CajunBot avoiding static obstacles - onbot video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROUcrm9yNxk

CajunBot’s first run, no obstacles - onbot video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbVTVgQ9ncI

Image gallery from The Daily Advertiser:
http://www.theadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/gallery?Avis=DG&Dato=20070627&Kategori=NEWS01&Lopenr=706270803&Ref=PH

Images taken throughout the day from Scott’s camera:
http://cbserver.cacs.louisiana.edu/sharing_files/site_visit/scotts_imgs/

Sayonara, sushi - an environmental problem without a technological fix: Sciam Observations
There is a particularly interesting / compelling / risible / dangerous pick your adjective brand of thinking known as Cornucopianism, which holds that all the solutions to our future problems will be technological.

Running out of Indium? No problem, says the Cornucopianist–those clever engineers will find another way to create the green light-emitting diodes used in flat-panel LCD screens.

But when it comes to depleting the worlds supply of, say, tuna, the fuzzy thinking that surrounds the notion that well never have to curtail our consumption or worry about overpopulation starts to break down.

“When global fishing bodies recently began lowering the limits on catches in the worlds rapidly depleting tuna fisheries, Japan fell into a national panic,” reports the Times.

In this case, it appears that sushi, Japans greatest gift to the culinary universe aside from Top Ramen, is a victim of its own success. The proliferating demand for the stuff is practically taking it from the mouths of its creators:

The problem is the growing appetite for sushi and sashimi outside Japan, not only in the United States but also in countries with new wealth, like Russia, South Korea and China. And the problem will not go away. Fishing experts say that the shortages and rising prices will only become more severe as the population of bluefin tuna — the big, slow-maturing type most favored in sushi — fails to keep up with worldwide demand.

Dunning-Kruger effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Dunning-Kruger effect is the phenomenon whereby people who have little knowledge systematically think that they know more than others who have much more knowledge.

The phenomenon was demonstrated in a series of experiments performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, then both of Cornell University. Their results were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in December 1999.[1]

Kruger and Dunning noted a number of previous studies which tend to suggest that in skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis, that “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” (as Charles Darwin put it). They hypothesized that with a typical skill which humans may possess in greater or lesser degree,

1. incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill,
2. incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others,
3. incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy,
4. if they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.

They set out to test these hypotheses on human subjects consisting of Cornell undergraduates who were registered in various psychology courses.

In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning examined self-assessment of logical reasoning skills, grammatical skills and humor. After being shown their test score, the subjects were again asked to estimate their own rank whereupon the competent group accurately estimated their rank, while the incompetent group still overestimated their own rank.

Games for Wii
This brazilian model “lost” her belly button as the Playboy magazine editors were retouching her body curves. The mistake went unnoticed, and the magazine sold 605,000 copies that month… lots of readers got pissed off when they realized they were wasting money on fake pictures.

front.jpg (JPEG Image, 1499×1159 pixels)

It looks like somebody got their “facts” confused with religious nonsense.

Astronomers look to quark stars for a fifth dimension - space - 24 June 2007 - New Scientist Space
IF THE universe has weird extra-spatial dimensions in parallel to the 3D world we see around us, then billion-dollar particle accelerators may not be the only place to find them.

So say Gergely Gabor Barnaföldi and colleagues at the Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics in Budapest, Hungary, who propose that extra dimensions may show their face in areas of extreme gravity around dense stars. The concept could also solve a 25-year-old puzzle about the origin of mysterious particles emanating from a distant star system.

Some string theories predict that there are many more dimensions than the four we experience: the 3D world plus time. From next year, particle physicists hope to spot these dimensions at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland.

Instead, Barnaföldis team looked to outer space for evidence of extra dimensions interacting with matter. They analysed the Cygnus X-3 binary system, in which a normal star orbits a second object, generally thought to be a neutron star.

Objects in Cygnus X-3 are under extreme gravity, which the researchers say would provide the necessary conditions for extra dimensions to affect matter. Moreover, it spews out ultra-high-energy particles as far as Earth, which the team say could have been tweaked by an extra dimension inside the system. Astronomers believe these high-energy particles, dubbed “cygnets”, strike our atmosphere and decay into muons. Since 1981, underground detectors on Earth have recorded sporadic showers of muon particles coming from the direction of Cygnus X-3. The cygnets are a puzzle because no known particles could last the 37,000-light-year journey from Cygnus X-3 to Earth without decaying.

Wired Blogs: Gadget Lab
Print-on-demand, the technology that lets you print and bind a paperback book in a matter of minutes with nary a press in sight, hasn’t exactly lived up to its promise of revolutionising publishing. In fact, the only thing it’s been good for is streamlining the operations of vanity presses that make most of their money from their own authors. The Espresso Book Printer, however, brings cheap book reproduction to the masses. How cheap? Does free of charge sound O.K.?

Installed in New York Public Library, the giant gizmo currently only offers books from a selection of 200,000 open-license titles. It takes about 5 minutes to make a book, and it’s not clear exactly why they’re free; I expect that once these are up and running in every college library, there’ll be a coin slot and perhaps a $2.50 charge for paper, ink and glue.

If it stays cheap, however, this could be a killer to big-box bookstores. Instead of going to the mall to buy your books, you’ll just buy them on iTunes, then go to the nearest machine to Fairplay yourself a no-frills hard copy for a bucks or two. Barnes and Noble will be reduced to a coffee house and a vending machine: it’s no coincidence they called this thing the Espresso.

News Hounds: Boulder High Student, Jesse Lange, Calmly Exposes Bill O’Reilly’s Hypocrisy
Bill O’Reilly will go to any length to be right so he decided to keep poking sticks at Boulder, Colorado after the controversy about a student forum had been resolved reasonably despite his interference. When he learned that Bud Jenkins, Boulder High Principal, had apologized to the parents who found the sex and drug education assembly offensive, O’Reilly tried to suggest he was responsible. Anxious to gloat about his imagined victory, he invited two students on from the school, Andrew Wishner and Jesse Lange but things just didn’t turn out the way he planned.
with video

O’Reilly really wanted to make the issue sound provocative last night calling the situation a “sex and drug scandal”. However the only thing scandalous has been O’Reilly’s unrelenting barrage of attacks for the last four weeks against Boulder.

The video

Senate passes energy bill, boosting mileage standards - CNN.com
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate passed an energy bill late Thursday that includes an increase in automobile fuel economy, new laws against energy price-gouging and a requirement for huge increases in the production of ethanol.

In an eleventh-hour compromise fashioned after two days of closed-door meetings, an agreement was reached to increase average fuel economy by 40 percent to 35 miles per gallon for cars, SUVs and pickup trucks by 2020.

Yesterday I came across the following excerpt from a speech by President
Theodore Roosevelt. It really sums up my thoughts about critics of the
project (in whole or in part).

Arun

The Raw Story | Bush’s approval rating plunges to new low
US President George W. Bush’s approval rating plunged to a new low of 26 percent, making him the least popular US president since Richard Nixon, a poll released on Thursday found.

The Newsweek magazine poll showed that 26 percent of Americans, just over one in four, approve of the job Bush is doing, marking his lowest level of backing since taking office in January 2001.

“In fact, the only president in the last 35 years to score lower than Bush is Richard Nixon,” the report said.

“Nixon’s approval rating tumbled to 23 percent in January 1974, seven months before his resignation over the botched Watergate break-in.”

The survey found that the public’s disillusionment with Bush spread from the Iraq war to domestic issues, with 73 percent of Americans disapproving of the job Bush has done with Iraq and a record-low 23 percent in favor.

Fifty percent said they disapproved of Bush’s handling of homeland security and terrorism — once a strong point for his administration following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

Sixty percent said they disapproved of his handling of the economy, 61 percent disapproved on health care and 63 percent disapproved on immigration.

The poll was conducted Monday and Tuesday and carries a four-point margin of error.

A separate poll released one week ago by The Wall Street Journal and NBC news showed Bush’s approval rate at 29 percent. That figure was a new low for the WSJ/NBC poll, after previously diving to 34 percent in December 2006.

Space Shuttle Lands in California Desert - New York Times
EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif., June 22 — The space shuttle Atlantis glided to a smooth landing on a dry desert lake bed here Friday, ending a two-week mission to the International Space Station that had turned somewhat dramatic after key computers broke down.
“There were a lot of challenges on this mission and they were all surmounted,” the Atlantis commander, Col. Frederick W. Sturckow, said on the runway here after leaving the spacecraft.

The landing at 12:49 p.m. Pacific time came after NASA had passed up four chances on Thursday and Friday to land at Kennedy Space Center in Florida because of rain and low clouds in the area.

NASA prefers to land at Kennedy, the shuttle’s base, because it costs more than $1.7 million and takes seven to 10 days to return the orbiter to Florida aboard a specially-equipped Boeing 747. But landing in rain can damage the shuttle’s delicate thermal tiles or even slow the craft down enough to affect its flight path.

Although the shuttle could have landed Saturday, NASA did not want to stretch the mission to its limit. So on Friday morning, mission managers, uncertain whether the skies in Florida would clear, took the first opportunity to land here in the Mojave Desert northeast of Los Angeles.

Bar Skanks Announce Plans To Kiss | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source
COLUMBUS, OH—In an announcement that received wide attention throughout Wolverine’s tavern Tuesday, bar skanks Stephanie Fletcher and Jessica Keneally stated that they would share a passionate kiss at an unspecified time that evening.

“Steph and I are totally hot for each other,” Keneally said over the loud music to several unspecified bar patrons. “We’re going to make out. We don’t care who’s watching.”
Enlarge Image Bar Skanks

The skanks pose for one of the hundreds of pictures taken over the course of the night.

According to eyewitnesses who looked up the second they walked in the door, the 22-year-old skanks arrived at the bar at approximately 10 p.m, dressed in their usual skank attire of low-cut tank tops paired with either low-rider jeans or a short skirt, and exposed, brightly colored thongs.

Testing today was off to a rocky start, but ended fairly successfully.

This morning John and I went out to cajunfield for testing but ran into a couple problems. The first was that the software was immediately dying. As it turns out, the estop was switched to “off” instead of bypass which was sending kill signals to the software. Yesterday when we set up the base station, we had to disable the estop because it has such a strong signal. The second issue we ran into was that the obstacle detection programs weren’t running. Before going for lunch, Suresh temporary fixed the software and made a successful run with John avoiding the static obstacle.

After Josh and Chandan did some of their work on the bot, Chris and I went back out to cajunfield. We again had some issues with obstacle detection and had to postpone for a while until suresh found the bug and did some simulator testing. We then tested that obstacle detection was working while at abdalla and then went back to cajunfield.

It was finally this time in the evening that we didn’t run into any issues with uc_planner crashing unexpectedly (it didn’t crash at all, as a matter of fact). GPS drift was somewhat of an issue, but Christ and I tested static obstacle detection/avoidance with success. After several tests we decided to try the intersection part of the software. The first two initial tests involving intersection precedence went great. Chris approached the intersection before the bot did and paused for a long time, and the bot waited the whole time for him. We tried from other directions with success.

After these short intersection tests, we were going to let the bot continue driving around a few times and Chris would meet at the intersection each time. The bot had different plans, however. In the visualizer, it was clear that the software detected his vehicle stopped at the intersection, but it did not wait for the vehicle to leave its place before proceeding. As a matter of fact, in the all of the following tests the same thing happened. We proceeded to test the convoy behavior with the SICK and except for one “mishap”, this went well. The “mishap” was that on one turn the bot decided to change lanes rather than follow the vehicle despite Chris driving at about 5 mph.

Lastly, we tested estop kill. Josh had the estop remote and killed the bot from abdalla hall while we were in cajunfield. We did not measure the stopping distance.

In summary:
- Static obstacle detection and avoidance: worked out and no further issues today beyond the initial ones.
- Intersection precedence: good for first 2-3 tests, then didn’t work correctly thereafter, unknown reason why.
- Convoy behavior: despite having only the one SICK, performed fairly well. Only issue was the one lane change and also one case at an intersection the vehicle was not detected (out of the fov of the SICK), in the other cases it was probably some software issue.

Despite issue with Ibeo and only having the one SICK, I think we are in good shape. We will certainly be testing/debugging throughout the weekend.

Defense against Ancient Virus Opened Door to HIV: Scientific American
Early humans successfully fended off a virus that infected chimpanzees by evolving a protein capable of neutralizing it, according to a new study. But what goes around comes around, evolutionarily speaking: Four million years later, the same protein seems to have left us more vulnerable than other primates to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

When researchers sequenced the chimpanzee genome in 2005, the biggest difference between it and the human genome was the extinct PtERV1 retrovirus, which inserted its DNA into the cells it infected like HIV does today. Chimps had 130 copies of PtERV1, but humans had none. “The question is: Why did our sister species get infected and not humans?” says virologist Michael Emerman of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

Girl’s Feet Cut Off At Six Flags - News Story - WLKY Louisville
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Police confirmed that a 13-year-old girl’s feet have been cut off at Six Flags’ Kentucky Kingdom.

Officials said they got the call around 5 p.m. Thursday. Both her feet were detached at the ankle.

According to MetroSafe dispatch supervisors, the girl was riding the Superman Tower of Power, which is 177 feet tall and drops riders at 54 miles per hour. According to Kentucky Kingdom, the girl was injured when the ride malfunctioned.

“We seen the cable break loose soon as it got to the top on the right-hand side,” said Chris Williams, who witnessed the event.

Treva Smith said it snapped again as the ride descended.

“The people on the ride just came and hit the ground,” Smith said.

Williams said she saw the teen maimed.

“As the ride came down, the wire swung left, struck the young lady on the back side of my children,” Williams said.

Williams’ daughter Amber said she gave up her seat to the 13-year-old and was sitting on the other side of the ride. Williams rushed toward the ride to find his daughter. As Smith raced to find members of her group she said she made a gruesome discovery.

“When I got up there, the lady, she was just sitting there and she didn’t have no legs,” Smith said. “She didn’t have no legs at all. She was just calm, probably in shock from everything.”

Smith said she saw no blood and the girl wasn’t crying but the same couldn’t be said for many who witnessed the incident on the ride formerly known as the Hellevator.

“My son’s over there tripping out man,” Williams said. “You want to come to a park and feel safe you know. We’ve got season passes. We’re not coming back for sure.”

But other visitors aren’t so worried.

“Every park, one in a million maybe something happens,” park visitor Kenneth Lay said. “But I have no fear.”

On scene EMT personnel were on hand to immediately transport the girl to a hospital. As of 10:34 p.m. Thursday there was no word on her condition.

The ride was shut down and will remain so until a full investigation has been completed.

Study finds guys not so naughty, gals not so noble | ajc.com
When men look at pictures of women in the buff, where are their eyes likely to go first?

Nope. Higher.
Men are more likely to look at a female’s face before gazing at other body parts, according to a new study by researchers at Emory University.

And when men and women look at pictures of heterosexual sex, women look longer at the photos than men do, according to the study published in the journal Hormones and Behavior.

Both findings may run contrary to what most people think, but they shed light on sexual attitudes that really aren’t all that mysterious when considered in a scientific light, said psychologist Kim Wallen of Emory.

Wallen and his former graduate student, Heather Rupp, showed still photos of couples having sex to 30 women and 15 men between the ages of 23 and 28. Each was rigged up with a high-tech eye-tracking gizmo to measure where his or her gaze went first, and how long it stayed there.

While men went straight to the face and lingered awhile, most of the women were more interested in what was going on in the pictures — the sexual activity.

Not surprisingly, Wallen said, women on hormone-filled birth control pills were interested in the overall view of the photos and “background” items like jewelry. But women not on the pill were more interested in areas of both men and women normally covered by clothing.

U.S. Lifts Embargo Against Palestine | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source
The United States lifted sanctions against Palestine, and will resume sending aid to the country. What do you think?

Year 2038 problem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The year 2038 problem may cause some computer software to fail before or in the year 2038. The problem affects programs that use the POSIX time representation, which represents system time as the number of seconds (ignoring leap seconds) since January 1, 1970. This representation is standard in Unix-like operating systems and also affects software written for most other operating systems because of the broad deployment of C. On most 32-bit systems, the time_t data type used to store this second count is a signed 32-bit integer. The latest time that can be represented in this format, following the POSIX standard, is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, January 19, 2038. Times beyond this moment will “wrap around” and be represented internally as a negative number, and cause programs to fail, since they will see these times not as being in 2038 but rather in 1901. Erroneous calculations and decisions may therefore result.

“Year 2038″ is frequently abbreviated to “Y2038″, “Y2K38″, or “Y2.038K” in software professionals’ jargon.

What a joke - Opinion
The Daily Show and broadcast news include all the same parts: a congenial anchor and a staff of correspondents on a flashy set, interviewing big name guests. The difference is one is a parody, while the other is the real deal - but deciphering which is which seems to become harder every day.

Jon Stewart, the host of The Daily Show, is the often pinned in the media as the Walter Cronkite for this generation of younger Americans - who we watch, who we get our news from, who we trust. Though such a contention is somewhat hyperbolic, it is a testament to how the media are failing us.

Stewart reported on his program how Tony Snow made a boldfaced lie in a press conference in saying the firings of several U.S. attorneys had nothing to do with politics. In a split screen, one box had Snow in a March 15 press conference saying, “It’s pretty clear that these things are based on performance and not on some sort of attempt to do political retribution.”

They played the tape from last Wednesday’s briefing. A reporter asked if the firings were based on performance, not politics, as he had said. His response: “No…we have never said that.”

What’s more troubling than blatant mistruths coming from the White House is learning of them from a comedy show - because, besides Stewart, only a Washington Post columnist and a few others outside the mainstream media reported this.

Slashdot | Judge Deals Blow to RIAA
“A federal judge in New Mexico has put the brakes on the RIAA’s lawsuit train, at least in the US District Court for New Mexico. The case in question is part of the RIAA’s campaign against file-sharing on college campuses and names “Does 1-16,” who allegedly engaged in copyright infringement using the University of New Mexico’s network. In a ruling issued last month but disclosed today by file-sharing attorney Ray Beckerman, Judge Lorenzo F. Garcia denied the RIAA’s motion to engage in discovery. This means that the RIAA will not be able to easily get subpoenas to obtain identifying information from the University.”

Skeptic: eSkeptic: Wednesday, June 20th, 2007
In this week’s eSkeptic we address one of the hottest topics in the news this week: vaccination and autism, considering the best scientific evidence to date on the possible connection. As you shall see, the scientists considering the link, Matthew P. Normand and Jesse Dallery, provide an excellent summary of what we know and do not know. Despite the lack of scientific evidence for a connection, however, do not expect this controversy to disappear, as the power of anecdotal thinking cannot be dismissed. Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning — in this case, the parents of autistic children are understandably seeking a causal link that provides them with an opportunity to right a wrong, in this case fixing the problem through changing the body’s chemistry, diet, nutrition, toxin load, etc. Sadly, it appears at this point that the causal vector(s) probably lie elsewhere.

— Michael Shermer

Read the article:

Mercury Rising
Exposing the Vaccine-Autism Myth