A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at him and says, "I'm sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger."

Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? His goal: transcend dental medication.

On Saturday morning, a roadie gets up early, as he has for so many Saturday morning rides, and softly slips out of the bedroom.

To which she sleepily replies, "Can you believe my husband went riding in that crap?"

The UK just slapped Microsoft's wrists for running a misleading advertisement that claimed Linux (an increasingly popular alternative to Windows) was "10 times more expensive than running Windows" ("Microsoft slammed over misleading Windows Linux claims"). This is good because it means that Microsoft has been busted for being a bunch of cheating, lying bastards, but it's bad because they're still a bunch of cheating, lying bastards that require truckloads of legal attention from all over the world.

The grounds for complaint against Microsoft were that the "comparison" (discussed in the advertisement) was performed using two completely different computer systems; the simpler system ran Windows, while the more complex and advanced system ran Linux. The end result is that the study was total bullshit, and any operating system on the more complex machine would have cost more to maintain (even Windows).

While reading through slashdot, I found an interesting post. This person related an experience at a company 9 years ago that happened to be responsible for marketing Windows 95 for Microsoft. Here's what the poster wrote:

I used to work in an advertising company. Oddly, the one that held the Microsoft account in 1995, when MS released Windows 95. At that time, there were a few 'jinks' planned for the release that were not, strictly speaking, legal. They knew that they'd get their wrists slapped, perhaps fined heavily. The company take on it? They knew they may get caught up for it, and slapped hard. But these jinks would get the 'message' across in a spectacular way. Nobody looked too hard at the slapdown and retractions, because they simply avoided the limelight. They had to look apologetic to the right people in private, and it was all forgotten. But people at large simply remembered the original advertising stunt.

In this, it's the same thing again. They knew they'd be held up by the ASA, and torn down a strip, and forced to stop the advertisement. However, they also know that the tech-unsure IT Managers and CIOs and so on will probably see it, and start saying "See, this Linux thing isn't so cheap after all! Stay with MS". Advertising like that is meant to stay in the head along with the words 'survey' and masquerade as fact, so that in a future discussion that's on the subject, they won't say "I saw an advert that said Linux is more expensive than Windows", they'll say "I saw a SURVEY that showed how windows was cheaper to run than Linux". Damage already done. Although the lie has been caught it's already spread, masquerading as fact. They've earned their money, MS will pay any required fines (they've probably already been built into the pitch before it was released), and MS will be smiling all the way as the flung mud sticks, as it always does.

New Scientist posted this interview with Alexander Yuvchenko, an employee working at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant the night of the explosion and meltdown. I'm fascinated by the details of what happened at Chernobyl, how the circumstances arose in the first place, and what has become of the town over the past few decades.

Alexander Yuvchenko was on duty at Chernobyl's reactor number 4 the night it exploded on 26 April 1986. He is one of the few working there that night to have survived. He suffered serious burns and went through many operations to save his life, and he is still ill from the radiation. He recently broke his silence for a documentary to be shown on the Discovery Channel. Here he speaks to Michael Bond about what happened that night.

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Postin' this shiznat fo' all my peeps who iz keepin' it real, yo. Time tah' git back to writin' mah letterz n shit...

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I guess she thought the world wouldn't notice if she flashed the universal sign to go f*$k yourself. After all, it was only during an Olympic event (Women's Road Race, Cycling) that she flung the bird to the world. She's gotta be relieved to know that nobody was there to take a photo! Wait a second... they did.

Details from Cycling News:

After doing most of the work in the winning break with Sara Carrigan, only to finish with silver, Germany's Judith Arndt came across the line and flicked the bird "to the world". Later, when confronted by officials, she claimed that she did not, that it only looked that way and she was being misunderstood. But it is well known that she is extremely angry with the German Cycling Federation for not choosing her good friend and teammate Petra Rossner for the team.

"I caught up to Sara and did a lot of work," said Arndt. "It would have been different if Petra (Rossner) had been here. She is the fastest sprinter in the world."

The latest ACM Queue features "A Conversation with James Gosling". In it, Gosling talks about writing his first interpreter as a highschool kid, and that he's been reusing the same idea ever since (including for Java).

Nice tidbit: the interviewer asked about C# (Microsoft's answer to, and complete rip-off of, Java), which drew out this amusing comment about Microsoft's approach toward security:

Microsoft is getting hammered over and over and over again about [security], and has been for years, and the company says a lot of good words, but it doesn't actually seem to do anything really significant [about the problem]. It issues a lot of patches. It doesn't actually think about things from the ground up.

Security is one of these things that you don't add by painting it on afterward. Like our metaphor earlier about buildings, if you're going to build an earthquake-safe building, you have to do it from the foundation up. You can't just build any old sloppy building and then apply earthquake safety paint to it.

A group of scientists have shown that monkeys procrastinate at doing work the same way that humans do, but they found a way to use gene therapy to temporarily eliminate the tendency to be lazy, thus turning the monkeys into hard workers. Pretty cool stuff with many far-reaching implications. Excerpts below taken from an article in Nature ("Gene therapy cures monkeys of laziness"), and there's another article at CNN ("Gene blocking turns monkeys into workaholics").

Procrastinating primates can be turned into workaholics, thanks to gene therapy. The discovery, which sheds light on the workings of the brain's reward centre, may further our understanding of mood disorders, such as depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Like many humans, monkeys tend to slack off when their goal is distant, then work harder as a deadline looms. But when a key gene is turned off, the primates work hard from the word go, researchers report in PNAS Online.

...

The team injected a short strand of DNA into each monkey's brains, temporarily switching off a key gene in a region of the brain called the rhinal cortex, which is known to be involved in processing reward signals. ... With the gene turned off, the monkeys were unable to anticipate how many trials were left before the reward was given. They stopped procrastinating and worked hard throughout the task, making consistently fewer errors at every stage.

"The monkeys became extreme workaholics," says Richmond. "This was conspicuously out-of-character for these animals."

Popular Science published "Fresh Fears Over Cellphones" back in February. Even though the FCC and most cell phone company representatives claim that there is no proof of damage from cell phone radiation, I can't help but think they're leaving out part of the truth.

A relevant point in this matter is that, with or without cell phone radiation, all humans are exposed to natural amounts of solar radiation from the sun, and various modern conveniences (computers, fluorescent lights, wireless routers, etc.) expose us to varying amounts of radiation. So even if low-level radiation exposure is deemed unhealthy, and cell phones are shown to emit an unhealthy amount, what's the big deal since we're surrounded by plenty of other radiation sources?

From my point of view, I would rather minimize my exposure, even if I can't eliminate it altogether (and yes, that's why I wear a headset when I talk on my cell phone).

The safety of cellphones has been called into question, again. This time the scientific community is paying very close attention.

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Last summer neurosurgeon Leif Salford and colleagues at Lund University in Sweden published data showing for the first time an unambiguous link between microwave radiation emitted by GSM mobile phones (the most common type worldwide) and brain damage in rats. If Salford's results are confirmed by follow-up studies in the works at research facilities worldwide, including one run by the U.S. Air Force, the data could have serious implications for the one billion+ people glued to their cellphones.

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His team exposed 32 rats to 2 hours of microwave radiation from GSM cellphones. Researchers attached the phones to the sides of the rats' small cages using coaxial cables -- allowing for intermittent direct exposure -- and varied the intensity of radiation in each treatment group to reflect the range of exposures a human cellphone user might experience over the same time period. Fifty days after the 2-hour exposure, the rat brains showed significant blood vessel leakage, as well as areas of shrunken, damaged neurons. The higher the radiation exposure level, the more damage was apparent. The controls, by contrast, showed little to no damage. If human brains are similarly affected, Salford says, the damage could produce measurable, long-term mental deficits.

Here's an extract from a new book titled How To Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson. The text is kinda long when compared to the usually-brief length of most web pages, but it's interesting and insightful. I've copied several excerpts below. I rarely come across a book that seems interesting enough to read, but this one does. Too bad it's only available in the UK.

The propaganda against oversleeping goes back a very long way, more than 2,000 years, to the Bible. Here is Proverbs, chapter 6, on the subject:

Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise:
Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler,
Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.

(I would question the sanity of a religion that holds up the ant as an example of how to live. The ant system is an exploitative aristocracy based on the unthinking toil of millions of workers and the complete inactivity of a single queen and a handful of drones.)

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Greatness and late rising are natural bedfellows. Late rising is for the independent of mind, the individual who refuses to become a slave to work, money, ambition.

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Idleness as a waste of time is a damaging notion put about by its spiritually vacant enemies. Introspection could lead to that terrible thing: a vision of the truth, a clear image of the horror of our fractured, dissonant world.

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Governments do not like the idle. The idle worry them. They do not manufacture useless objects nor consume the useless products of labour. They cannot be monitored. They are out of control.

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That being ill can be a delightful way to recapture lost idling time is a fact well known to all young children. On schooldays, the independent child soon learns that if he is ill, then he can lie in bed all day, avoid work and be looked after. What a different world from the everyday one of punishments, recriminations and duties. Suddenly everyone is very nice to you.

Major Food Sources of Trans Fat for American Adults
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I read this article a few days ago, Revealing Trans Fats. Yucko.

What is Trans Fat?

Although saturated fat is the main dietary culprit that raises LDL, trans fat and dietary cholesterol also contribute significantly.

Cyclingnews recently conducted an interview with Keith Bontrager. Good stuff.

My buddy IG sent me a link to this dude's site, maddox.xmission.com. I was laughing my ass off reading some of this stuff, including five shitty movies that everyone loves and you're not Dave Chappelle, and you're not funny.

A talk radio show was recently discussing the issue of obesity, whether or not it should be considered a disease. The trend in this country has been to treat obesity as a disease, confirmed by the Medicare policy shift that formally classifies obesity as a disease. But the Center for Consumer Freedom says obesity is not a disease, and the CCF's executive director said:

"This is truly a dumbing down of the term 'disease'. This is the only disease that I'm familiar with that you can solve by regularly taking long walks and keeping your mouth shut." -- Center for Consumer Freedom's Executive Director

I suspect the Director has not heard of "alcoholism" before, because it is also categorized as a disease and shares the same solution of "keeping your mouth shut".

The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence says:

Alcoholism is a primary, chronic disease with genetic, psychosocial, and environmental factors influencing its development and manifestations. The disease is often progressive and fatal.

While "idiocy" may not technically be a disease, the Executive Director of the CCD might consider avoiding it by keeping his own mouth shut, thus avoiding any opportunities to make stupid comments in the public forum.

The funny thing is, what's going on is anything but a "dumbing down" of the term "disease". A disease is more than something you catch from another person's sneeze, or by not washing your hands. The second definition of "disease" according to Merriam-Webster, is "a condition of the living animal or plant body or of one of its parts that impairs normal functioning". What is "dumbed down" about "obesity" being classified as "a condition that impairs normal functioning"? Is anybody out there trying to argue that it's normal for a person to risk having a heart attack while climbing a flight of stairs because he's carrying around an additional 150 pounds of blubber? Or is it normal for somebody to be unable to reach their feet to put on their shoes?

But hey, what the hell should I care? Anything that might lower my insurance premiums would be a good thing, right? Our health insurance premiums are huge right now, thanks in no small part to the mandatory subsidizing (by people like me) of the excessive health problems in the obese population. And when I say "excessive", I mean "excessive compared to me". I live a healthy, fit lifestyle, I eat well, exercise regularly, have no known health issues, and take no medications or prescriptions. But despite our own lifestyle choices, my wife and I pay large insurance premiums to have basic coverage. Shouldn't we get a discount?

From cyclingnews.com...

"Austinites to welcome Armstrong home"

After a hectic post-Tour schedule in Europe, Lance Armstrong will return to a hero's welcome in Austin Texas on August 13. The celebration of Armstrong's sixth Tour de France victory will include musical performances, a parade, video presentations and special guests.

Festivities get underway at 6.30pm on Friday, August 13, 2004 in downtown Austin, Texas one block South of the State Capitol at 1100 Congress Ave.

This will probably be one of the biggest public events Austin has ever seen.

Technical glitch grounds American flights

A computer glitch grounded American Airlines and US Airways flights from coast to coast Sunday morning, causing delays that were expected to last all day.

American had its planes back up after two hours, while US Airways flights were grounded for about three.

Who will get in more trouble: the people responsible for halting airline traffic for two major airlines, or the people who broadcast the profanity during the Democratic nomination last week?