Browser Cleanup and Work-Ahead

Stories to Pique the Interest and Cleanse the Palate

OK, some of them are just weird.

Free Prostitutes!
No, seriously.

If you want to watch Nick having sex with a prostitute, he's happy to let you.

The 36-year-old bank-security technician drove eight hours from his home in Metz, France, to Big Sister, a Prague brothel where customers peruse a touch-screen menu of blondes, brunettes and redheads available for free. The catch is clients have to let their exploits be filmed and posted on the Internet.

Doing your part for Praque tourism, eh, ladies?

Source: AZCentral (probably a Nidoking link originally)

California Scheming
So California is considering mandating the installation, in new homes, of thermostats they can remote control to turn down your AC during peak useage, ostensibly to prevent blackouts.

Without your consent.

On the one hand, yeah, it's better than a blackout; but who decides who gets to roast, and how? What about people who need the cool? The sick, the elderly, or just a poor schmoe who works nights and desperately needs his sleep?

The potential for abuse is ENORMOUS.

Look folks; you live in one of the sunniest states in the nation. It's called Solar Power. It just so happens to produce energy best at times when you want to use your AC most.

Look into it.

Source: International Herald Tribune

Pundit Class Perpetually Wrong
Jon Stewart ripped into the pundit class on their New Hampshire predictions, and subsequent near-meltdown, on an episode of The...err, A Daily Show that I missed (the name has been changed for the strike, I dunno why).

There's a video of the skit but I'm waiting to watch it with the roomie.

Source: Raw Story

Atrocious Headline
This is a story about how apparently some sugar free gums are made with sorbitol, a sugar subsitute... that is also a laxative.

Who thought that would be a good idea? MORONS!

But the headline takes the cake here.

On the run: Chewing gum blamed for chronic diarrhoea

What the hell is that? That's not even remotely funny.

Of course, neither is this.

In an unusual case study reported by next Saturday's British Medical Journal (BMJ), gastro-entorologists at Berlin's Charite hospital describe how they investigated two patients who had persistent diarrhoea.

One was a 21-year-old woman who had been experiencing diarrhoea and diffuse abdominal pain for eight months and had lost 11 kilos (24.2 pounds) of her 51.8-kilo (114-pound) body weight.

The other was a 46-year-old man with flatulence, abdominal bloating and diarrhoea so bad that he had lost 22 kilos (48 pounds), or a fifth of his body weight, over the past year.

Once again, I ask: What idiot thought this was a good idea? The headline OR the damn gum?

Source: Raw Story

Promising Research
So there's some promising AIDS research out now, in part due to the Human Genone Project. Basically now that we have the genome mapped, researchers can produce little snippets of RNA to selectively turn off any individual gene and see what happens.

Some researchers working on AIDS did this with all 21,000 genes that the human body uses to code for protein, to see which of them the virus needed to work. They found a couple hundred nobody knew it used, that we could mess with to fight the disease.

This is outstanding, and proof that science is awesome.

Source: The Washington Post