Saturday Morning News Coming Down

W00t, Kinkos called about our evil surprise.

Kids Do the Darndest Things
So you hear a lot about kids imitating this or that, and how it's therefore the victim of imitation's responsibility to make a product that kids either won't want to imitate, or won't die from imitating.

But what if, and here's a radical thought, kids are just sort of, you know, stupid, and could die playing any number of games? What if they could, gasp, imitate beneficial behavior as well?

Cases in point. First, a four year old British girl who apparently hung herself by accident, again apparently imitating a Go, Diego Go episode. I'm not sure how they know exactly what she was playing at, since nobody was watching her, but that's the story they're going with.

On the other hand, a young boy tried to defend his mother with a toy lightsaber from some random jackass who assaulted her on the street. Police were thinking that the commotion (and if it wasn't a cheapo saber perhaps the flashing light and sound) helped to drive off Mr. Happy-Fist.

The Lesson here? Maybe we should just remember that kids are kids, and the world is a big, scary place, itself only a fragile soap-bubble thin shell over the howling gulf of madness, and therefore, you might want to supervise the children rather than trying to child-proof Planet Earth.

Sources: Fox Noise
Fox Noise

The Old Axiom Is Probably Right
You know, the one about something seeming too good to be true...

Well, anyway, there's an air-powered car coming to market, promising 200km a tankful of air, a cost of only 7k dollars, and a top speed near 70. It's made of fiberglass and uses a compressed air engine of sorts to power itself.

Great, huh? Well...

If you look at the fine print, it's not that they're lying, but sort of exaggerating the novelty here.

The deal is, this is an electric car. An extremely, extremely light electric car. Tiny too. Instead of using Lithium-Ion batteries as the energy storage mechanism, it uses a tank of compressed air, that it can charge up by being plugged into a wall socket, where it then draws your juice to compress its own internal air supply.

So what you have here isn't a magic air-car, it's a fiberglass alterna-Prius.

Also, they 'hope' to see compressed air charging stations that would allow the car to fill up as fast as a gasoline car, which of course is the same fallacy as hydrogen cars; it'll never happen. There's no economic incentive for Big Oil to become Big Air Compressor.

So that leaves its electric car capabilities. How are those? Sort of.. beta.

It takes quite a while to charge, it's an ultra-light with a low top speed, and it has little bugs like not yet having a heating system worked out, since its engine doesn't generate heat.

Which will come in really handy, from a French automaker. It's not like they have winter in Europe,

right?

*shrug*

I'm all for alternative energy storage mechanisms, but let's not pretend we're reinventing the wheel when all we're doing is changing the number of spokes.

Sources: Raw Story
Promo Site

Texas Still Sucks
So a black couple tried to move into a white neighborhood in Arlington, Texas. Some of the locals were not impressed with this decision, assaulting the woman and spraypainting the house with racist grafitti.

The cops duly charged the woman who performed the assault with, well, assault, and the city is making a big show out of unity or something like that. But the big thing on everybody's mind in Arlington isn't that, you know, their city is full of racist, violent fucks, but that... the victimized homeowner doesn't want to take down the graffiti.

See, the guy has this funny idea that, you know, maybe the Texas town should have to bear its racist shame publicly. The cops, the neighbors, the city, the local media, they all are rather opposed to this idea, and are pressuring the man, trying to make him remove the graffiti. Despite there being no law on the books to compel him to do so, as the victim of the crime.

They're even holding fundraisers and such, as if the problem was that he couldn't pay to get a new garage door (the old one now being colorfully decorated in red spray paint with 'Die Nigger' and so forth.

However, many neighbors were annoyed. "Everyone gets the drift," said one. "It needs to be taken off."

Oh, we get the drift all right. Southerners are happy enough, coddling racist extremists, but they dislike it when the rock is removed and all their animal-lovin cousins scurry out from underneath in full Klan regalia. Bad for the public image and all that.

So once again, I say: Texas sucks.

Source: Raw Story

Privacy For Me, Not For Thee
So a judge has been forced to resign after somebody nicked, and then released to the cops and the press, an audiocassette he made. Apparently the judge likes to indulge in some rather kinky voice recordings. The cops got the impression that there was something horrible going on, until they investigated, it was leaked to the press, who are now suing to get access to the tape to publish it, and the judge, despite having committed no crime, has been pressured into resigning from office.

For what? For having a private life and hurting no one? Come on, people. You can't abuse a dictaphone. Get over yourselves. Here, let me sacrifice my chances at ever being a judge.

I loooove to kill puppies. Their dead, limp bodies feel so soft and squishy. Their fur is so much nicer as it cools, and they make great throw-pillows until the guts start to putrefy. Hmm, guts. I could stab ice picks into their tiny brains all day long, it'd be so much fun, I wish the neighborhood had more dogs!

There. See. I wrote something disgusting. Apparently my public life is over now.

Sort of a relief, really. Who wants to dedicate their life to public service when the public are such a bunch of pearl-clutching pansies, hunched perpetually over their fainting couches?

Source: AZCentral.com

Idiot Science Watch
So some nutbars at Yale have conducted a study they claim shows that women and gays are worse drivers than straight men.

If you think that sounds a bit out there, and would be skeptical, Good for you!

First the headline: Women and gay men are 'worst drivers'

Wow, that sounds pretty ironclad. Let's check the article.

Research has revealed that both perform poorly in tasks involving navigation and spatial awareness when compared to heterosexual men.

Psychologists at Queen Mary, University of London, who conducted the study, believe the findings mean driving in a strange environment would be more difficult for gay men and women than for straight male motorists.

Oh, so they didn't test driving at all. They tested 'navigation and spatial awareness'. Well, that sounds a bit fishy. What does that even mean?

The research team, led by Dr Qazi Rahman, used virtual reality simulations of two common tests of spatial learning and memory developed at Yale University.

In one, volunteers had to swim through an underwater maze to find a hidden platform, while the second involved exploring radial arms projecting from a central junction to receive 'rewards' .

So, what the study actually 'showed' is that women and gay men are worse at playing a couple of videogames, developed at Yale.

That's not nearly as big of a news story though, is it? Gee, I wonder why they would have extrapolated so wildly....

This part in particular makes me chuckle.

The results back earlier studies supporting the stereotype that women are poor navigators.

Although women are more successful in tests requiring them to remember the position of objects, men consistently do better in tasks requiring navigation and uncovering hidden objects.

God knows you never need to remember where stuff is when you're FINDING A PLACE.

Lolz. Seriously, these people are nitwits. You have a result that shows, potentially, if your copy of Tron there is actually a decent proxy, that women and gay men might have poorer navigational skills. So you run out and start screaming that they're poor drivers?

Might you want to, I dunno, actually put some subjects behind the wheel first? Test the actual, you know, driving?

Why do I have to know how to do these peoples' jobs better than they do?

Source: The Telegraph