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June, 2006 Archives | Homepage

One Drink and You Miss the Ape

A new study on drinking reveals that having just one drink can severely impair your observational skills.
New research by the University of Washington may make you think again: Most of the study participants who had had only one cocktail didn't even notice a gorilla walking through the middle of a ballgame. That's right. The UW researchers tested people while they focused intently on a single task — counting the number of basketball passes in a video. Most of them couldn't see much else, such as realize that the clip features a woman in an ape suit who suddenly walks to center screen, beats her chest and exits — a nine-second cameo.

They were twice as likely to miss it as nondrinkers. "We were very surprised to see how strong the results were," said Seema Clifasefi, who led the research in the UW's Department of Psychology. The study was small — only 46 subjects — but it could have implications for drunken-driving laws if expanded research shows similar results, she said. Clifasefi and colleagues at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, conducted the pilot study with volunteers between 21 and 35 years old. Half got plain tonic water. But the other half got vodka tonics stiff enough, based on their weight and gender, to raise their blood-alcohol content to 0.04 percent, or half the legal limit for driving in Washington. None of the participants knew for certain what they were getting.

Each participant had 10 minutes to down the drinks. Then they were each shown a video of two three-person teams passing a basketball and asked to count the number of passes. Among the participants, only four of those who got vodka, or about 18 percent, saw the gorilla. Of the tonic-only crowd, 11, or about 46 percent, spotted the ape.
The moral of the story is this: those of you who wish to see those naughty gorillas that are planning to crash your local 4th of July celebrations should definitely stick with Coke this weekend.

Posted on June 30, 2006
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Britney Bares All For Harper's Bazaar

Britney Spears on the cover of Harpers BazaarIncredibly unhappy with the fallout from her appalling Matt Lauer interview, Britney Spears decided to do a nude cover shoot for Harper's Bazaar while she's pregnant, just as Demi Moore did. The stylists had planned a Brigitte Bardot-themed shoot, but Britney threw a monkey wrench into their plans by dying her hair black. So the plucky photogs sucked it up and started snapping pix.
Yes, a pregnant, dark-haired Britney Spears has taken her clothes off for the cover of fashion glossy Harper's Bazaar. Photographs from the June 22 shoot for the August issue, on sale July 25, were leaked online and appeared on several celebrity websites. They show Spears, who is expecting her second child, in her full maternal glory. In one photo, she holds her son, Sean Preston, 9 months. The cover is the only official image the magazine is releasing.

The photograph by Alexi Lubomirski earns inevitable comparisons to Demi Moore's famous 1991 pregnancy cover shot in Vanity Fair.
We just don't know about the whole black hair thing. But it sure looks a lot better than it did during the Matt Lauer Disaster Hour, for which she unwisely eschewed the use of her hair and makeup artists. See how much better one looks with some professional styling assistance? It's amazing, really.

Posted on June 29, 2006
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Microsoft Bob Makes Worst Tech Products List

Microsoft BobA hideous Microsoft software package called Microsoft Bob has made PC World's list of the 25 worst tech products of all time. Microsoft Bob was rated as the 7th worst tech product.
No list of the worst of the worst would be complete without Windows' idiot cousin, Bob. Designed as a "social" interface for Windows 3.1, Bob featured a living room filled with clickable objects, and a series of cartoon "helpers" like Chaos the Cat and Scuzz the Rat that walked you through a small suite of applications. Fortunately, Bob was soon buried in the avalanche of hype surrounding Windows 95, though some of the cartoons lived on to annoy users of Microsoft Office and Windows XP (Clippy the animated paper clip, anyone?).
We are glad that we never had to deal with Microsoft Bob. Trying to turn off Clippy and other animated Office helpers was annoying enough over years. We will admit that with the more recent versions Clippy properly goes into hiding when ordered.

Posted on June 28, 2006
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Gwyneth Paltrow and the Ghostbusters

Movie star Gwyneth Paltrow has graciously agreed to help out Oasis singer Liam Gallagher with his ghost problem.
Oasis singer Liam Gallagher has asked Gwyneth Paltrow for her help - to chase ghosts out of his house. The wild rocker - who shares his London home with fiancée Nicole Appleton and their four-year-old son Gene - is convinced his lavish pad is haunted, after hearing unexplained noises and chilling footsteps.

Liam has also been left bemused after several objects went missing from his house with no explanation. A source was quoted in Britain's Daily Star newspaper a saying: "A week ago he lost his keys and then they turned up in a kitchen cupboard and no-one had moved them. And now two pans have gone missing. "Sometimes he will hear sounds that don't make any sense."

The 33-year-old star has now apparently turned to Shakespeare In Love actress Gwyneth, who previously hired a Kabbalah priest to get rid of "bad energy" in her home earlier this year, to help him with an exorcism. The source added: "He is just asking Gwyneth what she did so he can follow suit." Liam and Nicole are said to already be looking for a new place - in case the proposed exorcism doesn't work.
Maybe Gwyneth can start her own service, kind of like a better-dressed version of Ghostbusters.

Posted on June 27, 2006
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Tom Cruise Tries To Convert Superman To Scientology

Mike Walker of The National Enquirer reports that Tom Cruise is trying to convert Superman Returns star Brandon Routh to Scientology.
Does TOM CRUISE want the "S" on Superman's chest to stand for SCIENTOLOGY? My Favorite Alien — who just tried to convert ANGELINA JOLIE — targeted new Superman hunk BRANDON ROUTH faster than a speeding bullet! Tom met Routh — who just made the cover of gay mag "Advocate" under the headline "How Gay Is Superman?" — in a back booth at Factor's Famous Deli, where the Interplanetary Lord of Galactic CruiseControl was overheard inviting him to Hollywood's Scientology Center. (Tell-tale signs Superman's gay, according to "Advocate": "His camp hands-on-hips stance"... and "Loves stripping off in phone booths.")
Well, we're just not sure about the whole "Is Superman Gay" controversy, but we will say this: Tom Cruise is on a Mission to convert as many stars to Scientology as possible. After Angie and Brad slipped through his hands, he clearly decided to try for an up and coming Hollywood star. Run, Superman, Run!

Posted on June 26, 2006
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Test Tube Hamburger Heading Your Way

Wired magazine explains why test tube hamburger is coming your way soon.
What if the next burger you ate was created in a warm, nutrient-enriched soup swirling within a bioreactor? Edible, lab-grown ground chuck that smells and tastes just like the real thing might take a place next to Quorn at supermarkets in just a few years, thanks to some determined meat researchers. Scientists routinely grow small quantities of muscle cells in petri dishes for experiments, but now for the first time a concentrated effort is under way to mass-produce meat in this manner.

Henk Haagsman, a professor of meat sciences at Utrecht University, and his Dutch colleagues are working on growing artificial pork meat out of pig stem cells. They hope to grow a form of minced meat suitable for burgers, sausages and pizza toppings within the next few years. Currently involved in identifying the type of stem cells that will multiply the most to create larger quantities of meat within a bioreactor, the team hopes to have concrete results by 2009. The 2 million euro ($2.5 million) Dutch-government-funded project began in April 2005. The work is one arm of a worldwide research effort focused on growing meat from cell cultures on an industrial scale.

"All of the technology exists today to make ground meat products in vitro," says Paul Kosnik, vice president of engineering at Tissue Genesis in Hawaii. Kosnik is growing scaffold-free, self-assembled muscle. "We believe the goal of a processed meat product is attainable in the next five years if funding is available and the R&D is pursued aggressively."

A single cell could theoretically produce enough meat to feed the world's population for a year. But the challenge lies in figuring out how to grow it on a large scale. Jason Matheny, a University of Maryland doctoral student and a director of New Harvest, a nonprofit organization that funds research on in vitro meat, believes the easiest way to create edible tissue is to grow "meat sheets," which are layers of animal muscle and fat cells stretched out over large flat sheets made of either edible or removable material. The meat can then be ground up or stacked or rolled to get a thicker cut.
We have only two words for this story: Soylent Green.

Posted on June 23, 2006
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Gummi Bears Pose Security Threat

Think that those yummy Gummi Bears are innocent treats? Well, think again. The tiny sugary candies are an absolute menace menace to security systems based on biometrics.
They're sugary, adorable, and capable of foiling advanced security systems: A Japanese researcher has found that the gelatin used in Gummi Bears can also be used to make fake fingers that fool biometric fingerprint scanners. The research also found that it's a simple matter to lift a fingerprint from a glass, photograph it, and then imprint it onto a mold to create a duplicate fingerprint. This follows a study last year that found Play-Doh worked equally well. So much for plans by large retailers like Wal-Mart and Costco to let shoppers pay for purchases by scanning their fingers at the register.
No doubt they -- along with Play-Doh and who knows what else -- will be banned soon for being a national security threat.

Posted on June 22, 2006
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Scientists Discover Earth Is Surrounded By Popping Bubbles

Scientists made a really bizarre discovery which was announced today: the Earth is surrounded by super-hot bubbles which appear then pop out of existence. And no, we're not making this one up.
The space above you is fizzing with activity as bubbles of superhot gas constantly grow and pop around Earth, scientists announced today. Astronomers found the activity up where Earth's magnetic field meets a constant stream of particles flowing out from the Sun. While space is commonly called a vacuum, in fact there is gas everywhere, albeit not as dense as the air you breathe.

The newfound bubbles are technically called density holes. In them, gas density is 10 times lower. The gas in the bubbles is 18,000,000 Fahrenheit (10,000,000 Celsius) instead of the 180,000 degrees Fahrenheit of the surrounding hot gas, which is known as plasma [Graphic]. The bubbles were found in data collected by the European Space Agency's Cluster mission, a flotilla of four spacecraft. Researchers first thought they had an instrument glitch when the spacecrafts passed through bubbles. "Then I looked at the data from all four Cluster spacecraft. These anomalies were being observed simultaneously by all the spacecraft. That’s when I believed that they were real," said George Parks, University of California, Berkeley.

The bubbles expand to about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) and probably last about 10 seconds before bursting and being replaced by the cooler, denser solar wind, Parks and his colleagues say. It is not known for sure how the bubbles are created, but the researchers suspect it involves the solar wind colliding with the magnetic field, which forms a boundary called the bow shock. The phenomenon is similar to the wake formed by the front of a boat. The discovery, detailed in the journal Physics of Plasmas, could help astronomers better understand how this solar wind interacts with the magnetic field.
Popping bubbles that are 10,000,000 degrees Celsius? So the Earth is surrounded by boiling, popping bubbles of gas? This is just getting too freaky.

Posted on June 20, 2006
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Norway's Doomsday Vault

Norway has announced that it is building a Doomsday Vault deep in a frozen mountainside on an secluded Arctic island. The Vault will house seeds to repopulate the world with food in case of global catastrophe.
...Norway's ambitious project is on its way to becoming reality Monday when construction begins on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, designed to house as many as 3 million of the world's crop seeds. Prime ministers of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland were to attend the cornerstone ceremony on Monday morning near the town of Longyearbyen in Norway's remote Svalbard Islands, roughly 620 miles from the North Pole.

Norway's Agriculture Minister Terje Riis-Johansen has called the vault a "Noah's Ark on Svalbard." Its purpose is to ensure the survival of crop diversity in the event of plant epidemics, nuclear war, natural disasters or climate change, and to offer the world a chance to restart growth of food crops that may have been wiped out. The seeds, packaged in foil, would be stored at such cold temperatures that they could last hundreds, even thousands, of years, according to the independent Global Crop Diversity Trust. The trust, founded in 2004, has also worked on the project and will help run the vault, which is scheduled to open and start accepting seeds from around the world in September 2007.

Oil-rich Norway first proposed the idea a year ago, drawing wide international interest, Riis-Johansen said. The Svalbard Archipelago, 300 miles north of the mainland, was selected because it is located far from many threats and has a consistently cold climate. Those factors will help protect the seeds and safeguard their genetic makeup, Norway's Foreign Ministry said. The vault will have thick concrete walls, and even if all cooling systems fail, the temperature in the frozen mountain will never rise above freezing due to permafrost, it said.
The Vault will cost $4.8 million to build. There are already 1,400 seed banks all over the world to be used in case crops are wiped out. But none of those seed banks is as secure as the one the Norwegians are building. Any country can deposit seeds in the new vault; the Global Crop Diversity Trust is coordinating and helping to pay for the deposits for developing countries, which is really a pretty cool thing.

Posted on June 19, 2006
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Shaq Turns Into a Beanie Baby

photo of Shaq Beanie Baby Basketball great Shaquille O'Neal has been immortalized by Ty: he now has a Beanie Baby in his likeness. The ShaqBear is available online at www.ty.com/Shaq for $6.00. The official press release elaborates on this exciting launch:
ShaqBear(TM) is a 10" medium brown Beanie Baby(R) bear, wearing a white jersey and shorts, with red and yellow trim. The jersey front is embroidered with "SHAQ" and the Dunkman logo; the jersey back reads "O'NEAL" and has the number 32, all in red lettering. ShaqBear(TM) also wears Dunkman athletic shoes with the name "SHAQ" on the tongue. ShaqBear(TM) has 3 different hang tags; each tag variation has its own poem, Shaq Fact, and an inspirational message for children from Shaquille O'Neal.

"I am honored to be the first athlete for whom Ty created a Beanie Baby," said Shaquille O'Neal. "Beanie Babies have been providing companionship and strong values to children around the world for a long time. Those things are important to me, and partnering with Ty to continue to spread those messages really means a lot."

"We believe that ShaqBear has universal appeal," said Ty Warner, Chairman and CEO of Ty Inc. "Sports fans will want this item for its collectability, and children, adults and Beanie Baby fans will want this piece for our usual high quality, attention to detail and overall cute characteristics."
You're just a nobody until they've created a Beanie Baby in your likeness.

Posted on June 17, 2006
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Tom Cruise Named Most Powerful Celebrity

Forbes magazine has named Tom Cruise as the most powerful celebrity in its annual list of the 100 most powerful Hollywood players.
Couch-jumping, cradle-robbing Tom Cruise soared to the No. 1 spot in Forbes' annual Celebrity 100 Power List. The "M:i: III" star trounced last year's Forbes topper Oprah Winfrey, who fell to third place. The celeb roster, which hits newsstands today, ranks big shots based on the size of their paychecks and the amount of attention they get.

Cruise got the top billing because he commands the biggest box office and pockets the most bucks in Hollywood, earning $67 million last year from his cut of "War of the Worlds." "Love him or hate him, Tom Cruise is Hollywood's most bankable star," Forbes Celebrity 100 editor Lea Goldman told the Daily News. But don't cry for Oprah - even though she had to witness Cruise's crazed couch dance on her show. She way outearned him, pulling in $225 million.

Also hitting high notes: aging rockers. The Rolling Stones got a bang from their $172 million "A Bigger Bang" tour, hitting No. 2. Global peacemaker Bono pushed U2 to No. 4. Tiger Woods rounded out the top 5 with $90 million in pay. King of all media Howard Stern was among the royalty on the Forbes list, coming in at No. 7 thanks to his $302 million Sirius payday. His earnings were second only to Steven Spielberg, whose sale of DreamWorks helped bring him $332 million.

Pouty-mouthed Angelina Jolie's Third World-saving put her at No. 35 on the list. She's tied with her squeeze Brad Pitt's ex-wife Jennifer Aniston. Making the scene for the first time were "American Idol"'s Simon Cowell at No. 29 and Ryan Seacrest at No. 88. Forbes' biggest loser of the year was "Passion of the Christ" crusader Mel Gibson, who went from No. 3 in 2005 to nowhere this year. Also looking like she's been through three days of rain is Julia Roberts, another Forbes no-show. "She hasn't been in a movie in two years and was critically panned" on Broadway, Goldman said.
So Tom Cruise is the most powerful celeb, eh? Then why can't he get little Suri a $5 million photo deal? Because we'd really like to see a picture of the little tyke.

Posted on June 16, 2006
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Stephen Hawking: Humans Must Colonize Space Or Risk Extinction

Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking says that the future of the human race depends on our going out into space.
The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, world-renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday. Humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years, the British scientist told a news conference.

"We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system," added Hawking, who arrived in Hong Kong to a rock star's welcome Monday. Tickets for his lecture planned for Wednesday were sold out. He added that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth. "It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."

The 64-year-old scientist -- author of the global best seller A Brief History of Time -- is wheelchair-bound and communicates with the help of a computer because he suffers from a neurological disorder called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.
When someone as brilliant as Stephen Hawking says we need to go into space, we believe him. Too bad that NASA's funding has been cut so deeply that we'd be lucky to get a bottle rocket safely off the ground any time soon.

Posted on June 14, 2006
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It's A Tattoo Nation

Apparently, we're a Tattoo Nation. A recent survey shows that 36% of Americans aged 18 to 29 have at least one tattoo.
The study, scheduled to appear Monday on the Web site of the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, provides perhaps the most in-depth look at tattoos since their popularity exploded in the early 1990s. The results suggest that 24 percent of Americans between 18 and 50 are tattooed; that's almost one in four. Two surveys from 2003 suggested just 15 percent to 16 percent of U.S. adults had a tattoo.

"Really, nowadays, the people who don't have them are becoming the unique ones," said Chris Keaton, a tattoo artist and president of the Baltimore Tattoo Museum. But body art is more than just tattoos. About one in seven people surveyed reported having a piercing anywhere other than in the soft lobe of the ear, according to the study. That total rises to nearly one in three for the 18-to-29 set. Just about half — 48 percent — in that age category had either a tattoo or piercing.

Given their youth, that suggests the percentage of people with body art will continue to grow, said study co-author Dr. Anne Laumann, a Northwestern University dermatologist. "They haven't had time to get their body piercing. They haven't had time to get their tattoo. They are just beginning to get into it and the number is already big," Laumann said.
Just think, in about 30 years or so a majority of seniors will be wrinkly, sagging and covered in tattoos. We can't wait.

Posted on June 13, 2006
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NSA Eyes MySpace.com Users

The NSA (National Security Agency or No Such Agency, depending on who you talk to) is now keeping a watchful eye on social networking sites such as MySpace.com. Russell Shaw at ZDNet explains how the program is helping the agency create a full dossier on just about everyone.
New Scientist magazine reveals that the National Security Agency is funding research into how to add information from social networking site MySpace listings to profiles of individuals garnered from banking, retail and property records. As detailed in a footnote to a paper entitled Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, data from online social networks and other databases can be combined to uncover facts about people. The footnote said the work was part-funded by an organization known as ARDA, which stands for Advanced Research Development Activity.

Published in January by the Congressional Research Service, a report named Data Mining and Homeland Security, noted that part of ARDA's role is to promote integration of heretofore format-incompatible data sets about people- data sets that could be combined to generate more complete profiles of individuals under suspicion for potential terrorist links. To facilitate this integration, research is believed to be underway on Ressource Description Framework, a way of tagging data in a way that will promote more common uniformity with other data.

"By adding online social networking data to its phone analyses, the NSA could connect people at deeper levels, through shared activities, such as taking flying lessons," writes article author Paul Marks. Complete integration of such databases with phone calling records now believed to be in the possession of the NSA could be utilized in this manner: Calls from say, Pakistan to the U.S. could be data-mined, and if the recipients of those calls (identified from their phone numbers) called several other numbers within a few hours after receiving those calls from Pakistan, those other numbers could be checked for suspected terrorist links. And with a list handy of those who have been called available, it wouldn't take much to go to MySpace (or an archived MySpace repository), and search for MySpace users who have posted personally identifiable information that would indicate the need to explore their backgrounds further. Information such as the "flying lessons" example Marks writes about.

I'll do you one better. I believe that computer facial matching software will soon advance to the point where photos stored on NSA computers of terrorist suspects could then be mapped for similarities to photos on MySpace and other social networking sites.
Since it appears unlikely that anyone is going to put a stop to this unconscionable data mining of the lives of innocent Americans, you might want to watch what you post on MySpace.com: it's all going into a database somewhere. But you already knew that, right?

Posted on June 12, 2006
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The Toughest Guard Cat In New Jersey

Now this is what we call a true watch-cat. A black bear wandered into the back yard of a New Jersey family, but was chased up a tree by the family's orange tabby cat.
The unwelcome intruder was forced up a tree - twice - by the family pet, a tabby cat called Jack. The terrified bear was only able to make its escape when owner Donna Dickey called the hissing cat into the house. Ms Dickey said Jack liked to keep a close watch on his territory and often chased away small animals, but one of this size was a first.

"We used to joke, 'Jack's on duty', never knowing he'd go after a bear," Donna Dickey told local newspaper The Star-Ledger. "He doesn't want anybody in his yard," she added. The bear was first spotted in the tree by neighbours who thought the 15lb (7kg) cat was just looking up at it. They then realised the bear was afraid of the cat. After some 15 minutes, the bear descended, but was chased up another tree, before finally making its escape when Jack was called indoors.
Jack: he's 15lbs of sheer intimidation.

Posted on June 10, 2006
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The Littlest Dinosaurs

Photo of Europasaurus dinosaurGerman scientists have discovered a species of dinosaurs that was really tiny compared to their gigantic cousins.
When you think dinosaurs, you think big. But German scientists say they've discovered a species that evolved into a dwarf, ending up only about one-third the size of its closest known relatives. The fossils were of a four-legged plant-eater that was no lap dog: It measured about 20 feet from its snout to the tip of its long tail and it weighed about a ton. But next to its close evolutionary cousin Camarasaurus, a well-known beast that stretched some 59 feet long, this guy was a runt.

What happened? The researchers say it's a case of island dwarfism, the tendency of big species to shrink over time when they find themselves on an island. It's well-known among mammals, as with fossil elephants only about 3 feet tall found in Sicily and elsewhere. Scientists think that in an environment of limited resources, smaller body size becomes an advantage, and so captive populations shrink in body size over long periods of time.

*****

Sander, who specializes in the microscopic structure of bone, got his first look at the fossils in 2003 after an amateur bone-hunter found them in a quarry. Sander and other scientists initially thought they were from juvenile animals, but details of the bone structure showed they came from adults. Eventually the scientists realized they had remains from more than 11 animals of varying ages, including at least one fully grown adult. The bone analysis also showed that Europasaurus grew more slowly than bigger dinosaurs. Its small size was a normal growth pattern for the species and not the result of disease, Sander said.

That has been a point of contention in trying to explain the so-called hobbits of Indonesia, fossil remains that have been interpreted as revealing that a dwarf species of humans lived on a remote island thousands of years ago. Mark Norell, a dinosaur expert at the American Museum of Natural History, said island dwarfism had been talked about for the hobbits and many animals, and "to find it in dinosaurs is pretty neat."
We agree, Europasaurus is pretty neat.

Posted on June 8, 2006
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Hello Sues Over Shiloh Nouvel Pics

What a mess. Hello magazine now says it will sue all websites that ran the leaked first pictures of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's baby.
The photo "has been obtained totally illegally," said the magazine's features editor, Juliette Herd. Jolie and Pitt sold the photos through picture agency Getty, with all proceeds going to charity. Both Hello! and Getty say they will seek damages from any internet sites which reproduce the picture.

The leaked photo first surfaced on US gossip blogs Oh No They Didn't and Defamer on Wednesday. Several sites have already removed the picture, which shows Jolie lying beside her sleeping daughter while Pitt looks on from the side.

At a press conference in Namibia where the couple is currently based, Pitt and Jolie told reporters they had no plans to marry. "There is nothing in the air. The focus is the kids, and we are obviously extremely committed to the children and as parents together," Jolie told a news conference for local journalists at a hotel in the Namibian coastal town of Swakopmund. "So that kind of says it for us, and to have a ceremony on top of it is nothing."

The leaked image contains Hello! magazine's logo, suggesting the picture comes from the publication's cover. The publishers say they have yet to discover the source of the leak. "It's a complete mystery," said Ms Herd. "And we are very concerned at this breach of copyright".
Oh please. The photo of the cover appeared on Hello's own website and was immediately picked up by celebrity gossip sites all over the Internet. It had to have been someone at Hello -- they don't seem to be claiming that someone hacked them. Hello (which most people in the U.S. haven't even heard of) has gotten an amazing amount of publicity over this. It's People magazine who really got the short end of the stick here -- they're out $4.1. But they still have some more photos to run that people haven't seen yet, so all is not lost.

This is what happens when there is a bidding war for a photo of a newborn. It's ridiculous, really. Gwyneth Paltrow did it right: she just walked into the park and let all the paparazzi take pictures of baby Moses, thereby devaluing the photos. Sure the Jolie-Pitt baby photo money is supposedly going to charity, but what does it say about our culture when people are in hysterics over what a newborn child looks like? Nothing good, that's for sure.

Posted on June 7, 2006
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The Great Shiloh Nouvel Photo Controversy

Gawker.com is holding firm and refusing to pull from its site the cover of Hello magazine which shows Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and new daughter Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt. Apparently, Hello leaked the cover on its website early this morning whereupon Gawker, PerezHilton.com and several other websites immediately republishied the photos.

As you might recall, People magazine bid $4.1 million for U.S. rights to the photos and in Hello! paid $3.5 million for the U.K. rights. Because People is owned by Time Warner, Warner's attorneys threatened everyone who posted the pictures and everyone took them down, except Gawker. They're hanging tough and as of this afternoon, they are still online with a working server. But we'll see if Time Warner accosts a federal judge during the middle of cocktail hour and convinces him to sign a TRO.

Will Gawker cave? Are those really baby Shiloh's natural lips? Is Shiloh really wearing a skull t-shirt? Why does Brad Pitt have a gold wedding band on the third finger of his right hand? Stay tuned...

Posted on June 6, 2006
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Google, Microsoft And the Spreadsheet

Google and Microsoft announced that they have teamed up to make entering spreadsheets a web-based application.
Google Inc. is going back to the future by reinventing the spreadsheet as a Web-based application, seeking a simpler on-ramp for consumers to input data into databases, the company said on Monday.

The Web search leader will begin a limited trial on Tuesday of the classic software application defined by its grid of rows and columns and simple calculating capabilities that allow users to enter and organize information in structured form.

*****

Google Spreadsheet relies on technology the company acquired from a small Wall Street software developer it bought last year called 2Web Technologies, which in 2004 introduced tools to convert Microsoft Excel spreadsheets into Web services. "What is missing is the ability to share data more easily," Rochelle said. Users can sort data and take advantage of 200 functions and common spreadsheet formulas for doing basic calculations of numerical data. Google is working on improving printing, charts, filtering and "drag and drop" features, he said.

Rochelle said his company would be studying how much demand there is for Google Spreadsheet to work with Google Base, an online database service that allows Google users to post various types of information online. "Databases in themselves are really hard to program," said Charlene Li, an Internet analyst with Forrester Research. "What people use spreadsheets for is low-end databases," she said. Google Base is viewed by analysts as a stepping stone into the classified advertising or e-commerce markets, by helping users feature relevant information on Google's main search index, the Froogle shopping site and Google Local search.
It's so easy. You just enter all your personal medical, tax and financial information into an Excel spreadsheet and upload it to the Web. What could possibly go wrong?

Posted on June 5, 2006
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The Pasadena Chalk Festival

Pasadena Chalk FestivalThe 2006 Pasadena Chalk Festival, the world's largest street painting festival, is approaching. This year's festival will be held on June 17-18 in Paseo, Colorado. At the festival hundreds of artists will use 25,000 sticks of pastel chalk to draw murals on a stretch of pavement that covers two city blocks. The photograph on the right is one of the murals that was created at last year's festival, which was called the Absolut Chalk Festival. You can see several more photographs on the Pasadena Chalk Festival's website. There are also some great pictures here on Flickr. The festival is a free-of-charge public art event. Last year they had over 70,000 visitors.

Posted on June 3, 2006
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Mariah's Carey's $1 Billion Legs

Photo of Mariah CareyMariah Carey has insured her legs for $1 billion.
Reports indicate that songstress Mariah Carey, who has seen her career revive with the success of her latest album "The Emancipation of Mimi," has insured her famous legs for over $1 billion. The singer has signed up to front Gillette's Legs Of A Goddess campaign, according to the Daily Mirror.

A source close to the 36-year-old reveals: "The sum reflects her popularity. "She's about to start a US tour and she'll have to be careful."
We hope she doesn't cut herself shaving with her Gillette razor -- that could be very expensive.

Posted on June 1, 2006
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