I shouldn’t be surprised, but, wow. Student’s Recording of Teacher’s Views Leads to a Ban on Taping:
After a public school teacher was recorded telling students they belonged in hell if they did not accept Jesus as their savior, the school board has banned taping in class without an instructor’s permission, and has added training for teachers on the legal requirements for separating church and state.
This is in New Jersey, by the way.
The Daily Show’s Laguna Beach, the Real, Real Orange County is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long, long time.
Apparently, avoiding Australia’s famed land- and water-based predators isn’t enough. Wild eagles attack paraglider:
Britain’s top female paraglider has cheated death after being attacked by a pair of “screeching” wild eagles while competition flying in Australia.Nicky Moss, 38, watched terrified as two huge birds began tearing into her parachute canopy, one becoming tangled in her lines and clawing at her head 2,500 meters (8,200ft) in the air.
“I heard screeching behind me and a eagle flew down and attacked me, swooping down and bouncing into the side of my wing with its claws,” Moss told Reuters on Friday.
“Then another one appeared and together they launched a sustained attack on my glider, tearing at the wing.”
The encounter happened on Monday while Moss — a member of the British paragliding team — was preparing for world titles this month at Manilla in northern New South Wales state.
One of the giant wedge-tailed eagles became wrapped in the canopy lines and slid down toward Moss, lashing at her face with its talons as her paraglider plummeted toward the ground.
“It swooped in and hit me on the back of the head, then got tangled in the glider which collapsed it. So I had a very, very large bird wrapped up screeching beside me as I screamed back,” Moss said.
She said she thought about dumping her parachute-style canopy and using the reserve.
“But then I would have been descending on my reserve as the birds continued shredding it, which I wasn’t happy about,” she said.
Wedge-tailed eagles are Australia’s largest predatory birds and have a wing-span of more than two meters.
Moss said the attack ended after the second bird freed itself and the glider reached a height of only 100m from the ground, taking her outside the territory of the pair, who probably mistook her as a bird intruder.
In Go for the Gold!, Alex Tabarrok cites one of my favorite stories of an old industry learning new tricks:
A few years back, Toronto-based gold mining company Goldcorp (GG) was in trouble. Besieged by strikes, lingering debts, and an exceedingly high cost of production, the company had terminated mining operations….Chief Executive Officer Rob McEwen needed a miracle. Frustrated that his in-house geologists couldn’t reliably estimate the value and location of the gold on his property, McEwen did something unheard of in his industry: He published his geological data on the Web for all to see and challenged the world to do the prospecting. The ‘Goldcorp Challenge’ made a total of $575,000 in prize money available to participants who submitted the best methods and estimates…Within weeks, submissions from around the world were flooding into Goldcorp headquarters. There were entries from graduate students, management consultants, mathematicians, military officers, and a virtual army of geologists….
The contestants identified 110 targets on the Red Lake property, more than 80% of which yielded substantial quantities of gold. In fact, since the challenge was initiated, an astounding 8 million ounces of gold have been found — worth well over $3 billion. Not a bad return on a half million dollar investment.
How Green are Cities? Not as green as their proponents present them to be:
I get the point but I don’t quite buy this. Manhattan sells services, most notably finance and entertainment, to the rest of America, and in turns draws upon industrial outputs, which of course include steel and glass. It is also no accident that Gary, Indiana is near Chicago and those rather aesthetically thrilling factories off the New Jersey Turnpike are right outside New York City. Try the other boroughs as well, they don’t call Staten Island a big garbage dump for nothing. Praising Manhattan is a bit like looking only at the roof of a car and concluding it doesn’t burn much gas. Manhattan supports its density only by being surrounded by a broader load of crud. [...] Think of Manhattan as a place which outsources its pollution, simply because land there is so valuable.
Scented oils linked to male breast growth:
That case involved the four-year-old “who was using absolutely nothing on his skin except a lavender oil preparation that his mother had obtained from a homeopath. She used to rub it on his chest and body every night” because lavender, in alternative medicine circles, is supposed to have healing properties.Several months after the boy stopped getting the “healing balm”, his breasts returned to normal.
Dr Bloch then began to see lavender crop up in other cases, including the 10-year-old, who was using a hair styling gel and shampoo that contained both lavender oil and tea tree oil, and the seven-year-old, who had been using lavender-scented soap and skin lotions.
In laboratory tests, scientists at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina found that both substances can mimic the action of the female hormone estrogen and block male hormones that control both masculine characteristics and inhibit the growth of breast tissue.
I must admit to a certain fascination with Spec Ops guys talking about how to really kill the enemy. Take, for instance, this bit from Paul Howe’s Training for the Real Fight:
Who dictates the speed of the fight? The bad guy and how fast he falls, does. It might be a fast or slow process (the bad guy dying), but one should get in the habit of solving one problem at a time before moving to multiple threats. You can shoot two rounds on paper or ping a piece of steel and move to the next target, but in reality, two rounds or the sound of steel being struck may not solve your problem.I remember servicing a bad guy one night at about 7 yards with night optics. I was trained to do double-taps throughout my military career. I punched him twice with two 5.56 rounds and stopped for a split second in my mind and on the trigger, looking for a response from the bad guy. The problem was that he was still standing with an AK-47. I hit him with two more rounds before he began to fall the ground. To my amazement, he stood back up before collapsing a second time.
Lessons learned, shoot until they go down. Not one, not two, or three. I now teach a four in the chest, one in the head failure drill with the rifle. Why four? It may take the human body that long to react to the amount of trauma you are inducing (5.56). At the time of this incident, we were using military green tip ammo and the energy transfer was minimal. Realizing we had a stopping power problem, we developed a drill that would work on any determined individual and made it part of our training package.
I couldn’t believe this self-referential Old Spice Commercial Featuring Bruce Campbell was real.
Addendum: Bruce Campbell fans should note the chainsaw by the fireplace. Everyone should note the nautical pa
It’s truly shocking what a few Mooninite Marauders can do to a city like Boston:
Officials found 38 blinking electronic signs promoting the Cartoon Network TV show “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” on bridges and other high-profile spots across the city Wednesday, prompting the closing of a highway and the deployment of bomb squads.
[...]
“It’s clear the intent was to get attention by causing fear and unrest that there was a bomb in that location,” Assistant Attorney General John Grossman said at their arraignment.
Yes, that was clearly the intent.