Funny Headlines

Macabre, goofy, ironic, or preposterous - I kept a list of funny headlines, mostly from CNN. Check these out - they are all real. I think my favorite is the "League of Human Dignity" one, but there are some other diamonds too.

2/7/2002 Unruly Passenger Subdued with Axe
2/12/2002 Woman declared dead Saturday dies Monday
2/14/2002 Alert issued for potential teddy bear bombs
2/15/2002 From a CNN article about the first cloned cat: "The kitten joins a growing list of animals that have been cloned from adult cells, starting with Dolly the sheep and now including pigs, goats, cattle, mice and an oxlike creature called a gaur."
3/15/2002 Dachshund survives after eagle carries it off
3/19/2002 Whew! Stealth asteroid nearly blindsides Earth
3/19/2002 Sony robot sings, dances and isn't cheap
3/21/2002 Scientists test first human cyborg also in this article: "Warwick also hopes to wire himself up to a ultrasonic sensor, used by robots to navigate around objects, to give himself a bat-like sixth sense."
3/25/2002 Hubble spies galactic 'blue light special'
3/28/2002 Country singer Lyle Lovett trampled by bull
3/28/2002 Giant octopus caught off New Zealand
3/29/2002 From article, "Doughnut trail leads cops to thief" "They abandoned the truck when they were spotted by police responding to reports of a dangerous driver who was losing his doughnuts."
4/03/2002 Asteroid on possible collision course with earth
4/11/2002 Ed McMahon sues, says toxic mold killed dog
4/11/2002 Traveler's self-heating shoes cause airport scare
4/16/2002 Weed killer giving frogs multiple sex organs
4/24/2002 From article, "Mr. Elmo goes to Washington" WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In what may be the first appearance of a Muppet before a congressional committee, "Sesame Street" favorite Elmo donned his best suit and tie and took his cause to Capitol Hill.
5/03/2001 Judge orders defendant to pose nude
6/14/2002 Video: CNN's Natalie Pawelski travels to Iceland to view and taste one of nature's cutest birds
6/28/2002 Freezing mountaineer saved by telemarketer
7/10/2003 Pirate assaults sausage with bat MSNBC.com
7/12/2002 Sesame Street to introduce HIV-positive Muppet
7/12/2002 Shocked: 99 alien fish snagged in pond
7/16/2002 Quadriplegic sues strip club over wheelchair access for lap dances
7/19/2002 New TV show aimed at cats
7/24/2002 Alien fish no match for poison
7/26/2002 AOL: You've got fear
8/09/2002 Pornographer: I hacked al Qaeda
8/21/2002 Mom charged with letting kids get sunburned
8/23/2002 Report: Third child for Michael Jackson
10/18/2002 Is 'The Ketchup Song' the next 'Macarena'?
10/19/2002 There may another World Series quake, cats permitting10/22/2002 Airline pays woman squashed by obese passenger
10/31/2002 Canada issues U.S. travel warning
10/31/2002 Not enough fish in the sea, study finds
11/20/2002 New campaign: Would Jesus drive an SUV?
11/22/2002 Scientist burns penis with hot laptop
11/23/2002 Bush not 'a moron'
11/23/2002 Rain in Spain causes shuttle liftoff pain
11/25/2002 Hidden island off Sicily may reappear
12/09/2002 Marvel Comics to unveil gay gunslinger
12/11/2002 FAYETTE, Mississippi (AP) -- Two former Jefferson County, Mississippi, jurors have filed a $6 billion lawsuit against CBS' "60 Minutes" and a newspaper owner over comments about the size of jury awards in the county.
12/11/2002 Florida third-graders face pot charges
12/16/2002 Kentucky frees felons to balance budget
12/19/2002 Judge: Sell Bonds' homer ball, split proceeds
12/19/2002 Man sentenced for monkeys in pants
01/09/2003 Rare English moss ends 130 years of celibacy
01/10/2003 Researchers might find stroke treatment in bat saliva
05/08/2003 (MSNBC) Passengers sucked out of plane
06/09/2003 4 get monkeypox from prairie dogs
06/17/2003 Iraqi man hid 22 years in a wall
07/10/2003 Pirate assaults sausage with bat MSNBC.com
08/26/2003 'Bug Bowl' addition: Cricket-spitting
09/04/2003 FBI: Pizza man had another weapon
09/05/2003 Turtles lured to disco death in Greece
09/20/2003 Robot ship racing to death crash on Jupiter
10/09/2003 Black leaders outraged over 'Ghettopoly' board game
10/12/2003 Iraqi boy who lost arms in war angry at U.S. pilot
10/28/2003 Millionaire says he doesn't recall cutting up friend
1/16/2004 Disney worker deported to Haiti for role in massacre
2/7/2004 Doctors remove baby's second head
2/9/2004 Inmate escapes using toilet-paper gun
2/10/2004 Opportunity peeks out over rim
2/12/2004 Disney worker killed by parade float
2/19/2004 Teen surfing Web learns he has been abducted
2/19/2004 Conan O'Brien apologizes to Canadians
3/29/2004 Patient wins right to fly with pot
07/21/2004 Reverse air rage: Drunken flight attendants attack flier
07/22/2004 Plant fires 11 workers for chicken abuse
08/03/2004 Fat activists protest diet industry
08/11/2004 from article, "Man trying to lose 800 pounds" A group known as the League of Human Dignity helped arrange for Deuel to be driven to a local livestock scale, where he could be weighed.
8/12/2004 Gene blocking turns monkeys into workaholics
8/17/2004 Bear guzzles 36 beers, passes out at campground
8/29/2004 'Friendly' killer whale damages three boats "Now Canadian officials and an Indian group that believes the animal is the reincarnation of its late chief are working on a plan to protect both Luna and humans. "
9/10/2004 "Man arrested for 1974 Spam-related homicide"
10/24/2004 Britain's Royal Navy to allow devil worship
11/05/2004 Fighter jet strafes New Jersey school
11/14/2004 Vice President Dick Cheney is undergoing tests at George Washington University Hospital after experiencing shortness of breath, the White House said today. It is unknown whether Cheney, who has a history of heart problems, will be admitted.
11/15/2004 Pill may help prevent drug abuse, researchers say
1/21/2005 'Giant' 17-pound baby born in Brazil...A woman in Brazil gave birth Wednesday to a boy that doctors have nicknamed "giant baby."
1/22/2005 Review: 'Are We There Yet?' tiresome
2/14/2005 Court documents: Kazaa workers hate own software

Yahoo Quotes
2/24/2005 Top Stories - AP: Ga. close to naming official state amphibian
2/24/2005 Kenya urged to ban flimsy shopping bags
9/10/2005 He said a suicide note was found in her e-mails. The court heard that two suicide notes were found close to her body. A coroner said Carina appeared to have enjoyed her experience filming "The Colony."
9/14/2005 Inventor fuels car with dead cats
10/31/2005 Pastor electrocuted while performing baptism
1/10/2006 Mummified body found in front of TV
2/7/2006 U.N. staff flee cartoon riots

CNN Headlines
12/10/2006 "Gunman felt cheated over toilet invention"
12/13/2006 World's tallest man saves plastic eating dolphins
12/15/2006 "People are eager to adopt a pit bull who chewed off a baby's toes."
12/18/2006 Runner Fails Gender Test
2/15/2007 Boy, 3, on fire runs into tree crying for mom

It's Hairy Krishna.

Following the ESLly thread from yesterday, Krishna Gopal on LinkedIn asks, "How Inner peace can bring world peace.[?]" An innocent and pure question.

I think you have it backwards though. It is well established that one of the things that the human brain does under stress is to manufacture large amounts of the hormone cortisol. There is a mounting body of evidence to suggest that during cerebral development high levels of cortisol impede development of parts of the human brain that are active when people are feeling empathy. This seems to be an psychobiological basis for the long-observed phenomenon that people that grow up in particularly stressful environments are less caring and tougher.

I think inner peace comes from world peace, and not so much vice-versa. World peace comes from economic interdependence and the rule of law. In the end, it is technology that has provided the infrastructure and knowledge that has increased productivity, which has in turn increased trade and therefore our dependence on each other. This has reduced the amount of conflict in the world and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. It is easier for people that grow up in times of peace to be peaceful internally.

Women in Trousers? Whatever Will the Young Set Do Next!!?

John Kwag askes, in an ESL-ly kind of way, "Why does every generation seek to denigrate with wildly negative characterizations or predict social horror for every generation after them?" Sounds like Babelfish.altavista.com got its grubby paws on that one. As Borat would say, "Naaaisssss." Here is what I think.

Evolution teaches living things to be scared of anything new by killing the ones that don't run away on a regular basis. Over billions of generations, this has resulted in animals that have an instinctive false positive response to "Is something new dangerous?". Also, neural networks (of which brains are an example) often have problems unlearning once they have modeled an input stream.

So the older we get, the more uncomfortable we are with change for reasons of the network architecture of our brain. Add to this an instinctive fear of new things and *poof*, you observe the not-so-youong panicking at new ways.

Sell the Grand Canyon.

So Mike Murray asked, "Is the US economy in jeopardy?" Standard worries about the debt, deficit, etc. He sees trouble ahead but is baffled that some folks don't, and he wants someone to make a cogent explanation of the other side of the argument. Here goes.

Hi Mike. Ah, one of my favorite topics! Get ready to check the "Best Answer" box! Defecits most certainly DO matter, and anyone that says otherwise is a hack. However the degree to which they matter is affected hugely by other factors. It often helps to create a simplified example.

Let's say that you and your friends represent all the countries in the world. Let's say you have a rich friend Sam, and he represents America.

If someone told you that Sam had 8.9 million dollars of debt and asked you if he was financially solvent and/or headed for bankruptcy, what would you say? You would have to know more information first! If his net worth is 100 million dollars, and he has 8.9 million in debt, and he is going to borrow an additional 1 million next year, then he is in fine shape. You might want to know why he is borrowing money if he is worth so much though.

The answer is that he has cash flow problems. Much of his wealth is tied up in large assets, like land and construction projects. It makes sense for him to borrow to finance these projects because R&D, infrastructure, and a happy family make his home more productive, which has effects on the rate of economic growth that mitigate the interest on the money he borrows.
Many Economists think that rather than measuring national debt as a % of GDP, it should be measured against a composite that includes national wealth (the country-equivalent of net worth). Using this as a benchmark, the Debt/Book ratio of the U.S is about .1, even including all the "off budget" debt to social security.

That is why the sky isn't falling. But note that this is an explanation of why it could make sense to incur a debt, NOT a justification for why it is growing out of control. Just as each individual and each company should carefully examine the option of borrowing money to finance project, so should each country. Deficit spending that does not have a positive expected ROI will result in future inflation and/or currency devaluation, both of which reduce consumer purchasing power.
Booya.

The Ultimate Power Ball

I originally made this post on http://www.science.edu.sg/. It is a complex concept, so please bear with me.

I heard a news story around 15 years ago (probably on NPR) about two retired NASA scientists who had an idea for electrical power generation. The idea involved creating a huge gyroscope, mounted on the earth so that its plane of rotation bisects the circle formed by the Earth's equator. A huge gear is mounted on the same plane as the equator, inscribing the axis on which the gyroscope rotates. A generator is attached to this gear, and the entire enclosure is put inside a vacuum. The diameter of the gyroscope was described as having to be quite large, > 100 meters. The theory was that as the gyroscope was spun up, the rotation of the earth would force the structure to rotate, spinning the gear and generating electrical power. This would trivially slow the earth, and would convert the earth's kinetic energy to electrical power. I have been unable to find any reference to this, but it seems like it would work as long as friction could be lowered sufficiently. Over a two year period, I received two responses, reposted below.

Answer 1: "I am an aerospace engineer with a Ph.D. in astronomy. I can't tell you what ever happened to this interesting idea, because I have never heard about it in the course of a 16 year career in astronomy and aerospace; but I can at least attest that it is theoretically sound, even if not technologically practical. Moreover, it appears to be an inexhaustible clean energy source! A quick back of the envelope calculation (hope I didn't make a mistake) suggests that the stored rotational energy of the earth is of the order of 10 to the 10th power Gigawatt-millenia. (I chose these units, because they are easily compared to historical time and human power use rates)."
-Answer provided by Walter F. Kailey, Ph.D.

Answer 2: "I agree. The forces driving the generator are not applied against the direction of rotation of the gyroscope so it would not slow down even while the generator siphoned off energy from the rotation of the earth. Only bearing friction would slow it down. The more important question is: would it be practical? To a ground-based observer the gyroscope would appear to rotate one revolution per 24 hours, so if the generator had to rotate at, say about 100 revolutions per minute (a low but not unreasonable speed), the gear-up ratio would need to be 1 : (100 x 60 x 24) or 1 : 144,000. High gear-up ratios tend to be inefficient (high friction losses) so finding a generator that produces enough power at a slow speed i.e. lower gear-up ratio would be important. For Example: If a single-step reduction were used and the driven gear were 30 cm diameter, at 1 : 144,000 the driving gear would need to be 4.32 km diameter - rather large!"
-Answer provided by Keith Labrecque

Of course many people find the idea of slowing down the Earth to provide power somewhat horrifying. I think it is appropriate. Like Sting said, "When the world is running downYou make the best of what's still around".

Peak Oil Can Oil My Peak.

My opinion is that although the concept of Peak Oil rings true in the most literally way (the cost of extracting petroleum will increase over time as the cheapest and easiest to extract reserves are depleted), the often touted economic and social repercussions are fear mongering and a result of very shallow analysis.

There are massive reserves trapped in harder to extract contexts, such as oil sands, and there are massive unexplored areas where there are thought to be large amounts of oil. Add to this the fact that there are hundreds of years worth of coal and nuclear energy. If oil gets too expensive, we use more coal and nuclear in the mid term while alternative energies catch up.

Keep in mind that the Earth is exposed to enough radiant energy from the sun provides energy to 75 billion tons of biomass, and only about 1/3rd of 1% is humans. Living organisms are very good at turning energy from the sun into oils. There are plants that are more than 20% oil by weight. From a physics point of view there is no energy problem.

If oil was going to run out suddenly in 5 years and there were no such thing as coal, natural gas, or nuclear power then yes, there might be a pretty big social disaster. But there is coal, natural gas, and nuclear, and there is at least 50 years of oil too. As is almosts always the case, the alarmists are either idiots or opportunists.

Nature and Nurture

I had a thought some time ago that I just remembered about the whole Nature vs. Nurture argument. What if our genetics more or less fix our propensity towards basic animal instincts (fight/flight, feeding, mating, play, etc.) but our experience maps those instincts to real world behaviors?

For example, a child with a propensity to fight in almost every possible scenario could eventually learn to fight his own urge to fight, turning the instinct inwards. As a peaceful adult, he has not changed his instincts at all but has instead mapped the instinct to a suppressive behavior.

This way of thinking about the nature/nurture balance works well for me. I would be very interested in getting feedback from anyone in the Psychobiology / Biopsychology fields.

It took me a long time to get off my butt and actually start consistently blogging. Now that I have it has been a great disappointment that people rarely reply. What good are thoughts in a vacuum?

How can something so broken work so well?

Again, sorry for the teaser. No one is going to read this stuff without an intriguing title. In my defense, the U.S. primary and secondary education does smell pretty bad.

So Vaso Bovan on Linkedin asked the question, "Despite Inferior Elementary/Secondary Public Education, USA Dominates. Why?" Why indeed. To consider this question properly, I think you have to relax some of your assumptions and reexamine a definition or two.

First, what is education? U.S. schools definitely lag behind internationally in teaching math, science, languages, and probably literature and history as well. But they are excellent at encouraging students to develop good social skills, and to learn to question authority and ask questions. This may be a very large offsetting factor in how American students perform after high school graduation. A big part of actual achievement in life is related to abilities that cannot be memorized.

Another major factor is the lack of early tracking in the U.S. In most countries against which America is compared, there are entrance exams to enter middle school and/or high school and to stay on an academic track. Many more students begin preparation for a trade between ages 13-15 and these students (in most European countries and in China for example) are no longer counted as being in "high school" when it comes time to take tests for puposes of preparation.

Another significant item is that the U.S. Economy is less socialist that most (if not all) major European countries. The efficiencies from lower tax rates and the business friendly legal environment make it easier to establish businesses. Because of this there is a critical mass of entrepreneurs, and many people see entrepreneurship as a path to success very early on.

No one doubts the signifcance of brain drain. The U.S. gets the best and brightest from many places, and they stay and raise their children. That is a powerful force. Think about how adventurous an immigrant has to be to leave everything behind and come to a new country to build a life for their children. U.S. Immigration policy, for all of its faults, is exceptional at getting high quality hard working people, and for the most part they end up feeling tremendous loyalty to their new country.

The U.S. is also more religious than China and Europe. For all the sects, something approaching 90pct of Americans self-identify as Christian. Largely homogenous religious values, particularly in a religion that aggressively teaches charity and giving might help.

And the final major factor is access to capital. I don't think there is anywhere else in the world where it is as easy for someone with a good idea to find money to "make it so".

So the long and the short of it is that although learning more facts in school is probably a good thing, it isn't the only thing. And the benefits from a more business friendly environment, a more efficient economy, high quality immigration, better access to capital more than make up for the defecits. Strong national pride and strong and largely homogenous religious values along with an education system that fosters cooperation and the development of good social skills all seem to more than counteract the lag in learning facts and academic skills at an early age.

Can we rebuild it? Can we make it stronger?

Someone asked me for ideas on how to use technology to make the world better. Whoa. Changing the world is a lot easier than making it a better place. It takes historians decades to begin to decipher the lasting effects of historical forces. Lenin cared greatly about his fellow man, and the fruits of his intellect were poison. A vicious brute can cause a long term swing in the opposite direction when the world is disgusted by his ego and cruelty.

Trying to guess what will "make the world a better place" is probably a lot like flipping a coin. However my best suggestion would be helping to educate intelligent poor children anywhere in the world. Technology can help with this. A cheap used computer with a monitor and an Internet connection costs about $250 plus $100 a year. It is an encyclopedia of great power and allows a bright young person to learn anything. Check out the link below - it is MIT's OLPC (one laptop per child) media lab initiative. I believe it is the most important thing we can do to improve the world.

If you were hoping to create an idea yourself, I would ask you this: why? Smarter and more caring people than us have started thouands of great projects. It is a truer and better thing to help them than to waste time reinventing a poorer wheel. Helping severly impoverished people live longer without helping them educate their children is meaningless. Teach a person to read...

There has been a lot of talk about this next recession.

Maybe too much talk. Predicting a recession is very difficult in any environment, let alone one with two huge and rising stars (India and China). Over time, people that base their investment strategy on the constant belief that a recession is imminent will not perform as those that bet on growth. Doomsday preaching is more a personality characteristic than a sincere prediction. We get upset when someone that says things are about to melt down turns out to be right, the market drops 14% and then is stagnant for a year...but the truth is that same guy missed out on 10 years of groth at 9% a year to be right that once.

Predicting inflation is easier. I believe that since the early 80s inflation in the west has been low because we have imported more and more core products from low cost overseas producers every year while raw materials prices were also stable. In the last couple of years, there has been a huge and rapid rise in raw materials costs, and we already import almost all manufactured goods (there is no more cost savings to be had from increasing imports). Also, labor and production costs are starting to rise in China and India. Energy, which is a cost input to almost every product, is going to get more costly.

I am fairly certain that the Chinese economy is bubbling in a few areas, notably including real estate and public equity markets (the PEs are ridiculous and expect unsustainable growth, and in real estate the rental to price ratios are about half of what they are in the U.S.). I don't think their recession will spill over much to the U.S. when they correct, but it could cause them to draw down foreign reserves, which will flood the bond markets a bit - driving down bond prices, and driving up interest rates.

So long and short, no significant global recession is always the smarter bet, but you can expect higher inflation over the next 5-10 years. I am not comfortable predicting how much higher.

Evil. Pure evil. Muahahahaha. Sarah Lacy on Linkedin asked the question, "Is the Internet an inherently good force in the world, evil force or neither? The other day I overheard a guy saying he thought the Internet should be banned. I gasped and asked why and he said he thought it had not only done nothing to help humanity, it had actually set us back. what do you think? "

Well Sarah, here is what I think. A medium of communication is no more good or evil than a mirror is beautiful or ugly. It is a tool, and the ends to which it is manipulated reflects the purposes of the user. The Internet is used by many people for many different things.

I would venture that the most profound effects have been; 1) an increase in the rate of dissemination of information, 2) a decrease in the cost of research, and 3) a decrease in the difficulty of organizing people.

After at least 40,000 years of human culture we have only been able to use electronic communications for about a hundred. I seriously doubt that we were close to a societal equilibrium from the technological changes telephone and radio introduced even before the Internet came along. Many of the global sociopolitical changes that we talk about today were already happening before the Internet gained wide acceptance.

The long and short of it? Too damned early to say. It would be like saying that it will be a bad market day after the first trade of the opening bell.

Think you could be baptized in Second Life? If God made everything, I guess he made virtual water too. Sorry for the grabby introduction - I'm not sure anyone would read this if it didn't start off sounding sexier than it is. Now that you have torn off the wrapping paper...

I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, and I recently responded to a question from someone there. He asked if there are any real business opportunities in Second Life (SL). If you don’t know what it is, check out secondlife.com before you read on.

Most of what the other folks have discussed has centered on SL itself. I would like to bring a slightly different perspective. I believe there is no doubt whatsoever that SL-like environments will become very important components of the global economy *eventually*. Eventually could be 10 years, 20, 30...who knows. But way before they become a critical part of everything, they will continue to occupy a growing segment of the gaming industry.

The problem in trying to build a business or business opportunities around the trend is that "SL-like" environments does not guarantee by any means that SL will even be part of the industry when it takes off. There are many powerful firms with more resources and experience in 3D, massively multiplayer games, gaming hardware, marketing, etc.

If you think back on the last few quantum shifts in communications and computer technology (the Transistor, Graphical User Interfaces, Digital Cell technology, the graphical web browser, etc.) you will find that it is very common for innovators to fail commercially. They just prove there is traction, and someone better financed comes in with big tech and marketing resources and grabs the ball.

If you accept this reasoning, I think the best way to play it is to write tools for use in SL-like environments that do not commit you to SL itself but that enhance the user experience. I would suggest community-based applications for sharing and selling 3D objects, creating object and texture repositories, networking, data mining, marketing, etc.

During the .com bubble, things were all about technology until the technology started to coalesce, then it was all about content (and still is). I think this will be true of the technology around 3D immersive environments as well. Content is what the big boys need when they want to build competitive systems quickly. It is gold, and the only folks that have it are the ones that spent the last few years building it.

If you are intent on being an early mover, my advice is to look at what succeeded in the last decade in terms of Internet enhancements, and find analogies in the networked 3D world.