In an article in the Journal of Cosmology, two scientists posit that humans could travel to Mars much sooner—and cheaper—if the missions were one-way, much like the early settlers who traveled to North America and didn’t expect to return. Or the English who settled Australia. Or Napoleon when he, uh, settled Elba. Interestingly, neither of the scientists who wrote the article volunteered.
A new canned drink vending machine in Japan uses facial recognition to recommend drinks based on the customer’s age and gender as well as the temperature and time of day. “If the customer is a man, the machine is likely to recommend a canned coffee drink, since men tend to prefer these. If the customer is in their 50s, though, that recommendation is likely to be green tea,” a company spokeswoman said. A young woman might be offered tea or something slightly sweeter, a child milk, an ad agency executive would be offered scotch, and a police officer would be told to move on to the next machine and order a doughnut.
In an attempt to boost sales, Nations Trucks in Sanford, Florida, is offering a free AK-47 assault rifle to anyone who buys a used truck through the end of November. Since they’re actually giving out a $400 gun shop voucher, customers can opt to buy a different firearm, receive a $400 check, or use it as a down payment at the bail bond company of their choice.
If you want to get out of jury duty, try telling the judge, “I had a close friend in high school who killed 17 people.” It worked for John Backderf. When asked by the judge if he’d ever known anyone convicted of a crime, Backderf mentioned his boyhood pal, Jeffrey Dahmer. He was immediately excused. And you thought you had to lie about having had a vacation planned for the dates of the trial.
A few months ago Sarah Palin said President Obama doesn’t have the cojones to deal with the issue of illegal immigration. If she runs for president in 2012—did someone say “if”?—she might want to make sure she chooses a candidate with cojones grande. Like the Tuberous Bushcricket for instance. Biologists at the University of Derby, England, report that the Bushcricket has the largest testicles in relation to its body weight in the world, weighing in at 14% of its body mass. To put that into perspective, if it were a human male each of its testicles would weigh as much as five bags of sugar. But make fewer batches of chocolate chip cookies. What the scientists haven’t determined yet is why they chose a career that entails weighing animal and insect testicles.
The Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation of Chicago has a new weight loss product—flavored crystals you sprinkle on your food. The crystals, which they claim helped people lose an average of 28 pounds, supposedly suppress the appetite by tricking the brain into thinking you’ve had enough to eat after only having chowed down on a small amount. The crystals come in a range of simulated flavors including cheese, horseradish, coffee, and the ones that suppress your appetite the most, vomit, skunk, and Baby’s First Summer Diaper.
Paul the Octopus, the World Cup predicting cephalopod, has passed to his watery grave, but don’t fret. If you still need an oracle, there’s always Facebook. It turns out that Facebook was a good predictor of how the House of Representatives elections would play out. Based on the number of people who became fans of the candidates before the election, Facebook managed to predict 74% of the winners. Sure Alan Grayson of Florida lost despite having about six times as many Facebook fans, that’s because people thought his buttons said “Hike.”
An apparent bug in the iPhone’s alarm app caused it to not adjust to Daylight Savings Time in Europe, which began there over the weekend, so for many people their Monday morning alarm went off an hour later than expected and they were late for work. A spokesman at Apple denies it’s a bug, claiming it’s a feature. “We love our users and think they deserve an extra hour of sleep, so we gave it to them.”
According to a newly released account provided by a 19-year-old Austrian deserter, Adolf Hitler woke up about 10 a.m., enjoyed a nice breakfast of bread and marmalade, and was mild-mannered during personal conversations. The soldier also revealed that Stalin enjoyed long moon-lit walks on the beach, Mussolini liked receiving flowers and candy, and Idi Amin cried every time he watched Bambi.
A guy walks into Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s office and says, “I have no privacy when you do this.” Schmidt says, “Don’t do this.”
But seriously, folks. A while back, when asked how adults can clean up any Internet-based record of their youthful indiscretions, Schmidt semi-joked: “Change their names.” Then last week, in a CNN interview with Parker Spitzer, he said that people who don’t want their homes to appear on Google’s Street View should “move.” Interestingly, that exchange has disappeared from both the video posted on CNN’s site as well as the transcript. Yet amazingly your house is still on Street View. And those incriminating photos of you at that party are still on Google Images.
The moral? It’s easier to edit an interview than your online life.
Thank you! Drive safely. And don’t forget to tip your waitress…we’ll know it if you don’t.
A new survey finds that the average American teen sends 3,339 text messages a month. That’s 111 a day, eight an hour, or one every seven waking minutes. When confronted with this, most of the teens were shocked to learn that they had all that spare time in which to send more text messages.
Researchers at Indiana University and the University of Manchester have analyzed millions of Tweets and come up with an algorithm that figures out the mood of Twitter users. And along with it, predicts the ups and downs of the stock market with 87% accuracy. They’re working on refining the algorithm so it can also predict elections, select winning lottery numbers, and predict whether people who get fired as CEO for sexual harassment or as a news commentator for making racist remarks will not only land on their feet but make more money than ever. Okay, so we don’t need an algorithm to figure out the last one.
A couple of days ago the Vatican newspaper, Osservatore Romano, declared that, “Few people know it, and he does everything to hide it. But it’s true: Homer J. Simpson is Catholic.” Executive producer Al Jean begs to differ, saying that Homer and his family are “Presby-lutheran.” Meanwhile, Episco-Buddha-du minister I.M. Miksedup says, “Weird. We always thought Homer was Jew-slim.”
According to a new book, the accepted conversions of dates from Mayan to the modern calendar may be off by as much as 50 or 100 years. This means the Mayan calendar may not, in fact, end on Dec 21, 2012 as expected, thus the much hyped apocalypse is being postponed. Unless, of course, the calculations were off in the other direction in which it’s already happened. Like say, when George Bush was elected. On the positive side, it gives John Cusak more work by making it possible to film a sequel to the movie “2012.”
In a sad, blatant cry to Saturday Night Live begging for them to feature her in a skit, Delaware’s Republican Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell told a group of legal scholars and law students at Widener University Law School she wasn’t aware that the First Amendment to the Constitution calls for a separation of church and state. She was also shocked to find out that the Constitution guarantees the right to vote, a speedy trial, and free speech, which includes allowing former witches who can’t name a recent Supreme Court decision they disagree with to embarrass themselves over and over.
In a speech in Las Vegas on Sunday night, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid compared President Barack Obama to a trapped Chilean miner, saying that when he replaced George Bush in the White House he found himself in a “hole so deep that he couldn’t see the outside world. It was like the Chilean miners, but he, being the man he is, rolled up his sleeves and said ‘I am going to get us out of this hole.'” Unlike the Chilean miners who needed all that help. Reid, on the other hand, isn’t anything like a Chilean miner since he’s shown he can get himself into a metaphor hole so deep there’s no way he could ever dig out.
It’s obvious which part of “Anger Management” Faribah Maradiaga doesn’t understand. When the 19-year-old walked into her anger management class at Bellevue College and started complaining about the video that was being shown, another woman told her to “give it a chance.” Maradiaga pulled a knife and stabbed the woman, then threatened to kill her family. Not only has she been charged with second-degree assault, it’s a safe bet she’ll have to take the class again.
For the next month, the Macy’s store on 34th Street in New York City will have a “magic mirror” in a women’s fitting room that lets you try on virtual clothes by selecting different outfits from a touchscreen and seeing them on you. Sort of. You can even post the image on Facebook, where friends can “Like” it, “Ignore” it, or suggest you switch the mirror to “Funhouse Mirror Slimmed” before you post another image.
According to MSNBC, Justin Bieber is teaming up with Nicole by OPI to put out a line of, uh, nail polish. He’s also coming out with a book later this week, Justin Bieber: First Step 2 Forever: My Story, and there will be a 3-D movie about his life supposedly out next year. All that’s missing is a perfume—Bieber!—that will smell like a desperate attempt to amass as much money as possible before his voice changes.
A survey by anti-virus maker AVG found that the average age in which children have an online presence is six months, mostly because of parents posting or sharing photos of their babies, though 23% of parents start the process pre-birth by uploading the kid-to-be’s sonogram. The survey also found that 7% of babies have an email address at birth. And of those, 98% have received ads for V!agra, 76% have been asked to confirm their bank login information, and 47% have gotten an email from a friend who’s stranded in London after having had his wallet stolen asking them to send money immediately.
