BEARD RASH

 

Ian Thorpe's Amanda Beard claim looks a bit rash

IAN Thorpe thought he and US swimming sex symbol Amanda Beard  were in a relationship. She saw it differently - and today said so publicly.Champion athlete Beard has flatly denied that she and Thorpe were once lovers.
As speculations swirls around Thorpe's friendship with his Brazilian flatmate Daniel Mendes, Beard was adamant that she and Thorpe were never an item.

[I thought this story was interesting because of the coincidental usage of the word "beard". In gay circles a beard is the name of a female partner taken by a gay man to give society the impression he is straight.]

SPACE STALKER

2009 BD- Scary Asteroid Space Stalker

Don't look now, but we're being followed.  You can't miss him - he's ten meters tall, made of rock, and goes by the snappy name of 2009 BD.  Oh, and he's hanging six hundred thousand kilometers above your head.

This might sound like a scary Stone of Damocles but you can let Bruce Willis sleep in - it's much more of an oddity than a threat. 2009 BD was spotted earlier this year (no points for having worked that out), trailing Earth in almost the same orbit and at most a tenth of an Astronomical Unit away.  Since we're only 1 AU from the Sun, and that's a fair sight bigger, we should be fine.  There's absolutely no chance of the thing actually hitting us since even if it comes closer it'll be on course for a gravitational slingshot away again.  For now its odd little orbit, swinging round the sun while under Earth's influence as well, is a useful astronomical study for scientists.

Cannabis law change 'illogical'

The reclassification of cannabis as a Class B drug has come into
effect in England amid complaints by magistrates the new laws are
"illogical".
The government said it went against its advisors to upgrade the drug
because of worries of its affect on mental health.
Magistrates welcomed the reclassification but said planned fines for
possessing small amounts undermined the more serious classification.
They said it sent the signal cannabis is not as bad as other Class B
drugs.

FLASHBACK - July 2007

Top ministers admit cannabis use

A string of Cabinet ministers have owned up to smoking cannabis after
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said she had used the drug at Oxford in
the 1980s.
Chancellor Alistair Darling and Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly are
among those to admit using the drug when they were younger.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown was among those to say they had never
used it.
The Home Office is to review the decision to downgrade cannabis to a
class C substance.

NZ man finds US military files on MP3 player

A New Zealand man has found confidential US military files on an MP3
player he bought in an Oklahoma thrift shop, it has been reported.

Chris Ogle, 29, paid $15 for the player and when he plugged it into
his computer he found 60 pages of military data, Television One News
said.

The files contained the names and personal details of US soldiers,
including some who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as
information about equipment deployed to bases and a mission briefing.

"The more I look at it, the more I see and the less I think I should
be [seeing]," Mr Ogle said.

Although most of the files are dated 2005, TV One said it rang some
of the phone numbers and they were answered by the corresponding
personnel.

Mr Ogle said the MP3 had never worked as a music player and he would
hand it over to the US Defence Department if asked.

The Resolution of the Reality Hologram

You might think your fifty inch 1080p screen has a pretty high
resolution, but reality is a quadrillion times better - a hundred
trillion dots per inch. A collaboration between Fermilab scientists
and a hundreds of meters of laser may have found the very pixels of
reality, grains of spacetime one tenth of a femtometer across.

The GEO600 system is armed with six hundred meters of laser tube,
which sounds like enough to equip an entire Star War, but these
lasers are for detection, not destruction. GEO600's length means it
can measure changes of one part in six hundred million, accurate
enough to detect even the tiniest ripples in space time - assuming
it isn't thrown off by somebody sneezing within a hundred meters or
the wrong types of cloud overhead (seriously). The problem with such
an incredibly sensitive device is just that - it's incredibly sensitive.

The interferometer staff constantly battle against unwanted
aberration, and were struggling against a particularly persistent
signal when Fermilab Professor Craig Hogan suggested the problem
wasn't with their equipment but with reality itself. The quantum
limit of reality, the Planck length, occurs at a far smaller length
scale than their signal - but according to Hogan, this literal
ultimate limit of tininess might be scaled up because we're all
holograms.

Obviously.

Australia's Foray into Internet Censorship

Australia's decision to implement Internet censorship using
technological means creates a natural experiment: the first Western
democracy to mandate filtering legislatively, and to retrofit it to a
decentralized network architecture. But are the proposed restrictions
legitimate?

The new restraints derive from the Labor Party's pro-filtering
electoral campaign, though coalition government gives minority
politicians considerable influence over policy. The country has a
well-defined statutory censorship system for on-line and off-line
material that may, however, be undercut by relying on foreign and
third-party lists of sites to be blocked.
While Australia is open about its filtering goals, the government's
transparency about what content is to be blocked is poor.
Initial tests show that how effective censorship is at filtering
prohibited content - and only that content - will vary based on what
method the country's ISPs use.

Though Australia's decision makers are formally accountable to
citizens, efforts to silence dissenters, outsourcing of blocking
decisions, and filtering's inevitable transfer of power to
technicians undercut accountability.

The paper argues Australia represents a shift by Western democracies
towards legitimating Internet filtering and away from robust
consideration of the alternatives available to combat undesirable
information.