tales of an ordinary girl

Comedy




Games
Marc Ecko to bring serial killer Dexter to gamers
Dexter Morgan, the popular forensic expert/homicidal vigilante created by Jeff Lindsay, has been thrilling literary and television audiences for a while with his dark adventures. Now, it appears that Morgan will be entertaining game audiences in the near future. Marc Ecko Entertainment has released a statement announcing its intent to develop a game based on the Showtime series Dexter.

Government
Shaming the Poor
3. Shaming people for their poverty generally assumes that the only reason for poverty is that people are poor for reasons they can be shamed out of — i.e., poor people are poor because they are lazy and shiftless no good spongers who prefer to be poor, because really, it’s just less work. This is a nice little fantasy, which like most fantasies sort of falls apart when it meets up with the real world. People are poor and sometimes become poor for lots of reasons. The number of poor who are poor because they like it is, as anyone who thinks about it for more than half a minute may imagine, rather small. Most people would prefer not to be poor, as it happens, and would be willing to work to escape it.

Atheist soldier says Army punished him
According to the lawsuit, Hall was counseled by his platoon sergeant after being informed that his promotion was blocked. He says the sergeant explained that Hall would be "unable to put aside his personal convictions and pray with his troops" and would have trouble bonding with them if promoted to a leadership position.

Hall responded that religion is not a requirement of leadership, even though the sergeant wondered how he had rights if atheism wasn't a religion. Hall said atheism is protected under the Army's chaplain's manual.

3 CEOs made $460 million - House panel
The memo states that the three companies combined lost more than $20 billion in the last two quarters of 2007, as investments related to subprime mortgages fell apart. Meanwhile, the stock of Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Countrywide declined drastically.

International
Job discrimination is rife all over the world
Kelly Services, Inc. surveyed 70,000 job seekers in 28 countries (2006), and as they say discrimination includes “discrimination on the grounds of
colour, sex, religion, race, political opinion, age, medical record, sexual preference, trade union activity, marital status, nationality, disability (physical, intellectual or psychiatric), or impairment (including HIV/AIDS status).” One needs to keep in mind just a few thousand people were talked to in each country, and that these are people’s perceptions only…there will always a certain percentage of people who are disgruntled for no good reason.

Bulldozers tear down giant religious teapot
About 40 workers with bulldozers and lorries destroyed the "subversive" teapot and other symbols of the pan-religious Sky Kingdom, in Terengannu state. An assembly hall, a concrete boat and a temple-like structure that was under construction were also demolished. About 30 members of the commune watched but did not intervene.

Colour or class?
The term “working class” itself is highly contested. Some “middle class” people describe themselves as “working class” so that they are not seen as pretentious; others suggest that every one in Britain is now “working class”, some with more money, others with less of it. To understand the historic import, social and moral meaning, and inverse snobbery imbued in a British person describing him/ her self as “working class”, do take a look at this link. Britain, of course, with the US, boasts the lowest inter-generational social mobility compared to Canada and the Nordic countries, as shown in a survey conducted by the London School of Economics and the whole report can be found here. So who is “working class” exactly? Well, I am not sure.

Medicine
Airborne Agrees to Pay $23.3 Million to Settle Lawsuit Over False Advertising of its "Miracle Cold Buster"
Concocted by second-grade teacher Victoria Knight McDowell and her screenwriter husband Thomas Rider McDowell, Airborne promised to “boost your immune system to help your body combat germs” and instructed users to “take it at the first sign of a cold symptom or before entering crowded, potentially germ-infested environments.” The company’s folksy “created by a school teacher!” slogan and insistence that the product be stocked with real cold, cough, and flu medicines instead of with dietary supplements, helped turn the company into an overnight success, as did an appearance by Victoria Knight McDowell on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

Politics




Why Isn't Iraq in the 2008 Election?
There's an earlier history, an interesting one. You recall a couple of weeks ago, there was a mysterious Israeli bombing in northern Syria, never explained, but it a sort of hinted that this had something to do with Syria building nuclear facilities with the help of North Korea. Pretty unlikely, but whether it's true or not, there's an interesting background, which wasn't mentioned. In 1993, Israel and North Korea were on the verge of an agreement, in which Israel would recognize North Korea and in return North Korea would agree to terminate any weapons-related -- missile, nuclear, other -- any weapons-related activity in the Middle East. That would have been an enormous boon to Israel's security. But the owner of the world stepped in. Clinton ordered them to refuse. Of course, you have to listen to the master's voice. So that ended that. And it may be that there are North Korean activities in the Middle East that we don't know about.

No Need for Lawmakers' Approval of Iraq Pact, U.S. Reasserts
Rep. Gary L. Ackerman (D-N.Y.), whose questions at a House hearing Tuesday elicited the administration statement, described it as an "open-ended, never-ending authority for the administration to be at war in Iraq forever with no limitations." The conditions of 2002 no longer exist, he said.





Religion
What I hate most about Christianity
Just because you don’t got to the church on the corner with the big steeple and instead you go to little church meetings in a store front or in someone’s basement, doesn’t make you less religious. Just because you don’t say the rosary or sing hymns to organ music on Sunday mornings but instead you read the Bible every morning and you go to Bible study and sing workshop songs accompanied by acoustic guitar on Thursday nights doesn’t mean you have no rituals.

Science
Orderly Universe: Evidence of God?
In any case, order for free and apparent complexity greater than we might naively expect are no basis for believing in God as traditionally defined. Of course, we can always redefine God to be an inevitable island of order or some sort of emergent mathematical entity. If we do that, the above considerations can be taken as indicating that such a pattern will necessarily exist, but that's hardly what people mean by God.

Intelligent Design Sort
This algorithm is constant in time, and sorts the list in-place, requiring no additional memory at all. In fact, it doesn't even require any of that suspicious technological computer stuff. Praise the Sorter!

Sand Dunes Thawing on Mars


Earth's rotation may account for wayward spacecraft
The flyby anomaly received more attention in 2006, when former NASA scientist John Anderson, now retired, and his colleagues, posted a research paper online describing the anomaly and raising the possibility of a link with a similar puzzle called the Pioneer anomaly. The Pioneer anomaly refers to the observation that NASA's Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft are both slowing down more than expected as they fly away from the Sun in opposite directions.

February 20, 2008 Total Lunar Eclipse


Skeptics


Tech


Travel
Where to Go and What to Do in Chile: Climb a Volcano in Pucon
Which brings me to the best part…hot lava! The first time I went you could see the lava shooting out of the crater. Yes, Volcan Villarica is active. But, ask before you go up if there are little explosions that day (not that will burn you or anything like that, just explosions so you can see the lava). The second time I climbed with my family, all we got was a great view from the top. No lava. Everyone was pretty disappointed.