Random Linkage

A handful of new studies suggest that marital infidelity is “on the rise, particularly among older men and young couples.” Women are catching up to men in the cheating department—and young people may have a relaxed idea of what’s “normal” thanks to the ready availability of pornography on the Internet.

Game Krunch is a new webgame portal with myriad broswer-played delights lurking within. I’ve particularly enjoyed Tactical Assassin Substratum, which is sort of a browser Hitman with stickmen. Your perspective is that of a sniper rifle scope, with everything around it black - so it’s a matter of locating your target more than it is of shooting him.

A massive haunted house in a real prison

“Hi, this is Jan from HR. This year, instead of issuing direct pay raises, you’ll be receiving a raise in company stock! We’re excited to bring you this new opportunity to be a bigger part of the DoomedCorp family!”

So what is this particular pamphlet all about and what is its purpose? Kamp’s unwieldy subtitle lays it all out for the curious reader: “A Report on the Extent and Nature of Infiltration by Communist, Socialist and Other Left Wing Elements, and the Resultant Red Complexion of Propaganda Disseminated In, By and Through the Young Women’s Christian Association.”

Forget everything you’ve heard about frankness, sharing your feelings, getting him to express his. New research into the male mind makes it clear that discussion may be the fastest way to shut down communication. (Oh, you noticed that, have you?)

The nearly 300 pages of transcripts from the Brothman/Moskowitz grand jury reveal important new details about the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley, the so-called “Red Spy Queen,” and Harry Gold, who led authorities to David Greenglass and the Rosenbergs. In addition, NARA released the testimonies of Vivian Glassman, Edith Levitov, and Frank Wilentz from the Rosenberg grand jury.

Imagine a horde of zombies swarming down the main street of your town. Where do you go? If the nearest military base comes to mind, you’re probably OK. If you’re having trouble deciding between J. Crew and Sbarro … well, the good news is, you’re going to find the rest of this article extremely informative.

They use special object-recognition software to lock onto particular features of a video recording (a person’s knees or elbow joints, for example) and follow them around. Correlating those movements with consequences, such as the throwing of a bomb, allows them to develop computer models that link posture and consequence reasonably reliably. The system can, for example, pick out a person in a crowd who is carrying a concealed package with the weight of a large explosives belt.

In June, James Porter Moreland, a professor at the Talbot School of Theology near Los Angeles and a Discovery Institute fellow, fanned the flames with Consciousness and the Existence of God. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about consciousness,” he writes, “and how it might contribute to evidence for the existence of God in light of metaphysical naturalism’s failure to provide a helpful explanation.” Non-materialist neuroscience provided him with this helpful explanation: since God “is” consciousness, “the theist has no need to explain how consciousness can come from materials bereft of it. Consciousness is there from the beginning.”

The full engraving on the bowl reads, “DIA CHRSTOU O GOISTAIS,” which has been interpreted by the excavation team to mean either, “by Christ the magician” or, “the magician by Christ.”

Rather than the typical “background” gamma radiation of about 0.21 Röntgens per year, the edge of the Techa River was emanating 5 Röntgens per hour. Such elevated levels were rather distressing since that the river was the primary source of water for the 1,200 residents there. Subsequent measurements found extensive contamination in 38 other villages along the Techa, seriously jeopardizing the health of about 28,000 people.

How does a rainbow form? Is levitation possible? Do time machines exist? What does ‘quantum’ mean? What is the maximum force value found in nature? Is ‘empty space’ really empty? Is the universe a set? Which problems in physics are still unsolved?

This site provides a free physics textbook that tells the story of how it became possible, after 2500 years of exploration, to answer such questions. The book is written for the curious: it is entertaining, surprising and challenging on every page. With little mathematics, starting from observations of everyday life, the text explores the most fascinating parts of mechanics, thermodynamics, special and general relativity, electrodynamics, quantum theory and modern attempts at unification. The essence of these fields is summarized in the most simple terms. For example, the text presents modern physics as consequence of the notions of minimum entropy, maximum speed, maximum force, minimum change of charge and minimum action.

Scientists say there are more than 1,000 tracks at the site, in Vermilion Cliffs National Monument. In some places, there are as many as a dozen footprints in a square yard.

“It was a place that attracted a crowd, kind of like a dance floor,” said geologist Marjorie Chan, an author of a study of the site.

In the game, players can customize their own characters, align with the Jedi Order or Sith Lords and participate in adventures with other players on virtual worlds, such as Korriban and Tython.

Researchers in Germany are describing a potential alternative to Botox and cosmetic surgery for easing facial wrinkles. Their study reports that high intensity visible light from light emitting diodes (LEDs) applied daily for several weeks resulted in “rejuvenated skin, reduced wrinkle levels, juvenile complexion and lasting resilience.”

‘Any television person who sees the numbers when she appears on anything would say Sarah Palin would be great,’ veteran morning-show producer Steve Friedman told The Hollywood Reporter.

‘The passion she has on each side, love and hate, makes television people say, “Wow, imagine the viewership”,’ he added.

Operator: 911, state your emergency.

Joe McCain: Well, it’s not an emergency, but do you know why on one side at the damn drawbridge of 95 traffic is stopped for 15 minutes and yet traffic’s coming the other way?

Operator: Sir, are you calling 911 to complain about traffic?

A New York lawyer has failed in his effort to deduct from his taxes the $322,000 he spent on prostitutes, pornography, and sex toys. William Halby, 77, told a state tax-court judge that he had used “sex therapy” to help battle depression, osteoarthritis, and erectile dysfunction, and the deductions were therefore legitimate medical expenses.

Holly then proceeded to brag about what he’d done, even going so far as to give interviews to bloggers. He claimed that he moved around so much that authorities would never find him.

But they did. He had been posting messages boasting about his “skills” a few hours before authorities raided his home last night in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. After searching the premises, they took three computers and a telephone. He has yet to be arrested and charged.

Opening his mouth again, Holly said today, “I was just kind of shaking. I was thrown way off guard. I’ve never had anything like this happen before to a point that I just didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to kick them out of my house.” The oblivious hacker continued, “I guess somebody ended up ratting me out.”

A 43-year-old player in a virtual game world became so angry about her sudden divorce from her online husband that she logged on with his password and killed his digital persona, police said Thursday.

Lindsay Lohan’s career in jeopardy?

The 51-member council voted 29-22 to approve the measure. About two-thirds of the council would have been forced out of office under the two-term limit, but they can now run for a third term in the November 2009 election.

The hot new way to search for online games

In this month’s overview we will explain the effect of the Xbox 360 price cuts, and how the PlayStation 3 and Wii are positioned as the holiday sales season begins. We’ll also pore over the top 20 software list, and then provide updated tie ratios for the current generation systems.

“The most mindless, ignorant, uninformed comment” Sara Palin has made during this campaign, “and there’s been a great deal of competition” for that distinction.

This was Richard Wolffe of Newsweek commenting, on MSNBC, on Sara Palin criticising earmarks to fund fruit-fly research. That research is crucial, MSNBC said, to discovering treatment for autism. Palin made the fruit-fly comment during a major policy speech Friday that included promises to fund more help for kids with special needs.

The extremist McCain has befriended is G. Gordon Liddy, who got a 20-year prison sentence for multiple felonies in the Watergate scandal—including burglary, conspiracy and illegal wiretapping. Finally forced to acknowledge the connection in an interview last week by David Letterman, McCain ducked and dodged before replying, “He went to prison, he paid his debt, as people do. I’m not in any way embarrassed to know Gordon Liddy.”

But this unsolicited good fortune — $1.3 million since Friday — isn’t based on anything the former mayor and grandfather of seven did. It’s all because of something his rival, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., said.

On Friday, Bachmann appeared on MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews” and made what has been dubbed the million-dollar mistake: Bachmann alleged that presidential candidate Barack Obama might hold “anti-American” views and proposed a media investigation into “the views of the people in Congress and find out: are they pro-America or anti-America?”

Poll numbers say more about the pollsters’ leanings than about the facts, said Thomas Sowell in The Washington Times. “The general media bias is more blatant than usual this year,” and the pollsters seem to be trying to create the impression that the Republicans have already lost. But it will take more than “media spin” to put Obama in the White House, so the results on election day could be a big surprise.

“We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard-working, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation,” she told the crowd.

Back in 2007, eBay banned international sales of ivory goods on its site, but according to a report by the IFAW, this ban was largely ineffectual and much of the transnational ivory trade that the group monitored was conducted through eBay. Addressing these criticisms, the online auction house has now announced that, as of January 1, 2009, all ivory sales will be prohibited on the site.

Less than a year after announcing Android, the open-source phone operating system intended to jump-start the mobile Internet, Google began sharing the project’s underlying source code.

A man who was being arrested for using a student MetroCard on Tuesday evening struggled with two plainclothes police officers in a Queens subway station and then shot them with the gun of one of the officers, the police said.

While the average total audience of her program remains slightly smaller than that of Mr. King’s, Ms. Maddow, 35, has made MSNBC competitive in that time slot for the first time in a decade. The channel at that hour has an average viewership of 1.7 million since she started on Sept. 8, compared with 800,000 before.

Plenty of amusement park memberships pay for themselves in as little as two visits, says Robert Niles, editor of amusement park review site ThemeParkInsider.com. “It’s not just admission,” he says. “There are discounts on food, merchandise and parking, plus access to special events.”

A Pennsylvania mother has won the right to carry a gun to her 5-year-old daughter’s soccer games. Melanie Hain’s concealed-weapon permit had been revoked after other parents complained. But this week Judge Robert Eby ruled that Hain’s Second Amendment rights had been breached and returned the permit.

Yahoo on Tuesday reported a 64% decline in profits and said it planned to lay off at least 10% of its staff — about 1,500 employees — in the coming months.

The company’s third-quarter revenue came to $1.8 billion, a 1% increase from the same period in 2007. Its net income in the third quarter was $54 million, down from $151 million during the same period last year.

Moreover, while the chart below was not produced by Douglass and Christy, it was produced using their data and it clearly shows that in the past four years — the period corresponding to reduced solar activity — all of the rise in global temperatures since 1979 has disappeared.

Jerry Jackson was a Vietnam vet and postal worker who worked part-time at a bar. He was last seen at work at the bar on Dec. 28, 1971. When he didn’t show up for his postal job, co-workers called police, who found his body in his apartment on Jan. 2, 1972. He had been stabbed 50 times and his apartment had been ransacked. His car was also stolen.

“Joe sometimes engages in rhetorical flourishes, but I think that his core point is that the next administration’s going to be tested regardless of who it is,” Mr. Obama said, thanks to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, “an economy in free-fall,” and a host of “bad policies” by the current president.

But the Ohio man says he’s “getting ready to buy a company that makes $250,000 to $280,000 a year” – a plumbing company, actually. And if his company does bring in that money, he’s worried that he would be taxed more under Senator Obama’s plan.

ISRO said on its Web site that the mission would lay the groundwork for future lunar missions and “probe the physical characteristics of the lunar surface in greater depth than previous missions by other nations.”

#6: Doom 3 (2004). Fatal1ty won $25,000 and didn’t even know initially that he was playing for money.

Voicing a complaint common to those who prosecute famous defendants in matters big and small, Deputy City Atty. Michael Amerian said, “It just goes to show, I think, how difficult it is to convict any celebrity of a crime here in Los Angeles.”The grudging dismissal was a fitting conclusion to a 13-month legal battle that featured lofty principles, rock-bottom stakes and the complete absence of the woman at its center.

The longtime Fed chief acknowledged under questioning that he had made a “mistake” in believing that banks in operating in their self-interest would be sufficient to protect their shareholders and the equity in their institutions. Greenspan called it “a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works.”