Eideard

One summer night in 2007, a pair of 13-year-old northeastern Pennsylvania girls decided to strip down to their skivvies to beat the heat.

As Marissa Miller talked on the phone and Grace Kelly flashed a peace sign, a third girl took a candid shot of the teens in their white bras.
It was harmless, innocent fun, the teens say.

But the picture somehow wound up on classmates’ cell phones, and a prosecutor has threatened to charge Miller and Kelly with child pornography or open lewdness unless they participate in a five-week after-school program followed by probation.

On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union asked a federal judge to block Wyoming County District Attorney George Skumanick Jr. from filing charges, saying that the teens didn’t consent to having the picture distributed and that the image is not pornography, in any event.

Skumanick said he would fight the lawsuit. “Frankly, we just wanted to protect these kids…

The ACLU’s lawsuit claims…the photos are protected First Amendment speech.

Basic premise #1: people who think images distributed electronically are like carrying a single copy to show a friend and, then, bringing it back home safely are too ignorant for polite description.

Basic premise #2: 19th Century moralists in cop suits are about as useful to the process of moderating communications between human brings as a cast-iron gag. The all-seeing eye of someone who’s growing old awaiting his turn to run for governor.

UPDATE: The ACLU and the girls won their case and the judge has ordered charges dropped. Bravo for common sense.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures

It’s quite easy, wandering round the small town of Billund, to start believing in the existence of a Lego god. You can’t help but feel a master intelligence is at work here – the place is so manifestly wholesome, the street plan so well ordered, the pavements so tidy. Unostentatious automobiles proceed slowly along all-but-empty roads, stopping politely for pedestrians nowhere near a zebra crossing. A jovial red-and-yellow Lego giant points towards the town centre; huge coloured bricks lie scattered as if awaiting deployment in some exemplary new civic amenity (except that, being Denmark, it’s not immediately apparent what else the town might need).

I half-expect to be plucked from the pavement, brushed up a bit and plumped down in front of the smart rectangular building labelled Head Office: Lego A/S. My goal here is to find out how, in the teeth of global recession and barely five years since it was being read the last rites, one of the world’s best-loved brands has come back from the dead. For Lego, born of an earlier and tougher depression, is positively revelling in this one: the little studded, primary-coloured bricks are selling like never before. In Britain alone, the company’s turnover last year was up 51%.

Its home town, though, is a bit too much for some people. “I couldn’t ever live here,” admits Mads Nipper, who looks and – when it comes to plastic bricks – acts about 12, but turns out to be one of the company’s executive vice-presidents. “I’m nuts about Lego, believe me; I eat, sleep and breathe the stuff. But there’s a bit too much of it around here even for me.”

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The golf course is in Bangalore
Daylife/Getty Images

For decades, the United States beckoned as the land of opportunity for bright, young Indians, lured by the prospect of prestigious university degrees followed by jobs on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.

Indians have since 2001 been the largest foreign student population on American campuses, comprising around 15 percent of all international students at colleges and universities in the United States, according to the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi.

But now, the economic crisis that has sent the U.S. economy into its worst recession in decades, has tarnished the sheen of the ‘American Dream’ for many Indians who are opting for university studies and career opportunities at home.

America’s loss may be India’s gain, analysts say, pointing to a ‘reverse brain drain’ that may see India reaping benefits for years to come as some of its smartest and most talented people put their energies into India’ economy, Asia’s third-largest.

“The brain drain has already begun to reverse. Now there are many magnets pulling the best talent. Before, the U.S. was where everyone wanted to go,” said Vivek Wadhwa, a U.S.-based Indian academic who has written a paper on the issue. India’s economy has boomed at around 9 percent growth in each of the last three years, lifting millions out of poverty and creating a generation of affluent and ambitious young Indians…

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He’s a TV salesman offering an unbelievable deal — and police say you don’t want to do business with him.

Dubbing himself “Plasma Pat, the TV Discount Guy,” he allegedly took cash from Wal-Mart shoppers, promising to use his employee discount to get them a good deal on a TV set, police said…

Police in Largo, Florida, a city near Tampa on the state’s gulf coast, circulated security pictures of “Plasma Pat,” and now can put a name to the alliterative nickname. Investigators say their suspect is 60-year-old Joseph Wesley Torma, and they’ve just released a mug shot from a recent arrest in Polk County, Florida…

He allegedly befriended people outside Wal-Mart stores, telling his victims that he worked at the store, and that he could use his employee discount to get them a good deal on a major purchase.

Then, police said, he took their cash, walked into the store through one door — and out another, leaving his victims in the parking lot.

Police say they believe that Torma has left the area, and may be headed to Texas, but they have not explained why.

I guess the reporter means the police haven’t explained how they know he’s gone to Texas. I can guess why. Har!

Information Age Prayer is a site that charges you a monthly fee to say prayers for you. A typical charge is $4.95 per month to say three prayers specified by you each day.

“We use state of the art text to speech synthesizers to voice each prayer at a volume and speed equivalent to typical person praying,” the company states. “Each prayer is voiced individually, with the name of the subscriber displayed on screen.”

Prices, however, are dictated by the length of the prayer. As noted in the Information Age Prayer FAQ, “A discounted prayer will cost less than other prayers of similar length.”

I agree with Bill Christensen the writer of this piece – “Bow your head and click, that you might see the story more clearly.”

Students from Khartoum lined up to begin the hunt

For the first time, scientists were able to track an asteroid from space to the ground and recover pieces of it. The bits are unlike anything ever found on Earth.

The asteroid was spotted entering Earth’s atmosphere over Sudan in October and was believed to have fully disintegrated, but an international team found almost 280 pieces of meteorite in a 11-square-mile section of Sudan’s Nubian Desert. The largest was the size of an egg. Lab analysis showed that the rocks belong to a rare class of asteroid that has never been sampled in such a pristine state, so it could fill some gaps in our understanding of the solar system’s early history…

Finding the meteorites was a long shot, but because the rocks would be so important, meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of SETI, lead author of the study, took a bus loaded with 45 students and staff from the University of Khartoum deep into the desert to hunt for them. A 10-hour bus ride and an 18-mile trek through the sand took them to the remote area where scientists thought the rocks, if they existed,
would be. The group began sweeping the desert in a line and two hours later the first meteorite was found by a student.

“It was very, very exciting. Everybody was celebrating,” Jenniskens said. “You have to remember how important it is to find a piece linked to an asteroid we have seen in space.”

These fragments are pristine, virtually as they were through an eternity in space. Little time for any contamination by Earth minerals or oxidizers. Read the whole article.

What a fantastic experience, especially for those students.

Click on the photo for the road test video
Daylife/Reuters Pictures

Taking the world’s cheapest car out for its first public test drive by a journalist makes for a surprisingly smooth ride. Thrifty transport is not meant to be this comfortable. Tata’s Nano purrs from zero to 40mph in eight seconds and its gearbox changes with ease. The brakes are solid, bringing the car to halt smartly.

True, its 623cc engine whines a little like a blender when pushed to its top speed of 65mph and the body leans like the Tower of Pisa when cornering at speed. But the wheels will give out before you can tip the car over, the Guardian was assured by Tata engineers.

Built for functional frugality, the Nano is a striking if not a beautiful car. Flashing through the dusty streets outside the Tata plant in Pune, southern India, the Nano’s distinctive look turns heads. Many people, especially those who are riding motorbikes, break into smiles and thrust thumbs into the air when its jellybean shape appears.

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Daylife/AP Photo

Japan has certified a man aged 93 as the only known survivor of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both hit by atomic bombs towards the end of World War II.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip on 6 August 1945 when a US plane dropped the first atomic bomb. He suffered serious burns and spent a night there before returning to his home city of Nagasaki just before it was bombed on 9 August…

It was already recorded that Mr Yamaguchi had survived the Nagasaki bomb but officials just recognised that he had been in Hiroshima as well.

More than 200,000 people were killed in the two atomic bombings.

Certification as a hibakusha or radiation survivor qualifies Japanese citizens for government compensation, including medical check-ups, and funeral costs. His double dose of atomic bombs, however, does not mean Mr Yamaguchi’s compensation will increase, a Nagasaki city official said.

“My double radiation exposure is now an official government record,” Mr Yamaguchi told reporters. “It can tell the younger generation the horrifying history of the atomic bombings even after I die.”

If you have a chance, read John Hersey’s book, “Hiroshima“. Based on the experiences of survivors, it was an award-winner immediately after the war even though our political hacks tried like hell to suppress it.

After a long and twisted path through Congress, the House finally has passed and sent to President Obama a massive package of 170 public lands bills…that would create 2 million acres of wilderness nationwide.

The package had been blocked in the Senate for months by a filibuster before it finally passed there; it was defeated previously in the House by two votes under a procedure that required a two-thirds majority; the Senate passed it a second time under a new title; and that allowed House to pass it Wednesday with a simple majority on a 285-140 vote.

But Republicans, led in part by Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, howled about the process Wednesday that brought up the massive bill without allowing any possible amendments.

Even though two Bishop bills were in the package, he and others complained it contained many wasteful bills or locked up too much public land to such things as oil exploration — and contended it won approval only by forcing members to vote for a bad overall package if they wanted their home-state bills that it contained…

Don’t you wonder how long this nation which prides itself on democracy will continue with archaic and limiting legislative procedures which are always dragged out by reactionaries to try to prevent something which supports the common good, which might retain some of our nation’s beauty for future generations?

I have conservative kin who still pride themselves in being conservationists. Too bad they’re not wanted in the Republican Party any longer.

Imagine a platoon of soldiers fighting in a hazardous urban environment who carry personal digital assistants that can display the location of enemy shooters in three dimensions and accurately identify the caliber and type of weapons they are firing.

Engineers at Vanderbilt University’s Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) have developed a system that can give soldiers just such an edge by turning their combat helmets into “smart nodes” in a wireless sensor network…

Like several other shooter location systems developed in recent years, the ISIS system relies on the sound waves produced when a high-powered rifle is fired. These acoustic signals have distinctive characteristics that allow the systems to pick them out from other loud noises and track them back to their source. Current systems, however, rely on centralized or stand-alone sensor arrays. This limits their accuracy and restricts them to identifying shooters at line-of-sight locations…

Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Albert Sciarretta, who assesses new military technologies in urban environments for DARPA, is one of the experts who is impressed by the ISIS system: “It’s strong points are that it isn’t limited to locating shots fired in direct line-of-sight, it can pick up multiple shooters at the same time, and it can identify the caliber and type of weapon that is being fired…”

Current commercial shooter location systems are extremely expensive, with prices ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 per unit. By contrast, an entire node for the ISIS system weighs only slightly more than the four AA batteries that power it and costs about $1,000 to construct using currently available commercial hardware.

Sounds good to me. DARPA continues to support really interesting research, don’t they?