According to Wikipedia, some of the objects dropped on New Year's Eve:

• A pine cone
• An orange
• a conch shell, a pirate wench and a red high-heel shoe
• a beach ball
• a wooden duck
• a mossbunker fish
• a live opossum
• a pickle
• a cow
• a carp
• a Lebanon bologna

Um.

Happy double-oh-seven!

Poll #894532
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 1

Tree or Chree?

We've all heard about Seasonelle, the birth control pill that causes women to have only four periods per year. An even newer pill (which should come to the market soon), called Anya, will take periods away entirely. Both of these pills are taken daily and normal period cycles resume once they're no longer used.

This brings up a whole buncha questions. If it didn't, I'd be on Seasonelle already. I've been able to find some pretty decent information, which I'm laying out here systematically, for the sake of simplicity and sanity :)

( Read more... )

A journalist writes about a never-carried-out school shooting and what happens to letters addressed to "Santa, North Pole."

(The Guardian)

Those of you familiar with my Google obsession will not be surprised to know that I use their personalized homepage for nearly everything I do online. My homepage displays the weather, the next five events on my Google Calendar (including events from the public Columbia academic calendar), and feeds from my favorite news sites that give me pop-up summaries when clicked on.

My favorite news widget is a Google-made widget that taps into my (quite cool) Google Reader account. In one small scrollable area I get all the recent headlines from every site I like with an rss feed; with a click I can choose to see articles from only a single site (like LiveJournal) or from a preferred group of sites. Check the "read" box the corresponding article disappears.

LiveJournal didn't used to give rss feeds; I discovered today that they've changed. Awesome. So now I can get up to date on my friends' (public) entries without having to go allllllllll the way over to liveJournal itself. On top of which: The Google Reader site now has a notifier for OS X. That means my toolbar on the top of my desktop now has three tiny pictures on it; one tells me if I have new mail, one gives me a drop-down view of my calendar, and the last one tells me if any of my friends pages have been updated.

How do I love thee, O Google? To count the ways would be like counting stars. ;)

Millions of dominoes!

REWARD!!!! REWARD REWARD REWARD!!!!

I thought that would catch your attention :)

I'm offering a reward to any person (or if more one person, the first person) who successfully answers the following challenge. You can choose any of the following:

• A credit of ten gourmet hot chocolates at MAX cafe (with your name)
• A huge homemade hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps and foamed milk
• $30
• A kiss

The challenge is this. I got a Spanish-language message left on my answering machine back home in California; it appears to be from my host brother Alexander from Paraguay. My parents recorded it into their computer for me (did you know you could do that with Word?) and sent it to me via email. In the message he gives his email address. I can't for the life of me figure out what it is. I've tried sending notes to quite a few possibilities, but annoying email robots have returned them all to me. So I have posted the message here:

(the link)

For the reward you need to figure out a FUNCTIONAL EMAIL ADDRESS that SUCCESSFULLY CONTACTS my host brother in Paraguay, Alexander (nicknamed Gigo) Diaz.

( more details )

Oh! Or if you are a Berkeley person you can substitute a cafe of your choice (I recommend the Chocolate Cafe just over the border into Oakland :), or if you're from elsewhere, and all are welcome, make substitutions accordingly...

Google is testing a new search engine (shhhh, you're not supposed to know it's them!)

What's the best way to distinguish between people who are sexist, and people who are simply not-feminist?

The question came up in reference to this BBC article.

(a short exerpt:)

I met Metin in a funeral parlour in Diyarbakir.

He looked like he wanted to shrivel up and disappear. His head sagged sheepishly low and he had somehow twisted his upper body, like he was trying to take up as little space as possible.

Metin was in his twenties - and in serious trouble.

He had violated the strict code of honour that rules much of south-eastern Turkey, and he knew he was lucky to be alive.

Eighteen months ago, Metin married.

He had kidnapped the girl he loved because he could not afford a dowry. The couple have since had a baby but the bride's brothers are after them. They believe killing the couple will cleanse the family honour.

As he told me his sorry tale, Metin's eyes brimmed with tears of desperation. At one point he rounded on his elderly father, half deaf and stooped over a walking stick.

"I had to steal her," Metin wailed in accusation. "You never gave me any money for a dowry - you never even sent me to school!"

His poor father looked like he had been punched in the stomach - and I gulped back a lump in my own throat.

"I have not got any money," he protested, "or I'd have given it to you."

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese sociologists said that the country should promote bolder attitudes toward sex, but that wife-swapping was off the agenda, state media reported Monday.

..."Wife-swapping should not be promoted to the public as it will lead to the spread of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases," the China Daily quoted Zhang Feng, a family planning official, as saying at the fourth Guangzhou Sex Culture Expo at the weekend.

Seems rational.

From Slashdot:

eldavojohn writes "The CEO of a small search company wrote an interesting piece for Search Insider about Google's unique strategy. It notes that Google has yet to become a leader in any technology other than search — but that its mostly unsuccessful attempts to branch out all end up bolstering its brand, and thus its search ad revenue. Is the new recipe for success to do one thing unbelievably well and several other things indifferently? Does this remind you of strategies from any other companies?"

From the article, "Some of Google's non-search projects are really extensions of its search monetization, and are likely to succeed. But others projects mean entering areas where Google doesn't have much experience, and is taking a risk. With regard to those riskier areas, the key question for Google's future is whether it can realize that losing is really one of the best assets the company has."

Stolen from coslinks

Jackson Pollock (make sure to click.)

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - "Police Friday raided the office and home of a Republican congressional candidate after an uproar over a letter sent to Latinos saying it was illegal for immigrants to vote."

(here's a different article)

Nguyen, the candidate whose "aide" sent out 14,000 Spanish-language letters that said immigrants can be put in jail if they try to vote, is running in Orange County against five-term congresswoman Loretta Sanchez.

Orange County (as a side note) is the home of the Minutemen, the group in the recent Columbia drama.

My TA for economics thinks grade inflation is responsible for making students learn a lot less than they would otherwise. That's not an uncommon thing, but his reasoning was unusual: he says students who want to distinguish themselves have no way to do it but to take a large number of classes. This means to "achieve highly" Columbia students can only take a lot of courses, and to squeeze it all in they need to do the work half-heartedly. He said at Madison (where he went to college) there was a lot less grade inflation, and students were also less stressed and took fewer classes.

Anyways, it's a perspective I hadn't heard before. It's a thought.

One might presume that a man with a name like President Bollinger would be rather intriguing and mysterious. Could you imagine any half-decent novel that would have it otherwise?

In reality I suspect he's a quite average and bumbling man which is why his efforts to live up to his name fall so sadly short.

Take the following email: ( don't bother to read this )

For those who make the very prudent decision not to read the letter I included above, I'll summarize it here:

1) President Bollinger is very mysterious
2) President Bollinger knows more than you do
3) President Bollinger is a soldier in the everlasting war for free speech
4) Important things are afoot, but it's okay because it's being taken care of

I used to assume he spoke in vague language in order to be respectful of politically touchy issues. But as the years pass I begin to realize he just speaks in vague language. It's just what he does. You have no idea how many emails of similar format he's sent out en masse to the Columbia flock.