Archive for April 21st, 2012
UFO Over France Analyzed and Enhanced Video | Gather
A UFO caught on tape over France, showing several white orbs flying like no known aircraft, has been enhanced and analyzed. What is it?
The video, shot out a window overlooking an unidentified French city, catches at least five, silvery disk-shaped saucers several miles away on the horizon.As the videographer realizes he’s not looking at airplanes, he zooms in on the objects just enough to see they are not birds and not any kind of aircraft usually flying over a busy metropolitan city.
The Associated Press: Calif. ‘rudest waiter’ eatery may stay open
A San Francisco Chinese restaurant once known for having “the world’s rudest waiter” may not be closing for good after all.
The owners of Sam Wo restaurant are scheduled to plead their case to the city’s Public Health Department at a hearing on Tuesday.
Owner David Ho’s daughter, Julie, told the San Francisco Chronicle (http://bit.ly/JcjydH) that the restaurant will be closed over the weekend, but nothing is definite beyond that.
“This restaurant is my life,” she told the newspaper.
Health officials had demanded changes after finding violations including rodent activity, but the restaurant’s owners had said the 100-year-old, hole-in-the-wall eatery in Chinatown was just too old. They had planned to serve their last meals early Saturday.
At Tuesday’s meeting, the owners must present their plans to bring the restaurant back up to code, Health Department spokeswoman Eileen Shields told the Chronicle. Those plans would then have to be approved and implemented before Sam Wo could reopen.
“It’s a lot of money and time,” Shields said. “But people are so very loyal to that restaurant, and San Francisco is a city where nothing goes down easy. I’m hoping for the best, and that the neighbors and supporters will rally.”
Word of the restaurant’s closing saddened its customers, who lined up down the block to get a seat at one of its eight lunch tables on Friday.
“I know change is good, but sometimes you want to hold onto the happy memories,” said customer Darlene Lee, 71, who has been coming to the restaurant for 60 years and said its inexpensive fare is comfort food that reminds her of going home.
For those who did not grow up dining at Sam Wo, it became a cultural mainstay in the 1970s through reports by the late San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen and the “Tales of the City” novels of Armistead Maupin.
Both men immortalized the restaurant by writing about the antics of Edsel Ford Fung. Dubbed “the world’s rudest waiter,” Fung was known for verbally abusing patrons and slamming dishes on tables.
via The Associated Press: Calif. ‘rudest waiter’ eatery may stay open.
Is Your Dating Site Selling Your Profile? To Keep Membership High, Niche Sites Get Sly | Betabeat — News, gossip and intel from Silicon Alley 2.0.
Angela is a 34-year-old single woman from Alabama. She’s a Leo. According to her online dating profile, she is 5’8” with blue eyes and dark brown hair. “I am a creative, witty, intelligent girl looking for someone to shower with all my love and affection!” she declares, appending a smiley face.
Angela was included in a 1,000-pack of allegedly single, supposedly American women, which Betabeat purchased for $35. Her profile is one of a purported 14.9 million for sale on SaleDatingProfiles.com, where the inventory also includes 10,000 U.K. profiles for $200; 15,000 Russians for $240, and 70,000 Australians for $95. A pack of 2,500 lesbian profiles goes for $120, or 4.8 cents apiece; gay men are .003 cents each and are sold in a pack of 410,000. “High quality Gays adult dating profiles for sale with multiplay photos located in USA, United Kingdom, Canada and other countries,” the offer states. At the time of writing, SaleDatingProfiles was having a 75-percent-off spring sale.
Angela, who asked that her last name be withheld, has been dating online for years. But she never imagined her profile was for sale on the open market, or that it now appears on MeetGirlsGuys.com, which she never signed up for. “I have never even heard of that site!” she said, adding that she lives in Texas, not Alabama, and the photo is at least seven years old.
Brewer’s Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In 1961, 87-year-old Harry Meadows, a resident at the Haslemere home for the elderly in Great Yarmouth, England, achieved late-in-life notoriety when he accidentally killed 3 other residents of his care home by dressing up as the grim reaper and peering through the residents’ lounge window whilst holding a scythe.
The year before Harry’s performance, another resident of the same home, the then 81-year-old Gladys Elton, for reasons best known to herself, had conceived the idea of performing a striptease for her fellow residents of the home; unfortunately such was the effect of Elton’s performance that it caused the death of one resident by way of a cardiac arrest and the treatment for shock of five other residents.
The home was forced to shut down as a result of these two incidents.
via Brewer’s Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Yeah, Marilyn Monroe & Norwegian We Get; But What’s With the Michael Jackson & Portuguese? | DayRiffer
This article at MIT’s Technology Review offers some interesting things – women are likelier than men to tweet, and likelier to participate in Facebook and other social media – but the story’s focus is the weird (still) dominance of males to females on Wikipedia (women make up a mere 13% of those who contribute to the online encyclopedia) and how the disparity might affect the content, and the lean of the content, that’s up there.
Quoting a study of Wikipedia by “Pablo Aragon and buddies at the Barcelona Media Foundation in Spain,” in which “[t]hey chose the best connected individuals by downloading all the biographies and then constructing a network in which individuals with Wikipedia biographies are nodes. They then drew links between nodes if that person’s Wikipedia biography contained a link to another individual,” the researchers concocted a list of the “best connected people.”
Megaupload Trial May Never Happen, Judge Says | TorrentFreak
A US judge has put a bomb under the Megaupload case by informing the FBI that a trial in the United States may never happen. The cyberlocker was never formally served with the appropriate paperwork by the US authorities, as it is impossible to serve a foreign company with criminal charges.
via Megaupload Trial May Never Happen, Judge Says | TorrentFreak.
What cannabis actually does to your brain
Archaeologists recently found a 2,700-year-old pot stash, so we know humans have been smoking weed for thousands of years. But it was only about 20 years ago that neuroscientists began to understand how it affects our brains.Scientists have known for a while that the active ingredient in cannabis was a chemical called delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC for short. Ingesting or smoking THC has a wide range of effects, from the psychoactive “getting high” to the physiological relief of pain and swelling. It also acts as both a stimulant and depressant. How could one substance do all that?
