Surfing The Web So You Don't Have To
This is something I’ll have to send to some people I know, as I know they believe in many of these. Hell, even I’m a sucker, and have fallen for Arm & Hammer’s clever “It makes the fridge fresher” marketing ploys.
While we’re thinking about kitchen stuff, here’s a list of the various shelf lives of household products (food, toiletries, etc…).
It could help find your murderer if you’re ever killed (here’s the entry it refers to). Yes, I know this is so last month, but I’m a bit behind on my RSS feeds, OK? Link via Waxy.
Great — another excuse for women to fake it.
“At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings,? says Gert Holstege of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands….
As the women were stimulated, activity rose in one sensory part of the brain, called the primary somatosensory cortex, but fell in the amygdala and hippocampus, areas involved in alertness and anxiety. During orgasm, activity fell in many more areas of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex, compared with the resting state…
In one sense the findings appear to confirm what is already known, that women cannot enjoy sex unless they are relaxed and free from worries and distractions. “Fear and anxiety levels have to go down for orgasm. Everyone knows this but we can see it happening in the brain,” (Holstege) explains.
From an evolutionary point of view, it could be that the brain switches off the emotions during sex because at such times the chance to produce offspring becomes more important than the survival risk to the individual. Holstege points to the extraordinary behaviour seen in some animals during the breeding season, such as March hares, when the urge to mate seems to override the usual fear of predators.
Obviously, Yahoo! makes a ton of money on online ad sales, but some folks are saying that those advertisers are funding under-age sex-chat rooms. They’ve since pulled their user-created chat rooms from their site, saying (officially) that they “are working on improvements to this service to enhance the user experience and compliance with our Terms of Service.” In other words, they’ve worried they’re going to get their butt sued.
From the story, many advertisers have already dropped their ads on Yahoo, which is going to put an ugly dent on Yahoo’s bottom line.
From what “L” (who’s a volunteer in the Yahoo! chat help room and the person who sent me this link) told me, all the folks who hung out in the chat rooms are now bombarding (tens of thousands of users) the Yahoo!’s chat help room, asking where the hell they went. I’m sure there are legitimate folks using the chat rooms, but its interesting, nonetheless.
Update on 6/23: More video/news here. According to people that are still using the rooms, you can still get into the user-created rooms by issusing the “/join (insert user room name here)” command in the chat room. So the pervs are still there, but they’re just a bit harder to find.
Follow the tips in the EFF’s Legal Guide to keep yourself out of trouble. For those bloggers on the go, there are some portable-reader friendly versions here.
…let’s figure out the other major mystery of the 70s: Who is Carly Simon singing about?
That was, until SlashDot picked it up. So what is the project? “It’s a lab of humans from all over the world (from China to The Netherlands, from Korea to Brasil) They are paid to check search results of Google every day. Most of the employees, called international agents by Google, were recruited through universities all over the world. The aim is to avoid spam, to get the right sites at the top of the listing and to test new features, not shown to the public yet.” You can find more details about the site (with screen shots) here. More info will be on the Search Bistro site today (Update: Here’s the followup).
We’ve all read the countless articles following the identification of Deep Throat, and there has been a lot of great articles about Deep Throat and how the story came to be (a good piece written by Bob Woodward ran in today’s Bulletin and is also online here). One story that I found entertaining was this great little story about how it was an illuminating experience being kept in the dark.
The Grumpy Forester has a great entry pretty much summing up my feelings about the Nixon-supporting whack-jobs that are coming out of the woodwork saying Mark Felt was a criminal, anti-American, and should’ve gone before a grand jury. If he felt comfortable reporting this to authorities (instead of to a reporter) don’t you think he would’ve? This was obviously a corrupt government, and if this was “handled internally”, the problem would’ve never been fixed — it would’ve just been covered up, and Felt would’ve been demoted to a desk job. I applaud Felt for having the balls to put himself on the line to fix what was obviously something very wrong.
Some of these are disturbing (and obviously false), but they’ll keep you busy for quite a while (and I could’ve swore I linked to this site before, but I couldn’t find it).