Under a Gibbous Moon

In Turkey, an archeological team found an ancient temple. How old? It is estimated to be seven thousand years older than Stonehenge. That puts it somewhere around 9500 B.C.

That’s pretty much before the start of human civilization. Let’s see an inexplicably old temple in the middle of nowhere. It sounds kinda familiar.

I wonder if the Predators are here yet?

Now all we need is a ill billionaire to lead an expedition inside. I wonder is Steve Jobs is available.

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Disgusting but true. Bed bugs have a pheromone that lets males know that they have, uh, “mounted” the wrong gender. Bed bugs, it seems reproduce via traumatic copulation, wherein the male uses his needle like penis to punch a whole into the females chest and then ejaculates into them. Suddenly, Alien seems less creepy.

Researchers were able to block the glad that produced this (why?) and found that males would then mount other males and proceed to stab them to death with there penises.

I can just see the lab now:

“Doctor, when we blocked up those glands, the males started to impale each other with their penises.”

“Hmmm, interesting, let’s run more tests, just to be sure.”

And people get up in arms when they test shampoo on dogs.

Finally, in the comments on the first article, this related comic was linked to. Try to not be drinking anything when you read it.

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A recent Slate article, nicely titled Buy local, act evil, talks about a recent Psychology Science paper that concluded that people who made eco-friendly purchases were less altruistic and more likely to cheat and steal.

It then goes into a bunch of complicated and competing theories that essentially amount to people being good so they can be bad. I find that to be general bullshit. Oddly enough, the author basically hits it on the head in the last paragraph:

A decade or two ago, buying green products and other environmentalist measures might have just seemed idiosyncratic. Now such conduct is widely lauded…

Exactly, it has become the “thing” to do. Even more so, it has become a form of conspicuous consumption. When you start buy a dozen organic, free range brown eggs for $5 you’ve graduated to showing off. Which is not to say that everyone who spends money on such products is an asshole, merely that assholes tend to gravitate toward such trends.

It’s not that doing good makes you feel good about being bad, just that selfish, pretentious people like to put on airs of sainthood but given the chance will rob you blind and leave you dead on the side of the road (think Wall Street).

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This comes by way of Schneier on Security. A new scholarly paper from the American Journal of Forensic Medical Pathology that is cleverly titled, Use of a pig model to demonstrate vulnerability of major neck vessels to inflicted trauma from common household items.

A brief summary of this paper would be what every prisoner already knows, damn near anything can be used as a weapon in a pinch:

Commonly available items including a ball point pen, a plastic knife, a broken wine bottle, and a broken wine glass were used to inflict stab and incised wounds to the necks of 3 previously euthanized Large White pigs. With relative ease, these items could be inserted into the necks of the pigs next to the jugular veins and carotid arteries.

Now the biggest problem that I see with this is that the TSA will see this as a security hole that needs to be plugged as opposed to showing the futility of banned random crap. I’m afraid that this paper will cause us to all be flying naked soon.

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This in from  Schneier on Security. Apparently a company called ATSC is selling thousands of bogus divining rod type detectors to the Iraqi government. Despite no working parts or even batteries it well apparently detect just about anything that the operator wishes to find: guns, drugs, explosives or even dead bodies all by changing a piece of plastic coated cardboard on the unit. According to the manufacturer it works thusly:

Ignores All Known Concealment Methods. By programming the detection cards to specifically target a particular substance, (through the proprietary process of electro-static matching of the ionic charge and structure of the substance), the ADE651® will “by-pass” all known attempts to conceal the target substance. It has been shown to penetrate Lead, other metals, concrete, and other matter (including hiding in the body) used in attempts to block the attraction.

No Consumables nor Maintenance Contracts Required. Unlike Trace Detectors that require the supply of sample traps, the ADE651® does not utilize any consumables (exceptions include: cotton-gloves and cleanser) thereby reducing the operational costs of the equipment. The equipment is Operator maintained and requires no ongoing maintenance service contracts. It comes with a hardware three year warranty. Since the equipment is powered electro statically, there are no batteries or conventional power supplies to change or maintain.

At a cost of $16,500 to $60,000 depending on model, snake oil is expensive these day.

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