John Lennon and Yoko Have an Argument

Walking through doorways causes forgetting, new research shows

By Susan Guibert

(Notre Dame News) New research from University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses.

“Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away,” Radvansky explains.

“Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.”

The study was published recently in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Conducting three experiments in both real and virtual environments, Radvansky’s subjects – all college students – performed memory tasks while crossing a room and while exiting a doorway.

In the first experiment, subjects used a virtual environment and moved from one room to another, selecting an object on a table and exchanging it for an object at a different table. They did the same thing while simply moving across a room but not crossing through a doorway.

Radvansky found that the subjects forgot more after walking through a doorway compared to moving the same distance across a room, suggesting that the doorway or “event boundary” impedes one’s ability to retrieve thoughts or decisions made in a different room...

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Thanksgiving Turkey I Will Survive

Saudi moral committee threatens to cover “tempting” women’s eyes

By Manar Ammar

Women with sexy eyes in Saudi Arabia may be forced to cover them up, according to the spokesperson of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPVPV) in the conservative Gulf kingdom.

Spokesman of the Ha’eal district, Sheikh Motlab al-Nabet said the committee has the right to stop a women whose eyes seem “tempting” and order her to cover them immediately.

Saudi women are already forced to wear a loose black dress and to cover their hair and in some areas, their face, while in public or face fines or sometimes worse, including public lashings.

The announcement came days after the Saudi newspaper al-Watan reported that a Saudi man was admitted to a hospital after a fight with a member of the committee when he ordered his wife to cover her eyes. The husband was then stabbed twice in the hand.

The CPVPV is Saudi’s Sharia, Islamic law, executive arm and was founded in 1940 to ensure Islamic laws are not broken in public, yet over the years, the committee has been largely criticized over its human rights violations.

In 2002, the committee refused to let female students out of their burning schools in Mecca for “not wearing the proper head cover,” which contributed to a large number of dead.

15 young girls died in the fire and dozens more were injured. The CPVPV men banned the firemen and policemen from accessing the girls as “it is not okay for girls to be seen without their full Islamic dress in front of strangers...”

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New Bipartisan Law Would Make Dog Neckerchiefs Mandatory

Somewhere Raven says "I started that trend and gave Ron Schara a career and I still don't get any residuals!" here

McDonald’s Menu Changeover Prompted Wisconsin Woman's Meltdown

(The Smoking Gun) When Shanaya Edgell arrived early yesterday morning at a McDonald’s in Janesville, Wisconsin, she was expecting to order from the fast food joint’s regular menu--Big Macs, french fries, Chicken McNuggets, and the like.

Except it was around 3 AM and the restaurant had already switched over to its breakfast menu--hash browns, Egg McMuffins, hotcakes, and the like.

This enraged Edgell, according to Janesville Police Department officers.

The 22-year-old--for some unexplained reason--turned on her boyfriend, biting him on the lip and tearing off his shirt. At some point during her meltdown, Edgell climbed atop the roof of her 40-year-old beau’s car and launched into a loud diatribe about McDonald’s.

After Edgell dismounted from the vehicle, she was collared for disorderly conduct. Danny Davis, deputy chief of the Janesville police, told TSG that Edgell and her boyfriend had been at a bar prior to heading to McDonald’s.

When questioned by an officer about her behavior, Davis said, Edgell copped to “freaking out” in the wake of the menu changeover, adding that she was “acting crazy.”

Edgell, pictured in the above mug shot, is being held in the Rock County jail in lieu of $150 bond. She is scheduled for a court appearance later this afternoon.  

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Police: officer shoots at officer, goes for pizza

(Local10.com) LAUDERHILL, Fla. - A Lauderhill police officer fired 10 shots at another officer, but missed, said police.

Detectives said the shooting happened in a busy shopping area after 7 p.m. Saturday in the 5600 block of West Oakland Park Boulevard.

The officer who was shot at was working an off-duty detail at the time, but police said she was in a marked cruiser and in uniform. The shooter, Officer Kristopher Bieger, pulled up in his personal car and quickly fired 10 shots at the other police officer, and then took off.

Local 10 sources say that the shooting stems from a domestic situation between the two officers; allegedly, the officer who was targeted had broken up with the shooter on Friday. Police would only confirm that the two worked the same shift and knew each other.

After a three hour manhunt, Davie police and the SWAT team arrested the shooter at 14800 Griffin Road, inside a pizza shop.

"He ordered two slices," said Sam Karia, a witness. "He was buggin' out on the phone. Actually someone heard him crying on the phone to somebody."

When the SWAT team entered the shop, witnesses say the shooter prepared for the takedown.

"He told us all to hide in the back, away from the windows," a witness said.

The shooter has been suspended without pay. The gun he used was not his service weapon; it was his personal firearm.

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Ventura, miffed by court, says he's off to Mexico

ST. PAUL, Minnesota (AP) — Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura is so upset by the dismissal of his airport security lawsuit that he threatened Friday to apply for dual citizenship so he can spend more time in his beloved Mexico — or run for president of what he labeled "the Fascist States of America."

Ventura, also a former wrestling star, sued the U.S. government in January, alleging that airport scans and pat-downs amounted to unreasonable search and seizure. A district judge threw out his lawsuit Thursday, ruling it should have been filed in a Circuit Court of Appeals.

Ventura has said a titanium hip implanted in him in 2008 sets off metal detectors and that agents previously used hand-held wands to scan his body. He said he was subjected to a body pat-down after an airport metal detector went off last November. Ventura said he hasn't flown since and won't fly commercially again.

Outside the federal courthouse in St. Paul, with a crew from his "Conspiracy Theory" cable TV show filming, Ventura said he hadn't decided whether to continue pressing his lawsuit. He said he wanted to make his case before a jury, not a panel of judges.

Ventura, a political independent who served one term as governor, teased that he might have to run for president to change the policy and a court system he regards as broken.

Moments later, he vowed to apply for Mexican citizenship so he can live there more months of the year.

The former Navy SEAL said he had lost his patriotism.

"I will never stand for a national anthem again. I will turn my back and I will raise a fist," he said.

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Star Wars fanatic choked his Thai bride to death after she destroyed his collection of toys

(Mail Online) A Star Wars fanatic choked his Thai bride to death after she destroyed his prized collection of toys.

Rickie la Touche, 30, said his wife had had damaged his treasured Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker memorabilia which he had been collecting since he was a child.

During a subsequent row he suffocated Pornpilai Srisroy, 28, before running off to his mother's house to tell her what he had done.

The mother-of-one was later discovered dead on the couple's bed covered with a duvet and pillow in Leigh, Greater Manchester.

He was jailed for life with a minimum term of 12 years yesterday after a jury found him guilty of murder. He had admitted manslaughter.

La Touche - also known as Rickie Nehls - told police his wife had smashed up his Star Wars collection as part of a campaign to 'make his life hell.'

He claimed he was a henpecked husband who 'flipped' after she threatened to leave him to go back to her native Thailand.

He first met her in a bar while on holiday in Bangkok in Thailand in 2001, Preston Crown Court was told...

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Australian Mint Turns Out 1-Ton Gold Coin

AP

The world's largest gold coin weighs a ton.

(NBC LA) An Australian mint has produced the world's largest gold coin, a giant disk weighing more than a ton and worth more than $50 million.

The Perth Mint made the coin to comemorate Queen Elizabeth's visit to the city. It has a kangaroo on one side and the Queen's profile on the other...

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Vampire Facelift: Cosmetic Surgery Procedure Uses Patients' Blood

By David Moye

(Huffington Post) Vampires are known for having pale skin and an anemic pallor, so the idea of a "vampire facelift" sounds bloody awful, doesn't it?

Maybe, but a technique known colloquially by that name is starting to suck up attention and take a bite out of other forms of facial rejuvenation.

The technical term is actually the Selphyl System, and a doctor -- not Count Dracula -- begins the procedure by drawing a vial of blood from the patient.

That blood is put into a centrifuge to separate out the platelet-rich plasma, or "PRP," which is then injected back into parts of the patient's face.

According to Dr. Jack Berdy, a New York-based doctor of aesthetic medicine who has been doing the so-called "Vampire Facelift" for a year, the plasma fills volume in the face, but also stimulates the body to produce more collagen and elastin.

It also only takes 30 minutes in a doctor's office.

The downside? Well, it's on the high-end of facial rejuvenation injections because, compared to other facial injections, it is more physician-dependent.

Oh, and there's the blood-drawing part.

"It makes some patients queasy," Berdy told HuffPost Weird News. "Some patients can handle being injected, but faint when blood is drawn."

However, patients like 51-year-old Nancy Chira say the Vampire Facelift, despite the spooky name, is allowing them a chance to look better without going through a recovery process that requires them to look like a mummy.

"I don't have to scare my kids by looking scary," she told Fox News. "They won't really know know and, hopefully, it improves over time."

Dr. Norman Rowe, a New York-based plastic surgeon who has been doing the Vampire Facelift for two years, is happy with the results from the technique -- but isn't so fond of the name.

"I hate that they call it that," Rowe laughed to HuffPost Weird News. "The only thing related to vampires is that blood is drawn, but this promotes healing and rejuvenation and that helps reduce wrinkles."
Rowe says the platelets attract the body's stem cells, which then become whatever kinds of cells the targeted area needs.

"If I inject blood into a wrinkle, the stem cells will become skin," he told Fox News.

But while Rowe and Berdy say they have had good results with the technique, which is also being used by orthopedic surgeons to promote bone growth, other experts like Dr. Barry Handler, a San Diego-based plastic surgeon, says the cost of the Vampire Facelift could bleed people's wallets without having a real effect on their face.

"I'd say it adds $500 to the cost to what a normal non-surgical rejuvenation costs, but there's no real proof that it reduces swelling," he told HuffPost Weird News. "This seems to be a product searching for a use. Some people are injecting the plasma into penises and breasts."

However, new advances threaten to drive a stake into the metaphorical heart of the Vampire Facelift, according to Rowe, who says the technique may be in its twlight.

"Since this technique attracts stem cells to the face, I think the future is using the stem cells themselves and cutting out the blood -- which is the middle man at this point."

In the meantime, perhaps someone will invent a "Werewolf Treatment" for curing baldness.

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"The Exorcist" (1973) - Inappropriate Soundtracks

Zombie Gnomes

h/t to Fr. Erik Richtsteig

Apple Announces Plans To Release Steve Jobs 2

No Monkey Business: Typing Shakespeare

 By Carl Bialik

(The Wall Street Journal)  My print column examined a computer programmer’s effort to simulate the thought experiment of putting many monkeys over many years to the task of bashing keyboards, with the hope their random output would eventually include the works of Shakespeare. This effort was successful mainly because it changed the rules, requiring only that monkey-like software match nine-letter strings from Shakespeare’s works, rather than whole scenes, let alone acts or plays.

That made it the target for some skepticism from academic researchers. “This bit of silliness deserves no attention from anyone,” said Jeffrey Shallit, a computer scientist at the University of Waterloo. “It has nothing to do with evolution and it is of absolutely no interest mathematically.”

“It is of no scientific interest,” said Richard Stanley, an applied mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He said that if nine-letter strings are good enough, why not two letters? “If you waited until the monkey typed just ‘to,’ then waited until he/she typed just ‘be,’ etc., of course this would take much less time, but I would not consider this typing the sentence ‘To be or not to be, that is the question,’ ” Stanley wrote in an email. “You might as well do just one letter at a time, and it would be even faster but would accomplish nothing.”

“The ability of the random generator to do this is highly dependent on the size of the blocks” it counts as successful matches, added Robert Simon, a mathematician at the London School of Economics.

“I think this is about the easiest task for monkeys that can be imagined, and saying that they have typed the text is a stretch of the imagination,” said Brendan McKay, a computer scientist at Australian National University Canberra.

The project’s creator, Reno, Nev., software engineer Jesse Anderson, defended it for its ability to shed light on the scope of infinity. “It helps you wrap your mind about what would happen if you had infinite resources, and an infinite amount of time,” Anderson said. “We have a hard time thinking in terms of numbers that big.”

“He’s showing the power of raw computation,” said Dave Thomas, president of New Mexicans for Science and Reason. “It illustrates that monkeys randomly typing stuff eventually produce real words.”

Greg McColm, a mathematical logician at the University of South Florida, said the real point of the thought experiment is to illustrate that it is far more likely the monkeys might produce some piece of writing that is coherent, than a specific one specified before they are put to work. “In real life, the point is that a large number of independent events (like throwing darts at a dartboard) will almost always generate a pattern different from any previously selected pattern,” McColm wrote in an email. “Of course, afterwards, you can say that the darts form a horse and a pirate, but you are not going to start by saying you are going to form a horse and a pirate and then throw the darts (at random) and get a horse and a pirate.”

Anderson’s experiment did illustrate one intriguing mathematical concept, the coupon collector’s problem.

This problem involves determining how many random numbers one would have to generate to have a reasonable expectation of getting every number in a set. The answer is it would take far more than the total number, because there would be many duplicates on the way to completeness. There are about 5.4 trillion possible nine-letter strings using the 26-letter English alphabet, but it would take generating about 162 trillion, on average, to get all of them, and 184 trillion to have a 99% chance of getting all of them, according to Tobias Friedrich, a computer scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany. Since Anderson didn’t need all of them, only those in Shakespeare, he needed just 7.4 trillion random strings to succeed at his self-assigned task.

A previous effort to simulate Shakespeare online was actually a simulation of a simulation, said its creator, Nick Hoggard, of Lund, Sweden. “It ran on individual PCs that didn’t really have much power and I wanted those who had a slow PC to have an equal chance,” Hoggard said. “So my webpage didn’t actually do all the calculations but started off from a base where it assumed a number of calculations had already been done. 

This base progressed every day to reflect increasing numbers of monkeys.” The goal, he said, was “to try and attract visitors to a website and from there try to earn money through advertising.” It didn’t attract enough visitors, and the site is no longer online, though it did help inform Anderson’s effort.

A real-life experiment testing the monkey hypothesis that proceeded both of these simulated efforts pointed out a flaw in them, though: Plymouth University researchers in 2002 found that six zoo monkeys didn’t hit random keys on an iMac, but instead pounded away on certain favorites, particularly “S.”

While the monkeys liked some letters more than others, they preferred other parts of the enclosure to the computer. “They became much more interested in each others’ bits and pieces than in the computer,” said Mike Phillips, professor of interdisciplinary arts at Plymouth, who led the research. The iMac also was a target for monkey excretion as much as monkey typing.

Anderson said he is aware of the experiment and plans to incorporate the results into a future simulation. His virtual monkeys, which he increasingly thinks of as real ones, would somehow be incentivized to hit keys randomly. “I think you would have to train the monkeys or give them some kind of reward for doing something,” Anderson said. “Just putting [a computer] in a room with them, they’re not going to be that interested in it.”

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