Proverbial

I’ve always thought of clowns as very sad characters, so in need of the audience’s laugh as to willingly make fools of themselves. Which is why I can’t really think of anything more depressing than news of a clown being killed on stage. I can even imagine some people laughing when the man was shot, [...]

[Read more →]

SLOG reports on the Netherlands’ debate over whether or not something should be done against “age play” in Second Life. While they wonder about the legal implications of such actions, I can’t help but think that the whole reasoning behind the idea is ass-backwards.
For starters, the idea that “virtually having sex with children [that [...]

[Read more →]

England, home of “the toughest gun control laws in the world”:
Gun crime has doubled since they were introduced. Young hoodlums are able to acquire handguns - either replica weapons that have been converted, or imports from eastern Europe - with ease. (…) The only people currently incommoded by the firearms laws are legitimate holders of [...]

[Read more →]

I wonder what the impact of a 250-meters-wide asteroid somewhere on the Pacific Ocean would do to current global warming calculations. All those predictions about an economic breakdown setting the world’s population back to the 19th century would probably seem a little silly.
What amazes me is that, unlike global warming, this is a problem that [...]

[Read more →]

Well, it wasn’t quite concerns with imagery of Av. Paulista or Rio de Janeiro’s beaches, but it sure was fast (.br):
“It’s not only your image that’s exposed. You lose the tranquility of doing whatever you want in your residence”, says the attorney. According to Nicolau, the Public Ministry could file a preventive public civil lawsuit [...]

[Read more →]

Edible RFID. With the recent decision by a US court that covert GPS tracking is not illegal, I wonder how long it’ll be before policemen are putting RFID tags in suspects’ tea.

[Read more →]

Even though it seems like the song was pasted over miscelaneous footage, what you see is what you get: Peter Frampton doing an instrumental cover of Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun, with help from Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready and Matt Cameron. Great stuff.
It’s part of Frampton’s latest - and first all instrumental - record, Fingerprints, [...]

[Read more →]

When he nationalized Bolivia’s natural gas companies, soon after being elected, Evo Morales threw Petrobras out of the country, leaving Brazil close to an energy crisis while he threatened to increase the fuel’s price. The situation still hasn’t been solved, since Morales says he’ll only negotiate with diplomats, while Lula’s Foreign Relations Ministry says this [...]

[Read more →]

These news about a mind reading device have raised quite a few comparisons with Minority Report. But while it does remind me of K. Dick’s novel, I have to say it is for a different reason: more than a critique on preventive policing, I think the book is mainly a defense of free will.
And [...]

[Read more →]

In China:
Anyone can now send a text message or visit the country’s population information center’s website, to check if the name and the ID number of a person’s identity card match. If they do match the ID cardholder’s picture also appears, said the Ministry, adding that no other information is available to ensure a citizen’s [...]

[Read more →]