Smile And The World Smiles With You

Louis Armstrong sang, "When you're smilin', the whole world smiles with you." Romantics everywhere may be surprised to learn that psychological research has proven this sentiment to be true — merely seeing a smile (or a frown, for that matter) will activate the muscles in our face that make that expression, even if we are unaware of it. Now, according to a new study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, simply reading certain words may also have the same effect.

Jeremy Clarkson's Top Ten Controversies

In the 21 years since he first appeared on [BBC's Top Gear], the TV presenter and Sunday Times columnist has raised the ire of the Poles, the Germans, the residents of Norfolk, prostitute welfare organisations, gay rights groups and environmentalists to name but a few.

Hailed as a hero of political incorrectness and derided as deeply offensive, we can only be talking about Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson.

And here are some samples from Clarkson's own website:

Supercars are ... designed to melt ice caps, kill the poor, poison the water table, destroy the ozone layer, decimate indigenous wildlife, recapture the Falkland Islands and turn the entire third world into a huge uninhabitable desert, all that before they nicked all the oil in the world.

Driving most supercars is like trying to manhandle a cow up a back staircase, but this (the Audi R8) is like smearing honey onto Keira Knightley.

US Health Care Debate Gets Ugly

The debate on government run health care in the US is getting decidedly ugly. Thousands of ordinary Americans are turning out to town hall meetings to tell their representatives that they are very worried about losing whet they have, about higher taxes, about loss of freedom of choice.

Rather than listening carefully, Democrat organizers have turned nasty. Protesters have been accused of being "astroturfers" and Nazis. And now they are getting roughed up by union goons.

The Wall Street Journal summarizes and has advice for the Democrats.

All of this is unnecessarily and unhelpfully divisive and provocative. They are mocking and menacing concerned citizens. This only makes a hot situation hotter. Is this what the president wants? It couldn’t be. But then in an odd way he sometimes seems not to have fully absorbed the awesome stature of his office. You really, if you’re president, can’t call an individual American stupid, if for no other reason than that you’re too big. You cannot allow your allies to call people protesting a health-care plan “extremists” and “right wing,” or bought, or Nazi-like, either. They’re citizens. They’re concerned. They deserve respect.

Update: A first-person account from the Russ Carnahan town hall meeting where union goons went looking for heads to bust — and found one.

Update 2: Jim Treacher Tweets: "If Kenneth Gladney was an Obama supporter, right now he'd be more famous than Rodney King."

Mega-Destructo-Luxo-Crash Video Gallery

Crash test videos from Jalopnik. As they say, what's not to like?

Why Speed Cameras Are A Bad Idea

The Truth About Cars tells a tale of corruption and greed among top city officials, the cops and private contractors who fleeced the drivers of Caserta, Italy with rigged speed cameras.

An investigation is underway into possible fraudulent conduct on the part of local officials in thirty-three municipalities as well as fourteen private companies who operated the equipment under contract. In addition to seizing camera equipment, documents were taken from the offices of both photo enforcement companies and local police chiefs and mayors.

Collecting Whiskeys

£11,750 is about US$19,616. And that's how much someone has paid for a bottle of 80-year-old The Macallan Anniversary Whiskey.

Sadly the older this bottle gets, the more valuable it becomes and the less likely it will ever be tasted. This is a collector bottle. Destined for unfulfilled immortality. In the old car hobby it would be called a trailer queen. But even if you never turned a wheel in the old car, beyond its investment value, you could still enjoy its presence, even its aroma. Try that with your precious bottle. The old car will always start up and run. We'll never know what's in the bottle.

16 Kilobagpipes

Can you imagine the sound of 16,000 bag pipes? Neither can I. But there will be that many in Glasgow, Scotland this weekend for the collision er, confluence of the International Piping Live! Festival and the World Pipe Band Championships.

I will sleep safely tonight knowing the Planet is guarded by sixteen thousand bagpipes.

Global Wobbling

I am pretty sure we were taught in grade school that the earth wobbles on its axis causing sunlight to vary on the surface and over geologic time this causes ice ages. Perhaps it was just a theory then.

But now, scientists from Oregon State University are certain about it. What's more, they eliminate CO2 as a driver of atmospheric temperature.

Hiroshima

64 years ago today.

Photos here.

Wars Are Getting Less Deadly

There is a fascinating study at Slate of the numbers of people killed as a result of wars over history. Although people still die in wars in the present day, the numbers are historically tiny. Vastly more people are killed nowadays in traffic accidents.

"Great Pacific Garbage Patch"

A research vessel has set out from California's Scripps Institution of Oceanography to explore The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The expedition will study how much debris -- mostly tiny plastic fragments -- is collecting in an expanse of sea known as the North Pacific Ocean Gyre, how that material is distributed and how it affects marine life.

The debris ends up concentrated by circular, clockwise ocean currents within an oblong-shaped "convergence zone" hundreds of miles across from end to end near the Hawaiian Islands, about midway between Japan and the West Coast of the United States.

There is a similar confluence of plastics in the Atlantic as well.

Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein Update

From Breitbart:

Sudanese police fired tear gas and beat women protesting outside a Sudanese court Tuesday during the trial of a female journalist accused of violating the Islamic dress code by wearing trousers in public.

Police moved in swiftly and dispersed about 50 protesters, mostly women, who were supporting Lubna Hussein, a former U.N. worker facing 40 lashes on the charge of "indecent dressing."

Some of the women demonstrators wore trousers in solidarity with Hussein while others wore more traditional dress.

Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein was one of 13 women arrested for "indecent dressing." I suspect you did not know that 10 of those arrested women have already been flogged.

"I am not afraid of flogging. ... It's not about flogging. It's not about my innocence. It's about changing the law. I'm ready to receive 40,000 lashes."

Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein is a hero who should be recognized and supported.

Joker's Wild

Now doubt you've seen the caricature of Obama as a Heath Ledger-style Joker with the text "socialism" printed underneath.

Naturally enough, this dubious satire has caused squeals of pain from the Left. The depiction has been called "politically mean spirited and dangerous".

So with that ObamaJoker image in mind, where were these critics during the eight years of BusHitler?

What comes around goes around, eh?

New Nikon Camera Projects Photos

From Yahoo Tech:

That LCD on the back of your camera can get a little crowded when family and friends are all clamoring at once to view your images. Nikon is intent on changing that with the introduction of the Nikon COOLPIX S1000pj, the world's first camera to feature a built-in projector.

The camera will shoot and project video too.

Consider The Spleen

If not for "venting", then what is the spleen for? It seems to be a residual organ and we know we can live - for a while at least - without it. But what's it really for? The New York Times reports there's some new research:

Reporting in the current issue of the journal Science, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School describe studies showing that the spleen is a reservoir for huge numbers of immune cells called monocytes, and that in the event of a serious trauma to the body like a heart attack, gashing wound or microbial invasion, the spleen will disgorge those monocyte multitudes into the bloodstream to tackle the crisis.

“The parallel in military terms is a standing army,” said Matthias Nahrendorf, an author of the report. “You don’t want to have to recruit an entire fighting force from the ground up every time you need it.”

James May & The TR6

Ah the Triumph TR6. James May of BBC's Top Gear (the flat out best TV show in the world) explains how the Triumph TR6 is "the blokiest bloke's car ever built".

This great segment is taken from Season 2, Episode 5 of Top Gear originally aired July 8, 2003.

TQBFJOTLD

...and every other letter of the alphabet:

Hacker Hype

I've been reading Rob Rosenberger's stuff for years. As Anthony Watts is to global warming hysteria, Rob Rosenberger is to computer and network security hysteria.

He loves to poke fun at hackers and especially hacker conventions.

You can always count on hysteria before & during a global hacker convention — especially the siamese twins known as “Black Hat” and “DEFCON.” Panelists & presenters alike go shopping every year at this time for reporters who will breathlessly pre-announce the horrifying lectures they’ll give in a nonchalant fashion to their fellow hackers and to government middle-managers whose agency budgets let them play the role of a hacker.

Rosenberger wrote an excellent article on what he called False Authority Syndrome almost 15 years ago. In it he pointed out how computer security analysts and anti-virus vendors create a position of importance for themselves. It is still a must-read.

My only beef with Rosenberger is that he doesn't post more often.

Misty, Moisty Morning

That's what it is here in St. John's this morning. And that got me to thinking about British electric folk band Steeleye Span, a band we used to listen to...

Turkish Demolition Fail

A building being demolished in Turkey yesterday did something unexpected... Furthering the embarrassment of the demolition engineers, Turkish TV ran several examples of how demolition should be done. I gotta say it... They blowed up real good.

Er, except for one of 'em...

Mozart Pieces Debut

Two newly discovered pieces of music written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a child have been performed in the Austrian city of his birth, Salzburg. The piano pieces had long been in the archive of the International Mozarteum Foundation but only recently were they identified as compositions by Mozart. The music was played on Mozart's own piano at a house where he lived from 1773-1780, and which is now a museum.

More, including video, from the BBC.

In Resveratrol Veritas

"The therapeutic potential of red wine has been bottled up for thousands of years," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal, "and now that scientists have uncorked its secrets, they find that studies of how resveratrol works can lead to new treatments for life-threatening inflammation."