Associated Press – 2/18/08: Spending time behind bars in New York City might turn out to be good for your health. The overhauled menu at the city’s jails includes no sweets, no butter and only skim milk. The Department of Corrections wants healthy alternatives to traditional jailhouse grub.

A breakfast might include fresh fruit, whole wheat bread and wheat flakes. A sample dinner: pepper steak, rice and steamed carrots. “These people are in our custody, and they don’t get to make their own choices,” said Department of Correction Commissioner Martin Horn. “We have a moral obligation to make sound choices for them.” That means unsweetened muffins, which are expected to replace the wickedly sweet ones for the roughly 14,000 inmates in the jail system.

Concept illustrations of Gravia depict an acrylic column a little over four feet high. The entire column glows when activated. The electricity is generated by the slow fall of a mass that spins a rotor. The resulting energy powers 10 high-output LEDs that fire into the acrylic lens, creating a diffuse light. The operation is silent and the housing is elegant and cord free – completely independent of electrical infrastructure. The light output will be 600-800 lumens – roughly equal to a 40 watt incandescent bulb over a period of four hours.

To “turn on” the lamp, the user moves weights from the bottom to the top of the lamp. An hour-glass like mechanism is turned over and the weights are placed in the mass sled near the top of the lamp. The sled begins its gently glide back down and, within a few seconds, the LEDs come on and light the lamp, Clay Moulton said. “It’s more complicated than flipping a switch but can be an acceptable, even enjoyable routine, like winding a beautiful clock or making good coffee,” he said.

Moulton estimates that Gravia’s mechanisms will last more than 200 years, if used eight hours a day, 365 days a year. “The LEDs, which are generally considered long-life devices, become short-life components in comparison to the drive mechanisms,” he said.

Nicely done. My favorite in the Greener Gadgets competition.

Oh no Lawd! Not my private jet…have mercy!!!

wcco.com

Dwindling donations to the Living Word Christian Center in Brooklyn Park have prompted its high-profile pastor, Mac Hammond, to put his private business jet on the market.

Church spokesman the Rev. Brian Sullivan says Living Word has also cut its hourlong Sunday morning television broadcast to 30 minutes to save money.

He says the church has fallen $40,000 to $70,000 short of its weekly budget in recent weeks. Sullivan says the church is adjusting its budget accordingly.

Sullivan says the church’s problems could be a combination of the recession and the recent bad publicity about churches preaching the “Prosperity Gospel.”

The prosperity churches are based on the idea that success in business or personal life is evidence of God’s love.

Late last year, the U.S. Senate asked six churches to submit financial documents because of complaints about the lavish lifestyles of their ministers. Hammond was not among them.

Sullivan says the church is aggressively marketing the jet, and that the money raised from the sale would be reinvested in the ministry.

Times are tough all over, preacher man. See you in coach.

edmontonsun.com He thought it was a titillating idea. In an effort to make his calf tattoo of a buxom cowgirl more shapely, Lane Jensen gave the tattoo silicone breast implants. But after two weeks, the Edmonton tattoo artist’s body rejected them. “I thought it would make for good promotion. Augmenting tattoos with implants is becoming very popular,” said Jensen, 30, co-owner of Dragon FX tattoo and body piercing shop at Kingsway Garden Mall.

Brian Decker, a New York-based micro-dermal surgeon and friend, offered Jensen the boob job on his calf last December while visiting Dragon FX. Solid silicone implants are custom-shaped and often used in chin and nose reconstructions. Decker performed the implant procedure on Jensen’s calf Dec. 9. By Christmas Eve, the sutures split and a litre of lymphatic fluid drained from Jensen’s leg.

“My body just rejected it. I guess my girl wasn’t meant to have 3D breasts,” he said. “There was so much fluid in there. I went back to the studio and pushed on it gently – the implant shot right out.

What else is there left to say? I’m sure the readers can come up with something.

Click photo to listen.

This Episode’s Topics:

• Recording on the edge of tech
• Valentine’s day – Dancing With The Stars
• Let’s go shopping in Manhattan
• Es o si que es
• How sharp are you?
• Vacations in foreign places
• John’s philosophy for Cranky Geeks, and next week’s guests
• More recording tech and digital studios
• The Barcelona Conference, history of Motorola
• Andrew Orlowski, cell phones, The Register
• Look out! John and Adam play with phony accents
• From the Australian “outback” to a Google game show

A curious transcript purportedly about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination has been discovered among boxes of memorabilia that were long forgotten in an old safe at the Dallas County district attorney’s office.

While the transcript reads like a conspiracy theorist’s dream — Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby plotting to kill Kennedy — the DA’s top assistant said it’s likely material for a proposed movie.

Much…is bound to focus on the transcript, supposedly from a meeting between Ruby and Oswald at Ruby’s nightclub on October 4, 1963, less than two months before the November 22 assassination. In it, they talk of killing the president because the Mafia wants to “get rid of” his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

Says Oswald in the transcript, “I can still do it, all I need is my rifle and a tall building; but it will take time, maybe six months to find the right place; but I’ll have to have some money to live on while I do the planning.”

This is a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream.

A small addition will be made this week to England’s treasury of listed buildings: a tiny oak weatherboarded structure, which speaks of a rural past ignored by costume dramas, a time when parents and child could sit down peacefully together and let nature take its course.

The little shed will be declared a Grade II listed building this week, and it is far rarer than the handsome Georgian farmhouse in whose pretty garden it stands. The official report by English Heritage for the Department of Culture declares it “a rare surviving example of a late 18th century privy, even rarer because it is a three-seater”.

“It is the most glorious little building,” its proud owner, Mary Kellett, said. “It faces towards the evening sun, and it is the most delightful place to sit in the evening with a glass of wine and the door open, and just be peaceful and think.”

She adds hastily that it is no longer in practical use, though she suspects it was in her father-in-law’s day, as luxuries such as a bathroom were only installed in the main house in the 1960s.

A family that poops together – better eat the same root vegetables.

The mayor and his prison

These chuckleheads should be sent to Washington. We need people of vision like this running our country.

Out-of-pen thinking can fix jail mess

City officials in Hardin must find themselves in the unusual position of hoping for a statewide crime wave.

Unless malefactors step up to the plate and start getting themselves sent to prison in large numbers, Hardin is going to be stuck with 464 empty beds at its spanking-new, $27 million jail.
[…]
Now it’s shaping up as one of the most expensive misunderstandings in the history of Montana.
[…]
Basically, it comes down to this: The folks in Hardin thought they had a gentleman’s agreement with state officials – particularly those in the Department of Corrections – to send state prisoners to the private prison.

Those officials, however, said there were no contracts, no promises, no representations and not even a wink or a nod.

Check out the town website. Hardin is where they reenact that other local debacle, Custer’s Last Stand.

Have you ever arrived somewhere and wondered how you got there? Scientists at the University of Leeds believe they may have found the answer, with research that shows that humans flock like sheep and birds, subconsciously following a minority of individuals.

Results from a study at the University of Leeds show that it takes a minority of just five per cent to influence a crowd’s direction – and that the other 95 per cent follow without realising it.

“There are many situations where this information could be used to good effect,” says Professor Jens Krause of the University’s Faculty of Biological Sciences. “At one extreme, it could be used to inform emergency planning strategies and at the other, it could be useful in organising pedestrian flow in busy areas.”

Or we can just continue to use it to shape elections.

Susan Jacoby – Washington Post – February 17, 2008: Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans’ rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism. The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.

That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism — a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse.

This is heading us down a slippery slope where if you have a legitimate complaint about a company, there will be ways to prevent you from telling anyone else what scumbags they are. Next up, write a bad review of a restaurant and get sued. Oops. Sorry. Too late. The ways this can be abused and extended are endless if this stands.

Court Says You Can Copyright A Cease-And-Desist Letter

Back in October, we wrote about a law firm that was claiming a copyright on the cease-and-desist letters it sent out, and insisting that it was a violation to repost them. It’s long been believed that cease-and-desist letters that have no new creative expression and are merely boilerplates are likely not covered by copyright. On top of that, preventing someone from copying a cease-and-desist letter or posting it on their own website seems like a pretty severe First Amendment violation. The group Public Citizen hit back against this law firm’s claims, but surprisingly, a judge has now agreed that you can copyright cease-and-desist letters. The news was announced in a press release by the lawyer in question, who claims this means he can now sue anytime someone posts one of his cease-and-desist letters. He also goes on to slam those who believe free speech means being able to talk about the fact that a company is bullying them.

Here’s the decision as posted on the law firm’s website. (Speaking of which, don’t you dare look at their website’s html.) On the other hand, this might be crap. It just means they haven’t found a way to completely screw you. Yet.

There’s no winner or prize or anything… it’s just for weekend chuckles.

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The U.S. Department of Agriculture has recalled 143 million pounds of frozen beef from a Southern California slaughterhouse that is being investigated for mistreating cattle.

Officials said it was the largest beef recall in the United States, surpassing a 1999 ban of 35 million pounds of ready-to-eat meats. The amount of beef — 143 million pounds — is roughly enough for two hamburgers for each man, woman and child in the United States.

The federal agency said the recall will affect beef products dating to February 1, 2006, that came from Chino-based Westland/Hallmark Meat Co., which supplies meat to the federal school lunch program and to some major fast-food chains…

Federal officials suspended operations at Westland/Hallmark after an undercover video surfaced showing crippled and sick animals being shoved with forklifts.

Authorities said the video showed workers kicking, shocking and otherwise abusing “downer” animals that were apparently too sick or injured to walk into the slaughterhouse.

As folks noted in the article, once again, the USDA closes the barn door after the cows are out.

Update: Wow. Here’s the list of brand names and products affected by this recall.