News for the Week Ending May 20, 2007
I’m posting the weekly news round up early this week, May 20, 2007. I have to be in Orlando tomorrow morning (Sunday) at 8am to attend a software conference.
Son gives his mom the night off and is slain
For Mother’s Day this year, Wai Ng may have saved his mother’s life.
His gift to her was simple: The 28-year-old son, known to friends as Ray, offered to work his mother’s shift on Sunday at the family’s Chinese restaurant in Tamarac.
But late that night, authorities said, a gunman stormed into the almost-empty restaurant and demanded money. Before making his exit, cash in hand, the stranger fired a single shot, leaving Ng dead on the floor.
Andromeda Galaxy Might Steal Our Solar System from Milky Way
Our solar system might get booted from the suburbs to the boondocks of our galaxy when the Milky Way merges with its neighbor Andromeda in a few billion years, scientists say.
New calculations by T.J. Cox and Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics show there is a small possibility that the Sun and its planets will be exiled to the outer reaches of the merged galaxy.
“You could say that we’re being sent to a retirement home in the country,” Cox said.
This is not a parody. I swear. It’s all true.
Just so you’ll know that what follows is scientifically possible, I will acquaint you with a 2003 study funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation and published in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin.
The study found that conservatism can be explained as a set of beliefs and behaviors that result from a psyche controlled by fear, aggression, closed-minded dogmatism, and intolerance of ambiguity, compounded by mental rigidity and decreased cognitive complexity [dumbness].
Seriously, I’m not making this up.
Miami Tops List for Rude Drivers
For the second year in a row, rude drivers who chat on cell phones and speed through red lights have earned Miami the title as the U.S. city with the most road rage, a survey released Tuesday said.
Miami motorists said they saw other drivers slam on their brakes, run red lights, multitask while driving and talk on cell phones, according to the survey by AutoVantage, a Connecticut-based automobile membership club that offers travel services and roadside assistance.
Sex worth more than porn: $1.5 mil more, to be exact
Porn.com domain sells for $9.5 million, the biggest cash domain sale in history. The Los Angeles Times
Gay For A Day – A Small Ray of Hope
What punishment would you inflict on a teenager convicted of a violent homophobic crime?
Knee-jerk reactions tend to vigilante-style ferocity, but careful thought can yield surprising results, as police in Sussex, England, discovered this year.
Brighton’s hate crime unit ordered a homophobic teenager to spend a day working as an intern at the gay magazine 3SIXTY as part of his sentence. The boy had been part of a group who attacked a gay high school teacher in Dukes Mound, Brighton, early one Sunday morning.
Surly at first, the teen perked up when asked to write an article about a gay person in the public eye. He chose to pen a piece about the pop star Ian H Watkins, who’d outed himself before entering the Big Brother house. It seems the task enthused the boy, who stayed to oversee the page layout.
Following his internship, the boy asked his probation officer if he could write to the victim to apologize for his crime.
