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Italian wall lizards introduced to a tiny island off the coast of Croatia are evolving in ways that would normally take millions of years to play out, new research shows.
In just a few decades the 5-inch-long (13-centimeter-long) lizards have developed a completely new gut structure, larger heads, and a harder bite, researchers say.
I’m sure Ben Stein disapproves…
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Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT, arguing that the Saudi city is the true centre of the Earth.
Mecca is the direction all Muslims face when they perform their daily prayers.
The call was issued at a conference held in the Gulf state of Qatar under the title: Mecca, the Centre of the Earth, Theory and Practice.
And before you think they’re just religious nutcases, they’re really just feeling bitter about the past:
He said the English had imposed GMT on the rest of the world by force when Britain was a big colonial power, and it was about time that changed.
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Chris Matthew started off the Pennsylvania primary coverage with a bang tonight. Shortly after 6, seated by co-anchor Keith Olbermann, Matthews called the primary, and thus his coverage tonight, basically moot. “This contest is essentially over,” he proclaims to Keith. “Barack Obama is going to win the most elected delegates.”
He went on to say of the media, “Trying to keep this game going, we’ve created the delusion that somehow this race is still open.”
Follow the money. The media needs the candidates to spend as much as possible on advertising, it’s in their best interest to keep this going..
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Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.
Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.
Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo’s sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.
Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.
“You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We’ve had a number of attempted lynchings. … You see them covered in marks after being beaten,” Kinshasa’s police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday.
I just checked the calendar, and yes, it is 2008. Amazing that this still happens…
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Customers who have purchased music from Microsoft’s now-defunct MSN Music store are now facing a decision they never anticipated making: commit to which computers (and OS) they want to authorize forever, or give up access to the music they paid for. Why? Because Microsoft has decided that it’s done supporting the service and will be turning off the MSN Music license servers by the end of this summer.
The name “PlaysForSure” should have been a dead giveaway.
Never buy something with DRM.
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Have public company Boards learned any lesson from Enron? A March 31, 2008 article [sadly not online] about Stan O’Neal, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch, suggests not.
The Board at Merrill Lynch Enronized their company by promising to pay Stan O’Neal roughly $50 million per year if he made some numbers look good. One of the numbers that they wanted to see improved was Return on Equity. O’Neal managed to improve it by using the company’s cash to buy back stock. By reducing the amount of equity in the firm, whatever profit they managed to earn in a given year would be a larger percentage of the remaining equity. Unfortunately, for a company that faces risk, reducing the cash supply inevitably means courting disaster.
The Board also decided to give bonuses to executives based on where Merrill ranked in the business of creating mortgage-backed securities. O’Neal and colleagues managed to grab the number-one spot by 2005, near the tail-end of the real estate bubble. Merrill would buy up garbage mortgages from retail banks, mortgages that by 2005 hardly anyone else wanted. These were loans on houses that had never been independently appraised to homeowners who had never proved that they had any source of income. Merrill’s goal was to package up this junk and sell it to fools in the institutional investment community. This worked great for a while and Merrill pocketed a lot of fees. By 2006, however, the supply of fools to buy up baskets of junk mortgages was dwindling. Merrill could have simply stopped buying the mortgages, but that would have resulted in a loss of fees and a reduction in executive salaries. O’Neal, who had been the Chief Financial Officer of Merrill, and his subordinates decided to continue buying the junk mortgages and wrapping them up into CDOs but, because nobody out there was dumb enough to buy the CDOs, keep the CDOs for themselves and account for them at the value that they wished they could have sold them for. Merrill ended up with $32 billion in nearly worthless debt. O’Neal retired with the savings from his $50 million per year salary plus a lot of bonuses and retirement extras.
[..]
So… if you’re on a Board and you decide to compensate a manager with anything other than cash or a long-term stock option, make sure that you’re not granting compensation based on a number that the manager can easily manipulate. Keep in mind that managers are often a lot more clever in doing things that will benefit themselves than things that will benefit the company.
