Here’s the back story:

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Joel Branstrom figured he was about to be the butt of some kind of joke when he was blindfolded at a pep rally and told he would win tickets to the NCAA’s Final Four if he could hit a half-court shot.

But the popular girls basketball coach played along and sent the Olathe Northwest High School gym into a frenzy Friday by hitting the improbable shot.

"I’ve been around long enough and done these kinds of practical jokes," said Branstrom, who also teaches biology at the suburban Kansas City school. "I figured they were trying to punk me."

Before launching the shot, Branstrom figured he was about to be hit in the face with a pie, so he held the ball up as protection for a few seconds.

"I knew they would cheer regardless to make me think I hit it," Branstrom said. "I let it go, they cheered, I heard laughter. I seriously didn’t know I made it for a while."

video of the coach

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A federal watchdog criticized U.S. agencies on Thursday for squandering taxpayer money on facilities in Afghanistan that are too complex and costly for the Afghan government to maintain.

U.S. officials acknowledge that they plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to hire contractors to operate a complex of buildings in troubled Kandahar and other facilities in Afghanistan for the next 10 years.

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“Why in the world are we continuing to construct facilities all over Afghanistan that we know, and the Afghans know, they will not be able to sustain once we hand the facilities over?” asked Arnold Fields, the special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction.

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This is not the first time Washington has been accused of overbuilding projects for a frail allied government. During the George W. Bush administration, U.S. agencies were faulted for building power plants in Iraq that were never employed to capacity because they were too complex for Iraqi engineers to operate.

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Sharing or trading food during school lunchtime is not unheard of, but sharing landed one teenager in police handcuffs.

Ava Hernandez got a disturbing voicemail message from the Assistant Principal of Shorewood High School in March. Her 15-year-old brother Adam has been taken into police custody. She says, "It was because his friend had shared a lunch with him and he was accused of stealing was really, I don’t know, it was just over the top."

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Ava Hernandez says, “They were like, ‘Well do you know that friend receives federally free lunch?’, and I said, ‘I do now.’, and they said, ‘Well, it’s illegal to share a free lunch so either way Adam was breaking the law’.”

Why bother stealing a nugget when you can download the whole chicken at http://thechickenbay.org/?

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The Three Big Ratings Agencies (hereinafter, TBRA) are refusing to rate asset backed bonds due to the stepped up regulations of the financial reform package. This is ground-shattering news that already demonstrates the effectiveness of the new legislation. I’m going to tell you why.

Now, if you listen to CNBC or NPR’s Marketplace, this is meant to be a Very Troubling Development. You see, according to existing securities regulations, you can’t sell asset backed bonds without a ratings agency stamp on it that tells buyers the TBRA’s "opinion" of their risk. That’s a principle of transparency. You need an "objective" third party assessment of the risk for such bonds. If one of the TBRA doesn’t rate the bond, you can’t sell it. So, the bond market for asset backed bonds is at a dead stop: no ratings, no sales. Full stop.

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Meanwhile, solutions include a move by issuers to the private/144A market, where public filings with the SEC are not required, Barclays analysts said.

However, Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysts said in a report this week that limiting ABS issuers to the 144A market could reduce the options available to many investors. With a substantial portion of consumer and commercial ABS issuance stemming from the public market, many investors can not participate in the 144A market and it would therefore not be a long-term solution, analysts noted.

Additionally, a shift to the 144A market could also have the potential of increasing funding costs to issuers — which would eventually be passed on to consumers. Some issuers may choose to reduce origination volumes if faced with rising funding costs, BofA analysts observed.

Alternatively, said Barclays analysts, the SEC could also collaborate with the industry to alleviate the unintended results of the repeal. Analysts expect the former to take place initially, but the latter to be the eventual long-term result.

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The Gulf Coast region’s travel industry could lose up to $22.7 billion over the next three years as a result of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill if no action is taken to help the already damaged industry in the region, according to Oxford Economics USA projections released Thursday.

It’s a huge share of the tourism revenue, which includes flights, hotels, rental cars and restaurants, among other things. In 2008, visitors spent about $34 billion along the Gulf of Mexico coast, with Florida accounting for about $20 billion, followed by Texas with $7.2 billion and Louisiana with $3.6 billion, according to Oxford Economics.

If only we could point to somebody responsible for all this damage…

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With the financial system on the verge of collapse in late 2008, a group of troubled banks doled out more than $2 billion in bonuses and other payments to their highest earners. Now, the federal authority on banker pay says that nearly 80 percent of that sum was unmerited.

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Imagine that horrible though all-too-familiar feeling: You are standing before a fully stuffed closet and yet have nothing to wear.

Now, imagine something worse: Your closet contains only six items, and you are restricted to wearing only those six items for an entire month.

Now, if you can bear it, imagine something unspeakable:

No one notices.

Nearly a month into what amounted to just such a self-inflicted fast of fashion, Stella Brennan, 31, an insurance sales executive from Kenosha, Wis., realized last week that not even her husband, Kelly, a machinist, had yet figured out that she had been wearing the same six items, over and over, since June 21. The sad punch line is that Mr. Brennan is the one who actually does the laundry in the family.

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This self-imposed exercise in frugality was prompted by a Web challenge called Six Items or Less (sixitemsorless.com). The premise was to go an entire month wearing only six items already found in your closet (not counting shoes, underwear or accessories). Nearly 100 people around the country, and in faraway places like Dubai and Bangalore, India, were also taking part in the regimen, with motives including a way to trim back on spending, an outright rejection of fashion, and a concern that the mass production and global transportation of increasingly cheap clothing was damaging the environment.

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In a statement to The Daily Telegraph on Thursday, BP admitted that it edited images it posted on its official “Gulf of Mexico Response” website.

“BP’s photographic department uses Photoshop to edit images we post on the bp.com Gulf of Mexico Response web site,” a spokesman said.

“Typical purposes include colour correction, reducing glare and cropping. In a few cases, cut-and-paste was also used in the photo-editing process. These cut-and-pasted images have been removed.

“We’ve instructed our post-production team to refrain from doing (sic) cutting-and-pasting in the future.”

They’re still a bunch of fucking liars – they posted the images on their official Flickr page and the one labeled as “Original Image from Inside Helicopter” still shows the thing as being airborne.

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One of the best-known examples of the counterintuitive behavior seen in the quantum world is the double-slit experiment. Take a piece of material that blocks light and cut two small slits in it; hit the slits with a flood of photons, and they’ll interfere with each other as they exit the far side, creating a pattern of peaks and valleys corresponding to where the wavelengths of the photons interfered constructively and destructively. Do the same thing, but send the photons at the slits one at a time, and you still see the same pattern. In effect, the photon flows through both slits as a probability wave, and these probabilities interfere with each other.

Stranger still, the same behavior can be observed with particles. In many circumstances, an electron will behave as a simple, easy-to-quantify particle. But it will also act as a probability wave when confronted with a double slit.

It’s a great example, but it also raises a question that’s obvious only after you’ve heard it asked: what happens if there’s more than two slits? Is there a limit to how many probabilities a single particle can adopt as it flows through the quantum realm? A paper that will be released by Science today provides a pretty clear answer: two, just as quantum mechanics have suspected. That deceptively simple answer, however, has major implications for our attempts to combine quantum mechanics and gravity into a unified theory of everything.

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Steve Gibson has a plan to save the media world’s financial crisis — and it’s not the iPad.

Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission. And he says he’s making money.

I remember the good old days when Android fans made fun of the iPhone because some people did a jailbreak to install software, now those same people have to jailbreak their phones to be able to uninstall some software.

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Funniest thing is that people have said that to me, and they weren’t joking. Part of the reason I got an HTC Incredible is that everyone kept talking about how open Android phones are. Then I was like, "Ok, now how do I get WiFi tethering on this bad-boy?"

The response was, "Oh, it’s easy. You just have to root it."

"So you’re saying I have to hack it. Same way I can do whatever I want with my iPhone, but I have to hack it first."

"No, no. It’s totally different. Android is open."

"But you have to hack it in order to be able to do what you want?"

"Yes."

*sigh* "Ok, so how do I root an Incredible?"

"Oh, you can’t. Someone will probably figure it out sooner or later, but for now you’re just stuck with what you have."

"But I could jailbreak an iPhone now and do whatever I want with it. People already figured it out."

"Yeah, I guess."

"How is this more open again?"

"Because with Android, you can do whatever you want! It’s Linux, after all."

Attention to detail is what sets Apple apart. Take a look at this screenshot from the Ars review.

Who thought that “Text Messaging” would be too long to fit but “Text Messagin…” would not?

And any consistency with “Calculator”, “Music”, “News”, and “Gallery” would have made “Messages” the label.

The label choice is by Motorola, not Google. The truncating bug is by Google, where some developer went by character count instead of measuring the real text width.

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A $4.4 million Pentagon survey which asks its troops a series of questions about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) has come in for a lot of criticism, mostly related to purported bias in the selection and wording of questions. I might weigh in at more length on the bias claims later; my initial position, having read the survey, is somewhat agnostic. But really, I think the bias accusations somewhat miss the forest for the trees. The survey might or might not be biased — the bigger problem is that entire parts of it are completely useless.

In particular, given that the army that isn’t supposed to have any (openly) gay soldiers, the survey asks the troops to engage in an awful lot of speculation about the gay soldiers in their midst.

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‘s a bit like trying to anticipate a community’s attitude toward a potential influx of Russian immigrants by asking them whether there are any Russian spies around, and if so, what impact they’re having on the neighborhood. If you did that, the people who said there were Russian spies would probably be disproportionately Russophobic (and/or simply paranoid); their attitudes toward Russians would not be remotely representative of the community as a whole.

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How dare Apple think they can make this problem go away with a free case that makes the problem go away

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Look what they’ve done to poor Adobe, yanking away their right to spend more than three years figuring out how to run Flash on mobile devices. Look what they’ve done to the world’s developers, telling them to write specifically for iPhone rather than just port over apps designed for less capable phones. Compounding their sin, they have the unrelenting gall to insist that apps meet some basic standards for quality and reliability. With their “our way or the highway” attitude, Apple takes choice away from customers, forcing them to settle for a library of only 225,000 apps.

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In March, the Indian upper parliament passed a historic affirmative-action bill. If approved by the lower house, the law would reserve 33 percent of all parliamentary seats for women. You might think this would be well-received by rural women in India. But they long ago gave up on the government and have taken things into their own hands. India is witnessing a rise of vigilante groups, the most sensational of which is the gulabi, or pink gang, operating in the Bundelkhand district of the Uttar Pradesh state, one of the poorest districts of India. Some gangs have started what Indian journalists describe as a "mini-revolution" on behalf of women.

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1801 – Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not impressed due to the lack of tail call recursion, concurrency, or proper capitalization.

1842 – Ada Lovelace writes the first program. She is hampered in her efforts by the minor inconvenience that she doesn’t have any actual computers to run her code. Enterprise architects will later relearn her techniques in order to program in UML.

(go read the whole thing!)

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Unfortunately, Windows was not prepared for a program as awesome as this

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BP has been outed as a secret Photoshopper, albeit a pretty crappy one. I think we can help them out with those cleanup pictures, can’t we?

Send your best entries to me at contests@gizmodo.com with BP Photoshops in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs under 800k in size, and use a FirstnameLastname.jpg naming convention using whatever name you want to be credited with.

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Some Republican congressmen have been warned to keep their distance from the female lobbyists who prowl Capitol Hill.

Sources say House Minority Leader John Boehner has told GOP congressmen who partied with lobbyists "to knock it off." His spokesperson said, "Boehner has always told all our members that they will be held to the highest ethical standards."

While there’s no evidence of anything more than friendly flirtatious behavior, the lawmakers have been told to keep partying to a minimum in this midterm election year.

Of course, they’re still free to check the wide stance of male lobbyists..

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Six Mexican women have been sentenced 25-30 years in prison on homicide charges for terminating their pregnancies.

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Of the six cases, one was a spontaneous abortion, two others were undertaken because of rape and the rest were for accidental pregnancies, Cruz said.

‘All the men who got them pregnant abandoned them’, she said.

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Now, they’ve gone and done it again with this image of their aerial monitoring from helicopters over the gulf.

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The first thing you might notice out of place is the looming air traffic control tower in the upper left hand side of the photo

Then, direct your attention to where the water abruptly changes shades of blue in a frenzy of pixelation, blurring, and a disappearing vessel

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BP Photoshops Another Official Image TerriblyAnd last, while the helicopter clearly appears to be situated at some height above the boats ahead, the readouts on the dash appear to indicate that that door and ramp are open and the parking brake engaged, not to mention that the pilot appears to be holding a pre-flight checklist

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Black people are coming for you white people. Rachel Maddow argues that is the underlying theme of the four major Fox News-only stories of the Obama administration: Van Jones, ACORN, the New Black Panther Party, and now Shirley Sherrod. These stories are largely ignored by the mainstream media, but are being relentlessly pushed by Fox News in an effort to stoke white resentment towards the nation’s first African American president.

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The total of four comets and nine asteroid systems (including ten separate bodies) that have been examined up close by spacecraft are shown here to scale with each other (100 meters per pixel, in the fully enlarged version). Most of these were visited only briefly, in flyby missions, so we have only one point of view on each; only Eros and Itokawa were orbited and mapped completely.