[Quote]:

MojoUpgrade provides an interactive questionnaire full of sex ideas to help you and your partner determine the fantasies that you might both enjoy together.

[..]

We present a questionnaire to both partners separately and compare the answers in the end. If you both gave a positive response to an activity, then we’ll share it; if not, we don’t. That way if your partner is not game to watch midget porn with you, they won’t know.

So if both of you give a positive response to everything in the list, just to find out what kinks your partner has, and neither of you is willing to back down and admit to the ruse, you wind up having awesome hot kinky sex together just to spite each other.

[Quote]:

Rep. Peter King, a Republican from New York, is planning to introduce legislation that would make it illegal to bring a gun within 1,000 feet of a government official, according to a person familiar with the congressman’s intentions.

I thought we needed *more* firearms to prevent this sort of thing, not fewer. All this will do is ensure that anyone with a gun near an official is a criminal.

(Am I doing this right?)

[Quote]:

Manning has been charged with unlawfully downloading classified information and transmitting it “with reason to believe that the information could cause injury to the United States.” He has been incarcerated at Quantico for five months and has yet to receive the military equivalent of a preliminary hearing.

Nevertheless, Manning is in “maximum custody.” Also, under a “Protection of Injury” order, he is confined to his cell for 23 hours a day, even though his lawyer says a psychologist has determined he isn’t a threat to himself. His lawyer also says that Manning is denied sheets and is unable to exercise in his cell, and that he is not allowed to sleep between 5 a.m. and 8 p.m. If he attempts to sleep during those hours, he is made to sit up or stand by his guards.

[Quote]:

On Saturday night, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked someone on the scene in Tucson if anti-Semitism played any role in Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ shooting. His response was "no." It is well known that Giffords is Jewish, but anti-Semitism per se did not seem to be a contributing factor in the shooting of Giffords and 17 other victims in front of a Tucson shopping center.

That seems right, although all weekend I received emails from Jews indicating a special fear that, on some level, anti-Semitism played a part in Saturday’s events. This is probably nothing more than the natural response of any minority group to an attack on a very prominent member of the community.

JFK was clearly not killed because he was Roman Catholic, but most Catholics I knew back then believed that there was something particularly unsettling about the murder of the first Catholic president.

Muslims also were particularly unsettled by the Tucson shooting. They are aware that when incidents of this kind occur, they are invariably the first people to come under suspicion. (Remember when terrorism "investigator" Steve Emerson blamed Muslims for the Oklahoma bombing within hours of the explosion, before learning it was perpetrated by a right-wing extremist?)

Muslims are also upset that the word "terrorism" is not being used about the Tucson massacre when it certainly would be applied if the "lone" shooter was named Ahmed and not Jared.

[Quote]:

Sex and civic education in schools in Europe is an "attack" on religious freedom, Pope Benedict XVI said on Monday, following a Vatican row with Spain over a new course promoting liberal values.

Understandable – you want to keep the little boys ignorant for a while, and the women breeding more catholics for as long as possible, right?

[Quote]:

Astronomers have just announced the discovery of the first planet orbiting another star that is unequivocally not a gas giant: it must be a very dense, rocky-metallic object not much bigger than the Earth!

The planet, discovered by the orbiting Kepler telescope, is called Kepler-10b. The star (Kepler 10) is roughly the same mass and temperature as the Sun, and is located over 500 light years away.

The planet was detected because it passes directly between us and the star as it orbits. When it does that, it makes a mini-eclipse, blocking a bit of light from the star. By knowing how big the star is and how much light is blocked, the size of the planet can be measured (the bigger the planet, the more light is blocked). In this case, Kepler-10b is only about 1.4 times the diameter of the Earth, making it the smallest exoplanet ever found!

However, there’s more. The planet’s gravity tugs on the star as it orbits, so as the planet makes a big circle around the star, the star makes a little circle in response (I like to use the analogy of a father dancing with his small daughter; as he swings her around she makes a big circle around him and he makes a little circle, because he’s much more massive than she is). As the star moves slightly toward and away from us we can measure the change in velocity using the Doppler shift, and that in turn tells us the mass of the planet. It turns out Kepler-10b is a lot more massive than the Earth, tipping the scales at 4.6 times the Earth’s mass.

[Quote]:

We really are just that badass now.

Expect Kepler to come out with more amazing exoplanets as time goes on — in order to be sure you’ve seen a planet, it has to go across in front of the the surface of the star 3 times. Why 3? Because you need the time between the points to be the same

Transit. ———time 1——— Transit. ——–time 2———-Transit.

If time 1 = time 2, you have an orbiting body.

If you were far away looking for our Earth like this, time 1 = time 2 = 2 years, which is the bare minimum time you’d need to find us. Most likely you started partway through a year before your first transit, so it could be up to 3 years.

3 years. That’s the magic number.

Kepler launched in early 09, so if we are going to find an Earth-size rocky planet in the habitable zone of a star, we’ll start getting that info in *maybe* as soon as the summer of 2012 (I’d expect at least one by early 2013), and we’ll still be finding Earth-size planets further out in the habitable zones of stars in the 2013-2016 range.

The badassery has only begun with Kepler. If all goes well, in the next couple years we won’t just find a small exoplanet kinda like Earth but all molten, but a proper Earth-size planet in an orbit where there can be liquid water.

So they are feeling unjustly blamed for the actions of an extremist… Maybe they can ask Muslims for advice on how to deal with that.”

[Quote]:

Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader, was sentenced to three years in prison on Monday for money laundering and conspiracy stemming from his role in a scheme to channel corporate contributions to Texas state races in 2002.