Weird News from Around the World 

Our newspapers, magazines, and the internet are chock full of credible news stories that, though deserving of more attention, never quite make the national headlines. Here, for your consumption and diversion, are some of those stories. This is the Weird News from Around the World.

This is Your Brain… This is Your Brain on Cell Phone

[www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=mind-control-by-cell]

A May Scientific American article explores the mind control potential of your everyday cell phone. Anyone who has tried to use a cell phone near a speaker or other electromagnetic device is fully aware how the signals can affect the things around us, but what about the flesh and bone craniums to which we hold the devices ritually? How are our brains affected by all these transmissions? According to the article, recent studies have shown that your cell phone does have a measurable effect on your brain waves. In particular, it can boost your brain’s Alpha Waves, which is a condition normally associated with lowered awareness of your surroundings, as in a state of inattention or sleep.

When researchers turned their attention to the question of whether cell phones affected behavior by placing individuals in a subliminally altered state of consciousness, the results were astounding, if not scary. Cell phones, it was found, disrupted brain wave patterns and altered behavior not only during the call, but even long after the phone was switched off. It was also found that cell phone signals can interrupt sleeping patterns, affect mood, and increase sexual arousal. While the Scientific American article suggests these affects on the human brain aren’t any cause for concern, when taken in tandem with other studies that have shown the negative affects cell phone transmission have on honey bees and their navigation patterns, perhaps this should cause us to question if there isn’t a better form of communication out there, like, say talking to people face to face instead of calling them on our microwave oven handsets.

[www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-566181]

Many have heard of the “Most of Us” campaign to discourage underage drinking locally. Funded by the federal government, the “Most of Us” campaign attempts to change perceptions about high school and college age drinking by surveying young men and women and releasing the results showing that most do not drink. These relatively innocuous, albeit scientifically flawed, methods are not shared by some of our private English counterparts, who, according to a recent Daily Mail article, simply take facial recognition scans of everyone attempting to purchase alcohol or tobacco and add them to a database, which, in turn, alerts cashiers to potential underage customers.

Budgens, a London supermarket chain who plans on expanding the technology countrywide, justifies the apparent violation of privacy with a disclaimer on the counter stating that the mere act of attempting to purchase alcohol or tobacco gives them the right to save your biometrical information for this purpose, and they claim compliance with the Data Protection Act by storing the information as “data or 'tokens' - which cannot be reversed back into images, but can be compared to fresh pictures.” If it were this author, he might just find another place to shop.

Big Brother Shoots Music Video

[www.telegraph.co.uk]

            In a related story, the London Telegraph recently reported that an unsigned Manchester band called The Get Out Clause used Data Protection Act (like Freedom of Information Act) requests on CCTV footage to shoot a music video. Lacking the budget for a proper production, the band got the brilliant idea to use the thousands of CCTV cameras around their city of Manchester, England to their advantage. By setting up their instruments and playing to the many cameras on busses, trains, and street corners and then filing legal requests for the data, the band ended up with plenty of free material for their music video, international news coverage, and a big “FU” to the surveillance state.

 
Y2… $4.00 Gasoline?

[news.bostonherald.com/business/general/view.bg?articleid=1093507]

According to a Boston Herald article, many ‘mom and pop’ service stations around the country are poised to go out of business as gasoline approaches $4.00 per gallon. It appears that many of the antiquated pumps installed in these old stations only register purchase prices up to $3.99 per gallon on their spinning mechanical dials. This amounts to a sort of Y2K of the service station industry and many mom and pop stores will find the upgrades to the pumps too expensive to manage. One must wonder if this little ‘oversight’ in pump design wasn’t on purpose and how much it should really cost to get a brand new dial installed with more numbers on it. 

High Tech Headstones

[mdn.mainichi.jp/national/news/20080510p2a00m0na021000c.html]

Mainichi Daily News out of Japan has reported that a tombstone manufacturer there is helping families remember their loved ones by installing QR codes on their clients’ headstones. The QR codes can be read by cell phones, and link to a website set up by the company and an IT firm in Tokyo containing additional information about the deceased, complete with a guestbook and information about the funeral. The technology can be added to both new and old burial sites for around 200,000 yen ($2000). Is nothing sacred anymore?

 
New California Gold Rush?

[www.telegraph.co.uk]

The soaring price of gold and the threat of prolonged economic downturn has prompted a new California Gold Rush of sorts. According to the Gold Prospectors of America, The Telegraph reports, their membership has grown by 40% in recent years and people are concentrating new gold exploration efforts in states where large amounts of gold were previously discovered: California, Nevada, Arizona, and Alaska. Walt Eason of the Association explains: "It used to be that you might find $2,000 or $3,000 of gold after a week's work. Now it's possible that that figure could be $15,000 to $20,000."

It’s not just independent gold bugs and weekend panners getting in on the act. Commercial exploration has also taken an upswing with the price of gold, but professional focus has been on Mexico as the next source of large scale gold discovery. In spite of all this renewed gold fever, many long time gold prospectors warn that uncontrolled gold-buggery can lead to the poorhouse as the cost of operating mining machinery has risen with the cost of fuel.
 

Rats are Ticklish

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qObklTM5I2Y]

Researchers studying the “nature of joy” recently claimed they have discovered an astounding fact I’m sure none of us could have lived without knowing: rats are ticklish! In a YouTube video demonstrating the methods used in the study, a researcher can be seen placing a lab rat inside a topless cage and literally tickling him on the sides and belly. The rat can be heard squeaking incessantly as the researcher then records and measures each response. Although it is quite hilarious, one must wonder… who funds this sh*t?

Coin-Operated Automobile?

[www.usatoday.com/money/autos]

We’ve all heard about those so-called “sub-prime” loans and their affect on the housing market of late, but another type of  loan, sub-prime auto loans, has banks placing strange contingencies upon customers to get these loans. A USA Today article reports that as a condition of the loan, some California lenders are requiring customers to mount a box under their dashboard that not only alerts the driver when a payment is due, but locks the car down, rendering it undrivable, when the payment is past due.

Manufactured by Sekurus, a company that started out in the anti-theft business, the hungry little plastic box can be satisfied by entering a six digit payment code, obtained when the customer makes their regular car payment. If the code is not entered in time, the device transmits the precise global position of the automobile to the lien holder for easier repo. Just one more reason to save up your money and buy your next car outright, I say.