This week’s headlines from Yemen

Two headlines that came across my transom today:

Yemen: the Next Afghanistan? (NPR)
Acute hunger in Yemen (BBC)

Maybe it’s just me, but my gut says that if Americans paid more attention to the latter, it might help with the former.

About 85% of People Only Breathe Out of One Nostril at a Time

Science’s next great discovery: men alternate testicles every time they are shot down by a woman at a bar.

Actually, this story is somewhere between extremely fascinating and deeply bizarre:

Most interestingly of all, yet another study published in 1994, showed that when you are breathing through your left nostril, the right hemisphere of your brain will be more active or dominant and vice-verse when you are breathing through your right nostril. This can be a handy thing to know as the right hemisphere of your brain is your “creative/imaginative” side, while the left hemisphere of your brain is your “logical” side. So forcing breathing through one nostril or the other can actually affect the way you think at a given moment.

In the future, Wall Street will relocate to Central Park

The 21st century will prove what we’ve all unconsciously known through the 20th: Manhattan is uninhabitable.

Heat waves like those that baked the Northeast in July are likely to be more frequent and more intense in the future, with their effects amplified in densely built urban environments like Manhattan, according to climate scientists at The City College of New York (CCNY).

“Manhattan is subject to an urban heat island effect because its physical landscape is significantly different from the surrounding suburbs,” said Dr. Jorge Gonzalez.

The Bechdel Movie Test

I don’t entirely buy the argument being made here, but the questions it asks are interesting. More after the clip.

So—the question is, how many movies fail when men are subjected to the same test? Then what percentages are to be hand when an entire swath of movies is analyzed, as opposed to the montage in the video? Show me those comparisons, and I think you have the basis for demonstrating a trend. The absence of these numbers tells me that either the video’s authors didn’t compile them, or didn’t feel they were damning enough to share.

But the premise is valid, and worth asking regardless of all of our media.

Killed by Code: Software Transparency in Implantable Medical Devices

Turns out, only the hardware used for implants is inspected by the government. The software is a protected trade secret—much as it is in voting machines—and can only be reviewed in the event of catastrophe. So essentially, if you get a pacemaker, you have no way of knowing whether it’s running Mac OS X, Ubuntu, or Windows 3.1.

Even Vegas can go too far

I enjoy gambling much more than the next guy, but this is ludicrous. Picture from Caesars Palace LV, and then retweeted 1,000 times.

Tron Legacy releases the week of my birthday, when I will be turning 12

Just knowing this movie is coming out makes me happy. Sort of like how I felt watching previews for Star Wars and Superman Returns. So I’m really hoping this doesn’t suck.

Lord of the Bling

Themed slot machines are nothing new, but even so, I’m surprised to see this. Not a subculture which I thought would translate to mindless gambling. (Except maybe the orcs.)

Harrah's announcement of Lord of the Rings slot machine

Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world – Clay Shirky (2010)

I’m not a huge fan of Clay Shirky. His writing and speeches are always interesting, but I think a lot of what he has to say is restating the obvious. On the other hand, perhaps I’m undervaluing the value of the obvious, because many times he brings to light things that I haven’t yet given much thought to.

Reposting this video mainly because of his idea of cognitive surplus: the world gets one trillion hours a year of human leisure time, and some of it is spent on creative endeavors like the ones he highlights. Which raises an interesting question (to me, anyway): why do I blog? Why do I feel like I’m being lazy when I don’t blog? I’ve always chalked it up to just ego-stroking over my own self-satisfaction about the value of my opinions—but Shirky says something else is going on, with me and with everyone else who does it.

Fake femme fatale shows social network risks

Hundreds of people in the information security, military and intelligence fields recently found themselves with egg on their faces after sharing personal information with a fictitious Navy cyberthreat analyst named “Robin Sage,” whose profile on prominent social networking sites was created by a security researcher to illustrate the risks of social networking.

Despite some patently obvious red flags — such as noting that the 25-year-old Sage had worked professionally for 10 years — the scheme worked. The connections to Sage, who was depicted as a real-life Abby Scuito, a fictional character in CBS’s NCIS television series, were established in less than a month.