Europe has "Silent Discos." You listen to music on your headphones

Due to noise ordinances in Europe, club owners have created “silent discos” where clubbers listen to music through headphones. Rather than use a speaker system, some club owners have resorted to wireless headphones to entertain club goers.

Music is broadcasted via FM-transmitter to the clubber’s headphones. It’s called “silent discos.” The style of clubbing is popular for music festivals, when people want to party long after noise ordinances would allow. Two DJ’s often compete for the listeners, too.

Male model Andrej Pejic was FHM's 98th sexiest WOMAN

In 2011, male model Andrej Pejic was named by FHM the no. 98 in their list sexiest women! Pejic is an androgynous male model from Australia. He grew up in Serbia until he was 8 and then relocated with his family to Australia as political refugees.

He’s been able to successfully model both male and female clothing. He was ranked no. 18 on model.com for Top 50 Male Models list and no. 98 on FHM’s 100 Sexiest Women in the World 2011. There was controversy over the posting, though, and FHM ended up taking it down.

(Source) 

Daniel Craig: Pols are 'sh**heads

'That’s how they become politicians, even the good ones,' Daniel Craig said. | AP Photo

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By TIM MAK | 12/26/11 11:03 AM EST

Actor Daniel Craig put on a display of straight-talk that might have endeared him to voters had he been on the campaign trail, telling Men’s Journal that politicians are “sh**heads” who “stab you in the f**king back.”

“Politicians are sh*theads,” he said in an interview that appears in the January edition of the magazine, which is on newsstands now. “That’s how they become politicians, even the good ones. We’re actors, we’re artists, we’re very nice to each other. They’ll turn around and stab you in the f**cking back.” Craig said that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair had done unprecedented outreach to celebrities, but that he had turned off to the idea. “Tony Blair started it much more than anybody’s ever done. ‘Go and have tea at 10 Downing Street’,” he said. “…You immediately are aligning yourself with a political party.”  The “James Bond” and “Girl With A Dragon Tattoo” actor said that he doesn’t have the grasp of knowledge to articulately speak on politics, unlike fellow actor George Clooney.

“George has his finger on the political pulse, and he’s one of those guys who can get up and talk, and I don’t have that,” Craig said. “If someone shoves a microphone in your face and says, ‘Explain yourself,’ you have to have a 100 percent understanding of why you’re doing it, and unless you’re 100 percent, don’t f**king do it, leave it alone, let your work speak for itself.”

Craig also talks about what’s it’s like to be under a microscope because of his celebrity.

“I’m not a politician - you don’t need to know everything about me, you don’t get to see my tax returns,” he says. “If you sell yourself and give yourself up and share your innermost secrets, don’t be surprised when that bites you in the end.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70859.html#ixzz1hiBu5763

Scumbag PETA

No. 1 Nation in Sexy Web Searches? Call it Pornistan

They may call it the "Land of the Pure," but Pakistan turns out to be anything but.

The Muslim country, which has banned content on at least 17 websites to block offensive and blasphemous material, is the world's leader in online searches for pornographic material, FoxNews.com has learned.

“You won’t find strip clubs in Islamic countries. Most Islamic countries have certain dress codes,” said Gabriel Said Reynolds, professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame. “It would be an irony if they haven’t shown the same vigilance to pornography.”

So here's the irony: Google ranks Pakistan No. 1 in the world in searches for pornographic terms, outranking every other country in the world in searches per person for certain sex-related content.

Pakistan is top dog in searches per-person for "horse sex" since 2004, "donkey sex" since 2007, "rape pictures" between 2004 and 2009, "rape sex" since 2004, "child sex" between 2004 and 2007 and since 2009, "animal sex" since 2004 and "dog sex" since 2005, according to Google Trends and Google Insights, features of Google that generate data based on popular search terms.

The country also is tops -- or has been No. 1 -- in searches for "sex," "camel sex," "rape video," "child sex video" and some other searches that can't be printed here.

Google Trends generates data of popular search terms in geographic locations during specific time frames. Google Insights is a more advanced version that allows users to filter a search to geographic locations, time frames and the nature of a search, including web, images, products and news.

Pakistan ranked No. 1 in all the searches listed above on Google Trends, but on only some of them in Google Insights.

“We do our best to provide accurate data and to provide insights into broad search patterns, but the results for a given query may contain inaccuracies due to data sampling issues, approximations, or incomplete data for the terms entered,” Google said in a statement, when asked about the accuracy of its reports. 

The Embassy of Islamic Republic of Pakistan did not reply to a request for an interview.

In addition to banning content on 17 websites, including islamexposed.blogspot.com, Pakistan is monitoring seven other sites -- Google, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, Amazon, MSN and Hotmail -- for anti-Islamic content, the Associated Press reported in June.

But it’s not to censor the Pakistani people, Reynolds said. It’s to shut out the rest of the world.

“[It] could lead to conversion, which would undermine the very order of the state,” he said. “Part of protecting the society is making sure that there is no way it could be undermined in terms of foreign influences.”

Pakistan temporarily banned Facebook in May when Muslim groups protested the “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” page, where users were encouraged to upload pictures of the Prophet Muhammad. The page remained on Facebook, but Pakistani users were unable to view it, said Andrew Noyes, manager of Facebook’s Public Policy Communication.

And while Pakistan is taking measures to prevent blasphemous material from being viewed by its citizens, pornographic material is “certainly” contradictory to Islam, too, Reynolds said.

The country’s punishment for those charged with blasphemy is execution, but the question remains what -- if anything -- can be done about people who search for porn on the Web.

“It’s a new phenomenon,” Reynolds said.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/07/12/data-shows-pakistan-googling-pornographic-material/#ixzz1fq3RZtE1

The most expensive car crash ever? Eight Ferraris in supercar pile-up

Police officers investigate a Ferrari Crash in Shimonoseki, Japan (pic: AP)

It could be the most expensive car crash ever.

This was the scene after 14 luxury cars - including eight Ferraris - were involved in a pricey pile-up in western Japan.

A Lamborghini and two Mercedes were also involved in the smash.

The damage caused to many of the vehicles was thought to be so severe that they will have to be scrapped.

Ten drivers were reportedly taken to hospital after the incident but no-one was seriously hurt.

The accident is understood to have happened after one of the Ferrari drivers lost control on a wet road.

He is thought to have hit the central reservation and rebounded into the path of the oncoming cars.

Japanese TV reports the car crash

The supercars were being driven from Hiroshima to Kyushu along the China Road.

The road had to be closed for six hours while clean-up crews removed the wreckage.

The exact models of cars involved wasn't known, but their combined value could stretch into millions if they were brand new.

A new Ferrari 355, several of which were understood to have been written off in the smash, can cost several hundred thousand pounds.

Read more: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/12/04/the-most-expensive-car-crash-ever-eight-ferraris-in-supercar-pile-up-115875-23610157/#ixzz1fdkkgG00

Cosmic Variance

Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time

by Sean

“Time” is the most used noun in the English language, yet it remains a mystery. We’ve just completed an amazingly intense and rewarding multidisciplinary conference on the nature of time, and my brain is swimming with ideas and new questions. Rather than trying a summary (the talks will be online soon), here’s my stab at a top ten list partly inspired by our discussions: the things everyone should know about time. [Update: all of these are things I think are true, after quite a bit of deliberation. Not everyone agrees, although of course they should.]

1. Time exists. Might as well get this common question out of the way. Of course time exists — otherwise how would we set our alarm clocks? Time organizes the universe into an ordered series of moments, and thank goodness; what a mess it would be if reality were complete different from moment to moment. The real question is whether or not time is fundamental, or perhaps emergent. We used to think that “temperature” was a basic category of nature, but now we know it emerges from the motion of atoms. When it comes to whether time is fundamental, the answer is: nobody knows. My bet is “yes,” but we’ll need to understand quantum gravity much better before we can say for sure.

2. The past and future are equally real. This isn’t completely accepted, but it should be. Intuitively we think that the “now” is real, while the past is fixed and in the books, and the future hasn’t yet occurred. But physics teaches us something remarkable: every event in the past and future is implicit in the current moment. This is hard to see in our everyday lives, since we’re nowhere close to knowing everything about the universe at any moment, nor will we ever be — but the equations don’t lie. As Einstein put it, “It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence.”

3. Everyone experiences time differently. This is true at the level of both physics and biology. Within physics, we used to have Sir Isaac Newton’s view of time, which was universal and shared by everyone. But then Einstein came along and explained that how much time elapses for a person depends on how they travel through space (especially near the speed of light) as well as the gravitational field (especially if its near a black hole). From a biological or psychological perspective, the time measured by atomic clocks isn’t as important as the time measured by our internal rhythms and the accumulation of memories. That happens differently depending on who we are and what we are experiencing; there’s a real sense in which time moves more quickly when we’re older.

4. You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that’s mysterious — clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the “now.” Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds. (Via conference participant David Eagleman.)

5. Your memory isn’t as good as you think. When you remember an event in the past, your brain uses a very similar technique to imagining the future. The process is less like “replaying a video” than “putting on a play from a script.” If the script is wrong for whatever reason, you can have a false memory that is just as vivid as a true one. Eyewitness testimony, it turns out, is one of the least reliable forms of evidence allowed into courtrooms. (Via conference participantsKathleen McDermott and Henry Roediger.)

6. Consciousness depends on manipulating time. Many cognitive abilities are important for consciousness, and we don’t yet have a complete picture. But it’s clear that the ability to manipulate time and possibility is a crucial feature. In contrast to aquatic life, land-based animals, whose vision-based sensory field extends for hundreds of meters, have time to contemplate a variety of actions and pick the best one. The origin of grammar allowed us to talk about such hypothetical futures with each other. Consciousness wouldn’t be possible without the ability to imagine other times. (Via conference participant Malcolm MacIver.)

7. Disorder increases as time passes. At the heart of every difference between the past and future — memory, aging, causality, free will — is the fact that the universe is evolving from order to disorder. Entropy is increasing, as we physicists say. There are more ways to be disorderly (high entropy) than orderly (low entropy), so the increase of entropy seems natural. But to explain the lower entropy of past times we need to go all the way back to the Big Bang. We still haven’t answered the hard questions: why was entropy low near the Big Bang, and how does increasing entropy account for memory and causality and all the rest? (We heard great talks by David Albertand David Wallace, among others.)

8. Complexity comes and goes. Other than creationists, most people have no trouble appreciating the difference between “orderly” (low entropy) and “complex.” Entropy increases, but complexity is ephemeral; it increases and decreases in complex ways, unsurprisingly enough. Part of the “job” of complex structures is to increase entropy, e.g. in the origin of life. But we’re far from having a complete understanding of this crucial phenomenon. (Talks by Mike Russell, Richard Lenski, Raissa D’Souza.)

9. Aging can be reversed. We all grow old, part of the general trend toward growing disorder. But it’s only the universe as a whole that must increase in entropy, not every individual piece of it. (Otherwise it would be impossible to build a refrigerator.) Reversing the arrow of time for living organisms is a technological challenge, not a physical impossibility. And we’re making progress on a few fronts: stem cells, yeast, and even (with caveats) mice and human muscle tissue. As one biologist told me: “You and I won’t live forever. But as for our grandkids, I’m not placing any bets.”

10. A lifespan is a billion heartbeats. Complex organisms die. Sad though it is in individual cases, it’s a necessary part of the bigger picture; life pushes out the old to make way for the new. Remarkably, there exist simple scaling laws relating animal metabolism to body mass. Larger animals live longer; but they also metabolize slower, as manifested in slower heart rates. These effects cancel out, so that animals from shrews to blue whales have lifespans with just about equal number of heartbeats — about one and a half billion, if you simply must be precise. In that very real sense, all animal species experience “the same amount of time.” At least, until we master #9 and become immortal. (Amazing talk by Geoffrey West.)

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