Couple regrets selling baby to buy new mobile phone
“A pair of young lovers in Chongqing Municipality sold their baby boy for 2,500 yuan ($366), Chongqing Economic Times reported Thursday. Police say the couple now feels remorse and wants the baby back.
The baby’s mother Zhang Yao, 19, met the boyfriend surnamed Xin, 21, through the Internet. The two quickly developed an intimate relationship. Zhang gave birth to the baby late November, but they have not married.
Police say the couple believed they could not afford to raise a child. On December 2, six days after the baby was born, police say, they sold the newborn baby to a man who gave his name as Li Yong. Li arranged to re-sell the baby for 10,000 yuan ($1,464) the next day, but his behavior alerted neighbors who called the police.
An investigation revealed that neither Zhang nor Xin held steady jobs and spent most of their time on the Internet. Their parents were reluctant to support them, so the couple decided to give the baby away – for a price.
Xin told the police that he had used the 2,500 yuan to buy a new mobile phone.”
Read more at Global Times
What if the Internet breaks?
The 40-year-old system might be vulnerable to technical collapse or cyberattack, which could cause widespread chaos in fields from banking to health care to government.
When your Internet service goes down, it’s at best an inconvenience. If you rely on it for business, it can quickly cost you money. So imagine: What happens if the Internet breaks?
Picture people wandering the streets lost without GPS or maps on their iPhones, unable to pay for food or other goods with a simple swipe of a card.
Companies would have to resort to faxes and phone calls instead of e-mail; they’d quickly reach capacity and be unable to function. Credit cards wouldn’t work; stores and hospitals would run short of supplies. Even electrical power to our homes could be disrupted.
“It would be a mess,” said Dave Marcus, the director of security research for McAfee (MFE, news, msgs). “You would be taking businesses that were designed to do all their point-of-sale and financial transactions through the Internet and going back to pen and paper and taking checks in a car to the bank. People would lose their minds.”
Read more at Money Central MSN
Stockholm Library Interior
Asking Derren what he really wants for Christmas is a bad idea – the answer was “this”, but sadly we don’t think it’s possible. The book collection at Brown Towers would struggle to make it past half way compared to this impressive collection, and the renovation might clash with the stuffed animal theme.
Sadly the above image isn’t real. It’s a 3D generated image from the fantastic designer Oliver Charles. Olivier graduated from the Architecture School of Paris La Seine. He started to work with 3ds Max 11 years ago.
He switches between his two jobs: architect (with Armel Neouze and Jacques Gelez) and graphic artist and now he teaches 3ds Max at his old school.
To see how this stunning image was created there is a full rundown (for those interested in the nerdy bits) over at CG Society.
Fast-Growing Christian Churches Crushed in China
LINFEN, China — Towering eight stories over wheat fields, the Golden Lamp Church was built to serve nearly 50,000 worshippers in the gritty heart of China’s coal country.
But that was before hundreds of police and hired thugs descended on the mega-church, smashing doors and windows, seizing Bibles and sending dozens of worshippers to hospitals with serious injuries, members and activists say
Today, the church’s co-pastors are in jail. The gates to the church complex in the northern province of Shanxi are locked and a police armored personnel vehicle sits outside.
The closure of what may be China’s first mega-church is the most visible sign that the communist government is determined to rein in the rapid spread of Christianity, with a crackdown in recent months that church leaders call the harshest in years.
Authorities describe the actions against churches as stemming from land disputes, but the congregations under attack are among the most successful in China’s growing “house church” movement, which rejects the state-controlled church in favor of liturgical independence and a more passionate, evangelical outlook.
Read more at Fox News
Frank Sinatra – December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998
Beginning his musical career in the swing era with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, Sinatra became a solo artist with great success in the early to mid-1940s, being the idol of the “bobby soxers”. His professional career had stalled by the 1950s, but it was reborn in 1954 after he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
He signed with Capitol Records and released several critically lauded albums (such as In the Wee Small Hours, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, Come Fly with Me, Only the Lonely and Nice ‘n’ Easy). Sinatra left Capitol to found his own record label, Reprise Records (finding success with albums such as Ring-A-Ding-Ding, Sinatra at the Sands and Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim), toured internationally, and fraternized with the Rat Pack and President John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s. Sinatra turned 50 in 1965, recorded the retrospective September of My Years, starred in the Emmy-winning television special Frank Sinatra: A Man and His Music, and scored hits with “Strangers in the Night” and “My Way“.
Sinatra attempted to weather the changing tastes in popular music, but with dwindling album sales and after appearing in several poorly received films, he retired in 1971. Coming out of retirement in 1973, he recorded several albums, scoring a hit with “(Theme From) New York, New York” in 1980, and toured both within the United States and internationally until a few years before his death in 1998.
Sinatra also forged a career as a dramatic actor, winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in From Here to Eternity, and he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for The Man with the Golden Arm. He also starred in such musicals as High Society, Pal Joey, Guys and Dolls and On the Town. Sinatra was honored with the Kennedy Center Honors in 1983 and awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan in 1985 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1997. Sinatra was also the recipient of eleven Grammy Awards, including the Grammy Trustees Award, Grammy Legend Award and the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
The above painting bt Derren in 2002 is available as a limited print from the art store.
Hard Drives Sculptures
Hard drives gone bad don’t always have to end up in the trash. Miguel Rivera, a systems administrator, took a pile of used drives, gutted some and turned them into beautiful sculptures.
“The overall concept was to make something out of just hard drive parts and pieces,” says Rivera. “I wanted it to look solid and heavy so I leaned towards just using metal — no plastic or gluing things together.”
The results are creations that almost take your breath away in their complexity and beauty.
Wired (Thanks @helennewbury)
Complete 2010 Enigma Tour announced
The complete Enigma tour is now announced. We’ve added some new towns to the end – Nottingham and Leicester. It’s highly unlikely we will be adding any more locations after this, so if you’re waiting for Derren to come to your town and it’s not on the current schedule you may have a while to wait.
Ticket sales for a lot of venues have sold out. There’s still some left for the new dates and some for the previously announced venues – so it’s an ideal xmas pressie to request from Santa (if you believe in him like we all do).
On the extremely slim chance we add new dates to the current list you’ll find out here first.
If you have tour tickets to sell/swap/etc you can get them verified via @phillisdorris on twitter.
The terrifying sleep disorder that afflicts millions
Hannah Foster was lying in bed with her eyes open. She could see by the clock that it was 3am, but something was very wrong – she couldn’t move a muscle of her body. Even worse, she could sense something pressing down on her and she was struggling to breathe. Consumed by panic, she tried to scream, but nothing happened. It felt like a nightmare, but she knew that it wasn’t, because she was too alert and she recognised her green flowery duvet and the wooden floor of her room.
Suddenly, she was able to move again and the feeling of pressure vanished. But she was left terrified, shaking and gasping for air. ‘It was like nothing I’d ever experienced before,’ recalls the 25-yearold from Brighton. ‘After a normal day at work, I went to bed around 11pm, as always, and the next thing I remember is waking up, basically paralysed. ‘It was terrifying. And the more I panicked, the more it felt like I couldn’t breathe properly.’
What happened to Hannah might sound like something from a gruesome horror film, but it is in fact very real – she was experiencing a fascinating phenomenon called Sleep Paralysis (SP). Just as surprising, it is very common, explains Chris French, Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Studies suggest that around 40 per cent of the general population experience SP at least once in their lifetime.
Daily Mail (Thanks DG)
Does Listening To Music Aid Learning?
There’s no doubt, on various levels, that music can effect your mood, pace and perhaps even your concentration, but since the early ’90s a theory has been evolving about music’s link with intelligence.
Most notably ‘The Mozart Effect’ has commanded the majority of attention – primarily by frantic mothers desperately trying to mould their child into the pinnacle in modern offspring. The crux of the idea has been widely interpreted to be that “your child can increase their intelligence by listening to Mozart‘s music”.
As a theory that is primarily adopted by parents, mother of one Shradha Sarogi explains why she chose to live by it: “‘My father studied in America and he reads a lot of books on child psychology. He told me to listen to Mozart because it’s very important. Especially when I was pregnant.”
“I got the music because I read that the beats of Mozart coincide with the heartbeat of the foetus. So it makes the child intelligent”
Full Article at Rivmixx
The Psychology and Power of False Confessions
On July 8, 1997, Bill Bosko returned to his home in Norfolk, Virginia, after a week at sea to find his wife murdered in their bedroom. A few hours later, Bosko’s neighbor, Danial Williams was asked to answer questions at the police station. And after eight hours there, Williams confessed to the rape and murder of Michelle Moore-Bosko.
Five months later, because of inconsistent physical evidence, the Norfolk police became convinced that Williams did not act alone and turned their attention to Joseph Dick, Williams’ roommate. Dick confessed as well. He later pled guilty, testified against two other co-defendants, named five more accomplices who were never tried, and publicly apologized to the victim’s family. “I know I shouldn’t have done it,” Dick said just before the judge gave him a double life sentence. “I have got no idea what went through my mind that night — and my soul.”
Dick now says that all of that is untrue, and he has a team of lawyers who believe him. In 2005, the Innocence Project filed a petition on behalf of Williams, Dick, and the other two members of the group called the “Norfolk Four.” They petitioned Virginia Governor Tim Kaine for clemency on the basis of new physical evidence, and in August 2009, the outgoing governor issued conditional pardons, which set the men free but forced them to be on parole for the next 20 years. It was a decision that Kaine struggled with, and he granted conditional pardons because he said the men failed to fully prove their innocence. “They’re asking for a whole series of confessions … to all be discarded,” Kaine said on a radio show in the fall of 2008. “That is a huge request.”
We know that false confessions do happen on a fairly regular basis. Because of advances in DNA evidence, the Innocence Project has been able to exonerate more than 200 people who had been wrongly convicted, 49 of whom had confessed to the crime we now know they didn’t commit. In a survey of 1,000 college students, four percent of those who had been interrogated by police said they gave a false confession.
But Why?
Read more at Psychological Science
