Man threatens to down Qantas jet with mind power
“Singapore police are questioning a man who threatened to bring down a Qantas flight from Sydney to Singapore.
The man was restrained by flight stewards after he made threats to disrupt QF31 using mind power.
According to ABC reporter Nick Luchinelli, who was onboard the flight, it seemed the middle-aged man was either under the influence of drugs or alcohol or both.
He was suffering some sort of delusion and people sitting close to him said he was threatening to use the power of his mind to bring the flight down.
The stewards had to take the threat seriously so he had his arms and legs cuffed and remained that way for the rest of the flight.
Singaporean police boarded the flight after passengers disembarked.”
Read more at ABC News
James Randi – The Pigasus Awards 2009
James Randi offers up his thoughts on those who deserve a mention for their work. “No matter if it was blatant cynicism, shocking callousness, lazy ignorance, or merely old-fashioned pig-headedness — these men and women took those qualities that most vex us to their wild, crazy extremes. We’d salute them, but we’re too busy gaping.”
Bradford and Sunderland’s First Night
Bradford boasts one of the finest Waterstones in the whole U of K, and it was a treat to tuck myself right up inside it for a hot choccy and a bally good read. St George’s Hall is a lovely, cramped and creaky old place, but sadly not quite suitable for the show, which looked far from its best. (Many of the important bits and pieces the theatre were supposed to provide were not in place, so I imagine we may switch venues next time we play Bradford).
The audience was definitely not a theatre-savvy one (plenty of getting up to go to the loo and so on), so I caught myself glaring uncharitably at some offenders who were shattering the atmosphere for the audience at the wrong moments by noisily getting up and squeezing past people in their row. Such things don’t affect me on stage, but it’s infuriating to put all the work into the show and then have a few people spoil it for large blocks of the audience by treating it like casual TV watching. You have my permission to throw your drinks at these people if they annoy you. Rant over.
Despite this gripe, the shows were fun. It feels like a very intimate venue and everything went well enough. The audiences were comparatively quiet but I enjoyed both nights.
Went to see Clash of the Titans on the second day, which, despite its infuriating confusion of mythologies (Arabic Djinns? In Ancient Greece?), and re-envisioning Acrisius as Perseus’ father (to presumably help work in the now exhausted Hollywood father/son reconciliation cliché), I enjoyed a little more than Jennie and Iain, who are deeply devoted to the original. Performances not great, but it feels affectionately done and there are some fun sequences to keep it from dragging. For whatever my thoughts are worth on the subject: which is next to nothing.
The huge Sunderland Empire gave us a great first night: still a few boisterous and incontinent audience members but a fun show. It’s a tall place: the people up in the balcony must have been suffering from all sorts of vertiginous nasal hemorrhaging. My microphone died on me and Coops came out to fix me up with a new one, while the audience watched, presumably convinced it was part of the show for some reason. Apologies to any of you for that. Keeps us all on our toes, though.
About to head off for tonight’s extravaganza. What japes. If you’re coming, have a little wee first. Cos we’re now not letting you back in if you go out…
x
Farmers Claim Aliens Are Attacking Their Sheep
“A series of bizarre incidents involving sheep in Shropshire have led to farmers’ claims that aliens are attacking their livestock.
Farmers near Shrewsbury claim to have witnessed sheep being “lasered” by unidentified light from UFOs.
They have linked the unexplained incidents, where sheep’s brains and eyes were removed, to the mysterious orange lights in the sky.
They have found sheep with “neat holes” while their brains and other internal organs were removed. Other animals have lost eyes or had their flesh “carefully stripped away”, usually on the left side.
Phil Hoyle, 53, who has spent almost a decade investigating how the livestock have died, said the UFOs were found to have roamed a 50-mile “corridor” between Shrewsbury and Powys.
Mr Hoyle and 15 members of the Animal Pathology Field Unit, claimed they witnessed UFOs at work last month while working during the night at a Welsh hill farm near Radnor Forest.”
Read more at The Telegraph (thanks, Tammy)
Why Are Some People Smarter?
“AT EINSTEIN’s autopsy in 1955, his brain was something of a disappointment: it turned out to be a tad smaller than the average Joe’s. Indeed, later studies have suggested a minimal link between brain size and intelligence. It seems brain quality rather than quantity is key.
One important factor seems to be how well our neurons can talk to each other. Martijn van den Heuvel, a neuroscientist at Utrecht University Medical Center in the Netherlands, found that smarter brains seem to have more efficient networks between neurons – in other words, it takes fewer steps to relay a message between different regions of the brain. That could explain about a third of the variation in a population’s IQ, he says.
Another key factor is the insulating fatty sheath encasing neuron fibres, which affects the speed of electrical signals. Paul Thompson at the University of California, Los Angeles, has found a correlation between IQ and the quality of the sheaths (The Journal of Neuroscience, vol 29, p 2212).”
Read more at New Scientist
Newspaper’s April Fool UFO Joke Sparks Panic
“A Jordanian newspaper’s April Fool’s Day report chronicling a late-night visit by 10-foot-tall aliens in flying saucers sparked public panic and almost led to the town’s emergency evacuation, officials said Monday.
The Al Ghad newspaper published a front-page article April 1 about the fake UFO landing near the desert town of Jafr, some 185 miles (300 kilometres) from the capital, Amman. The report said the UFOs lit up the whole town, interrupted communications and sent fearful residents streaming into the streets.
Jafr’s mayor, Mohammed Mleihan, got caught up in the paper’s prank and said he sent security authorities in search of the aliens.
“Students didn’t go to school, their parents were frightened and I almost evacuated the town’s 13,000 residents,” Mleihan told The Associated Press. “People were scared that aliens would attack them.”
A Jordanian security official, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss security issues, said an emergency plan was almost enacted in Jafr.”
Read more at Yahoo News
Rare ‘Supertaskers’ Can Juggle Driving And Cellphones
“People with superhuman powers walk among us—or at least drive among us, scientists say.
Numerous studies have shown that the vast majority of people can’t drive well while distracted, such as when talking on a cell phone. (See “Young Cell Phone Users Drive Like Elderly, Study Says.”)
A new study supports those findings, but it also uncovered a rare group of people who perform as well or better when multitasking.
About 1 in 40 people are “supertaskers,” the study found. The discovery may open the door to a slew of new research into how the brain handles multiple streams of information.
The existence of supertaskers “does seem to violate traditional cognitive theory,” which says that the human brain can actively pay attention to just one task at a time, said study co-author Jason Watson, a University of Utah psychologist.
For the new study, Watson and colleagues tested 200 people in a driving simulator, first without any distractions, then while solving math problems and memorizing words spoken over a cell phone.
Most people got worse at driving and at the given tasks when trying to do both at once. But five of the volunteers had no problems driving while talking, and a couple even did better at the math problems.”
Read more at National Geographic
A (Very) Young Artist Makes Waves
“Jackson Potts II is just 10 years old, but he’s already learning that controversy can be good for an artist.
The budding photographer was asked to participate in an annual exhibition, at the Xnihilo Gallery here, based on the Stations of the Cross, or final footsteps of Jesus Christ before he was crucified, according to the Bible. Jackson responded with a powerful staged image—of a police officer beating a child before a crowd of onlookers.
The photo, titled “Station 7,” was his way of depicting in a modern context the biblical moment when Jesus falls for a second time, with the cop replacing the Roman soldiers, and the boy representing the innocence of Christ.
“Dad asked me whether I wanted to do an older interpretation, or modern, and I chose modern,” Jackson said. “The police officer—he is just doing his job.”
But the image proved too much for the Ecclesia Church, a progressive Christian house of worship that shares its space with the Xnihilo Gallery. The exhibit started March 6 and runs to April 25, but the church, which controls the space, allowed Jackson to briefly display his art only during the show’s opening, then ordered it taken down.”
Read more at Wall Street Journal (thanks, Tammy)
Researchers Find Differences In Shy Brains
“People who are shy or introverted may actually process their world differently than others, leading to differences in how they respond to stimuli, according to Stony Brook researchers and collaborators in China.
About twenty percent of people are born with this “highly sensitive” trait, which may also manifest itself as inhibitedness, or even neuroticism. The trait can be seen in some children who are “slow to warm up” in a situation but eventually join in, need little punishment, cry easily, ask unusual questions or have especially deep thoughts.
While such traits are relatively familiar because they are easy to observe, the researchers, have found evidence that for those with this innate trait, the actual underlying difference is in the brain’s attention to details. The study was conducted by Jadzia Jagiellowicz, Xiaomeng Xu, Arthur Aron, and Elaine Aron at Stony Brook University, along with Guikang Cao and Tingyong Feng of Southwest University, China and Xuchu Weng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. This research, designed to validate the fundamental role of deeper processing of information, was published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.”
Read more at Physorg.com (thanks, SuZi)
New Written Language of Ancient Scotland Discovered
“The ancestors of modern Scottish people left behind mysterious, carved stones that new research has just determined contain the written language of the Picts, an Iron Age society that existed in Scotland from 300 to 843.
The highly stylized rock engravings, found on what are known as the Pictish Stones, had once been thought to be rock art or tied to heraldry. The new study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, instead concludes that the engravings represent the long lost language of the Picts, a confederation of Celtic tribes that lived in modern-day eastern and northern Scotland.
“We know that the Picts had a spoken language to complement the writing of the symbols, as Bede (a monk and historian who died in 735) writes that there are four languages in Britain in this time: British, Pictish, Scottish and English,” lead author Rob Lee told Discovery News.
“We know that the three other languages were — and are — complex spoken languages, so there is every indication that Pictish was also a complex spoken language,” added Lee, a professor in the School of Biosciences at the University of Exeter.
He and colleagues Philip Jonathan and Pauline Ziman analyzed the engravings, found on the few hundred known Pictish Stones. The researchers used a mathematical process known as Shannon entropy to study the order, direction, randomness and other characteristics of each engraving.
The resulting data was compared with that for numerous written languages, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese texts and written Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Ancient Irish, Old Irish and Old Welsh. While the Pictish Stone engravings did not match any of these, they displayed characteristics of writing based on a spoken language.”
Read more at Discovery
