Icelanders Avoid Inbreeding Through Online Incest Database
So says Samantha Grossman in TIME:
Nowadays, some light Internet stalking is as common a pre-date ritual as showering or putting on a clean shirt. But for Icelanders, that online screening process can include running a date’s name through an incest database.
Sound ridiculous? Consider this: when you live in an isolated nation with a population roughly the size of Pittsburgh, accidentally lusting after a cousin is an all-too-real possibility. But a search engine called Íslendingabók (the Book of Icelanders) allows users to plug in their own name alongside that of a prospective mate, determining any familial overlap. The site claims to track 1,200 years of genealogical information about the island’s inhabitants. Anyone with an Icelandic ID number — that is, citizens and legal residents — is accounted for, the New York Daily News reports.
Not only can the site rule out courtships that might be a bit too close for comfort, but also it…
Muammar Qaddafi’s 1980s Family Photo Album
Tyler Hicks of the New York Times found family pictures at the the Qaddafi residence in Tripoli, and they’re amazing. How often do images of a Third World dictator make you irresistibly nostalgic for childhood?
The Qaddafis playing soccer. Baby photos. Colonel Qaddafi as a young lieutenant in the late 1960s. Later, as a father. And finally, a bizarre figure; something of an object of ridicule. A picture of Seif al-Islam atop a horse was a glossy, poster-sized print.
“Monetizing” Electoral Politics: TV Networks Are Out To Sell, Not Tell
Already the projections are in—not for who is going to win the election in 2012—but for how much it is likely to cost.
Public Radio International concludes: “Campaign spending in the 2012 US election could reach $6 or 7 billion dollars as outside groups pay for electoral influence.”
Here we are in the middle of a deep recession that’s getting deeper by the day, with austerity the unofficial slogan du jour while Republican scheme up new ways to trim, cut and decimate government spending, and parties are spending billions on political horse races.
They decry government spending but they don’t talk much about their own spending, do they?
And neither do the Democrats who are also backing an orgy of spending cuts if only to show their opponents how “responsible” they are.
As both parties slash spending that benefits people, they are in a manic overdrive effort to raise more for themselves and their campaigns.
Dave Levinthal,…
First Advertising Campaign Targeted At Monkeys
The advertising belief that sex sells may not just work on humans, but on monkeys too. That is what the first non-human aimed advertising campaign is basing its marketing strategy on. Via Wired:
A primatologist has created the first advertising campaign aimed at non-human primates and believes that it will be sex that sells.
Laurie Santos from Yale University’s Comparative Cognition Laboratory has teamed up with advertising agency Proton Studio to “determine where advertising has innate primate responses”.
Santos and team will create two foods specifically aimed at Capuchin monkeys — possibly two different colours of jelly. One will be featured on a billboard outside of the monkeys’ enclosure and the other will not. After a set period, the monkeys will be offered both foods. “If they tend toward one and not the other we’ll be witnessing preference shifting due to our advertising,” Keith Olwell of Proton told New Scientist.
[Continues at Wired]
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Woman Solves Her Own Kidnapping
The New York Times reports:
It was an abduction that made headlines and stunned the authorities: A 3-week-old infant, taken to a Manhattan hospital in August 1987 for treatment of a fever, was snatched by a woman dressed in nurse’s clothes and never heard from again.
Two decades later, with investigators stumped and the case cold, the parents of the abducted girl refused to give up hope, believing that someday their daughter might return.
Their prayers were answered.
Carlina White, now 23 and living in Georgia, was reunited on Friday with her biological parents, Joy White and Carl Tyson, bringing an end to one of the most baffling missing persons cases in the New York Police Department’s files. The reunion brought elation to a mother and father racked by pain and anger for over two decades, and a new family for a woman who had long held suspicions about her past.
[Continues at The New York…
