Archive for November, 2006
Yes, Sharon Stone looks amazing in her 50′s, but even more amazing is how Sofia Loren looks in her ripe old 70′s. Even better than some do in their 30′s I might add. And if I looked as fabuloso as Sophia does at her age, I would pose for the iconic Pirelli Calendar too.
Another good thing about Sophia is that she always kept her respectability (unlike Shaz and the famous beaver), refusing to do revealing poses in her 50-year-plus career in show business.
As she hit her 72nd birthday, however, she has agreed to pose seductively, but tastefully for the limited edition Pirelli Calendar in which the Italian actress appears in a slinky see-through black dress revealing enough to distract from an impressive pair of drop-diamond earrings.
Sofia said of the recent shoot :
“I enjoyed myself posing as if I was a little girl again.”
In Milan, a Pirelli spokesman commented: “I can confirm that Sophia Loren has posed for the 2007 Pirelli calendar. The pictures were shot last week in America and she looks fantastic – you wouldn’t think she is nearly 72 years old.”
As Sofia famously said:
“You have to be born a sex symbol. You don’t become one. If you are born with it, you will have it even when you are 100 years old.“
Readers Digest has been around for as long as I can remember, its small book-like pages bright and beckoning in places like the washroom. Not that I don’t like it, but I somewhow always think of my Grandmother, who always had a subscription, bought their books and joined their sweepstakes on a regular basis.
Because of her, I have in fact begun to buy it as I stand in line at the supermarket, but yes, it does always end up somewhere in the bathroom. After all, it is the perfect size.
But back on topic, good old Readers Digest, which is also a giant publishing and direct marketing operation has made a deal to be purchased by Ripplewood Holdings LLC, a private equity firm, for $1.6 billion.
For 16-years Reader’s Digest was a publicly traded company handled by a charitable foundation until 2002. The company had however been in deep debt for some time to the tune of a whopping $776.3 million, with the circulation of its magazine declining from 12.6 million in 2000 to about 10 million.
Eric Schrier, RD’s CEO wrote a letter to his employees with these words:
“Much has been written about going private, and of the advantages for some organizations when time-consuming public disclosure and shorter-term, quarter-to-quarter pressures are alleviated”
Readers Digest was founded by DeWitt and Lila Wallace in 1922 in an apartment underneath a speakeasy in New York City‘s Greenwich Village. Circulation of the magazine grew rapidly and peaked at about 17 million in the 1970s.
If you think you can send an sms text message fast, how about doing 160 characters in less than 42 seconds.
Well, in Singapore, a sixteen-year-old by the name of Ang Chuang Yang did it it 41.52 seconds, beating the Guinness World Record previously held by American Ben Cook, whose record was a mere 42.22 seconds.
The Singaporean student was part of the competition organised by Singapore Telecommunications, to break the SMS (short message service) world record which was won last July by the now ousted American.
Ang, who said that the trick was about using a cellphone with large keys boasted that he’s try for en even speedier 39 seconds next year.
If you’re curious to know (and possibly practice?) what the 160 character sms message provided by the Guinness World Records said, this was it:
“The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.”
Hmmm. That would probably take me at least 5 minutes!!
SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) has been plaguing parents from the beginning of time with a condition that kills babies (usually from one month to one year) without any warning or apparent reason.
The recent findings suggest that SIDS may have a biological cause, one connected to an abnormality in the brain. In future, doctors are hoping that this means that infants can be tested, and the risks reduced.
David Paterson, a neuroscientist at the Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School commented:
“To a certain extent, this demystifies SIDS and indicates that it’s a disease process…it’s not this mystical event that happens for no apparent reason.”
Researchers in the study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, located defects in the area of the infant brain that controls breathing, blood pressure and arousal from sleep.
The studies were done from brain autopsies of babies who had died from SIDS, comparing them with nabies who had died from other causes. The SIDS babies had brain stem abnormalities that affected their breathing due to the bodie’s inability to regulate seratonin, which controls vital bodily functions like these.
In effect, these defects are linked to 75% of SIDS deaths.
SETI Institute, the non-profit organization whose mission is to “to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe.“, has said that the search for intelligent life in the universe has reached a new era.
After listening for signs of “life out there” for 40 years with little results, they have now said that the reason for this is because the extraterrestials are probably sending out laser or light signals, and not radio. Makes sense, no?
SETI (Search for Extraterrestial Intelligence), who unveiled a new facility last April, answer two pressing questions you’ve always wanted to know:
1. How do we know if the signal is from ET?
Virtually all radio SETI experiments have looked for what are called “narrow-band signals.” These are radio emissions that are at one spot on the radio dial. Imagine tuning your car radio late at night? There’s static everywhere on the band, but suddenly you hear a squeal – a signal at a particular frequency – and you know you’ve found a station.
Narrow-band signals, say those that are only a few Hertz or less wide, are the mark of a purposely built transmitter. Natural cosmic noisemakers, such as pulsars, quasars, and the turbulent, thin interstellar gas of our own Milky Way, do not make radio signals that are this narrow. The static from these objects is spread all across the dial.
In terrestrial radio practice, narrow-band signals are often called “carriers.” They pack a lot of energy into a small amount of spectral space, and consequently are the easiest type of signal to find for any given power level. If E.T. is a decent (or at least competent) engineer, he’ll use narrow-band signals as beacons to get our attention.
2. What happens if we find something?
Keep in mind that the receivers used for SETI are designed to find constant or slowly pulsed carrier signals? something like a flute tone against the noise of a waterfall. But any rapid variation in the signal – known as modulation, or more colloquially as the “message” – would be smeared out and lost. In order to understand anything that E.T. might be saying to us, we’ll have to build far larger instruments to look for the modulation of his signal. It’s more than likely that, once a detection is made, the money will become available to build this far larger instrument.
Until we can measure the modulation, all we’ll know is that there is intelligence out there. We can pinpoint the spot on the sky where the signal is coming from, and slow changes in its frequency will tell us something about the rotation and orbital motion of E.T.’s home planet. Even with this limited information, the detection of alien intelligence will be an enormously big story. We’ll know we’re not alone, and we’re not the smartest things in the universe. And of course there will be a loud clamor to build the big dishes that would allow eavesdropping on E.T.’s message.
Then what? Suppose we get the message? Will we understand it? No one knows, of course. It’s conceivable that an advanced and altruistic civilization will send us simple pictures and other information.
