A: Cyclical.

A woman’s face is most alluring at the height of her cycle.

Women who make the room light up with their good looks may have a secret up their sleeve – it may be down to their menstrual cycle. Both men and women consider a woman’s face to be at its most attractive when she is at the peak of her fertility, according to new research.[...]

Roberts and his team selected about 50 women aged between 19 and 33 years in both Newcastle and Prague, the hometowns of two of the group members. They took two pictures of each subject. The first picture showed them when they were fertile, 8 to 14 days after the first day of their last menstruation. The second was taken 14 days later.

Ok, so guess which set of pictures features the more attractive women, the right or the left.

Read on to find out.

And that’s the way it is…

Likely Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry claimed Tuesday night that he’s a big fan of rap and hip-hop music.

The straitlaced Beacon Hill blue blood who married into the $700 million Heinz ketchup fortune told MTV: “I’m fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think that there’s a lot of poetry in it. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it.” [...]

Still, Kerry defended the gangsta rap genre, telling MTV: “I’m still listening, because I know that it’s a reflection of the street and it’s a reflection of life. And I understand all that.”

Sure you do Mr. Ketchup. Keep snowboarding in Idaho big guy…

Read more here.

In the Shakespeare Programming Language of course:

A few weeks earlier we had discovered a number of truly fascinating programming languages, such as Java2k1, Sorted!2, Brainfuck3 and Malbolge4, and we wanted to make our own. We have no idea why, but that night we were also thinking about Shakespeare in general, and Shakespearian insults in particular and three hours later we had come up with this amazing idea: the Shakespeare Programming Language, SPL.

This is the documentation of the language and how we made it.

Design Goals
The design goal was to make a language with beautiful source code that resembled Shakespeare plays. There are no fancy data or control structures, just basic arithmetic and gotos. You could say we have combined the expressiveness of BASIC with the user-friendliness of assembly language.

A sampling of the code:

Prime Number Computation in Copenhagen.

Romeo, a young man of Verona.
Juliet, a young woman.
Hamlet, a temporary variable from Denmark.
The Ghost, a limiting factor (and by a remarkable coincidence also
Hamlet’s father).

Act I: Interview with the other side.

Scene I: At the last hour before dawn.

[Enter the Ghost and Juliet]

The Ghost:
You pretty little warm thing! Thou art as prompt as the difference
between the square of thyself and your golden hair. Speak your mind.

Juliet:
Listen to your heart!

[Exit the Ghost]

[Enter Romeo]

Juliet:
Thou art as sweet as a sunny summer’s day!

No further comment necessary.

Read more such code here.

Amazon.com just recommended this book to me. I wonder what that says about me…

Iraqis mutilate the body of a dead American after a car bomb blast today. Ungrateful pricks.

See more here.

(via drudge)

There’s a new mockumentary out about the fictional 1999 assassination of Bill Gates:

When Microsoft chairman Bill Gates was shot dead on December 2, 1999, it was a tragedy that resonated throughout the world. But as time wears on, that tragedy has developed into a mystery for many observers, who see police misconduct and a cover-up where others see an open-and-shut case. NOTHING SO STRANGE follows the efforts of an organized group of these skeptics, who call themselves Citizens for Truth, as they launch an aggressive independent investigation of the Gates assassination and in the process confront the LAPD, a hostile mainstream press, and the group’s own internal squabbles. With never-before-seen amateur footage of the Gates assassination, hypnotic 3D recreations of the various aspects of the crime, and almost unlimited access to the inner workings of Citizens for Truth, NOTHING SO STRANGE is ultimately both personal and political-an intimate portrait of average citizens on a search for the truth, as well as a revealing look at the last great crime of the 20th Century.

The film was promoted with mock websites linked to above, in an act similar to the Blair Witch Project. But the Blair Witch was entirely fictional. Bill Gates is not, and making a movie about his murder seems entirely inappropriate to me. It looks as if someone may have a coffin picked out for Gates. Unreal.

Visit Nothing So Strange.

From the streets of Bangkok:

Thailand’s Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra sent his teenage daughter to work at McDonald’s on Monday.

The billionaire leader sent 17-year-old Paethongtan to the fast food outlet as part of his campaign to encourage greater responsibility in the young.

Well, it’s better than having her work the streets. Puts a new perspective on “supersize” portions, no?

Read the article here.

Ireland has banned smoking in all its pubs. Some expect their revenues to actually go up as a result of the ban:

Business has improved in New York’s bars and restaurants since a smoking ban was introduced, according to the city authorities

A report issued today shows that tax receipts from the hospitality industries rose by almost 9 per cent after the ban.

The news comes as Ireland became the first country in the European Union to introduce its own smoking ban in pubs, restaurants and other workplaces today.

The New York report appears to undermine claims by representatives of Ireland’s pub and restaurant businesses, that the ban could lead to a substantial loss of trade.

Excuse me for pointing this out, but the city’s smoking ban took place on March 30th of last year. The year before that should have been a recession year for Manhattan bars and restaurants, as the hospitality industry suffered as a whole and especially in New York in the year following the 9-11 attacks. So a 9% rise in tax receipts doesn’t necessarily indicate anything more than that. It doesn’t logically follow that people were previously vacating bars because they were too smoky for them.

The article goes on to say that California had a similar experience, but then again, most California establishments have an outdoor patio area where people can smoke to their lungs content. Not true in New York.

Read the article here.

Visit NYC Clash, a group fighting for smokers rights in New York City.

See Penn & Teller on the subject.

Let New England Castles build you one.

Amenities are numerous:

• low maintenance

• Non-Flammable
• saves on utility costs
• economical to heat and air condition
• insects and rodents can?t chew on it
• higher resale value
• built to last

Optional Features:

• Turrets

• Towers
• Por-to-Cochere
• Garden Roof Tops
• Tile Roofs
• Venetian Plaster
• Radiant Heat
• Stone & Tile Floors
• Kitchen Barbeque
• Life Time Roof Life

I really need a house with turrets.

Visit New England Castles.

Guess who said the following:

Osama bin Laden, do two things. The first is you really have to get the intelligence agencies better organized to deal with the terrorist threat to the United States itself. One of the problems that we have is a kind of split responsibility, of course, between the CIA in foreign intelligence and the FBI in domestic intelligence. There needs to be better cooperation because we don’t want to wake up one day and find out that Osama bin Laden has been successful on our own territory.

It’s Condi Rice, in August 2000. Before Bush was even elected.

Thanks, Nick, for the heads up.