Doesn't anybody else think the headless, legless, mutilated torso-like "Boyfreind Pillow" is downright creepy?

If that wasn't enough, now there's a cyber girlfriend that's being marketed by a Hong Kong firm. The more money the guy spends on her the more she responds.

*sigh*

Paris is celebrating: Paris Fetes 1944 Liberation from Nazi Occupation

Two columns of Second World War tanks, trucks and cars rumbled through Paris on Wednesday to re-enact the arrival of French and United States forces 60 years ago to liberate the city from four years of Nazi occupation.

Women in war-era fashions kissed men in faded uniforms as the olive-drab columns snaked into the city from the south, just like the French Second Armored Division and the U.S. Army's Fourth Infantry Division did on August 25, 1944.

Life without numbers

[...] Daniel Everett, an American linguistic anthropologist, has been studying and living with Piraha for 27 years. Besides living a numberless life, he reports in a separate study prepared for publication, the Piraha are the only people known to have no distinct words for colours.

They have no written language, and no collective memory going back more than two generations. They don't sleep for more than two hours at a time during the night or day. Even when food is available, they frequently starve themselves and their children, Prof. Everett reports. They communicate almost as much by singing, whistling and humming as by normal speech. They frequently change their names, because they believe spirits regularly take them over and intrinsically change who they are. They do not believe that outsiders understand their language even after they have just carried on conversations with them. They have no creation myths, tell no fictional stories and have no art. All of their pronouns appear to be borrowed from a neighbouring language.

Their lack of numbering terms and skills is highlighted in a report by Columbia University cognitive psychologist Peter Gordon that appears today in Science. [...]

Also:

Anthropologist helps Intel see the world through customers' eyes

[...] A native of Sydney, Ms. Bell grew up at her mother's anthropology field site in central Australia north of Alice Springs. She had just finished her dissertation on boarding schools for Native Americans when she met an engineer in a Palo Alto bar. This man's company had just received a major investment from Intel and was intrigued by the notion that Ms. Bell's anthropological expertise might help both companies develop better products.

After conducting an initial study of technology uses in western Europe, Ms. Bell realized that American engineers assumed that a global middle class was emerging in Asia that was interested in buying and using consumer electronics in the same way the Western world did. [...]

"CNN reports that in a bid to protect its lucrative media contracts, the IOC is barring competitors, coaches, and support personnel from writing firsthand accounts of their Olympic experience, on the web or in print, for the duration of the Games. Nor are they allowed to ever post photographs or movies that they've taken, including media of themselves, even after the Games are finished. They've threatened to disqualify anyone that violates their restrictions and sue them for monetary damages.

Discussion at slashdot.

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