I unfortunately had no choice but to click this BBC News piece by Matt McGrath:

Accounts of unusual sexual activities among penguins, observed a century ago by a member of Captain Scott’s polar team, are finally being made public.

Details, including “sexual coercion”, recorded by George Murray Levick were considered so shocking that they were removed from official accounts.

…

He was shocked by what he described as the “depraved” sexual acts of “hooligan” males who were mating with dead females. So distressed was he that he recorded the “perverted” activities in Greek in his notebook.

Necrophilia is now hooliganism. Also I like the idea of being so upset by something that you start writing in Greek.

Adam Liptak, The New York Times:

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that officials may strip-search people arrested for any offense, however minor, before admitting them to jails even if the officials have no reason to suspect the presence of contraband.

Matthew Day, the Telegraph:

A determined German cleaner destroyed a piece of art valued at £690,000 by cleaning away what she thought was an unsightly stain from the artwork.

The cleaner got to work on an installation by the late and famed artist Martin Kippenberger at a museum in Dortmund.

Entitled “When It Starts Dripping From The Ceilings” the piece comprised a tower of wooden slats with a plastic bowl at the bottom painted brown to give the impression of discolouration caused by water. The cleaner took the paint to be an actual stain and scrubbed the bowl till it looked new.

Whoops. :[

When commercial nuclear power was getting its start in the 1960s and 1970s, industry and regulators stated unequivocally that reactors were designed only to operate for 40 years. Now they tell another story — insisting that the units were built with no inherent life span, and can run for up to a century, an Associated Press investigation shows.

…

Regulators and industry now contend that the 40-year limit was chosen for economic reasons and to satisfy antitrust concerns, not for safety issues. They contend that a nuclear plant has no technical limit on its life.

But an AP review of historical records, along with interviews with engineers who helped develop nuclear power, shows just the opposite: Reactors were made to last only 40 years. Period.

…

In 1982, D. Clark Gibbs, chairman of the licensing and safety committee of an early industry group, wrote to the NRC that “most nuclear power plants, including those operating, under construction or planned for the future, are designed for a duty cycle which corresponds to a 40-year life.”

And three years later, when Illinois Power Co. sought a license for its Clinton station, utility official D.W. Wilson told the NRC on behalf of his company’s nuclear licensing department that “all safety margins were established with the understanding of the limitations that are imposed by a 40-year design life.”

Weeeeelllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllp. I am not a nuclear power alarmist, but shit like this does not help your credibility at all guys. Really. Cut it out.

Also, thumbs up to the Associated Press National Investigative Team for doing actual, real reporting on an issue related to nuclear power.

The Nissan LEAF all-electric car is full of technological firsts. One of which is a GSM cellular connection to the internet for providing voluntary telemetry information to Nissan, new charging stations, competitive driver rankings, and even RSS feeds. This is called Nissan CARWINGS.

Apparently when CARWINGS checks RSS feeds, it sends a bunch of parameters in the query string. Parameters like these:

“lat” and “lon” variables contain the current position of the vehicle, “speed” is the vehicle speed, “car_dir” is the direction of the car, and “lat_dst” and “lon_dst” is your destination configured in your navigation system”

All of these lovely values are being provided to any third party RSS provider you configure: CNN, Fox News, Weather Channel, it doesn’t matter!

Oh dear.

On the upside, this post does contain a demo of a cool location-based weather RSS feed, so uh, I guess it’s not all bad news for Nissan. (It’s all bad news for Nissan.)

Think Progress:

Now, Obama has fulfilled his campaign promise to capture the terrorist leader, so did Fox News give credit where is due? This morning, Fox and Friends approvingly played a clip of Bush from shortly after 9/11, saying, “President George W. Bush promised to the nation that Osama bin Laden would be caught any way possible.” “We did finally get him,” host Brian Kilmeade said after the clip.

In what is likely to become a chorus on the right, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s president wrote this morning that “Bin Laden’s elimination vindicates U.S. strategy in the region, started under President George W. Bush.”

Update: House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) issued a statement praising Bush, writing, “I commend President Obama who has followed the vigilance of President Bush in bringing Bin Laden to justice.”

Oh dear.