Whoa.

Rex Jameson bikes and swims regularly, and plays tennis and skis when time allows. But the 5-foot-11, 180-pound software engineer is lucky if he presses 200 pounds—that is, until he steps into an “exoskeleton” of aluminum and electronics that multiplies his strength and endurance as many as 20 times.

The Salt Lake City Tribune reports that local global defense contractor Raytheon, having purchased Jameson’s company, is producing these puppies. more »

In case you were wondering, honesty is not dead in the digital age. Today on craigslist, the best men seeking women personal of the day:

The headline reads: “I just want to get laid.”

Who doesn’t?

The text of the ad reads:

“I don’t want to meet your mother or father. I don’t care about your personal life, your history or your dreams and aspirations. I just want to fuck you. It’s natural, I’ve got the penis and you’ve got the vagina. Hopefully they fit together. The rest of these guys are just yanking on your chain to get down your pants after some cheap pizza and beer. All men are scumbags and I am the only honest scumbag left on the planet. You read this far so obviously you are not all that disgusted so send me a photo and Ill send you one of mine.”

The honesty of this ad is refreshing. Why more people don’t just put it right out there like this astounds me. I’d like to shake this guy’s hand.

What’s crazier than a ten-year old giving birth?

A single human giving birth 18 times!

The Duggars’ oldest child, Josh, is 20, and the youngest, Jennifer, is nine months old.

The fast-growing family lives in Tontitown in northwest Arkansas in a 7,000-square-foot home. All the children—whose names start with the letter J—are home-schooled.

Duggar has been been pregnant for more than 11 years of her life, and the family is in the process of filming another series for Discovery Health.

While some people might try to stereotype a family in Arkansas with 18 kids, all of whose names start with the letter J, presumably in honor of their father, Jim Bob, I have to say that the couple seem happy, sane and wholesome on the youtubez:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVFjPoTj3ew]

more »

First, if you haven’t heard about the Mental Health Parity bill, it’s an incredibly important measure that insurance companies are fighting tooth and nail, and that would stop insurers from shirking payment for mental health issues. Kennedy, who has suffered from addiction and depression, got a little play in the Times’ Week in Review, and the piece is worth a read.

Second, while not exactly a staunch defense of immigrant’s rights writ large, PK’s recent HuffPo piece is pretty interesting. It turns out he’s a sponsoring a bill “exempt anyone receiving a Ph.D. from an American university from numerical immigration limits.” Called the New American Innovators act, PK touts it as an economic growth strategy. The idea:

Well-known Stanford economist Paul Romer has discussed a “prospector theory” of high-skill immigration. As Mr. Romer describes it, “the more people you have prospecting, the more you will be stumbling on rich veins of gold.”

American universities regularly graduate American students of the highest quality, and our economy has reaped the benefits for decades. But American universities also produce foreign graduates of equally high quality. Our economy has benefited from their talents as well. In fact, between 1995 and 2005 one quarter of all start-up engineering and technology firms in the United States had at least one foreign-born founder. By 2005, these companies produced $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers.

There’s gold in them thar hills!

From Boston Globe, and improved upon by Richard Florida:

The article claims that out of all major metro areas in the U.S., Boston and surrounding areas have the most even single male-to-single female ration.

Hmmm, I wonder how Providence measures up.

Projo has the details:

Human-rights violations around the world, from the ongoing genocide in Darfur to human trafficking in Eastern Europe, will be the focus of the third annual Brown University Human Rights Film Festival, running Thursday through Sunday.

The Devil Came on Horseback, a first-person account by a former U.S. Marine of Sudanese government-backed attacks on black Africans living in the Darfur region, will be the first film in the program at 6:45 p.m. Thursday in Sayles Hall. Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof, who wrote about events he witnessed in Darfur on several visits, will speak.

Opposition claims Zimbabwe election victory; Robert Mugabe mum with the “official count” still secret.

Keith Richards is too high to write autobiography, remember life.

Saudi Prince plans mile-high tower in Jeddah. Tower-of-Babel jokes not OK. Penis jokes inevitable.

Russia wants to build a tunnel from Siberia to Alaska, mostly to export their cave-dwelling, anti-credit card and processed food doomsday cult.

As the Olympic torch sets off from Tiananmen Square, German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she’ll boycott the Beijing Games.

Turkish Supreme Court to hear case “to ban the President, Prime Minister and the country’s ruling party on grounds that they’re threatening the constitutionally-mandated secular basis of the state.” Now that’s separation of church and state.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHUAsTrl4JI&e]

Ouch. Definitely some cheering too, and definitely a well thrown pitch. Still, ouch.

Big ups to the lovely and brilliant Ariel Werner, Brown junior, criminal justice reformer, Dose blogger and Rhode Island’s own and only 2008 Truman Scholar. Her bio on truman.gov:

Ariel Werner is a student at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where she works to understand and mitigate the effects of mass incarceration. In 2006, she served as Student Coordinator of the RI Right to Vote Campaign, a ballot initiative that restored voting rights to 15,000 individuals on parole and probation. She received a C. V. Starr Public Service Fellowship in 2007 to work at the RI Family Life Center for ex-offenders and an Arthur Liman Public Interest Law Fellowship in 2008. She currently coordinates Space in Prison for the Arts and Creative Expression (SPACE), a Brown student group that works to provide a forum for creativity within the RI Adult Correctional Institution.

Kim beat me to the punch on RIFuture, but all of us at the Dose are proud of Ariel. Especially me. Way to rep the Ocean State!

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaP9eiWuX3s]

Seriously. I know its somewhat painful to watch. Is it for real?

With all the $1 million offers to pose for this and that magazine being thrown around, lets remember that Jersey Girl Ashley’s most prized asset, the movie rights, are still out there. It could be a grittier, seedier, 21st century version of Almost Famous. Feeling it? No? Ok.

First the good news: you know “Kristen”, aka Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the instantly famous call girl who got jiggy with Client #9 on Valentine’s Eve? Turns out she’s a recording artist. And while her myspace page, after being discovered, got a million hits in like an hour and was promptly shut down, Ms. Dupre’s jams are for sale at Amie Street, a content sharing site started by some recent Brown grads and named after a residential block in Fox Point!

Check it:

Ashley Alexandra Dupré, a struggling singer, uploaded a new track to Amie Street, an online music-seller, hours after she was exposed as the prostitute Kristen talking on tape about the disgraced Eliot Spitzer.

Ms Dupré apparently hopes to cash in on her notoriety with sales of her CD Unspoken Words. At about midnight local time on Wednesday she logged on to the website to upload Move Ya Body, a second track from the album. Move Ya Body and the first track, Can You Handle Me, Boy?, quickly surged to the site’s maximum price of 98 cents, based on popular demand. Before the news broke, Can You Handle Me, Boy? had been selling at 9 cents. “This is definitely the most traffic we have had,” Joshua Boltuch, a spokesman, told The Times. He said that the demand- driven prices of her songs had risen just as fast as or faster than major artists selling through the site.

In other news, Wonkette recently discovered that prostitution is legal in Rhode Island. It’s true! more »

Ok, I haven’t seen it, but it looks phat as hell: CGI Woolly Mammoths, ancient civilizations, and non stop-action. Too bad it got panned hard by the Times:

“Only time can teach us what is truth and what is legend.” This bit of fake-folk wisdom commences the voice-over narration of “10,000 BC,” and the more you think about it, the more preposterous it seems. If anything, time confuses the issue. But it’s best not to think too hard about anything in this sublimely dunderheaded excursion into human prehistory, directed by Roland Emmerich from a script he wrote with Harald Kloser, who also helped compose, using his better ear, the musical score.

Whatever. There’s no need to to be snooty. Sometimes you just want to some action-packed reverse-sci-fi Sabretooth Tigerz and Zigguratz and Clan of the Cave Bear-style hairdos, something that tickles you in that StarGate/Atlantis/Lost Civs/Erich Von Daniken spot, and you want it now.

This is on the top of my list to catch at Providence Place- anyone seen it yet? more »

Which one is Ben Stein?  Here he is in the Projo, going off on Darwinism. And here he is on O’Reilly:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWMGD1Dg6L8]

Stein gets this right (while taking on the tone of the godless evolutionist Christopher Hitchens):

Maybe we would have a new theory: We are just pitiful humans. Life is unimaginably complex. We are still trying to figure it out. We need every bit of input we can get. Let’s be humble about what we know and what we don’t know, and maybe in time, some answers will come.

But how does that jibe with broad assertions of Creationism, predicated on nothing?

Holy shit! Facebook just went bilingual:

Ahora hispanohablantes en todo el mundo pueden unirse a Facebook. Conéctate con todos tus amigos, en cualquier idioma.

Puedes cambiar tu preferencia de idioma aqui.

Usa el buscador de amigos para ver si mas de tus amigos se [h]an unido y invita a todos tus amigos hispanohablantes a que se registren.

I should totally get class credit for stalking people in Spanish.

p.s. — This is where that asshole Thomas Friedman would say, “The world is flat.”

This is like a bad dream. A bad, hilarious dream.

…It seems some Camden-Rockport Middle School eighth-grade boys are taking it to new heights and allegedly making a game of seeing who can expel the loudest and grossest flatus.

According to this week’s “Fire Cracker” newsletter though, an informal eighth-grade publication, the joke’s on the boys as the penalty for “intentional farting” is now a detention.

“Strange, but true, thanks to a bunch of 8th grade boys, intentional farting has been banned from CRMS,” the newsletter said. “It started out as a funny joke and eventually turned into a game. This is the first rule at CRMS that prevents the use of natural bodily functions. The penalty for intentional farting is a detention, so keep it to yourself!”

Detention for farting?