Apparently, drinking makes you gay. Via new sf blog io9 (and why an sf blog is linking to this is a mystery to me), scientists at Penn State have tested animal sexual behavior under the influence of alcohol.

…. male fruit flies, which typically court females, also actively court males when they are given a daily dose of ethanol. ….A second discovery is that repeated exposure to ethanol causes male flies to engage in more inter-male courtship …

Please do not look to this blog to make some politically incorrect but probably funny jokes about drunk gay FRUIT flies.

==============================

Meant to mention, yesterday flew on one of Cathay’s newly outfitted Boeing 777s. The seats in business class are all facing at an angle, rather than straight ahead, enforcing privacy even if you don’t want it.

Back in steerage economy, the new seats have backs which do not recline. Instead when you push the button, your seat slides forward. So the guy in front of you can’t destroy your laptop when he decides to go into nap mode after a meal. Not entirely comfortable though. The foot rest is a band of strong cloth rather than what you may be used to, extremely uncomfortable to me. The seats are a bit wider (9 seats across rather than 10) but this is partially negated by the fact that each seat belt now has this huge padded airbag attached to it. If the plane slams into the side of a mountain or goes into a screaming dive from 35,000 feet, not sure what good an airbag will be. Book/magazine storage is now under the seat instead of in front of you – and when you slide your seat forward you can’t get at it.

Also, they couldn’t get the video system working properly during the flight. For lack of anything better to watch, I watched the boot-up messages each time they rebooted. Their system is using Linux, and I saw all these error messages not only related to non-existent files and directories but also related to programming errors. What kind of tests does their IT department do before moving stuff into production? From looking at this it would seem the answer is “none.”

Oops, time to go to the dentist!

Hongkie Town
Share